Trapped in TV Land

"Dad, you've got to get us out of here! Use the remote!"

"This is what I call a drive-in movie!"

— Carlos, The Magic School Bus, "The Magic School Bus Spins a Web"

A group of characters, often a mix of heroes and villains, are trapped by some form of Applied Phlebotinum inside the world of literature, video games or the like, but most often, television. Either they must learn to cope with their newfound environment until some way can be found to escape, or they will jump from channel to channel, hitting a multitude of clichéd worlds and thin parodies.

A plot very much at home in a Super Hero spoof or other comedy show with a loose set of physical constraints. It's a wacky plot that allows the writers to have fun with the tropes this wiki catalogues, and make it all moot at the end without a Snapback.

Most times, one of the cast members will be Genre Savvy, or even a fan, and will use that knowledge to beat the system, and many times there is also a Genre Blind character, that is too serious, sane and is not into that kind of entertainment, and insists in using real-world logic in a place where that doesn't apply, and becomes the victim, the Butt-Monkey or The Millstone.

Most common in animation, where "building" all the new environments and sets is easy and cheap. Well, easy. Also common to Fanfic Fuel.

There's an unspoken rule that, somewhere in the universe, there is a show similar to Star Trek: The Original Series.

Overlaps sometimes with The World as Myth. This trope is infrequently connected with its opposites, the Refugee from TV Land and Real-World Episode.

Sub-Trope of Anomalous Art and Trapped in Another World.

Compare with Portal Book, which can trap characters in Book Land and is frequently paired with a "Reading Is Cool" Aesop, and Media Transmigration, which is when the protagonist is permanently transported into the Show Within a Show, usually due to death. Compare and contrast Intrepid Fictioneer, for when the travel is deliberate. See also Fisher Kingdom, if the channels change the visitors.

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Examples:

Advertising

• This 1995 Pepsi commercial where Shaquille O'Neal isn't necessarily trapped there, but travels across it to reach the screen that's playing a Pepsi commercial to grab a bottle. And returns in time to win the game with Woody Woodpecker's help.
  Shaq: (to the camera from inside the screen) Who says there's nothing good on TV?

Anime & Manga

• The sixth Case Closed movie, The Phantom of Baker Street, sees the main characters trapped in a virtual reality game controlled by a rogue AI, and featuring Jack the Ripper.
• Horror Comedy one-shot Final Girl (2019) follows an overworked office worker who blacks out in front of a movie theatre showing a classic Slasher Movie, and wakes up not only within the story of the film itself, but also inhabiting the body of "Summer", the sexy blonde cheerleader with a healthy sex life that is all but stated to be the first to die by the slasher's hand.
• Invoked in Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, which features characters from our world attempting to find a way into Amestris (the setting for Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)).
• Chapter 17/Episode 26 of Ghost Sweeper Mikami features a haunted video game which is an expy of Dragon Quest. Yokoshima and Okinu get trapped in it while Mikami uses her spiritual powers to participate in it from outside.
• Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! episode 8 has the cast sucked into a cursed Dating Sim (based mostly on Tokimeki Memorial) with Mahiro as the Player Character; if he wants to return to reality, he has to pick a girlfriend (or Hasta) by the end of the school year. The whole thing plays out as an even longer chain of anime references than usual and culminates in Nyarko, Cuuko, and Hasta having a martial arts battle over him while dressed as Pai Chan, Mai Shiranui, and Bridget. Nyarko wins.
• Overlord handles this in a unique way. While the protagonist is trapped as his VR MMORPG character, everything in the world he's trapped in (aside from his guild base and now-sentient NPC servants) is completely different from the game world, outside of a few suspicious holdovers (primarily, how magic works.)
• In Princess Tutu, the main characters are characters from the book The Prince and the Raven, which ended prematurely when its author, Drosselmeyer, died. While the characters have escaped from the book, the entire city is being controlled by a story, which in turn is controlled by Drosselmeyer's ghost. Some of the characters are Genre Savvy, while some aren't.
• The initial premise of Sword Art Online has online gamers trapped in a dangerous virtual reality facing real-life death.
• While not in a television per se, the 2nd part of the 1993 Time Bokan OVA has Yatterman's Dorombo Gang enter a sewer and find a world entirely populated by Tatsunoko Production characters. While attempting to cause havok and expecting Yatterman-1 and -2 to show up, they don't count on the Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, Casshern, Hurricane Polymar and Tekkaman arriving and trouncing them. Oh, and there's the obligatory Speed Racer cameo too.
• The framing device for the anime exercise video (It Makes Sense in Context) Training with Hinako has one shot of a girl in the real world being taken into a glowing TV set, where she apparently becomes an anime character.

Asian Animation

• BoBoiBoy: This is the basis of the plot for episode 7. Adu Du traps BoBoiBoy and Gopal in their Papa Zola game, and they have to Win to Exit; otherwise, they'll be trapped forever.
• Happy Heroes: In Season 10 episode 23, Big M. traps the Supermen in a video game, with the Supermen having to go through its candy, ice, and lava worlds and Win to Exit.
• The Motu Patlu episode "Magical Book" is about Motu inadvertently getting himself and his friends trapped in a magic book about Sentient Vehicles. They wind up having to help a female car named Baby to save her sister from a few cars and trucks who are bullying her.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Invoked by Wolffy in Happy, Happy, Bang! Bang! episode 38, where he invents a portal that lets one travel into television and movie screens and enter the program or film they're playing. Wolffy uses the portal to trap Paddi in the film Dao Yang Kong Jian and chase after him.
• Simple Samosa: The premise of the episode "Khelo Samosa" involves Chatpata Nagar's inhabitants being stuck inside the "Pakwanman" arcade machine and being forcibly puppeteered to play the game's enemies. Samosa and friends go in to save them.
• Popo of TELEMONSTER can turn his mouth into a television and suck people into it, which he frequently does to the other characters to send them on adventures, or just get rid of them when they are being abusive to him.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics had a multi-part story where Archie Andrews is trapped inside the world(s) of his TV set, and he had to get out before his parents came home from their trip.
• Caballistics, Inc.: When the team investigates a haunting at the derelict Luddgate film studio, they find themselves trapped inside various horror movies produced by the studio after a failed demonic extraction of Jenny. Turns out that the studio head was an occultist who built his own dimension to both play out his own fantasies and to trap people in an illusion so he could suck out their lifeforce to sustain himself.
• Ellie Dee gets transported into a video game in one issue of Cherry Comics, where she has to Win to Exit.
• The Fantastic Four miniseries Fantastic Four: True Story does this in a homage to the Thursday Next books (see the Literature section below).
• The Flash: The story "Flash of Two Worlds" has a variation, in that Flash (Barry Allen) is transported to Earth-2, where the adventures of the old Flash (Jay Garrick) who Barry read about as a child took place, but it's less 'he goes into a comic book' and more 'he travels to the reality that those comics were depicting', so it's only this trope from Barry's perspective.
• What Gwenpool claims happened to her: She lived an ordinary life in the real world but through some unexplained way was transported in the universe of her favorite fiction, Marvel comics. Other characters think she is crazy, which is certainly also an option. Doesn't help that she thinks since the world wasn't real where she came from, its people aren't real now, and are therefore expendable, so she has no qualms against murdering them en masse.
• The off-beat comic book series The Invisibles had an appropriately weird example where King Mob and Boy get caught in the mindscape of the Marquis de Sade (yes, really) during an attempt to pull him out of the past that goes somewhat pear-shaped. They end up having to witness the entirety of 120 Days of Sodom, which King Mob treats as a sick joke.
• One storyline in Justice League involved the evil Queen of Fables trapping the League in a book of old fairy tales (the original bloody ones) and forcing them to live through the stories.
• An issue of Marvel Team-Up plays with this kinda sorta when Spider-Man and the Not Ready For Prime Time Players team up against Silver Samurai during the live airing of an episode of Saturday Night Live.
• A two-part story from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW) has the ponies get trapped in book land since Equestria — despite the occasional Schizo Tech — generally pre-dates things like TV and computers. The idea works fine for the The Lord of the Rings and Film Noir parodies, but it gets a little weird when the story starts parodying Star Trek, of all things.
• She-Hulk met old Howard the Duck foe Doctor Bong when he set about changing television shows' internal reality (just roll with it) and accidentally zapped her into them. Possibly the most infamously surreal Shulkie story ever.
• The Simpsons Futurama Crossover Crisis: The first miniseries is about the Planet Express crew ending up inside of a Simpsons comic because of the Brain Spawn.
• Superman: The Superman Annual #9 had a secondary story in which Superman artist Curt Swan fell asleep while drawing a comic and woke up in Metropolis. It was All Just a Dream, except that Curt found two bullets in his hand from when Superman stopped a crook.
• This is the power of Supreme baddie the Televillain - entering into a TV show's fictional world and drawing others into it as he pleases. And, of course, changing the channel to whatever premise fits his need. In one outing he killed Monica on an episode of Friends to prove he wasn't kidding around.
• In Titans (Rebirth) #25, Source energy send Nightwing and Miss Martian into a woman's TV and they skip between a Casablanca-esque Film Noir, a Western and a vaguely Star Wars-like sci-fi movie as she channel-hops.
• This is the entire premise of Cary Bates' and Keith Giffen's mini Video Jack series, for Marvel imprint Epic Comics. Due to a combination of magic and technology, teen friends Jack Swift and Damon Xarnett are transported to a TV version of their hometown, which changes (as well as them) as they zap through the channels.
• War of the Gods has Grant Morrison's Author Avatar from their run on Animal Man appear as a recruit of the Suicide Squad during their tie-in to the event, bemoaning that they've been trapped within the DC Universe after the events of their Animal Man run and that they can't reliably use their ability to influence the story to defend themself from harm now that their fate is at the mercy of a different writer. Sure enough, they're abruptly killed off by getting a sudden case of writer's block while the team are fighting off Beastiamorphs.
• In Youngblood (Image Comics), the Televillain goes on a rampage using the miracle of TiVo and ends up trapping a recent addition to the team on the set of Oprah. Shaft and Cougar go after her and briefly end up on a number of different shows, including a rerun of Seinfeld.
• Young Justice: In the 80-Page Giant where Arrowette, Impulse, Red Tornado, Robin, Secret, Superboy, and Wonder Girl fight the entity from which Bedlam gained his powers and it sends them through different genres of fiction— Film Noir, Spaghetti Western, Giant Mecha Anime, Silent Film Horror, etc.

Fan Works

• In The Blue Dragon series, the two primary protagonists (Demex in the first, Josh in the second) get sent to the The Legend of Spyro universe.
• The Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Inside The Game", which is a Smurf adaptation of the plot of TRON (see below in Film). "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" makes the Smurflings think they have been transported into the story of The Wizard Of Odds, but it turns out to be All Just a Dream.
• Kyle-091 is about a Halo fanboy ending up (via sending himself there with Forerunner tech) on the ONI medical station orbiting Reach in the early stages of the Spartan program. Since he knows what's going to happen in the future, the ONI would've been after him had it not for Mendez and Halsey covering up the incident by giving him Spartan enhancements and sneaking him into the program. The sequel turns this around by the Covenant trying to invoke a Grandfather Paradox.
• The fandom for The Lord of the Rings often ignores this trope. There are stories where a modern girl falls into Middle-earth, as if fiction becomes real, but Middle-earth is not inside a book or movie.
  • This trope does happen if the girl falls through a Television Portal into the movies. This happens in MagnoliaCinderellaCupcake.
  • I am NOT a MarySue is a straight example of Trapped in Fan Fiction Land. A curse dumps main character Caroline into a bad fan fiction she reviewed and transforms her into the main character, an elf named Sornif. The fan author Leggieluver123 has corrupted Middle-earth. Caroline, in the role of Sornif, intends to escape by restoring Canon, as Sornif is not a canon character.
• Locked In Digital is about Izuku Midoriya being kidnapped by a Mad Scientist with a Body Uploading Quirk and digitized into a computer server. The teen must go through nine different simulations based on early 21st century Horror games, including BioShock and Five Nights at Freddy's, and beat them all within a year before the server overheats and kills him. The story is told as a Flashback B-Plot with the "B" plot itself showing his runs. The "A" plot reveals the aftermath: The simulations have not only taught Izuku a lot of skills like swordmanship and gunmanship but has altered his body into that of borderline superhuman, despite being Quirkless. The downside is he suffers from severe PTSD with Blood Knight tendencies thanks to his struggles to survive which involve constantly dying and encountering multiple dangers within the games. Unfortunately, Izuku must also deal with going to UA, encountering similar events as his canon self with his kidnapping being the catalyst of the notable changes.
• Mass Vexations, is one of the more notable examples of this trope. Another self-insert story, it shows Art, a quirky college guy, suddenly transported to the world of Mass Effect. He doesn't gain super-powers, and it shows how a fan of the game could realistically interact with a fictional world, while trying to hide that he knows pretty much every single outcome from when he arrives (near the beginning of the first game) to the end of the second.
• My Little Brony: Reality vs Fantasy (a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic) is about a brony who ends up in Equestria. The Equestrian natives are understandably freaked out, and he's forced to go live with Zecora and Apple Bloom. His arrival, however, is just in time for him to witness one of the great laws of Equestrian apocrypha: that which states that all shall go to shit. In this case, a mad scientist wants to get rid of the ponies, but it turns out that the (ponyfied) Doctor and his companion Derpy Hooves are watching.
  • The fanfiction site Fimfiction.net contains literally thousands of similar fics based on the same premise; a human in the real world, whether a brony, a normal guy, a celebrity, or a self-insert, somehow lands themselves in the MLP universe. Hilarity Ensues.
• In Must Love Ned Flanders, a fanfiction of The Simpsons, Naomi gets transported from this world to the Simpsons world.
• The New Adventures of Invader Zim: The entire plot of Season 2 Episode 12 is that Zim, Dib, and Tak's teams get caught up in an explosion involving quantum energy from one of Zim's failed plans which sucks them into the TV dimension. They end up having to move between various TV shows and films trying to find a way out and ultimately end up confronting the Scary Monkey, which is actually an Eldritch Abomination feeding on the intelligence of its viewers.
• TD of The Non-Bronyverse, with the emphasis very firmly on "trapped". In a sharp contrast to most stories within the genre, he utterly despises being stuck in Equestria, and makes getting home his number one priority.
• Cyan in Perspective, with a heavier emphasis on most than the trapped part and the emotional trauma that comes with it. Cyan is aware of the horrors of where he is in the RWBY series, but hasn't a clue how he arrived.
• Sleeping with the Girls is all about this, fused with semi-uncontrolled reality hopping. Before you ask, no, there's no sex, the title's just like that. A guy who is an anime fan in real life is, for unknown reasons, being teleported to the side of eight of his favorite anime characters. The problem? He is transported the instant he falls asleep, and the characters he likes are a) always asleep when he teleports to them, and b) they tend to run in the Tsundere category. One of the most realistic takes on a self-insert, he nearly dies several times because they can throw punches he can't survive, not to mention that he almost never gets enough sleep. He's cycling through eight separate worlds, each one one of his favorite anime/manga. Currently in the middle of its second of what the author claims is a three-volume story. See the trope page for more details.
• The famous Star Trek fanfic Visit To A Weird Planet eventually spawned a sequel, Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited, which appeared in one of the early Star Trek fanfic anthologies. While the characters were on set, the actors were struggling to deal with a crisis involving a Klingon ship.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom has quite a few of these. One particularly popular story that spawned an array of Recursive Fanfiction is ''Why Am I Pinkie Pie'', wherein a human from our world switches brains with the fictional character Pinkie Pie and must figure out a way to switch back. He-In-Pinkie's-Body goes on a grand adventure, while Pinkie-In-His-Body does nothing but watch television in his house her entire stay.
• The Wild Horse Thesis is a story about how, due to a magical spell, Ranma from Ranma ½ is trapped inside a series of videotapes, which contain Neon Genesis Evangelion. He finds himself replacing the main character Shinji, but has all his abilities and techniques intact. Unlike some of the other examples, we see Ranma having his Tokyo-3 adventures from the viewpoint of Ranma's family and fiances, who are watching the tapes in the "real" world. The best part is seeing Ranma telling people in the show of his "previous" life, thinking no one knows what he's talking about, while the characters in the "real" world are subjected to his honest opinions of them.

Films — Live-Action

• ABCs of Death 2: Two boys find themselves trapped in the world of the ads of their favourite action figures in "W is for Wish".
• In the obscure flick Adventures in Dinosaur City, where a trio of kids find themselves zapped into the world of their favorite cartoon after trying to watch the show on a screen in their dad's lab.
• Possibly first done in the "Murray in Videoland" sketches in the 1987 film Amazon Women on the Moon.
• Might or might not be happening as part of the Surreal Humor in The Appointments of Dennis Jennings. In one scene Dennis discovers that the people on his TV can see him. And then the movie cuts to some redneck couple, the couple in Dennis's TV, who can see him on their TV.
• The Cabin in the Woods is a borderline example. It doesn't feature characters that are trapped in a horror movie per se, but it does feature them trapped in a world of horror movie cliches. It's also implied that the monsters seen in the last third inspired movie monsters.
• In the sex comedy Deep in the Valley, two friends get trapped in a world based on porn movie cliches, and find it's not all fun and games when a lovesick stalker and a Fair Cop go after them.
• In Delirious, a soap opera writer gets hit on the head and wakes up as a character inside his own show.
• A voluntary example is the German comedy Die Einsteiger. The duo Gottschalk/Krüger use a technobabble remote to jump into genres, mostly for trolling Nazis, vampires, gangsters, Romans et al. (since they are Genre Savvy and their "victims" not) and merrily snark along.
• In The Final Girls, a movie theater showing an '80s Slasher Movie is accidentally set on fire, and the protagonists get trapped within the film when they try to escape through the movie screen. One of the protagonists, Max, is the daughter of one of the film's recently-deceased stars, and is hit by an emotional onslaught upon seeing her mother "alive" again — especially knowing that her mother's character gets killed. By the end, Max manages to escape the film, only for her and her friends to end up in the sequel.
• Jumanji:
  • In Jumanji, Alan spends 26 years in Jumanji. Unfortunately, it all happens offscreen.
  • Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle instantly has the characters sucked into the Jumanji world once they start the game.
  • Jumanji: The Next Level has some of the same characters along with some new ones sucked into the game once again.
• Last Action Hero has a kid sucked into an action movie, and the characters following him back to the real world.
• In Mary Poppins, Mary, Burt, and the children jump into a chalk pavement picture.
• Anyone murdered by the killer in Midnight Movie becomes trapped in the black and white Hillbilly Horrors film he originates from.
• The Big Bad of 976-EVIL 2: The Astral Factor, seeking to frame the female lead, traps one of her friends inside a television program. It doesn't seem so bad at first, as she finds herself amongst the ending of It's a Wonderful Life. Then the movie is mashed up with Night of the Living Dead (1968) which is playing at the next channel and she is killed by the Creepy Child zombie from it.
• Two American teens (brother and sister) are sucked into a black-and-white 1950s sitcom series in Pleasantville, where they inadvertently take the role of two of the main characters.
• The Purple Rose of Cairo: Played with. No one is trapped but it's clear that characters are meant to stay in their films and the audience is meant to stay in the real world. Tom easily brings Cecilia back with him into the film for a date and they easily step back into the real world again.
• The Buster Keaton movie Sherlock, Jr. can be considered an early example of this trope. Keaton plays a movie projectionist who dreams he walks into the movie he is showing, and at first has a hard time dealing with a series of jump cuts.
• Last chase scene in the horror film Shocker has the protagonist and the villain fight their way through war documentaries, Leave It to Beaver, Frankenstein, a boxing match, newscast and Alice Cooper music video. When the villain tries to escape by diving into the nearest TV, the hero pulls the plug, making the villain simply bash his head into the screen.
• Smosh: The Movie revolves around Anthony and Ian finding an embarrassing YouTube video of one of themselves they want to be removed, resulting in them going to YouTube headquarters and asking Steve YouTube to remove it. He then suggests that the two "change the video from the inside", resulting in them travelling through various videos.
• This was the plot of the 1992 film Stay Tuned, where couch potato Roy Knable (played by John Ritter) and his wife Helen (played by Pam Dawber) get sucked into a Hell-spawned satellite TV network. In an obvious nod to his TV career, Ritter's character was briefly trapped inside a demonic version of Three's Company, complete with lookalikes of Chrissy and Janet coming in and asking him "Where have you been?" He promptly fell over the sofa and screamed in horror.
  "That's what I've been trying to tell you! Our Parents - Are Trapped - In Television!"
• In the slasher film There's Nothing Out There, the main characters come to realize that they have literally wandered into a slasher film. There's even a scene where one of the characters swings off the boom mic.
• Some scenes in TRON evoke this trope for video games.
• The "I'm sending you to cartoon land" -moment from Twilight Zone: The Movie.
• When things start going haywire at the party in Weird Science, one of the party-goers gets trapped in an episode of The Munsters. He remains trapped in the TV as people try changing the channel.

Literature

• The Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Crooked World sees the TARDIS crew trapped on a cartoon planet populated by thinly-veiled parodies of Scooby-Doo, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Wacky Races, Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, and others. The Doctor's interference means that for the behavior of those parodies, Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs.
• In a 1943 short story "The Exile" by Edmond Hamilton, four sci-fi writers are talking about their craft. One of them, Carrick says that one time, he got stranded in a world that he made up. He invented a cruel, barbarian planet with detailed history and geography, and started feeling that the planet actually exists now in a parallel universe. When he imagined himself on that planet, he was transported there. But he was unable to get back, so he eventually started to make a living by becoming a science-fiction writer, using his more civilized and peaceful homeland as a basis for his stories. When one other writer asks Carrick how did he get back, he responds: "I never got back home. I'm still here."
• Gameknight999 begins with Gameknight999 getting sucked into the game by one of his father's inventions. Later, his sister and father tag along as well.
• There's a Robert Bloch story (found in the anthology Hollywood Nightmare, edited by Peter Haining) about a woman who, after watching so many tv-horror-marathons that her brain melts (more or less), finds herself taking a walking tour of RKO Horror and the Universal Monsters canon. Hilarity Does Not Ensue.
• The humor book How to Survive a Horror Movie tells how to recognize if you've become a victim of this trope, and how to stay alive once you're there.
• There is ''I'm Stuck in a Video Game'', which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• The Incredible Umbrella and its sequel The Amorous Umbrella, by Marvin Kaye. The protagonist acquires a magical umbrella that allows him to access fictional worlds. Or nearly access them — he tended to be rather flighty and stray thoughts would often turn the realities he was visiting into fanfic universes.
• Woody Allen's short story The Kugelmass Episode features a man launching himself into various classic novels. It being Allen, the protagonist enters Madame Bovary just to have sex with female protagonist — though unbeknownst to him the text changes to reflect his intrusion. In the end, when he tries to enter Portnoy's Complaint the machine malfunctions and drops him into a Spanish textbook.
• The third part of Monday Begins on Saturday opens with a test of the theory that fictional universes exist in parallel to the real one. Sasha Privalov, the narrator, travels to a world made by the collective imagination of Science Fiction authors. The world is split in two by a wall; one half is a spacefaring utopia populated by inventors infodumping the technical details of their inventions, and the other is a dystopia split into segments where humanity is enslaved by something or other (aliens, The Virus, etc). And in a subversion of Like Reality, Unless Noted, almost everyone is near-naked, because writers tend to explicitly describe only small parts of their characters' wardrobes.
• Ms. Wiz Goes Live has Ms. Wiz take Caroline and her little sister inside the TV. In a variation they go to an actual TV studio where the sister causes an uproar on a talk show, Ms. Wiz reads her own version of the news and Caroline does a guest spot on a drama. The book ends with a producer calling the house to see if Caroline wants a bigger role.
• Tom Holt took a turn in My Hero, in which it's revealed that when a novel is written, a number of "actors" are hired from among the teeming population of characters and have to act it out. The actual plot is driven by a Western writer ending up trapped into his own novel and then managing to get a message to an indifferently talented boilerplate fantasy author asking her to send the hero of her novels in to find him. The net result goes through everything from Pride and Prejudice to A Midsummer Night's Dream to Sherlock Holmes, in much the same way that a wrecking ball goes through a brick wall. Of note, it's revealed that in-universe, there's a number of openings linking reality and fiction, including Alice in Wonderland and - due to its massive collection of fiction - the basement of the Library of Congress, a hole which permits the fantasy author to get an autograph from Captain Kirk.
• The Neverending Story: Halfway through the story, Bastian gets transported into the world of the book he was reading — although it's really more of a realm of the human imagination in general. This seems like a great deal at first, since everything he wishes for becomes real, so he doesn't feel trapped. However, both Be Careful What You Wish For and Power at a Price eventually come into full effect, and Bastian finds he needs to escape before he loses his humanity. To do that, he needs to find the wishes that will lead to Character Development instead of Wish-Fulfillment.
• In The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong, Shen Yuan, an anti-fan of trashy Wish-Fulfillment Harem Genre web novel Proud Immortal Demon Way ends up transmigrated into said series after he dies. He is trapped in the role of Sadist Teacher Shen Qingqiu for The Hero Luo Binghe's backstory. His very presence and different choices begins to drastically alter the course of the story.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels concern an invention called the "Prose Portal" which allows people to enter works of fiction. Later novels reveal a whole world of fiction, in which characters in books are like actors, and must "act out" the events of a story every time it is read.
• One of the first examples (if not the first), from 1940: Typewriter in the Sky by L. Ron Hubbard, a Deconstruction of swashbucklers with the main character having "fallen into" the role of the Designated Villain.
• In Andrew Hussie's unfinished story Wizardy Herbert, the title character and a few friends of his are trapped in a bad Harry Potter-like novel.

Live-Action TV

• Amazing Stories has a cross between Be Careful What You Wish For and this trope in "Welcome To My Nightmare". Complaining that real life is nothing like the movies, and wishing it was, he lands in the movie Psycho — as the woman who gets killed in the shower scene. It gets bonus points for having plot-relevant movie posters, such as "It's A Wonderful Life" when he escapes from the film.
• The television adaptation of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure has an episode where the guys use their time machine to travel into Bill's stepmom's favorite soap opera, as a nod to the preceding Animated Adaptation (see the "Western Animation" section).
• In Charmed:
  • The sisters are trapped in an old movie ("Kill it before it dies") in the episode "Chick Flick". Meanwhile, the handsome hero of that movie and villains from slasher movies escape into the real world.
  • The episode "Charmed Noir" has Paige and Brody sucked into a 1930s Maltese Falcon spoof while investigating the murder of a teacher at the Magic School. Also, outsiders could write plot twists which were incorporated into the narrative.
• At the end of an episode of Clarissa Explains It All, Clarissa fakes this happening to h as part of a Zany Scheme to get revenge on her brother.
• Day By Day: The best-known episode of this short-lived NBC sitcom of the late 1980s was "A Very Brady Episode," where teenager Ross Harper — after being yelled at by his parents about goofing off and getting poor grades as a result — falls asleep and imagines himself in an episode of The Brady Bunch as "long-lost Brady son" Chuck Brady. A satire of the original series, Chuck interacts with several of the show's main characters and gets advice about his poor grades from Mike, and all is going well ... until the family begins to repeat their dialogue. "Chuck" wonders what's amiss, and Mike explains what he's seeing is a rerun. Everything becomes chaotic and Ross screams to be let free into the real world ... after which he wakes up and realizes it was All Just a Dream.
• The Doctor Who story "The Mind Robber" features the Second Doctor and companions getting stuck in the Land of Fiction, where characters from every story ever written are real (the Doctor Who Expanded Universe returns to the Land on a couple of occasions).
• In Dramaworld, American college student Claire is magically transported into her favorite Korean drama. She's supposed to be a 'facilitator' to help make sure that the stories stay on track... but things don't go quite according to plan.
• In the finale of The Famous Jett Jackson, Jett actually switches places with Silverstone, the character he plays in the Show Within a Show. Now Jett has to save the world from a Mad Scientist, while Silverstone has to adjust to life as a normal teenager in a small town. Notably, his great-grandmother quickly realizes the truth, having known Jett all his life. Then Jett jumps back into the show in order to save Silverstone, whom the showrunners have decided to kill off, resulting in a Spot the Imposter scene with three identical-looking characters: Jett, Silverstone, and the shapeshifting Big Bad.
• Farscape: "Revenging Angel" is a borderline case. Technically, it's all just a near-death hallucination of Crichton in a Looney Tunes world, but all tropes, gags, and parodies are just the same as in any "true" example of this trope.
• New Zealand kids show Freaky had an episode ("Sitcom") where a girl with troubles at home gets sucked into the TV and finds herself as part of perfect Dom Com family. However, she quickly discovers that life in TV Land is not as carefree as she supposed.
• In a 1991 episode of Growing Pains, Ben is trapped in the show Growing Pains — that is, a world where his family life is the subject of a trope- and cliché-ridden Sitcom.
• Legends of Tomorrow: In the episode "The One Where We're Trapped on TV", the Fates have taken over the world; in order to save the other Legends from her sisters, Charlie turns them into characters in in-universe TV shows. Zari, Behrad, and Nate end up in a Friends-style sitcom called Ultimate Buds, Sara, Ava, and Mick end up in a Star Trek spoof called Space Trip, and Constantine and Astra end up on a Downton Abbey parody called Highcastle Abbey. They all have their memories altered to fit their characters, but fortunately Zari's pre-Cosmic Retcon self (long story) is able to take control of their body and start traveling between the shows to gather everyone together and restore their memories. They then start breaking from the scripts, forcing the shows to get cancelled so that they'll be deposited back in the real world.
• Reversed in Hi Honey, I'm Home!!, which featured a family from a 50's sitcom that has been canceled. They are relocated to the Real World, in a typical 90's suburb. When overwhelmed by the complexities of the world in which they now live, they seek comfort by using a device known as a Turnerizer, which causes themselves and their home environment to revert to monochrome. The outside world (as seen through open doors, etc.), as well as anyone from the outside world, are unaffected.
• The live-action adaptation of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids has an episode where Wayne invents a remote control that picks up dead television waves for a bored Nick and Amy. However, when the kids bicker and accidentally spill juice on it, the remote causes Wayne, Nick, and Amy to be sucked into a vortex that lands them into various programs.
• This is the plot of an episode of Lexx in which the heroes are plopped onto a literal "TV world," where they mysteriously transported onto the set of a show and are "rated" on their performance in whatever TV show they land in. High ratings lead to "primetime," whereas low ratings lead to gradually more degrading roles, ending with being decapitated on a snuff show and having one's head added to the mostly offscreen "audience".
• In The Librarians 2014 episode "And the Silver Screen", two of the characters get trapped in a movie.
• In Lost in Austen, Amanda Price finds a door through her shower stall that leads to the world of Pride & Prejudice. She accidentally trades places with Elizabeth Bennett and then promptly messes up the original storyline.
• My Name Is Earl has a small subplot when Earl was in a coma, in which Earl was in the only place he felt happy; 'TV Land'. A few episodes detailed his life in a fifties television sitcom, while his friends tried to get him out of a coma. The older he got in the sitcom, the closer he was to dying in real life.
• Power Rangers Time Force had a two-parter based around this concept with the Big Bad and the Monster of the Week splitting up the Rangers and sending them through westerns, Samurai films, Martial Arts Epics, Jungle Hero serials, Musicals, and even a Mad Max parody!
  • Power Rangers Samurai combines it with Dream Within a Dream for the Halloween Episode "Trickster Treat".
• Red Dwarf X ramps this up when the crew realise they face having no independent existence outside a TV show. To avert this fate they visit Earth. Where Lister (Craig Charles) visits the set of a long-running TV soap opera. And ends up having a heartfelt chat with an actor playing a taxi driver (Craig Charles) who is nonplussed by it all, viewing Dave Lister as a previous role he played...
• Happens to the Twist kids in the Round the Twist episode "TV or Not TV". While their parents are away, Pete, Bronson, and Linda get in a fight over what to watch on TV, and the power of them using their remotes simultaneously causes the trio to act like their favorite TV stars (a private detective named Jack Geddes, an Australian football player named Rick the Rock, and a female investigative news reporter named Mary Moore)...until the real Jack, Rick, and Mary enter the real world and trap the Twist kids into the TV world.
• Parodied in the episode of Scrubs, "My Life In Four Cameras," in which JD treats a patient who was a fictional writer for Cheers. JD imagines his day at the hospital as a multi-camera sitcom. The end of the episode showed what really happened: there wasn't a happy ending.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation justified this by using malfunctioning holodecks: the crew would go to enjoy an adventure based on classic film or literature, and find themselves trapped inside with the safety mechanisms turned off. Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine also used this plot device.
  • On TNG the Enterprise learned of an alien race that accidentally destroyed a twenty-first century space shuttle and tried to make the surviving astronaut comfortable by recreating his world. Since the only source of information they had about his home was an old book, he ended up spending the rest of his life inside the book's story. Unfortunately the book sucked.
• Supernatural:
  • Used very nicely in the episode "Changing Channels" when the Trickster does this to Sam and Dean, who are forced to perform in CSI clones, cheesy '80s sitcoms, health commercials, and zany Japanese gameshows. Naturally, genre savviness, breaking of the fourth wall, and hilarity all ensue. Castiel's status as the Ensemble Dark Horse is likewise nicely lampshaded when he shows up during the '80s sitcom segment, then appears confused when an entire invisible studio audience begins cheering.
  • Supernatural then does the reverse in "The French Mistake" in which Sam and Dean are kicked out of TV Land and into the "real world". Hilarity Ensues.
  • The episode "ScoobyNatural" has Sam, Dean, and Castiel getting sucked into the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode "A Night of Fright is No Delight" through a cursed TV that they took as payment for another job. Dean, having seen this episode before, tries to use his knowledge to solve the mystery early (and hook up with Daphne in the process), only for the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax to be very quickly — and gruesomely — subverted when a real ghost starts killing people, all while various elements of the show's world and characters are parodied. Notably, it was a full-fledged crossover between the two shows, with Frank Welker, Matthew Lillard, Kate Micucci, and Grey DeLisle all reprising their voice roles from the current Scooby-Doo animated series.
• The Disney Channel original movie Teen Beach Movie is about two modern-day teenagers who get sucked into a '60s beach party movie.
• That's So Raven has an episode in which Raven has a dream that she and her friends are in various TV shows and movies (such as I Love Lucy, The Wizard of Oz, etc.)
• WandaVision: The premise of the show is that Wanda Maximoff and Vision find themselves in an idealized retro sitcom world, with Vision somehow alive and well even after being killed earlier. Cracks soon appear in this seemingly perfect facade, and Wanda and Vision eventually realize that everything is not as it seems, despite Wanda's best efforts to avoid realizing the true nature of this world.
  • Meanwhile, the residents of Westview are literally trapped in TV Land. Wanda's reality-altering magic has transformed the town into her personal sitcom fantasy world, and forces the residents to act out their scripted roles while preventing them from even thinking about leaving. Even worse, if Wanda doesn't need them at any given time, they're frozen in place, all the while fully conscious of what's happening to them.
• Weird Science had the boys explicitly thrown into a slasher movie and a soap opera, as well as into alternate universes modeled on The Twilight Zone and James Bond movies.

Music Videos

• New Century Ultraman Legend, a 2001 music video made by Tsuburaya to celebrate the 35th Anniversary of the Ultra Series, has a young boy and his father being caught in a storm and unexpectedly transported into a television playing reruns of old Ultraman shows, with both father and son interacting with different Ultramen at different points in the franchise.

Podcasts

• This is the case for Marche in Interstitial: Actual Play, both before and during the adventure. He came from a world where Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts were games that he played, and already spent a significant amount of time trapped in the former. Then he lands in a Sonic the Hedgehog world during the game and fanboys accordingly.
• Two examples pop up in the dimension-hopping Gemini Arc of Sequinox. One of them is a Zeerust sci-fi world where the elements of the TV set are clearly visible. The other is a standard sitcom where the girls can hear the canned laughter and are aware of going through the opening title.

Puppet Shows

• In the Sesame Street special When You Wish Upon a Pickle, a mysterious (and sentient) Wish Pickle, which grants one wish per customer, is delivered to Sesame Street. Ernie's wish for Bert (who wants to be a weather man) to be on TV causes Bert to become physically trapped inside the television and get shuffled from show to show.

Theme Parks

• Disney Theme Parks:
  • CineMagique in Walt Disney Studios (Disneyland Resort Paris) is about a member of the audience (played onscreen by Martin Short) that, after rudely interrupting a silent film montage, gets poofed into the screen by a magician from a (fictional) film and from there travels through a potted history of cinema along with the leading lady from said film (Julie Delpy), incorporating actual scenes and sequences from films including but not limited to Some Like It Hot, Titanic (1997), Star Wars, Henry V (1989), and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Best described as a Disney theme park version of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.
  • The Disney's Hollywood Studios attraction Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway opens by "sending" guests through a movie screen showing a Mickey Mouse cartoon.
• The premise of Anxiety in 3D from Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights 2000 was that the guests were trapped in Jack the Clown's malfunctioning virtual reality game.

Video Games

• The Action 52 game The Cheetahmen begins with the Action Gamemaster, while playing video games, suddenly sucked into the TV, where he is somehow transformed into a Cheetahman.
• In The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures, the titular Nerd is in Game Land and must go through various pastiches of various video games to get out.
• The sequel to the casual game Azada features puzzles embedded in books of fairy tales and of various literary classics.
• Bang-On Balls: Chronicles: The game's four main worlds are stated to be movies in-universe. Player Character Bob physically enters a tv in order to get to them.
• City of Villains has "The TV Invasion", a Story Arc of missions for characters level 45 to 50 that takes you into a monster movie, a gangster movie, and a post-apocalypse movie, all at the bidding of Television itself.
• Comix Zone features a Badass Normal comic book author trapped in his own comic. If he can't fight his way through the story (traversing the actual panels), the comic's villain will take his place in the real world.
• This trope is the premise for the first Gex game. In the next two sequels, he entered TV land(s) voluntarily.
• Creep TV: Muriel and Eustace are trapped inside the TV by poltergeists, and Courage has to rescue them.
• In Disney's Magical Quest 3, Huey, Dewey, and Louie are pulled into Storybook Land by King Pete. Mickey and Donald Duck, with the assistance of the Guardian Fairy, have to rescue the trio by entering the book and defeat the evil ruler.
• In Doki Doki Panic (famously dolled up into Super Mario Bros. 2), the game begins with two kids trapped into a storybook by King Wart, and a family of four has to get them back.
• In The Fairly OddParents: Shadow Showdown, the absence of the Royal Jewel (the source of magic power for all fairies) has caused a strange signal to emit from TVs everywhere. The final two levels, "The Great Esc-ape" and "Vicky Strikes Back", are the result of fictional TV shows eclipsing reality.
• Friday Night Funkin': Week 6 sees The Boyfriend and The Girlfriend getting stuck in a 16-bit dating simulator. Their opponent for that week is The Senpai, the protagonist of the game. "Thorns" reveals they are not the first people to get stuck in the game.
• The 1990's sidescroller Garfield: Caught in the Act plays this trope quite literally.
• Hidden City features an event case where Violet invites her rival, Mr. Black, and his subordinate, Rayden, to play a board game under the pretext of a truce negotiation while intending to trap them in the game forever. Inside, they find another agent, Conrad, whom Violet has trapped years before and had been presumed dead.
• The plot of Landflix Odyssey is that Larry has been sucked into Landflix, and now has to traverse the various shows to find his way out.
• The Midnight Channel in Persona 4 is a mysterious alternate reality connected to the real world through TVs, where multiple characters end up trapped in and need to be rescued by the Investigation Team. When trapped in the Midnight Channel, the world takes the form of sets for a TV show reflecting the victim's mind, ruled over by an Evil Counterpart of themselves representing their Fatal Flaws and dark secrets.
• A variant is the old Amiga platform game Premiere, where a guy finds himself trapped in the rival film studios. Every level is a stage that represents a different film genre, such as horror, sci-fi, western, historical epic and, oddly enough, cartoons.
• This is also the premise of another Amiga platformer from the Nineties, Oscar.
• Rad Rodgers is about Ricardo "Rad Rodgers" Rodriguez getting sucked into a video game, and him trying to get out.
• This is part of Raving Rabbids TV Party: the Rabbids get sucked into Rayman's TV set, and in the single-player mode they set out to annoy him into busting up the set and letting the Rabbids out.
• The Sonic Storybook Series — all two of them — in which Sonic is pulled into classical storybooks. The first one is based on "Aladdin", and the second on Arthurian Legend. Both featured Sonic the Hedgehog replacing the titled hero, along with the title itself.
• Seymour Goes To Hollywood, set in a film studio. Entering the various sets, Seymour would encounter actual characters from the films. Either that or the actors all followed The Method.
• The movie theater side quest in Silent Hill: Downpour has Murphy stepping into a horror movie after piecing together a film reel. The reward for this side quest is a powerful Golden Gun, "just like in the movie."
• Spot Goes To Hollywood has the titular 7 Up mascot exploring levels based on movies.
• Happens to the player at the end of Stay Tooned!, right after the inverted form of this trope is resolved.
• Yet another Amiga game: the protagonist of the shooter Videokid gets sucked into his VCR and must fight his way inside five tapes based on different film genres (fantasy, western, sci-fi, gangster drama, and horror).
• Viewtiful Joe is basically Last Action Hero, except it's a video game about Toku movies, and the main character becomes an action hero. It's also deconstructed with Captain Blue, who went insane because his life kept on going downhill, as even after an upside happened, fate would find some way to twist it into something he wouldn't want. His rise to fame as a movie director? Eventually forgotten. He gets sucked into his own movies as the hero? Eventually goes insane because he can't escape this transient Movie Land to meet his family and eventually tries to destroy everything. It shows a lot, and is probably what would happen if people really did get trapped in a "Movie Land".
• Possible in the white chamber, trapping the player in an extremely low-resolution game world and containing one of the game's many deaths (via Explosive Barrel).
• Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey: Book land, rather, via a virtual reality computer system, but the principle is the same — Wishbone gets sucked into The Odyssey and has to play his way through the story in order to escape.

Web Animation

• Hello Kitty and Friends Supercute Adventures: "Kuromi's Movie Madness pts. 1 & 2" see Kuromi, My Melody, and Badtz-Maru transported into the world of movies by Chococat's invention. They go through several genre films, including film noir, musicals, and a silent film.
• On the website Homestar Runner, in Strong Bad Email #150, "alternate universe", Strong Bad celebrates his big "sesquicentenn-email" by constructing an alternate universe portal and visiting the various alternate realities of the Homestar body of work, where he meets all of the various duplicates of himself.
• The International Moron Patrol has the dubious honor of having two episodes featuring this trope; Episode 10 centered around characters Hentai Boy and H Hog being sucked into a videogame console. The 2007 Halloween episode 2-parter had Henrik being sucked into the TV, too.
• Kaizo Trap has a video game trapping the heroine's partner inside it, and she goes in to rescue him. Unfortunately, the game is a Platform Hell title, but after countless deaths and game overs, she eventually gets the skills of a speedrunner.
• One of the episodes of the surreal, nonlinear flash series Sixgun revolves around a character who has been sentenced to a "maximum security sitcom," which apparently involves being forced to read corny one-liners and quips at gunpoint by robots. He gets his hands on the gun, tries to shoot his way out, and dies a happy man.
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers:
  • In an episode, Mario has to fix the pipes in Peach's Castle and ended up having a bad accident that leads him to a land full of Teletubbies. Turns out at the end that it was All Just a Dream.
  • Another one involves Sonic the Hedgehog and Dr. Eggman in a similar Teletubby-driven situation as they travel through dimensions.
  • During the first half of Season 14, the main cast get trapped in one thanks to Mr. Puzzles and are forced to act out his skits against their wills with the whole thing Played for Drama.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Gyno-Star features a story arc in which the main character (feminist superhero Gyno-Star) gets trapped inside the world of beer commercials, and has to deal with sexist stereotypes and objectification of women.
• Captain SNES: The Game Masta, a vastly improved fan sequel to the Captain N cartoon below, uses the same premise, where a person from the real world gets sucked into Videoland.
• In Homestuck, John asks his Nanna if he got sent into SBURB when he enters the Medium. He did not.
• Rather savagely deconstructed in minus., somewhat surprisingly considering the tone of the comic. In this strip, minus brings a random boy into a book for some reason, and, like with most Self-Insert characters, the boy makes himself into a God Mode Stu, playing both the story's hero and villain like a violin without regard for the sake of the world. It's all fun and games until he realizes that he can't return to his own world, at which point he goes somersaulting over the Despair Event Horizon and is implied to destroy the world and everyone in it, including himself.
• The Neon Ice Cream from Neon Ice Cream Headache has the effect of "aligning your nervous system with a certain electromagnetic frequency", which corresponds to a certain TV channel, causing the user's body to be zapped into the world of the TV show being played on that channel. But what's more interesting is what happens when you come out of the TV world, as if several television sets are tuned to the same channel, one copy of the person will come out of each one.

Web Videos

• 7-Second Riddles: A girl gets pulled into a nightmarish horror-movie world by a Monster Clown, but is able to escape by solving his riddle.
• AFK: All of the gamers, who find themselves waking up in a world like their computer game. Some are fine with this and even prefer it. Others though are desperate to get home, particularly Q as she left her daughter there alone.
• In S3EP2 of Mario and Luigi's Stupid and Dumb Adventures, Mario attempts to go back to his home dimension after accidentally ending up in an Alternate Universe, and along the way, he meets Dora, SpongeBob and Charleyyy in their respective dimensions.
• This is the very premise of New Century Ultraman Legend, a young boy named Kanchi and his father getting dragged into a television set playing reruns of old Ultra Series shows. And then helping various Ultras fight off monsters.
• The Nostalgia Critic: At the start of their review of The Ring, Doug, Malcolm, and Tamara exploit the fact that Samara has to emerge from a TV set by switching the channel to The Simpsons, The Wicker Man (2006) where she gets hit by a truck, and a Looney Tunes cartoon where she gets blown up by Wily E. Coyote.
• Paw Dugan's Top 9 Video Game Composers has Paw and his friends That Chick With The Goggles, Angry Joe and Spoony get trapped in video game land by Paw's Superpowered Evil Side. The worlds they travel to include Super Mario Bros. 2, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Battletoads, King's Quest V, Dragon Quest, River City Ransom, Wolfenstein 3-D, and Harvest Moon. Worth noting, the lead-in to this video had Paw and company depicted as modified Final Fantasy VI sprites and fighting Dark Paw in the classic turn-based style.

Western Animation

• The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo episode "That's Monstertainment" had Zomba trap Scooby, Shaggy, Scrappy, Daphne, Flim-Flam, and Vincent Van Ghoul inside the television airing of a movie called The Son of The Bride of The Ghost of Frankenstein.
• Barbie movies:
  • In Barbie in the Pink Shoes, free-spirited ballerina Kristyn and her costume designer friend Hailey are transported into the stories of various ballets when Kristyn puts on the enchanted ballet flats.
  • In Barbie: Video Game Hero, Barbie gets trapped in the video game she was working on and has to help save it.
• The final season of the Animated Adaptation of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures added the capability to travel into TV shows, movies, and literature to the guys' time-travelling phone booth, leading to a series of cheap thinly-veiled pop-culture parodies. (This was also used once in the following live-action series, see the "Live-Action TV" section)
• Ben 10 has the episode "Game Over", where Ben and Gwen get stuck in Ben's Sumo Slammer video game due to an accident with Upgrade and lightning.
• The cartoon Captain N: The Game Master used a variation of this as its premise; California teenager Kevin Keene was trapped in Videoland, whose reality encompassed pretty much every Nintendo-licensed NES game.
• The first half of the Darkwing Duck episode "Twitching Channels" follows Darkwing chasing his electricity-themed enemy Megavolt through the fictional universes of many TV shows. The second half of the episode becomes a Real-World Episode, as Darkwing and Megavolt both discover that they themselves are just TV show characters in our universe.
• Dead End: Paranormal Park: In episode 8, Pugsley, Barney, Courtney, and Norma find themselves in the world of Pauline Phoenix's shows and movies, where they are initially stuck playing various roles until they wake up or are woken up by one of the others. It turns out that Norma was aware from the beginning, but wants to stay because going back to the real world would mean having to face the truth that she recently learned about Pauline not being as good as she'd believed.
• The Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop episode "Telenightmare" had one of Dr. Zitbag's inventions cause Zitbag, Horrifido, and Officer Deadbeat to be beamed inside the television and chasing each other through different television shows.
• The premise of the DuckTales (2017) episode "Quack Pack!" is that the family is trapped in a 90s era domestic sit com tv show that turns out to be the result of a wish made by Donald on a magical genie's lamp.
• The Fairly OddParents! did a Made-for-TV Movie, titled Channel Chasers, wrapped around a combination of this trope (most examples being stuff you probably grew up with during the '90s) and Time Travel. Some of the shows parodied in "Channel Chasers" include Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Blue's Clues, Sesame Street, Scooby-Doo, The Simpsons (complete with a blackboard gag: "This is the sincerest form of flattery"), The Jetsons, Rugrats, Jonny Quest, Batman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; however, the movie was more centered on a parody show named "Maho Mushi", which was inspired by many anime shows such as Dragon Ball and Pokémon: The Series.
• Futurama did it with classic (and handily public-domain) books in one episode: Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick and Pride and Prejudice.
  • Also, in a comic, the main characters end up in a Simpsons comic. Both shows have the same creators.
• One mini-episode of Garfield and Friends featured this plot, involving him mostly travelling through various commercials; at the end, it was All Just a Dream (although he kept the scarf of the shopping channel...). Another episode featured a variant on this, where Garfield woke up to find he was in the wrong cartoon, an odd cross between Mazinger Z and Transformers; eventually, he was shot into a forest of Bambi-esque forest animals, and ran off into the distance, shouting that he wanted the giant robots back.
  • Garfield being trapped in a TV was also the main plot of the Sega Genesis video game Garfield: Caught in the Act, which brought him through stages themed after Horror, Pirates, the Stone Age, a Film Noir, an Egyptian pyramid, and the final level being called the "Season Finale".
  • This happened to Garfield again in The Garfield Show episode "Virtualodeon"; Professor Bonkers created the titular channel to try and bring the characters on TV into the viewers' homes, but it sucked Garfield into the TV when he shut it down. Reversing the process also had the unintended side-effect of bringing all the TV characters that had been chasing Garfield out into the real world; this was reversed once the TV was unplugged.
• Gumby is a downplayed example. Many episodes involve him and his friends walking into books and interacting with the characters, but Gumby & co. can leave at will.
• KaBlam! anthologizes the Life with Loopy episode "Late Night Loopy" where Loopy enters worlds of TV.
• Kim Possible. In the episode "Dimension Twist" Kim, Ron, Rufus, Dr. Drakken, and Shego are pulled into a dimensional vortex crossed with a TV cable signal. Shows they visit: Friends, rendered as Pals, Space Passage, a Star Trek sendup, with Kim as a Red Shirt, Survivor - in the Arctic, a kids' puppet show reminiscent of Teletubbies, a Tom and Jerry-style cartoon, Fear Factor, Alias,^note which KP has been accused of ripping off That '70s Show, reimagined into the Salem era as That 1670s Show, ER, Evil Eye for the Bad Guy, a supervillain's version of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, The Fearless Ferret, a parody of the old Batman (1966) show and a Continuity Nod to a previous episode, The Hollywood Squares with triangles (which oddly enough seems reminiscent of Battlestars from the same producer, though they likely didn't know of that show), a commercial for Ron's favorite restaurant, "Bueno Nacho", Professional Wrestling, a cooking show, with Rufus as the secret ingredient; a talk show, and Animal Planet, rerendered as Ape Island, which is hell for Ron.
• Happens to Kevin in Krypto the Superdog season 2 episode 1B "Attack Of The Virtual Vegetables" where he ends up trapped in the video game in Krypto's rocket. Krypto, along with Streaky, joins him to help him win the game by catching the eggplant and earning a crown before dinner.
• Looney Tunes: The 1990 short Box-Office Bunny, in which Bugs Bunny gets chased around a movie theater, ends with Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd getting thrown into movie screen that just happens to be showing a slasher flick.
  Bugs: It takes a miracle to get into pictures, and now these two jokers want to get out.
• The Magic School Bus does this in the episode "Spins a Web", in which the class enters a 1950s sci-fi flick about a town being terrorized by a 50-foot Slaying Mantis. Oddly enough, the Topic of the Week is spiders.
• Happens to The Mask, when he's sucked into his TV by villain The Channel Surfer, a former TV fanatic mutated by the combined radiation from a wall of televisions falling on him. Once inside, The Mask is exposed to sights that not even he can stand, such as a nauseating Care Bears parody, a Best Hits of the 70s CD ad, complete with The Mask freaking out over now wearing a polyester leisure suit, and Gilligan's Island.
  The Mask: You've been here for 30 years. You've built a nuclear reactor out of coconuts. For the love of God, man! FIX THE HOLE IN THE BOAT!!
• The Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures episode "Don't Touch That Dial" had Mighty stuck in a television set, going from one parody cartoon show to another at the whim of a bored kid constantly changing channels.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Power Ponies", the ponies end up sucked into the comic book world of The Power Ponies and have to face the over-the-top villainess The Mane-Iac. Oddly enough, in Equestria, the industry of selling comics that can do this seems to be a completely normal and even thriving industry.
• In Mysticons, Zarya gets sucked into a game on her cell phone, followed by Emerald and Piper.
• Mr. Bogus gives us the episode "B-TV", which involves Bogus getting trapped in the television set, as part of an elaborate plan devised by Baddus and his Meteor Goons, Ratty and Mole, and Jake and Butch to take their revenge out on Bogus, for all the times that he's defeated them.
• The premise that starts off Season 12 of Ninjago is that the video game "Prime Empire" is transporting its players into the world of the game once they reach a certain level.
• The Patrick Star Show: At the end of "Lost in Couch", GrandPat gets stuck inside the wall, and then finds his way into the TV. He winds up on a bowling show, but he has fun with it.
• In one episode of The Proud Family, Oscar's attempt to fix the TV leads to him getting sucked into it. Every channel Oscar involves him getting hurt, like getting tackled by football players, getting pounded by a boxer, getting chased by a bull while only speaking Spanish, and getting interrogated/tortured by mobsters.
• One of the syndicated episodes of The Real Ghostbusters "Who're You Calling Two-Dimensional?" had the team sucked into a cartoon dimension that, reasonably enough, ran on Toon Physics. Another episode "Station Identification" works with a similar premise, the Ghostbusters have to fight a haunted TV station and are attacked by spooky versions of TV characters including He-Man and Star Trek.
• Has happened a couple of times on Regular Show, most notably in "Go Viral", with the protagonists being pulled in as punishment trying to create one.
• A variation is used in the Rugrats episode "Kid TV": When the television set breaks, the babies climb into a cardboard box and make their own shows, which they're randomly running in and out of by the end: a game show, a soap opera, a Perfume Commercial, a James Bond-esque show commercial, the news, and a COPS spoof.
• SheZow: In "In She-D", SheZow starts losing her dimensions due to expired vanishing cream. She enters the Buttwipe 3D movie in an attempt to regain them, and then finds she can't leave.
• The Simpsons:
  • A "Treehouse of Horror" segment uses this plot, with Bart and Lisa sucked into The Itchy & Scratchy Show. At one point they change channels, appearing in a live-action snippet of Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.
  • This trope gets inverted in another episode, as Homer is transported into the third dimension.
  • And the Hypocritical Humor of having Chief Wiggum mock Rainier Wolfcastle for an obvious parody of Last Action Hero.
    Chief Wiggum: Magic ticket my ass, McBain".
• The South Park episodes set in Imaginationland.
• Space Goofs: Happens to the television-addicted Bud in "TV Connection". After initially trying to escape, Bud finds that he likes living inside the TV and opts to stay. He even starts watching another TV through his television set. Unfortunately, the other aliens need to get Bud to the real world immediately once his television breaks and he's broadcast to every TV in the area.
• Strange Hill High: In "Health & Safety", Mitchell, Becky, and Templeton get trapped inside an old safety film.
• The 70s Superfriends did it at least twice. In one episode, the Legion of Doom put them into random fairy tales, in the other Mr. Mxyzptlk put them in The Wizard of Oz with Aquaman as the Scarecrow, Supes as the Tinman, and Wonder Woman as the Cowardly Lion.
• Teen Titans has the science fiction nerd/supervillain Control Freak (who is oddly enough not a Control Freak) design a piece of tech to do this intentionally. Beast Boy was the couch potato/cliché expert. Control Freak explicitly did this to obtain various powerful gadgets and abilities from different series to use them against the Titans, and actually proves quite dangerous as a result. Shows they visit include:
  • A Soap Opera
  • An old B movie
  • A Science Fiction Martial Arts Movie show, where Control Freak gets some training
  • The local news
  • A Western with Robotic gunslingers.
  • A thinly-disguised cross between Battle Of The Planets and Star Wars
  • A parody of one of Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin's nature shows
  • A Dukes of Hazzard parody
  • The first type of Side Effects Include... commercial, with the side effect listing of the second type.
    • The name of the product in question was Zinthos, one of Raven's Magic words. It was also said to be blue (the color of Raven's outfit) and the side effects including what happens when she loses control of her emotions, such as extra eyes.
  • A Barney-esque Edutainment Show
  • A Looney Tunes spoof with Beast Boy as Wile E. Coyote chasing after Control Freak acting like the Road Runner.
  • A Dr. Seuss style cartoon.
  • A black-and-white sitcom from The '50s.
  • A French cooking show involving chocolate and snails.
• Control Freak (again) in Teen Titans Go! This time, he shoves the team inside "Pretty Pretty Pegasus", a show Raven is obsessed with. She loves it, but everyone else is weirded out by it. Control Freak also loves this show, apparently.
• The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat also did a plot like this, and like KP, it included a Friends sitcom called "Pals".

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