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We would parade across the rooftops in the still of night, making not but a whisper. By the time they realized there was a parade it was already over...
In shows which feature martial arts heavily, there are a lot of different styles found in The Verse. This is Truth In Television somewhat as there have been many martial arts developed throughout history often based on local needs. For example Okinawan weapons were developed from household and farm implements.
Sometimes they just take it too far, and you get everything made into a martial art. Need medical attention? We have Ninja Medics! The King's scribe? He probably knows Martial Arts Calligraphy. Need trees chopped? Martial Arts Lumberjacks. Expect these characters to have an Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance related to their fighting style.
The inverse of I Know Madden Kombat; this trope covers instances where martial arts are used for mundane tasks, or a martial art is developed from humble beginnings. This trope is sometimes invoked by games that seek to be balanced for PVP or competitive dueling.
Compare Mundane Utility, What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome.
Contrast What The Fu Are You Doing.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Ranma 1/2 is likely the Trope Maker, certainly the Trope Codifier, and the list of just how many different styles that the anime alone named is ridiculous. Most, but not all, are based specifically on one of the many strange competitions they have. But yes, it does include Martial Arts Calligraphy in a filler episode. In general, you have "serious" ones (that is, ones where the contestants actually aim to hurt each other), and "contest" ones (martial arts that tend to be goofy even by this series' standards).
- On the serious side, we have these gems...
- Martial Arts Cookery: though never explictly named, there are implied to be quite a few of these in the world of Ranma 1/2. Ukyo Kuonji, one of the main characters, practices a variant revolving around okonomiyaki, and in the late manga we are introduced to a childhood rival who practices a variant involving takoyaki. An anime episode has Ukyo fight a practioner of Martial Arts Crepe Cookery, and the episode ends with the implication of Martial Arts Sushi/Sashimi Cookery.
- Good Old Days Martial Arts: an anime-only martial art that involves using old-time toys (trading cards, tops, marbles, hackey-sacks, thread, etc.) as deadly weapons.
- Martial Arts Calligraphy: while the combatants do aim simply to be the first one to draw a certain kanji/hiragana symbol, they are also allowed to beat the snot out of each other with letter openers, paper weights, ink, paper and calligraphy brushes the size of quarterstaves. An apparently lost variant allows the practitioner to draw special designs on a person's body that can manipulate their internal ki — the only example we're shown, the Mark of the Gods, is a goofy smiley face on the belly that amplifies the subject's skill something like tenfold.
- Martial Arts Figure Skating: teams of two in extravagant costumes zipping around on an ice-skating rink and beating the living tar out of each other.
- Martial Arts Tea Ceremony: uses items from tea ceremony, including stirring sticks, spoons and tea whisks, as weapons. Combatants must fight from the formal kneeling position — the trained practitioner can zip around in this pose as though they were standing, thanks to their strengthened toes, and even climb, hang upside down from the ceiling, and jump.
- Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics: implicitly a girls-only style (explicitly stated to be so in an anime filler episode involving an attempt to create a men's version), combatants use gymnastic props to beat on each other. Oddly enough, Ryouga knows this art well enough to teach it to Akane.
- Martial Arts Cheerleading: another girl's only style, Martial Arts Cheerleaders attempt to bolster their team through a mixture of cheering on their own teammates and beating up the opposing team, usually with very flashy moves.
- Martial Arts Takeout Delivery: combatants race to be the first to deliver their takeout to the delivery place, beating up anyone who tries to oppose them. The only rule is that their own delivery item survive unscathed.
- Bathhouse Fu: an anime style (though hinted at by Happosai in an early story common to both canons), this fighting style is amphibious in base (combatants attack both from under water and on the surface) and uses items from around the bathhouse, like towels and pails, as weapons.
- Martial Arts Shogi: the most ridiculous of the serious styles, combatants dress up in shogi piece costumes and adhere strictly to the actual rules of the shogi piece they are ranked. What keeps this from being a hokey style is the fact that they do legitimately try to pulverize the other team.
- There's actually more serious Martial Arts and Crafts in Ranma 1/2 than there are joke ones... which is kind of worrying.
- Martial Arts Dining: this style gives a whole new meaning to "food fight". The objective is to be the first one to clear all of the many plates of food you're given — and, for an extra twist, you must be incredibly neat about it. As in, you can't be seen to actually eat the food — if you're spotted, you get an extra plate as a penalty. As a result of centuries of adherence to these insane rules, practitioners have faces that they can warp and stretch like silly putty, as well as super-speed hand-strikes. Swallowing watermelons whole, picking a sweet from the top of one's own head with one's tongue and then swallowing it, all of these are possible.
- Martial Arts Watermelon/Carry The Snowman Race: two different versions of a contest, one for beaches, one for mountains, and both essentially based on the Smashing Watermelons game. With a watermelon/miniature snowman in one hand and a bokken in the other, race for the finish line while smashing the items carried by the other racers and avoid getting your own smashed.
- Martial Arts Pingpong/Badminton: just like the ordinary game... only the balls that the fighters bat back and forth can contain all sorts of booby traps, like exploding in a shower of glue.
- There was also a Martial Arts Marriage Contest, in the second movie.
- And then of course there's Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, which lives on this. The main character uses "Fist of the Nose Hair", which is basically Exactly What It Says On The Tin. That is only the beginning of the martial arts madness.
- In Cromartie High School, Masked Takenouchi masters the art of pillow-jutsu, in which he softens a pillow by beating it with a stick according to the desires of the pillow user. He takes out a whole bike gang with this type of combat.
- Every school club in Futaba Kun Change seems to have martial art based upon whatever the club's focus is. Including martial arts calligraphy.
- The chainsaw-fu that protagonist Fumio in Saitama Chainsaw Shoujo uses on her classmates was originally meant to aid her when she inherited her grandfather's lumber company.
Comic Books
- Captain America once fought Ninja Sumo Wrestlers.
- Raphael using Chinese Butterfly Knives to trim a Christmas tree. This scene made it into the 2000s TMNT cartoon.
Film
- Shaolin Soccer is centered on this trope. Stephen Chow's character believes that martial arts can be used for every day tasks. To promote the usefulness of kung fu, his ragtag group of former shaolin monks use their kung fu superpowers to play soccer. We also see kung fu used to trim trees, park cars, and fetch objects from high shelves. Tai Chi is also used to cook.
- Stephen Chow's earlier film God Of Cookery featured Shaolin-style cooking, complete with an over-the-top martial arts contest.
- In Hero, one's skill in swordsmanship directly crosses over into skill at calligraphy. Nameless studies Broken Sword's calligraphy to get a better impression of his warrior skills.
- In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon one of the protagonists comments on the princess' calligraphy skills, comparing it to swordplay. She tries to act dumb, but her secret is clearly out.
- Tiny anvils begin to rain as she goes on to comment on how her name looks like "sword."
- In Kung Fu Dunk, the main characters uses a special martial arts technique in the finals of a basketball game to travel through time in order to make the winning basket. In the same vein, his Masters from Kung Fu School show up to play after the most of his team is incapacitated by the opposing one. Projectile weapons are thrown, over-the-top slow motion is used and pressure points are hit.
- In the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, Leo puts his swords by slicing up a pizza and distributing the slices to the plates. The last one ends up falling on Splinter's head!
- Examples from classic kung fu movies:
- Shaolin Soccer was somewhat predated by the 1983 Hong Kong movie The Champions, where Yuen Biao and Dick Wei use Football-Fu on each other.
- There's more Martial Arts Calligraphy to be had in 1982's The Prodigal Son.
- Jet Li repeatedly does Kung Fu Healing People in the Once Upon a Time in China series.
- Almost anywhere you find a training scene in an old kung fu movie there's likely to be something like this - the 'student learns some kind of Everyday Skill Fu and eventually gets bored of it, protests to the master and is finally shown what the meaning is' routine. Some examples are Jackie Chan learning Martial Arts Walnut Cracking in the original Drunken Master, Chin Kar Lok being taught Noodle Cooking Fu by Lau Kar Leung in Operation Scorpio, and Austin Wei in Shaw Bros' classic Five Superfighters unknowingly being taught Kung Fu Labouring.
- Parodied, of course, by Kung Fu Panda's Martial Arts Picking Up A Dumpling With Chopsticks training scene. Sorry. I could go on like this all day. I'm going now...
- The Karate Kid has the infamous "wax on, wax off", not to mention "paint the fence", "paint the house" and "sand the deck". I've got nothing for Crane Kick, except getting free pizza from the delivery guy.
- Gymkata featured the deadly combination of ninjitsu and... gymnastics.
- It also completely fails at both.
Literature
- In the Discworld novel Thief of Time, Lu-Tze dismissively describes tung-pi as "bad-tempered flower arranging".
- Making Money has a brief demonstration of sloshi, Martial Arts Clowning, in which ballistic pie throwing, brutal ladder work and lethal balloon animals all feature.
- Deconstructed in the Age of Discovery trilogy by Michael Stackpole and done entirely seriously. A true Martial Artist may achieve true magic and potential immortality by completely mastering his style. But then again, so can a basket-weaver once he completely masters basket-weaving.
Live Action TV
- A variation appears in an episode of Sliders on a world where they have "seers" for every imaginable field — medical work, law enforcement, even politics. (But presumably not gambling.)
- The Goodies episode "Kung Fu Kapers" featured the Lancashire martial art of Ecky-Thump, which consisted of hitting people with black puddings.
- John Belushi's famous series of Samurai sketches on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, in which he portrayed a samurai running various mundane businesses (Delicatessen, Tailor, Hotel, Bakery, etc.) and speaking only (fake) Japanese.
Real Life
- Capoeira is a martial art meant to look like a dance.
- When there wasn't anyone to spy on or assassinate, the ninja worked as gardeners.
- They did this as a "social stealth" tactic as well... no one looks at the peasant gardener.
- The ubiquitous "dragon dance" seen at Chinese New Year — and so damn many movies — is a form in Kung-Fu.
Tabletop Games
- Among the many martial arts presented by Tabletop Games Exalted, there's "Dreaming Pearl Courtesan Style" for fighting while being refined and social, "Citrine Poxes of Contagion Style" for fighting with medicine and poisons, and "Prismatic Arrangement of Creation Style" for combining sorcery and martial arts. "Laughing Wounds Style" includes fetish gear as a form armour, and uses whips and chains as a form weapon. Popular among lesbian stripper ninjas, as is Pearl Cortesan. Let's not even mention some of the fanmade Martial Arts.
- And of course Second Edition canonised Martial Arts Sailors (Seafaring Hero Style), Martial Arts Orgies (Orgiastic Fugitive Style) and even Martial Arts Psychiatrists (Border of Kaleidoscopic Logic Style, one of the most powerful in the game)
- Don't forget the Quicksilver Hand of Dreams Style, which involves the manipulation of dreams and imagination and the imposition of same upon concrete reality, and the Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style, which can best be summed up as Martial Arts Parallel Universes.
- The Diana Warrior Princess Tabletop RPG includes the ancient numerology-based martial art known as The Way of the Exploding Grid, or Su Doku.
- Parodied in the RPG Ninja Burger, where characters use their ninja skills for fast food delivery, losing honor if they're seen or late. Their slogan? "Guaranteed delivery in 30 minutes or less, or we commit seppuku!"
Video Games
Webcomics
- Parodied also in Web Comic Sam And Fuzzy, which has the Ninja Mafia (black suits, ties, ninja masks), who were exactly what they sound like: organized crime, complete with protection rackets, run by ninjas (sort of). The Ninja Mafia broke up into a variety of mercenary and other groups when their emperor and ruling council were slain, including one bunch who formed their own Ninja Burger franchise, though that was more like a ninja-themed McDonald's. They are, by the way, far and away not the most absurd element of this comic. That honor probably has to go to the competing gerbil-run organized crime syndicate.
- No, that honor has to go to the obsessed vampire who turns people he bites into werewolves.
- No, that honor has to go to the sociopathic teddy bear Played For Laughs. NMS, by the way, has ninja bookkeepers. Not just bookkeepers who are ninja, but people trained in the art of ninja bookkeeping. Both bookkeeping with ninja skills, and keeping ninja books. *stage whisper*: They really only call it that to make the extremely elderly bookkeepers feel better about not reliably being Badass Great-Great-Grandparents.*/stage whisper*
- Thief, in 8-Bit Theater, has a squad of Law Ninja. They kill anyone that violates his forged contracts. They also wear bright red and are, as Thief describes them, "inherently disposable."
- The French ninjas of "Le Restaurant Des Ninjas" run their restaurant without being seen. Everything from directing patrons to their tables, to delivering menus, food (including desserts, drinks (including refills), and the bill, all while being completely stealthy. Well, almost completely. They're so effective at hiding, they hide their restaurant. There are also ninja accountants, but we never see any.
- Ninja accountants appear on-screen in Goats.
- Played with in Order of the Stick, where a waitress, upon sneaking up on her customers and startling one, admits that she's waiting tables to pay for ninja school.
Western Animation
- Kim Possible of course has the standard Mountain Temple Ninjas, Monkey Ninjas, and Aristocratic Englishman Monkey Ninja. It also has Embarrasment Ninjas. Dr. Drakken speculates that in that field it pays to specialize.
- In the first episode of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the turtles walk through the "ninja district" of the city and, after finding their original destination (Ninja Pizza), see signs for Ninja-run dry cleaning, shoe repair, video rentals and dentists.
- At said Ninja Pizza, the food is thrown like shuriken at the customers (and either you catch it or it ends up all over you).
(A ninja throws a dagger with a piece of paper at the Turtles' table, landing smack in the middle. Raphael picks it up.)
Leonardo: What is it, a threatening note?
Raphael: Worse than that...it's the check!
- Spongebob Squarepants: in one episode, it is revealed that Spongebob is nigh-obsessed with karate, driving his boss Krabs to nearly fire him from his frycook job due to the fact this obsession is interfering with his work... until he realizes that Spongebob's karate can also be used to mass-produce burgers.
Web Original
- Chaka, at Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, has the superpower of Ki control, and has invented new Martial Arts And Crafts at the drop of a shuriken. When given detention, she invented (on the fly) martial arts mopping (instant cleaning by attuning her Ki with the mop), martial arts linen folding, martial arts grime scrubbing... She has used her martial arts skills for healing problems beyond medicine, like Doctor Heavy's inability to turn off his local 8-G gravity field (she turned it into a local 0-G field by accident). And she has developed all kinds of martial arts weapons for herself, including sewing needles, forks, playing cards...
- Parodied in Naruto The Abridged Comedy Spoof Series Show, where just about anything is a ninja thing.
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