Big Lipped Alligator Moment - Television Tropes & Idioms

All Dogs Go To Heaven includes, out of ruttin' nowhere, a bizarre and nonsensical musical number that derails the plot right near the end of the film. The two main characters fall into a cave where they are brought by a Wacky Wayside Tribe to meet their leader, an unnamed Big Lipped Alligator who breaks into an Esther Williams tribute. While he does materialize just as randomly again to eat the antagonist, even his carrying the characters home can't be counted as furthering the plot. The only reason they fell into the sewer to begin with (which happened when a floor gave way for no readily apparent reason) was to have this sequence. If returning to the surface had provided an obstacle for them, that might have furthered the plot. Taking them back just means that it would be even easier to remove the sequence entirely without changing the story. The scene also seemingly violates the rules of the movie: animals can only speak to members of their own species, with Anne Marie being the only being who can communicate with everyone. Yet the Gator and Charlie can share a cross species musical number. This only adds to the sequence being completely out of place in the film. That said, nobody mentions him or his -er- very flamboyant Chanson Engagement ever again.

Close Trope Namer

Legend Of Galactic Heroes, of all things, manages to get one in early in its second season, in the form of a bizarre sequence where Reinhard and Kircheis turn into angels and fly away into the sunset. It lasts all of five seconds, comes out of nowhere right during the middle of another character's speech, and has absolutely no bearing on the plot at hand (Reinhard and Kircheis both remain firmly on and in the latter's case, in the ground afterwords).
- Worth noting that this is not actually something that happened. It was the illustration of a metaphor about their relationship, which is what Annerose was talking about. The "wings" metaphor recurs now and then throughout the series, though never again accompanied by the weird-as-hell imagery.
- In the third season, we cut to a scene of Dusty in a fancy pirate outfit complete with a pirate hat with a large feather and a hook hand. We never see this outfit again. Ever. And no one mentions it.
In the Pokemon anime, Ash gets turned into a Pikachu by a magic spell that was supposed to make him capable of understanding what they say (which, oddly, it doesn't. He still talks normally in that state). Lasting the incredible length of the last 3 minutes of the episode and the first 3 seconds of the next - at which point it wears off. Totally irrelevant to the show's plot, and after it wears off? You guessed it, never mentioned again.
- The episode "Island of the Giant Pokemon" features a scene where, after having endured an encounter with a giant mechanical Rhydon, Ash's Pokemon and Team Rocket's Pokemon are suddenly crying and drinking away their troubles at a sushi bar that's attended by a Slowpoke. The next morning they wake up in a completely different area and the Slowpoke sushi bar is never explained or referenced again.
- While the sushi bar in the middle of nowhere is kind of unbelievable, it's quite plausible that they ending up going on a drunken bender, and later woke up with no memory of the previous night.
- Is it just be, or is the idea of Ash's and Team Rocket's Pokemon off their faces on shots the best idea never seen on TV?
The manga Qwan derailed itself at the climax of its plot to transport the hero to a strange place full of people obsessed with their own hair and beards. This also happened close to the end of the third volume and the next volume still isn't out yet, almost pushing this into Gainax Ending territory.
At one point in the manga Beelzebub, a side panel is used to explain a slightly obscure term one of the characters uses. This explanation is placed over an image of a teddy bear at a bar, with a footnote saying "This picture has no relevance what-so-ever."
- Kuma-chan strikes again later on, for absolutely no reason this time, when instead if sitting at a bar it's taking a bubble bath.
The noodle scene in the Bleach anime. Yoruichi eats food for a whole minute...and that's it. She just eats for one minute, and extremely quickly too. Notable in that the same scene in the manga took up all of one page.
- This is like a result of Adaptation Decay: the animators saw the scene in the manga, decided it was pretty funny and made it into an Overly Long Gag...that lasted about 30 seconds too long.
- Notice that Yoruichi eats a lot more in the anime than she does in the manga.
This disco zombie dance number in One Piece. There is no lead up beyond zombies shuffling to a mansion carrying a disco ball, and no mention of it ever made again, though the dance hall is mentioned as a possible location for a wedding reception later in a one-off gag.
- The entire arc is a play on Michael Jackson's songs and videos - the name Thriller Bark (Thriller), Brook the skeleton's 45-degree angle pose joke (Smooth Criminal), and the aforementioned dancing zombies (disco dancing, but sadly not the music). But yes, it's a throwaway joke.
  - The dance sequence was originally intended to be a more direct parody of Thriller (with similar music and dance moves) but someone in the legal department got worried about the potential for a lawsuit so the bit was changed to a far more generic number, which makes the whole thing seem random and out-of-place.
  - Speaking of which, try to forget for a moment that Michael Jackson's Thriller is a music video, and then think about the scene where MJ starts dancing with the zombies.
In a movie that's already one hell of a Mind Screw, the brief moment in the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie when the video of Nanami the cow is put in by the shadow girls manages to be one of these, coming right after a dramatic and horrifying scene, and of course never being mentioned again. Of course, according to Kunihiko Ikuhara, this was intentional. He's just that sort of guy.
The very first scene in Transformers Victory - in a Wild West town populated by Transformers, a pair of Decepticons arrive and are driven off by Star Saber, who seems to be a gunslinger, in front of a Christian church. This has nothing to do with the plot, and is never mentioned in any context throughout the show.
Axis Powers Hetalia's 18th episode. The Axis and Allies are fighting, and the giant Godzilla-sized embodiment of Roma Antiqua just rose from the...sea...and... just watch...
- Although this one is mentioned again in episode 32, by Roma Antiqua himself to Germany.
Azumanga Daioh certainly seems to be full of Big Lipped Alligator Moments, too many to list, but among which include "one life one meeting", the new year's dream sequences, and the kitchen knife incident with Osaka, particularly in the anime when it cuts to Tomo splattering ketchup onto some eggs. But then again, many fans consider the presence of these Big Lipped Alligator Moments part of the show's charm.
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children seems to start with one of these. After a bit of introductory text, the very first scene is a bunch of strange red furry animals running up a cliff overlooking a ruined city in a scene that seems more at home in the Lion King than this movie. Of course, it's only a BLAM in the context of the movie, since it's a shot-for-shot rerendering of the last cutscene of Final Fantasy VII itself (and in that context it was more of a Gainax Ending). But without that context, a new viewer will have no idea what it has to do with the movie.
- Presumably, Square Enix assumed that pretty much everyone watching Advent Children would have already played through Final Fantasy VII; given that the game was almost a decade old by the time of the movie's release and considered an iconic "must-play" game almost from the moment of its release, that was probably a safe assumption.
There is an early episode of Digimon Adventure 02 that, although comedy-driven and not supposed to be taken seriously, had a pretty jarring scene. Simply putting, V-Mon all of a sudden admits having romantic feelings for Tailmon and decides to train hard to evolve and impress her. It's a very strange scene, mainly because in the Digimon series (especially the Adventure continuity) almost no Digimon ever show romantic affection for other species of Digimon. And of course, this affection was never even hinted before, and it's never mentioned later.
As pointed out by the guys at Deconstructing Comics, in the original Ghost In The Shell manga the plot is abruptly interrupted by several pages of a lesbian sex scene that ends equally abruptly. This is not only never brought up again, but the rest of the manga is fairly prudish compared to Shirow's later work. Besides being basically several pages of porn in an era when manga was still a new art form in the US and seen as a kid's medium, it was seen as pointless enough that most early editions of the book left it out completely (besides the fact that it would have never gotten past the censors).
- A Cyberspace lesbian threesome. When we cut back to the participants, they are in the real world, on seperate beds and couches, and fully clothed. If we ever perfect that technology, our species is doomed.
In the Evangelion Gag Dub Evangelion: ReDeath, Pikachu attacks NERV. However, the following scene acts like an AMV for Pokemon set to the AC/DC song "Big Balls", and there's not much of a focus on Pikachu, but rather James, another character from Pokemon. After the "AMV" is done, ANOTHER random anime is introduced- Tenchi Muyo. The cast of Tenchi Muyo is quickly killed off by Pikachu, and the plot returns. ...yeaaah...
Mahou Sensei Negima's infamous furo Skinship Grope scene is a single chapter that cheerfully starts with the announcement that sure, we're all worried about the captured Asuna and all, but we need something lighthearted! Cue about fifteen pages of some random girl groping the cast in the bath and their retaliation. This is never mentioned again.

Close Anime and Manga

Marvel Zombies 3 contains a scene where a superhero named Captain Mexica (who comes from an alternate timeline where the Aztec empire never fell) becomes infected and eats people, as he was a specimen collected for Earth-616. He is eventually cut in half by Machine Man. Of course, no one ever discusses him before or after his appearances.
Crisis Crossover events that affect unrelated comic series will often result in these for readers of those periphery titles. A particularly egregious example was in the second arc of New Thunderbolts, when the story gets interrupted in the middle of a battle by House of M so that the series can shift to a story in another reality that is loosely connected to the actual series only by thematic similarities. The recap page of the next issue has the arc's villain, the Purple Man (who had thus far been describing himself as a writer) complaining that his story was interrupted by some bizarre intrusion that had nothing to do with what he had planned.
Just as Operation: Zero Tolerance was starting in the X-Men books, Jeans is briefly K Oed... the begining of the next issue shows her meeting with Iron Man (who, along with half of the Marvel Universe, was presumed dead but had actually been sucked into a new universe). Before either of them can secure any answers, Jean is pulled back to Marvel 616 proper and this scene is never mentioned again. Word Of God says this scene (and a few other power freak-outs Jean experienced) was supposed to have more relevance, but they dropped the plot point completely after the other Heroes returned.

Close Comic Books

In the animated film Hoodwinked, each of four main characters describes what they saw to the investigator. Three of the stories fit together quite intelligently, like puzzle pieces, but the Lumberjack's tale is a BLAM. It bears very little relation to the other characters until the end, and up to that point is largely about selling Schnitzel from an ice-cream truck. While singing and dancing.
The deranged tunnel scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory qualifies for this trope. Naturally, it's the film's most famous scene.
- This also shows how a BLAM event is dependent on the direction of the story. Wonka is always quirky and offbeat, but for the most part everything makes its own level of sense until they enter that tunnel...
The Dancing Fire Gang from Labyrinth, though there is a very small reference to them earlier in the film and another in the finale. They still make no major impact on the plot, as the Nostalgia Chick points out here.
The obscure film The Curse Of The Cannibal Confederates (a.k.a. The Curse of the Screaming Dead) has an example. To quote the Agony Booth recap:
(After a scene where one character goes ballistic for no reason whatsoever and roughhouses another character) "Wait, how did Bill get over there all of a sudden? Okay, let's consider what we just saw. Mel attacked Bill in a scene which A) had very little motivation, B) made no sense, C) will never be referred to again, D) breaks continuity with the scene immediately following, and E) wasn't even in focus. It appears (Tony) Malanowski didn't realize that just because you film something doesn't mean you have to put it in the movie."
There's a scene in Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster in which a giant condor randomly attacks Godzilla, and Godzilla kills it. It's never mentioned in the film why the condor even attacked in the first place or anything like that. It's just... there.
- Likewise, there's Hedorah's pointless ten-second cameo in Godzilla: Final Wars. He's just randomly in some city before Godzilla kills him and it's NEVER explained why he's even there in the first place or even if he's being controlled by the evil aliens.
- Speaking of Hedorah, the weird-as-hell film Godzilla VS The Smog Monsters is chock full of BLAM. These include a scene where a guy hallucinates everyone has a fish-head, the weird animation sequences, but, by far, the most famous example is when Godzilla uses his own thermonuclear breath to fly... and he never does it again in any other film.
- Just in case that movie wasn't weird enough, the canonical English title is actually Godzilla vs. Smog Monster. There's no "the".
In Teen Witch, there are several scenes of a group of teenagers who start rapping for no reason. At one point, the main character's best friend raps off against them. These scenes have no influence on the plot and don't even reference each other within them. They have proven to be a prime cut of Snark Bait, however, thanks to Memetic Mutation.
- Also: "I! Like! BOYS!"
At the end of the Japanese version of Frankenstein Conquers the World (does anyone expect this sentence to end well?) the monster gets randomly attacked by a giant octopus wandering through the forest.
The infamous Zion rave from The Matrix Reloaded — with Neo and Trinity's sex scene spliced in for an extra dose of incomprehensibility. It was supposedly meant to emphasize the blurring of the lines between man and machine. (See also: the blood flowing over the code on the hovercraft terminal, the Merovingian gettin' it on with a human, half the movie's dialogue, and all that other stuff which... didn't involve a solid five minutes of completely random people dancing and Keanu Reeves' bare ass.)
- With the obvious symbolism involved, Trinity would have conceived. Talk about Chekhov's Missfire
- The Train Room (And the Train Man) from The Matrix Revolutions — a scene which, while having enough plot ties to make it not completely irrelevant, is completely forgotten once Neo has been rescued. Neither the room, or The Train Man, are ever seen or referenced again in the film.
  - The Train Man shows up again as part of the dozen-plus-way standoff at gunpoint later on in the night club.
- Also; Neo's telekinetic (assumed) powers, which were what caused him to arrive in the Train Room to begin with, no longer cause him any problems when used at the end of the film.
Perhaps the BLAMMIEST BLAM of all time is the unexplained, unmentioned, full of Nightmare Fuel scene in Arachnophobia when, for no reason at all, a plastic doll OPENS IT EYES and WATCHES as a spider lowers itself down onto it's face and crawls around.
In the film Flubber (a remake of The Absent Minded Professor), the Flubber blobs decide to have an impromptu synchronized mambo sequence for no reason. In several "Makings of" for the film, the film makers all but admit the only reason they even made the movie at all was for the mambo sequence.
- well, at least it served some purpose, then...
Cabin Fever has two; the infamous pancake scene and the weird rabbit surgeon.
- Or they're, as Phelous refers to them, "Big Crocodile Scene Happenings."
This occurs in the musical film Sweet Charity when Oscar takes Charity to his "Church of the Month" as a first date. What follows is a bizarre Fosse-choreographed song-and-dance number led by Sammy Davis Jr. called "The Rhythm of Life", which mocks hippie culture and religions like Scientology.
- It is important to note that, BLAM it may be, "Rhythm of Life" is considered by many to be Sweet Charity's best song.
A few things in the 80's film version of Annie qualify. You'd think getting to visit the President would be worth discussing later but...
- "Let's go to the movies! / Let's go see the stars!!!"
Life Of Brian, probably the only Monty Python film that could have randomness feel out of place, has one of these in the form of a flying saucer briefly abducting Brian while he's trying to run away.
- Director Terry Jones, on the Criterion Collection Commentary, states that that scene was added to the film because the writers had written themselves into a corner trying to figure out how Brian would get away from his pursuers after climbing all the way up a tower. One person jokingly said "What if he gets shanghaied by aliens?", and they went with it.
- Ooh, you lucky bastard!
Python pulled off another BLAM in Meaning Of Life with the "Find the Fish" segment.
- John Cleese admitted in an interview that it probably the least sensical joke they've ever done. That, my fellow Tropers, is a statement.
About halfway through Beavis And Butthead Do America, Beavis and Butthead are stranded in the middle of the desert. Beavis chomps down on a hallucinogenic Peyote cactus, and the next few minutes melt into a nightmarish tribute to the boys, animated and scored (huh huh, "scored") by Rob Zombie. It could be justified, because Beavis was having a trip and Butthead simply lay down unconscious.
Muppet Treasure Island has the epic musical number "Cabin Fever." It actually is mentioned again, but by a character who's insane enough that he could have just been imagining it (and his cellmates seem to think he did). Which brings us to the question: if one of the criteria is that it's never mentioned afterwards, can a BLAM be lampshaded?
- Obviously, they all got cabin fever and they all went MAD! The guy who remembered it is the Only Sane Man, which isn't hard to do when you're a Muppet.
  - Clueless Morgan as an Only Sane Man? That's a worrying thought...
"The Lonely Goatherd", in the film version of The Sound Of Music. It was cute, it was funny, but did not advance the plot, and felt like something that was put in just because they had five extra minutes (and had killed the song's original dramatic function by moving "My Favorite Things" to the bedroom scene).
The 1996 version of Romeo + Juliet starring Leonardo Dicaprio has many Big Lipped Alligator Moments. The first comes in the scene where we meet Leo. After meeting Leo, they cut, for no reason at all, to a fat fillipino guy and a man watching a dancing hooker. Another big lipped alligator moment comes in the scene where we first meet Mercutio—he, for no reason at all, starts singing "Young Hearts Run Free" while in drag. Another comes soon after that where Romeo takes drugs and has an acid trip where he sees strange things like Tybalt kissing his own aunt and Mercutio singing again.
Crank: High Voltage is full of random moments, but most of them at least relate to the plot or the hero's backstory. One scene, however, breaks away from a gunfight to show the therapy session of a minor character from the first movie, played by Glenn Howerton. At the end of the session, he's killed by a stray bullet from the gunfight, and the movie continues.
A substantial amount of actual Busby Berkeley routines don't even attempt to make a transition from the previous scene. "You're just a good gal gone wrong." Cue the dancing cats.
In the awful live action City Hunter movie, there is a scene where Jackie Chan and his opponent crash into a Street Fighter II arcade machine and then start turning turning into characters from the game for the remainder of the fight until someone unplugs the machine. It makes no sense and is never explained or referenced ever again.
- And it's still better than either of the full-length live action movies in every concieveable way. Well, maybe some people might have a problem with Jackie Chan dressing as Chun-Li...
In the otherwise forgettable Red Sonja movie, Big Bad Queen Gedrin summons her wizard to identify the strangers entering her land. The wizard does his mojo on some sort of mystic scrying pool... to reveal five seconds of a naked dancing woman, which fades out to Sonja and her party. No one on-screen reacts to the naked woman, not even in a "Dude, seriously?" manner.
The Ent-draught scene from the extended version of the second film of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Merry and Pippin drink water from a brook and grow taller, then a tree eats them. Nice nod to the books, sure, but within the context of the movies it's pretty random. And the growing taller thing is brought back for a joke towards the end of the EE, but then never mentioned again as the two seem to have shrunk back to normal size? If you're not a fan of the book, this scene makes little to no sense.
Turkish Star Wars, in spite of barely making any sense in the first place, still manages to have a BLAM. After the first fight, the scene of the protagonists riding on horseback across the plains is interrupted by several shots of a papier-mâché ogre sitting on some rocks and shrieking at the camera. The ogre is never explained and never seen again, and it doesn't even interact with any other characters during its brief time in the movie.
Even though it's a very brief moment, the Zen Room from the Rocky Horror Picture Show certainly counts. It's only shown for two seconds, has random wipe-out cuts, and is never mentioned again.
Although probably half the movie could qualify, the sequence with Plaster of Paris in The Spirit seems particularly out of place. Though longer than a normal BLAM, Plaster appears, does a kooky dance, helps the Spirit escape, stabs him, and runs off singing to herself. Admittedly lampshaded by the Spirit ahead of time by saying that if the silhouette is who he thinks it is, she's the strangest woman he's ever met.
"Seventeen" in Repo The Genetic Opera.
- Not really much of a BLAM, as it does advance the plot, because it shows that Nathan is losing his control of Shilo, and him slapping her at the end of the number probably influences her decision to go after the Repo Man for Rotti.
The Fame parody in Dance Flick comes out of nowhere and is never mentioned again.
Though Xanadu has many weird spots, they usually have some bearing on the plot. But then there's one scene where Sonny and Kira turn into cartoon characters (animated by Don Bluth, no less,) and then chase each other for no real reason.
- The Nostalgia Chick would like to differ; the movie has no cohesion, and the scenes happening are more often than not never mentioned again, so a mere BLAM won't work here. For this, we're gonna need a BLAM Episode.
The scene in The Shining where Wendy Torrance walks in on a ghost performing implied oral sex on another ghost in a dog suit and mask. This was an important component of a major historical (and ghost-related) plotline in the original book, but since most of that plotline was excluded from Kubrick's screen adaptation, the scene is left with little meaning apart from general ghostly wierdness.
Hook features a scene where Tinkerbell grows to be human-sized, shares a romantic moment with Peter, then returns to normal just as inexplicably. Spielberg wrote the scene simply to appease Julia Roberts, who insisted that she have at least one scene with another actor.
A scene in Hellraiser: Inferno has Detective Joseph Thorne being brutally beaten up by a pair of kung-fu using Asian cowboys after stumbling through the woods.
Averted in the original Italian Job, which had a surreal scene cut featuring the thieves and the cops chasing them interrupting their frantic car chase to do some choreographed ballet on ice with their cars to The Blue Danube. This is completely out of sorts with the rest of the film and was apparently filmed without the director's knowledge and he promptly cut it when he found out what had been done.
When Billy Madison decides to not give up, he expresses it in song. Then other characters, major and minor, join in until the song's rousing end. Otherwise, this movie is not a musical.
- Do you have any more gum?
Spy Fiction Mockbuster Operation Kid Brother (or Operation Double 007 for MST3K fans) has a scene where the Big Bad's Amazon Brigade applies The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction to an Army convoy carrying a load of Phlebotinum, while dressed as Wild West burlesque dancers. They then change into... skunk(?!?) outfits and disguise the truck they need as a float promoting a casino (to The Jimmy Hart Version of "Yes, Jesus Loves Me") before escaping. The first riff after a hard cut to the Omniscient Council Of Vagueness:
Servo:...the hell was THAT?
- It isn't not out of left field. They were stealing an important plot item.
Pieces, a movie most noticeable for its Take That at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its Tag Line, has a sequence where a female character is randomly ambushed by a karate teacher. This means absolutely nothing in terms of the plot and is brushed off with a throwaway line later on before vanishing from the story.
Numerous little bits from The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T by Dr Seuss (1953), in particular the Dungeon Orchestra scene and the "Dress Me, Dress Me" song. Oh, and the hypnosis fight.
In The Grudge 2 a girl is shown drinking an entire bottle of milk with some grotesque gulping sounds. She then vomits the milk out into the bottle and drinks it again. This continues for some time, for no reason.
The infamous "Atheist Fight" from Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, weird even for such a film. Jesus is walking back to his apartment after buying some wood to make stakes, when a van pulls up, and a group of atheists attack him. More and more waves of them keeps coming out of the van, like a clown car, but he schools them all.
Kincaid's dog, Jason, in A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master pisses fire on Freddy's grave in a dream. This somehow resurrects Freddy. It could be considered a joke since Jason (the dog) revived Freddy.
The already weird nightmare sequence in Glen Or Glenda had a completely random bondage and rape scene added into it. This was Executive Meddling for the sake of padding the movie and increasing its exploitation quotient.
In Godzilla Versus The Astro Monster, Godzilla does a ludicrous victory dance.
- "A happy moment..."
Charlie Chaplin's silent movies include some of what are perhaps the earliest examples of Big Lipped Alligator Moments. One example is in The Kid when Charlie falls asleep and has a dream where he's suddenly an angel, and dances with a lot of women dressed as angels until people dressed as demons come in and tempt everyone to evil. It comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with the actual plot, and of course, sealing the deal, he wakes up and the movie continues as normal. A similar sequence occurs in his short film Sunnyside as well. Chaplin's longer films often did randomly inserted nonsensical dream sequences.
At one point of Kazaam, Max suddenly shoots out of a glass of water the genie was about to drink. This is never explained, let alone ever mentioned again.
In the Directors Cut of the film adaptation of Watchmen the scene in which Hollis Mason is brutally beaten to death by some Emo Teen is as heart wrenching as it was in the comic, but because he is a minor character in the film, unlike in the book, his death, which is out of the blue and never talked of afterwards, seems out of place.
- It is talked about again. It appears as a news report while Nite Owl II and Rorschach are looking for information in a bar. After Nite Owl II hears this news, he beats up a nearby Topknot gang member, the gang responsible for the act.
A famous one is the "Broadway Rhythm" sequence from Singin In The Rain. It almost feels like it was lampshaded to somehow shove in a 1950's Broadway stage act (complete with moving scenery) into a period piece movie they were making. It not only lasts about 10 minutes, but it also has it's own little story to tell of Don's character in the sequence falling for a dancer which offsets the romance in the film proper between Don and Kathy.
- If you can swallow that, try this: the song is also supposed to be part of a musical called The Dancing Cavalier; in other words, they have a 20th Century Broadway scene in a play set in the English Civil War. BLAM!
- Worse, arguable, is the "Beautiful Girl" scene which comes right the heck out of nowhere, and doesn't actually feature any of the main cast. It only makes sense when you learn that the movie was really mostly made to showcase pre-written songs. Apparently, they couldn't figure how else to work a song about women's fashion into the flick.
  - Actually, Kathy Selden plays one of the dancers at the start of the number, but has no lines.
- "Moses Supposes" is another one. Our heroes go to a speech therapist. For no apparent reason, they destroy the poor man's office while performing a number. It is never mentioned again.
- This can all be chalked up to how the movie was written; in most musicals, the plot is written out first, then the songs are created to emphasize and develop it. For this film, all the songs (aside from "Make 'Em Laugh") were already written, and the plot was essentially written as a framing device to justify putting them in the film. "Singin'" gets away with this only because the song and dance routines are so damn good that you don't care how irrelevant they are to the story.
- An even worse offender is An American in Paris, again starring Gene Kelly. The entire end of the movie is a 17-minute dance-fest with zero dialogue and no plot relevance. Supposedly, it took a month to film and cost half a million dollars.
In Warriors Of Virtue: after Warrior of Water Yun returns from his self-imposed exile, the entire village is in Celebration Mode. Cut to a female... kangaroo (The movie didn't seem to give the Warrors' race an actual name) emerging from platform, singing some odd Asian-style warbling song, looking like we're gearing up for a musical breather scene... then after three seconds of singing, we jump back to Komodo's lair. When we finally get back to the village? Celebration? Over. Warriors? Nowhere. Sense? None.
Many Harry Potter fans would consider the talking heads in the film version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to be a BLAM. Also see Adaptation Decay.
- From that same movie, there is a random singing choir of Hogwarts students conducted by Professor Flitwick
  - Which the sixth movie averts by using its existence for an "emergency choir practice" joke.
- Then there was a scene added to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince in which the Death Eaters burn down the Burrow. This scene is not in the books, is awkwardly shot (to the point that it takes a bit to realize what is happening), takes the Death Eaters involved and has them Kick The Dog quite unnecessarily, will clearly have ramifications in the adaptation of the final books, and is given absolutely no reaction, follow-up, resolution, or reference afterward. In the context of the single installment, it is incredibly random and confusing.
  - Especially since the entire Weasley family just stand there staring at their burning house instead of, oh say, using their magical powers to put it out.
There's a scene in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday where Jason (in the body of a coroner he had earlier possessed) kills the girlfriend of a cop named Josh before forcibly taking Josh to the old abandoned Voorhees house. There Jason strips Josh naked, straps him down and shaves his beard off before possessing him. Why Jason bothered abducting, stripping, restraining and shaving Josh before possessing him is never explained in the film or by the crew; every other possession just has Jason lunge at someone, force their mouths open and have his disembodied soul squirm down their throat and that's it, no grooming scenes or anything.
In the most recent remake of King Kong we are treated to a monolouge by Captain.Hayse, who compares the events of the film (Somewhat breaking the Fourth Wall) to Heart Of Darkness. Neither the book, nor it's similarities to the film are ever mentioned again. In fact the character who prompted Hayes to even talk about the book in the first place was Jimmy, a character whose unresolved storyline mysteriously ends without warning once the film moves to New York.
In Across The Universe, the characters are stranded in some grassy field, where they come across some crazy carnival and watch giant "blue people" on stilts dance around Eddie Izzard who screams out a somehow more nonsensical version of the Beatles song, "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite". Plus, Prudence, the lesbian cheerleader, shows up out of nowhere in a horse suit and dances among a crazy background of cutout tigers and moving dummies and disappears just as suddenly. The characters never comment on this afterward. It has no relevence or plot in the story other than making reference to a crazy Bealtes song - still doesn't make it any less awesome though.
- Possibly averted. This troper got the impression that this scene was the result of the characters going to a circus while still loaded up on hallucinogens. The circus itself seems to have existed, as Prudence hooks up with "a contortionist" from the circus who shows up with her again towards the end of the film, which may in and of itself pull this one out of BLAM territory.
In the 1993 version of The Beverly Hillbillies we cut to the family members of the Clampetts in an airplane playing banjoes and dancing to fight boredom. Though the family is seen at Jed's wedding the event itself is never mentioned again.
In the Japanese film Suicide Club, after two sisters are kidnapped by thugs and taken to an abandoned bowling alley, the gang's leader (wearing a sequined jumpsuit) stomps an animal to death and then breaks into song. The song is in Japanese but with an English chorus, and as he sings there is an implied rape of a third girl depicted. The next morning the police catch up to the criminals. The scene ends with one of the girls presumably alive and the thugs taken to prison, but none of these characters are mentioned again.
Gene Kelly's famous dance scene with Jerry the mouse in the movie Anchors Aweigh. The scene started from Gene's character telling a story to a group of school children about something that'd happened to him while in the navy, and we're taken to a scene in which Gene Kelly falls into a hole and ends up in a cartoon world ruled by King Jerry, who's outlawed singing and dancing because he cannot do it himself. Gene heads to Jerry's castle, and teaches Jerry to sing and dance via a song and dance number. The scene clearly has nothing to do with the rest of the movie which is about two navy servicemen visiting Los Angeles in the 1940's, and Gene's over the top story is never brought up again.
- Bugs Bunny made a similarly bizarre appearance in My Dream is Yours.
The indie romantic comedy Gigantic has a recurring BLAM throughout it. At random points in the plot the male lead is attacked by a strange homeless man, with no explanation given. This has no bearing on the rest of the plot, and he does not admit it to anyone else, thinking up excuses for his visible injuries. In the last encounter he is able to kill the attacker...and then the body mysteriously vanishes. There is never any explanation given for it, and the incidents are never mentioned again in the film.
Arguably, the shot in Citizen Kane in which a parrot very loudly squawks into the camera. Not only is there a huge Special Effect Failure where you can see the background through the parrot's eye, but Orson Welles even stated afteward that the only reason he put it in was in case people had fallen asleep in the theater.
In Monkeybone, Julie wants to scare Stu awake from his coma. So while he's on a roller coaster escaping Death, he's thrown through a painting into his worst nightmare: a black and white scene where he's a carrot and he's about to be cut open on an operating table by strange mutants, with a brain being served to him by a strange nurse on a silver platter. Monkeybone saves him by pulling him out of the picture. This plot element of scaring him awake and that nightmare is never mentioned again.
The vast majority of scenes in Kung Pow: Enter the Fist would seem like BLAM material in most other films, but in this one, they actually fit its bizarre logic. Nonetheless, the film does have one brief and (by this trope's usual standards) unremarkable, but still noticeable, BLAM: A short trunked creature is shown as the camera pans over to a more relevent scene.
In the Vanilla Ice vehicle Cool as Ice, there is a strange scene of Cathy's family in fast forward. It definitely qualifies as a BLAM
The special edition of Return of the Jedi adds one of these in the form of a randomly inserted musical sequence involving a big-lipped alien chick in a bikini who looks rather similar to an alligator.
- Referring to the big lip, I thought Sy Snootles was in the original 1983 version's own musical sequence too.
  - "She" was, but just as an animatronic in the background. In the original version, we only caught the end of the song, where Oolaa is dropped into the Rancor pit.
When the Boys Meet the Girls from 1965 is not quite a BLAM Episode. Most of it actually makes sense, even if it also prompts 'lolwut' when you describe it. Since the best way to describe the movie is that somebody mixed the scripts for a season of a melodramatic soap opera with that of a variety show & the shooting script of a music video, and then pared it down to movie length...
The Hong Kong action movie Fantasy Mission Force could be said to be made up of nothing but BLA Ms, some of which are accentuated by the dubbing. For example, it opens with a musical number entirely in Cantonese. No effort is made to translate it, so it is not clear why it was even left in; it could simply have been edited out entirely without adversely affecting the movie.
In the So Bad Its Good movie Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, there is a pointless scene of Lex Luthor dancing with a woman who is dressed as Marie Antionette.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Tommy Doyle gets a pipe and beats Michael with it so hard, green ooze starts leaking out of his mask. When the mask is found on the floor, it's completely clean and it's never explained why the ooze was leaking out of Michael.
Gremlins 2 has two of these, even given the context of the film.
- Firstly, we have the scene where a completely and utterly random movie critic appears on screen and throws the fourth wall right out the motherlicking window.Why? He's reviewing the first Gremlins film. He criticizes it's making fun of innocents being brutally slaughtered by Gremlins. He is then eaten by pack of the creatures himself and from there on the movie continues along it's merry, messed up way.
- Until, during a talking scene a pair of Gremlins actually take control of the movie, tearing out the film and doing shadow animals with the projector light. Hulk Hogan materializes straight out of WTF town and tells them to piss off. This is all entirely in context, makes perfect sense, drives the storyline and is frequently referenced by other characters
In Beverly Hills Cop III, there is a scene where some carjacking mechanics dance to the supremes.
In the otherwise superb Australian film Beneath Clouds, one scene shows our female lead, Leia, trip over in a corn field. Getting up she see's a black cat. As she stares it intently, dramatic music plays. She then turns to look at where she is, for literally ONE second, and when she turns back the cat has vanished into thin air.
Mad Monster Party, the stop-motion animation film, has this in the "Stay One Step Ahead" musical number. As Boris Karloff's character Baron von Frankenstein sings the song to his nephew Felix, a gang of really weird creatures, unlike any of the beings seen elsewhere in the film, pop out of a television set and sing the chorus. At the conclusion of the sequence, they pop back into the TV. Neither Felix nor the Baron (nor anyone else) ever mentions this again afterward.
In the abysmal sequel The NeverEnding Story III, the Rock Biter, whose home now contains a TV for his kid to watch music videos on, takes off on a bike and sings "Born To Be Wild."
Spy Kids II contains a weird scene where Juni steals gold from a cave in the island and a bunch of skeletons attack him and his sister. Not only does this not make any sense in the movie's context (even considering it features people riding in flying magnets), but neither kid brings it up again.
In The Film Of The Book The Running Man, the Stalker "Dynamo" uses electricty for his gimmick. So when he makes his grand entrance, he sings the aria from Act Three of "The Marriage of Figarro".
- To be fair, Erland van Lidth (aka Grossberger, is also a classically trained opera singer, so he had probably been waiting for an opportunity to show off this talent.
In New Moon, when The Volturi try to kill Bella, Alice trys to convince them not to kill her, by telling them that she'll turn her into a vampire, she then has a vision of Bella and Edward in formal clothing running happily through the forest, in slow motion no less. Now this seems like foreshadowing, but in what's suppose to be a serious scene, it just comes off as a big WTF.
In Demolition Man, John Spartan sits in his apartment when a young naked woman appears suddenly on a video screen in front of him says "Sorry, wrong number." and then disappears into WTF obscurity.

Close Film

Even Interactive Fiction can have these. The opening sequence of Infocom's classic Planetfall has the player character forced to scrub the deck in a spaceship corridor. A few turns later, along comes an alien ambassador (from the planet Blow'K Bibben Gordo if This Troper recalls correctly) who drips slime all over the deck, and hangs around making a few irrelevant comments. The alien ambassador neither helps nor hinders the protagonist, and leaves just as suddenly as he arrived a few turns later. He is never seen or heard from again (and in case you're wondering, the deck scrubbing isn't important. It's just to give the PC something to do before it's time to rush to the escape pod and begin the real adventure).
- It's a puzzle. Most games start expecting you to DO something, like exploration or combat. Here, those things get you tossed in the brig, making it impossible to get to the escape pod when the time comes. The correct thing to do here is the one thing you can't normally do in interactive fiction - keep your head down and wait for the plot to proceed on its own.
- Interactive Fiction is perfectly capable of having entire stories made on acid. Some of them are surprisingly good. However, random BLAM moments often occur in otherwise serious games which were either poorly planned or rushed through the beta testing phase. We really shouldn't be surprised, since most IF is made by solo hobbyists who aren't getting paid and Sturgeons Law applies.
Infocom's Wishbringer also has this, in the form of a small mailbox that comes to life and follows the player around, and a large mailbox that threatens the player. Neither mailbox is relevant to the storyline or puzzles, and if they happen to meet each other, they have this bizarre over-the-top fight where both expand to giant size while a crowd of postal meters gathers to see it. Then, all of them are obscured in a puff of smoke, and when the smoke clears, the mailboxes and the weird spectators are gone. The player is left to just go on as if this really crazy scene never happened.

Close Interactive Fiction

There's a scene right near the end of IT that's...well it has no effect on the story, and breaks the flow of the story, and is completely shockingly spit-take-worthy, and just kind of...there. Anyone who has read the book knows what I mean.
- Meanwhile, people who haven't read the book will remain forever ignorant, lost in a sea of oblivion, a panorama of missed references and a fog of ignorance, until someone sheds some light in whatever the above troper might possibly be talking about that merits a mention on this page. Alas, such is not to be, and this example will be useless —useless!— to all but the select few.
  - Very well. I believe the first troper meant the scene where after defeating the titular monster for the first time, the Loser's Club can't find the way out of the sewers because the bond between them is breaking. Beverly brings them back together by having sex with all six of the male Losers. They are all 11 at the time. Now pass the Brain Bleach.
There's that uncomfortable and unnerving "Vodka" chapter that comes the eff out of nowhere late in His Dark Materials. Just... what?
- You tell us.
  - I don't remember the exact details, but it's something like this- Will, a 12 or 13 year old boy, is traveling alone. He stops at the house of an old man (who I think was a priest) to ask for directions. The old man pushes him into accepting a drink of vodka, chats in an overly friendly manner, is very touchy-feely, tries to convince Will to stay a while and is just generally creepy. After few pages of this, Will insists on leaving and the man gives him a hug and lets him go. There is no mention of the incident or the old man ever again.
  - This is probably Phillip Pullman's way of inserting a 'creepy pedo priest' into the book as a subtle Aesop. Makes sense given his hatred of Christianity and organized religion in general.
In addition to a number of Wacky Wayside Tribe incidents, one can probably find a number of Big Lipped Alligator Moments in L. Frank Baum's Oz books. The first book, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, has the China Country, where all the inhabitants are made out of china. Some of them, such as the singing china clown, have been broken and mended several times. They neither help nor hinder Dorothy and her friends, they are introduced out of nowhere and have nothing to do with the story, and they're never mentioned again in the book afterward (or in any of the later Oz books, for that matter). things like this add to the unnerving dream-logic of the story.
- Word Of God all but admits that the China Country only exists to pad out the length of the journey from Point A to Point B.
There is a particularly narmful scene in Of Mice And Men where Lennie hallucinates that he is being berated by a talking rabbit.
- And his Aunt Clara.
The episode of the dinner of Trimalchio in Petronius' Satyricon, making this Older Than Dirt.

Close Literature

Doctor Who: Part 7 of The Daleks' Master Plan has our heroes picked up by police on Christmas, getting split up on a Roaring Twenties movie set (the only time this troper recalls in Classic Who that we see entertainer characters with more than just a cameo and without a dark secret), and finally breaking the fourth wall.
- It should perhaps be noted that there was a good reason for this. The episode was broadcast on Christmas Day and the production team worried people might not bother tuning in to watch. By making the episode irrelevant to the plot of the complete (12-part) serial as a whole, they didn't have to worry about people tuning back in the week after and not having a clue what was going on.
This troper feels that one particularly traumatizing moment in the Power Rangers Jungle Fury finale qualifies in this category: the furry scene. Granted, in the Sentai, the furry suits made sense and actually were an integral plotline in the show at one point, but in the American version, they are randomly summoned up during the finale, then suddenly removed within twenty seconds, and nobody mentions the event for the rest of the episode (adding to this is that the characters involved with said furries are reduced to Living Scenery status for the rest of the episode as well, and probably for good measure).
- Hardly traumatizing, just bizarre and unexpected. How could you say anything nasty about that face◊?
Shows like Flight Of The Conchords, The Young Ones and The Mighty Boosh guarantee at least one Big Lipped Alligator Moment per episode.
- A very memorable one is the scene in a season two episode of The Mighty Boosh, in which a crazed man throws a book out of the window and kills a bear.
"Books? Books?! This book ain't gonna' save yer life when there's a grizzly bear on the loose!"
- Snuffbox is kinda similar to the above, except usually the BLAM is the same song repeated every episode, with minor changes to the lyrics.
- There’s a real-life explanation for it, though. Comedy at the BBC was administered by two divisions of the Light Entertainment TV department: LETV Comedy, which covered sitcoms, and LETV Variety, which was sketch- or skit-based entertainment. Now, LETV Variety offered a higher budget per episode, but required that each episode contain at least one musical number and, y’know, sketches. This is not to say that the Young Ones team didn’t like being able to book and stage their favourite bands, but that’s the reason why they did it, along with all the non-sequitur scenes.
Robin Williams and Billy Crystal's guest appearance at the beginning of the Friends episode "The One With The Ultimate Fighting Champion" has no relevance to the plot and is never mentioned again. It wasn't even in the original script, they coincidentally just happened to be in the same building where Friends was filmed and the writers asked if they wanted to make a guest appearance.
In the third season of FX Channel's The Shield, Detective Dutch Wagenbach is told by a serial killer that he will never understand what it means to take a life. Wagenbach goes home, and listens as a stray cat meows outside his window. He gets up, goes outside, picks the cat up, and strangles it to death while looking straight into its eyes. It has no bearing on the rest of the series, and it is never mentioned again. Then again, that's what happens when you let David Mamet write an episode of your show.
- Actually it's briefly alluded to in the following episode, and apparently resolved a number of episodes later when Wagenbach adopts an unwanted stray kitten (someone had left a box of them in the police station for the officers to adopt throughout the day, he took the last one, that no one else wanted). He names it "Claudette", after his partner, and seems to be attempting to make up for his moment of insanity in the earlier episode by raising the kitten. His killing the cat in the first place is still a very bizarre and out of character scene, that comes right out of no where, with no actual plot baring, however, so it counts in a certain way.
- That felt more like Leave The Plot Threads Hanging. The Shield was absolutely riddled with plot elements that looked like they were leading somewhere, but disappeared without a peep. (See also: Julien's self-hatred.)
- According to Word of God, Julian's self-loathing and denial was not resolved because it would be unrealistic for him to deprogram himself within the short time period in which the show takes place, but there are hints that he will eventually come out. As for Dutch killing the kitten, one common interpretation is: he spends a lot of time leading up to this contemplating what makes people kill, and this experience shows him that it's a matter of the person, not the act, because he feels remorse and disgust instead of power.
On the final episode of series 19 of Have I Got News For You, after given his Odd One Out group, Paul Merton begins to ponder the answer. Suddenly, the camera fade-cuts to some footage of Paul and fellow captain, Ian Hislop, skipping through a field in slow motion to sappy soft music for several seconds. Camera cuts back to Paul, who's got a day dreamy expression on his face. He then shakes his head and appologising, saying he was "miles away". The footage popped up again in the later seasons when Joan Collins hosted in a Dynasty spoof, but aside from that, there was no explanation for it. According to Paul of the Very Best of HIGNFY DVD commentary, he tried for eight years to get that gag onto the show and was rejected two times by two different producers, the trid try helped and the gag was put in. Still no idea why he did it... Or Do We? Hint, hint.
A running joke in the fourth season of Nash Bridges had the SIU move into a former disco which would start playing "Disco Inferno" at random intervals without explanation. It's just as weird as it sounds.
One episode of the game show version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego ended with Rockapella (who did the main theme) suddenly start singing another one of their songs, "Zombie Jamboree." It had absolutely no relevance to the episode, and unless the Zombie Apocalypse version of the game was very well-hidden, no relevance even to any incarnation of the series. Made all the more surreal when, on an afterschool program, they included the original lyrics, which included a "damn" during the chorus.
- Hey, they said "dang."
In the middle of a segment regarding binge drinking on the talk show The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, a picture of a cat in a high chair eating spaghetti randomly appeared for a few seconds, and then disappeared. Nobody acknowledges this or ever talks about it again. This quickly became a meme known as "Spaghetti Cat" and it became a running gag on another show, The Soup. Apparently it was a type of dialog sensor, but it was still so outlandish and out-of-nowhere that it should count.
Arguably Chuck's attempted rape of Serena (and to some extent Jenny) in the Gossip Girl pilot. Due to the fact that the pilot was based heavily on the books while the rest of the show, not so much, pilot-Chuck differs from the character we see in the rest of the series. His assault of Serena is not only never mentioned again, but she keeps confiding in him and turning to him with her problems, plus she's highly supportive of his relationship with her best friend. Hardly the kind of relationship you have with someone who tried to rape you.

Close Live Action TV

Crankshaft had a week-long series (starting here) that featured a much older Ed Crankshaft living in a nursing home combined with flashbacks to various baseball-related points in his life. Readers speculated that it was another "leap forward" similar to the one that had recently been done in Funky Winkerbean; others wondered if it was the beginning of the strip's conclusion. The next week, everything is back to normal. But what else would you expect in a newspaper comic?
The infamous, week-long, 1989 Garfield run "Garfield Alone" was a particularly creepy example of this. Garfield wakes up to find himself in an alternate reality where Odie and Jon are nowhere to be seen and he's all alone in a boarded-up, run-down, old uninhabited house, tormented by loneliness.
- Maybe not. Since so much of Garfield is devoted to how he gets along badly with Odie and Jon, the sequence could be a "Ghosts of Christmas" sort of affair that reminds him he does like them after all.
- It should be noted that the sequence ends with Garfield seemingly willing himself into believing everything is back to normal, and thus the comic continues as if nothing ever happened. A popular interpretation is that everything that happens after this storyline is the result of Garfield's willful denial of reality, and that we've since been watching the delusions of a cat in an empty house who is slowly starving to death. This individual BLAM moment may have the unintended effect of turning the last 20 years of the comic into Nightmare Fuel.

Close Newspaper Comics

The drinking quintet in the second act of Marschner's Der Vampyr seems to mainly be an excuse to have a drinking scene; it interrupts the plot with characters who had one or two lines previously and whom we never see again, and ends abruptly with the discovery of Emmy's death.

Close Opera

Professional wrestling in general is full of these kind of moments due to it's on-the-fly writing style and the relative secrecy most wrestling companies work under to avoid spoilers. Frequently story lines are started and then squashed due to one or more of the performers dying, quitting, being fired, or being injured. Angles can also suffer heavily from attacks by Moral Guardians and by Executive Meddling.
In 1990, the WWF was hyping a giant egg, whose contents would be revealed at the Survivor Series. The egg's hatching turned out to be a rotten moment, as what emerged was a huge chicken-like thing called the Gobbledy-Gooker (played by Eddy Guerrero's older brother Hector in a hideous suit). Wrestle Crap has more.
- Originally, the egg was supposed to contain some character called The Eggman to be played by Mark Callaway. But someone decided a near 7-foot 300-pounder shouldn't be an Eggman. So they threw the Gobbledy-Gooker in there instead and debuted Callaway as a giant zombie ghoul character called The Undertaker. And that's worked for nearly two decades. Go figure.
A Halloween episode of WWF Smackdown has Smackdown General Manager Stephanie McMahon encounter Raw GM Eric Bischoff wearing a Vince McMahon mask in her office. After doing a bad impression of Vince, he rips off the mask and gives her a long, passionate kiss, which she resists at first, but slowly begins to enjoy. Aside from a very small inside joke during Eric Bischoff's trial in early 2006, it is never referenced again.
WCW's entire "Blood Runs Cold" angle was rather infamous for being a BLAM that was several months long, and ate up time on several of their shows. At a time when the entire WCW is gearing up for war with the nWo, and every storyline seemed to gradually weave its way into that, there was always one segment each night that involved a bunch of Mortal Kombat knock-offs fighting over a helmet for some reason. Once the whole thing was over, Glacier and Wrath would disappear for months, Ernest Miller was demoted to a jobber, and Mortis got mocked by Raven, lost his mask, and became Kanyon. Glad to find out that this storyline, which was hyped for months and played out (badly) over several more months, was so damn important, guys.
- WCW was prone to creating unintentional BLA Ms. They did not allow their commentators to view the backstage segments so that the commentary would be more spontaneous... unfortunately they just looked clueless more often. One notorious example was a segment where the nWo beat Ric Flair up in some random farm field. Flair later hitchhiked to the arena in a truck filled with turnips. When he finally made it to the arena, dirty and stumbling around dazed holding an axehandle, the commentators - who didn't see the beating or hitchhiking scenes - wondered if he was drunk, rendering the whole thing a BLAM.
  - Not to mention, Dustin Rhodes is Seven... well, for a few vignettes anyway.
On a 2003 episode of WWE Raw, there was a note found backstage saying "I Still Remember" left for Booker T. Booker T was alarmed by this and seemed to be frightened by what it meant. It was never mentioned again, although it was speculated to be a sign of Goldust's return which didn't happen until quite some time later.
During WCW's Captial Combat in 1990, Sting was trapped in a cage with metal bars at ringside by the Four Horsemen. Later on, RoboCop, the fictional character from the movie of the same name, came out and bent the bars on the cage, allowing Sting to escape. There was never any mention of this again and Robo Cop left just as quickly has he had arrived.
And then there was the time Rick Steiner was doing an in-ring interview with Mean Gene Okerlund, only to be interrupted by (I kid you not) Chucky. The evil possessed doll star of the Child's Play movies appeared on the video wall and made some jokes at Rick Steiner's expense for a while, while Steiner actually challenged Chucky to come to the ring and face him. Chucky did a plug for his new movie, Bride of Chucky, and then told Rick Steiner not to mess with Scott Steiner (who Rick was feuding with at the time) because Chucky wanted to direct him in a new film. This was, however, Chucky's only appearance in WCW, and the whole thing was never mentioned again afterward.

Close Professional Wrestling

The catchy "One Night in Bangkok" in the musical Chess. Freddie/the American sings about going out partying in Bangkok at the beginning of the second act, but the song has no bearing on the plot of the musical as a whole, other than setting the scene. The song was (wisely) marketed to promote the musical, and actually reached a high point on the music charts.
- In some versions of the story, the song plays as Freddie goes out in Bangkok and gets beaten up. Which makes it a little more relevant.
"Brush up your Shakespeare", from Kiss Me Kate. The two gangsters have found out that the debt doesn't have to be paid, Kate's actress has decided that she loves her ex-husband after all, and the gangsters are leaving the theatre after a day's work... when the Fourth Wall comes crashing down, the pair are in front of a curtain, and they start tapdancing and singing about the virtues of Shakespeare as used in the seduction of women.
- Also from "Kiss Me Kate" is It's Too Darn Hot. While it is an extremely catchy song, nothing happens besides dancing.
Speaking of Shakespeare: the Porter Scene in The Scottish Play is either a welcome bit of comic relief in the middle of a harrowing story, or else a completely incongruous digression possibly thrown in by some other writer who preferred fart jokes to serious theatre. Either way, that makes this one Older Than Steam.
- Shakespeare does a lot of these. It's all basically the Rule Of Funny.
- The scene also serves to cover the actor's costume change. Without the interlude Mac Beth has two lines in which to wash off the blood from the murder.
The speech Mercutio gives about Queen Mab in Romeo And Juliet is arguably an example of this.
The stage adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang features one toward the end where the King, Queen and everyone else in the palace of Vulgaria break into a dance called "The Brazillian Samba" which was not featured in the film (and very probably not the book). Still, it was the King's birthday, but aside from that it has nothing to do with the plot.
- If it happens before Music Box/Truly Scrumptious, it's probably to allow Caracticus and Truly to change into their doll costumes and makeup.
The play My Name is Rachel Corrie is about a young woman by that name who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer demolishing a Palestinian family's house which she was attempting to protect. The play opens with her apparently reading a journal entry which describes a bizarre, seemingly schizophrenic hallucination. Then the play goes on as a monologue narrating her life and thoughts leading up to her death. At no point is the opening scene explained or referred to again, and she never shows any other signs of mental illness or hallucination.
- I think some people might dispute that...
There are many scenes in the musical The Pajama Game that could be considered big lipped alligator moments including a musical number during a picnic called "Once A Year Day", The opening of Act 2 called "Steam Heat", and a scene where Hines sings about saving time for no reason only to establish that he's a psycho which, by the time the song is sung, most of the audience already knows.
- "Once a Year Day" is a natural outpouring of song by Sid after he gets a kiss from the girl he loves. Not exactly the most plot-shaking development, but many, MANY musical numbers have been built on less. Including, as you say, the Act 2 opener, which is actually called "Steam Heat," and was a pop hit in the 1950s. Adler and Ross, the songwriting team of Pajama Game were also pop songwriters and included a completely pointless song in their other show (Damn Yankees) as well, "Who's Got the Pain?"
Any number of musical comedies have at least one or two BLA Ms. There are an incredibly large amount of examples in the genre.
- As noted in a couple of examples above, sometimes this is to allow for a costume/scene change, sometimes because the songwriters wanted to insert a "catchy" song (and plot be damned), and in a few cases because it makes a part more attractive to "name" actors... which doesn't hurt the box office.
- One that deserves to be pointed out is Guysand Dolls. Near the end of the show, when all the gamblers are at a prayer meeting, and Nathan Detroit persuades Nicely-Nicely Johnson to speak, Johnson is forced to improvise. So he comes up with this dream he sort-of had, and everyone around him, completely out of free will, becomes a gospel choir backing him up. Thus begins "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat." After the song is performed, it is never sung again.
  - In fairness, being "sung again" is definitely the exception rather than the rule in musicals, and in the movie version at least it's implied that Nicely-Nicely was actually sincere, as he appears in one of the Save-a-Soul "uniforms" at the end.
In Mac Beth, there's a scene that is cut out of most film versions, where Hecate herself comes to the Wierd Sisters and yells at them for giving Mac Beth this information instead of her. This scene does not alter the plot as it does not result in the witches trying to correct their mistake or even doing anything about it. in fact, there's even a fairly common hypothesis that the scene was, in fact, a last-minute adition by someone else, or demanded by someone else, as it has nothing to do with the rest of the story. Which makes this Older Than Steam.
- Argh! Hot potatoes, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends! Ngh!

Close Theater

If you consider something from Phoenix Games really a game, "She's so jealous of me~"
The MMORPG Everquest 2 has a BLAM in the form of the Tower of the Drafling. In the middle of a rather overrun contested area, is a beehave. Clicking said beehive shrinks you down, and allows you to explore and fight inside it. Nothing about this is explained. Ever. At all. In fact, it's not really referred to again in any of the quest texts, either.
- It makes sense to players from the first game, as there really were tiny little bee people called Bixies in the zone Misty Thicket - which corresponds to The Enchanted Lands and Rivervale in EQ 2. Now, as for how said bee people survived 500 years of Bad Stuff happening...
- The NPC that mumbles with the name '?' is likewise never explained.
In Metal Gear Solid 4, Big Mama goes off on a tangent comparing The Boss to the Virgin Mary, and Big Boss to Jesus, quickly adding pseudo-religious imagery to the mix of MGS4's "What the Fuck?" moments. This angle is never ever mentioned again.
- Sounds like a parody of fan theories about the series and analyzing everything way too much.
  - ... That's is the most ironic comment I've ever seen on this site.
The "Dream Land" level from The Simpsons arcade game. Could also be considered Cloud Cuckooland.
The Taito arcade game PuLiRuLa has the player characters given the ability to cause a Big Lipped Alligator Moment as a "smart bomb" style special attack to clear the room of enemies. Seriously.
- ONLY THAT? LOOK AT THE 3RD LEVEL. Dream of a Megalomania!!! (Also, look at 6 minutes in: THAT'S the Smart Bomb BLAM. Listen to the players' reaction.)
  - Speaking as one of the players in question, we really did not have ANY clue that Clingfilm Sentai was going to appear. We'd both played the game before and had never seen ANYTHING like it. It was really quite majestic in it's sheer randomness.
The Kill Sat sequence from Resident Evil: Dead Aim. See here.
- After reading through that LP, this troper would like to write down that moment just to make sure he isn't going crazy. Essentially, a Chinese agent is sent to stop a terrorist. During her mission, China later decides to negotiate with him. For some reason, this means she is now a target of the Chinese government, specifically their laser satellite. (Why they would kill a loyal agent because they canceled her mission is beyond me.) She avoids the laser and the game's protagonist removes the gps tracking device from her body. After that the whole "enemy of my own government"/killer satellite thing is never brought up again in the game.
Shadow The Hedgehog has one of these. In Shadow, you either help the aliens or the heroes, with one subplot dealing with Shadow vs. Eggman. In level that is almost too far away to reach that Eggman subplot, the hero mission is stealing 400 rings from Eggman's amusement park with Tails. Finishing this mission brings you away from the Eggman subplot, and the rings, the park, etc. are never mentioned again. This troper has a fanwank theory about how those rings could fit, but it's ludicrous at best.
- Not impossible, though. Getting the dark mission in each of the two levels following that one will put you right back in neutral (where the Eggman ending is) for the final level.
  - That same level (Circus Park) is a BLAM altogether - it can only be accessed by (1) defeating a bunch of aliens at what is effectively their launchpad, or by destroying one of their major tanks in a city. Shadow enters the park out of nowhere only to spout one of the most reviled lines in the entire game. Said park itself is the brightest of the entire game, and is slightly contradicted later in the series (Eggman's overarching goal since Sonic Adventure is to create "Eggmanland", which finally happens in Sonic Unleashed, and turns out to be a theme park itself - why wouldn't Eggy be happy with Circus Park?). It also shows Tails to be almost completely out of character - he crashes the Tornado for no reason, and cares more about these rings than the plane? Good thing it's not necessarily the canon path through the game, but the fact that it's the only way to Death Ruins (potentially a major plot point) is disappointing. Cryptic Castle is *almost* as bad, except Eggman has built castles with ghosts before, and the intro at least makes a bit of sense, yet it still brings him into the storyline sooner than necessary. Then again, given the subject matter and gameplay, it's possible that the entire game is a BLAM.
  - The current theory as to the canon route is Westopolis -> Lethal Highway -> Prison Island -> Sky Troops -> Iron Jungle (leading directly to Space Gadget) -> Final Haunt. GUN won Westopolis and Lethal Highway, lost at Glyphic Canyon and Digital Circuit, won at Central City and launched a counter attack that involved Death Ruins. This explains everything that happens in the Last Story. The entry point to Mad Matrix is at Cryptic Castle, so it is assumed that the Chaotix went here rather than Shadow.
Captain Brooke getting attacked by a skeleton at the end of the seventh stage of Elite Beat Agents.
- It was the cursed skeleton of the chest's original owner. Although, considering that each level has nothing to do with the other the whole game can be considered a BLAM...or nineteen levels of awesome filler, whichever you prefer.
- Just like Ouendan and its sequel!
  - Technically, none of them count for one reason: the last level and Gondor Calls For Aid.
  - Credit must be given to Ouendan's old pottery master who goes out seeking inspiration. There is no logical sequence of events that could lead to him record-scratching at a club.
In the first three episodes of Sam And Max Season 2, whenever someone says "birthday", a mariachi will appear seemly out of nowhere, says "Did someone say....BIRTHDAY?!", and proceed to play a song. When he finishes, he disappears as seamlessly as he appeared, leaving the characters with mouths agape. Then in episode four it's revealed that these mariachis are actually T-H-E-M, who've been collecting souls of the dead and sending them to places unknown, so they can sing for birthdays across time.
- A better example would perhaps be the War Song scene from Abe Lincoln Must Die.
Monster X from Cave Story is a weird machine that comes out of nowhere in The Labyrinth, and once you beat it, it turns out to be a.....Giant.....Cat....??? It is never mentioned again.
- Of course, considering the properties of the caves, it might not always have been a cat.
In Final Fantasy Tactics after the battle in Yardow Fort city, Ramza and Rafa have a conversation that is interrupted by a talking frog, who hops onto the map, relays a message from Malak, and then explodes ala Mission Impossible. Given the game's somber tone, the sudden randomness of the incident seems out of place in the game. Neither Ramza nor Rafa bat an eye at the exploding frog, and no-one ever mentions the frog after this. Scene can be seen here, from 4:05 to around 4:30
In Kingdom Hearts II, during the second visit to the Land of Dragons, Sora is pursuing a black-coated man who he thinks might be Riku. When he apparently corners him, the man unhoods himself and reveals himself to be Xigbar of Organization XIII. Xigbar says one line then runs away. In the final world, however, when Xigbar appears to Sora, reference is made directly to their original encounter at Hollow Bastion, making it a follow up to that. So then, aside from unhooding himself, what was the point of Xigbar showing up at the Land of Dragons if it's going to be ignored as if it hadn't happened?
- Whole fight with Chernobog in first game seems to be this - it comes out from nowhere and after the end is never mentioned again, not even in bestiary.
- Also Kairi's Keyblade Kingdom Hearts II could count, since it's only seen during one cutscene and isn't even named.
In Iji, there is the trippy Sector Z, a sector made up of a few of Daniel Remar's other games. You get there by finding all ten hidden posters, then by making a Tasen blow a hole in a cracked wall. When you find the teleporter pad, you'll also find a logbook that briefly describes how the sector was found. If you play through Sector Z in a normal game file (not single sector play), you turn up in the beginning of Sector 2 when you exit. Dan asks Iji where she went, and she says that she doesn't really know, and only remembers some kind of rave or mosh inside a video game console. When Dan remains silent, Iji tries save face by giving a more technical explanation, but is interrupted by Dan saying, "You know what? I'm going to pretend this conversation never happened." It is never brought up again during the rest of the game, as if it never occurred.
At one point in Kagetsu Tohya Shiki randomly gets eaten by a magical talking jaguar for going through Arcuied's underwear. What the hell is going on here? Even Shiki is baffled. And unlike numerous other bizarre things in this oddly named sequel - though it's far from the only example - this never comes up again or is explained in the slightest.
Seiklus is a surreal game and most of it makies little sense, but one moment in particular is unusually jarring. After discovering the ability to teleport to random places, you can sometimes find yourself in an unbelievably out of place labratory room which contains a flying monster made of smoke behind a glass wall. The room is not on the map and does not move your progress forward at all.
In Silent Hill 3, the appearance of the Sewer Goddess comes out of friggin' nowhere, is completely out-of-place in the famously grungy 'blood and rust' game, and is then never mentioned again. Ever.
- It's a very, very well hidden joke reference and not something that's part of the actual narrative. You might as well count the UFO endings too, while you're at it.
In Super Mario RPG you can go behind a curtain in Booster Tower which turns Mario into his 8-bit version. The theme from Super Mario Bros. starts to play and you are able to wander around the room until you turn back to your normal self after a while. This comes out of nowhere, it has no relevance to the plot and it is never explained.
- This BLAM is repeated once per game in the first two Paper Mario Games. Super Paper Mario upgrades it into two new powerups—one causes the characters to become giant hulking (and pixelated) 8-bit versions of themselves, while the other causes small 8-bit allies to follow the character. However, the developers wisely threw in a BLAM regardless; in one scene, a koopa grabs the giant powerup and chases the player across the stage until he or she finds a giant powerup as well, and can then fight the koopa on equal footing.
  - The reason for the 8-Bit Mario part in Super Mario RPG is however mostly tied to the fact that it is an Easter Egg, and is, in fact, entirely optional.
In Parappa The Rapper 2, Chop Chop Master Onion from the first game has a show that's "Strictly for Adults" in which CCMO teaches "romantic karate". and Parappa and his best friend try using the moves on each other while unbeknownst to the two of them, Parappa's father and girlfriend's father watch. This is never mentioned again. Lyrics include "Caress your lover" and "Get it on." This is one eighth of an E-rated game.
Gore:Ultimate Soldier is a fairly standard space FPS. SUDDENLY, HORDE OF YELLING SKELETONS WITH CHAINSAWS, WHAT DO YOU DO?
MegaMan Star Force 3 had the most random apparition of Hyde/Dark Phantom... ever. He kind of shows up, says Geo ruined his life, is defeated again and falls off the Wave Road (wait, you could fall?). And then... never ever mentioned again.
The Megaman Battle Network games are FULL of BLAMs, but one in particular truly stands out: in MMBN2, a deadly spider gets loose on an airplane, and Lan has to help trap it. The spider incident has absolutely no bearing on the game's plot, is an utter waste of time, and even worse, features a BLAM within a BLAM in the form of the whiskey event◊. Seriously, what the fuck were they smoking when they wrote the scenario?!
Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver feature an optional event where an entire UNIVERSE is created and presumably destroyed in order to give you a rare Pokemon. Proof here
Final Fantasy IV has the dancing-girl, who randomly turns into a football-player and then proceeds to run around in the inn, like (s)he was trying to get a touchdown, complete with fitting Music. She returns to normal afterwards. You can watch the scene multiple times, but the only comment EVERY made on it by ANYONE is Cecil's dumbstruck "What the—?!"
In the Legend Of Zelda The Wind Waker manga, would this scene count?
During the trip to the Fourth Ranked Battle in No More Heroes, Travis falls asleep on a train. This causes him to... dream of playing a Bullet Hell shooter based on his favorite Cute Witch/Giant Mecha show. And no, the following battle has nothing to do with said anime, or shooters. It just... is.
In Tatsunoko Vs Capcom, after Yami is defeated, almost none of the characters in the game ever talk about how they defeated him, you'd think beating the lord of darkness and the creator of technology would be an achievement (Then again, they've arguably fought worse...)
At one point in Earthbound, while in Moonside, a man refuses to let you past unless you bring him "a guy whose eyebrows meet in the middle and who also has one gold tooth" (his exact words). That guy attaches himself to you at one point (he's invisible). Bring him to the man, and they leave together to get a drink. Even by Mother standards, this is random; one Lets Play has an illustration of Ness and Jeff shrugging it off following the sequence.
- The entirety of Moonside is just one giant Big Lipped Alligator Moment, frankly, with the possible exception of the boss fight at the end.
The Nightmares in the Milkman Conspiracy level of Psychonauts. Basically, a hole just opens up in the ground and arms drag Raz in, a freaky monster attacks, and when you beat it, Raz just appears back where he was, and no mention of it is anywhere to be found. It gives the impression that the developers realized after they'd written the funniest level in the whole game that it didn't have any fighting other than the boss, and just stuck them in there at random to make up for it.

Close Video Games

The appearances of the Halloween Monster in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob.
The random death metal comic from Questionable Content found here, drawn to commemorate the 666th strip.
- Pintsize attempted to recreate the magic for strip #1337. It didn't work very well.
The strip featuring Fruit Pie the Sorcerer.
- And "A Brief Intermission", a "Let's All Go to the Lobby" parody.
This strip early on in Penny Arcade where Tycho is a giant turnip in a sweater. No comment is made about this, and it never happens again.
- In the book collection this strip appears in (Attack of the Bacon Robots!), Tycho explains that Gabe threatened to draw him this way until he bought a Dreamcast.
  - Honestly, this troper always assumed it was meant to be Div's perspective, to show exactly how drunk he was.
"Surprise Ending" indeed: "Je suis de retour!"

Close Webcomics

The Nostalgia Chick makes reference to this in the Nostalgia Critic's review of Ferngully, and even pulls a few of them herself during the review such as interrupting a joke about Tim Curry to break out an accordion and play it with no relevance to their discussion or the movie. (Which, since this is where the trope and the name first came together in one place, they gleefully lampshade.)
- The Critic points out in his "Top 11 Mindfuck Moments" video that many of the scenes he mentioned could be considered a Big Lipped Alligator Moment.
- A BLAM has actually been used by the Nostalgia Chick in combat, as she invoked one in the Anniversary Brawl to save herself from Little Miss Gamer and The Aussie Guy, before punching them in the gut.
Zero Punctuation has one of these in its LittleBigPlanet review with a man (presumably Yahtzee himself) dancing around in boxers with googly eyes on the butt.
- Making it a Crowning Moment Of Awesome is the fact he does it to Soul Bossa Nova.
The internet meme "It's Over Nine Thousand!!!" contains a random cut to "Cosmo Dance" from Rhythm Tengoku.
Professor Otaku began ending his vids with these after his Street Fighter review, and has been fairly consistent with tagging them onto the end of his videos. However, lately, he seems content to simply use the footage without additions.
In The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of Moonwalker, right at the end (after throwing a fit of explosive proportions), he turns into a cat, and then pads off.
- Obviously you need to see more Micheal Jackson music videos. He did the exact same thing for the "Black or White" music video. It was as incredibly strange back then as it was when the Nerd did it.
If you can fathom this, the popular Youtube Poop the dinner blaster lol managed to have one of these, where Scatman John starts singing The Invisible Man and then starts shooting at... um... actually who was he shooting at?
- Most Youtube Poops run off of this trope, as the "story" will randomly jump from something to something else entirely unrelated to what was happening moments before.

Close Web Original

Ferngully has the appearance of a big carnivorous lizard who tries to eat Zak while singing a song about the food chain.
The Pink Elephants scene from Dumbo.
- This one's open to debate. While the sequence itself has no real plot relevance, it's all part of a drunken episode that leads Dumbo to apparently fly for the first time. He wakes up in a tree, unable to remember how he got there, but Jim Crow and his friends clue him in and show him how to do it while sober.
The infamous animated Titanic movie has a few of these, but most notably, "IT'S PARTY TIME!"
- And considering that it's set on the Titanic in 1912, the infamous rapping dog sequence's bizareness goes Up To Eleven.
The Brave Little Toaster manages to have a BLAM within a BLAM. About halfway through the film, the appliances find themselves beside a small pond where they meet some animals, including a singing fish who gives an epic performance on par with ~~Big Gay Al~~ ~~the original Big Lipped Alligator~~ Big Gay Alligator. And in the middle of this, the Toaster runs off to be alone and has a very awkward encounter with a lone tulip. Neither incident ever comes up again.
- The tulip is supposed to remind Toaster of Blanky and make her/him realize how lonely he is. S/he begins to treat Blanky better after that. It's still hard to read the symbolism when you're a little kid.
  - But what caused the moment in the first place was the tulip seeing ITS reflection in Toaster's chrome.
- But far more bizarre and out of place that this double BLAM is a nightmare Toaster has later, in which he is menaced by an Evil Clown who is dressed as a firefighter, and wields a firehose that sprays forks.
  - No. It's a nightmare for a toaster. Water and forks are tops of the list of fear for a toaster.
  - And clowns too, presumably.
- In The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, during the characters' flight into outer space, they encounter a cloud of singing balloons that floated away from Earth.
- Moreover, The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue has these...vaguely cow-like...things with disc-drives that break down the door, with other stuff trailing behind in order to break into song and dance. Then they leave and the movie goes back to the plot.
The entire time/dimension travel sequence in Transformers Armada, that happened without explanation (despite the gobs of mystical advanced technology lying around), is never mentioned again, and really does little to advance the plot. The only thing we learn is that the Mini-Cons rejected Unicron and gained sentience because the kids went back in time and showed them how much they cared about their beepy robot friends. And since it's never mentioned again, it's ultimately a pointless plot twist.
Some episodes of Chowder feature at least one instance of a pink fuzzy gorilla-looking thing named Kiwi appearing without mention to deliver a one liner or a piece of exposition, then disappearing. As far as this troper knows, he was only acknowledged once or twice.
The first instance of Peter Griffin fighting the giant chicken in Family Guy could arguably fit this trope since it's over the top, happens spontaneously, and is never mentioned again for the rest of the episode (save the very end where someone who saw all the events mentioned ITS randomness). The subsequent chicken fights could even be considered subversions.
- At this point, Family Guy is fairly stuffed with these.
  - Like Conway. Flipping. Twitty.
  - This Troper wonders if that's some kind of inside joke, as Seth MacFarlane looks enough like Conway Twitty that he may have gotten teased about it at some point.
The direct-to-videoThe Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue had this as well, though Don Bluth was not involved in the film. Jeremy the Crow and his new sidekick Cecil the anthropomorphic insect are found running a scam in the woods, with Jeremy disguised as the Great Owl and posing as an oracle giving fortunes for money. The musical number that ensues is over-the-top with bizarre animal dancing. At the end, Jeremy's thin disguise falls off, and the forest animals chase him and Cecil away. Jeremy and Cecil rejoin the main storyline, and the whole sequence is never mentioned again.
Sesame Street once had a stop-action sequence about an orange (anyone who's seen it knows what I mean already) that made no sense whatsoever. The orange bounces and shuffles its way along a kitchen counter as items attach to it, forming a face. When it is finished, the lights go down, a spotlight comes on, and it sings the "Habanera" from Carmen. This alone would almost qualify as a BLAM, but it gets better: the orange struggles with her tone on the "L'amor" bit, getting more and more atonal, and her face suddenly explodes. Moments later the pieces all fly back on, and she finishes the aria as if it never happened.
- You too can witness the Operatic Orange here.
Mickey MouseWorks had a sequence in the Donald Duck episode "computer.don" where Donald gets sucked into his computer while trying to fill out his personal information, and is left at the mercy of a cursor that mostly pokes his ass until eventually being printed back out. This has no bearing on the rest of the episode apart from an excuse to throw in an Art Shift to CGI. Watch the BLAM here.
On the episode "Humiliation 101" of My Life As A Teenage Robot, once Jenny figures out that she in fact will not be embarrassed by her mother in front of the entire school, she breaks into random song with Brad and then they proceed to school after singing this little ditty with a small dance included as if nothing ever happened.
Hanna-Barbera's feature Heidi's Song had not one, but two: first, Grandfather tells Heidi stories about evil spirits haunting the mountains right before she goes to sleep, leading to a Disney Acid Sequence nightmare; second, when Heidi is locked in the rat-infested basement by Fraulein Rottenmeier, the rats break into a musical sequence, with Sammy Davis Jr. as the head rat. (And for this BLAM, he gets second billing on the movie, right after Lorne Greene as Grandfather and before the girl who voices Heidi.)
In Felix the Cat the movie there are many scenes that could qualify like the circus, the singing undersea creatures, and when the Duke's henchmen chase the heroes a monster pops up and randomly starts quoting from On The Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire!
"Stella, Stella come back!, I could've been somebody!".
The new...interludes on Cartoon Network that play before commercials nowadays. They aren't commercials, they don't promote any of the shows, they're just there to be completely random, confusing and proof that CN has jumped the shark. Examples include clips of an animated, ridiculously overmuscled guy screaming and doing exercises, a guy walking into a brick wall with the line "walk fail" showing up, and a guy turning into a werewolf, and then into a chihuahua.
- Little Kid!, BIG MOUTH! My dog eats eggs. BIG MOUTH!
- DRINK FAIL!
- BOUNCING BULLDOG IN A BIKINI
- Chihuahua... dressed as a taco... eating salsa... does. not. compute.
- ANIMALS EATING WHILE RANDOM PERSON SINGS NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM.
  - I don't have cable, but is the "Nom nom nom" movie this one: YouTube movie? (There's also a live-action version of the same music video) If so, Cartoon Network's just stealing memes from You Tube. The other bumpers described remind me of other You Tube videos, too.
In the first Tom And Jerry movie, there is a musical number when Tom and Jerry are being threatened by a singing gang of alley cats. After sending the cat gang into a sewer, the titular characters apparently blocked it from their memories, because the cat gang is never mentioned again
At the very end of We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, the main villain is suddenly mobbed by crows, who were never referenced to before, who perch on him like a scarecrow, hiding him from view for a few seconds. Then just as suddenly, they fly off leaving only his eye-replacement screw. The first time he saw this, yours truly could only say "holy crap."
- The crows were hanging around the circus before hand, plus being his death scene at the end of the movie, it's not like he'll affect the plot much anymore.
- It would have made more sense, but a relevant scene was cut for being too creepy. Screweyes reveals that his missing eye was pecked out by a crow, and that he is afraid of the birds but keeps them around because it allows him to master his fear.
In Raggedy Ann and Andy a Musical Adventure at one point Ann, Andy, and the Camel fall into a pit and meet a disgusting slimy blob who can't stop eating called The Greedy, after defeating him he is never brought up again.
The Total Drama Action episode "Dial M For Merger" has a scene where Chris breaks up the teams, and LeShawna lamets "They're breaking us up? After all we've been through together?" Then it randomly goes into a parody of the 6teen opening. It's never mentioned again.
In the KingOfTheHill episode Returning Japanese Part I Bill and Dale receive visions from a sweat lodge, Bill's involves him riding a motorcycle naked along a giant fork and crashing into a giant pie, Dale's involves him having sex with a giant praying mantis that then chops his head off.
The Belgian animated feature Pinocchio in Outer Space features a scene where Pinocchio and Nurtle the Twurtle (don't ask) fly to Mars, are menaced by giant crabs and other horrible mutants, and finally escape by dropping an atomic bomb. This has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
Dot and the Kangaroo and its sequels each have several of these.
OK, this may be taking things out of context, but in the trailer for Disney's upcoming The Princess and the Frog, 1:50 looks eerily like the picture at the top of this page. Same physique, same posture, dancing...this is a literal BLAM.
Walk on the Wild Side, a season 2 episode of X Men Evolution, opens with Jean getting angry at Scott because of his assertion that it was a good thing a man was there to save her and Magma. This leads to the two forming an all girl vigilante group with Tabitha, and they quickly rope in Kitty and Rogue, complete with music videos, a change of spy wardrobe, and enough Charlies Angels riffs to make Kim Possible proud. Even Mystique gets in on the action.
The original Shrek film has this, in the form of a Robin Hood who, for some strange reason, speaks with a French accent and is referred to as 'Monsieur Hood'. He appears out of nowhere, does a song and dance with his Merry Men, attempts to kidnap Fiona, and then he and the men are soundly trashed by Fiona. The incident is never mentioned again, and Monsieur Hood and his Merry Men only appear again during the 'Kareoke Dance Party' on the DVD.
Rock A Doodle has the main protagonist Edmund run into his brain (?) and hallucinate the other characters berating him for being a "scaredy-cat". (Cause he got turned into a cat, get it?) As per the usual, it is never mentioned again.
In Turtles Forever, there is a scene where all eight of the Turtles go to the 1987 world, and experience the 1987 Turtles fight... A giant mutant banana, pizza monsters, evil leprechauns, and monstrous bowling balls, saving 1987 April in the process. After this scene, the Turtles leave, and 1987 April is abducted by a mutant banana, never to be seen in the movie again.

Close Western Animation

Ever wanted to know what a Real Life Big Lipped Alligator Moment would be like? Well, here are some...
- ImprovEverywhere excels at this.
- Pretty much any flashmob is going to be a BLAM to anybody around who is not involved.
- Prangstgrup's Lecture Musical is yet another example.
- An ESPN play-by-play announcer, just before the biggest play in the the 2007 Georgia-Alabama footballl game, asks his booth mates about Britney Spears.
- The infamous "hackers on steroids!!" news report features, out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, an exploding van. All together now: You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
Wouldn't dreams sort of count as real-life BLAMs? I mean, they interrupt the main narrative with a sub-plot that's disjointed at best, can range from And I Must Scream to Mary Sue and has little or no bearing on the main plot save for the occasional Eureka Moment... So Yeah.
At Green Day concerts on their 21st Century Breakdown tour, a man in a bunny costume comes onstage before the band, does the Y-M-C-A, and is never spoken of again.

Close Real Life

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