That ’90s Show Has Weird Historical Errors Most People Missed

That ’90s Show debuted the first half of its second season on Netflix on June 27, 2024. Or, to make it more confusing, it is labeled “Part Two” with “Part Three,” aka the second half of Season 2, set to air on October 24, 2024. Don’t worry; that isn’t even the strangest thing about That ’90s Show. The sequel series to the popular That ’70s Show now follows Leia Foreman (Callie Haverda), the daughter of Eric Foreman and Donna Pinciotti from the original series and the granddaughter of Red and Kitty Foreman (Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp respectively). The series follows Leia as she spends the summers with her grandparents in Point Place, Wisconsin, making a new group of friends.

Season 1 occurred in the summer of 1995, while Season 2 was the following summer of 1996. Both seasons of the series capture the classic vibe of That ’70s Show, making it such excellent comfort television. Yet eagle-eyed viewers, or anyone with a passing reference to 1990s history or even to That ’70s Show, will notice that the series timeline doesn’t add up. For all the people having a meltdown on the internet about The Acolyte allegedly breaking Star Wars canon, the real culprit of canon breaking is That ’90s Show for how it plays fast and loose with both the series’ internal history as well as real-life history.

Real-Life Historical Errors in That ’90s Show

Right off the bat, let’s discuss the use of the song “My Own Worst Enemy” by the band Lit, which is used in the trailer for Season 2. The song choice is appropriate because it is from the 1990s and does speak to the general teenage angst that the series focuses on…yet the song debuted in June 1999, three years after Season 2. Now, this is just a piece of marketing that exists outside the world of the series, so that isn’t a big deal. What is more problematic is how the characters refer to movies that have not come out.

In the second episode of the series “Free Leia,” the characters visit a video store. One of the videos on the shelves is Batman Forever. That ’90s Show first episode takes place over the Fourth of July weekend of 1995 when Batman Forever would be celebrating its third week of release at the box office (and was actually the number 2 movie at the box office that weekend). Also present is Apollo 13, a film that came out on June 30, 1995, and was at the top of the box office on the Fourth of July weekend. These movies shouldn’t be on video shelves because not only are they still in theaters, but Batman Forever wouldn’t be released on VHS until October 31, 1995, while Apollo 13 would land on video shelves on November 21, 1995.

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Yet the more significant, mind-boggling background detail is that The Lost World: Jurassic Park is on the video store shelves even though the movie would not come out for another two years. Point Place, Wisconsin, got access to a movie two years before everyone else, even before Speilberg started filming. The video store would now be a top spot for movie fans all over the world, as you can see movies that are still playing in theaters or haven’t even started filming years in advance.

Then, in Season 2’s episode “Baby-Baby-Baby,” Leia has a dream sequence where she and her boyfriend, Jay Kelso (Mace Coronel), reenact a sequence from Baz Luhrman’s 1996 teen romance, Romeo+Juliet. The movie came out in 1996, and Season 2 was set during that year, but the dates don’t match up. Season 2 of That ’90s Show was in the summer of 1996, while Romeo+Juliet would not open until November 1, 1996, about five months after the season started.

That ’70s Show Continuity Errors

Sharing continuity with a sitcom series that already had a loose sense of continuity (they had multiple Christmas episodes in the show’s universe of just three years), but it does highlight some issues that fans of both series have had to work through. The biggest is Leia’s age. Leia is turning 15 during her summer trip in Season 1, implying she was born in 1980. That means the only way for her to be the child of Eric and Donna is that she would have had to be conceived during the New Year’s Eve Party series finale and would have to be born prematurely to fit because Eric and Donna were broken up in the final season as Eric was away in Africa teaching.

That one can be explained by the one who can’t, Jay Kelso. Jay Kelso is the son of Michael Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) and Jackie Burkhart (Mila Kunis). He is said to be 16, meaning he was born in 1979 during the events of That ’70s Show. Not only was Jackie not visibly pregnant, but she and Kelso were not together at that point in the series. Instead, Jackie was dating Fez (Wilmer Valderama). That ’90s Show shows Fez is bitter that Jackie left him for Kelso. Maybe she did have an affair, but one wonders why they wouldn’t just make Jay the same age as Leia or even just set the series from the start in 1996 so the character’s birth years would all be in the 1980s, after the events of the original series.

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There are also minor ones, from the fact that Gwen Runck (Ashley Aufderheide) and her brother Nate (Maxwell Acee Donovan) and mom Sherri (Andrea Anders) live in Donna’s old house, yet the kitchen layouts not only don’t match, but the design of the house doesn’t fit with what fans know of the original series. This is a minor one, but it does show how That ’90s Show relates to continuity with the original That ’70s Show is less in the details and more in the vibes. Part of that includes various historical inaccuracies in the original series, like Reese’s Cereal, despite not being invented until 1994, or even Eric’s Spider-Man bedding, barring the design of the 1990s Marvel aesthetic.

Point Place, Wisconsin, very much exists not as an accurate representation of a time period but as a feeling audiences remember of both the 1970s and the 1990s. That ’90s Show is streaming on Netflix.