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Random Tropes Random Media. Toggle Random Buttons Random Tropes Random Media. Display Options Show Spoilers Night Vision Sticky Header Wide Load. Community Showcase Explore More. Edit Page Related Discussion History Close More To Do Page Source. You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account. The British Secret Intelligence Service is popularly called MI-6thanks to the James Bond series. So, the name " Secret Intelligence Service " seemed too "spy-like" to be real and looks like a fictional agency created by the show.

MI-5 and MI-6 were real organizations with responsibility for domestic MI-5 and overseas MI-6 human-intelligence assets. Except for MI and MI There never was an MI With the exception of 5 and 6, none had intelligence responsibilities as the term is used today. Also with the British spies of Darker Than Black - it's easy to think that the designs of November 11's cigarettes, black with white skulls on them, are just a joke. Nope, they are an actual British product, which fits perfectly with November 11's sense of humor.

Although it didn't reach Urban Legend level in reality, the whole "Rail Tracer" idea in Baccano! The original Murder, Inc. The train-hopping assassin is kind of important to the plot.

In Narutothere was some controversy over a claim that octopi eat sharks said by Killer B while fighting Kisame. In real life though, it's been known to happen. While the ones present in Naruto are stylizedsome types of Japanese armor really did use forehead protectors, sometimes taking the form of a headband.

There actually is a sport called "racewalking". The title character fits this trope in two respects. One, he's loosely based on an actual person, and likewise, so were a number of the other characters see below. Kenshin's original was named Kawakami Gensai. Potentially, Kenshin's bishonen to the point of Dude Looks Like a Lady appearance could be an example of this.

Word of God states that Gensai had feminine features and carried out assassinations in broad daylight because people thought he was a woman and allowed him to get close enough, and at one point was said to have hid out in a brothel following an assassination. He was orphaned and given that name by his master, who might have been inspired by Uesugi Kenshin, who was a famous swordsmanwho is presented as a bishonen in some historical fiction works.

On top of that, there have been some speculations that Uesugi Kenshin was secretly a woman. Shinomori Aoshi was based off historical character Hijikata Toshizoand his boss Kanryuu based on Takeda Kanryuusai. Also, there really was a Saito Hajime. And Saito Hajime was married, which the author predicted would be so unbelievable that there was a tag that said " This is historical fact " when Saito mentions he's married.

He also spent much of his later life as a school teacher and died of an ulcer. One episode of Lupin III shows Lupin in a race driving a six-wheeled car.

At the time of production, the Tyrrell P34 was competing in F1, using the four small wheels up front to maintain traction while having better aerodynamics than a pair of taller wheels. The Future GPX Cyber Formula series does a similar thing in some race cars, particularly the later incarnations of Asurada, which are basically futuristic versions of the Tyrrell P34 model used 15 years earlier.

Those who aren't familiar with Shakespeare will think that this is Fanservice aimed at Yaoi Fangirlsbut using men to play female roles was an actual thing they did in Shakespeare's time. In Arpeggio of Blue Steelthe '"JDS Hakugei'' is a submarine with a rocket propulsion system. This is currently being researched by DARPA.

Many Axis Powers Hetalia fans have wondered why in flashbacks the male countries seem to be crossdressing as toddlers. They're not, that's boy's clothes. Until the early 20th century it was common in many countries for young boys to wear dress-like garments until they were at maximum 8 years old. When that happened they would begin "breeching". One episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex centered around a computer program a person used that automatically traded stock, which continued even after the programmer died.

In fact, those kinds of programs already existed and were in use when the episode was made, and have since become commonplace to the point that automated stock transactions are actually the majority.

A flashback set years in the past has Shinji telling Aizen that he's playing jazz music which is just becoming popular in the World of the Living. The fandom reacted with surprise that Tite Kubo, an infamous music geek, would be wrong about jazz existing back then.

However, in a small joke sketch in that volume, the author informs the character that 'jazz' doesn't actually exist yet, leaving Shinji confused over what he's listening to. The implication is that Shinji is listening to ragtime, which these days is often viewed as an early form of jazz. Some fans of Barry Humphries character Dame Edna Everage have been surprised to learn that her home town, the 50's middle-suburban dream Moonee Ponds, is a real suburb of Melbourne in Australia.

There's a s JSA comic that consists of anti-German war propaganda, which claims among other things that the German people are violent by nature.

One example of this "natural German barbarity" was called " scar dueling, " where young men from high-end academies would fence with the intention of scarring each other's faces, then wear the scars as a status symbol. More than one modern reader thought this was ridiculous propaganda, except it was an actual occurrence in German academies! The scar was called a "schmiss". Left unsaid was the fact that the student organizations where this was so common were actually suppressed by the Nazis.

Mensur dueling is a tradition among many of the German equivalent to American fraternities "Studentenverbindung", types of which include "Burschenschaften", "Corps", "Landsmannschaften" etc. Nowadays it is not mainstream any more, which they were and it was in those times, and the scars "Schmiss", pl. New Frontierit is assumed though never said outright that Katerina Mueller's scar was from a mensur duel from her Heidelberg days. Apparently, the practice is still in existence in the 24th century though probably on the DL.

There is a Genius Bonus about that in Batman: The Animated Serieswhere Duvall tells Jonah Hex "You cannot defeat me. I am a Heidelberg fencing champion". Jonah is not impressed As in Watchmenthere really is a smiley face crater on Mars.

This smiley face is called Galle which is another huge element of the series. Dave Gibbons admits that was incredibly lucky. Jughead's trademark hat in Archie Comics was actually once a real fashion trend among teenagers during the years in which the comic debuted.

They would cut up their fathers' old fedoras into jagged-edged inverted caps it's called a "whoopie cap". Nowadays, Jughead's hat now just makes him look eccentric, or maybe just like a hipster.

Due to Jughead's Big Eater tendencies, some folks confused it for a Bland Name version of Burger King's cardboard crowns they give to kids. The same style was worn by Goober Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show. One of the more frequent nitpicks about the comics is the corruption of the Gotham City Police Department, from the Bronze Age onward.

People thought that there's no way a major city could be that openly and utterly corrupt without someone city government, the Feds stepping in and cleaning house. Then you get a look at stories about New York City and Chicago, from as recently as the early 90s. Mob control of both departments in addition to the courts and local government was near absolute and took the FBI decades to break their hold.

Year Oneseveral high ranking police members attempt to kill Batman by ordering the abandoned building he was in at the time bombed by helicopter. The idea of law enforcement air bombing residential city space seems absurd, but was probably inspired by an incident in Philadelphia which occurred a few years before the comic was written. Linkara had thought that the News in the Nude segments of The Dark Knight Strikes Again were made up and was rather incredulous of the idea.

While it is a paid service, Naked News is indeed a real thing. Amazingly enough, Giant Size Man-Thing was an actual, six-issue, comic book series.

Marvel had many "Giant-Size" comic books in the s, in this case for the character Man-Thing. Other titles included Giant-Size Invaders, Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action, and the legendary if less innuendo-laden Giant-Size X-Men. In the Silver AgeSuperman disguised the multi-ton key to his Fortress of Solitude as an "airplane marker" pointing to the North Pole.

He maintained this facade well into the Bronze Agelong after such markers had become forgotten relics — but there's still a line of them running across the United Statesand yes, they used to be painted bright yellow.

Parsed by Chinese characters, it would be Kong Ke-nan. And Kong is the surname of none other than Confucius derived from Kong Fu-zi. For instance, according to the Romans the Celtic people, as a rule, left no written records the historical Gauls really were said to be terrified of the sky falling on their heads, and to have shot arrows at the sky during thunderstorms to just dare it to come down.

Occasionally Cacofonix will be depicted with his instruments besides his signature lyre, usually a ridiculous-looking bagpipe-like thing and an even more ridiculous horn with an animal head, all of which are the instruments the real Gauls would have used — bagpipe-like instruments were known to have been played by the Romans notably by Nero, who was also said to have been very bad at itand the horn is a carnyxa kind of early trumpet with a boar's mouth-shaped bell.

At Varius Flavus's orgy in Asterix in Switzerlandthe women are wearing ridiculous, apocalyptic hairstyles with a bonnet-shaped mass of tight curls at the front of the head. That is a hairstyle seen quite commonly on busts of rich Roman women. One gag in Asterix the Gladiator involves a trio of Romans in silly costumes walking into the arena covered in advertising slogans before a gladiator fight, while Caesar wonders whether or not people are bothered by all of the commercials.

This is obviously a joke about television advertising but was an actual practice — gladiator matches were preceded by advertising and sometimes the gladiators themselves would carry advertising pennants, wear slogans or use sponsored equipment.

Many fans had thought that Linkara made up "It's magic, I don't have to explian it," unaware that it's a jab at Joe Quesadawho said said it to justify the controversial changes made to Spider-Man in One More Day. Knights of the Dinner Table: Fans of the Insane Clown Posse will recognize it as the band's drink of choice. Some fans were likewise unaware that Hawk the Slayer is a real movie.

Though this may become less of an example since Hawk the Slayer has been featured on Rifftrax. A story arc in the s Old West comic strip Latigo starts with one character, who is a bit impractical and thoughtlessrejoicing at finding a "three-dollar gold piece".

It's got to be a fake, right? Mint tried it, from to In the 35 years it was produced, less than half-a million were struck, at all three U. There was a Garfield strip where he put on another performance on top of the fence and had money thrown at him by the resident of some distant Pacific island in the form of a millstone. The Yap islands in the Pacific really do use enormous round stone discs with a hole in the middle as a form of currency.

See The Other Wiki for details. Anyone who grew up in the '60s or '70s would remember the Yap stone coin's frequent appearances in Ripley's Believe It or Not! In ElvisElvis' daughter listens to "Smurf Hits," pop songs with the lyrics rewritten to be about The Smurfs. Most people in Sweden, where Elvis is published, know that Smurf Hits is a real thing. But the fact that the song that Elvis' daughter is listening to, which goes "Kokobom smurf smurf, kokobom smurf smurf," is real will surprise a lot of readers since it sounds more like a parody.

In one Foxtrot strip, Jason and Marcus, being confused what "fantasy football" means, play a tabletop game about fantasy creatures like dwarves and balrogs playing football. Something similar actually exists. In Boys Und Senshadoit is mentioned that there is a sport called Sentoki-do, similar to Sensha-dobut with planes rather than tanks; Akio's family does it, but he is unwilling to do so because of the accident that killed his father.

The author says that combat dogfighting actually exists in real life, over the Pacific Ocean, with lasers instead of simunition rounds. The Heroes of the Storm fanfic Heroes Of The Desk has its protagonists escaping in a vessel propelled by "magnetohydrodynamic" engines.

The drive is both a real if impractical concept and has been used in fiction before as the "caterpillar drive". Its cousin, the magnetoplasmadynamic drive ion enginealso makes an appearance, though the ability to have both in a single housing switching between modes at will is Rule of Cool.

In A Kingdom Divided it is mentioned that the airships' rotary engines tended to lose cylinders in mid-air. It's an actual issue of WWI-era aircraft rotary engines.

In Seven Days In Sunny June a group based in several high schools is named "The Club" whose purpose is to drug and date rape girls in the various schools until it was taken down. Some people complained that it was a Very Special Episode plotline doused with a lack of realism until the author pointed out that said groups do exist In Vinyl and Octavia Engage in Roleplaythe two title characters play a tabletop roleplaying game called Pony Tales.

It's a real thing. NASA actually had designs for such a ship, called the Orion Drive. Needless to say, just like Torgue, reality set in and it was scrapped. In Ambience A Fleet Symphonya C is landed on the USS George Washingtonwhich led to some readers calling it impossible.

Actually, Cs have been landed on carriers beforealthough the idea was later rejected as too risky to be made a routine operation. Several readers of Doing It Right This Time were quite surprised to learn that The Ethical Slut is a real book.

The Statue of Liberty is a golden yellow in the first An American Tail movie. The animators showed their workbecause the statue's skin is mostly copper, it really was that color when it was new. The greyish bluey green is copper oxide that formed in subsequent decades. In Despicable Me 2Lucy uses a lipstick taser on Gru, a moment showcased in the trailer.

Stun guns disguised as lipstick actually exist. Many people who viewed Frozen were surprised to find that ice harvesting was an actual thing in the 19th century that was especially common in Norway and many other parts of Europe and North America. Blocks of ice were put into icehouses to store food before modern refrigerators existed. In Beavis and Butt-Head Do AmericaMr.

Van Dreissen picks up an acoustic guitar and plays a song called "Lesbian Seagull", which later reprises over the end credits sung by Englebert Humperdinck in the style of an Award Bait Song.

The song is silly enough that you'd think it was made up for the film, but the original version was released in by gay singer-songwriter Tom Wilson: The album it appeared on, Gay Name Gamefeatured both serious and humorous songs, so it's unclear whether the narm of this particular song was intentional after all.

The Aracuan bird from The Three Caballeros is actually a real species, called the Aracua or Speckled Chachalaca. However, the real animal looks nothing like Disney's version. In My Little Pony: They're a fairly accurate representation of typical portable sequencers. The Direct-to-Video film Annabelles Wish also has an aluminum Christmas tree in Aunt Agnes' apartment when she's talking on the phone. In Inside OutRiley stops at a roadside attraction with dinosaur statues on her way to San Francisco.

What most viewers don't know is that there is an actual park like the one Riley visited in Arizona. They may know of the older, more famous Cabazon Dinosaurs in Californiathough.

The storyline of the Disney Infinity 3. The channel in question was based on the now defunct Puppy Channel. In AnomalisaMichael arrives at a hotel in Cincinnati and is given the option of a smoking or non-smoking room, picking the former.

The film takes place in ; Ohio did not ban smoking in hotels until the following year. Like a lot of the other pieces of Japanese corporate culture seen in Gung Ho"Ribbons of Shame" are very real. In GoodfellasHenry literally brings one home after the Lufthansa heist, crowing, "We got the most expensive one!

All clips of Joseph McCarthy in the film were footage of the late senator himself. To be fair, though, the editing of the film did significantly increase the "over the top" effect — much of it plays like a greatest-hits compilation of McCarthy's most extreme moments. From Monty Python's Life of Brianalthough it was intended as a metaphor for the British Left during the s, We ARE Struggling Together is also quite accurate to how Judean groups acted during Jesus' life and the writing of the Gospels.

For instance, neither the Sadducees nor the Pharisees liked the Romans, but they also both disliked each other. The "What have the Romans done for us? The "Red Ryder" model of BB guns really existed in The Thirties and weren't just a product of Jean Shepherd 's imagination. Daisy manufactures Red Ryder BB rifles even today. They've been in continuous production, too, not reintroduced after the movie became popular.

They were advertised in the back pages of children's comic books. While the Red Ryder didn't have "the compass in the stock and the thing that tells time", another model in the product line, the "Buck Jones", did have both a sundial and a compass in the stock.

The Buck Jones was a shot pump action, though, not a carbine action, shot. The most likely explanation is that Shepherd merged the two models in his memories. And "You'll put someone's eye out" was a warning that many mothers issued concerning it Lifebuoy Soap is almost completely forgotten now, except in India, where it is a big brand like Dove in the US, but it's actually still being made. Likewise Palmolive is known almost entirely as a dish soap these days, but they did and still do make hand soap.

In Scandinavia, at least, they also make shampoo and conditioner products. Many viewers probably laughed at the "anachronistic" fountains on the grounds of the French royal palace in the movie version of Alexandre Dumas ' novel The Man in the Iron Mask. Truth is, not only were they real, but they're also Older Than They Think: The very idea of gravity-powered fountains, in fact, dates back at least to the ancient Romans.

Pre-electricity fountains were to be found in parks and ornamental gardens throughout Europe at one point. They've mostly been replaced or fallen out of use now, though. It's easy to assume that Kate, the female medieval blacksmith from A Knight's Taleis just another piece of the movie's deliberate Anachronism Stew and Politically Correct History.

But, according to the law of the Blacksmith's Guild of the time, if a blacksmith died and his widow was trained in the profession, then she was allowed to work as a blacksmith to support herself and any children from the marriage unless she remarried, and Kate refers to her late husband in one scene.

There still survive examples of medieval craft works that were made by widows of guild members we know this because in addition to their late husband's craft marks, which they were allowed to use, these women added a lozenge — the heraldic symbol for "female" — to assert their identity.

Paris' 13th century tax rolls list women as schoolmasters, doctors, apothecaries, plasterers, dyers, copyists the literate population of 13th century France was about equally distributed between the sexes, and the records seem to indicate women bought more booksand bookbinders; Louis IX's court records also list women as hairdressers, salt merchants, millers, and farmers.

Some crafts notably brewers in England, hence the archaic term "alewife" — which has no masculine equivalent — for a woman innkeeper today, it refers to a kind of fish were largely monopolized by women. Also, Ulrich von Lichtenstein was a real person, though his exploits were in fact much more fantastic and flamboyant than those depicted in the film. Likewise, the presence of black cowboys in recent westerns. Many cowboys in The Wild West in the ss were freedmen; many blacks were attracted to cowboy work because discrimination wasn't as bad in the West as it was in the South, and freedmen often had experience handling animals from their time in bondage.

It is their absence from the classic Western format of the '30s through early '60s that is inaccurate. This omission is hinted at in The Cowboy Way through one of the two main characters' skepticism concerning the existence of famous black rodeo performer Bill Pickett.

Then again, very few characters in Westerns are actually cowboys, i. In the Ridley Scott film Gladiator: It was cut because the idea felt unbelievable. Commodus deciding to fight a gladiator in the arena looks like a plot device to let Maximus get his revenge. The historical Commodus did actually fight in gladiator contests, although it isn't how he died.

The humongous bank vault door in TRON may look like a slightly over-the-top prop. It along with the laser lab and computer room is real and can be found at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The door does weigh four tons; it serves to allow heavy equipment to access the laser lab.

Even in the film, the real opening mechanism is visible standard-looking panic bar controlled latch mechanism once the door finishes opening. Justin Simien thought of taking out the Blackface Party because he thought audiences might find it too absurd.

Then he found out racist parties just like it were happening in universities all over the country. General Ripper 's paranoia about fluoridating water is most likely to come across as simply a manifestation of him being insane.

However, his suspicion was shared by the ultra-right John Birch Society, and thus was an allusion to an actual conspiracy theory which was shared by people with similar ideology as the fictional character. Paranoia about fluoridating water is still a major thing in the extreme Right and, increasingly, in some circles of the extreme Left. Another thing from that movie: If you think it's unrealistic that a general like Turgidson would be so cavalier about killing millions of people in the name of winning the Cold Waryou probably don't know about General Thomas S.

Power, who was the commander in chief of Strategic Air Command from When the RAND corporation parodied in the film as the BLAND corporation advised that SAC not strike Soviet cities at the start of a war, Power replied: Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?

The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win! Turgidson's personality could also have been based on Curtis LeMay, commander of SAC from and later Chief of Staff of the USAF from to Some of his most famous quotes date after Dr.

Strangelove, but are equally chilling. Discussing the period before the USSR developed nuclear weapons he said "Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had acquired through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds the atomic bomb—and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons.

That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it. I think there may be times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. There was a point in time when Romans actually hired philosophers to recite at dinner parties so that the host could look cultured.

Which was just another custom they swiped from Greeks wholesale. In Ancient Greece there were traveling philosophers for hire who advertised their guest-entertaining services to wealthy hosts with pretensions of culture. Many of the varying scenes of The American Civil War depravity in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are actually Sergio Leone showing his workmuch to the confusion of most of his prop builders, cinematographers and actors who were confused by everything from the long coat Leone chose to dress Blondie in to the train cannon with the spy tied to the front of it and the scene where the soldiers grimly shoot a criminal after standing him next to a coffin.

Just in case anyone was wondering about that scene where the traffickers are testing the purity of their merchandise So, if the powder tastes like heroin and melts at the right temperature as determined by a Thiele melting point apparatus in this casethen it's got to be pure heroin. The trafficker's expert demonstrates all the salient points of the lab procedureeven displaying the mineral oil bottle just to show us that he's using the usual heat transfer medium.

On top of that, real heroin was used for that scene. Also, the entire plot is based on the real "French connection" case where raw Turkish opium was processed into heroin in Marseilles before coming to the US. Many other countries have also served as drug middlemen. The Confederate States of America contains several faux commercials for some very afrophobic products, including a brand of tobacco with a name you need N-Word Privileges to say.

Disturbingly as is revealed at the end of the documentaryall of the products with the exception of the Shackle, an electronic slave monitoring system that appears to be based on the real life ankle monitors that are handed down to parolees and people under house arrest that automatically notify the police when the subject steps out of their designated area turn out to be real though no longer existent brands. After realizing the negative press they'd been getting, they changed the name to " Darlie Toothpaste " and changed the picture from a racist black caricature to a generic white man in a top hat.

However, they didn't change the name in several Asian languages, and ran ads explaining that despite the changes in packaging, "Black Man Toothpaste is still Black Man Toothpaste. The Korean movie A Tale of Two Sisters is extremely symbolic, and there is a lot of stuff that goes on that doesn't immediately make sense and you have to think about it in order to get what is going on. Therefore, Western viewers can be forgiven for the Epileptic Trees they come up with in trying to deduce the symbolism of the tents right by the road in a scene where two characters are driving at night.

These tents are actually a common sight in rural areas of Korea as they serve an agricultural purpose. The World Sudoku Championship that featured in the mockumentary Colours By Numbers? It's real, as are some of the competitors mentioned. The entire story in I Love You Phillip Morris counts as one of these; if the film didn't specifically tell you at the beginning that "This actually happened," there's no way anyone could believe it.

The tag line "More of this is true than you would probably believe" in The Men Who Stare at Goats pretty accurately sums up the weirdness that the movie is based on.

One example that kind of hurt the film is that the real organization covered actually used Star Wars references such as calling themselves "Jedi Warriors".

Unfortunately, several reviewers assumed that this aspect was a labored Actor Allusion to Ewan McGregor and criticized the film for it. It's a Wonderful Life: After the film was released, Frank Capra received several letters complaining about the idea of a high school gym with a swimming pool underneath its floor, saying that no such places exist.

Reviewers also knocked the scene as being too obviously contrived and unrealistic. The scene was shot at Beverly Hills High School's "Swim Gym"which opened in and is still used today. Of course, what it would be doing in a podunk town like Bedford Falls is slightly less justifiable. The same location and prank were also used in the teen flick Whatever It Takesperhaps as an homage to Wonderful Life. There is a brief shot of a rotisserie powered by a record player. That may seem improbable today, but those things actually did exist, and, in any case, it looks sufficiently Rube Goldberg to have been Mary's or possibly Uncle Billy's invention.

The story of a monk who wrestled under a mask to earn money for his orphanage? Too silly to be anything other than a comedy? Tell that to Fray Tormenta. To a modern viewer, the "anti-drug" message of Reefer Madness is assumed to be straightforward. No problem; filmmakers could tack on some kind of token "moral message", and stay within the rules of the game.

Another infamous example is Child Bridewhich includes an extended scene of a year old skinny-dipping by claiming to draw attention to the problem of child marriage. A number of the complaints about inaccuracy in the Mel Gibson film Apocalypto actually fall into this category. The big black cat in the film is a female jaguar, not a leopard. The Maya did actually practice human sacrifice, though not as shown in the film: They also did have a blue paint-like dye that they used to mark individuals before sacrifice.

The decapitation of prisoners was older, more important and more widespread than heart ripping among the Mayans, and like in the movie, it involved dropping the head down stairs and being caught in somewhat sport-like fashion by people at the base. This happened at ballgame courtyards like the one the remaining prisoners are taken to later in the movie rather than in temples, though. The part where they throw the bodies of the sacrifices down the temple's steps is entirely real, however. So the movie is combining and simplifying things here, not making them up.

The Maya Civilization still existed at the time the movie is set c. Many Maya city-states, though greatly diminished in power and prosperity compared to their Classic counterparts the ones that collapsedcontinued to exist, even well into the colonial era.

Pirates of the Caribbean and some other pirate movies feature female pirates. There were Pirate Girlsnotably Anne Bonny, Mary Read, Jeanne de Clisson and Grace O'Malley.

Zheng Yi Shao ended up being one of the most successful pirates ever and one pirate is in fact an Expy of her. Similarly, the commonness of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything would imply that real pirates were all bloodthirsty ravenous wild men. Only a few of them were that terrible, but many liked to be thought of that way because people who're frightened out of their wits are much more likely to give up their valuables.

In other words, yes, The Princess Bride 's Dread Pirate Roberts' reliance on reputation was sort of used in real life. Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Some people have been surprised to learn that The Castle Aaaaargggh is a real place and not "only a model". It's called Castle Stalker, and it's in an inlet on Loch Linnhe in Scotland.

Although the shots looking up at the French throwing animals over the battlements were done with a mock up for logistical and safety reasons. On the special edition DVD, there's a surreal moment when Terry Jones and Gilliam travel to Doune Castle and the other locations used in the film —and buy a copy of their own movie script in the castle's gift shop.

To be precise, for the exterior shot of Camelot the Pythons used a very obvious model, for the interior shots i. In fact, every single interior in the film is Doune Castle, and what's more, most of them are the same room.

Other King Arthur films usually depict the knights wearing plate armor, which did not appear until the 14th century. Using animals as ammunition in catapults? Yeah, they actually did that in medieval siege warfare, since it was a convenient way to spread disease in besieged castles.

The Cloudcuckoolander monks, who smack themselves in the faces with wooden planks while chanting, are a parody of Real Life flagellants. And smacking themselves in the face with wooden planks is actually very mild compared to what the real flagellants did, who are thought by some to have accidentally invented BDSM via Pavlovian conditioning. Hell, even the killer rabbit has basis in fact. It was inspired by real medieval religious artwhich often visually depicted the sin of cowardice by showing a knight fleeing in terror from a rabbit.

Those familiar with the Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incidentwhich happened a mere four years after the film's release, will know that under the right circumstances, a rabbit can indeed seemingly become vicious. As mentioned in the Appeal to Worse Problems trope, an example was used about how in The Phantom Menace there were elected officials who happened to have titles such as "Queen", and that some places actually did elect monarchy, including medieval Ireland and early modern Poland. There are still elective monarchies, including Malaysia, Cambodia where the King is elected by other members of the Royal Familyand Wallis-and-Futuna, a French territory in the Pacific Ocean, which is divided into three traditional kingdoms each led by a king elected among the local aristocracy.

However, it should be noted that in these cases, it's never a truly open democracy, and a mere election of one of several high ranking aristocrats. In some North American native bands, the children of elected chiefs are officially titled princes and princesses, although that title only matters while their parent holds office.

By some historical oddity, the President of France shares the monarchy of Andorra with a Spanish bishop. This makes the Co-Prince of Andorra a freely elected monarch diarch? Many viewers of Borat did not know that Kazakhstan was a real country.

In fact, it is the ninth largest in the world and also the largest landlocked country. However, the "Kazakhstan" of the film resembles the non-fictional country In-Name-Only and you can bet they were not freaking amused-government officials made a point of noting the large Jewish Kazakh community, who emphatically are not mistreated in the manner of the film. This confusion led to an embarrassing incident at a sporting competition in Kuwait. Maria Dmitrienko, a Kazakh, placed first in an event and the tradition was to play her national anthem when she was awarded her medal.

But the officials mistakenly played the fake Kazakh anthem from the movie rather than the real anthem. Dmitrienko handled it graciously and the officials apologized when their mistake was pointed out. The system James Bond uses at the end of Thunderball is commonly viewed as the most unrealistic thing James Bond ever does, even in That device is the Fulton Surface to Air Recovery System, or STARSa very real and very safe air recovery system, with only one death throughout its history, caused by improper use.

The pocket-sized breathing device used by Bond during the movie, on the other hand, was fake but thought to be real, even by the Royal Navy, who tried to get some from the producers, only to be told it was only as effective as the user's ability to hold his breath.

One of the more ridiculous scenes in Live and Let Die involves Bond running over the backs of a bunch of alligators and crocodiles to get off an island before the carnivores can eat him. According to the commentary on the film, they were planning to have Bond escape using his magnetic watch to pull a boat over, but felt it lacked excitement.

They asked the animal handler on the set how he would escape from the island and he proceeded to do the "run-over-their-backs" stunt for the camera. The footage is actually of him doing it! Another example of this occurred in The Living Daylights. Most fans assumed the scene with Bond and Kara using her cello case to slide down the mountain like a bobsled was done via special effects, thinking that was absurd; actually, it was a simple stunt that both Timothy Dalton and Maryam d'Abo did themselves, actually using it as such.

It took quite a few takes, however. The helicopter-suspended buzzsaws seen in The World Is Not Enough are in fact used for trimming trees in real life. And it is possible to fly a snowmobile with a paraglideras seen with the film's parahawks.

Spectre sees M getting nervous about the UK joining an intelligence-sharing arrangement called "Nine Eyes. In reality, the UK is already a member of the "Five Eyes" alliance and has been for decades. The "I say, let 'em crash! Airplanes actually did have smoking sections at the time the FAA didn't begin to ban smoking on flights until This really applies to any TV show or film made before the smoking ban, including the famous "Nightmare at 20, Feet" episode of The Twilight Zonewhere William Shatner lights up right before seeing that thing In Blast from the PastDr.

Calvin Webber Adam's father likes him some hot Dr Pepper. Anyone watching The Muppet Christmas Carola more comedic adaptation of the story, without reading the book or watching any of the more serious adaptations, might be surprised to learn that Scrooge's "more of gravy than of grave" pun was in the original novel. In the trailers for Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog DaysGreg is shown getting a new cell phone called a "Ladybug" that looks like something straight out of the 90s and only calls home and Some might think that that's just his parents being out of touch, but there exists a real phone called the Firefly that only calls numbers that the parents program into the phone, as well as Many critics and some viewers unfamiliar with stock-car racing thought the name of the main character in Days of ThunderCole Trickle, was an over-the-top, too deliberately Southern name.

But at the time Dick Tricklea legend of the sport, was still racing. There were complaints about Madonna still having '80s Hair in Dick Tracywhere she played Breathless Mahoney. The film is set in — a time when what we now think of as Eighties Hair was actually a popular hairstyle for women. In fact, Jean Harlowa sort of proto-Madonna and arguably the Trope Maker for the Dumb Blonde trope, was famous for having frizzy hair much like Breathless's in the movie.

The breathable liquid in The Abyss? It's a real thing designed to help scuba divers prevent getting barotrauma. Not only that, but they actually used the stuff in the movie where they submerged a rat in it much to the anger of certain animal rights groups. The rat survived unharmed, if you needed to know. Apparently, some people aren't entirely convinced that Titanic was a real ship.

The film To Hell and Back is about World War II badass Audie Murphy, played by himself. The climax of the film involves Murphy saving his squad by climbing atop a burning tank destroyer and holding off German soldiers alone with the mounted machine gun. Over the top, right? Yes, but he really did thatand he was awarded the Medal of Honor for it.

In fact, the film had to scale back some of his war stories because they would be too unbelievable to the viewer. The scene in the first film where Lex unlocks the laboratory doors by flying through the files and folders of a computer using an unrealistic 3D interface while exclaiming "It's a Unix system! You can even download an open-source clone if you should buy antisoma shares a modern Unix-like operating system like Linux.

Viewers of Jurassic World most prominently Doug Walker have noticed the " Pterodactyl with a T. It's actually a real pterosaur called a Dimorphodon. That said, the movie's pterosaur differed in a number of ways from the real animal, which had a more arboreal lifestyle and a smoother curve to the snout. Believe it or not, the "Suck Kut" from Wayne's World is actually a parody of a real product called the Flowbee. It was invented in by Rick Huntand the Flowbee, as Wayne so eloquently put it, " certainly does suck ," but it was exactly the kind of dodgy product you would see advertised in infomercials on the Real Life equivalents of low-budget late-night cable access shows like the Show Within a ShowWayne's World, and believe it or not, you can still buy them.

It seems like a gag barclay stockbrokers market master up for the film, but some music stores actually had "NO STAIRWAY" signs before the movie came out due to the number of people who would test out their guitars with that song.

Some stores kept similar signs up well into The Oughts. This is based loosely on a real thing. The "Derelicte" look in Zoolander is a spoof of a real fashion design exhibited by John Galliano inwhere models dressed like the homeless, even wearing trash found in the streets of New York.

During the opening sequence of A Hard Day's NightThe Beatles are shown running from fans at the train station. Well, except for Paulwho's disguised himself by wearing a phony beard. In the early years of Beatlemania, the Beatles really wore disguises in public to avoid being seen. Even better, the scene really is of the band running from fanswhich just happened to be caught on film. People got so caught up in whether or not The Amityville Horror was fake that people thought the DeFeo stock market board game western publishing were made up, and that the house didn't even exist.

Many viewers of Birdemic called "bull" on protagonist Rod's hybrid Ford Mustang. Turns out there is a California company that will convert any vehicle to hybrid irs reporting options trades full electric—though it's expensive.

So Rod's hybrid Mustang is plausible, though A the film implies that Rod bought it as a hybrid, and B converting a muscle car like a Mustang to a hybrid massively misses the point of both muscle cars and hybrids. At the end of This Is Spinal Tapthe band members, whose career is in the toilet in America to the point where they're playing to an unenthusiastic audience of approximately 20 people on a small stage at a California amusement parkhead to Japan and perform a concert in Kobe, where they become a massive success once again and reignite their career.

And the same happened in Real Life for Anvil. Both heavy metal and punk were popular in Japan long after they were on the decline in America or Britain. Johnny Mnemonic contains a scene where the eponymous character intrinsic value of an american call option "Thomson Eyephones" a head-mounted display.

It tends to make modern viewers snicker because of the obvious assonance to the similarly named Apple smartphonebut it's actually an example where the authors have Shown Their Work.

In the early s, the first head-mounted displays were manufactured by a company called VPL, owned by Jaron Lanier. They were called Eyephones, as a pun on "earphones". When VPL folded, all its patents were transferred to Thomson.

The film A Million Ways to Die in the West features the song "If You've Only Got a Mustache", which extols the benefits of having a nicely-groomed patch of lip fur. While it sounds like something Seth MacFarlane would've invented, not only is it a real song, it was written by the prolific American songwriter Stephen Fosterand would even have been a contemporary popular song in the year the film is set.

In Back to the Futureas Marty tries to convince his father George to take Lorraine to the dance, George refuses because that would mean that he'd miss his favorite show Bo sanchez stock market pdf Fiction Theatre.

Science Fiction Theatre was an actual sci-fi show from The '50sa spiritual predecessor to both The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone in an extended version of the "Darth Vader" scene, Marty name-drops both shows. Coincidentally, one castmember was a Michael Foxand because he was already in the Screen Actor's GuildMichael J.

Fox had adopted the middle initial "J" to distinguish himself from the elder Fox. Likewise, younger viewers and even some contemporaries might be confused by anatomy of the stock market chart gag where Marty orders a "Pepsi Free.

All the President's Men: Untilwhen former CIA associate director W. Mark Felt revealed he was Deep Throat. Or at least, Felt claimed he was "Deep Throat". But Felt was 92 years old insick, and near death, and some continue to believe that "Deep Throat" was more than one person.

They think Felt simultaneously cashed in on the case before dying, and diverted attention from others who also fed Woodward information. In Idiocracythe most popular movie in the year is "Ass", two hours of a close-up of a man's bare ass.

A film which was nothing but a close-up of someone's ass? That sounds too ridiculous to be true. Actually, Andy Warhol made such a movie called Taylor Mead's Assa somewhat sarcastic response to one critic who complained about "films focusing on Taylor Mead's ass for two hours.

However, Holland was even more filled with water than it is now and ice-skating was a common skill for both women and men. There have naturally been questions about "a Black Aristocrat" in Cinderella being too much like Black Vikings. In actual fact, there were instances such as Abram Petrovich Gannibalthe ancestor of Russian Poet Alexander Pushkin. In 18th Century France, there was Chevalier de Saint-Georgesa Fencing Master and buying disney stock certificates musician does herding behavior exist in chinese stock markets composer who served as Marie Antoinette 's personal tutor.

In addition to this, there is Alexandre Davy de la Pailleteriebetter known as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of Alexandre Dumas.

Given the film's blend of styles and groups from different periods it is not as out of place as people think. It has also been theorized that Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III of Great Britain, had black ancestry. The one German operator who used his girlfriend's name Cilly in many of his transmissions sounds like a fanciful way of "humanizing" how the codes were broken.

Additionally, because military messages always follow a set format, Bletchley would arrange for the military to do something which they knew the Germans would report - such as air-dropped naval mines at a specific point. Because they already knew what the message said, they could easily work it backwards. Joan's apathetic reaction to Turing's sexuality seems far-fetched, but she was indeed reportedly "unfazed" when he admitted it to her. The Wizard of Oz contains a scene where Dorothy falls into a pig pen and everyone panics.

Most people who aren't farmers see this as Narm and don't realize the very real risk of being killed and eaten by pigs should you happen to fall in their pen. Historically, pig herding or anything else to do with pigs was considered a dangerous profession.

Adult pigs run as long as 6 feet snout-to-tail, and weigh as much as pounds. In The Middle Agespigs have been tried and executed for eating children. The government's technology in Enemy of the State is actually ten years behind what the US government had in store at the time the movie came out in This was done on purpose, both for the benefit of the writer and the viewer.

In Galaxy QuestGwen asks the Thermians, does herding behavior exist in chinese stock markets an incredulous manner, "Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island [is real]? Coast Guard did receive letters and telegrams from '60s TV viewers pleading with them to find and rescue the castaways! Viewers may assume that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them made up the oddly artful and picturesque City Hall subway station where the final confrontation tradesim metastock plug-in place.

In fact, although it is no longer in use, the City Hall Station was real and operated from towhen its proximity to a nearby station and the logistical challenge of remodeling it to accommodate the length of the newer trains made it impractical to keep it open.

The station is now abandoned but can be glimpsed from certain subway routes or from the transit museum, and it is if anything even more visually intriguing than how the movie depicted it. RoboCop 2 has the "Magnavolt" which gives a lethal electric shock to would be car thieves, without draining your battery. A company in South Africa markets a portable flame thrower that is attached to the bottom forex goiler indicator download a car to deter would be carjackers, though the intent would most likely be inverbit binary options sl singe them rather than outright burn them.

Nearly all of the unusual vehicles and weapons used by HYDRA in Captain America: The First Avenger were based on real designs for German Wunderwaffe during WW2. Lemony Snicket's How to make money without stress in nigeria Series of Unfortunate Events: There actually is a hotel in New York City organized by the Dewey Decimal System.

Readers of Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows may be puzzled swiss forex apk download the author waxes lyrical about the old custom of ohaguroor tooth blackening.

Yes, prior to the Meiji era, Japanese women would dye their teeth black with a ferrous solution; black smiles were considered more elegant than natural, ivory-coloured teeth. Also in Elizabethan England people were really fond of sugar and had the expected dental hygiene practices of Elizabethan English i.

Those who could not afford their dose of sugar sometimes coloured their teeth forex market stories gain the proper look.

The town certainly celebrates the tale's lore though, especially around Halloween. The Van Tessel family, including Catriena, were real as well. Ichabod Crane was the name of an army captain that Irving met before writing the story. This example is somewhat of an inversion, however, as it was not until that the village of North Tarrytown was officially named Sleepy Hollow, largely due to the popularity of the Washington Irving tale.

Some sources also claim that it was the nearby town of Kinderhook that actually inspired Irving's story. Terry Pratchett loved this trope. Generallyif something sounds bizarre-but-not-implausible,even odds it was actually real, or only a mild exaggeration of the truth.

Apparently it is a common late-night, drunk-food dish in Adelaide. Also commonly eaten by sober people during the middle of the day in other parts of south Australia. Also in The Last Continentthe regatta where people run along a dry river bed carrying boats is actually happens indus valley civilization trading system Alice Springs, Australia.

Exploding billiard balls happen to be real too. In Mortone of the early books from Albert's life is from "back before they invented spelling. Prior to the rise of dictionaries, words were just spelled phonetically, with no real regard to consistency.

There were cases of people spelling the same word differently each time they wrote it. Notably, the myriad ways William Shakespeare wrote his own name. Surely the idea of a rahanvaihto helsinki-vantaa forex war being fought over an island that's just risen from the ocean is a fantasy narrative device used by Terry Pratchett to poke fun at the idiotic nationalism of a bygone age?

The Other Wiki disagrees! Ornamental hermitslike the one on the Ramkin estate in Snuffwere indeed a big thing in 18th century England. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! Which also exists in our world, though it has since been renamed Bioko; it's a major part of Equatorial Guinea. Good Omens mentions the angel Aziraphale's collection of Infamous Bibles, named from errors in typesetting.

Amazingly, all of these Bibles other than the Charing Cross and the Buggre Alle This actually exist. These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible, so called from a printer's error which caused it to proclaim, in I Corinthians, "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?

There were the Discharge bible, the Treacle Bible, the Standing Fishes Bible, the Charing Cross Bible and the rest. Aziraphale had them all. Even the very rarest, [ The Christmas Episode of Corner Gas actually features an aluminum Christmas tree.

A Kelly criterion futures trading Episode of Green Acres had Oliver eager for a traditional rural Christmas, and discovering 'traditional' in Hooterville meant aluminum Christmas trees.

She died in bed envy robot forex with her head in the toiletshe didn't do it to be remembered During an early episode of SeinfeldJason Alexander objected to the actions of his character, George Costanza, insisting that no sane person in Real Life would ever react this way; specifically, quitting his job and turning up the next day as if nothing happened.

Larry David informed him that he himself did exactly that when he worked as a writer on Saturday Night Live. This completely changed how Jason came to see the character, imitating Larry David from then on instead of his previous Woody Allen -like portrayal.

Knowledge that all four of the core characters on Seinfeld are based on real people can lead one to view the early episodes of the show when the correspondence was the most direct in a new light.

These people existed, and they were doing things like this in New York in the s. In the pilot episode, Jack mentions the GE Trivection Oven, an oven that combines three types of heat with ludicrously over-the-top descriptions of it.

Though meant more as Biting-the-Hand Humor than Product PlacementNBC cynthia macys easy forex breakout trend trading simple system special commercials during the premiere to convince the world that yes, this was a real product. Another episode featured a gold necklace with the acronym EGOT referencing the quest for an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony and said that it was originally made for Philip Michael Thomas.

Younger audience members may not have realized that this wasn't just a random pop culture reference—the term "EGOT" was actually coined by Thomas, back in the '80s, when he frequently stated that his goal was to win all four awards. To date, he has never scored so much as a nomination for any of them.

Thomas claimed at the time that the letters stood for Energy, Growth, Opportunity and Talent. At least one fan of Merlin had this reaction to the mention of belladonna eye drops to 'make the eyes look more beautiful'.

They were immediately corrected—belladonna dilates the pupils, so therefore did have this effect. It was actually named belladonna beautiful woman after its using in cosmetic eye-drops. The active ingredient in belladonna, atropine, is still used medicinally in eyedrops to treat near-sightedness. In the commentary for Generation KillEvan Wright often had to state "this actually happened" during the more absurd, fantastical-seeming occurrences on the show.

In fact, they actually had to tone down the more bizarre shit that the so-called Captain America pulled. Pierce on Community tries to make a Forced Meme out of the phrase "Streets Ahead".

The characters reacted with scorn towards him. It's an existing phrase in Australia and the UK, which is rather appropriate as another episode showed that Pierce always rips off other people even when he's not trying to.

In the BBC's version of Robin Hood there was much derision when the character of Isabella was appointed Sheriff of Nottingham. Remember mockolate fake chocolate made from suspicious substances on Friends? Disgusting and potentially hazardous? Well, so does anyone who grew up in the Soviet Bloc. Hershey's and other chocolate companies are doing this now, replacing cocoa butter in their "chocolate" with vegetable oils. Where is the stock market headed ken fisher have taken to using the "mockolate" term coined by Friends to describe it.

In one episode when Chandler and Ross's old wild partying friend nicknamed "Gandalf" comes to visit, some of the others don't get the reference—which would be unlikely today since the Lord of the Rings films have made the main characters' names ubiquitous. A lot of non-American viewers don't realize that Days of Our Lives is an actual show and just think it's a Soap Within a Show.

The writers of Heartbeat learned that at the time when the series is set, bobbies were still wearing capes. They shot some test scenes with Nick wearing a cape but audiences felt it looked too weird so they switched 5 minute binary option brokers pimp the more familiar modern-day overcoat. And when some fans wrote in to point out the inaccuracy, the producers wrote back explaining that Aidensfield was in a region selected to test the new police uniforms before they were adopted across the country.

In Sesame Streetthe Count's obsession with counting ana traders jp stock like it would just be a Pun. However, in Eastern European folklore regarding vampires, one way to escape a vampire was to scatter seeds on the ground, as they had a compulsion to count them all, and would be distracted until they finished.

This may also be the strangest ever example of Fridge Brilliance. This was lampshaded in an episode of The X-Files when Mulder, finding himself with a stomach-full of chloral hydrate-laced pizza and being attacked by a vampire, reaches for the nightstand, where lies his gun and Knowing he's way too wasted to shoot, he scatters the seeds, the vampire laments that he has to pick them all up, and does so compulsively.

Scully arrives about a half-hour later as Count Suckula is about to go for Stock exchange broker pakistan neck. What happens next is a matter of opinion. In an episode of Have I Got News for Youthey showed a picture of Viktor Yushchenko before and after he was poisoned.

The audience laughed, even when told it was real. It just seemed too ridiculous. There were many complaints in online fandom about the Doctor Who episode "The Shakespeare Code" suggesting there were black people living in England in William Shakespeare 's time. In real life, Queen Elizabeth I wrote letters to the Buying european stocks in canada of London complaining about the "great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors" in the city.

A similar case was President Nixon's black Secret Service agent in "The Impossible Astronaut". He actually had international stock brokers in usa least one black Secret Service agent in real life.

The very next episode revealed that Canton was kicked out of the FBI for wanting to trading the pristine method for options a black man.

Some felt this wouldn't even have occurred to someone in —except the episode is set less than a year before a gay couple in Minnesota applied for a marriage license, and was also the year of the Stonewall Riot the police action credited with starting the Gay Rights movement.

Many young Doctor Who fans may be surprised to discover that the Police Box design did not originate with the show. The mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie that serves as a plot point in "The Unicorn and The Wasp" really happened.

Wojo had to improvise when the precinct room was out of coffee. Barney does a disgusted forex broker list reviews uk take at the result—hot Dr.

What Explains Herd Behavior in the Chinese Stock Market? - Munich Personal RePEc Archive

The soft drink company actively marketed this treatment of their drink in the early '60s, but it didn't catch on. Saturday Night Live In the mid-to-late s episodes, Nora Dunn and Jan Hooks appear on a recurring skit involving a Lifetime network show called Attitudeswhich appears to be an outrageous spoof on the sort of shows that aired on Lifetime.

It was actually a parody of a real show. Ditto for Christopher Walken 's The Continental recurring sketch. Walken actually remembers seeing the original version as a kid. Many viewers outside the the New York metropolitan area and, to be honest, quite a few within it thought that Joe Franklin was a character Billy Crystal made up for sketches on the show.

He's very much realand did in fact host the first TV talk show. In the season 34 episode hosted by Anne Hathaway her first time hostingthere was a CSPAN sketch showing various deadbeats who would be benefiting from the bailout during the housing crisis-cum-recession. Then-cast members Darrell Hammond and Casey Wilson played a couple named Herbert and Marion Sandler no relation to Adam who cheated Wachovia Bank out of a lot of money and made off like bandits.

Lorne Michaels didn't know until after the sketch aired that Herbert and Diferença entre call option vs put option Sandler were a real couple that actually did this making the "People Who Should Be Shot" caption underneath them during their time onscreen a little uncomfortable to laugh at.

Because of this, NBC's SNL video website and the network reruns edit out the entire part featuring Darrell Hammond and Casey Wilson as Herbert and Marion Sandler though the shots of them as background characters weren't edited in any way.

The Netflix version does show the part, but is edited to remove the "People Who Should Be Shot" caption and Herbert Sandler's line about thanking the U. When Chevy Chase was doing Weekend Update, Michael O'Donoghue wrote a joke: According to reports, neighbors ignored the Professor's cries of 'Pleh!

But Professor Backwards was a real person whose real name was James Edmondson and he had been murdered that week as described. All O'Donoghue did was add the part about him yelling "Pleh". Martin Short's chain-smoking attorney Nathan Thurm from the season ten 60 Minutes parody is based on a real person from a real 60 Minutes segment.

Stargate SG-1 's military base in Colorado, bizarrely burrowed into Cheyenne Mountain, is, in reality, fake The show even mentions once or twice that the SGC is below NORAD, though the remarks are so offhand you can be forgiven for missing them.

The ridiculously thick blast door, shown sealing itself whenever there's a crisis, is also real. Also, not only is there a real Stargate Program, it was actually weirder than the one in the show. It's depicted — more or less — in The Men Who Stare at Goats. To add to the hilarity, there is actually a door in Cheyenne Mountain marked "Stargate Command". It's just a broom closet.

Specify messageboxoptions fxcop military put it there out of appreciation for the series. How I Met Make money mock trials Mother: In the episode "Legendaddy", Robin didn't know that the North Pole was a real place. She only knew it as the legendary place of residence of Santa Claus.

Barney's story about early sailors mistaking manatees for mermaids is actually true. Although, the idea that they mistook them for mermaids because they were desperate might be debatable. There is a blog, Polite Forex companies in france, that does reviews of every episode of House for medical accuracy; a typical episode will have several errors, mostly of the nit-picky variety excusable for the sake of story and cambio eur usd forexpros something boneheaded, obviously wrong.

Such seemed to be the case early in the 8th season, when Dr. House was brought in to diagnose not a patient, but a set of lungs for transplant, kept in a glass box, which were showing signs of premature deterioration. A great deal of disbelief was shown at the show's depiction of the lungs, clean, dry, and sterile, in a clean, dry, sterile box.

Cut to fans providing pictures and video of actual lungs ex-vivolooking just like that, to the amazement of the other commenters, trained medical professionals among them. In real life, bull semen is used as an ingredient for hair treatment products and anti-aging skin cream.

In the MTV Movie Awards spoof of The Matrix Reloadedthe Architect, played by Will Ferrellmentions that he created many video games except for Froggerthough he did name it, saying "Did you know they were going to call it Highway Crossing Frog? Highway Crossing Frog was indeed the original name until Sega changed it.

Andy's bleeding nipples caused by extreme chafing in The Office US. Sure, it sounds like some bizarre ailment to exaggerate Andy's danger proneness but it's a real thing that affects athletes. It's called "Jogger's Nipple. However, there really is a California University of Pennsylvanialocated in California, Pennsylvania. And 75 miles away is their conference rival Indiana University of Pennsylvania yes, in the town of Indiana.

The third time they did the gag prior how much money does an ecologist make Super Bowl 49they sprinkled in a few real players with weird names in the mix. If they resembled either Key or Peele, you probably would have thought names such as Ha-Ha Clinton-Dix and Ishmai'lly Kitchen were fake. In the final episode of Fawlty TowersManuel is revealed to have a pet rat, which he insists is a hamster.

While the other members of the staff are appalled due to a health inspector coming the next day, domesticated rats are quite real and in most cases are extremely clean, good-tempered and highly intelligent animals. In fairness to the staff, even if they knew about pet rats, they couldn't be sure that the health inspector would.

An additional helping of this trope comes along due to the rat having wild coloration, which is completely possible even in domestic rats. There were plenty of black people living in Victorian Londonnot to mention many Chinese and Indian communities as well. And the actor playing Renfield has been cast as a servant, which is not far-fetched at all.

The math Kevin's class is taught in High School seems like forex position risk calculator algebra with some nonsense grafted on to make it sound smart. However if you took Linear Algebra or even Discrete Mathematics in college, you'll notice that the "nonsense" is actually perfectly valid mathematics, though of a much higher level than is necessary for a high school algebra class.

This is the infamous New Math of the late 60s and early 70s, and is a good example of why it's no longer used. The extraneous details made something like simple algebra much more difficult to understand.

Although this may seem like a case of Magical Computerit's actually VRML Virtual Reality Markup Language which at the time was considered to be the future of the web. Each website would be represented as a building that the user would stroll through. A VRML corporate intranet wouldn't be all that uncommon back in Many viewers were surprised to learn that is such a thing as the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.

Even some Australian viewers. Cyber and other procedurals increasingly use the silly terms "dark web" and "darknet" and "deep web" to refer to hidden parts of the Internet.

These are actual names, and are generally used more or less correctly, though you're more likely to just find porn on there. The "deep web" is the part of the internet that is just not indexed by search engines, and thus unreachable by straight-forward searching; you have to know the specific address to go to.

Some of it is intentionally non-indexed content, like the back-end of a dynamic or script-based website, macys opening hours july 4th personal web storage accessible only through their personal passwordor corporate databases that are useless without their custom tools.

Some of it is defunct web pages that aren't linked or indexed, but still exist out on some GeoCities server out there. And some of it is the dark web. The "dark web" is intentionally hidden from standard access methods such as HTTP addressingand often requires some specialty protocol to read. While not everything in the dark web is criminal in nature, a lot of it is either illegal or only marginally legal — hacking toolkits, online gambling, counterfeiting and fraud, drugs, and, yes, porn—including a good deal of child porn.

Supposedly there are sites out there that are basically eBay and Craig's List for drugs and mercenaries. In season 2 of Penny DreadfulDorian Gray and his date visit a fancy upper-class ping pong parlorwhich not many viewers had a clue was an actual fad at the time. Not the Nine O'Clock News: Foreign viewers may not realise that the "Get a TV licence—it's cheaper than a funeral" parody in which the TV Licensing Authority hunts down and murders people who don't pay their TV licence fee is only a slight exaggeration of the real PSAs it was based on, and indeed ones that came later on were even more extreme, almost indistinguishable from the parodies.

Overlaps with Paranoia Fuel on Criminal Minds. While a number of the cases may seem far-fetched, most of them are loosely based on actual serial killers- the stranger the case, the more likely it is to be based on a real one.

Olaf, Minnesota really exists. It's a township in the western part of the state, and presumably it's not as bizarre as the town Rose Nylund came from. There is also a St. Olaf College located in Northfield, Minnesota. In Tommy Wiseau's sitcom The Neighborsthe characters wear underwear with "Tommy Wiseau" clearly printed across the band.

Most viewers mistook this for a Bland-Name Product spoof of Tommy Hilfiger, but Wiseau actually does have his own underwear brand. The device that Howard was working on to allow anyone to kiss a partner via the internet, on The Big Bang Theorymay seem silly and far fetched, but there have been numerous attempts to do this in real life.

An episode of Atlanta featured a character who claimed to be "Transracial". This might have seemed like a mean-spirited caricature of Transgender people, but people who claim to be "Transracial" genuinely exist. Many American listeners thought that the "Electric Avenue" of Eddy Grant's early '80s hit song was a made-up name for a party place.

In fact, it's a real street in the neighbourhood of Brixton in South London, which gets its name from being the first market street in the area to have electric lighting and hosts a stratégie trading options binaires immigrant street market and once you realize that, the fact that it's a protest song about the Brixton riot rather than a party anthem becomes clearer.

Others have called it a deliberate mis-attribution: However, the song is actually referencing a Cover Version of "California Dreamin'" The Beach Boys had released as a single two years earlier in Perhaps because of its use in Super Size Me"Rock N' Roll McDonald's " is one of the better-known Wesley Willis songs.

Listeners tend to think it's just about McDonald's in general, and are therefore puzzled by lyrics like "McDonalds is the place to rock" and "people flock here to get down to the rock nonprofit org money maker. Rock N' Roll McDonalds is an actual place—a large flagship McDonalds restaurant full of rock and roll memorabilia in Willis' home city of Chicago.

A similar restaurant with same name and theme exists also in Helsinki, Finland. It is full of 's memorabilia. Mel Blanc recorded a wild takeoff on Al Jolson singing, "Toot Toot Tootsie" which Jolson sang in The Jazz Singer.

Mel best way to make money members runescape a part of it. Just Mel stock market tjx silly? Jolson actually whistled the chorus in his version of "Toot Toot Tootsie". The "Weird Al" Yankovic song "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" recaps a family road trip to see the world's biggest ball of twine.

He also rattles off a list of other tourist traps they've visited in the past: Like Elvis-A-Rama, the Tupperware Museum, The Boll Weevil Monument and Cranberry World, Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, Poodle Dog Rock, And the Mecca of Albino Squirrels. The Trojan War was long believed to have been pure myth until the ruins of Troy were actually discovered in Turkey. They still turned out to have grown in the telling somewhat, however. For one, there wasn't a single city of Troy, but many, each built over the ruins of the last.

Which one of these, if any, inspired the story is hard to say. Archaeological discoveries apparently related to myths and legends tend to be all over the place with regards to this trope. Each new find has different groups declaring that a tale is confirmed, disproven, or needs to be rewritten and all can usually offer up at least a token bit of evidence for their viewpoint.

Even the discoverers themselves are often at odds with each other over how to interpret what they've dug up. At least part of how to get more starpoints on stardoll cheats problem derives from a sort of ancient Memetic Mutation.

Good stories spread, and locals alter those stories to relate to local heroes, events, and locations. It's often a mistake to attempt to point to an archaeological site as the source of a story, because it's just as likely that there are literally dozens of such sites scattered around.

For example, the famous Twelve Labors of Hercules were likely originally the famous acts of ten or twelve different local heroes, whose stories all got clumped up and attributed to the most famous one.

The playfield freeway signs in Truck Stop refer to various towns with funny names, such as "Santa Claus, IN", "Smackover, AR", and "Metropolis, IL". These are all Real Life Cutesy Name Towns. Ric Flair and Harley Race both seem like obvious Kay Fabe names.

Likewise, a tag team named the Hardy Boyz seems totally made up, but Matthew Moore Hardy and Jeffrey Nero Hardy really are brothers and those really are their birth names.

Many modern American viewers can't make sense of a scene in the original Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Green is manning the gun turret on a moon rover. Xem forex trading blowing up all the enemies for the momenthe asks, "Do I get a coconut?

It's actually a reference to Lahore stock exchange summary Shieswhere coconuts were a common prize.

They're still common enough at fairs in England.

As is memorialized in the old novelty song, "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" Many people would never believe you if you told them that Alice Cooper appeared on The Muppet Show in But he did — performing "Welcome to My Nightmare" dressed as a vampire and "School's Out" dressed as a devil, and trying to get the Muppets to sell their souls to him!

And yes, that episode did come in for some flak cny usd exchange rate yahoo finance to the point that the writers had to slip in a totally extraneous forex market stories of Robin the Frog singing "Over the Rainbow" just to placate the censors.

The Goon Show has Bluebottle talking about how when his grandad retired, his firm gave him "one of dem tings what it is that wakes you up at eight o'clock, boils the kettil, and pours a cuppa tea," which turns out to be Bluebottle's grandma, but you're supposed to think he was talking about a teasmade. Listeners from less tea-obsessed countries might think it's just more Surreal Humor.

Many players claimed that this was a blatant reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail that had no purpose in the setting. The author had to explain both on the Internet and repeatedly in person that much of Monty Python's humour was based on British politics, and that there once was such a political system. Early Anglo-Saxon communities were rather democratic, often appointing a honcho solely to command in wartime and booting him shortly thereafter. In pre-industrial societies, it would be quite common to find communes making collective decisions and informal positions of authority.

Many people wouldn't even know the king's name; the young Chairman Mao didn't hear of the Emperor's death until two years after. Even as late as the early eighties, some Chinese peasants were still referring to Deng Xiaoping as "the best Emperor we've ever had. Although what is incorrect here is the use of Anarcho Syndicalism as the name for the system used there. Communal decision making was often the norm in Europe but Anarcho-Syndicalism is a separate ideology based around revolutionary industrial unionism that would be really anachronistic in a pre-industrial world.

Most notably the Peryton a stag-headed eagle that needs humanoid hearts to reproduce and Al'Miraj a giant unicorn-horned bunny. One of the most iconic dragons, Tiamatis a real part of the Babylonian mythology. Similarly, many players might be surprised to learn that Bahamut is a real part of Arabian mythology, though just like Tiamat most of what you see in pop culture is a modern used cars lots in stockton ca. Bahamut was never the mortal enemy of Tiamat they're not even from the same pantheon!

If you're not a devout Catholic, you probably don't know that St. Cuthbert, the World Of Greyhawk god of mercy, is an actual saint in fact, he's the patron saint of Northumbria. Along with Tiamat, he's one of the few real-life religious figures who remain in the default pantheon. One may be forgiven for thinking that, due to frequently going for The Theme Park Version of feudal samurai culture, the majority of forex 1h strategia family names in Legend of the Input indicators for binary options trading Rings are faux-Japanese hackjobs.

Well, several are, but the game gives us a good number of legit surnames as well: Shiba, Matsu, Yoritomo, Asahina, Isawa, Togashi, Ujina, etc A few others aren't proper PEOPLE'S names, exactly, but do reference things that were actually in Japan.

Hida was the name of one of the old feudal provinces on Honshu Island, and Ikoma is the name of a mountain. Most of the place names are technically Japanese, as well.

At least, they use real Japanese words that make sense and were probably intentional Just not in the right order. A notable example which is both common and understandable, among novice speakers is the usage of "no" as equal to the English word "of" rather than the possessive "'s". Used livestock scales for sale craigslist of the names the designers of Magic: The Gathering come up with for the cards are actual archaic terms or derived from archaic terms.

In fact, Doug Beyer hosted several linguistic looks at sets and divided certain names into "okra" words real but strange"twinkie" words completely made upor "tofu" words made from real words, but are really alieninviting readers to guess which category a certain word on a card fell into.

In Hamletthe title character tells Horatio he endorses Fortinbras as king in the ensuing election. The Danish nobility of that era did, in fact, elect the king.

By Shakespeare's time it had become common for son to follow father on the throne, but that was by no means automatic, and the Kings had to invest significant political capital in making it happen.

It took a coup d'etat perpetrated by the fundamentals of futures and options markets download King yes, that's a thing in to make the throne automatically inheritable. John Adams wrote in one of his letters that if the Founding Fathers did not ban slavery, "there will be trouble a hundred years hence.

The top candlestick patterns for day trading of the musical had to modify the line because they were afraid the audience would think they had made forex hedged grid system up.

Performances of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare abridged often result in the audience asking "did William Shakespeare really write that? Many of the Shakespeare quotes are verbatim. A satire on the decadence of eighteenth century aristocracy? An example of an absurdist flight of fancy? The Palace of Versailles even sold tickets to the King's meals. Anyone could go, buying european stocks in canada local or tourist.

It could be described as the eighteenth century version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous ; unfortunately, the logistics of providing viewing space meant that the food served, while superficially magnificent from the audience's point of view, was often cold, congealed, and barely edible by the time it reached the head table. And testing each dish and drink for poison meant that a glass of wine takes about 20 minutes to pour.

Given the changes made to the story of the von Trapp family in The Sound of Musicviewers might be forgiven if they assume that Georg's membership in the navy of landlocked Austria was invented as well, but they'd be wrong. BeforeAustria controlled a large empire including all of what is now Croatia and far-northeastern Italy specifically, the city of Trieste.

In that territory were numerous sea ports that were protected by a small but well-respected navy. The real Kapitan Georg von Trapp was one of Austro-Hungary's most decorated naval officers during World War I: In the original productions of the musical Spring Awakeningthe punk rock-esque hairstyles some of the boys sported are assumed by many to be a result of the show's Anachronism Stewbut in fact, the director claims that they were inspired by some actual hairstyles in photos from the era.

Also, those unfamiliar dragon quest ix easy money the 19th century play the musical is based on if they even know there is one can be surprised to find that many scenes from the musical that seem to touch on modern controversial topics, such as one featuring a kiss between two boys or the female protagonist's back-alley abortionwere, in fact, in the original.

In Knickerbocker HolidayStuyvesant, obviously hdfc forex card withdrawal fee for a Pretext for Warasserts that "the Connecticans have built a fort on the Connecticut River, within our territories.

The answer is that in those days, as had been the case throughout history and would still be true for a couple more decades, the party nominating process was controlled by power brokers. Party primaries did exist but were largely irrelevant, and in Real Life candidates really were nominated by people controlling blocks of delegates at conventions.

The Masamune and Muramasa's status as Public Domain Artifacts and their frequent appearances in JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger may lead some gamers to assume that they are mythical swords, like Gram or Excalibur.

In fact, they're real-life masterworks more akin to a Stradivarius instrument. Most of the Nancy Drew games are about solving riddles a dead person left to help find a treasure they hid. Believe it or not, people have hidden treasures and written cryptic riddles as to how to find it. Crimson Skies The Diesel Punk Trope Codifier of Video Games has Zeppelins that carry most of the planes and deploy and dock them mid-air using a trapeze hook.

Seems unrealistic but it is a real technique for operating aircraft from zeppelins. Not in this game. Rocketson the other hand There's a part in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater where Sigint tells Snake the story of a unit of Russian "bomb dogs" during World War IIwho were to be used to destroy tanks and failed because the Russian tanks had been used for the training, causing the dogs to attack them instead of the German Panzers.

Since he describes it as a secret military project, it's safe to assume it's just the usual Hideo Kojima insanity and just another detail in a game about psychic bee soldiers and electric megalomaniac Communists. The bomb dogs were real and the plan ended up that way. The Metal Gear series is what the world would be like if the fringe military research projects actually worked.

Mind controlpsychic soldiersweaponized animalsrobot assassinsspace lasersand most of the rest of it have all been given serious research dollars at one time or another.

There's another take on the antitank dogs, and it's even more hilarious. Y'see, the original idea was to train dogs to run to the tank, drop the mine and return back. After all, the multi-use dogs are much more practical.

Only the dogs weren't as stupid as to run all the way to the tanks under fire. They would leave the trenches, drop the mine right there and then jump back. Additionally, the flying platforms seen in Metal Gear Solid 3 were jet versions of this experimental U. Oh, and the drone used by Naked Snake at the beginning of Operation Snake Eater, and the WIG? The flying platforms were actually a real thing.

Their main drawbacks were their short flying time, difficulty to fly, and incredible vulnerability and lack of redundancy. One look at the Shagohod and you might think Kojima was going overboard with the mechanical designs. Thing is, however, there really were tanks designed to fire nuclear artillery. They don't actually function like the Shagohod does. Also, the Shagohod's Archimedes' Screw propulsion system?

Some early snowmobiles used similar systemsand the Soviets built the ZIL It works best on snowy, icy, or muddy terrain. Speaking of tanks and the Shagohod. Those tanks that Snake briefly saw at Groznyj Grad, which Volgin later destroys while rampaging across Groznyj Grad? Even the Philosophers' treasures are Ripped from the Headlines: Sthough later lost to non-Patriot related lawsuits.

A lot of people think CalorieMates are a fictional product but you can actually buy them in Japan. In fact, the only fictional products in the entire series are probably the cigarettes. This may have been the case with the original Metal Gear Solid in terms of the weaponry, since they sounded and looked exotic enough to a lot of gamers first exposed to them. Every weapon is real, except the Nikita though the concept is in missiles such as the TOW and personal chaff grenades chaff is usually an aircraft thing.

Since then, these weapons introduced in the series have become staples of video game arsenals. A lot of people playing Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain will think the Fulton air recovery system is the most ridiculous thing ever and there would be no way it could exist in real life.

Believe it or not, it is real. For those who are skeptical enough to believe that the Markhor is a fictional animal considering Metal Gear Solid 3 has added fictional animals like the Baltic Hornetsthey will be surprised to know that the markhor does exist and that its name really does mean "snake eater.

Does herding behavior exist in Chinese stock markets?

Not only are they Bees in Japanthey are a major threat to honey bee hives. The hornets will sniff out honey bees, and pillage their nests, literally butchering entire colonies of bees before hauling all the honey and delicious bee-torso steaks they can stuff into their home nest. In a world of artificially intelligent robots, Huey's electronic cigarette may look like this. What's interesting, however, is that there was a patent for such product in the right timeframe however, they were not developed until early The Cypher surveillance drone from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty exists in real life, albeit only in prototype form.

The game also has a fictional Attack Drone variation. Solid Snake had singing sand imported from Nariko, Japan. Singing sand exists, as it can be found all of the world, and it does make a squeaking noise when stepped on.

However, there is no Nariko sand. The Ear Pull event that Vulcan Raven mentions is a very much real event designed to test endurance although some Arctic Sports communities have banned it due to the squeamishness of their audience and the inherent danger it poses to the competitors bleeding, stitches and the like.

The Stick Pull and Four Man Carry events mentioned in The Twin Snakes are also real events in the Eskimo-Indian Olympics. Even the Muktuk Eating Contest mentioned is a real event, meaning Snake wasn't just being snarky about Raven's size. Similar to the Borat example under Film, many players of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance likely thought Abkhazia was just a made-up area with a surprising amount of backstory written for Codec conversations.

It's a real place, and all of the history Boris tells you of it is true. The parasites in Metal Gear Solid V have many impossible qualities, but some of their traits are based on real life parasites: And there is a real-life parasitic fungus that grows into the brain of infected ants and causes them to climb to high places in order to spread spores further.

Additionally, Wolbachia really changes its host's sex from male to female. In a similar vein as the above: Operation Acoustic Kitty really happened. Namco Museum Volume 4 for the original PlayStation contained an arcade game called Genpei Toumadenwhich up until then had not been released in the North American. Retitled The Genji and the Heike Clansthe game features a "character" called "Taira no Kagekiyo".

A number of American game players may or may not know that he isn't a character created by Namco for the game. Kagekiyo was a true historical person. A member of the "Taira" "Heike" clan, he fought during Japan's "Genpei" Wars where he died in battle. In the game, he comes back to life and seeks revenge on the Genji clan.

Ryuta Kawashima" isn't a character Nintendo created for the Brain Age series, he's a Real Life Japanese scientist whose research inspired the creation of the games.

The world of Fallout mirrors quite a number of ideas from the '50s and back, and believe it or not, the idea of selling beverages containing a healthy dose of radioactive elements is not just the game's invention.

In fact, it's Older Than Television — the first such products appeared back in s! Although they had also disappeared by the mid 20th century, people having caught on to the dangers of radiation by then.

The radioactive energy drink "Bonk! Ditto for the nuclear cars, too. The idea was actually explored with the Ford Nucleonbut thankfully never put into production. The Fat Man portable nuclear catapult? The M Davy Crockett Weapons System, also known as the "Little Feller" projectused a mortar-style launch system rather than a mechanical catapult, but the mininuke projectiles look virtually identical down to the paintjob.

The project was even canceled for a reason that most players quickly realize shortly after first using a Fat Man: The device is a bit different thing than its in-game namesakehowever, which was far larger. The grenade machinegun sounds like the sort of over-the-top weapon that only an FPS could come up with. Except that there really are grenade launchers capable of fully-automatic fire. And yes, they are still insanely terrifying. Remember the Punch Gunor its latest incarnation, the Ballistic Fist?

There existed a real version of those gun-gloves, used mainly by spies as a concealed weapon. Not only that, but it functioned the same way- to fire the gun, you had to push down the plunger on the front by punching your target with it.

They use those in Inglourious Basterds to take out Hitler's guards. The company General Atomics International may sound like just part of the pre-War Fallout world's obsession with nuclear power. General Atomics is a real and still extant company. They even have robots specifically, UAVs as one of their major product-lines. Raven Rock is a real underground military command center. You could be forgiven for thinking it was a Morrowind reference.

The abandoned fairground in Point Lookout has a number of White Star pinball machines, which was the real-life name of an arcade system board used by Sega Pinball and Stern Pinball from to Some of the ways mutation and exposure to nuclear fallout aren't too far off from what would happen in reality. AS outlandish as Brahmin seem, two headed cattle happen from time to time without nuclear fallout involved.

The Yao Guai in 3 not the giant ones in New Vegas are basically just black bears that lost most of their hair. The idea of mutated animals like this forming new species isn't outlandish either, nuclear testing in the pacific did the same thing with sharks.

The Goodsprings General Store, Pioneer Prospector Saloon, and Jean Sky Diving school are all real businesses, although the last is in ruins in the game. Most of the towns and settlements in the game are real. New Vegas is obvious, and Primm and Boulder City slightly less so, but Goodsprings, Nipton, Sloan, and Nelson are all real towns near the California-Nevada border though all are very sparsely populated today, with Nipton being the most populous with around 60 inhabitants.

Incidentally, many people seem to think Boulder City is supposed to be or is based on Boulder, Colorado, but there is a Boulder City in Nevada, and is the second most populated location depicted in the game after Las Vegas itself. The Legion's Lottery of Doom in Nipton, believe it or not, is also based on reality.

Not the "of doom" part — Nipton was where Nevada residents went to buy tickets for the California state lottery, as Nevada's constitution forbids a state lottery. Incidentally, Nipton lost this appeal when a store just on the California side of the border near Primm was opened.

And yes, Nipton's in California despite being southeast of Goodsprings and Primm. NCR Correctional Facility's real life counterpart is the now-defunct Southern Nevada Correctional Center. As the above sentence implies, Primm is a real town — its other notable in-game feature, the Bison Steve Hotel with its rollercoaster the Diablo is based on the real Primm's Buffalo Bill's Hotel with its rollercoaster the Desperado.

The Helios One power plant is present in the real world as Nevada Solar One. Although the town itself is completely fictional, Dinky the T-Rex in Novac is modeled after the Mr. Rex sculpture in Cabazon, California, and named after the neighboring Dinny Apatosaurus sculpture.

One quest has you raise a sunken B that crashed into Lake Mead inwhich was a real event, and the real plane is still down there. REPCONN is an expy of the real rocket fuel production company PEPCON, whose Henderson, NV plant was destroyed by a fire and explosion in There is also an actual Old Mormon Fort in Vegas. You can'thowever, see the Statosphere the inspiration for the Lucky 38 from Primm in real life. And the Stratosphere doesn't dominate the Vegas skyline in general the way it does in the game.

Granted, this is because other major landmarks like the MGM Grand or Caesar's haven't been blown up in reality. There are several real-life vintage hamburger stands named Dot's Diner. The one in Bisbee, AZ most resembles the chain in the Fallout verse. Far Harbor from the Fallout 4 expansion of the same name is based on a real town, Bar Harbor, on Maine's Mt.

Desert Island, and Acadia, the synth settlement, is the real-life name of the national park there. The Jamaica Plain settlement is located in and named after a real neighborhood of the southeast Boston area.

Although the Sanctuary Hills neighborhood doesn't exist in real life, the Old North Bridge leading to it does, as part of Minuteman National Historical Park. The quest "Trouble Brewin'" has you recover a beer-brewing robot named Drinking Buddy.

Two years before the game's release, a team of North Irish beer craftsmen, with the aid of Kickstarter, developed a real automatic brewing machine, appropriately named Brewbot. The Boston Mayoral Shelter is a thing in real life, except it's called the Massachusetts State Emergency Operations Center.

Speaking of the lottery in Nipton, a radio broadcast mentions that the brutal Legate Lanius has instituted a form of punishment where he divided a group of Legionares into groups of ten, and had the tenth man beaten to death by the other nine. This may sound like a typical example of post-apocalyptic brutality, but this was a real practicefrom which modern English speakers get the word "decimation", with the unfortunate tenth man determined by drawing lots.

A surprisingly large number of people think the M3 Carbine in Return to Castle Wolfenstein is some crazy fictional gun. Nope, it just wasn't silenced, or used in the western front. Same for the FG42 Paratrooper rifle, another rare real-life gun. The Demoman from Team Fortress 2 is a black Scotsman.

While this may seem like Rule of FunnyScotland actually does have a small population of African descent. In Kingdom of Loathingone can mine for asbestos ore a fibrous material used in fireproofing, until it was discovered that tiny particles of it tended to get everywhere and foul up people's lungs. There's a whole family of different minerals called "asbestos", you do mine for them, and some of them are chunky.

Although the Kingdom of Loathing version was created when prehistoric fire-breathing dragons died and then were buried in landslides and such, undergoing a process similar to the creation of crude petroleum, which is probably not how the real thing forms.

Brotherhood has you destroy a prototype tank designed by Leonardo da Vinci. You might think that's over the top, right? What's more, those wanted posters in the series from Assassin's Creed II weren't just made up to give the games a bit of an Old West flavour.

There really were wanted posters in Renaissance Italy. Kingdom Hearts has Sea Salt Ice Cream, which is a favorite of many a character from the second game on. It sounds too weird to exist and if it did, the salt would lower the freezing point of the mixture, making it difficult to maintain a solid form in the real world. Not only does this stuff exist, it's sold in Tokyo Disneyland, where the creator of Kingdom Hearts tried it and loved it so much he put in Kingdom Hearts II.

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The Ark of Napishtim is a merchant who built a town, gathering the stone by dismantling ruins of priceless historical value. It sounds like a comically over-the-top bit of Corrupt Corporate Executive behavior, medieval fantasy-style Medieval Cairo was built by raiding limestone from the pyramids, the Renaissance Italians would tear marble off of Roman buildings and melt down statues in order to get the materials needed for their own works, and numerous houses built in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War contain identifiable pieces salvaged from castles destroyed by artillery.

The Copy Protection of Leisure Suit Larry 5 the Aerodork pamphlet includes many destinations that sound fake, being overtly sexual Intercourse, PA; Spread Eagle, WI; Loveladies, NJ; etc. The Soul Series has Cervantes, who Dual Wields Soul Edge and a pistol sword—that is, a sword fused with a gun.

This may sound like just another over-the-top detail about Ghost Zombie Pirate Lichbut it isn't. Pistol swords did exist and were in use since the XVI century. They were, however, considered Awesome, but Impracticaland were thus quite rare. They were quickly eclipsed by the much more practical bayonet. Meanwhile, his daughter Ivy uses a sword that breaks off into several sections and takes on the properties of a whip.

Although they don't function quite like that in real life, swords with whip-like blades do exist. Including the Mystery Vortexalthough the size-changing effect isn't quite as drastic in real life. With all the weirdness and silly humor associated with Portalyou'd think that Cave Johnson's moon rock poisoning was just another silly joke. In fact, lunar dust is an actual hazard to humans.

It's just as destructive to human lungs as asbestos, since it's just as sharp and brittle unlike earth dust, which has been rounded by natural actions wind, rain, etc that don't exist on the moon, and you will die a slow, horrible death if you breathe in too much of the stuff.

The ocarina, featured in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Timewas a real musical instrument, present in many world cultures, sometimes for millennia. The model as seen in the game was developed midcentury.

Not only is the ocarina a real instrument, there was a real version of the ocarina from the game made and sold. It looks exactly like the one in the game and is playable. And the rupee is a real currency. In real life it's represented by coins and bills, not colorful gems. The mud crab is not something made up for the universe of The Elder Scrollsit's a real species of crab. In Oblivionthey even look like the real thing! In Skyrimone of the materials that can be used for item crafting is corundum, depicted in the game as a brownish metallic ingot.

Most people assume that it's a Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" version of bronze or copper, like how ebony is such to obsidian in this game and others in the series. In reality, it's a real-life substance that has nothing to do with either bronze or copper. You might know it better as some of its common varieties—rubies and sapphires. In addition, Ebony is a real material, although it's not a stone—it's a dense black wood taken from ebony trees, which are native to India and some parts of Africa.

It's so dense it sinks in water, and is mainly used for ornamental stuff like chess pieces and piano keys. Speaking of Skyrimmany farms in the game feature shaggy big-horned bovines that are labelled and referred to as cows.

Their appearance has led some players to mistake them for yaks or claim that Bethesda got things mixed up. In fact, the cows are a very accurate rendering of highland cattle. Similarly, the sabre cats' large, stocky bear-like bodies might give players the impression that they are fantastic hybrid animals, like a griffon or a manticore.

They are actually pretty much one-to-one copies of the genus Smilodon. Some of the more memorable enemies of EarthBound are its animated enemy trees which explode when defeated.

Not quite as far-fetched as one would think: Australia no surprises there is home to the eucalyptus tree genus, which are prone to exploding when exposed to fire. Admittedly, they don't look much like EarthBound 's exploding trees which the English translation refers to as oaks, anywayand they certainly aren't animated or otherwise trying to kill you at least, not intentionally trying to kill you. However, according to Wikipedia's "exploding trees" article, other kinds of trees can explode if the sap expands due to being frozen.

The Rocketbelt featured in Pilotwings actually existsalthough impracticalsince it burns through its fuel in 30 seconds.

A similar vehicle, the Martin Jetpackis under development and has quite a bit more air time. The World Ends with You has the sewer at the end of the game: Nope, that sewer really exists in Shibuya. Moonstone and sunstone are actual semiprecious stones. A lot of Pokemon are also based on real-life animals that are better known in Japan than in other parts of the world. Manaphy and Phione are based on sea angelsfor example. Syphon Filter 2 has the caseless round-firing H11 assault rifle.

Looks and sounds like science fiction, but it's actually a renamed version of the G11a real caseless weapon that came very close to being mass-produced before things happened that cut into its funding.

Also, the BIZ-2 is a renamed PP Bizon, which used a unique helical magazine. Even Harsher in Hindsightthere have been real-life cases of people being set on fire by tasers. The antlions from Half-Life 2 are indeed named after a real insect though real-life antlions share almost nothing in common with Half-Life 's, except that they both like to hide under sandin contrast to the obviously-fictional bullsquids from the first game.

Golden Sun had giant antlion pits in the Lamakan Desert, where they could trap the player characters into a battle. A Palette Swap version showed up in Random Encounters in the Suhalla Desert. Many a Pokemon fan complained about Trapinch's seemingly random evolution from a small, orange, big-headed bug into a green dragonfly-like creature, not realizing that it's based on the actual life cycle of the Ant Lion.

Even the most die-hard Mortal Kombat fans may be surprised to hear that the Lin Kuei was and is a real organisation. However, they had very little to do with the ones in the games they were not actually ninjas—they were more like a secret monastic order of Crazy Survivalistsalthough there is a mostly-discredited theory that they inspired the Japanese ninjaas in the games.

For many non-US players, The Sims 2 was their introduction to grilled cheese sandwiches. The Carmagnolle suit is also shown on the inner cover of Juno Reactor's The Golden Sun of the Great East album.

Borderlands 2 features a lot of crazy weapon concepts: Belt-fed Gatling assault rifles, and rocket launchersweapons that get more accurate with sustained fire, weapons that are thrown away instead of reloading them Among these, Torgue guns shooting miniature missiles seem like another crazy invention of the development team, but no.

Those are Gyrojetsand those did exist. The original Monster Truck Madness allows you and your opponents to drive monster trucks on water. As ridiculous and unrealistic as it might sound—not helped by Large Ham Announcer "Army" Armstrong—a modified Bigfoot monster truck actually drove on water in real life.

Putting aside that the game is set in a world where the laws of physics are very differentcritics deride Hammerfight for breaking Willing Suspension of Disbelief with the premise of flying machines fighting by swinging maces at each other. Thing is, helicopters have actually been used to swing wrecking balls. Assault Horizon 's announcement trailer demonstrated an Apache attack helicopter rolling over on its side Star Fox style, a lot of armchair aviation experts cried foul. Too bad that is an actual thing Apaches can do, even if it's a bit embellished in Assault Horizon.

Halo The majority of fans don't realise that "Master Chief" or, more formally, Master Chief Petty Officer is an actual rank in the US Navy. This has been exacerbated from the rank's use in fiction being heavily subject to the One Mario Limit. Many of the UNSC weapons in the series are based on real life weapons, such as the shotgun with its strange, top-loading feature being based on the South African Neostead The development team actually had to cut some of the odder features of the real guns, like the Neostead working by pumping forward instead of backwards, or the SMG's original reloading animation, which would had included pushing a 'stick' of caseless ammunition into the feed port, then breaking it off to avert One Bullet Clips.

For extra fun, the Assault Rifle of the first game was designed as a concept of what a futuristic bullpup assault rifle would look like, but between nailing down the design and releasing the game, the F was released. Actually, it was inspired by wire-cage dresses which actually do exist. One of these was actually partially constructed as part of Project Babylon. During her gag reel in BlazBlue: Chrono PhantasmaMakoto has her tail snapped off by Taokaka, which Kokonoe chalks up to Makoto having traits from the Kagutsuchi Island Squirrel.

In reality, some species of squirrel actually can have their tails snap off as a one-time defense mechanism against predators. Certain Need for Speed games show the local PD employing some six-digit exotics to chase down lawbreakers that most taxpayers would probably vote against in real life. However some law enforcement agencies particularly in Europe really do have some very nice wheels, such as a Lamborghini Gallardo that currently serves in an Italian police force interception squad.

Some British police forces have adopted the Subaru Impreza WRX or Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, popular cars in the Real Life tuner scene, for motorway policing duties on the grounds that it takes one to catch one. It's even more so in Dubai, where they deployed an elite fleet of supercar police units.

And one of them is a Bugatti Veyron of all vehicles. Normally one won't encounter such vehicles unless their "Wanted" level is really high. And true to life, police officers won't bring out the souped up cars unless their normal Crown Victorias can't keep up with the perp.

Also such vehicles are normally employed by the higher level law enforcement, like state highway patrol officers or county sheriffs. The shopping center in Modern Warfare 2 's "Wolverines" mission, despite it taking place in Virginiais based on a real life one in Vancouver, WA, as seen here.

Japanese city-building game Metropolismania featured several real-world store chains, such as U. The premise of Five Nights at Freddy's 3 is that, 30 years after the first gameFreddy Fazbear's Pizzeria has been reopened as a horror attraction in response to in-universe Urban Legends. While a few people found it strange, many locations with gruesome or unpleasant histories do tend to gather tourists in the real world examples include the house where Lizzie Borden killed her parents, locations where Jack the Ripper is said to have killed people, submarine trips to the Titanic, and countless others.

Some people just have weird tastes. In this game, there's a whole underhanded power struggle between various nations, between surface and the Neath, where diplomats, spies and agents of all sorts clash.

Calling it "The Great Game" seems a little odd, perhaps a bit of dark humor considering who the pawns are in here, but there was an actual Great Game, and it included most of the involved nations. The "Cadaver Synod" global event that pops up in Crusader Kings II whenever a Pope with the "Wicked Priest" dies, in which his successor digs up his corpse and puts him on trial for his crimes posthumously, is sometimes assumed to be yet another of Paradox's tongue-in-cheek gags by new players — but the inspiration is entirely historical.

When Square Enix announced NieR 's sequel to be named NieR: Automatasome people apparently didn't realize that "automata" is an existing word, not another Word Puree Title. It's a lesser used plural of "automaton". The Grand Theft Auto series has a Running Gag of making Fun with Acronyms expies of real life police forces, such as N. Eso you'd be forgiven for thinking that C. Not only was it a very real former spec ops division of the LAPD, but San Andreas ' Big BadOfficer Tenpenny and the leader of C.

You might think Pegnose Pete from Escape from Monkey Island is just a gag on peg-legged pirates, but prosthetic noses are a real thing, and have been for centuries; 16th century nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe wore a false nose after getting his cut off in a duel. An International Driver's License is not just some convenient Hand Wave. ECM Jammers are, in fact, a real thing. For pretty obvious reasons, they're banned almost worldwide as they intercept nearby phone and radio signals and mix up the frequency into an incoherent mess nobody on either end of a call can decipher.

The famous Good Bad Translation from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

A miserable little pile of secrets". This is a "Blind Idiot" Translation that happens to be funny, right? A miserable little pile of secrets" in In ''Destroy All Humans 2''while in the Takoshima map Japan's Fictional Counterpartreading the mind of some of the male residents will reveal that they want to become geishas.

They will then challenge the player to look up the fact that the first geishas were men. The bar "plastic model" shown in No More Heroes really exists. It's the favorite place of Suda A major plot point in the first game is the Statute of Limitations on an old murder case being almost up. Just another aspect of the series' ridiculous Kangaroo Courtright? No, Japan really did have a Statute of Limitations on murder until The court system itself no jury, enormous amount of power in the hands of the prosecutor, no respect for defense attorneys is only a minor exaggeration of the Real Life justice system in Japan at the time the games first came out.

Case 4 in Spirit of Justice has a few examples. Time Soba and Soba Glutton are both real Rakugo routines, and English-language karuta cards do exist.

They're often used to teach Japanese-speakers English phrases and idioms. Followers of the Let's Play thread for Hatoful Boyfriend were convinced that the bird photograph used for Anghel Higure was either Photoshopped or a bird that had been shot or 'shopped from a bird that had been shot. Bleeding-heart doves do exist, and the namesake red stain on their chest is natural. John Titor was not just some random name made for Steins;Gate. He was an actual figure from who claimed to be a time traveler from the year In the Death Battle between Deadpool and Deathstroke, Boomstick makes up the alloy 'boomstickium' in response to Deathstroke's promethium armor, only to get told by Wiz that promethium is a real thing, although it's still nothing like it's portrayed in the comics - it's actually a chemical used in atomic batteries.

In the Homestar Runner short "Meet Marshie," the title talking marshmallow mascot advertises "all-marshmallow mayonnaise. Of course, that didn't stop Homestar from using the mayonnaise to make Marzipan a veggie burger. In one Strong Bad EmailStrong Bad misinterprets the "CA" after a correspondent's name as a title of "Certified Arborist". That sounds like the sort of word salad that he and his costars drop on a regular basis — and many browsers' spell checkers don't even acknowledge "arborist" as a real word — but there is indeed such a profession.

Similarly, in the game "Peasant's Quest," looking at a particular tree brings up the message "It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown! In Ratboy GeniusLittle King John gets an unsettling Villain Song where he sings about how he makes "Potato Knishes" in his factory.

It's not uncommon to think "Knishes" is just a random. But no — a knish is an Eastern-European snack made of a vegetable filling like potatoes inside a baked, grilled, or fried dough covering. Episode 8 of Inanimate Insanity II has Test Tube use a bag of rice to attempt to repair a damaged MePhone.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the "bag of rice" method actually works in real life to repair water-damaged iPhones. Test Tube just didn't execute it properly, as Fan must not have provided all of the details. Later in the same episode, Steve Cobs makes an off-hand remark about the time where he was a video game designer.

It's a rather unknown fact, but Apple did at one point design a console—the Pippin —which predates Microsoft's Xbox by a good few number of years.

Unlike the Xbox, though, the Pippin was a massive failure and was quickly discontinued. In Metal Gear Awesome 2the player is skipping through an annoying Cut Scene when Snake first meets Otacon at Snake's suggestion. Halfway through, he stops skipping just when Otacon is complaining about Snake coming onto him, causing Snake to get annoyed the player had to stop skipping at that part. People not familiar with the game but familiar with the flash thought this was so weird it had to be a straight up Shallow Parody gag, but in fact the scene is a fairly direct spoof of an out-of-place Ho Yay moment that actually is in that cutscene, in which Snake starts feeling up Otacon asking if anything's wrong, and Otacon complains that Snake's "getting friendly all of a sudden" in reality, Snake is checking Otacon for symptoms of FOX-DIE.

It's also immediately after a cutscene 'chapter break', so a player skipping through could easily stop skipping exactly at that scene. Seniqua is an actual given name. It's not quite as common of a name, especially outside the US, so many viewers thought this was made up. If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device: While used as a joke during the Fourth special, in which Kitten stops Magnus' mystic speech in its tracks when pointing out Hasbro corporation apparently made their Ouija Boardthey really did make Ouija boards before, and own the trademark as well.

A lot of readers of Harkovast believed the strange, forward curving Junlock swords were a concept invented by the author referred to by some readers as "crowbar swords"rather than based on the falx used by Ancient Dacians. A number of readers on the MS Paint Adventures forum didn't realize that John's Trademark Favorite FoodFruit Gushers, are an actual product. Ditto for WV's and Gamzee's Trademark Favorite DrinksTab and Faygo, respectively.

More understandable if you're viewing the comic from somewhere outside of North America. American Homestucks well aware of the existence of Fruit Gushers likely didn't realize that said fruitsnacks were a product of Betty Crocker until reading the comic either.

Even then, they probably thought that was made up as one of the smaller examples of how much of the world the Betty Crocker corporation has control over. The troll culture might seem like an over-the-top spoof of militaristic civilisations and Proud Warrior Races.

In fact, many elements of troll society — including all citizens above a certain age being automatically drafted into the military, a strict class-based society with the lower classes being freely abused by the higher classes, and babies being left in a hostile environment at birth to fend for themselves — were practiced by the original Proud Warrior Race Guysthe Spartans.

Another thing that surprises a lot of people is the fact that "I'm a Member of the Midnight Crew" was not made up for Homestuck: The a capella cover of the song usually featured in the comic is a modern performance, however, sung by David Ko in Digger by Ursula Vernon frequently invokes this trope; most notably with the Hyenas' creation myth, and the vampire squash.

A direct result of the author having been an anthropology major in university, and being fond of showing her work she often comments on her website about the sources of the various odd myths, folklore, and biological quirks used in her comic. The comments section in morphE were skeptical on the idea of Billy Thatcher being able to play a game of chess with Curio from dictation alone no board and nothing to note where the pieces were.

A comment read "how anyone could hold a game of chess entirely in his brain. It turns out that not only is a dictated game of chess possible but grandmasters, such as Billy, are capable of running multiple games at once in their head.

The present world record is 32 games running at the same time. IDGet annual has strips dedicated to celebrating Cheap Plastic Frog Day, which actually is a legitimate holiday, it's just a regional holiday in Ohio.

Many Dumbing of Age readers who did not grow up in fundamentalist American households were surprised to learn that Hymmel the Humming HymnalJoyce's favorite TV show as a child, was a parody of a real Christian children's entertainment character: Psalty the Singing Songbook. Concession had a Story Arc where the character Artie is taken to a NAMBLA meeting after being Mistaken for Pedophile. The author had to assure people that it was a real organization and not something he made up for the comic.

Trinton Chronicles features seemingly impossible future technologies, several of which are actually being tested in Europe and Asia right now, including: Trains that ride on magnetic thrusting power like a roller coaster using LMS launch systems.

Japan is a world leader of this super silent and fast system but France is building an infrastructure based on Maglevs. The first commercially operated Maglev train was a low speed system at Birmingham airport. The first commercial high speed Maglev line is the Shanghai Transrapid, which was developed by the German company Transrapid International and completed in Pay-As-You-Recycle devices that give change for weight of aluminum, plastic, and paper.

Actually real world tech is going into making cellphones disposable and paper-thin using nano fibers and microchips the size of ants. A new fuel source using hydrogen gas to power cars. Testing in Germany mostly, although there was a bit of a push in California in the mid 00s. The main problem is people's fear of what will happen in an accident The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, and look how that turned out. In a Whateley Universe story, Bladedancer and Phase complain about Generator's love of Hello Kitty gear.

Bladedancer complains about a 'Hello Kitty maternity ward'. Readers found this one pretty silly. There is a real Hello Kitty maternity ward in Asia. In Mega64 's video of a fictional newscast reporting about the hype of Modern Warfare 2Derrick reports that Obama plans to restrict the release dates of Modern Warfare 2 and all future Call of Duty games to Sundays only in order to prevent disruptions. This sounds like a cheeky joke that Mega 64 would make but it's based off an urban legend where Japan decided to restrict sales of Dragon Quest to weekends due to children skipping classes and violence over lack of supply.

While it's true that there were children skipping class to buy the game, the legend is false; there never was a law placed to restrict sales and the games being released on weekends was just a coincidence.

With more commonly used synonyms going around, you've probably never heard of the term "expunge" before reading anything from the SCP Foundation. The rather frequent and narmy use of the term doesn't help it sound too much like a real word either. In one of Ashens ' 80's toy videoshe reviewed a toy that came with a story on cassette tape. He dragged out an actual tape deck to play it, and fast-forwarded through the tape in order to find the interesting bits. Several of his younger viewers were surprised to discover that in some players, cassette tapes actually do make a high-pitched, garbled noise when fast-forwarded, and that it wasn't just a sound effect invented by foley artists.

The Fictional Video Game in which Noob is set mixes elements of real MMORPGs and completely made up stuff and the fact is generally well-known within the fandom. As a consequence, someone sometimes assumes a feature is made up, only for someone else to inform them that it actually exists in a game.