My Tropes on TV Tropes

TV Tropes, for those who don’t know, is a wiki website dedicated to recognizing and cataloguing trends and patterns in fiction known as tropes. A good place to waste time, perhaps, but I’m of the opinion that nothing is a waste of time if you’re enjoying yourself. It’s probably helped my writing a lot, at least on the theory side of things. If I am thinking of using an idea in a story I can look up how other works used it. You could think of a trope kind of like a cliche or a stereotype, but it isn’t exactly the same thing, since it isn’t necessarily overused or negative. It is simply a tool of storytelling. An underlying assumption or an accepted premise which may or may not reflect reality. I discovered TV Tropes in 2009, and have been a member for going on 12 years. It’s amazing to think it’s been that long. It was still the days of MySpace when I started on there. TV Tropes was a very different place back then, and had a very free, laissez-faire approach to what they allowed on the site, allowing users to inject personality and opinion into their posts, as well as apply tropes to real life, bragging “we are not Wikipedia”. They’ve since had to become more strict and sanitized the site, in an attempt to be taken more seriously and be more friendly towards the advertisers. In fact I blame the corporate advertisers for most of the tone changes to the site over the years, which seems to happen to every website that lasts long enough. To be fair, things also changed thanks to people abusing their privileges and posting weird, creepy or offensive stuff, creating the need for regulation. As always, the worst part about wikis are all the other people on them, of course. But, slight feelings of They Changed It Now It Sucks aside, I’ve stuck with the site.

Since 2009 I’ve launched my fair share of tropes, as well as works pages for the site. It’s usually a very shocking experience when I can think of a trope that’s not already on the website somewhere, but it’s happened at least eleven times. And I suppose I should feel proud, or at the very least feel lucky, that none of them have ever been deleted as of yet. They’re solid tropes. I watch a lot of old films and cartoons that I would wager most people under a certain age don’t watch these days, which probably explains why many of these tropes hadn’t been launched yet before I did it. Most TV Tropes users are on the younger side, and are too busy watching anime I guess (to be fair I watch and enjoy anime too, but if you knew nothing about culture except what was on TV Tropes you could be forgiven for thinking that Naruto has far more cultural significance and literary merit than the writings of Shakespeare; but I think the lack of literary snobbery is one of the greatest things about TV Tropes, so don’t get me wrong). They’re mostly comedy or animation tropes of the early to mid-20th century, because yes, I’m a grown man who watches cartoons. Disgraceful, isn’t it? Well, societal norms are mostly bullocks anyway. Except maybe the taboos against murder and cannibalism, those are alright. But I will watch and enjoy whatever I want. So there. 

When you edit a wiki you don’t really get to take credit for anything. It becomes part of the public domain, in a way. But I felt like writing about the pages I started and what inspired them, just so that there was record of it somewhere. Click on the trope titles to be take to the page. This will be roughly in the order they were launched.

I Fell For Hours

This is when a character just keeps falling and falling, maybe into a bottomless pit, usually but not always for comedic effect. You know it’s in play when the character has to take a breath mid-scream, or otherwise starts to wonder when they’ll finally hit the ground. It’s a classical trope that has examples dating back to Greek mythology, but likely emerged in its modern form with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, although this example still predates it being used for comedy. That may have started sometime in the Golden Age of Animation. It lends itself to animation because it is something that should be physically impossible; not that there are no live action examples, of course. There are quite a few literary examples as well. This was my first trope, launched when the Super Mario World cartoon was at the apex of its memetic popularity. The most popular episode to parody and meme was “Mama Luigi”. Videos like this one for example were all the rage on YouTube. During the episode, Luigi falls into a chasm, and narrating the story, he says that he “fell for hours”. If I were to do it today I might have come up with a different name, like Overly Long Fall, but it is what it is now. The trope has been up for more than ten years at this point. I just find the concept of falling for that amount of time funny, for some reason. While brainstorming the trope I thought of a lot of different examples of characters falling “for hours”, such as scenes in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, the Bugs Bunny short The Heckling Hare, and more. The other users came up with even more examples, and a trope was born. 

Is There a Doctor in the House?

This was a phrase I heard a lot in the old media I watch a lot of from the 1930s-50s. When someone is injured or faints, inevitably someone shouts for a doctor. This originated in theater, when “house” referred to the theater itself. It’s usually played for comedy; its turn toward being a comedic trope happened with the advent of film, because it was funny to see someone on film address the audience when we all know it’s a recording and not live. The phrase can be altered, with the words “doctor” or “house” replaced by something more plot-relevant. Examples from The Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, along with others, were what prompted me to start it. You barely ever hear this phrase uttered today, but the most recent examples I thought of were from the 1990s, so it was still in the public consciousness in my lifetime. The trope luckily survived the website’s purge of stock phrases that weren’t true tropes. It was tropey enough for them, I guess.

Vot Ocksent?

Someone speaks in an accent but is oblivious to it, leading to hilarious misunderstandings. Gussie Mausheimer from An American Tail was my initial example, as well as Antoine from the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, among others. The other users found the bulk of the other examples. There’s really not too much to say about it, but I do find it funny when it turns up.

Gold Tooth

This trope probably would have been launched eventually with or without my involvement, but it didn’t exist yet when I joined the site, so I got the ball rolling. People with gold teeth in fiction are usually shady and villainous, for some reason. Obviously in real life having a gold tooth doesn’t make you a bad person, but if someone in a story has a gold tooth you can bet they’re evil. That’s what this trope is about. Warren T. Rat, again from An American Tail, as well as one of the robbers from Home Alone, were my initial examples.

Verbed Title

This was a pet-peeve trope for me in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when every animated movie had to have a stupid one-word title, often a verb in the past perfect tense. Tangled, Frozen, Hoodwinked, Enchanted. Ugh. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was a big thing in television show titles too for around that same period. It advertises to people with short attention spans. It seems to have gradually died off now though. For the most part anyway; it’s probably not going to completely go away, as it does also predate that glut of movies I mentioned, and isn’t exclusive to animated movies either. Scrooged, for example. An awful example of taking a word that isn’t even a verb and putting it in past perfect tense; and not the only example like that. Ooh I can’t stand it, as a Creative Writing major. I started this trope out of spite, I admit.

Construction Zone Calamity 

This trope used to be very widespread, but it’s not used much these days. As the description says, it’s where every sleep walker or escaped baby wanders into. The protagonist will always either be chasing someone through the construction zone (or is the one being chased), or less commonly have gotten a job working at one and still have to go through all the slapstick comedy hijinks. You have to dodge swinging steel beams, deal with malfunctioning elevators, almost fall off the tall steel skeleton of the skyscraper multiple times, all that fun stuff. Every classic cartoon series had a construction zone episode, sometimes more than one. But it wasn’t exclusively an animation trope. The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy did it too, as you see above. In fact Harold Lloyd was the likely inventor of this trope, in the silent film Never Weaken. No one has come up with an older example yet. So it was a live action film trope first. But the trope died out in live action long before it died out in animation, which kept it alive for decades longer. It didn’t really survive the fall of the Hollywood studio system in the 1960s when cartoons went to television. Every once in a while someone brings it back in a modern work, but only in reference to the classic uses of it. It’s weird that it died out, since it’s not like there aren’t still tall buildings being constructed. I guess that style of slapstick humor is no longer in fashion, really. Or maybe you just can’t really do anything new with it, since it was so overused from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Dogs Love Fire Hydrants

Images you can hear if you’re of a certain age.

This was just something I noticed they didn’t have yet one day, so I decided to start it myself. I never really got the whole “dogs love fire hydrants” thing. Never seen it happen in real life. Dogs will pee on anything, not just fire hydrants. But I’ve seen it a lot in cartoons. The oldest examples found were from the 1930s, and the oldest example on the page is a Disney cartoon starring Pluto. However it must be older than that since it was already something they could rely on the audience assuming. The examples I grew up knowing were in Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life.

Fur is Clothing

This is another widespread classic cartoon gag, where a cartoon character’s fur is removable and they have little boxers underneath, or alternatively their fur has pockets built in. The Tex Avery short Lonesome Lenny (pictured above) as well as a number of uses in Ren and Stimpy were my initial examples. Others came to me later. The trope still shows up sometimes in modern works, but was more prevalent back when cartoon characters were getting blown up by sticks of dynamite on a regular basis.

Pie Eyed

They had a trope for Black Bead Eyes, but not this, so I started it. It’s the eye-style from 1920s and 30s cartoons, where the pupils are shaped like Pac-Man. Think Betty Boop, early Mickey Mouse, all those old black-and-white cartoons. The name “pie-eyed” is the actual term for these eyes among animators. I researched that prior to starting the trope. The modern examples are interesting too. Most are trying to capture the aesthetic of classic cartoons, but a couple, like the 1980s Super Mario Bros. cartoon, seem to have it for no special reason. The Pac-Man cartoon really missed an opportunity by not using this trope. 

Meet your Early Installment Weirdness 

This is one of my favorite tropes I launched. This is when a show or some other work of fiction does a crossover episode where the characters meet their previous selves, either how they were at the beginning of the series, or the versions of themselves from a previous unrelated series. Early Installment Weirdness was already a trope on its own, so this trope kind of builds off that. I don’t know how old the trope is or who was the first to use it, but it seems relatively recent. I don’t think anyone has brought up a true example from before the 1980s. Except maybe one; The Road to Oz, published in 1909, actually has kind of an example, but it’s more of a nod to a previous illustrator than a full-fledged crossover episode, so it’s only barely this trope. What they call an Ur Example. Meet Your Early Installment Weirdness is a very meta, post-modern kind of trope. And post-modernism was rare if not nonexistent before the mid-20th century. 

Turtles Forever was the example that inspired me to launch this trope; a 2009 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles special where the latest incarnation of the Turtles at the time met their 1980s counterparts from another dimension and they had to join forces. I ranted about this briefly on the blog before (it came up in my An American Tail reviews), but let me do a more in-depth rant, because it relates to this trope and how it gets handled sometimes. I hated how they portrayed the 1980s Ninja Turtles, making both them and the villains Shredder and Krang look far stupider and more incompetent than they were in the original show, mere caricatures of their original selves. The 1980s cartoon was mainly humorous while the 2000s cartoon was more serious, but they didn’t have to exaggerate the characters that badly. They tried their hardest to make the 2000s Ninja Turtles look cooler because the special was created by the people who did the 2000s cartoon, obviously. They must have been sick of having their cartoon compared to the original cartoon, and it shows. It smacks of insecurity, and is what happens when someone is forced to homage something they not-so-secretly despise. But I quickly thought of other examples of this trope. The video game Sonic Generations is a more level-headed example, where the modern Sonic teamed up with the classic Sonic and they remade some of the old levels in 3D. Sega has no real reason to despise the 1990s Sonic the Hedgehog (at least the Japanese version, they seem to hate the American incarnations of Sonic like the cartoons), so they treated both versions fairly. Someone else brought up the Garfield example, which provides the perfect image to illustrate the trope in action. Not every example ends up bashing the earlier versions of the characters, but a good many do. I prefer the ones that don’t.

Deliberate VHS Quality 

This music video is not in fact from the 1980s.

My most recent trope, launched a couple years ago now. I started to notice a lot of the music videos I watched from goth and synthwave bands were either filmed on VHS or used a VHS filter, in an effort to capture a nostalgic 1980s aesthetic. Someone familiar with VHS can discern the difference between a filter and the real thing quite easily. It’s a relatively new trope, having only emerged after the advent of the DVD, making it exclusively a 21st century trope. It’s hard to say exactly where and when it started, but I started noticing it around the mid-2010s. They often make it look like the worst, most warped and degraded VHS tape you could ever find (especially some of the filters do this), which is a bit unfair to the medium, but that’s the reputation VHS has these days. The examples quickly piled up, and I had enough material to launch a trope. I’ve almost single-handedly written the whole page, although of course not all of it. My love of collecting VHS tapes was what led me to notice a trend not many people were talking about. 

Conclusion 

I guess it’s been a little while since I launched a new trope, but that’s because by now there are so few that haven’t been catalogued on the site yet. The majority of the ones I launched were within my first year or two on the site, back when there weren’t as many trope pages and launching them was much easier to do. You have to go through a lot more red tape to start a trope than you used to, thanks to people abusing the privilege. Even when I tried to start an index for Armenian Media on the site they made me launch it like a trope through the same process, having to gain approval of enough users and prove it was something the site needed. But who knows. Maybe I will discover another trope soon. In the meantime, I often start new works pages. That is still easy to do, for now, and I’ve done dozens of those. Of late, I’ve been doing the Oz books; before I got to it TV Tropes only had pages for the first three. I did the rest of L. Frank Baum’s books and a few of Thompson’s, and even a couple modern pastiches. In the near future I will start one for my own webcomic too, and in fact I’ve done a page for everything I published, from Odinochka to my fan fiction (and the fact that they still allow fan fiction to be catalogued on their site shows me that they haven’t completely lost their way, not many other wikis would allow that). The site is forever one of my homes on the internet.