"While most agree that the financial theory behind the scheme is "crazy," others counter that the idea of flying a hot-air balloon filled with dry ice over Wall Street is so outside the realm of conventional thinking that, paradoxically, it just might work."
In real life, when someone is in serious trouble, they, even on the fly, have to think of a logical, sensible and reasonable strategy that can get them out of it with as little loss as possible, in the best conditions possible as well.
In movies, the characters can make the most irrational, nonsensical or plain dumb decisions, and it works!
Why?
Because it's Crazy Enough to Work, that's why. Sometimes characters will even credit it to it being crazy (enough to work). A possible example would be something along the lines of "What about patching up the nuclear reactor with a pack of gum and peeing on the fire from the top of the reactor? That's so crazy, it just might work!"
While heroes of every genre will come up with these, expect a lot of them from Badass Unintentionals, since they lack the knowledge, strength, and sometimes even the courage to come up with a better idea.
Lampshaded frequently enough that it's become a Stock Phrase of the Genre Savvy.
Routinely pulled off by Crazy Awesome characters. Compare Million to One Chance; the less probable a plan is to work, the more likely it will succeed in Hollywood conditions. See also It Runs On Nonsensoleum and Refuge in Audacity (which run on a similar premise) and It Will Never Catch On (which is a specific type of joke that invokes a similar reaction in the audience). See also Confusion Fu for people who weaponize this trope.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: If smashing a small robot into a big robots head, almost impaling the pilot of the big robot (who, by the way, was the one who thought of this) in the process is not Crazy Enough to Work, then nothing is. Oh, and they also run a walking, nonflying battleship up a mountain and jump through the air for a good half a mile just to get a chance to kick an Airborne Aircraft Carrier. This universe runs on Rule Of Cool, so it was destined to succeed.
And when the flying kick only scratches the side of the Airborne Aircraft Carrier? They at once make the captain fling the wheel over in the most exaggerated way possible, turning the flying kick into a flying roundhouse kick that of course succeeds.
Everything that happens in Gurren-Lagann is too crazy to work. And yet it does...
Bleach: In episode 135, we see Matsumoto, with Kon by her side, saving the life of a girl that was about to drown when falling in the water after her plushie. How? By removing Kon from his plushie body and tossing him in the mouth of her plushie, to get Kon—as the plushie—to go save the girl instead of, say, going in there herself. She offered a weak rationale ex post facto, and simply let the hilarity ensue.
In the early episodes of Black Lagoon when their torpedo ship is cornered by an attack chopper the 2 badasses and the tech nerd onboard were getting ready to kiss their asses goodbye when the timid loser businessman they had taken hostage comes up with a plan to charge the copter head-on and use a shipwreck as a ramp to launch them high enough that they can hit it with a torpedo. It works, of course.
In Eyeshield 21, sometimes when Sena or Monta comes up with an implausible or just plain ridiculous strategy, Hiruma will tell them something like "That plan's completely stupid! ...Let's do it!"
Isaac and Miria in Baccano! usually get away with their crimes because they are so absurd that no-one can take them seriously, or believe that they could pull something like that off. For example, they robbed a Mafia money delivery dressed up as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, and knocked out the wise guys with baseball bats in the middle of the day on an open street only a few yards from their office.
Several of Misato's plans in Neon Genesis Evangelion, particularly her idea to deal with Sahaquiel, the butterfly-like Angel going for a suicide drop from orbit, by using Evas to catch it on its descent.
When the Epic Hail signaling the war's end fails to stop two armies from charging at each other and re-igniting the war, Kanata Sorami tries the Power of Rock. It works long enough for The Cavalry to show up.
Comic Books
When Justice League uses a crazy superhero to predict the actions of completely crazy bad guys, at least you have the "crazy" part covered.
Fanfiction
In Aeon Natum Engel, during the brainstorming on how to kill a Monster of the Week, a certain Tactical Director was mumbling in her drunken stupor about the miniguns. More sober minds heard this, made some math in their heads, tested it and lo and behold, it's actually viable (It must be noted that the Author in general tries to avoid Crazy Awesome).
Company0051 has grenades taped onto dodgeballs. Granted, it'd just be easier to throw the grenades themselves, but it does allow the Kid Soldiers to show off their mad dodgeball skills.
The whole plot of Decks Fall Everyone Dies is to pull off a plan that's so crazy it might work to bring card games back.
Film
Ordinarily, when a mining ship from the future commanded by an Ax Crazy Romulan shows up and starts laying waste to ships and planets, most folks would decide to steer clear of the damn thing. Of course Captain James T. Kirk decides that the best course of action is to take them head on.
James T. Kirk is the living embodiment of this trope.
McCoy: So you're saying you want to go backwards in time; find some of these whales; bring them forward in time; drop'em off; and hope to hell that they tell this probe what to go do with itself??!!
Kirk: That's the general idea.
McCoy: But that's crazy!!!!!!
Kirk: You've got a better idea?? Now's the time.
In Pirates of the Caribbean, when Jack Sparrow uses the recoil of a cannon to toss him from one ship to another, it prompts the exchange between him and Lord Beckett:
Lord Beckett: You're mad! Jack Sparrow: Thank goodness for that, 'cause if I wasn't this would probably never work.
And upon landing in front of his bewildered crew:
Jack Sparrow: And that was all without a single drop of rum!
The basis behind the plan to rescue Morpheus in The Matrix. Complete with call out.
Trinity: Nobody has ever tried anything like this before. Neo: That's why it's going to work.
Parodied in the Dana Carvey film The Master of Disguise. The line is repeatedly used for the most simple and straightforward plans. Dramatically.
Okay, so you're a rich playboy snarker who's out for a relaxing afternoon drive in the deserts of Afghanistan, when a bunch of psycho terrorists blast the crap of your armored truck, fill your chest with shrapnel, hook you up to a car battery, toss you in a cave, and then tell you that if you don't make a missile for them, they're gonna feed you to the hyenas. Sounds like you're screwed, don't it? Here's what you do: build a tiny chestplate that puts out more energy than the warp core of a Federation starship, forge some iron and heavy metal by hand, and design a badass suit that's capable of kicking doors of hinges, bitch-slapping terrorists by the dozen, equipped with a rocket launcher, a pair of flame-throwers and has a rocket pack so that you can blast off after wreaking havoc. Oh, and you have to do this while trapped in a cave! With a BOX OF SCRAPS!... And they're watching you 24/7 on camera. Most people don't have the audacity to attempt something so brazenly outrageous. But then, Tony Stark ain't most people!
Gimli: Certainty of death, small chance of success... What are we waiting for?
An explanation for the insufficiently nerdy: they're about to suicidally attack Sauron's far superior army to distract him while Sam and Frodo try to complete their insane plan of attempting to simply walk into Mordor, somehow bypass the tens of thousands of bloodthirsty orcs, climb up an active volcano barefoot, and destroy a telepathic Artifact of Doom before it takes over their minds and/or gets stolen from them and handed to Sauron, which would grant him godlike power. Not only does it work, but all the heroes survive, except for Gollum and a bit of Frodo.
Sahara: Pulling a Panama? Okay, believable, considering gas is just as flammable today as 2005. But using a box of tools to convert a one-winged, at-least-as-old-as-you airplane into a windsurfing desert-crosser? Really?
Shortly after that, when the other kid Vikings figure out Hiccup's plan to have them train their own dragons:
Ruffnut: You're crazy! (leans in closer) I like that.
During Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves this is invoked by Will Scarlett (Christian Slater) after he launches Robin (Kevin Costner) over the castle wall with a catapult... "Fuck me, he cleared it!"
The attack on Aqaba in "Lawrenceof Arabia" probably qualifies as this.
Literature
Animorphs invoked this frequently pretty much every time Rachel came up with a plan it was this. Marco says it word for word more than once.
The majority of plans crafted by the Codex Alera's hero, Tavi of Calderon, hinge on this. So much so, in fact, that his lover is able to correctly reason Tavi's chosen location for the series Final Battle by thinking of a place that only a lunatic would willingly enter.
You want examples? Of course you do! Take, for instance, his role in the defense of the Elinarch. Due to a lot of things going wrong at once, he ended up in command of a single, inexperienced legion (about 7,000 soldiers) who had to hold a bridge against an army of more than 50,000 Canim: centuries-old, enormous, and incredibly dangerouswolfmen. First, to stop them from crossing the river anywhere else, he had all the butchers in the camp and the towns at either end of the Elinarch throw buckets of blood into the river to attract sharks. Any Canim trying to swim across quickly learned the error of their ways. He also went out to try to negotiate with the leaders. By himself. He proceeded to use his knowledge of their culture to laugh in the face of an Evil Sorcerer and exploit a division in their leadership. Then he sat for an hour and played chess with Nasaug during a truce to let them remove their dead from the field*
Tavi won
, in order to buy time for his men to set up his next tactic: sawdust and fire furies planted in every building on the Canim side of the bridge, which he then had his only Knight Ignusblow up while the Canim were trying to move through them. He'd made sure they were all in the buildings by having everyone in the legion hold tiny firecraftings over the main square so the stones were superheated and anyone trying to step on them would get fried. And the battle ended when he had his Knights Aerisbend the air to form a quarter-mile-wide magnifying glass, concentrating the sunlight into aDeath Ray. The general consensus among the characters seems to be that Tavi is completely insane.
Ehren: "This plan is nuts... you're nuts... *looks around* I'm going to need some pants.
And that thing mentioned above about going into the most suicidal place he could think of? His plan was to piss off the Eldritch Abomination-like Great Furies Garados and Thana and use them against the Vord Queen. It only really works when she tries to claim the furies and he has the even crazier idea of cutting her connection and letting them go free to wreak random destruction. They are very pissed about the attempt to control them, and Thana, an enormous, sentient thunderstorm, pretty much literally chews the Vord Queen up and spits her out.
Harry's plans in The Dresden Files are often of this variety. Since they are written by the same man as the Codex Alera, this is far from surprising. Zombie dinosaur, anyone?
"Challenge everyone (White Council, White Court, Shagnasty) who shows up in one place at the same time, just to try to draw out a single baddy who won't be able to miss the opportunity". Particularly since the thing that worked in the end was hiring a plain old vanilla mortal private investigator to take pictures of everyone going through the Ways to the island.
Drinking a magical Klatchian Coffee, jumping out of a moving car and facing down a group of psychopathic lycanthropes at full moon. And this isn't the craziest thing he has done.
John Dies at the End has this come up a lot, usually for John's plans. About a third of the way through the book, after the heroes decide to fight a ballroom full of monsters with The Power of Rock, he even speaks a variation of the Stock Phrase:
John: I'm lead, Jim is rhythm, Jen sings backup. Jen, just repeat everything Dave sings, only like one second behind. The sound system will be on the stage. We duck out there and plug in and wail. Okay? Guys, this is just retarded enough to work.
[[X-wingSeries Wraith Squadron]] specializes in these plans. Just during their first active mission, they fake the Millenium Falcon to decoy a Star Destroyer away from an evacuating Rebel base then proceed to capture(and utilize in a False Flag Operation) a Correlian Corvette pocket carrier with an X-wing's laser cannon carried by the squadron's resident Gamorean.
Live Action TV
Pick any (and we do mean any) of the plans hatched by the folks on Stargate SG-1. Blowing up a sun; using every Stargate simultaneously to generate a wave capable of disintegrating matter across the whole galaxy.; sneaking into a conference where all your major enemies are gathered; storming an enemy mothership with just four people. Believe it or not, these aren't the craziest ones.
One later season episode lampshades the escalating ridiculousness:
Col. O'Neill: All I'm saying... just for the record... this is the wackiest plan we've ever come up with. [He turns and starts to leave the room] Maj. Carter: Wackier than strapping an active Stargate to the bottom of the X-302? Col. O'Neill: [As he walks out the door] Oh, yeah. Maj. Carter: [Calling after O'Neill] Wackier than?than blowing up a sun? Col. O'Neill: [From the corridor, unseen] Yep! Maj. Carter: [to Jonas and Daniel] ...He's probably right.
Some of the stuff that Chuck Bartowski comes up tests the very limits of sanity. But somehow, it works.
Farscape: See John. See John have a fight with a large empire. See John strap a nuclear bomb to his chest and walk into their headquarters as a diversion. See John Win.
A fair number of Star Trek adventures feature somebody coming up with plans that are Crazy Enough to Work. Scotty especially had a habit of making stuff work that simply defied the laws of physics.
Subverted for some darn reason, later, in which we learn that sometimes Scotty exaggerated the time limits to make himself look awesome.
Played with in Star Trek: Voyager. Former Maquis, who made up a lot of the crew, had to make do with next to nothing a lot, so they came up with ways to do the mission that'd make regular Federation officers protest like mad. Janeway was smart enough to let her Maquis people do their thing when needed, but even then it didn't always work.
Many of the myths tested on Mythbusters turn out to be this. For example, if a car goes fast enough, can it skip right over the surface of a 120-foot lake and keep driving when it gets to the other side? The Build Team didn't think so either. Then they tested it. Can you fool a highly-sensitive sonar motion detector by holding up a bedsheet in front of you to absorb the sound waves? Guess what...
Every single episode of MacGyver, of course. Crazy Enough To Work is the driving principle behind MacGyvering.
Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith: It gets better! (starts laughing)
Corner Gas. Many of the schemes tried by Brent LeRoy and Hank Yarbo (and a pretty significant chunk of the schemes everyone else in the main cast try) fit into this trope. Most of the time the plans fail miserably, but even when they work, the success just creates another problem they hadn't anticipated.
This happens a lot in Blackadder, always prefaced by the words "I have a cunning plan".
Subverted as these plans usually fail, or are so stupid that is no way to actually enact the plan.
"Pathetic! Absolutely pathetic! Contemptible! Worth a try!"
On The Daily Show, when John Hodgman suggests that America fake its own death to avoid debt, Jon Stewart said "Wow, that's so crazy... it just might be fucking crazy."
Any and all prison escapes by Michael Scofield of Prison Break. Features of his plans include structural engineering know-how, coded phrases and last minute improvisations due to being failed and/or betrayed by other people. However special mention must go to his later plot to steal Scylla. Let's take the most prized possession of the powerful Company that keeps trying to torture and kill us!
Major Bunny Colvin comes up with a pretty interesting plan in season 3 of The Wire. Faced with the drug trade sprawling over more and more of his streets, as well as an increasing pressure to get crime rates down, what plan does he come up with? Legalize drugs. More specifically, he sets up three "safe zones" in his district and makes a deal with the dealers: if they move all their trade there, the police won't touch them. And it works. Dangerous street corners are cleared for ordinary people and his men can focus on fighting crime more concretely, as opposed to making endless futile drug raids. Crime goes down 14%. But in the end, The Wire is too naturalistic for such a Zany Scheme to be workable: once his superiors find out about the whole thing, "Hamsterdam" is shut down, Colvin is disgraced and the streets return to normal. Major Rawls even comments that his plan was brilliant - insane and illegal, but brilliant.
The plan to capture Angelus has to qualify. It involved Faith doping up during a fight, allowing herself to be fed on, then Angelus getting high off the drugs she took. To be fair the plan was thought of as crazy and dangerous.
The crew of Serenity practically does this for a living. The maneuver "Crazy Ivan" is called that for a reason, jumping onto a moving train is risky enough when it's not a hyper-fast futuristic train, injecting yourself with adrenaline to stay conscious long enough to call for help can be suicide, fighting off about thirty seasoned fighters with a bunch of prostitutes needs no explaination, and even Jayne didn't think it was possible to get Mal out of Niska's skyplex.
In Halo 2, the Master Chief dives out of Cairo Station with a bomb larger than himself and falls into the engine of a Covenant Carrier, detonates the bomb, and falls again to land on a UNSC ship that is miniscule by comparison.
Cortana: I know what you're thinking, and it's crazy.
Master Chief: So? Stay here.
Cortana: Unfortunately for us both, I like crazy.
...
Sarge: For a brick, he flew pretty good!
In Halo:Reach, Kat proposes a way to take out a covenant super-carrier that involves "the single most expensive piece of equipment made by man".
Carter:"Even for you, Kat, that's..."
Kat:"...inspired?"
Carter:"Not the word I would use."
Subverted in Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones. Ephraim, along with his 3 bodyguards, plans to raids the enemy castle and take it over, on the basis that "If the enemy thinks the same [that the plan is insane], there's our opening." Unfortunately, it turned out that one of the aforementioned 3 bodyguards was The Mole, and therefore the enemy was completely prepared for the siege.
This was how the Wii was made. A console relying on outdated technology (basically, just a faster and slightly improved GameCube) and motion controls that many claimed would never catch on? Nintendo is mad! Four years later and the console is still selling damn well, beating out the more powerful Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. Nintendo does have an advantage in that a Wii can be cheaply sold at a net profit, but the other consoles are more expensive and are sold at a net loss, as Microsoft and Sony banked on high game sales and charging for online content to make up the remainder.
Earlier with the NES? Marketing a game console as an entertainment system because it had a robot attachment? Worked well enough to restart the entire American games industry.
Nintendo's success's can reasonably be said to run on this, they thrive by trying to bring in new markets instead of trying to compete with the main market. When they did during the N64 and Gamecube era, they entered a slump.
Nintendo has a tradition for being nontraditional. Gamepads instead of joysticks, twin-screen portables, autostereoscopic 3D, motion-sensitive controls standard, the list doesn't end here. While many of their innovations took hold and were accepted by the mainstream for being different, others didn't fly so well because other, more mainstream innovations (like CD and later DVD game media) managed to overshadow Nintendo's efforts. Like any company, Nintendo both hits and misses.
Played with in Left 4 Dead 2. Coach comes up with an idea to start up a band's pyrotechnics in order to call for a helicopter. After hearing this, Nick drops this line.
In Tales of Vesperia this is intentionally invoked when Brave Vesperia formulates the best way to destroy the Adephagos by using Spirits and the removal of blastia from the world, something that would be all but impossible. However, it works, and the world is saved.
Annyseed uses a love potion in order to deter someone from her, rather than attract someone to her. Winston, you’re a genius! Mmwa! Page 61.
Most of Red Mage's plans in 8-Bit Theater, constantly lampshaded. A most notable example is when he explains his plan has to work because it has no logical basis whatsoever on which it could fail.
Also frequently subverted on the frequent occasions when these plans spectacularly fail to work.
So many things in Sluggy Freelance. One of the best examples is the Ferret Bazooka, where Caffeine Bullet Time is weaponized by putting a hyperactive ferret in a cardboard tube, pouring in a pixie stick, then pointing the tube at whatever you want destroyed. If all goes as planned, a ferret on a serious sugar rush will shoot out of the tube at supersonic speeds.
Parodied in xkcd. When Nathan Fillion wants to try the Crazy Ivan maneuver from Firefly on his electric skateboard, he insists it's so crazy it has to work. Jewel Staite replies "No, that's the opposite of true." She was right.
Alt Text: "Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to failhilariously."
A lot of the inventions the Sparks come up with in Girl Genius fall under this trope. Granted, they probably make perfect sense to the Spark making them, but to everyone else...
Agatha:' "This has a small, but fascinating, chance of actually working!'' Let's do it!"
The "party" of Darths & Droids (and quite a few actual Tabletop RPG parties) runs on these kinds of ideas. In this comic Pete points out that Jim is their group's resident master of this trope.
When they try to mimic what Jim would do, Annie keeps doing things to try to slow a spaceship's fiery descent from orbit. Each time, Pete responds, "Not crazy enough!" Finally, her plan is to fire all of the ship's missiles at the ground just before landing, using the explosion to cushion the fall. Pete's response? "Too crazy!"
In Dark Dream Chronicle, Hanna tends to resort to this immediately when running doesn't work.
Western Animation
One Tiny Toon Adventures episode has Babs and Buster consulting a computer on how to rescue a friendly flea living on Furball from an evil, carnivorous bug. The computer reads, "Cliché; #1: Shrink our heroes." After Babs says it's crazy enough to work, Buster says "That's Cliché; #2!"
On Family Guy, Peter says this before putting his hand in a waffle iron. Needless to say, that didn't solve the problem at hand. However his second one does.
Spoofed in one episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants. Patrick suggests moving Bikini Bottom to avoid an attack from a giant worm. Squidward says, "That's just crazy enough... to get us all killed!" They do it anyway. And it fails.
It's worthy of note that the only reason it failed is because the worm was lured over the cliff the city was pushed under.
In Kim Possible, Shego says of a plan by Dr. Drakken, "I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I think you may have finally achieved 'so dumb, it just might work.'"
In an episode of Futurama, the Planet Express crew and the Globetrotters are trying to solve the problem of "time skips" that jump everyone in the Universe forward in time, leaving them with no memory of what went on in the interim. At one point, Hermes Conrad says, "Say, I'm no physicist, but I think I know how to stop the skipping. We'll just—" after which time skips, everyone but Hermes is nude and in a conga line (Hermes is in a Hawaiian shirt, playing a steel drum) and Hermes cries, "I don't know how this was supposed to work!"
Of course, most of the (often successful) plans in Futurama — especially if they're by Farnsworth or Fry — are usually Crazy Enough to Work.
Carl: Johnny, I have a plan. Johnny: It's just crazy enough to work! Carl: But you haven't heard it yet. Johnny: Enough talk! I need action!
Beast Wars. After Optimus Primal jumps, in beast mode, from a flying island that's just more or less gone nuclear, in the hopes of catching a tree branch on the way down before he and Rattrap go splat or get charred to a crisp. He does.
Rattrap: Of course you do know that was crazy. Optimus Primal: Sometimes crazy works.
Jumba: That's crazy! Lilo: So crazy it just might work? Jumba: No, just crazy.
Used often in Hey Arnold!! Usually with the phrase, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Let's do it!"
Played with in Maryoku Yummy when Maryoku and Shika are searching for Bob. Shika starts out by systematically checking every spot in Nozomu, but Maryoku suggests starting with the places they'd usually find Bob.
Shika: Well, it sounds crazy, but— Maryoku: Good! Follow me! Shika: But I said it sounds crazy! Maryoku: Yet you're still going to give it a chance. That's so nice.
Used almost word for word in an episode of the 2010 Pound Puppies:
Strudel: An adoption fair? How crazy is that? Lucky: So crazy, it just might work.
Parodied in Drawn Together. When Spanky fills in every blank in a mad-lib with "Penis", Wooldoor suggests using words other than penis, to which Spanky replies "That's crazy, Wooldoor! Just crazy enough to penis."
One episode of Megas XLR (itself a big parody of sci-fi and anime clichés) found the titular robot with a critical part badly damaged, so they scrounge around a junk planet for a replacement. Ultimately unsuccessful but in need of the part to win a fight, Coop goes down below. When he comes back up, Megas is back up and running and proceeds to kick butt. When Kiva asks how he fixed Megas, he replied, "When in doubt…duck it!" Kiva is uncharacteristically impressed, "Primitive…but amazing technology!"
Real Life
Many variants on this are attributed to Niels Bohr, notably to Wolfgang Pauli, on Pauli's nonlinear field theory: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."
Reputedly, when Lee Smolin was running around proposing that black holes give birth to new universes, Murray Gell-Mann said, "Smolin? Is he that young guy with all the crazy ideas? He may not be wrong."
A relatively new chess opening, dubbed the Halloween, is a perfect example of this trope. 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Nxe5?! The faces of people who've seen this opening — right before they were flattened by a march of pawns — is something to be seen.
Back when legalized racism was rampant in the USA, no shortage of people were trying to find ways of eradicating it. You wouldn't have thought that simply not taking the bus would make a difference. Martin Luther King and those who worked with him proved otherwise.
After The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, stores refused to sell video game consoles and people were wary of video games. So what did Nintendo do? They packed in the Robotic Operating Buddy (which was a piece of garbage that worked with two games) so they could tell stores it was a toy, and they made it a front-loader so it resembled a VCR more than a gaming console. Today, Nintendo is one of the richest companies in the world.
When they released the Citroen 2CV in Africa they included a manual for alternative solutions when parts weren't available, which included things like shoe-laces.
Politicians, scientists, and relief workers have been trying for nearly a hundred years to bring Africa out of the third world. One young boy, WilliamKamkwamba, decides to introduce the first ever steady electric power supply to his famine-devasted cholera-torn village. And he did it with a box of scraps!!!. The villagers called him "misala", meaning crazy, right up until the first light bulb lit up in his hands. Okay, he didn't do it in a cave, but he's still a bigger badass than Tony Stark cause he did it for real.
Wait, are you going to play your amp loud, resulting in distortion and then make the guitar loudest in the mix? When Eric Clapton did just that back in the Blues Breakers in 1966, he ended up inventing modern rock guitar as we know it.
To be fair, the Tyrians reacted quickly to the situation and managed to hold off Alexander for a while by employing their sea advantage to hold up Alexander's initial attempt at a causeway. Only when Alexander tried again, this time with ships helping in the work were the Tyrians defeated.
Generals throughout history could occasionally get away with pulling off stunts like this due to this exact trope, usually involving an attack so unlikely (say, through a seemingly insurmountable desert, swamp or mountain range), the enemy is caught completely off guard (think the Blitzkrieg in the Ardennes Forest). If its crazy enough, the enemy will never see it coming, and it just might work. Of course, if the opposing general or his intelligence officers are good enough to see the method in the madness, it tends to be a spectacular failure.
Zhuge "Sleeping Dragon" Liang was a Chinese general famous for his masterful battle strategies and deceit. Once during the War of the Three Kingdoms, he was trapped in a town with only a handful of soldiers and an opposing army of a hundred thousand men approaching fast. He immediately sat himself atop the city walls with the gates wide open, calmly playing a lute. The leader of the enemy army, Sima Yi, was quite familiar with Zhuge's ingenuity and, thinking this was all a big setup for a deadly ambush, immediately retreated.
The fate of Apollo 13. So your Cool Ship has an explosion literally halfway to the moon. Here's the plan: 1) Use a machine designed strictly for landing and taking off as a lifeboat, even though it will have to support three people when it was only designed to support two; 2) Shut down all electricity, subjecting your crew to near-freezing temperatures (not to mention the havoc the frost is sure to wreak with the electronics when you have to turn them back on); 3) Kitbash a working carbon dioxide filter out of whatever you have lying around because the ones in the lifeboat can't handle the workload; 4) Carry out course corrections with an engine unsuited for such fine maneuvering, using such high tech navigational methods as "placing your thumb over the Earth and lining it up with your window frame"; and 5) Literally invent a new procedure to restart all your electronics so as to not blow every fuse in the craft, thus stranding yourself in space. The Subversion of this is, in the hands of ordinary people, yes, it would be Crazy Enough to Work. In the hands of NASA's highly trained corps of Steely Eyed Missile Men, it came off as almost...commonplace. The reality is somewhere in between; they weren't Crazy Prepared for this type of situation, but they were trained enough not to panic even when Murphy's Law struck (note the tone of the now-famous line, "Houston, we have a problem."—concerned but not freaked out), trained enough to coordinate with mission control, work out a solution, and get home alive! Apollo 13 was a technological disaster but a human triumph.
That may or may not be the point of the Steely Eyed Missile Men; create unusual and ingenious solutions to unexpected problems under tight deadlines. Besides which, while the vague concept may be "just crazy enough to work", there's a helluva lot of effort put into making sure that everything is within the bounds of reality.
Hannibal's conquering of Italy in 218 BC. The Romans never expected anyone to be crazy enough to march over the alps, and certainly not for it to work. He did lose half of his army and most of his war elephants doing it, but he conquered and held most of Italy for 15 years.
