Fish Out Of Temporal Water / Western Animation

• This is how Anne feels in Amphibia since Wartwood and Toad Tower, as well as several other areas are about as advanced as the United States in the 18th to 19th century. Until it's revealed that Amphibia has ancient ruins of factories and advanced computers, as well as robots.
  Anne: I thought you guys were pastoral or something.
• This is the premise for Animaniacs: the Warner siblings getting out of their water tower prison after having been sealed in it by Warner Bros. personnel since the '30s. They adapt fairly well for the most part, but it really comes into play when the show got revived, showing how they were sealed again for around two more decades, and after they get out, they wind up trying to catch up on everything they've missed in the interim.
• The major driving plot of Avatar: The Last Airbender is how Aang cryogenically froze himself for 100 years, waking up to find that a war with the Fire Nation started not long after he was frozen, wiped out his entire civilization, and has gone on since then. Sometimes, the show thematically explores the consequences of how things change with time — in an early episode, he meets his only known surviving friend, who is now much older than he is; and about mid-series, he finds what used to be an oasis in the desert to be completely dried up. This is most notably explored, however, whenever the Air Temples are visited — Aang is shown reminiscing about how things are so different in his old homes, especially since for him it wasn't even a year ago that they were full of life.
• Wanda Pierce from Bojack Horseman is an owl who recently woke up from a 30-year coma in 2015, and has to adjust to the technology of the modern world. She also dresses in 80s-style clothes.
• The Alternate History episode of The Boondocks, in which Martin Luther King Jr. didn't die when he was shot, but remained in a coma for 30 years, uses this trope to critique aspects of both contemporary African-American culture and the mainstream news media.
• Captain Caveman.
  • Cavey seemed either reasonably used to most of the 20th century items he encountered (despite a propensity toward trying to eat half of it), or possessed his own Stone Age equivalents of modern tech. In one episode, Cavey made use of one of his club's functions, a firefly-powered "world's first x-ray" beam. Post-"Teen Angels" appearances of Cavey might Handwave this by showing him as having lived during the Flintstones' 20th century-like Stone Age.
• Cleopatra in Space: The series focuses on 15-year-old Cleopatra VII as she gets transported 30,000 years into the future, to an Egyptian-themed planet that is ruled by talking cats.
• In the Codename: Kids Next Door episode Operation: C.A.K.E.D.-F.I.V.E., a Kids Next Door operative from the 1800s (aptly titled Numbuh 19th Century) is thawed out after being frozen in an ice cream explosion for over a hundred years. Numbuh 19th Century is understandably confused by the modern world, and his archaic views, especially his male chauvinism, do not make him popular with the operatives of the present... particularly Numbuh 86.
• Dinosaur Train:
  • The protagonist is Buddy Tyrannosaurus, who was adopted by a family of Pteranodon, which lived about 20 million years before Tyrannosaurus. The learning segment for "Great Big Stomping Dinosaur Feet" even points out that that T. rex didn't live at the same time as the other Pteranodon Terrace locals. The Dinosaur Train travels through a time tunnel whenever the family visits Rexville. Together, these imply that wherever Buddy came from, his egg wasn't laid in the same epoch that he lives in.
  • While almost everyone in this show is a time-traveller, Dion Dimetrodon stands out for being the only Palaeozoic animal to appear; at the end of his episode, he briefly enters the Triassic and comments on how different everything is in the future.
• Elena of Avalor: The titular princess was trapped in the Amulet of Avalor for 41 years after Shuriki attempted to murder her. Once she is free from the Amulet, Elena finds that Avalor City is a prosperous trading center and such. But, she finds her cousin Esteban has aged that amount, and in a later episode she meets her childhood friend, who is now much older than her.
• Futura in Filmation's Ghostbusters, a ghostbuster from the future. Her role seems to be the Audience Surrogate for the ghostbusters to do exposition about thing in the present that she doesn't understand.
• Fry in early Futurama; he adapted surprisingly quickly.
  • Said best in "The Cryonic Woman"
    Michelle: You were a loser in the year 2000 and you're a loser in the year 4000.
    Fry: Yeah, but in the year 3000, I had it all; a couple of friends, a low-paying job, a bed in a robot's closet. I envied no man, but you wrecked everything!
  • Speaking of which, Fry's on-again-off-again girlfriend Michelle is a prime example in "Cryonic Woman". She cringes and/or screams at the sight of every weird thing that wasn't in the 20th century, including all the non-human members of the Planet Express crew, and the Professor (once prompted) and Amy (when she says she's from Mars).
  • The reason Fry adapted quickly was more of a production thing: they were finding it hard to create more storylines about Fry adapting to the future, so they turned him into a straight, somewhat dim-witted (Depending on the Writer) man in an insane future.
  • In one episode Fry walks in on a support group for cryonically frozen people. He doesn't really care about anything but the buffet, unlike the guy who lived in a time when man was ruled by sentient carrots, the executive from the 1980s who missed out on the implosion of "merger fever", and the caveman who found his wife in a museum.
• Gargoyles had this in the first episode with the main protagonists having slept for a thousand years, but they adapt surprisingly quickly, particularly Hudson's love of T.V. and Lexington's genius for learning technology in general. Later on, Griff of the London Clan of gargoyles is pulled forward fifty years.
• The Author of the Journals, Ford Pines, from Gravity Falls. He's been trapped in another dimension since 1982, and it shows. He talks about 8-tracks and floppy disks in an Establishing Character Moment.
• Billy of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy dug up Fred Flintstone in his backyard. And took him to show-and-tell, where he snapped from being 30,000 years out of place and went on a rampage.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): In "The Time Wheel", Orko accidentally pulls King Tamusk, a former ruler of Eternia, to the present. Tamusk is at first unaware that he's time traveled and thinks he was simply teleported away from his kingdom. He's disoriented and frightened when he sees several machines, but thinks that the machines and changes to the surroundings are the result of magic. He then mistakes King Randor for a usurper and attempts to fight him to regain his kingdom. Tamusk is also upset because in his time, everything is decided by battle and war and Eternia has become much more peaceful. He-Man manages to stop him and convince him that he's in the future and to be returned home. It's implied this is a Stable Time Loop, as the history books mention Tamusk used to be cruel and warlike, until he suddenly changed to a fair and just ruler after seeing how Randor and He-Man do things.
• The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones has this with the Jetsons going back in time and meeting the Flintstones. Eventually the Flintstones end up going forward to the Jetsons' future. Both sides are initially confused by what they find when they leave their respective time periods, but they manage to adapt pretty quickly.
• Kiva from Megas XLR is a soldier from the future fighting an alien war. She intended to send the Megas robot back to a turning point in the losing war, but accidentally sends it back to the 20th century. When she finds it in the early 21st century, she discovers the time controls are broken beyond repair.
• Ivan Dobsky was convicted as the Meatsafe Murderer in the early 70s, only he never done it, he only said he done it so they would take his willy out of the light socket, but two nice men named D 'n A said he never done it, and they told everyone. So Ivan is released from prison, but he finds himself unable to cope with the changes that have occurred in society during the 20-odd years of his imprisonment. He laments this fact and says he wants to go back to prison, but people tell him he can only go back to prison if he does something truly horrible. Hilarity Ensues.
• Mummies Alive! used and abused this trope with gay abandon. The mummies, after awakening over 3,000 years after their deaths, obviously have a lot of adjusting to do, but this adjustment period seemed to take an extremely long time, with jokes about the Mummies encountering modern technology making up at least 80% of every single episode.
• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Princess Luna was sealed in the moon for a thousand years. As such, her dialogue is peppered with Flowery Elizabethan English (often at high volume), she uses the Royal "We", and she is obsessed with archaic long-abandoned court protocol. The word "fun" is less than 1000 years old; as such, she's unfamiliar with it.
• Discussed in The Owl House. Emperor Belos/Philip Wittebane came to the Boiling Isles in the mid 17th century, and because he came from a community of witch hunters, decided he would stay on the Isles, carry out the genocide of the witch population, and be hailed a hero upon his return. However, by the time he manages to get the Draining Spell working, over 300 years have passed. Luz rightly points out that witch hunters aren't a thing in the modern era, and that a man in Puritanical garb ranting about the Demon Realm would likely be written off as insane.
• Rocko's Modern Life: The 2019 special Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling revolves around Rocko and his friends returning to O-Town after 20 years in space and finding their home completely changed. Heffer and Filburt embrace new aspects of modern life like food trucks and smartphones; Rocko, not so much.
  Rocko: The 21st century is a very dangerous century.
• This is the entire premise of Samurai Jack: Jack has been sent to the future and is trying to get back home to feudal Japan. A great deal of the comedy in the series is dependent on Jack's lack of understanding in the future. Most notably, "Jack" was a slang three hipsters called him on the streets and he thought that was what they seriously thought his name was.
• Played for laughs in The Simpsons when elderly Jasper freezes himself in the Kwik-E-Mart freezer so that he can be alive to see the future. Apu takes advantage of the situation by changing his store to the 'Freak-E-Mart' with frozen Jasper as an attraction for tourists. This doesn't last very long when the freezer fails and Jasper wakes up and sees the changes in the store, actually thinking he is in the distant future.
  Jasper: Moon pie... what a time to be alive.
• The Smurfs in both Season 9 of the cartoon show and in the live-action movie.
• South Park lampshaded this in "Prehistoric Ice Man" by having a Human Popsicle who was only frozen for three years... but the town treated it as if this were a big thing.
  • In "Go God Go", Cartman was turned into a Human Popsicle while trying to cut down on the time until the Nintendo Wii came out. Unfortunately, he ended up freezing himself for 500 years, when technology such as the Wii ceased to exist.
    • The next episode shows that he has adapted to life in the future quite well, although his primary concern is still to get a Wii. And when he gets it, he can't play it. For bonus points, when he does return to the present, he's actually further back and has to wait months instead of days for the Wii's release.
• An almost literal example in Spongebob Squarepants where the episode "SB-129" has Squidward accidentally get frozen and awaken in the distant future.
• A significant part of the premise of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward was seeing them adapt to living 100 years in the future. Everyone but Raphael adjusted fairly quickly while Raph found the conveniences of the future to be inconvenient, i.e. being attacked by appliances while trying to read the holographic newspaper. "I hate the future!"
• Teen Titans:
  • This happens to Cyborg, when he gets spontaneously warped to 3000 BC and dumped right in the middle of a war between a tribe of barbarians (led by the surprisingly bad-ass Sarasim) and some vaguely demonic creatures. He helps them fight off the monsters several times, and eventually discovers the one responsible for their appearance — Krall, an unscrupulous warrior from the tribe who asked a witch to give him glory, and instead received monsters he couldn't defeat. He asked her for the strength to beat them, and she brought Cyborg from the present. A transformed Krall and his minions lay siege to the warriors' home, and Krall manages to get the upper hand against Sarasim. Before Cyborg can save her, he's pulled back though a time warp to the present by the other Titans. At first he's distraught, but later Raven shows him a book detailing the history of Sarasim's tribe, which shows that they managed to defeat Krall's army, and Sarasim survived.
  • Another episode has Starfire sent twenty years into a Bad Future, when three of her four compatriots are retired.
• A Thousand and One... Americas: In many episodes, Chris doesn't realize at first that he's not in the present time since he's currently dreaming of an era that precedes the arrival of Christopher Columbus, which leads to him making assumptions that are correct for his era but not for the one he's dreaming of, and occasionally mentions inventions that didn't exist yet (thus forcing him to make hasty explanations or justifications about them) . For example, in the first episode, Chris is surprised to learn that nobody at Alicora's town travels in vehicles, and more so when he realizes she doesn't even know what wheels are (he's unaware that he's dreaming of a pre-Columbian civilization, pre-1492, where the inventions in question were unheard of). In a later episode, this dissonance actually gets him into trouble because he's not supposed to know (much less publicly mention) the then-secret composition of bronze.
• Happens to Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog when they travel back in time to help the only survivor of an Indian attack discover California (story arc "Go West, Young Manfred"). Tom tries to change into a helicopter but can't because helicopters hadn't been invented yet.
• Transformers: Animated's take on Cyclonus only appears for a few minutes in the actual show, but the Allspark Almanac II lets us know that he's from the future and is just biding his time until Megatron becomes Galvatron.
• Caleb from W.I.T.C.H. gets transferred from a medieval fantasy-like world to early 2000s America. He fits in pretty well but doesn't understand certain aspects of modern culture or modern technology.
• Yvon of the Yukon follows the misadventures of a 17th-century French explorer who finds himself in the 21st-century Canadian Arctic after getting frozen in ice for 300 years.

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