Trivia / Model United Nations

• Older Than They Think: Model UN traces its roots to Model League of Nations, which started among the Ivy League schools in the US (which was, significantly, not a member of the League) in the early to mid-1920s.
• Referenced by...: We should note that most portrayals of Model United Nations in media are — intentionally or otherwise — wildly inaccurate.
  • Winning London, a movie featuring the Olsen Twins.
  • The music video for The Decemberists' song "16 Military Wives" (off the album Picaresque) portrays an intramural MUN conference gone whack. (This is hardly surprise: even without the video, the song is transparently a Protest Song targeting George W. Bush in general, the Iraq War in particular, and self-righteous celebrities to top it all off).
  • The Springfield Elementary Model United Nations has figured in some episodes of The Simpsons. With Bart (representing Libya) getting special points for insulting everyone around him.
  • A 1980s episode of Grange Hill featured the kids from Grange Hill School representing Tanzania at a model UN conference.
  • Mentioned in the first season finale of Glee when the audience is informed that the Glee club has been disbanded and the Mock UN club has taken over their room. It doesn't last however.
  • The main plot of the Community episode "Geography of Global Conflict" involves two (highly-inaccurate, but that's hardly the point) rival Model UN clubs at Greendale.
  • Parks and Recreation's "The Treaty" features a Model UN that Leslie Knope both runs and participates in.
  • In Kickin' It's 3rd season premiere, it's mentioned that Milton is president of the school "Student UN".
  • In the Season 6 Mad Men episode "Favors" (set in early fall 1968) Sally goes with her friend Julie to Manhattan for a Model UN conference. They're mostly in it to hang out with boys more or less unsupervised (which is fairly true to life, to be honest—especially considering that if, like Sally, you're a fourteen-year-old girl at an all-girls Boarding School, what else would you want to do?). That said, Sally seems to take it at least somewhat seriously, reciting facts about the Philippines off the top of her head (an early indication of her increasing seriousness and maturity in the last season, presaging her political positions in 1969-70 and her very mature reaction to Betty's cancer diagnosis), while Julie tries to avoid the subject and just discuss cute guys.
  • Issue #14 of the Beavis And Butthead comic series featured Highland High hosting the Model United Nations.
  • In the Star Trek prequel novel Kobayashi Maru, Cadet Sulu is part of a "Model galaxy" simulation where each student plays a different planet. Sulu, representing a poor and non-Federation world, finds himself left out of the negotiations. He resorts to tossing paper airplanes to communicate with other players, and turns terrorist by marking them with the note "This is a remotely-controlled missile" and throwing them at enemies. He and several other left-out students manage to band together and actually achieve something while those with established worlds are squabbling, and their teachers uses this to make a point about diplomacy.
  • In the romantic comedy Along Came Polly, Reuben and Polly supposedly met in high school when they were both Model UN delegates.

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