Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Heavy Handed; Heavy-Handed
If you missed it, don't worry, they'll say the line
Again and again and again
— Ode to a Superhero, Weird Al
A portmanteau of anvil and either delicious or malicious, depending on the usage, anvilicious describes a writer's and/or director's use of an artistic element, be it line of dialogue, visual motif, or plot point, to so obviously or unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head. Frequently, the element becomes anvilicious through unnecessary repetition, but true masters can achieve anviliciousness with a single stroke.
Heavy-handed for the new millennium. (Extreme polar opposite of subtle.)
Frequently it is used to emphasize something that was already fairly obvious.
Common in kids' shows, since they're less aware of subtle nuances, though not as much as writers and directors seem to think.
Bonus points awarded if the supposed message or moral has only but the most tenuous connections to the actual plot, story, or the events of the episode; or, if the consequences brought about to tell the moral are blatantly arbitrary or don't even make any sense (see examples below).
If the work goes beyond anvilicious into hectoring lectures, then it has become an Author Filibuster.
See also Script Wank, Cant Get Away With Nuthin, Scare Em Straight, Obviously Evil, And That's Terrible, Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.
Examples:
Anime
- Earth Maiden Arjuna is pretty much the anime version of Captain Planet (see below), with the "awesome" superhero replaced with a Magical Girl as with more psychological angst.
- Card Captor Sakura has an ending segment in the first season of the original Japanese version (and in some dubs) called Leave it to Kero-chan, which (after putting Sakura's Outfit of the Week on display) basically hits the viewer over the head with things that Sakura learned in the episode you just saw. It was thankfully averted in the English broadcast (that is, everywhere except the US), where it was just a review of the costume.
- Dancougar Nova got pretty Anvilicious in one episode, which made oblique references to the War on Terror being fought solely over oil, and featuring a nearly rabid, transparently American commander crushing the titular robot while declaring that because his nation is strong, it gets to decide what justice is.
- Being about how war affects humanity, the Gundam franchise has dropped many anvils over the years.
- In Zero No Tsukaima, the episode in which Colbert-sensei dies was a very thinly veiled message about why war is bad, the entire second season being about how War Is Hell.
- In an episode of the Kirby anime, Dedede gets addicted to snacks and becomes grossly fat, unable to even stand up. This is followed by two characters announcing out loud that this is what happens if you only eat snacks and stay up all night watching television and Dedede being paraded through the town, pointed and laughed at. All of this before the episode is even halfway through.
- Naruto has a lot of these, mostly concerning friendship.
- The Aesoptinum factor of Soukou No Strain is made particularly obvious when not only is the research conducted on harmless aliens, but they look and like little girls and anesthetic doesn't work on them. So every time one is dissected, they're being brutally tortured and the scientists just shrug and figure 'Hey, they'll get used to it eventually.'
- The first Pokémon movie and the first straight-to-dvd special, Mewtwo Strikes Back and Mewtwo Returns respectively, club the viewer over the head with their messages. Gee, thanks for telling us that fighting to the death isn't fun, that judging someone or yourself by the circumstances of birth is wrong, and that it's a good idea to protect natural resources. We would have never figured that out. They're not very hard to grasp, even before the giant swarm of killer bugs comes to help enforce the Green Aesop, even given the young demographic. Then every character available starts repeating the aesops, including Team Rocket, and it goes straight to Narm.
- The dubbers added all of the anviliciousness to the first movie (due to the fact that they literally rewrote the entire script), but the second movie does have a blatant Green Aesop in both versions.
- Considering the anvil of normal pokemon is "Catching wild animals is not only a wonderful thing in itself; you can also force your captured animals to fight."...
Comic Books
- Jack Chick. Granted, evangelical tracts are Anvilicious by nature (as their purpose is to convert people), but Chick manages to make some of the others look almost subtle.
- Pretty much every Very Special Issue written by Judd Winick.
- Marvel Civil War was supposed to be ambiguous. However, the only vague approximation of ambiguity came from how each book was anvilicious for different sides depending on what the writer thought was right.
- A fair amount of EC Comic stories are spectacularly unsubtle; Judgement Day
 in particular. A robot civilization with clear different castes for robots with orange casing and robots with blue casing being evaluated for whether or not it's worthy to join The Federation falls short, the two castes mirror "Separate But Equal" very closely, and at the end we see that the evaluator is black. Of course, Some Anvils Need Dropping.
Film
- The "educational film" Reefer Madness is notorious for the sheer ludicrousness of the anvils it drops against marijuana - or as it spells it, "marihuana". Apparently, pot makes you a horrible driver, can drive you insane... and lets you play the piano really fast.
- The film was recently parodied with Reefer Madness: The Musical. It sends up the original by going even further (for example, claiming marijuana causes cannibalism)... but then turns around and drops its own anvils against censorship with the last number. (Yes, real subtle with the book-burning cheerleaders...)
- Amazon Women On The Moon ended with another parody of this.
- Actually the easter egg at the end of AWOTM is a very close parody of "Sex Madnesss", a melodramatic VD flick.
- Literally every movie ever made that includes drug-use, with two exceptions: stoner movies (for obvious reasons), and A Scanner Darkly, which demonizes the war on drugs more than drugs themselves.
- While often true, it should be noted that merely showing the negative effects of drug use does not necessarily invoke this trope unless the message is either exceptionally overt or disjoint from the plot. For instance, the stars of Requiem For A Dream all suffer negative effects of drug use in some way, but the film is meant to demonize people and their myriad addictions (food, sex, dreams, nostalgia, etc.) rather than simply being a movie about "hey kids, Drugs Are Bad m'kay?" Interpretations of the film are numerous, but it can be argued that Marion, the only one whose true primary motivators are the drugs themselves, is the one who ends up the best off (at least compared to being brain damaged, in prison, or physically mutilated).
- Every single Soviet kids' movie or series, ever. Sadly, some new series, started long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, continue the tradition to this day.
- The animated film Quest For Camelot. Though the film is cute, after watching it, one can't help but wonder "could they hammer home the lessons about teamwork and The Power Of Friendship any harder?"
- Yes, after watching Quest for Camelot I realized that blind people and women weren't worthless lumps of carbon. Nice message but lighten thy hand.
- Platoon. Just in case we didn't get the subtle subtext involved in Stone placing an evil sergeant and a good sergeant in charge of plastic-faced Charlie Sheen's raw recruit as the devil and angel on his shoulder, Stone has Sheen provide a wildly anvilicious voiceover monologue at the end of the movie. "I felt like a child born of these two fathers..."
- The scene at the end of The Fifth Element where Leeloo is looking through the encyclopedia and hits the 'W'. War is bad, mmkay?
- The Fifth Element being Love, or possibly Life, depending on which you side with.
- Leelu missed the entries for Atomic Bomb and Holocaust the first time around. That's what you get for skimming so fast!
- The Happening. Just in case you didn't get the environmental message pervading every second of the film, there's a crazy scientist on TV at the end whose sole purpose is to drill this into the audience. Oh, and The Power Of Love can subvert nature.
- The Poseidon Adventure. Christian symbolism list: Climbing a Christmas tree to salvation? Check. Religious figure in charge? Check. Other religions make a heroic sacrifice? Check. Lake of fire? Check. Crucifixion scene? Check.
- The "coming of age in the hood" parody Don't Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood lampshades the anvils by having the postman, played by producer Keenen Ivory Wayans, pop up whenever a character is delivering a particularly anvilicious speech to loudly exclaim "Message!" directly to the audience. In itself lampshaded when the main character gives a long-winded, confusing speech that pretty much summarizes every other anvil up to that point in the longest way possible, the Postman arrives, looks at the camera confused, and then says "The *** is he talking about?"
- The film Pleasantville is guilty of this in one pivotal scene, where a shop keeper hangs a sign that reads "No Coloreds."
- Pleasantville as a whole is guilty of this with various anvils through pretty much the entire film.
- Ridley Scott in Kingdom of Heaven doesn't hold back from hammering viewers with the evils of organized religion. Every clergyman will either be questioning the existence of God, or more likely a Jerkass. Having the leading bad guys as secular nobles in a region teeming with Church Militants would have been confusing for viewers, so it called for a Historical Villain Upgrade making Guy of Lusignan and Raynald of Châtillon Knights Templar.
- The documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, makes some good points, and is in general for a good cause, but it does so in an incredibly anvilicious manner, including a montage of people celebrating their efforts to keep Wal-Mart out of their town being successful (not very anvilicious) combined with loud gospel music about "Victory", plus the words "Victory" flying every which way on the screen along with names of towns over people dancing and singing with joy, leading up to a title in of "VICTORY". This scene actually ends the shortened version of the film.
- Carrie. Pointing out that picking on people is bad (mmmkay?) is one thing. Turning (nearly) everyone (other than the protagonist) into either an overblown Jerk Ass and/or complete whackjob to drive the point home is just plain ridiculous. On the other hand, this is exactly the way a troubled teenager might see the world, so it might just be a case of identification with the protagonist.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still. Both of them. The original with its message of "the United Nations needs more power if it is to keep us safe" and the remake with its message of "the only way to save the earth from global climate change is by stopping our use of any and all electricity RIGHT NOW!"
- Johnny Mnemonic. Johnny having the "cure" to an obvious AIDS reference, and that the villain is the medical companies for whom selling the treatments that don't work is more profitable than selling the cure.
- Happy Feet has a couple in it. The most anvilicious is the environmental message that pervades about the last quarter of the film. Subtle...like a hand grenade.
- Hand grenade nothing. That was as subtle as a nuclear bomb... Or a Chick tract.
- The Bollywood film Main Hoon Na is mostly a silly action comedy, but a key plot point involves a reconciliatory prisoner exchange between India and Pakistan that is taken extremely seriously.
- The film of The Devil's Arithmetic is one long anvil, and actually includes the line "Why didn't I listen to my grandfather more!?"
- Expelled is a documentary by Ben Stein, yes that Ben Stein, defending Intelligent Design. its hard to stay open minded when watching the film as a darwinist at the moment he declared believers in Darwinism as Nazis you realize it advertises as comedy, but it isn't close...
- What makes it especially Anvilicious is that Stein, known for his economic background, appears to be ignorant of social Darwinism in a scene (and doesn't mention that Darwin himself found the idea abhorrent), and misquotes Darwin in such a way as to make the man sound like he favors widespread eugenics, when the unmodified quote says that it's to humanity's credit that it shows compassion to its weak and sick members. To hear Stein's version of Darwin, you'd think the man a cackling mad scientist, rather than a human being who was genuinely thankful that even then-modern society, for all its flaws, was better than survival of the fittest in nature.
- The movie Crash. Apparently racism is not a good thing. But then everyone in Los Angeles is racist so it's normal.
- The Iron Giant: "Guns are bad!"
- 'The Iron Giant' (the book): "enslaving powerful alien bats is good".
- Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith. "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause." et al.
- In Dead Poets Society one of the teachers says: "Think for themselves? Of course we shouldn't teach the boys to think for themselves!' It's almost as if the film-makers didn't want us to like him.
- Before the contemporary Left Behind series, which is certainly Anvilicious, there was a terrible miniseries in the 1970's or so released on video which had a similar title. It had a theme song by Cliff Richards with the lyrics, "There's no time to change your mind, the Son has come... and you've been left behind!" The videos were about all of the horrible things that would happen to non-Christians at the end of the world. It was like having your TV grab you by the face and scream, "You're going to die horribly, and then you're going to Hell! Repent! Repent!"
- "District 9" by Peter Jackson and Niel Blomkamp. It is set in a South Africa where aliens come to earth, then get segregated from humans by the government. Hey, Does This Remind You Of Anything? The trailer only gets less subtle from there.
Literature
- Witness Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Men at Arms, in which the first gun invented in his medieval-fantasy society is turned by the Power of Belief into an Artifact Of Doom that infects anyone who touches it with a vicious bloodlust. Pratchett in general has made several comments about modern weapons in Discworld. For example in one dialogue between Lord Vetinari and Leonard of Quirm (the creator of the Gonne and someone who constantly switches between creating super weapons and coffee machines in his teatime), Leonard mentioned a device so horrible that it will end all wars, because nobody would be insane enough, from Leonard's point of view, to use it. (This is a fairly direct reference to Nobel and Dynamite, BTW)
Leonard: "That? Oh, something of a toy, really. Makes use of the strange properties of some otherwise quite useless metals. They don't like being squeezed. So they go bang. With extreme alacrity."
Vetinari: "Another weapon..."
Leonard: "Certainly not, my lord! It would be no possible use as a weapon! I did think it might have a place in the mining industries, though."
Vetinari: "Really..."
Leonard: "For when they need to move mountains out of the way."
- He had quite a lot to say about attempts to actually ban weapons from private citizens in Night Watch, though.
- The 'gonne', when the guards look for it is 'gonne'. -and of course much is made of the people it makes gone as well.
- And Going Postal isn't the most subtle take on privatisation: "These are the crimes of the Board of the Grand Trunk: theft, embezzlement, breach of trust, corporate murder—"
- Technically it was started by a private company and was illegally taken over by another by means of the above crimes. At the time of the novel there had never been public control of it, and the hero argues against nationalizing the system (he ends up running it as part of the post office between books, though).
- This occurred, unsurprisingly, in the already rather drab Inheritance Cycle. In a scene in the second book, Eldest, has a discussion with a dwarven priest about religion. Arya, who is arguing against religion, is portrayed as quiet, polite, reasonable and ten times as rational in her arguments. The dwarven priest, who supports religion, is portrayed as wild-eyed, fanatical, and ranty. Later, it's revealed that the flawless elves are an atheist race. Also, whenever any of the characters go on and on about how precious life is...only to have the main character strangle a nameless guard with only the faintest hint of hesitation.
- The novels of Ayn Rand, such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, are basically thinly disguised screeds on Objectivism shoved down the reader's throat. As are the Sword Of Truth novels, by Terry Goodkind, who—yup—is an Objectivist and considers Rand the most important philosopher since Aristotle. At least Rand had the decency to make The Fountainhead a fair novel before loading her magnum opus with multiple chapter-length speeches explicitly defining her world view. Of course, none of Rand's novels have gained any critical acclaim except from those who agree with or are sympathetic to her views. Many literary critics consider her to be an outright terrible writer.
- Perhaps unsurprisingly, the literary critics who consider her a terrible writer are usually the ones who do not agree with, or are not sympathetic to her views.
- Less than 10% of Americans have even read Atlas Shrugged. If this is a barometer of interest in Objectivism, it might therefore be somewhat difficult to find a professional literary critic who agreed with Rand's views before reading the book. And since this is one of the founding documents of that belief system, this would be like asking a Communist to impartially critique the works of Karl Marx.
- Anthem is possibly the most unrelentingly Anvilicious of her works, starting with its very first sentence: "It is a sin to write this."
- The Phantom Tollbooth has certain Anvilicious aspects in terms of how it presents the "Learning is fun!" message, that and all the Parental Bonus content stuck in.
- This is Older Than Dirt. Aesop's original tales were very straight-forward, actually just as anvilicious as the original Greek fable was. Mostly the tales don't go longer than a single paragraph before the moral. When confronted with the much subtler La Fontaine et al modern novelizations, one can surely feel the weight of the aesops.
- The character Clarisse in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Actually, never mind, just count the whole book.
- The Mercedes Lackey School of Heavy-Handed Social Commentary. 'Nuff said.
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood most definitely qualifies, in a very feminist way. Our narratress is in a society where her role is to give birth or else, and it's clear that this is the end result of white male religious fanatics taking over the world.
- The first book in His Dark Materials clearly has some anti-Catholic elements, but manages to be a bit subtle about them. The anvil count goes up in the second book, and by the third book any subtlety at all in regards to its anti-religious slant is abandoned.
- I read them, I got the anvil as organised religion = bad. Individual choice = good, but flawed. Overall it's about making your own mistakes.
- Don't forget that being a virgin = supporting the establishment. So, kids, if you want to show your independence, go have sex!
- Much of the work of John Ringo tends to be somewhat on the unsubtle side, to put it mildly, but his latest work, The Last Centurion, isn't an anvil, it's an M1 Abrams tank (about 70 tons, for the record).
- In David Weber's Honor Harrington series, Haven goes through a revolution [it's first of three in the same few centuries] that sees a man named Rob S. Pierre head of the Committee for Public Safety, which is now running the whole country. "Rob S. Pierre". THE COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC SAFETY. DO YA GET IT? ROB PIERRE? [The place's capital is called Nouveau Paris in case ya didn't get it.] Also, every Liberal, Conservative, or anyone with anything but loyalist or centrist credentials except for one or two tends to be textbook Strawman Political with the subtlety in delivery of several bomb-pumped laser warhead anvils.
- Many of the works of Hans Christian Andersen, who in addition to being severely depressed and self-doubting was also a devout Christian. Here's the end of the original The Little Mermaid, with the nameless protagonist in Purgatory:
"Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at his good conduct, for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!"
- The Karen Traviss-authored Gears Of War novel Aspho Fields repeatedly drops the anvil that "weapons developers = war criminals" over and over and over again.
- Which seems like a very strange moral for a setting in which humans are only still alive BECAUSE they have satellite lasers, chainsaw bayonets, humongous tanks and other ultra-powerful weapons.
- We are talking about the same Karen Traviss with the Mandalorian fetish, right?
- Many books in Africa are stories that teach kids about AIDS, predictably there's a character who wants to go be with girls so he can be a "man" and chiding his friend for not doing the same, and you can see where this goes...
- Uncle Toms Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, seems to be an anvilicious condemnation of slavery with its stereotypes of Southern slave traders and even sections where the (third-person) narrator speaks about how "miserable" the slaves are or how "no good characters EVER seem to like slavery or the Southern slave traders". Bonus points go to the fact that it isn't clear Stowe ever saw much of slavery firsthand (though, she definitely Did the Research).
- The Last Battle. A pro-Christian work which shoves its message down your throat, including stopping the plot to retell Plato's 'allegory of the cave'. All the people who don't believe in Aslan are doomed. It also includes Straw Atheists. Not entirely realistic ones.
- Hold the phone. Don't forget about the young Tarkaan who got into Aslan's Country because he believed in the real Tash. C.S. Lewis also included the "last-minute" salvation of everyone else in Narnia. They each had a choice as they came to the doorway. Each of these were hotly disputed theological arguments of his time. Add to that the fact that it is the last of seven books, each dealing with their own segments of theological discussion, and it might not be as Anvilicious as you think.
- Virtually any major series by Harry Turtledove, particularly the Worldwar and Colonization series, where Turtledove pads his 200 page story to 500 by repeating the exact same exposition regarding certain characters every time they appear in text. (Example: Mordecai Anielewicz—-breathing in nerve gas is bad and it causes pains in your joints even twenty years after breathing it in. Repeat every time Mordecai appears in text.)
- This just in - Sam Carsten sunburns easily. News at 11.
- No Country For Old Men. Apparently, according to the Author Avatar, liberalism, bad manners and dyeing your hair green have the same moral equivalency as drug dealing and cold-blooded murder.
- Anything by Jonathan Swift, though somewhat subverted in that he usually intended his messages to be Anvilicious, since he tried being diplomatic and got nowhere. Even then, some people believed he was serious.
- The first chapter of Everlot, by Neal Shusterman. I think he wants to tell us to wear our seat belts...
- Sheri S. Tepper's books tend to have a rain of hardline eco-feminist anvils; especially The Gate to Women's Country and The Revenants. Along with the pervasive eco-feminism, some of her work, such as the Arbai trilogy, drops the occasional anti-religion — specifically, anti-Mormon — anvil.
- Pretty much everything written by Robert H. Heinlein is guaranteed to be sprinkled liberally with anvils; although many critics disagree on what some of those anvils actually are. His personal philosophy is pretty well laid out in his first, but unpublished prior to his death, novel For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs; as well as the letters collected in Grumbles from the Grave. He admitted to pandering to cultural restrictions in order to get his work published, so his books are often an odd combination of Anvilicious, and GettingCrapPastTheRadar; particularly with regard to his opinions on homosexuality and sex in general.
- The Redwall series says, "Vermin are bad." Mice, shrews, otters, squirrels, rabbits, watervoles, badgers and hares are good. Rats, foxes, stoats, weasels, frogs and lizards are evil. OK, a lot of fantasy has clearly distinguished good and evil races, but attention is frequently drawn to the distinction and every time the lines are flirted with in Redwall books, the character dies soon after. Note,the reason vermin are bad- they lie, steal and murder- make no sense in a real world setting.
- Artemis Fowl (the first book)rams "Humans are destroying the earth." down your throat, with everything from blatant statements to subtle hints. While this is championed by vegetarian fairy protagonist Holly Short who plays with dolphins and hates what humans have done to the Earth, but even the mostly amoral criminal protagonist Artemis Fowl hates whaling and eats organic food. Later books are marginally more subtle. (ie. Artemis killing the last silky furred lemur for money, then finding it contained the only cure to his mother's disease.)
- The Anita Blake books 10-13: "It's OK to have sex outside of marriage. In fact, homosexuality, polygamy, one-night-stands and BDSM are also totally cool, as long as everyone consents. So don't spend hours worrying about your virtue when someone's life depends on you having sex in the next half hour." Anita spends three books angsting over this (and a couple more about the first bit), when the intended answer is obvious. It makes sense given her Catholic background, but is extremely irritating.
Live Action TV
- Literally just about every sitcom or drama since 1970 has had at least one "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" episode. Many have had several.
- Full House invariably ended in someone learning a lesson.
- Boy Meets World had many anvilicious aesops, particularly of the Cant Get Away With Nuthin variety. Perhaps it was the force of all those anvils that led the main character to be so unhinged in the final seasons.
- Virtually anything written by Ben Elton feels the distinct need to tell rather than show.
- Pick an episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Surprisingly, the Animated Adaptation is far less so. The format allowed a lot more outrageous situations, which actually make the moral of each episode make some sort of sense.
- The Star Trek episode "Let That be Your Last Battlefield", concerning a race where people who were black-skinned on the left side of their face and white-skinned on the right, were persecuted by the people who were white on the left and black on the right. Anviltastic!
- Similarly, a Star Trek Enterprise episode was such an Anvilicious AIDS parable that they went and plugged an AIDS website after the episode. To be fair, UPN made all of their shows do Anvilicious AIDS-related episodes as part of an Viacom HIV awareness campaign in 2003. So Enterprise was not alone...
- Then there was the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone," which went anvilicious against the capitalists of the era on its way to demonstrating through Picard's actions that what Kirk did in the corresponding TOS episode was wrong. Gets Funny Aneurysm Moments from later events; Data proudly announces that the Federation has no television—but it will eventually come out that holodecks are, in their way, worse.
- The Star Trek novel "Ship of the Line" by Diane Carey has a few Take Thats to this Anvil-happy episode. Will Riker argues with Morgan Bateson, who is from 90 years before TNG. When Riker says the Picard line "We strive to better ourselves," Bateson snaps back "Who do you think you're 'better' than?" Bateson points out the arrogance of 24th Century Starfleet members. Picard also gains new appreciation of Jim Kirk through some interactive historical holodeck programs, leading to a CMOA against Gul Madred.
- Don't forget the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Symbiosis," where Species A is saving Species B from a deadly virus that hasn't actually existed in centuries by selling them space crack, and we learn that doing drugs is bad. It even includes a bonus speech to Wesley about just why drugs are bad.
- Speech hilarously taken out of context on YTMND, where it appears Tasha appreciates drugs.
- Tasha Yar is on record as having cussed out the rest of the crew for having lived perfect lives in the Federation. She grew up on a planet that wasn't a part of the Federation, and thus she had to fight to survive. Tasha probably appreciated drugs repeatedly before joining star fleet.
- What Yar's speech ever more heavy-handed was that it had nothing to do with Species B's situation. They thought it was necessary treatment for a disease: after all, every time anyone stopped taking the drug they'd get sick, after all, addictive drugs come with withdrawal symptoms. Recreational use this was not.
- Another TNG episode: In the fourth season "Drumhead", we get an entire episode focused on an overzealous starfleet admiral going on a witch hunt in the Enterprise to find an accomplice of a spy working for the Romulans, and thereby accusing an innocent crewman who has the misfortune of being the grandson of a Romulan as well as Picard himself. A blatant Aesop against those same witchhunts.
- This anvil was softened by the revelation that the admiral was right about one of his suspicions. His method of addressing the problem would have been disastrous, though.
- Norman Lear practically pioneered the trope for American prime-time TV. All In The Family, Maude, Good Times, Sanford And Son, One Day At A Time, and The Jeffersons were all thick with Anvilicious plots and Points To Be Made. So were his later series, but by then people had become less tolerant of his anvils. Then again, All In The Family, Sanford And Son, and The Jeffersons had highly sympathetic bigots, which lightened the intended anvils in those series.
- The New Zealand TV soap Shortland Street does this all the time.
- The 1998 episode in which Jenny Harrison appeared on a television show to rant about the poor state of the New Zealand health service is probably the most anvilicious scene of Shortland Street in its 16 year history, though to be fair it was also Truth In Television.
- You can include the entire Degrassi franchise in this, the result of creator Linda Schuyler trying to make a series that would showcase the effects of certain issues on children. Famous examples of Anvilicious behaviour in the franchise include Dwayne having to deal with AIDS and Shane (a.k.a. "Canada's national baby daddy") dropping acid and jumping off a bridge in Degrassi High, and Manny getting an abortion in 'Degrassi The Next Generation''.
- So someone jumps off a bridge and/or has an abortion every episode?
- J Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame was very blunt in how he much he hated children or anything cute that would supposedly ruin the show, evident by how they were all instantly killed in quite jarring ways. Even a teddy bear given to him as a joke. To be fair, the children shown generally last for at least most of the episode that they appear in before dying in a suitably dramatic manner, and two of them survived In The Beginning's framing story intact.
- "Green Is Universal", a concept so heavy-handed and self-righteous that it couldn't be contained on just one network. Indeed, this bi-yearly theme appears on every cable and broadcast channel owned by NBC. NBC in turn is owned by General Electric, a polluter so massive and frightening that even Captain Planet would fear to confront it. The irony is so thick and juicy that you could cut it with a steak knife.
- Bonus points awarded for extending it to, of all things, their sports casting when they thought it was a good idea to make the guys sit around in the studio with their lights off.
- Except that they paid whatever miniscule environmental benefit aaaaaaallllllll back, with MASSIVE interest, by flying to the Arctic to film a promo. Unless they faked it (the reporter's breath has no fog), in which case they're scamming the audience.
- Lampshaded in the 30 Rock episode "Greenzo," where David Schwimmer is a mascot who tries to put a positive spin on GE's corporate practices.
- General Electric stands to make a huge profit off of manufacturing "Green" products. Thus, they are promoting their own products by being green.
- The "Pangs" episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, featuring a Native American ghost who showed up and started killing people, and the main characters argued back and forth whether it was right to stop it because the natives had their land taken away from them.
- The Doctor Who Season 4 finale has Daleks. Speaking German. AT
NUREMBERG NÜRNBERG! Just in case you forgot they were based on Nazis. It's meant to be funny more than anything else, but still.
- Also of note is "The Two Doctors". Eating meat is as bad as electrocuting a human alive!
- I'm sorry, I think you missed it: 'eating meat is a death sentence for someone'.
- The Radio drama "The Last" is ridiculously anvilicious in it's anti-war message. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with statements like "Money that should have went to space exploration went to develop more weapons" and "She should have known dropping bombs is wrong, that war is wrong".
- The years that Andrew Cartmel was script editor (1987-1989) also had a tendency to be a bit on-the-nose about how 'right-on' the show was.
- 24 often runs afoul of this, whenever the show is focused on anything other than Jack Bauer kicking ass. Yes, thank you for introducing a preachy side character, but we know not all Muslims are terrorists, thanks.
- Twenty Four also has to drill into everyones head how torture is fine and could save lives because it always, ALWAYS works. People who against torture are obviously lawful stupid and are getting in the way of saving lives.
- The (very short-lived) Weird Al Show, thanks to a rampaging case of Executive Meddling, had one specific lesson for each episode to teach, and that lesson was mercilessly repeated to the point of drawing attention to it in voice-overs before each commercial break. Half of the enjoyment of the DVD release comes from the scathing commentary of Al and others on the anvilicious display of insipid points.
- Now And Again lasted only one season but it still had its own offender, "There Are No Words", about how good it is to read (and write). It features characters who comment at length about their affection for books, and an obligatory book-burning scene.
- Supernatural: "Life sucks, get a helmet."
- Eleventh Hour: The episode with the Flesh Eating STD.
- The Twilight Zone: Several episodes written by Rod Serling come off as terribly heavy-handed today ("The Gift" is a particularly egregious example, made worse by casting with Unfortunate Implications)— but given that Serling created the show due to Executive Meddling with his more socially conscious scripts (the story about his script based on the lynching of Emmett Till is a doozy), it may just be that one generation's subversive social commentary is the next generation's dropped anvil.
- It's easy to forget that Emmett Till's funeral was recent at the time of the script, and that having a righteous black man surrounded by corrupt racists was, well, so out of the ordinary that I'm amazed it saw air.
- While the cable anthology horror series Masters Of Horror tends toward good old-fashioned gore and nudity, one first season story, Homecoming directed by Joe Dante of Gremlins and The Howling fame, is anvilicious to the extreme. For no adequately explored reason, soldiers killed in Iraq rise from their graves as shambling zombies. These zombies don't want to eat us - they just want... to vote... against the president (never named but obviously Bush). The main characters in the story are fictional equivalents of real world conservative figures - Karl Rove renamed Kurt Rand (but played by the really quite likeable Robert Picardo) and Ann Coulter renamed Jane Cleaver, among others. When the zombies swing public opinion against the president and the election goes against him, wonky voting machines are called into action to throw the vote... in Ohio and Florida, natch. Of course, the zombies won't stand for this, and suddenly all of America's war dead - both Gulf Wars, Vietnam, Korea, and even the World Wars are rising from their graves to get revenge. Sure, sure, Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped, but even this left-wing troper was cringing by the end of it.
- What makes this especially egregious is that the conservatives are played to a man as lightweight hypocrites, rather than a single one of them actually having an honest, core belief. This troper is a diehard liberal, but it's ludicrous to paint this so simply.
- Star Trek the original series, which was unique for its era in that it was likely the only show in which no one smoked. Gene Rodenberry had originally cast Majel Barrett as the second in command of the Enterprise, a feminist first for the time, but was put under pressure by his producers to put cigarettes into the show. He refused, so they gave him the ultimatum, cigarettes or Majel. Majel did finally make it in in a more traditional role as Nurse Chapel.
- Stargate Atlantis drops an anvil by having Rodney McKay say that the real solution to global warming is "everyone doing their part". Then it goes Space Whale Aesop.
- Rodney "six planets and counting" McKay? And isn't one of the big lines for Green stuff about how there's only one planet available? I'm all for protecting the planet but considering how many of them seem to explode on this show we might be safer with CO 2 and shit rather than McKay.
- The Secret Lifeofthe American Teenager does this this on an episode-to-episode basis about sex, and a scene-to-scene basis for the moral of the episode.
"Just because you're having a baby together doesn't mean you two are right for each other"
"You shouldn't be with Ricky just because you're having his baby."
"The parents of a baby aren't the people who created the baby, but the people who take care of it."
...etc.
- The final scene of the final episode of the remake of Battlestar Galactica is a ridiculously anvilicious message about the dangers of overdeveloping modern robotics. Or maybe "Treat your creations with respect", or "do not enslave artifical lifeforms".
- Apparently it was just meant to emphasize one of the main themes of the show about not treating any intelligent lifeforms differently and, presumably, that we were getting there soon so we had better remember that. The inclusion of the robot montage made it seem more like 'Robots are dangerous - let's stop them now'. The earlier part of the scene had two head characters musing anviliciously about how we were repeating negative societal aspects including commercialism among other worse things (apparently they had no problem with slavery and so on in the thousands of years before hand) saying in a weirdly spoken tone just to make it clear we are the ones being told 'will it happen again?'
- The characters in The West Wing display at times a tendency to really try and hammer the point they're trying to make home.
Music
- Parodied in the Weird Al Yankovic song "Don't Download This Song." "Cuz you start out stealing songs/Then you're robbing liquor stores/and selling crack and running over school kids with your car."
- "Green Christmas", a song on You Tube. It is very Anvilcious about its environmental message and has nothing to do with Christmas. I believe the word 'Christmas' was put in there as a form of Wolverine Publicity.
- Not to be confused with "Green Chri$tma$", an anvilly-but-funny swipe at Christmas commercialization by humorist and ad man Stan Freberg.
- Compare the last, joke line of Relient K's I'm Getting Nuttin For Christmas: "Well I'm getting nuttin' for Christmas because I contributed to the green-house effect which melts the Polar Ice Caps which melts the North Pole where Santa Clause lives. He's mad. Pbbthh!"
- "Green Blues", an anti pollution song.
- If you listen carefully to Beyonce's "If I Was A Boy", you can hear that she pauses before the words "better man" just so the loud thud sounds from impacting anvils don't drown out the lyrics.
- The 70's song I've Never Been to Me dropped a pretty anti-feminist anvil that basically boiled down to "sure, you might think you have a great life being independent, career-minded, free spirited and sexually uninhibited, but you won't be truly happy and fulfilled until you settle back into your traditional roles of wife and mother."
- Some bands are Anvilicious in their entirety, especially where politics are concerned. I'm look at you, Rage Against The Machine, and System Of A Down.
Theater
- The truly Anvilicious narrator in Blood Brothers not only shows up to highlight every moment of foreshadowing in the musical, but also appears at the end to let any terminally inattentive audience members know what the message was.
- Parodied/played for laughs in Avenue Q. "The Money Song" starts with an over-the-top Anvilicious moral on charity and being generous... then halfway through the song, everybody runs into the audience asking for money.
- The Toxic Avenger, based on the campy movie of the same name, could be a hilarious hour of nothing but New Jersey jokes, which it is in some places, but eventually it gets bogged down by its need to hammer "Pollution BAD!" into the audience. Emphasis on hammer.
Video Games
- RuneScape recently made an Anvilicious quest about global warming, to the extent that the end of civilization was predicted because of one coal power plant.
- And let's not forget the whole plot (and especially the ending) of Chibi Robo: Park Patrol...
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is often depicted as this, mostly depending on whether or not one buys into the Alternate Character Interpretation. If one does, then congratulations, you have a Anvilicious Wall Banger. If one does not, then it might wind up so because it's a moral that heavy gamers are apt to reject - "Excessive escapism is bad for you".
- Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core does this a lot, with Angeal in particular. "DREAMS AND HONOR!"
- "Everyone has a right to life!"
- Not to mention racism, genocide and slavery are all bad, I did not know that.
- Let the record show that the actual anvil dropped was about racism rather than the obvious. It was more a sense of "It's wrong to commit genocide!"
- Also, from Richter: Courage is the Magic that turns Dreams into Reality. Courage is the Magic that turns dreams into reality. Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality. OK, it's mainly Emil that's doing this to snap himself out of Non Action Guy mode, but it's still annoying.
- No one said Tales of Hearts was subtle. On the plus side, it's a good way to learn the Japanese words for feelings, warmth, connections, and bonds. Or rather, have them pounded into your head right next to "Spiria" and "Soma Link". Did we mention you should tell the people close to you about your feelings?
- World Of Warcraft recently got Anvilicious with the starting quests for death knights. Walking through the streets of your faction's main city with guards throwing rotten fruit and spitting on you because you look like you belong to the Scourge? Does This Remind You Of Anything?
- The reason you look like one of the scourge, it's because like ten minutes ago you were one of them. Those people have every reason hate you and throwing food doesn't cover it by a long shot. Perhaps the game should remind the player even more often than it already does, that while the (death) Knights of the Ebon Blade now are fighting for the "right" side they are still disgusting no-morals undead abominations.
- Only guards of your capital city (Orgrimmar/Stormwind) will treat you like this. Normally the Death Knights are supposed to speak to their faction leader to be accepted as a member of the Horde/Alliance, but all this quest really does is get the guards of your capital city to stop harassing you. It is not unheard of for people to skip this quest entirely for the sheer novelty.
- Ace Combat 5, a game focused on air combat with an awesome soundtrack and lots of explosions, features a trio of wingmen for the player character whom hate war, often to the point of giving pacifistic rants in the middle of missions where they are assisting the player in killing dozens, if not hundreds, of enemy airmen, sailors, and soldiers.
- Eternal Sonata is extremely guilty of this in the ending. All the characters, one at a time, stand in front of a black screen and speak directly to the player and blatantly spell out the ideas and concepts that they struggled with during the entire storyline and spell out some of the more subtle notions like products that make life easier but are actually quite dangerous and if human beings are the masters of creation or the masters of destruction.
- Metal Gear Solid had a character in it whose primary purpose was to lecture the player about how nuclear weapons were bad with her endless list of statistics and Wangsty backstory. Even after beating the game, you'd see a screen giving the number of ICBMs in the world as of the version's release.
- Persona 4. Near the end, the protagonist's adorable little sister will die, and the player is given the option to either execute the person responsible for that or spare him. If you execute him, nothing happens. If you choose to spare him, however, the protagonist's sister miraculously comes back to life without much in the way of explanation. It later turns out the man is actually innocent, but there's no causal relation whatsoever between the execution and the revival or lack thereof.
- In Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar Games reminds the player that American conservatives are absolutely evil at just about every oppurtunity possible. It's best summed up by the in-game TV show "Republican Space Rangers".
Web Comics
- Pastel Defender Heliotrope was blatantly banging the readers over the head with ideas of the oppression of women and sexual identities and evils of religion...when it bothered to make sense.
- Then, just to make sure ALL the bases were covered, JDR reveals in the ending that the entire thing was started because some robots wanted to ask permission to do I'm-not-sure-what but no one was around to ask. Just to make sure that she's striking out against anti-piracy legislation in the most Anvilicious and crazy way possible.
- Unicorn Jelly by the same author.
- This Nodwick storyline. Yes, Mr. Williams, we all know Microsoft is doing all that. Stop rubbing it in and switch to ReactOS already!
- El Goonish Shive has a particularly painful anvil dropped in an oddly familiar explanation of how religion works on the Uryuom homeworld.
- Irregular Webcomic decide to drop the anvil of Be Careful What You Wish For in this strip. Intentionally, with the link to this page.
- Dominic Deegan drops numerous anvils of "intolerance is bad!". We know this because everyone who acts intolerantly is usually portrayed as irredeemably evil, not to mention the fact that something horrible will probably happen to them before the end of the arc.
- The Comics I Don't Understand site has a special tag for anvilicious comics.
Western Animation
- Family Guy delivers its many, many messages with all the subtlety of a ten-pound sledgehammer. You could probably make a drinking game out of how many times the show makes a poorly veiled Take That against something (take two shots when they're making jabs at Republicans or women). This has unfortunately affected the show's quality, where one joke was pretty much the characters saying "Laura Bush killed a guy." over and over again. Furthermore, Brian has changed from being the straight man and witty intellectual to becoming basically a vehicle for Seth Mc Farlane to deliver his annoying (even to this leftie) socially liberal, anti corporate agenda. It reached a new low in a recent episode, in which Stewie steals a Nazi's uniform after traveling back in time, and a McCain-Palin campaign button is attached to the uniform.
- And let's not forget the episode where Meg finds religion and Brian is outed as an atheist. Judging from the reactions on Dethroning Moment Of Suck, anvilicious may be an understatement for that one.
- "One Beer", a mini-episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, does a send-up of heavy-handed Cant Get Away With Nuthin cartoons about the dangers of underage drinking. They have a can of beer. Hampton notes they usually wouldn't touch such a thing. Buster replies that they have to act out of character for the plot to work. The single can of beer (split between Buster, Hampton, and Plucky, which means each got about four ounces) puts them into a foggy dreamland, in which they eventually drive a car off a cliff and die. Not surprisingly, the executives eventually refused to reair the episode, because they felt it was so heavy handed that it came off as sarcastic.
- Yes, Transformers Animated writing staff, we get that the Autobot High Command is the Bush Admistration and that fearmongering and promoting a Witch Hunt is bad. Enough already.
- Where's Peter Cullen telling them "Freedom is the Right of All sentient beings"
- Spoofed mercilessly in a "U.S. Acres" short from Garfield And Friends. Roy got a job on "The Buddy Bears", an obnoxiously cheerful kids' Show Within A Show, where part of his role as "Big Bad Buddy Bird" was to have sixteen-ton safes dropped on his head for not agreeing with the singing, dancing ursines. The quite literally anvilicious moral, according to the Buddy Bears: "Always go along with the group, or someone may drop a sixteen-ton safe on you."
- It could be said that the premise of Captain Planet And The Planeteers was anvilicious. A group of eco superheroes who command the powers of nature to fight evil polluters. Yup, bad guys who don't produce anything; just pollute. Though in its defense, if they had written it as a cyberpunk story about a bunch of eco-terrorists fighting against the overwhelming power of the corporate menace, it wouldn't exactly have been able to appeal to children now would it? That's the lesson here: if it's U.S. children's television, it must make use of anvilicious aesops. Removing them makes the show no longer acceptable for children!
- That said, Captain Planet as a Shadowrun campaign would be AWESOME.
- I think it would rather fit Werewolf: The Apocalypse
- Sometimes happens in South Park, such as in one episode where a character explains to another character about how there is no global warming, climaxing with "What are you, a retard?"
- Each episode in which the denouement dialogue begins with, "You know, I learned something today..."
- Another episode brutally parodied this trope. Stan, Kyle and Kenny attempt to illegally download songs off the Internet for free. They download one song and almost instantly, an entire FBI squad busts into the house, holds the kids at gunpoint and arrests them. This was also a Reef Blower. When Stan asks what's wrong with downloading music, the officer responds that an artist will have to buy a slightly smaller island for his kid, or wait a few days before buying a gold plated swimming pool.
- In the episode "Canada on Strike!" they brutally attacked the Writers' Guild of America strike with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the knee. Given the fact that Parker and Stone seem to hate everything that anyone else approves of, this isn't particularly surprising.
- Practically every episode of The Proud Family, with its politically correct suburban upper-middle-class conservative African-American family learning some lesson, often concerning race relations.
- The show drops the anvil especially hard in the episode "EZ Jackster". The scriptwriters manage to slam The Matrix movies (the "bad kid" is black, named Morpheus, and dressed like Morpheus did in the movies) and hit the audience over the head with a story about how illegally downloading music and spending time online is bad, and nice kids don't do it. Oh, and it visually equates illicit filesharing to drug abuse. Seriously.
- It also routinely dishes out "feminism is bad, and even if you try to do what the boys do, you'll fail anyway." Check out the football episode.
- Parodied on the Animaniacs cartoon, where the final sequence to many episodes was the "Wheel of Morality", a Big 6 style wheel the characters would spin to randomly determine the moral of the episode in a parody of And Knowing Is Half The Battle. ("Wheel of Morality, turn turn turn, tell us the lesson we should learn!") One short played up the randomness and gameshow / gambling aspect by having the result be a prize in the form of a free vacation.
- What makes this especially amusing is that the creative team on the show was pressured to include lessons in the format. The above was only one response, while another, vastly more scathing one has Slappy Squirrel go through plastic surgery to start her career over... so she can make cartoons more violent, just like they used to be.
- Does anyone else remember the Pound Puppies cartoon? It was so bad that at one point, the adult puppies (?) tell one of the child puppies (?!) a story about how a kid lying about breaking a vase causes the death of everyone they know and the destruction of their whole fantasy world. Kind of harsh.
- Cartoon All Stars To The Rescue uses healthy doses of Narm and Nightmare Fuel to create a special so Anvilicious that it may very well be a form of brainwashing. The show put the drug addict kid through what can only be described as a Cartoon Carnival of Souls as part of their Drugs Are Bad argument.
- He Man And The Masters Of The Universe had 'What moral did we learn in this episode?' segments at the end of each episode.
- One common complaint of the Futurama episode, "I Dated a Robot", is the strong anti-file sharing sentiment that seems to be pervasive through most of the episode. ("And Nappster says illegal copies never hurt anybody!") At least they had the decency to lace it with copious amounts of comedy.
- GI Joe taught us all that knowing is half the battle. So now you know. The other half? Blowing shit up.
- In later years, Popeye cartoons were sometimes used as a way to get kids to eat their vegetables, particularly spinach, as the title character uses it as a Super Serum. Sometimes, it worked.
- Back in the old SEGA Genesis days, Sonic's cartoon series ended occasional episodes with a "Sonic Says" section which gave kids good advice.
- The episode "Grande Size Me" in Kim Possible focused on how it's better eating healthy food than fast food. Cue a Super Size Me parody, Incredible Hulk transformation and Breaking The Fourth Wall. Lampshaded and played for laughs at the end of the episode where Ron gives a speech to the viewer about how mutating your DNA is bad, and you should never do it.
- Danny Phantom - In one episode the main character cheated on a test. So what happened? Did he get detention? Extra chores? Well, his entire family along with his two friends and teacher die, Danny's human self is slaughtered soon after and a Vlad/Danny Phantom hybrid takes over the future where he kills (you assume) ALMOST EVERYONE ON THE ENTIRE PLANET. Considering that these are the same guys who created the genre savvy Fairly Oddparents this comes off as a complete Ass Pull and full of Narm. In fairness to the creators, it does so via a chain of events that would confuse even Rube Goldberg. (And even though it apparently happens in the "true" timeline, it seems like it only does through evil, future Danny's intervention. This is why time travel gives us headaches. Some took that episode to mean "Everybody deserves a second chance, especially the good guys!"
- Of course, it doesn't help that the only reason everyone Danny knew died was that Mr. Lancer somehow became momentarily psychic. Because he believed that Danny (and ONLY Danny) stole the test answers. He doesn't know of Danny's powers, and the test answers were in a briefcase that was handcuffed to him. Said briefcase was unopened when the answers were stolen, so he blamed him because... Otherwise there'd be no show.
- The Polar Express makes sure that no one misses its religious message. The plot revolves around a boy who is tortured by doubts of Santa Claus, who is shown to be like a god to everyone at the north pole. The boy is a stereotypical woobie just because "Christmas doesn't work for him." Everyone who doesn't believe in Santa is annoying, scary, or both and the most spiritual of the kids apparently is the best leader... yes, we got the message.
- The Noodles the Rabbit segments of British dark animated comedy show Monkey Dust combine a scientist describing horrific animal experimentation to an uncaring executive over sad piano music and the experimental rabbit acting like Bugs Bunny. Naturally, the final segment shown ends with the scientist being killed by a falling anvil.
Magazines
- That article in The Onion about more people learning Klingon than a Native American language.
- Oh wow. I'm not even a Trekkie and that really felt like a sucker punch to my sense of morality. There's the plain fact that Wikipedia has more articles and information about most popular fiction than about anything real and not as sexy/cool.
|
|
