http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AluminumChristmasTrees

Homer Simpson, The Simpsons , "Last of the Red Hat Mamas" "Roadrunners are real?"

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An element that exists or existed in Real Life but is assumed to be fictional by audiences, often because it seems too unlikely, bizarre, or kitschy to be real. Truth really is stranger than fiction...

The Trope Namer is A Charlie Brown Christmas, from 1965. In the special, Lucy said "Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown! Maybe painted pink!". Aluminum Christmas trees? In pink?! Viewers are frequently surprised to find out that line wasn't just a bit of comic exaggeration: The '60s had their share of oddball kitsch, and the aluminum Christmas tree is a God's-honest-truth real example. They were an early form of artificial tree with metallic needles — not a hollow metal cone as shown in the special — but yes, they existed, and you could even get them in pink. They were usually called "tinsel trees," which is the name under which they are marketed today.note You can buy them online .

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So why do viewers assume these shiny spruces must be fictional? Well, as it happened, A Charlie Brown Christmas so thoroughly destroyed the appeal of the tinsel tree that sales plummeted, and they were taken off the market before the Sixties were over.note It wasn't the end for artificial trees, but the fashion turned toward verisimilitude instead of an openly-synthetic look. And as mentioned above, the tinsel tree is still for sale and is even making something of a comeback.

In short, this trope is in play when a quaint element of Real Life appears in a work of fiction and is mistaken for part of the fiction. The reason is always simple unfamiliarity with the object, so it is more likely to trip up audiences viewing that work from a different perspective (most commonly years after the work was released, or in another country). It doesn't hurt that other "aluminum Christmas trees" are, like the original, well outside the pale of usual experience and improbable by definition; even so, it's immensely funny (to people in the know) when an audience dismisses a Real Life element as patently absurd and "unrealistic".

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This can also occur in a period work when the writers did do the research, but the truth they uncovered is so bizarre or surprising that audiences think they must have just made it up. In this case, they may add a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer. Of course, something existing doesn't necessarily imply that it was common enough to just show up in the chronological and spatial span of the work or at the frequency it does in the work, which is why period pieces in which all the costumes are reconstructions or composites of documented outfits still manage to be fashionable for the period the works are written/produced in.

Compare Technology Marches On, "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny, Widget Series, Defictionalization, and Poe's Law. A subtrope of Reality Is Unrealistic, Values Dissonance, and Truth in Television. Can also be used as a means of Shown Their Work. Frequently found in Unintentional Period Pieces. If even the creators were unaware that the "tree" was real, it's Accidentally Correct Writing.

When this occurs in-universe, it's either Eskimos Aren't Real, or the work will give a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer.

Nothing to do with the Christmas tree the Skylab astronauts made from left-over aluminum cans.

It could simply be a case of Small Reference Pools.

Example subpages:

Other examples:

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Anime and Manga

Comedy

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.

JJ Bittenbinder from John Mulaney's special Kid Gorgeous is a real person. Mulaney didn't really exaggerate much about Bittenbinder's "Street Smarts" presentation, either. The real Bittenbinder didn't deny anything from the bit other than the fact that he didn't wear a cowboy hat when he talks to kids. The specials that Bittenbinder did for PBS Kids can also be found on the internet to be compared to the bit.

A lot of people thought that Bill Cosby's "Chicken Heart" routine was a fake Lights Out episode that Cosby made up just for comedy purposes. There was indeed an actual episode of Lights Out called "The Chicken Heart". While Cosby did exaggerate a bit, the basic premise of "a chicken heart becomes enormous" is mostly intact. However, more people know of Cosby's routine mocking the skit than the actual episode. Carroll Shelby building Bill Cosby a custom sports car capable of going 200 M.P.H. actually happened.

Image Macro: "How are unicorns fake, but giraffes are real? Like what's more belivable, a horse with a horn or a leopard-moose-camel with a 40 foot neck?"

Comic Books

Comic Strips

Knights of the Dinner Table: The Faygo soft drink, beloved of the characters, and the bizarre flavours mentioned (like Rock & Rye), is an actual US brand and not something Jolly Blackburn made up. Fans of the Insane Clown Posse will recognize it as the band's drink of choice. For added surprise, Rock & Rye is both a whiskey cocktail and a commercial liqueur made with rye whiskey and rock sweets. 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 1980s Old West comic strip Latigo starts with one character, who is a bit impractical and thoughtless, rejoicing at finding a "three-dollar gold piece". It's got to be a fake, right? Nope, the U.S. Mint tried it, from 1854 to 1889. Nobody liked it. In the 35 years it was produced, less than half-a million were struck, at all three U.S. Mint facilities, combined.

starts with one character, who is a bit impractical and thoughtless, rejoicing at finding a "three-dollar gold piece". It's got to be a fake, right? Nope, the U.S. Mint tried it, from 1854 to 1889. Nobody liked it. In the 35 years it was produced, less than half-a million were struck, at all three U.S. Mint facilities, combined. Garfield In one strip where he put on a singing performance on top of the fence, he 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! on the funny pages, but everyone else.... In one strip, Jon purchased a "battery powered battery charger". At first glance, this seems like an absurd waste of money, but in fact many people carry external battery packs to recharge the batteries in their phones and other portable electronics when there's no power outlet available.

In Elvis, Elvis' 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.

Fan Works

Films — Animation

Music

Mythology and Religion

The Trojan War was long believed to have been pure myth until Heinrich Schliemann succeeded in finding the ruins of Troy in Hissarlik, 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. It wasn't just Troy either; Greek cities mentioned in the story but not inhabited in Homer's time have been found, and some of the stranger pieces of equipment like boar-tusk helmets have been found dating to the bronze age.

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 this 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.

Historians assumed that King Belshazzar from the Book of Daniel was made up, due to non-Biblical sources identifying Nabonidus as the king of Babylon at the time of its conquest by Cyrus the Great and other historical inconsistences. However, it was later discovered that Nabonidus's son and heir apparent was named Belshazzar and that he was his father's regent in the capital while he was campaigning.

Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, is usually thought to be merely a mythological king, because the only stories we have of his life are outlandish and framed in that kind of setting, and also because the name "Uruk" doesn't sound like a real city. However, Uruk was a real ancient Sumarian city-state, and Gilgamesh was its historical king. Gilgamesh is widely accepted to have ruled sometime between 2900 and 2350 BC, and we know this because of references to him from a different ruler we KNOW existed.

Pinball

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.

Podcasts

Hey! Jake and Josh: A more disturbing example pops up during the Cool Kids Table game Bloody Mooney. When Ms. Pear the detention teacher threatens to hit the students with a paddle, Jessica shoots back that she can't because it's 1986. The DM Alan, through the teacher, points out that striking students was actually still allowed until the nineties. In episode 51 of Pokémon World Tour: United, Alan describes a Chansey dipping her cookie into her tea as something strange, causing Jake, Josh, and Matt to all roast him for having never considered that that's the purpose of cookies in the first place.



Professional Wrestling

Puppet Shows

Many modern American viewers can't make sense of a scene in the original Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Lt. Green is manning the gun turret on a moon rover. After blowing up all the enemies (for the moment), he asks, "Do I get a coconut?" The response is something like, "When we get out of this, you'll have all the coconuts you can eat." This is often misinterpreted as a racist joke. It's actually a reference to Coconut Shies , where 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".

, where 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 1978. 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 — to the point that the writers had to slip in a totally extraneous scene of Robin the Frog singing "Over the Rainbow" just to placate the censors.)

Radio

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. Which, incidentally, is why in the video for Queen's "I Want to Break Free", Brian is woken by by an alarm clock that's blowing steam.

. Listeners from less tea-obsessed countries might think it's just more Surreal Humor.

Tabletop Games

Theatre

Visual Novels

Web Animation

Webcomics

Web Original

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