Either/Or Title

aka: A Work By Any Other Name

Or, A Work By Any Other Name; Or, The Work So Nice, They Named It Twice (Or in this article's case, thrice).

Sometimes a work gives itself multiple alternative titles in the title, usually giving the short title first, with the result commonly being a Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle. Using this trope these days can give a similar retraux feel as In Which a Trope Is Described. Songs with unintuitive titles often include the most prominent word or phrase from the lyrics in parentheses as an alternate title for practical reasons.

Compare Colon Cancer. Musical examples might overlap with The Something Song.

Not to be confused with the title of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophical novel Either/Or.

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Examples, or: Samples That We'll Explain to You

Anime & Manga, or: Cartoons and Graphic Novels from the Land of the Rising Sun

• Tsutomu Nihei's Knights of Sidonia had a oneshot prototype version known as Winged Armor Suzumega, or The Armored Insects Sphingidae.
• Trigun, or: The Ballad of Vash the Stampede, or: The Legend of the Galaxy's Greatest Gunslinger
• Ulysses 31 has four episodes titled in this manner, at least in the original French: Le Cyclope ou la Malédiction des dieux, Éole ou le Coffret des vents cosmiques, Sisyphe ou l'Éternel Recommencement and Nérée ou la Vérité engloutie. The respective titles for the English dub don't keep on the trope though (Vengeance of the Gods, Guardian of the Cosmic Winds, The Eternal Punishment and The Hidden Truth).

Asian Animation, or: Cartoons from the World's Largest Continent (Excluding Japan)

• Happy Heroes: The official DVD and VCD covers for Season 1 and Season 2^note the ones that don't use the Season 2 logo, which uses its subtitle "Happy Heroes and the Happy Superhero" give the show's title as "开心宝贝 又名开心超人" ("Happy Heroes a.k.a. Happy Superman").

Comic Books, or: Juxtaposed Pictorial and Other Images in Deliberate Sequence

• An In-Universe example from Doonesbury: "Our Friend the Amphetamine, or Why Johnny Can't Blink" by Uncle Duke.
• Don Rosa's "The Old Castle's Other Secret" or "A Letter From Home"
• Hulk: The End, or "The Last Titan".
• Iron Man: "Alone Against A.I.M." or "What a Way to Start Out in Your Own Mag!!"
• Uncanny X-Men #167: "The Goldilocks Syndrome" or "Who's Been Sleeping in My Head?"
• Who Took the Super out of Superman?? or "The Double or Nothing Life of Superman"

Fairy Tales, or: The Oldest Ones in the Books

• "Cinderella, or the Glass Slipper"
• "The Frog Prince" was titled "Der Froschkönig oder Der eiserne Heinrich" ("The Frog King or Iron Henry") by the Brothers Grimm.
• Briar Rose or the "Sleeping Beauty" in the Woods

Fan Works, or: The Literary Equivalent of D.I.Y.

• Applied Cultural Anthropology or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cruciatus.
• "Sam Evans' Four Steps to Getting Your Man, or: Snippets in the Epic Bromance of Kurt Hummel and Sam Evans".
• Fledglings, or: Everything's Better With Penguins
• For The Greater Goof has the alternate title of Or, how Fred and George got the Order of Merlin, First Class, at the august age of thirteen.
• A Game of Cat and Cat: "Your Daily Public Service Announcement Against Underage Drinking, or, Don't Drink and Dash"
• Higher Flier OR My Little Blackbird
• The third chapter of If It's Dinsday, This Must Be Castle Town is titled "Dr. Borville, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Factory."
• The fourth chapter of the Turning Red fic Maple Sugar Pretty Cure, "Coming Through, Make Way! Cure Bounce!" comes with the alternate title "Abby Becomes an Arsonist".
• The Nutdealer Expanded Universe: The second entry is titled "Nude Alert or Silly Anagram Based Jokes".
• Oversaturated World: Pinkie Pie's Problematically Private Passion's Parental Personages Presented Perpostorously Prior Publishing Previously Paraphrased Preoccupation, where the title extends into the description, with:
  Or:
  In Which Pinkie Pie Meets Her Crush's Strange Family Before Telling Her Crush She's Crushing On Her.
  Or:
  Let's See How Much We Can Make A Manifestation Of Laughter Squirm.
• Queen of All Oni does this every chapter; the first title is always serious, with the second usually being more comedic.
• The Bones fanfic "The Role of the Peloponnesian War in Modern Dating Rituals (or how Temperance Brennan Kissed a Warrior)".
• Spontaneous Earth: nothing is more sacred than any other thing has an alternate title in its summary that's more descriptive of the fic's contents than the main title: Or, why Skyfire is not allowed to go to mycological conferences for the next three years.
• The Star Trek: Voyager J/7 Slash Fic Why Janeway Doesn't Have Sex (or 'The Seven Solution')
• With Strings Attached, or The Big Pink Job.

Films — Animation, or: Cartoon Cinema

• In the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, Tweedledee and Tweedledum tell Alice about "The Walrus and the Carpenter, or The Story of the Curious Oysters".

Films — Live-Action, or: Motion Pictures

• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The various permutations of "or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love X" are listed under The Joy of X.
• On the promotional posters, Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles was advertised as Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles or Never Give a Saga an Even Break.
• The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Banya!, a Russian film about a guy who gets drunk at a communal bathhouse and winds up stumbling into the wrong apartment, causing comic hijinks and romance when the woman who lives there comes home.
• Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes.
• The Making of 'Evil Dead 2', or The Gore the Merrier.
• Otto; or Up with Dead People
• Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.
• The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck
• Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
• Delta Farce or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Iraq
• Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman: It's the story of a hedonistic woman who fancies herself the reincarnation of Don Juan and ruins the lives of the men she seduces.
• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
• Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
• A Man Escaped: Only in the original French. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut translates out to "Death Penalty Escaped, or, The Wind Blows Where It Wishes". The second part of that title is a quote from the Gospel of John and is commonly rendered in English in archaic King James Bible English as "The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth".
• XX's "The Birthday Party" is shown at the end to sport a title of this variety - "The Birthday Party, or, The Memory Lucy Suppressed From Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn't Really Her Mom's Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It's Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).
• The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding Hood; or Oh Wolf, Poor Wolf
• Broken Blossoms or the Yellow Man and the Girl

Literature, or: The Art of Words

• Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
• Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Confusingly, the whale is always called Moby Dick, without the hyphen.
• The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. The subtitle was later used as the title of Bilbo's book in The Lord of the Rings, and was to be the name of the film adaption of the third part of the book, until they decided to use The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
• Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson.
• Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, also by Samuel Richardson.
• Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning penned and titled a poem "Sebastian, or Virtue Rewarded" when she was about 9 years old. The contents still apparently haven't been published.
• Subtitling your book "or: Virtue Rewarded" was apparently Victorian (Stuart- and Hanoverian) era slang for Morals Inside®.
• The Marquis de Sade's novels Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue; Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded; and The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinism.^note Sometimes the last word is translated as Licentiousness Even the film based on the latter received a similar title, see below.
• The famously banned erotic novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland.
• Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney.
• I, Cthulhu; or, What's a Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing in a Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W)?, by Neil Gaiman — doubles as a snowclone title of the form "I, Noun".
• The Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil.
• Kurt Vonnegut was very fond of this scheme:
  • Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death. "The Children's Crusade" part was due to a promise to the wife of a fellow former soldier. She was upset that the book he was writing would glorify war. She said, "You guys were just children back then". So he promised the book would be titled, "The Children's Crusade". Although no one bothers with the full title, she need not worry, it doesn't glorify war.
  • God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine.
  • And the last of the "Trout Trilogy": Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday!.
• This is incredibly common in early 20th century children's series books as well. Examples: The Bobbsey Twins, or Merry Days Indoors and Out and The Moving Picture Girls, or First Appearance in Photo Dramas. This seems to have died off by the time Nancy Drew came about.
• Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. The title was a Shout-Out to Dr. Strangelove.
• Inheritance Cycle: Brisingr and Inheritance have alternate titles on the cover pages:
  • Brisingr, or, The Seven Promises of Eragon Shadeslayer and Saphira Bjartskular
  • Inheritance, or, The Vault of Souls
• John O'Farrell's An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper-Class Idiots In Charge and An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain, or 60 Years of Making The Same Stupid Mistakes As Always.
• Referenced in Wyrd Sisters, where the Discworld version of William Shakespeare, Hwel the Playwright, has written a comedy called A Wizard of Sorts, or: Please Yourself - the subtitle parodies the subtitle of Twelfth Night and the actual title of As You Like It.
• Wil Wheaton's short story The Saga of Spongebob Vega$pant$ (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Star Trek).
• Friedrich Nietzsche was famously fond of subtitles, but the only case of this was Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer.
• The Sea Cook, or Treasure Island.
• Varney the Vampire, or, the Feast of Blood
• Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country
  • Followed by its sequels: The Grand Tour or the Purloined Coronation Regalia: Being a revelation of matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, including extracts from the intimate diary of a Noblewoman and the sworn testimony of a Lady of Quality; and The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After: Being the private correspondences between two prominent families regarding a scandal touching the highest levels of government and the security of the realm.
• Cormac McCarthy's western novel Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.
• All of Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift books take the form "Title, or The X of Matthew Swift".
• On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
• Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
• Dave Barry in Cyberspace is not itself an example, but several of its chapter subtitles are. The most convoluted example is:
  9: The Internet
  Transforming Society and Shaping the Future, Through Chat
  Or: Watch What You Write, Mr. Chuckletrousers
  Or: Why Suck Is OK, Blow Is Not
  Plus: Danger! Sushi Tapeworms!
• Voltaire's Candide, ou L'Optimisme, translated into English as "Candide, or All For the Best", "Candide, or The Optimist" and "Candide, or Optimism".
• Michael Moorcock's Doctor Who novel The Coming of the Terraphiles, or Pirates of the Second Aether!
• The Diamond Age, Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
• Principia Discordia or How the West Was Lost was the original title. The 4th edition is more well known, and bears the slightly more cumbersome title, Principia Discordia or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her: The Magnum Opiate Of Malaclypse The Younger, Wherein is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything.
• Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal.
• Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan A novella written in 1898 by Morgan Robertson. It tells the story of an ocean cruiser named Titan, which, while traveling on the North Atlantic, accidentally hits an iceberg and sinks, causing the death of over half her 2500 passengers. Yes, it bears a striking similarity to the real life story of the famous ship with a similar name (and also to the equally famous movie). The twist? It's not a documentary. This novel was written 14 years before the Titanic was launched; it was written even before the Olympic Class liners (of which the Titanic was the insignia ship) were even designed! Eerie!
• In 1886, Mary Young Ridenbaugh published a book called Enola, or Her Fatal Mistake. It was not a big seller. But it inspired a family to name their daughter after the title character. When she grew up, she had a son, who became a bomber pilot during World War Two. He named one of his airplanes after his mom, Enola Gay. You may have heard of it.
• Paul Cornell's Shakespearian pastiche Doctor Who story has an Either Or Title and a Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle: "The Trials of Tara, Or Would That It Were; The Comedie of Count Grendell the Mafter of Grach With the Life and Death of his New Executioner".
• Pierre Beaumarchais's "Figaro" trilogy parts are named, chronologically, "The Barber of Seville or the Useless Precaution", "The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro", and "The Other Tartuffe or The Guilty Mother"
• Philip Pullman wrote a short picture book entitled Clockwork, or All Wound Up.
• In Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken, Chapter 12, "The Chapter on Fox," runs through multiple subheadings in this manner:
  They Distort, We Deride
  or
  We Retort, They Have Lied
  or
  They Purport, We Decry
  or
  They Are Short ¹of Truth!, We Have Plied ²the Truth!
  or
  Smorty Smort, Blort Deblort ^note this last is the only title used in page headers for this chapter
• The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real
• The Coronation: Averted in English. But the original Russian title of the novel is Коронация, или Последний из романов, "Coronation, or the Last of the Romanovs". The book is centered around the 1896 coronation of Nicholas II, and the second half of the title is Title Dropped by butler Mr. Freyby at the end of the novel, when he correctly guesses that Nicholas will be the last of the dynasty.
• The Tale of Samuel Whiskers; Or, The Roly-Poly Pudding by Beatrix Potter
• The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons
• The full title of The Mysterious Chronicles Of Oz is The Mysterious Chronicles of Oz, or Tip and the Sawhorse of Oz.
• The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead.
• Fall, or Dodge in Hell
• The sixth and final chapter of The Exciting Adventures of Super Grover, a Sesame Street book, is entitled "Super Grover and the Hole Story, or Gone Fishing".
• Robert Benchley:
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or David Copperfield
  • No Poems, or Around the World Backwards and Sideways
  • From Bed to Worse, or Comforting Thoughts About the Bison
• The Sorrows of Satan, or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire
• Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks
• Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula; or, The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count
• Eric, or Little by Little
• Chapter 26 of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas is called "Waking Up from the Boolean Dream, or, Subcognition as Computation".
• On its first appearance in Lippincott's magazine The Sign of the Four was titled The Sign of the Four, or, The Problem of the Sholtos.

Live-Action TV, or: We Guess No One Does This Here

• Blackadder does this in the end credits of its third series. For instance: Blackadder the Third, or Dish & Dishonesty.
• Class: "The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did"
• The French dub of The Girl from Tomorrow was titled Alana ou le Futur Imparfait (Alana or the Imperfect Future).
• Police Squad! had two titles for each episode, used at the end of the title sequence: one was spoken, and a completely different one was written on screen.
• One episode of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego is titled "The Unfair Exchange, or Stock Shock".

Music, or: The Rhythm's Gonna Get Ya

• Every song on Radiohead's album Hail to the Thief (including the album itself, which is actually titled "Hail to the Thief, or, The Gloaming"). For example, singles "There There" and "2+2=5" are really called "There There (The Boney King of Nowhere)" and "2+2=5 (The Lukewarm)". While the secondary titles are rarely ever used, the tracklist on the back cover includes both, and the lyrics in the liner notes only use the secondary titles.
• The Incredible String Band's 1967 album The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion.
• Sufjan Stevens sometimes combines this with his infamous love for long titles. Consider this whopper from the Illinois! album: "The Black Hawk War, Or, How To Demolish An Entire Civilization And Still Feel Good About Yourself In The Morning, Or, We Apologize For The Inconvenience But You're Going To Have To Leave Now, Or I Have Fought The Big Knives And Will Continue To Fight Them Until They Are Off My Land"
• The Coldplay album Viva la Vida or Death and All his Friends. As you might guess, it has two Title Tracks.
• On Them Crooked Vultures' self-titled album, there's the song "Warsaw or the First Breath You Take After You Give Up."
• "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" and "Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)".
• Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" and "Viva La Gloria? (Little Girl)".
• There is a Queen song titled "Machines (or Back to Humans)".
• Bright Eyes' 2002 album Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground.
• "Richard II, Or Extraordinary Popular Dimensions And The Madness Of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem)" by Titus Andronicus
• Cradle of Filth's first EP, "V Empire Or Dark Faerytales in Phallustein"
• Music/Glassjaw's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang EP has "Star Above My Bed (Call of the Tiger Woman)" and "Vermont Connection (The Chapter 7 Test or The Ephesians Were Right After All)".
• The Beatles:
  • "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"
  • "This Boy (Ringo's Theme)"
  • Some early pressings of "I Am The Walrus" had the secondary title "No You're Not, Said Little Nichola." (Nichola was the little girl John Lennon entertained on the bus in the Beatles' special Magical Mystery Tour.)
  • "I Want You (She's So Heavy)".
• The last track of Paul Simon's Graceland is a song entitled "All Around the World, or The Myth of Fingerprints".
• Simon & Garfunkel did a song called "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)".
• Chiodos has The Undertaker's Thirst for Revenge is Unquenchable (The Final Battle). Interestingly, it's almost exclusively referred to by its title.
• The Dandy Warhols' Odditorium or Warlords of Mars.
• Captain Beefheart's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller): In this case, the two titles are somewhat justified because much of the album consisted of reworked songs from a never released Frank Zappa-produced album that would have been called just Bat Chain Puller.
• The soundtrack to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines has a cut titled "The Dance of the Intrepid Airmen, or: 55 Years Before the Beatles."
• Love's Forever Changes album includes a song called "Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale".
• Egg released "The Song Of McGillicudie The Pusillanimous (Or Don't Worry James, Your Socks Are Hanging In The Coal Cellar With Thomas)" on their self-titled 1970 debut album.
• Except for the short introductory track, every track on Lemon Jelly's Concept Album 69-95 is titled with the last two digits of the year in which the track's principal sample was released, followed by a more easily-remembered title, e.g. "''79 aka The Shouty Track", "'95 aka Make Things Right", etc. The year element is usually dropped when the tracks are referred to in any other context.
• The Left Banke's Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina. Apparently either they or their label couldn't decide which single should be the Title Track.
• Somewhat confusingly, Elliott Smith's album and song Either/Or are not actually examples.
• Tori Amos has "Black Dove (January)" on Songs from the Choirgirl Hotel.
• Industrial black metal band The Wicked named their second (and last) album as Sonic Scriptures of the End Times or Songs to Have Your Nightmares With.
• Anna Russell's operatic spoof of Hamlet was titled "Hamletto, or Prosciuttino."
• Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)".
• Monty Python's "Penis Song (Not the Noel Coward Song)".
• Many songs the Sherman Brothers wrote for Disney, such as "I Wan'na Be like You (The Monkey Song)" and "Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)".
• Pink Floyd has "Breathe (In the Air)".
• U2's "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)".
• The Rolling Stones' "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)".
• Oasis has the album (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, and many subsequent songs such as "It's Gettin' Better (Man!!)", "(Probably) All in the Mind" and "(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady". Asked about the parenthesis in "(It's Good) To Be Free", Noel Gallagher tried to explain:
  See like on (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, I thought, 'Well everyone's gonna call it 'Morning Glory' anyway', so I started doing it just because I didn't know why people do it. I've done it loads of times now. If you take the brackets away it's called "To Be Free", which makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. It's like, they think I'm some fucking thicko from up north, well I'll show them. Heheheh! I don't know why I do it, but there'll be plenty more. I'm thinking of the album title to be all in brackets and nothing outside them. Just call it 'The Bracket Album'!"
• "It's All Tears (Drown in This Love)" by HIM, sometimes just called "It's All Tears". A variation of the alternate title appears in the lyrics, but the primary title appears only once.
• David Bowie's "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)".
• Tears for Fears has the original 1982 single "Pale Shelter (You Don't Give Me Love)" ^note it's different from the more popular 1983 version which is simply called "Pale Shelter" without the parenthetical subtitle and "Laid So Low (Tears Roll Down)".
• "Wellington's Victory, or the Battle of Vittoria" by Ludwig van Beethoven.
• The full title of "In the Fade" by Queens of the Stone Age, according to Rated R's album booklet (which, fittingly, parodies the MPAA's content warnings), is "In the Fade; or Universal Subconscious".
• Will Wood has a penchant for these, most notably with “The Song with Five Names, a​.​k​.​a. Soapbox Tao, a​.​k​.​a. Checkmate Atheists! a​.​k​.​a. Neospace Government, a​.​k​.​a. You Can Never Know”.

Puppet Shows, or: There's a Hand Inside Me

• The title for the Eureeka's Castle Halloween Special is "It Came From Beneath the Bed, or A Nightmare on Magellan Street".
• A 1991 Sesame Street special focusing on Big Bird's Birthday is entitled "Big Bird's Birthday, or Let Me Eat Cake".

Radio, or: The Hills Are Alive with the Sound

• As with anything they were let near, The Goons mocked this mercilessly.
  • For example: How To Rule The World In 80 Days Or: Your Money Back. Shortly after announcing that title, you could hear "There's money for you, there's money for you..."
  • Another one went "The Greatest Mountain in the World, or, I Knew Fred Crute, or, The Greatest Mountain in the World!" ^note We're not entirely sure who Fred Crute was.
  • ''The Case Of The Missing CD Plates" is announced as:
  We present Baroness Orczy's masterpiece, Baron Orczy. Or: "A Strange Case of Diplomatic Immunity", in which a strange case of diplomatic immunity is recounted. Chapter One, a Strange Diplomatic Case of Immunity, or A Diplomatic Case of Strange Immunity, or through hook, line and blizzard with Ava Gardner.
• Big Finish Doctor Who's Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche Doctor Who and the Pirates or The Lass Who Lost a Sailor.

Theatre, or: Life Is But a Stage

• Mozart's Don Giovanni is actually called Il dissoluto punito, ossia Don Giovanni (The libertine punished, or Don Giovanni).
• William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will. This was the only example that Shakespeare made himself (rather than publishers), and it's a bit of a pun. The title could be taken to mean, "Twelfth Night, or whatever title you prefer."
• Winifred Phelps' Temptation Sordid, or: Virtue Rewarded, A Melodrama
• Charles Shadwell's Irish Hospitality, or Virtue Rewarded
• Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, or Virtue Rewarded
• Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change
• Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?
• Every Gilbert and Sullivan work except Trial by Jury and The Sorcerer. In the case of Princess Ida, or Castle Adamant, the secondary title breaks with the usual pattern by being just as cryptic as the primary.
• W.S. Gilbert used this method to title several burlesques, extravaganzas, and other works that predated his regular collaboration with Arthur Sullivan:
  • Dulcamara; or, The Little Duck and the Great Quack (1866 extravaganza, based on Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore)
  • La Vivandière; or, True to the Corps (1867 burlesque of Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment)
  • Robinson Crusoe; or, The Injun Bride and the Injured Wife (1867)
  • Harlequin Cock Robin and Jenny Wren; or, Fortunatus and the Water of Life, the Three Bears, the Three Gifts, the Three Wishes, and the Little Man who woo'd the Little Maid (1867 Pantomime)
  • Robert the Devil; or, The Nun, the Dun and the Son of a Gun (1868 extravaganza, based on Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable)
  • The Pretty Druidess; or, The Mother, the Maid and the Mistletoe Bough (1869 extravaganza)
  • Tom Cobb; or, Fortune's Toy (1875 farce)
  • Eyes and No Eyes; or, The Art of Seeing (1875 one-act musical)
• In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), the cast make fun of how Strictly Formula Shakespeare's comedies tend to be, and thus abridge them all into one play. The title is The Comedy of Two Well-Measured Gentlemen Lost in the Merry Wives of Venice on a Midsummer's Twelfth Night in Winter, or Cymbeline Taming Pericles the Merchant in the Tempest of Love as Much as You Like it for Nothing, or The Loveboat Goes to Verona, or Four Weddings and a Transvestite!
• Eric Overmyer's On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning.
• Eugène Ionesco's Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It
• Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up
• The swedish revue Grisen i säcken – eller som en kork i mörker eller värmlänningarna kommer tillbaka eller doktor Haka's rekordrevy. Translated to English it's: Pig in a poke – or like a cork in dark or the Värmlanders come back or doctor Haka's record revue.
• McQueen: or Lee and Beauty, James Phillips' 2015 creation that has seen The West End stage twice.
• Aphra Behn's The Rover; or the Banish'd Cavaliers
• Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed
• New Faces of 1952 had a sketch titled "Whither America? (Another Revival?); or, The Energy Contained in a Glass of Water Would Drive an Ocean Liner?"
• Ben Jonson's Volpone; or, The Fox
• Exaggerated by Tony Kushner's Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or “Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein” or Ambivalence
• Beaumarchais's play The Barber of Seville has the secondary title "La Précaution inutile" (The Useless Precaution) while the sequel, The Marriage of Figaro has the secondary title "La Folle Journée" (The Crazy Day).

Video Games, or: Bring The Mountain Dew

• The title screen of Bugsy says:
  BUGSY
  or:
  The Struggle of One Small Rabbit to Build a Successful Career in the Fascinating World of Organised Crime
• An obscure Centipede rip-off Arcade Game has the title War of the Bugs or Monsterous Manouvers in a Mushroom Maze.
• The 1993 adventure game, Pepper's Adventures in Time introduces each chapter of the game with such a title. One title hints at what you'll generally be focusing on, while the other gives a clue about the defining event of the chapter.
• Frenemies; Or, I Won an Andy Phillips Game.
• For Love Of Digby
  or
  (A Day In The Life Of A Couch Potato/Changing The Channel).
• A Fly on the Wall, or An Appositional Eye.
• Chickens of Distinction
  (or, "It Takes a Tough Man To Make a Tender Chicken")

Web Animation, or: Moving Graphics Watched on the Internet

• RWBY: The show has a book that was created by the Big Good, Professor Ozpin, called Fairy Tales of Remnant. One of the stories is known as "The Indecisive King". However, its full title is actually "The Indecisive King (a.k.a The King, the Crown, and the Widow)".

Webcomics, or: All the Fun, No Paper

• Stickman and Cube does this in storylines, e.g., "Robo-Cube. Or, Cube Disappears #2", to make it clear that the comic in question is part of said storyline, and which part in particular.
• Darths & Droids Episode 131: Sour Relations, or "Tell Me More, Tell Me More", followed by Episode 132: Dour Narrations, or "Like, Did He Have a Pod?" The alternate titles constitute a Shout-Out, and a most unexpected one at that.
• El Goonish Shive does it 4 times in one strip with "Nanase: Scantly Clad For Hire" OR "Justin's Frustration" OR PERHAPS "Justin's Cat's Out Of The Bag" OR MAYBE "Dan Couldn't Decide On A Title"
• Every episode of Monster of the Week is titled [parodied X-files episode title], or [author's joke title], like episode one: Pilot, or They Haven't Invented The Theme Song Yet or Revelations, or Scully Gets Her Catholic On.
• Square Root of Minus Garfield pulls a double Shout-Out to Dr. Strangelove and Inception with "Donutception, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Donut (Wars)".
• Prequel -or- Making a Cat Cry: The Adventure. The name says it all, really.
• Balderdash! has had two. The first one was "Balderdash! or, the baker's apprentice". When Afia was introduced, it became "Balderdash! or, a tale of two witches".

Web Original, or: Web-Based Stories That Are Not Fan Works

• Whateley Universe: Have Yourself a Monkey Little Christmas Or The Uncanny X-Mas

Web Videos, or: Videos You Can Watch on the Internet

• Dining Room or There is Nothing, a less-than-settling YouTube video.
• Guaranteed* Video's "The Amazingly Aerodynamic Unleaded & Quadro-Cylindrical Fly-o-mo Car, Or: Shitty Shitty Bang Bang"

Western Animation, or: Moving Drawings from the Americas, Oceania or Western Europe

• Every cliffhanger episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle ends with an example of this. At least one of the two titles is nearly always a reference to a movie, book, song or well-known phrase (e.g. "Some Like it Shot", "Captain's Outrageous", "Banks a Million").
  • Sibling Jay Ward series Hoppity Hooper effects this as well. The first titles shown on screen (in a story arc regarding a wig maker out to do in the heroes) was "Dressed to Kill, or: Three's a Shroud."
• The Teen Titans (2003) episode "Bunny Raven or How to Make a Titananimal Disappear" uses this format both for itself and each of the episode's three acts, which are shown on signs in-universe.
• The Simpsons:
  • The series' Casino Episode had a Shout-Out to Dr. Strangelove with the title "$pringfield, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling".
  • Show Within a Show example: In "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk", the episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show that Bart watches is entitled "House of Pain, or This Old Mouse".
• Both Mission Hill and Stroker and Hoop did this. Both of them, however, only lasted 13 episodes.
• The Hanna-Barbera version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures featured an episode where our heroes fetch Mozart and Little Richard, titled "The Birth Of Rock And Roll, or: Too Hip For The Womb."
• The finale of The Robonic Stooges was titled "Stooges, You're Fired." Reference sources have the Either Or title as "The Day The Mirth Stood Still."
• Hanna-Barbera's 1967 revisionist version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had the alternate title What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) homage to Rocky And Bullwinkle, I See A Funny Cartoon In Your Future uses this. The antagonist is Madame Argentina, a crooked fortune teller who leaves the girls in a literal cliffhanger using three Powerpuff voodoo dolls. The next episode is "Hoo Doo Voodoo, or: Don't Scrye For Me, Argentina."
• Several Scooby-Doo episodes had alternate titles that were not used. Among them:
  • "Scooby-Doo Meets The Addams Family" (or "Wednesday Is Missing")
  • "A Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair" (or "The Counterfeit Caper")
  • "Scooby-Doo Meets Laurel & Hardy" (or "The Ghost of Bigfoot")
  • "The Caped Crusader Caper" (or "The Sying Fluit...er, Flying Suit")
  • ""Who Was That Cat Creature I Saw You With Last Night?'' (or, "Make A Beeline Away From That Feline")
  • "Terror, Thy Name Is Zombo" (or "Roller Ghoaster Ride")
  • "A Scooby-Doo Christmas" (or "Ho Ho Horrors")
• The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall follows the same convention that plagued the book series it's parodying, "The Rover Boys".
• A Tom and Jerry cartoon from 1967 is titled Guided Mouse-ille (or Science on a Wet Afternoon).
• Every episode of Black Dynamite has at least two alternative titles, shown and shouted at the start.
• The Looney Tunes short Eatin' on the Cuff or The Moth Who Came to Dinner.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy had two episodes in season 7 with alternate titles. "Everything Breaks" was also known as "Breaking Things To Billy," while "The Show That Dare Not Speak Its Name" had the alternate title "Cubix Rube."
• The Robot Chicken short "Of Moose and Squirrel," a crossover between Rocky and Bullwinkle and Of Mice and Men, ends with a Rocky and Bullwinkle cliffhanger spoof, complete with one of these.
• Popeye: One cartoon from the Al Brodax era is titled "Voice from the Deep" or "See Here Sea Hag".
• The Danger Mouse episode "Duckula Meets Frankenstoat" plays with this, with several either/or titles that fade out ("or: Frankenstoat Meets Duckula, or: Duckula and Frankenstoat Meet Danger Mouse and Penfold, or: Duckula and Penfold Meet Frankenstoat, or...")
• The four original God Rocks! episodes have an alternate title that begins with "or..." on the cover.
  • "Ten Rockin' Rules (or... Wakin' Up is Hard to Do)"
  • "A Blast From the Past" (or... Anybody Got Change for a Buck?)"
  • "Splatball Square-Off (or... Nose to Knee With a Defiant Giant)"
  • "Flip-Flop and Rock (or... It's Ruff to be Puff)"

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