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Conspicuously Light Patch
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Guess which bush Amuro pushes aside.
In older cartoons (and some newer ones), it used to be somewhat obvious that an item apparently part of the background would get picked up and used. What made it obvious was that it was strikingly lighter in color than its stationary surroundings. Alternately, it might have an obvious difference in detail or color saturation — animated objects in older cartoons tended to be simpler than the backgrounds, which would be painted in greater detail and with more colors. Another telltale sign would be clear black outlines on the object: the three clearly outlined rocks on the cliff would be the ones to tumble.
This was an unintentional artifact from the animation process. Foreground/animated objects were drawn by the main animators separately from the background and matte painters. Because the two processes were done at different times and locations and by different artists, consistent color matching was very difficult. Additionally, the unpainted portions of cels are not perfectly transparent, so the colors on lower cels became more and more muted as additional layers were added to the top of the stack.
Film critic Roger Ebert has called this the "Fudd Flag", after Bugs Bunny's nemesis, who uses it to determine which tree Bugs is hiding behind, which rock he needs to trip over, etc.
Something similar occasionally appears in older live-action productions. In particular, you may see an oddly colored sheen around the characters in shows featuring heavy use of Chroma Key. In his review of the "StarWars" prequel trailer , Mr. Cranky dubbed this slight Special Effects Failure a "mystical aura."
This also applies to mid-era point-n-click Adventure Games, when the background would be painted or 3D rendered, while objects would usually be drawn sprites. However, this had a practical use, allowing players to easily locate collectible objects, even small ones. Especially small ones. A similar version can appear in action games that require you to destroy parts of the environment to procede, again, mostly in older ones. The breakable parts would usually be a different color, and one can sometimes even see the seams where the object is supposed to break apart.
In early console games, some interactive objects might use a noticeably different palette than the background, since sprites and backgrounds have their own color spaces.
Occasionally inverted by allowing the cel/object to exist and making it readily visually apparent, and then moving the background art instead of the cel.
Examples
Fudd Flags
- Just about every Looney Tunes or Hanna-Barbera cartoon ever made.
- An episode of Extreme Ghostbusters featuring "The Piper" had this exact trope. When the characters were standing on the pier, one could see the foreground planks in a richer shade of mahogany shortly before they were smashed to pieces.
- The New Adventures of Alvin and the Chipmunks had this all the time, from a door that was shortly going to be opened, to a boulder that was going to fall down on the heroes.
- In the animated feature American Pop, one character is seen playing the piano, and as he moves his arm his sleeve repeatedly flickers to a lighter shade than the rest of his shirt.
- Duck Tales had an instance that was particularly obvious due to the fact that it appeared in the title sequence (about twenty seconds in).
- Scooby-Doo: Trap doors, curtains hiding monsters, vases that activated secret passages, paintings with moving eyes, it was everywhere. Quasi-subverted in the theme song, however, with an obviously-background-painted Scooby-Doo covered in bubblegum, which is cleared away by an animated tongue to reveal the lighter, animated Scooby.
- The video game Serious Sam, interestingly, features these. Behind a lightly colored spot on a wall, you could expect to find a secret by moving to it or shooting at it.
- Not just Serious Sam, but Conspicuously Light Patches, along with other texturing and lighting tricks, were pretty much a staple in FPSes since Doom, as they were often a clue to where a secret could be, or where monsters would come from.
- Wolfenstein 3 D pulled a major dick move in not doing this most of the time; if you wanted to find every secret, you had to move up and down every wall repeatedly hitting the action key.
- The newer, Crystal Dynamics-developed Tomb Raider games have been criticised for constantly using white ledges to signify which parts of the wall Lara can grab.
- Not the same people who bitched about the identicality of grabbable ledges and worthless background imagery, I hope.
- In the second episode of Avatar The Last Airbender, the snow wall Sokka is standing on has plenty of these, including his snow watch tower, which collapses as Prince Zuko's ship approaches.
- Mods (amateur expansions) for the original Half-Life engine have this quite often, based on rendering limitations. Lighting effects were determined when the level was built, and didn't change during play, even if an object moved to a differently lit environment. Similarly, interactive objects didn't block light, meaning a bright light would shine right through a door or destructible wall as though it were glass. Levels had to be designed with the limitations in mind, by having near identical lighting on both sides, or leaving the light off on the opposite side until it was triggered.
- The Touhou doujin-anime Musou Kakyo: A Summer Day's Dream has this almost constnatly.
- In He Man And The Masters Of The Universe (the old series) you could tell which rocks were going to fall as they'd be coloured lighter.
- Invoked in the LEGO Crossover Games, where non-LEGO scenery serves only as background. All interactions involve only LEGO items.
- In Gargoyles, there was a scene where a blind man pulls out a book from his shelf. All the other books are generic browns and reds, the one he pulls out is bright blue. For the aversion, see below.
- Spongebob Squarepants, although the ones in older episodes could be attributed to the fairly small budgets at the time, the newer, more Nickelodeon-backed episodes have no such (weak) excuse.
- No form of animation being intrinsically immune to the Fudd Flag, claymation-animated works are wholly capable of falling prey to it, too. Davey And Goliath did it nearly every episode.
Mystical Auras
- There's a particular bit in the 80s Flash Gordon movie where, as a rocket travels forward entering the Imperial Vortex, this bright, transparent... thing moves behind it. Instead of moving steadily behind the rocket, it sort of jumps whenever the rocket's going to go past it.
- Objects that are interactive but would not otherwise be obvious glow in the video game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
- Extremely apparent in some Muppet productions, as Jim Henson liked using Chroma Key a lot in the mid-80's. It gets to the point where you can tell something's up when you see that "mystical aura" around a character.
- In the B Movie Xanadu (not to be confused with the trope,) Sonny gets one as he enters the muses' world, as seen at the bottom of this page.
- On Babylon5, some special effects failures let you see the characters were suddenly in front of a blue screen such that someone was going to do something that required a special effect to depict.
- In Metroid Prime 3, anything you could use the Grapple Lasso on shimmered yellow, and in all three of the games scan data would be Color Coded For Your Convenience to tell you if you had scanned them or not.
- Crysis does the same thing when tagging hostile targets.
Point-And-Click Version
- Final Fantasy VII had the point-and-click-adventure-game example of this trope. Any object, person or thing that could be examined was rendered in rather blocky 3D (mind-blowing at the time, but extremely dated now, ten years on) against the smoother, less-dated pre-rendered backgrounds. In fact, the main character remarks on it once or twice in the Beginners Hall.
- Even more obvious in the PC version, in which the backgrounds are still 320x240 but everything else is in high resolution.
- In the City Of Heroes computer game, items that must be found to complete a mission not only pulse with light, but emit a sound to alert players to their presence, earning them the nickname of "glowies" among players. This falls under the category of Acceptable Breaks From Reality, mind.
- Bioshock has the option to have items you can pick up shimmer like this. Items vital to beating the game are particularly shiny.
- Want to know if a corpse in Playstation-era Resident Evil is just a corpse or if it's going to bite your legs off as you walk past? Just check whether it's rendered like the background or like a character model. Smooth-shaded = dead dead, jagged polygons = zombie.
- Not nearly so easy in the Gamecube remake, however. The increased render capabilities make the zombies blend in a lot better to the remade backgrounds.
- Occasionally the series will fake you out, though, with a polygonal body that doesn't get up and try to eat you.
- In Super Mario Bros. 3, one level featured enemies who hid in brick blocks; the blocks concealing enemies were easily distinguishable because, due to palette limitations, they didn't shimmer the way that normal blocks did. Naturally, in the Super Mario All Stars remake, there was no such giveaway, due to the SNES' more advanced graphics capabilities.
- They're still a slightly different color in All-Stars, though that's probably intentional. Another example would be underground hidden blocks — on the NES, the starry background would be a noticeably (though not too noticeably) different color where a hidden block would show up. No dice on the SNES.
- The "different palette" version shows up a lot, albeit totally unplanned, when playing a monochrome Game Boy game on a Game Boy Color or Advance. Backgrounds are colored green and sprites are colored red. Fortunately, there's a couple different palettes you can choose when turning the game on that negate this effect.
- In Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, most of the items to be caught (specially as Improvised Weapons) have some sort of lighting.
- In The Legend Of Zelda Ocarina Of Time, the area of floor you have to bomb in order to reach King Dodongo uses a texture that doesn't quite mesh with the floor around it; if you look closely you can see the seams. Also, the rocks that you can bomb tend to be very obvious, as they all use the same model.
- Jet Set Willy had all collectibles in a blinking color.
- World Of Warcraft frequently has quests where you have to pick up objects on the ground. These objects are scenery and can't be manipulated (and don't even light up when the cursor hits them) unless you're on the relevant quest. Since finding which book among the thousands of books you see in a building is the one you're supposed to pick up is annoying, Blizzard eventually made quest objects sparkle and glow to make them easier to discern.
- If you see a patch on a wall in Mondo Medicals that is lighter than the rest of the wall, you can walk through that part. This is key to solving many of the game's puzzles, including "Counts to Fifteen" (15 is hidden behind one of the walls).
- While the first Monkey Island game featured pixel-art backgrounds that meshed convincingly with foreground elements, backgrounds in the second and third were hand-painted. This was mostly averted; items that could be picked up were often also hand-painted and pasted in, and disappeared when you picked them up. This convention was completely thrown out in Grim Fandango and ''Escape from Monkey Island," in which everything is 3D but the backgrounds are all pre-rendered and, more importantly, anti-aliased. So just look for the items with jaggedy edges.
- Circle of Blood averted this; everything (everything) was in the same cartoonish style, including things two or three pixels wide that you needed to pick up. People took to calling it Circle of Mouse because if you didn't mouse over every pixel in a new area, you missed something.
- Conspicuous in King's Quest VII, the first SVGA King's Quest game, where the cartoonishness of interactable objects, in contrast to the backgrounds, sometimes make it ludicrously easy to figure out that, say, a statue is actually going to come to life and kill you.
Parodies and Aversions
- Animaniacs made fun of this. In one episode, the Warner Brothers (and Sister) were rented out to a Hanna-Barbera-esque company, and placed in a Yogi-Bear-esque cartoon with plenty of these.
- The anime Blue Seed had an omake sequence after one episode which parodied this; one character stops and monologues on the properties of a set of desk drawers, noticing that one is drawn more simply and in a different palette — therefore it must be the only one that moves, and contains the item he is looking for.
- The Homestar Runner game "Peasant's Quest" subverts the game version. At one point in the game, a conspicuously light candle appears on the screen. If you try to get it, the game says "It seems like you should be able to do that, doesn't it? Sorry. No dice."
- The Animals Of Farthing Wood averted this by having certain objects painted on the animation cels so that the characters could use them without them looking conspicuous beforehand.
- Averted in The Simpsons by painting the backgrounds on cels, same as the characters. It succeeded most of the time, but there were still tell-tale "Fudd flags" visible at times until the production switched to digital rendering methods.
- Averted in Spirited Away; the art book points out that CG was used to animate the dishes when Chihiro's parents start nudging them around with their pig snouts.
- Inverted like hell in Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind, where the titanic Ohmu insects are made up of animated backgrounds.
- In Gargoyles the animators worked very hard to keep the stone gargoyles from being Fudd Flags. When stone, the gargoyles are in background animation, appearing as any other inanimate object. When they come to life, they are in cel animation.
- Don't step on it!
- Russian animation often averts this. Some of the examples are "Firing Range" and "The Singing Teacher".
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