Daily Entertainment

[boston_bruiser]

I am two for four in the finals department.

Then I have to do a paper over spring break about methylbromide pesticides, their various chemical properties, their health risks, differences in policy between CalEPA and FedEPA on them, pros vs. cons of phasing them out, etc. Five pages, double-spaced, five academic sources.

Just countin' down the days to BioShock, man. Counting. Down. The days.

Today's DE is from leeshajoy, and it goes like this:

Internet-based film critic Lindsay "The Nostalgia Chick" Ellis coined the term "Big-Lipped Alligator Moment" to describe a bizarre non-sequitur scene inserted into an otherwise normal story. A true Big-Lipped Alligator Moment has three distinguishing characteristics:

1. It comes completely out of nowhere.
2. It makes absolutely no sense even in the context of the story.
3. Once it's over, the scene is never mentioned again.

So, my question is: Does your pup's canon have a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment? Are there any moments that come close but don't quite meet one of the criteria?

Comments

[jjprobert]

Erm, For Jack and Max, no. Because Reilly writes to the maxim: If it doesn't advance the plot, it gets the chop.

Erik, I can't think of one in Thor or The Avengers off the top of my head.

Bean, some of the 'revelations' he has, particularly those which happen to fit Orson Scott Card's worldview very nicely, fit into parts one and two. However, they definitely do not follow point 3...

And for Alfred, I'm sure there's stuff out there in comics canon that would count, but from the Dark Knight Trilogy, again, I can't think of any off the top of my head. Then again, some of the one use gadgets Batman pulls out might count.


Also, I feel you on the finals, dude. I'm in final year project, 32 hours until it needs handing in, territory myself. So, good luck!

[damncompass]

AHAHAHA. Shadow series.

Just... *facepalm* Don't get me started.

*with love from Valentine, who might be returning*

[herr_bookman]

Autor's canon looks like this on the surface, until you realize it's all a massive brickjoke... Except nope! it's all actually a sneak-attack brickfeels that also happens to be funny.

[gorgonfondness]

Seconding this!

And now that I'm thinking about it, I'm having trouble finding Big-Lipped Alligator Moments in Mia's and Lucas's canons. Lunar and Mother 3 are both strange games and the really unusual, unexpected events that seem to fit the bill for a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment have too much relation to what's going on or end up getting mentioned again.

[fairytaleknight]

Yes. I was going to mention the episode where a ridiculously self-involved dancer named Femio is inexplicably followed by enormous quantities of bulls, but while Femio makes very little sense on his own, his presence and behavior highlights changes and developments in the character arcs of all four central characters. Princess Tutu: where narratives look bizarre, but everything has a purpose in the end.

Fallen London is both non-linear and pretty good about... not doing this. Homestuck, though...

[cameoflage]

the sweet bro and hella jeff interlude

just

the sweet bro and hella jeff interlude

Re: Fallen London is both non-linear and pretty good about... not doing this. Homestuck, though...

[crabbycustomer]

The thing about Homestuck is that it's not very good about never referencing these things again.

[leeshajoy]

Also, it's hard to claim with a straight face that, apart from those sequences, Homestuck makes sense. ^.^

[cameoflage]

These are both entirely true.

[inlovewithwords]

God why am I awake.

I'll let others handle OUaT. Codex Alera is pretty tight, overall; there are some kind of 'eh it wasn't necessary' scenes, but they usually flesh out characterization and do make sense, at least mostly. I think Dresden suffers from this more. If anyone who's read it has examples, by all means, share.

As for Smallville, not even going there. There are too many for sanity.

[kd7sov]

One word: Toadonpa.

By "Toadonpa" I of course mean what I've previously called the "Cutscene of Utter Crack". The adoptive father of one of the party members is being held for repeated ransom, so you can optionally sneak in and rescue him. Once you get there, his captor shows up, gloats, and pulls a release lever that's inside the cell to open up the back wall and let a monster out. (This monster is Toadonpa.) When you defeat it, you're treated to a lovely interlude about how he was sneaking up to stab you in the back when you defeated his monster and it landed on him, pinning his leg, but everyone's glad the leg isn't actually broken, and... You know what? Here, watch it yourself. (If you want to skip to after the fight, that's here.)

There is a secondary one, that doesn't quite make no sense at all: when you first visit Kolima, everyone is turned into trees. The tree responsible tries to turn you into trees, too, but you are protected by these... magic shield domes. At the end of the scene, one party member suggests that you try to learn how to master and control the shield-dome power, but no reference is ever made to it again.

For My Little Pony, you can probably find someone to justify slapping the title on just about any episode. Especially "Mysterious Mare-Do-Well". But for me, the winner has to be "Too Many Pinkie Pies". All of a sudden Pinkie, who can be on the screen twice in the same frame during musical numbers, panics about not being in the same place as each of her friends at any given moment. So she uses this magic underground pond in the Everfree Forest, that only she (and a book hidden in a secret compartment in Twilight's library) knows about, to make imperfect clones of herself. Naturally this goes wrong, and in the end the only solution is to destroy the clones with a spell that could just as easily destroy the original without anypony knowing. And despite the fact that one of the Pinkies is acting differently than all the others, nopony - including herself - seems to consider that that might be a hint as to which one's the original.

[newredshoes]

...is that an All Dogs Go to Heaven reference?

[saphyria]

Yep! That's the trope-namer.

[newredshoes]

WHY WOULD YOU LINK ME TO TV TROPES, SAPH

WHY

[saphyria]

Because I'm secretly (ha!) evil. ^_____________^

*sips tea, sweetly*

[leeshajoy]

Yeah. Jack clipped out the line that explains that. :P

[newredshoes]

That movie is the reason I call virtually everything that's smaller than me "Squeaker."

[1nv1nc1ble]

It was the movie that taught me that, while Dom DeLuise can sing, Burt Reynolds most assuredly CANNOT.

[mm_mythos]

Can't think of anything from other canons at the moment, but G.I. Joe in general could qualify for this, but I'd have to say some of the most BLAM-worthy moments in the Sunbow canon are:

"The Germ", featuring a giant bacterium rampaging across New York.
"Primordial Plot", where Cobra clones dinosaurs [yes, that's right].
"The Greenhouse Effect", where Cobra uses giant vegetables to try to take over Chicago [every time you have a Crimson Guard take a prominent position in the episode, they invariably manage to screw it up].
"Cold Slither", using subliminal music to hypnotise people into supporting Cobra, or something. Even the Dreadnoks thought it was stupid, and walked off the stage.

But quite possibly the most ridiculous episode in the series had to be "The Gamesmaster: A ten-foot-tall manchild decides to abduct two Joes and two Cobras and has them try to fight their way off his island of lethal toys. G.I. Joe and Cobra have to team up to get them back.

Nobody knows where this guy came from, and we never see him or his fatal playground again, despite him promising a return.

[herr_bookman]

"You win this time, heroes, but I shall return! ...Unless there are budget cuts that prevent me from doing so."

[bjornwilde]

The only thing that is occurring to me is a certain nearby small town sheriff in Andrea's canon. The intro scene makes little sense to the plot at large but ends up later (two books or so) being character development for her.

I tried to look for my other canons on tv troupes but nothing; although Val's entire existence could be one.

[camwyn]

Fallout 2 has the most Big-Lipped Alligator Moments of any of the Fallout games, mostly because if you go into a Special Random Encounter circle you stand a chance of encountering the TARDIS or a Star Trek shuttlecraft or something of that nature. Fallout New Vegas has the option of you taking the Weird Wasteland perk, which deliberately turns certain elements of the game into 'bzuh?' moments that nobody else will ever reference- like the skeleton with the fedora, crammed into a fridge by the side of the road, or like the camp of little green aliens who try to kill you (without Weird Wasteland this is a bunch of mercenaries), or the two skeletons outside the burning house in Nipton that are labeled 'Owen' and 'Beru'.

The most I can say for FO3 is that nobody actually ever references the downloadable content plots after they're done with, and you have no option of saying "hey, authority figure, there's an alien ship in orbit" or "hey, authority figure, there's a slave-taking warlord in Pittsburgh" or "hey, authority figure, don't go to Point Lookout, trust me on this one". But they make a certain measure of sense insofar as anything in Fallout ever makes sense, and they're mostly internally contained plots that at least have some kind of connection to the rest of the story (there have been aliens referenced or shown in Fallout games since FO1, the Pitt was foreshadowed in a note found in a cave area Ellen never visited and mentioned by one of the Paladins at the Citadel, Point Lookout involves a ferryman showing up to offer boat rides to Maryland, etc.) And you can generally go back to the DLC areas, just in limited form, so that's at least sort of like mentioning them again.

[saphyria]

Sunshine's canon doesn't have any Big-Lipped Alligator Moments, because for the most part everything serves the plot. She does experience the Ten Seconds That Went Nowhere, but that is different (>____>), and does affect the following plot despite her attempts to erase it from her memory.

Yrael's canon likewise doesn't have any Big-Lipped Alligator Moments.

Zelgadiss' canon sometimes feels like it's made of Big-Lipped Alligator Moments, only the moments are entire episodes long. Brass Rackets (magical tennis tournament!), Artemay Tower (Zelga-bunny!), Dragon Cuisine (No really, you look like his dead family), Forbidden Dance, Wonder Island (totally not a theme park I'd want to go to), Village of Justice(geriatric Power Rangers!), Quality Time (fish-people soap opera), every last cross-dressing episode (at least one per season), and Slayers Premium (Octopese!) come to mind.

[not_my_sandbox]

Hmm... well... Runescape tends to clean up on number 3 eventually except when it comes to game mechanics updates. The early ones were explained away by "a cabal of wizards did it", but now its more "what do you mean you weren't able to jump over that fence before?"

Story-wise, people complained about Salt in the Wound because the big bad Mother Mallum, who had survived the God Wars and capture by the Temple Knights, who was a major threat to the world at large, was unceremoniously killed off along with the quest series surrounding her by someone dropping a pillar on her. And it wasn't the player character who did it, it was a character introduced in the quest and never mentioned again. There was considerable furor and teasing of the quest's story dev in the forums for weeks afterward.

Tail of Two Cats has some odd cutscenes at the end of it. Imagine two cats on a magic carpet, visiting random places around the world. On a date. It gets sorta mentioned afterward, but it is still odd.

Both make sense (somewhat) in context. Salt in the Wound never gets mentioned again even tough the devs insist it is canon and not an implanted memory as was helpfully suggested by a player, and Tail of Two Cats is just... random. The two cats were important people before they were cats (one being Neite, Amascut's former high priestess and the other being Robert the Strong, who singlehandedly almost drove the dragonkin into extinction), and I am sure they'll be important again, but its just very random.

[baptizemyself]

The closest we get in relation to Helena is probably the implied threesome she has with Green Lantern and Lady Blackhawk.

It is definitely 1 and 2 but it does get referenced (much) later, once Gail Simone got her hands on the characters again and basically turns the worst Big Lipped Alligator moment I have ever had the displeasure to come across into stupid boys telling stupid lies about their sexual conquests. Thank god for Gail.

[gavin62truck]

The Probie briefly becoming a stalker with a gun. WTF, Probie.

[probie62truck]

Yeaaaaaaah we won't mention that tidbit, like, ever.

[gavin62truck]

Then again, if he'd never gotten the gun, he would've never gone shooting with Sean, and he'd never have shot the cat, and he'd never have met the Amazon veterinarian.

Wow. That...is a truly mind-boggling series of events.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

... Amazon veterinarian?

[gavin62truck]

She was like, 6'2" or something, and Mikey liked it.

[boston_bruiser]

...guys? Your canon is weird.

[gavin62truck]

Thank you.

[ceitfianna]

I'm not sure how much this can actually be done with Gilbert and Sullivan since they thrive on making you go wait, really, but the final song in Pirates was always one of these moments for me. For the longest time, I thought the song "Above All Else We Love Our Queen" was created for the movie until I read the play and its there. I'm trying to find a youtube link of it because you really have to see it to believe it. Here it is in all its weird glory, oh no, that's just the finale not above all else we love our queen, still worth a watch. I've found it! Here! I love this operetta so much.

This is hard to do with Discworld, because Pratchett tends to tie everything back together but the banshee in the post office is almost there.

Demeter's canon is weird as you get so many different versions of each story and Greek myths have their ways of being surreal.

I can't think of anything for the others. I'm home sick and still a little fuzzy. I need more tea.

[haole_cop]

Season 3 is chock-full of these, so far.

Like, for example, how Chin's wife dies in the first episode, is referenced in 3.02, and never brought up again.

Classy, show.

[aberration]

I think you mean basically everything that happens in Heroes after season 1.

As for my others... Adventure Time is does a lot of random shit, though it'll usually follow up on it, except for the sometimes super bizarre ending scenes. Which tend to just... happen.

[ladyoflorien]

Good luck, Jack!

As for the DE, yeeeeeah. It would be pretty impossible to answer for Leela, because Futurama is pretty much one giant Big-Lipped Alligator Moment all woven together. Lily's comes mid-season 2, when a woman who has spent the entirety of her canon as a self-sufficient, sneaky, independent, hard as nails conniver (often manipulating the main mover and shaker in Hell on Wheels with full knowledge of doing so), has a sudden and poignant breakdown over what is going to happen to her if she is abandoned. I don't. What. Similar things happened to Renee, but we're not talking about season 8 of 24 because seriously, I could be here ALL DAY making lists of Big-Lipped Alligator Moments.

The fist one to pop into my head was Regina's, which came near the end of season 1. Yeah, that time she tried to seduce David? Right. What the hell even was that? And they literally never brought it up again. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

[1nv1nc1ble]

The trashbag. I just don't know.

So, for those unaware, Mark found out he had his powers when he was hoisting a bag of Burger Mart trash into a dumpster. It went flying off into the sky, which he was okay with, because hey... superpowers!

Anyway, it eventually lands in London, where a group of people start worshiping it as a gift from "the Sky God." By the time someone tries to talk them out of it (pointing out that it's fast food, probably American, and probably fell from a plane), he's beaned by Mark's mortarboard, which he accidentally tosses too high when he graduates from high school (a soon-to-be written OOM/EP). This poor fellow is proclaimed "the Sky God's servant on Earth" by the strange tribe of primitive screwheads that apparently reside somewhere in London.

Yeah. Big-Lipped Alligator.

All I can think is that Kirkman likes "The Gods Must Be Crazy" and wanted to put the joke in.

[hey35andholding]

Clem's canon generally is this.