Kevin Spencer had scenes like this every episode. They're usually something small (like Allan passing wind so hard he takes off like a rocket) or take up a whole scene (such as when Anastasia molests a bunch of trees, throws up, passes out, then is accosted by wildlife.) This makes sense, considering Kevin himself regularly loses his train of thought, and deviates from his plans rather quickly.
The entire time/dimension travel sequence in Transformers Armada, that happened without explanation (despite the gobs of mystical advanced technology lying around), is never mentioned again, and really does little to advance the plot. The only thing we learn is that the Mini-Cons rejected Unicron and gained sentience because the kids went back in time and showed them how much they cared about their beepy robot friends. And since it's never mentioned again, it's ultimately a pointless plot twist.
Some episodes of Chowder feature at least one instance of a pink fuzzy gorilla-looking thing named Kiwi appearing without mention to deliver a one-liner or a piece of exposition, then disappearing. He was only acknowledged once or twice.
I guess this is just Lampshade Hanging, but in the episode where they were digging under Mung's rival's house to steal a hoard of gems, they encountered... a big alligator.
There's also the time when Chowder was trying to get Mung to try his nauseating new dish, "foofinscoops". Mung balks at the prospect. The camera then cuts back to Chowder, who is suddenly in drag, with a blonde wig and makeup, and he says "Pretty please?" in a sultry voice. Mung shouts "WHAT THE-?!?" One second later Chowder is back to his normal appearance and voice and it's never mentioned again.
The first instance of Peter Griffin fighting the giant chicken in Family Guy.
The second one invokes this in-universe though... even though the audience has seen Peter fight the giant chicken before, all the others see is Peter disappearing to fight the chicken, then return bruised and beaten, and go right back to talking about Quagmire's womanizing problem as if nothing has happened.
And the third instance could be a BLAM-within-a-BLAM...when the chicken and Peter reconcile and go to dinner...before renewing hostilities over who should get the check...
Family Guy might as well be called "Big Lipped Alligator Moment: The Animated Series".
Conway Twitty isn't over the top enough to be a BLAM. He has to settle for just being filler and padding.
He is in "The Juice Is Loose" where it becomes and Overly-Long Gag that goes on for 5 whole minutes (which is bascially taking up a fourth of the episode) and leaves you just as confused afterwords as the most over the top BLAM as a result.
A similar moment done again in "Foreign Affairs", but this time it is David Bowie and Mick Jagger's music video of "Dancing in the Street" in its entirety.
Sneakers O'Toole is yet another textbook example of this. Even by Family Guy standards, it literally comes out of nowhere.
In the soapbox derby episode, Speed Racer and his dad are shown talking in their awfully dubbed way, and then he says, "We have no relation to this plot! Hohoho!" or something like that. Can you hang a lampshade on a BLAM?
Some opponents of Family Guy argue that too many or all of the cutaways on Family Guy are BLAM. South Park harps on this in Cartoon Wars, calling them irrelevant and interchangeable.
Pretty much every episode has several BLAMs, but one that stands out is Chris reaching for the orange juice and being beckoned by a random hand, which he joins and then suddenly enters the music video for "Take on Me".
Lois: Chris, where were you?
Chris: I DON'T KNOW!
Another is where Meg checks to see whether Chris is done in the bathroom; we see him sitting on the toilet with the top of his head missing and it's screwed on by a mechanical claw while "The Imperial March" from Star Wars plays.
Invader Zim has one of these in "The Girl Who Cried Gnome". Zim unleashes a robotic gopher on a Girly Ranger who's trying to sell Ninja Star cookies to him. After trapping her leg in a tunnel dug by the robot, it begins dancing and is spontaneously sucked into another dimension.
"Huh... I don't remember programming that..."
Played for laughs in the Halloween episode. Right before the mook reports back to Halloween Bitters that Dib didn't care about Zim possibly dying we're treated to a pan-over of the skool. There is a swarm of bats flying out of it, however just a second later there's dancing skeletons in tophats.
The Rugrats Movie had a musical number where newborn babies in the hospital list complaints.
There's a Deleted Scene only shown on television broadcasts, where Didi and Stu have a trippy dream.
Mickey MouseWorks had a sequence in the Donald Duck episode "computer.don" where Donald gets sucked into his computer while trying to fill out his personal information, and is left at the mercy of a cursor that mostly pokes his ass until eventually being printed back out. This has no bearing on the rest of the episode apart from an excuse to throw in an Art Shift to CGI. Watch the BLAM here.
Before the dream, Tigger mentions the Heffalumps and Woozles and says they like to steal honey, then he leaves Pooh's house and the dream kicks in after a few minutes or so.
However, this still qualifies as a BLAM since Pooh never refers to it again after it's over.
While played straight for the film alone, it's inverted for the Winnie-the-Pooh series as a whole, where later features would show Heffalumps and Woozles as Real After All.
On the episode "Humiliation 101" of My Life as a Teenage Robot, once Jenny figures out that she in fact will not be embarrassed by her mother in front of the entire school, she breaks into random song with Brad and then they proceed to school after singing this little ditty with a small dance included as if nothing ever happened.
Hanna-Barbera's feature Heidi's Song had not one, but two. First, Grandfather tells Heidi stories about evil spirits haunting the mountains right before she goes to sleep, leading to a Disney Acid Sequence nightmare; second, when Heidi is locked in the rat-infested basement by Fräulein Rottenmeier, the rats break into a Villain Song, with Sammy Davis Jr. as the head rat. (And for this BLAM, Davis gets second billing on the movie, right after Lorne Greene as Grandfather and before Margery Gray as Heidi.)
In the Chucklewood Critters TV special "Which Witch is Which", Ranger Jones leaves his Halloween party to investigate something, but when he does, the scene cuts to a pointless music video showing these witches that perform all these magic spells. This segment/song holds nothing to the plot at all.
The new... interludes on Cartoon Network that play before commercials nowadays. They aren't commercials, they don't promote any of the shows, they're just there to be completely random and confusing. Examples include clips of an animated, ridiculously overmuscled guy screaming and doing exercises, a guy walking into a brick wall with the line "walk fail" showing up, and a guy turning into a werewolf, and then into a chihuahua.
Little man, BIG MOUTH! My dog eats eggs. BIG MOUTH!
DRINK FAIL!
BOUNCING BULLDOG IN A BIKINI
APELOPE
Chihuahua... dressed as a taco... eating salsa... does. not. compute.
ANIMALS EATING WHILE RANDOM PERSON SINGS NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM.
Some are also rather disturbing and potential Nightmare Fuel. Such as the multi-colored skulls being pulled over each other.
That was 2009. They're all gone now.
They have new ones. Now viewers are treated to badly photoshopped pictures of hybridized animals and asked to go online to vote "check" or "fail". You can do this, but it's never explained why.
Considering the equally random and bizarre [adult swim] bumps (which came first), this may be a strange case of programming block spillover.
Most of [adult swim]'s shows tend to not be that strange. It's usually just a shot of some scenery nowadays. Sometimes it will be a minor and subtle joke, or occasionally they'll do something to say something like "you're watching Adult Swim, therefore everything is right" by having "you" be the boat and "Adult Swim" be the ocean.
For a while in the late 1990s/early 2000s, Cartoon Network ran similar commercials featuring a character or characters from one of their shows doing something over and over on a loop (such as laughing or squirting milk out of their noses). After about 30 seconds of that, the words, "Screwy, ain't it?" would come up on the screen.
The Total Drama Action episode "Dial M For Merger" has a scene where Chris breaks up the teams, and LeShawna laments "They're breaking us up? After all we've been through together?" Then it randomly goes into a parody of the 6teen opening. It's never mentioned again.
"Walk on the Wild Side", a season 2 episode of X-Men: Evolution, opens with Jean getting angry at Scott because of his assertion that it was a good thing a man was there to save her and Magma. This leads to the two forming an all girl vigilante group with Tabitha, and they quickly rope in Kitty and Rogue, complete with music videos, a change of spy wardrobe, and enough Charlies Angels riffs to make Kim Possible proud. Even Mystique gets in on the action. Watch it here. The BLAM isn't derived from it being a girl power episode so much as it is from there being no indication of those feelings or attitudes before or after the one episode and the events that took place are never mentioned again after.
In Turtles Forever, there is a scene where all eight of the Turtles go to the 1987 world, and experience the 1987 Turtles fight... A giant mutant banana, pizza monsters, evil leprechauns, and monstrous bowling balls, saving 1987 April in the process. After this scene, the Turtles leave, and 1987 April is abducted by a mutant banana, never to be seen in the movie again.
The old French cartoon Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea (known to English-speakers from its early 80's run on Nickelodeon) was for the most part, a serious sci-fi adventure story about a group of adventurers trying to save an underground civilization from disaster. But about once every other episode, the plot would suddenly be interrupted by a musical number performed by a group of pirates. Apart from the fact that no other characters ever sang (except for Bic and Bac), the pirate song felt very out of place as it featured a different art style and was much more humorous than the rest of the show. Sometimes this was followed by the pirates causing trouble for the heroes, but in several episodes the song is just dropped into the episode at random, and the pirates don't actually do anything afterward. Sometimes they didn't even appear in the episode aside from the song.
What was really annoying was that the song was two minutes long, and showed up in almost every episode. It was always exactly the same, too. Basically, it seems like the creators intentionally crafted a BLAM that they could just drop into each episode to pad out the runtime. Some episodes included it TWICE.
In episode 25 of the third season of Winx Club there's a moment where Bloom during a fight with Valtor is hit by an attack and lands in some mud. While she tries to get up, the mud turns into a monster and tries to eat her, Bloom destroys the mud monster, Valtor comments on her aiming skills and they resume the fight without really explaining why the mud turned into a monster.
Dexter's Laboratory had an episode where Dexter is stalked by a little girl with enormous, soul-penetrating eyes. While the episode, like most episodes of the series, contains little-to-no background music to maintain a quiet and suspenseful vibe, all of the sudden we're inexplicably treated to a colorful, poppy, saccharinely upbeat musical number to illustrate Dexter's frustration. Although completely out of left field, it remains one of the more popular scenes in the show's history, and could be seen as either an Ear Worm or the show's Crowning Musicof Awesome.
A straighter example appears at the beginning of the episode "Continuum of Cartoon Fools", in which Dexter is seen sitting at a desk, scribbling something on a piece of paper and looking at a stopwatch while periodically making a bizarre noise that sounds like "BAAAAWT". It's never brought up again, and we never do find out just what the hell he was doing it for.
He was timing a storyboard of the very cartoon he was in. That...still doesn't make sense, though.
In that same episode, at the end of a sequence where Dexter blocks off every possible entrance to his Lab to keep Dee Dee out only to have her pop up again, his frustration reaches a breaking point, and he decides to... smash a watermelon with a mallet.
Animaniacs did this quite often, typically with quick, random cameos by other various Animaniac characters in each other's segments. For instance, it happens twice in the Slappy Squirrel cartoon "Bumbie's Mom", and Slappy lampshades it both times.
It was pretty common to see Ralph the security guard chasing Yakko, Wakko and Dot through one random scene in at least one cartoon per episode that the Warner Brothers (and Sister) weren't supposed to be appearing in. It was quite literally a Running Gag, and would usually culminate at the very end of the episode with the siblings scampering back into the water tower and Ralph shaking his fist at them.
In Phineas and Ferb, the popularity of the "Gitchie-Gitchie-Goo" song in one episode led the higher ups to decide to make the musical segways Once an Episode. That includes when it really doesn't make any sense to have a musical number whatsoever. The writers do their best of course, but sometimes there's just no way to work a song into the plot of an episode. And yet there's one there anyway.
"Robot Rodeo" ends with a particularly weird one "Izzy's Got the Frizzies", with an extended sequence of Isabella go-go dancing to a song about her frizzy hair. Made even odder by the fact there was a much more sensible musical number earlier in the episode.
"Summer Belongs to You" has probably the weirdest one to date: "J-Pop (Welcome to Tokyo)", where everyone turns into big-eyed anime characters and starts dancing like they're in a Caramelldansen video in front of wildly flashing backgrounds, all while a perky pop song with Intentional Engrish for Funny lyrics plays. It's even lampshaded!
There is no Candy in Me from "Picture This!", a spur-of-the-moment rap at the very end of the episode brought about by Candace's stunned stutter.
Buford: Nerd ain't no piņata!
"Dance, Baby" from "Candace Disconnected", where Dr. Doofenshmirtz randomly invites Perry to join in his "evil exercise show", and they start doing aerobics to a goofy disco song with nonsencial lyrics.
"Shot in the Butt with a Dart" from "Bad Hair Day" has Doofenshmirtz, after getting mistaken for a rare "tangerine orangutan" and being shot with a tranquilizer dart, singing a random show-tune about it, only to lose consciousness in the middle of his song.
I'm blurry and drowsy, but balladry beckons Though I'll probably lose consciousness in seventeen seconds
For a non-song example, there is the Giant Floating Baby Head. It first shows up in "One Good Scare Oughta Do It!", where the boys try to cure Isabella's hiccups by building a haunted house. At the end of the episode, they admit that they don't even know what it was, where it came from, or why.
The end of The Simpsons episode "Burns, Baby Burns". Homer and Larry have just been caught staging a kidnapping, when suddenly the whole scene turns into a party. Lampshaded when Marge asks where the music and liquor is coming from, and Homer replies, "It's a party, Marge. It doesn't have to make sense."
Although this can be seen as a jab at how many of Rodney Dangerfield's (who was voicing Larry Burns) movies seem to end with a spontaneous party.
Specifically, it's referencing his spontaneous party in Caddyshack, which even had the same Journey song "Any Way You Want It." It was something of a BLAM in that movie, too.
The surfing ending of "Grift of the Magi." Lisa did say that the ending would be "insulting to your [the viewers'] intelligence." It's like the writers were aware that the show was getting too wacky for its own good.
In the episode "Ned-liest Catch" Homer is chasing Ned Flanders to convince him not to break up with Edna at one point he starts swimming in a canal trying to keep up with him but he gives up and drifts away, moments later he is randomly attacked by a giant octopus.
The episode "Monty Can't Buy Me Love" has a minor one. The family is taking a stroll through the neighborhood when they catch sight of some kind of big public event happening just down the street. Marge wants to continue on her walk, but the others run off to check out the event, so Marge reluctantly tags along. The event in question is the grand opening of a new shopping mall, which isn't a BLAM per se as the mall is owned by young, charismatic Australian billionaire who makes Monty Burns envious, thus setting the main plot in motion. But as the family is waiting to be let into the mall along with the rest of the crowd, Marge notices Homer mysteriously sipping champagne from an elegant glass. "Homer, where'd you get that champagne?" she asks. Homer simply points to his right and says "Clown" - at which point a stereotypical Non-Ironic Clown named Noodles appears beside Homer literally from out of nowhere holding a champagne bottle, and refills Homer's glass. ("Thanks, Noodles.") Although an earlier shot of the event had made clear that there were indeed circus clowns on hand to entertain the crowd, the last time we see Homer before that one sequence (and that had been only seconds before) the only person standing beside him had been Bart. One commentator on the episode sarcastically wondered if Bart had suddenly disappeared, only to be replaced by a clown.
In the otherwise incongruous Season 4 episode, 'Brother From The Same Planet' *
The episode in which Bart pretends to be a disadvantaged little boy so he can get a Bigger Brother, after Homer's latest act of parental negligence — i.e., forgetting to pick him up after soccer practice
, we have Homer leaping out of the bath, running out the door naked after waking up from his dream of finding Bart dead at the soccer field from neglect, and the following surreal exchange occurs:
Lisa: Dad, hide your shame!
Ned Flanders(from outside): Hey Homie, I can see your doodle!
Homer: Shut up, Flanders.
One of the Henry and June wraparounds in an episode of KaBlam! had June going to sing a pretty song, and saying how she wanted to make the show "intimate". She also said that without Henry on the show (this is the episode where he quits temporarily), she wanted to "spread her wings", but what did that do with the plot? The song was nice, the scene was funny, but what did it have to do with the episode? The scene never got mentioned again, but only one small remain- after the following short and the commercials, June was wearing a neckbrace (she crashed into the fourth wall), but it suddenly disappeared by the final wraparound. Plus, it was very out of character for her.
In the episode "Eek a Penis", during Mrs. Garrison's chase to find his "penis" (a white experimental mouse with a penis surgically grafted onto it), the "penis" stops fleeing at one point after glimpsing at the moon, and begins to have a duet with itself (the mouse and the penis, which can talk now) in the vein of "Somewhere Out There" from An American Tail. They are stopped midsong by Mrs. Garrison, and the "penis" never sings, or talks, again.
Earthworm Jim has an amusing intermission in the middle which in pretty much every case had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. The blammiest (in "Opposites Attack!") is probably "six seconds of dancing turtles".
Courage the Cowardly Dog had Eustace being attacked by a squirrel that came out of nowhere in the episode "Family Business".
One episode had the family's house being placed in the middle of a biodome. At one point, the biodome produces a thunderstorm, and when Eustace grabs the front door handle to look outside, the handle gets zapped — and in the middle of Eustace's electrocution, a duck's head gets overladed across his butt and quacks.
One episode opens with an archeologist dusting off a gem stone inside some sort of temple, which suddenly shoots out a beam of light, which is reflected off a few things before causing a disco ball to come out of the ceiling and some music to play for a brief moment. Afterwards, the acheologist just shrugs and continues where he left off.
An early Bugs Bunny cartoon, Fresh Hare, ends with one of these: Bugs has been caught by the RCMP, tried for many serious crimes, and sentenced to death. An early Elmer Fudd (the fat one) asks him for his last wishes, and he replies "I wish... " and the entire scene becomes a blackface minstrel number of "I Wish Was in Dixie." The cartoon has probably been made one of the Censored Eleven because of the ridiculousness and everyone is a black stereotype. You can find it online if you want.
It was censored on TV to remove that Big Lipped Alligator Moment (often by going straight to the end card, but sometimes, they have the actual music playing while the video is looped), but the Censored 11 cartoons are the ones where every character is a black stereotype, like Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, Clean Pastures and Uncle Tom's Bungalow (though that did have a white girl in it).
Also, it has been released on various DVDs of classic cartoons. No censoring, nothing.
The Jimmy Two-Shoes episode "Ghostsmackers" goes into a commercial for a ghost-related Misery Inc. product. It gives nothing to the plot, and the product is never scene again.
In the Code Lyoko episode "Code Earth", it's revealed that Odd made a music video named "Break Break Break Dance", which is never mentioned again, unless you consider a brief exchange between him and Ulrich right after the song is interrupted.
Ulrich: You made a video? Odd: Well, yeah. It's pretty cool too. Ulrich: What's the title? Odd: "Break Break Break Dance"!
In Home Movies, in Brendon's production of "Starboy and the Captain of Outer Space", the conversation turns to hot dogs and how they're made - there's an abrupt cut to a still-picture montage of the two visiting a hot dog factory with a guy in a hot dog costume, with a bossa-nova soundtrack, and right back to the action...in the space of maybe three seconds. One might wonder if one even really saw it.
The American Dad episode "The One That Got Away" has Klaus throw a smoke bomb on the floor and vanish from sight. A moment or two later, there's another blast of smoke, and when it clears we see Klaus, now with a sword and crown, cutting his way out of the belly of a Lovecraftian monster. This event gets precisely three lines of discussion before being forgotten about entirely:
Klaus: I don't know, but wherever it was, I am their king now.
The "Crack" medicine commercial parody on "A Jones for a Smith". Yeah, it works as a satire on how prescription meds can be just as bad as illegal drugs, but, like most gags in Seth MacFarlane's cartoons, it doesn't really have a relevant place in the plot. Of course, unlike a lot of gags in Seth MacFarlane's cartoons, this one has some justification in it as Stan may have been high enough to see his life as a medicine commercial (which ends with him cuddling up to a homeless man [whom Stan saw as a dog during his hallucination] on a dirty mattress in an alley).
The Smiths singing "We Go Together" in "Home Wrecker".
The BBC Christmas animation The First Snow of Winter is the story of an Irish duckling who gets seperated from his family while flying south, and is befriended by a water vole. About ten minutes in, for no real reason, Voley and Sean start line-dancing. And then an entire flock of sheep joins in. At the end of the scene they spin around to look at the sheep grazing as if even they're wondering whether that really just happened.
Mr Magoo's ChristmasCarol: After Old Joe meets with the undertaker, laundress and charwoman (the last two of whom inexplicably look like witches), the four burst into a loud song for absolutely no reason, proclaiming how bad they are.
The Sea Pony scene in My Little Pony: Rescue at Midnight Castle. Everything's been semi-serious up to that point, and then Megan and a Pony fall in the river and get eaten by a giant clam. CueDisney Acid Sequence in which the Sea Ponies rescue them while singing a catchy doo-wop song (and judging by their expressions, Megan and Applejack are just as confused as the audience). The whole song is never mentioned again, although the Sea Ponies themselves later help Megan and the Ponies sneak into Midnight Castle.
At the end of the Adventure Time episode "Evicted", Finn and Jake finally reclaim their home from Marceline and... Well, you'd better see it for yourself.
In the Metalocalypse episode "Fatherklok", Toki, Murderface, and Pickles all express their disdain for their respective fathers... when seemingly out of the blue, Nathan disagrees with them, and the show cuts to a montage of Nathan and his father doing fun, stereotypical father-son activities together, accompanied with cheesy, overly happy music.
Also when Toki sings Underwater Friends, presumably they're still recording and listening to that craziness, but not Toni's Hamburger Time Disney Acid Sequence because clearly that was a dream.
An episode of Justice League Unlimited titled "Kid's Stuff" had a rather funny one. It features a baby Etrigan randomly appearing. We never find out how or why he got there.
Bender: When I grow up, I wanna be a steam shovel!
In the short-lived Clerks: The Animated Series, during the episode where Dante Hicks is being sued, they suddenly declare that they ran out of money and had to let the Korean animators come up with their own ending, whereupon the episode suddenly goes into a way over the top Anime parody.
We, the jury, find in favor of... Big American Party!
The early Betty Boop cartoons were racy, surreal, and featured a lot of hot jazz music and vocals by the original king of cool, Cab Calloway. These musical numbers were often BLAMs, though, as in "Minnie the Moocher", in which Betty is very suddenly and for no apparent reason accosted by a singing, dancing ghost walrus (a rotoscoped Calloway). Yes, a ghost walrus, who then proceeds to sing the eponymous song for no reason at all. This is pretty strange even by the standards of early Betty Boop.
Bebe's Kids features a strange, almost music video sequence inside a tunnel of love.
