And You Thought It Was Real

Alexander: Don't you make any TV shows on your planet? Theatre, films?
Mathesar: Historical documents of your culture, yes. In fact, we have come to document our history from your example.
Gwen: No, not historical documents. They're not all historical documents. Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island is a —
Mathesar: [with a dismayed look] Those poor people ...

— Galaxy Quest

Something that is a work of fiction or some people practicing for the real thing gets mistaken for the real thing. Poor Communication Kills comes into play and most the rest of the episode is based on this one misunderstanding. May lead to You Just Ruined the Shot.

While this trope often pops up because of a simple miscommunication it also can turn up in works where there are aliens involved. No Such Thing as Alien Pop Culture, right? Well, Law of Conservation of Detail might explain that, but in this case the aliens literally do not have pop culture. Or any other form of entertainment, because in their culture there is no such thing as fiction. And therefore, when they watch something like Star Trek they think we actually have laser weapons and photon cannons.

This trope does not have anything to do with an ultra-realistic costume or anything of the sort.

Inverse of And You Thought It Was a Game, where something that's real gets mistaken for pretend. Related to Out-of-Context Eavesdropping, This Is a Work of Fiction, Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality, You Watch Too Much X. Similar to Red Herring.

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Examples:

Anime And Manga

• Doraemon:
  • One episode involves the cast getting ready to fight a bunch of Mole Men after one of them had a premonition that they were invading the surface. Turns out, it was just shooting for a movie.
  • The 2015 movie Doraemon: Nobita and The Space Heroes has the roles flipped: this time, the cast is shooting for a movie and an alien comes to them for help thinking they are superheroes.

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: In Flying Island: The Sky Adventure episode 14, Weslie and Paddi see Tibbie kidnapped in a building and at the mercy of two bird people about to beat her up. Not only is it not her, but the situation is a film being recorded rather than an actual violent run-in; Weslie and Paddi don't realize this until after they've crashed the filming.

Fan Works

• In this Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fanfic, Meggy and Blue (the Inklings) do some research on the Fourth of July after Ness mentions it. They find out about Independence Day, come to the conclusion that Will Smith was a war hero who fought off actual alien hordes, and decide to tack a "re-enactment" of it onto the end of the fireworks show they're planning by stealing Samus' underwear and pinning the blame on Ridley.

Films — Live-Action

• The 1995 movie The Adventures Of Captain Zoom in Outer Space has an alien race mistakenly thinking an arrogant 1950s actor is really the heroic space adventurer he plays on TV and whisks him off to fight in their war.
• Galaxy Quest: A group of aliens who have no concept of fiction believe that a Star Trek-like TV show from Earth is real and abduct the (retired) actors to help them fight a war.
• Home Alone: Kevin tricks a pizza delivery boy and the Wet Bandits into believing that they overheard a murder occur by playing a gangster movie.
• Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb: the Lancelot statue that gets alive ran away from the museum to try to find the kingdom of Camelot. When he finds it, it's actually a theatrical play with Hugh Jackman as King Arthur. Lancelot, knowing nothing about opera, goes onto the stage and talks to "Guinevere" as if she's the real one, which confuses the viewers. When he's told that it's just an opera and not a real thing, Lancelot goes nuts and runs away.

Literature

• Animorphs:
  • When the Yeerks first came to Earth, they were horrified to discover that humans not only had variable-setting laser weapons, but were capable of multiples-of-lightspeed travel in realspace (with recording devices capable of such impossible speeds). They quickly figured out it wasn't real, but thought it was for intimidation purposes. It wasn't until they started infesting them that they understood the human need for entertainment.
  • The Ellimist's species was destroyed due to a misunderstanding: one of their favorite pastimes was playing extremely detailed Civilization-like games, which were part of the data they broadcasted into space. Another species picked up the signal and saw a race of Manipulative Bastards who played god with other sentient beings, and destroyed nearly all the Ketrans. Ironically, the Ellimist eventually did play games with other sentients when he had attained godlike power.
• In the children's story The Book that Saved the Earth, some Martians that are planning to invade Earth wind up in a library and end up mistaking a book of nursery rhymes for things that Earthlings have accomplished. Their leader, who looks like an egg, reads Humpty Dumpty and winds up believing that the earthlings know about the invasion and are planning their own invasion of Mars leading to him calling off their invasion and evacuating his people to a planet millions of lightyears away.
• Diplomatic Act is a 1998 novel by Peter Jurasik, who played Londo on Babylon 5 and clearly used the role in the plot: An actor who plays an alien diplomat on a popular TV show is abducted into space, not for a war, but to take part in negotiations to prevent one as the aliens think he is his noble, wise alien character. Meanwhile, one of the aliens takes his place on Earth to quickly realize he is merely an actor (it's indicated the very idea of fiction may be a purely human concept) and tries to get back to warn his people about the mistake.

Live Action TV

• Blackadder: In "Sense and Senility", the two actors trying to coach Prince George take a break to rehearse their own play, "The Bloody Murder of the Foul Prince Romero and His Enormously Bosomed Wife" (a philosophical piece). Baldrick overhears them during a scene planning to torture the prince and his servant, thinks it's for real, and the panic spreads to Prince George. Blackadder returns, and immediately realizes the truth, but chooses to get rid of the actors by confirming that they were traitors, having made the classic mistake of planning their deed by writing it in play format.
• One episode of Castle seems to involve a dead secret agent. Then Castle realizes that the victim was just playing a deeply immersive spy game, along with a few of their witnesses who didn't realize they were dealing with the real police.
• Space: Above and Beyond: The Chigs often mutilate human dead out of a mistaken belief that humans can come Back from the Dead. Having no concept of an afterlife themselves, they misunderstood The Four Gospels after stealing cable.
• The Stargate SG-1 episode "Rules of Engagement" manages to combine this with And You Thought It Was a Game. In the episode, SG-1 stumbles across what appears to be a missing SG team in a firefight with some Jaffa. When they move in to assist, they get shot by their would-be allies, who turn out to be Goa'uld infiltration trainees participating in war games using weapons modified to be non-lethal. The opposite trope comes into play when SG-1's very real weapons are unknowingly mixed into circulation with the fakes, leading to both camps believing their Deadly Graduation has begun.

Video Games

• In Undertale, Undyne believes that anime is human history. When Alphys confesses to her that it isn't, she initially laughs it off, but then begins to undergo an existential crisis. You have the option to either reassure her that it is real, or confirm that it isn't.

Webcomics

• Latchkey Kingdom: "Team Awesome - Gala" sees the team hired as security for a gala event. The gala is attacked by masked cultists seeking an ancient artifact, tying up the team and dumping them in the coat room, only for CB and Classy Cat-Burglar Ms. Tery to escape and try to foil the scheme. It turns out to be an elaborate dinner theatre, complete with a dashing swashbuckler come to save the day. The other staff try to explain it, but CB runs off before they finish.

Western Animation

• American Dad! episode "An Apocalypse to Remember": Stan mistakes a nuclear drill as real and thinks nuclear war is happening, evacuating his family to the woods. He then spends most the rest of the episode hiding the truth from them so his family doesn't think he's an idiot.
• In one episode of Family Guy, Mayor Adam West watches Romancing the Stone and sends the entire Quahog police force to rescue the film's heroes, but by the end of the episode, the rescue is called off.
• In the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power episode "Roll With It", Scorpia uses a spy-bot to spy on the Alliance's planning session. However, unknown to her, the session has devolved into the Princesses trying to one-up each other with crazy stories about how they'd use made-up powers to single-handily capture the fortress Scorpia is guarding. Scorpia believes everything she hears and is terrified.
• One episode of The Simpsons had the family go on a cruise. When Bart realizes that the cruise is going to end soon and he'll never have fun like that again, he tries to extend the cruise by passing off a movie about a viral outbreak as a news report. It fools everyone, including celebrity passenger Treat Williams who starred in the movie.
• In the Sonic Boom episode "Eggman The Auteur", Sonic stops one of Eggman's robots that is attacking the village early on in the episode, only to find out that it was actually for a film that Eggman is making. Subverted in that it is later revealed by Orbot and Cubot that Eggman was actually using the film as a cover to mine for rare metal in order to make stronger robots. Only for it to be Double Subverted when Eggman reveals that was a ruse too and he was actually tricking Sonic into filming the last part of his movie.

Real Life

• On October 30, 1938 the book The War of the Worlds about an alien invasion was adapted into a series of fake news broadcasts for The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which fooled many people into thinking an actual invasion was happening and causing mass panic.^note Although whether the "mass panic" actually happened is disputed.
• In Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys, Dave tells the story of two of his friends who are given the alias of "Wally" and "Lynde" because they were stoned during the story. They were watching TV and the broadcast was interrupted by a news report about Hurricane David, with the couple slowly realizing that they had no time to get ready even if they could think clearly or had full mobility. Fortunately Wally eventually remembered they were watching a recording made several years back, so the danger posed by the hurricane had passed.
• Radio host Neal Boortz in 1988 created an entirely fictitious event for his radio program called "The Great Georgia Cat Chase," or alternatively the "Georgia Cat Chasing Championship" or "Great Neal Boortz Cat Chase." This is a supposed sporting event in which cats were tossed out of airplanes and caught by skydivers, presented complete with "live commentary" and sound effects of angry, mewling cats. He reported that a number of people called in to complain, convinced that it was real. Additionally, a California newspaper reported it as if it was real. Boortz even went so far as to say that most people listening to it thought it was real, though whether that's true is debatable at best.
• In 2017, a thief named Terry Jon Martin stole a pair of prop ruby slippers, as worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, from the Judy Garland Museum, believing them to be studded with real rubies which he could sell for a lot of money. After learning the "rubies" were simply red glass, Martin simply got rid of the shoes, though they were subsequently recovered. (In fairness, Martin had never seen the film and didn't realize the shoes were being kept for their cultural, rather than financial, value.)

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