There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fiasco, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because it didn't happen to them.
Epic Fail: when normal, run-of-the-mill failure just isn't enough.
This is about something that should be fairly straightforward and typical for a character but then goes horribly, HORRIBLY wrong in a manner probably thought impossible. It's when a character seems to be facing a pass or fail situation, a do or die type of test and then fate hands them a third option, fail in a manner so bizarre it's impressive. We're not talking, "Supervillain decides to shoot a random minion but misses." We're talking, "Supervillain decides to shoot a random minion, but misses- and the bullet ricochets off two walls, smashes the instrument panel on his Doomsday Machine and ends up inches from the minion's head, weakening a structural support and causing the base to come crashing down. And the minion is the only survivor." A failure so ludicrously, unexpectedly awesome that, despite its status as a failure, it manages also to be admirable for its uniqueness and irreproducibility.
At its best the trope can give the viewer a much needed jolt out of a sense of boredom, it can produce a laugh out of something you wouldn't think could, it can inspire a temporary sense of fate or dramatic justice. At its worst, it can become a Deus ex Machina, rescuing the writers from the fortress of logic they have enclosed themselves within with a Hand Wave of "luck".
Often used against those who are Tempting Fate, and sometimes as a demonstration of how monumentally screwed you are in a Final Boss Preview. When epic failures come in forms that shouldn't even be possible, they can be examples of Beyond the Impossible. Often this trope comes with an Incendiary Exponent, possibly because of the Rule Of Cool.
Compare Critical Failure (a game mechanic meant to represent the normal ever-present danger in any action), It Got Worse, For Want of a Nail. This trope is the norm for Stupid Crooks.
Not to be confused with Epic Flail, though you can certainly commit Epic Fail with an Epic Flail if you're not careful.
If you're looking for the trope that used to have this name, it's now Offscreen Moment of Awesome.
Yukko kicks off her shoe similarly to Osaka, below, and loses it the exact same way. Then she chases the car and trips and loses her other shoe.
Mio and sports period.
Nakamura's attempts to use the Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo to capture Nano. Not only does she end up drinking the coffee she herself drugged twice, but the second time was well after the first, which demonstrated that such drugs don't even work on the Robot Girl.
The Big O uses this coupled with the Rule of Funny for maximum impact. In Episode 18, Jason Beck decides to pwn Roger Smith with a robot that's a walking parody of the Power Rangers, Mazin Kaiser, Getter Robo, Voltes V, and Zambot 3, and the pwnage he gets for his trouble is totally and epically hysterical.
For those who haven't seen this, it's combined with Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? where after getting its own lengthy transformation sequence complete with poses and Beck shouting the robot name with background flash effects, Roger just looks at Beck with the most bored expression on earth and just shoots it to pieces. It should be noted that the setting is composed of taciturn, stoic characters and philosophical ones, which makes Beck's mech stand out. For bonus points, the player can recreate this scene in Super Robot Wars Z and get new weapons for The Big O as a reward.
And the icing on the cake is that the battle takes place in a Dome whose setting is based on Japan.
Asuna of Mahou Sensei Negima! once tried to light her crush's cigarette, but accidentally lit his beard instead. She then doused the fire with the first liquid she could get her hands on — piping hot tea.
The Digimon Adventure movie Our War Game has a moment of this that is both funny and serious. Taichi, in a frustrated manner, bangs on the side of the monitor he's using to observe the fight between the Digidestined's Digimon and Diablomon. The computer it's connected to crashes. Hell, he didn't hit it very hard at all. Taichi's reaction (AKA, his expression) is priceless. Though, besides being funny, it serves as an Oh Crap moment as WarGreymon is now more or less a sitting duck for Diablomon.
It should be noted it only looked like that. What really happened was Ken already did it to him shortly beforehand (with the elbow to the face), and like many of his techniques it had a delayed effect.
Nagi in Hayate the Combat Butler is so bad at domestic tasks that when trying to make herself a cup of tea, she failed so badly that a flying saucer apparently crashed through the wall.
Sheryl Nome in Macross Frontierfalls into the cockpit of an advanced prototype fighter in episode 14. She invokes her Catch Phrase, gets a Theme Music Power-Up, takes off...and promptly bounces said fighter off an enemy capital ship before being mercilessly shot to pieces and forced to eject. This all happens inside thirty seconds. A brutal subversion of Instant Expert, since she's really an idol singer, and she'd only had a handful of lessons before then.
Made funnier by the fact that when it doesn't work the first time, the creature she is attacking does the equivalent of looking down a hosepipe...
Kurumi's Evil Plan in Kimi ni Todoke to split up Kazehaya and Kuronuma by making Kazehaya think that Kuronuma likes someone else. Not only does the Batman Gambit end with the misunderstanding cleared up, Kazehaya becomes inspired to actually act on his crush and it makes Kuronuma aware of the fact that she likes him too, further deepening their bond. Kurumi, thinking it actually worked, ends up confessing to who she thinks is Kazehaya with her back turned...only to discover that not only has she confessed to the class' idiot gym teacher instead (who rejects her), but Kazehaya accidentally walked in on the confession. Just to rub it in, he kindly informs her that he won't tell anyone else.
Fresh Pretty Cure!: Villainous example — the job of a Labyrinth is to use monsters to cause misery so they can gather it as energy. Enter Westar. His plan involves using a living wig to change people's hairdos to cause misery. It totally backfires and instead everyone hit by the monsters attack is intensely amused. Incidentally, this scene is one of the most meticulously animated in the whole series.
You have to be a particularly intense kind of stupid to use an explosive as your means of transportation in a major competitive event. In one episode of Pokémon, one person has an Electrode as his mount. One pitfall later, he's out of the race...as are several other contestants.
Another contestant uses a Rhyhorn as his mount. Rhyhorn is basically a rhinoceros made out of rock. Not the best you could use, but pretty good. He's actually doing pretty well, but then he comes to the first jump over a river and...sinks like, well, a rock.
In the episode "Holy Matrimony", James tried to lie about his status, claiming that he froze in the snow and died after running away from home after faking amnesia. The other characters (even Brock, the wise person of the group) fell for it, despite James being the one telling the story. Misty was the only one who actually realized that his story was false.
In two episodes of DP, Ash, Dawn, and Brock (especially Brock) were fooled by Jessie, James, and Meowth's disguises. Normally, it isn't noteworthy, but in this particular case, they were still fooled even when Jessie, James, and Meowth's disguises...just consisted of glasses and green coats. It didn't even cover up the telltale red R on their uniforms properly, and there was a light in the background shining on them. It's not even the worst offender either: an entire populace, and Brock, participated in a contest about which Croagunk was the best looking. They chose Meowth, despite his disguise actually being so bad it would have been impossible to mistake him for a Croagunk.
In the Arrancar Saga of Bleach, Dordoni manages one during his introduction. While giving a speech and running, he falls off the platform he was running on when it ends and crashes into the ground. And this guy can walk on air.
Also, in Chapter 470 Rukia tries to use Kido while stuck as a plushie, and fails spectacularly.
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo are often filled with these moments, especially in fights, whenever some attacks go wrong or just don't work at all.
In the first episode of Cube X Cursed X Curious, Fear tries her hand at cleaning. Granted, she's never done anything like that before, but that's no excuse for trashing the whole house. Some of the things she did just went against common sense.
THE iDOLM@STER - Makoto tries to cutefy herself during the Are We Live? Show. The audience was not pleased.
Comics
The final chapter of Batman: A Death In The Family has The Joker appointed ambassador to the United Nations by the Iranian government; the Iranians, who are Always Chaotic Evil in this story, plot to have the Clown Prince of Crime kill the entire U.N. General Assembly by gassing them right after making a speech. But Superman thwarts Joker's plan, causing the villain to flee the chamber with Batman in hot pursuit. The Joker hitches a ride on a helicopter with his gun-toting Iranian cronies, but Batman grabs hold of the aircraft just as it takes off and fights his way in to confront the cowering Joker. One of the Iranian gunmen panics and opens fire with his assault rifle. The result? It's bad enough that the gunman succeeds only in "harmlessly" nicking Batman's arm, but he also "manages" to deal a fatal wound to every person on board but Batman - including the pilot himself, whom he shoots in the back of the head! We are told that "the gunman immediately realizes his mistake," but he doesn't have long to regret it: Batman punches him out, knocking him unconscious and then diving into New York Harbor, leaving everyone in the chopper to die when it crashes into a nearby dock. (Well, except The Joker, of course.)
Jason: Why can't my successes ever be as spectacular as my failures?
Non-comedic example: In Secret Six, Black Alice admits that she tried to use Raven's powers to remove her father's asthma. She gave him cancer instead.
In one strip of The Far Side a man lost a quick draw to a sloth. One bystander mentions that the newly deceased wasn't exactly what you would call a "quick draw".
In one issue of X-Men Storm had one of these when it comes to dealing with her claustrophobia. The thing that set her off wasn't being trapped in rubble, having to fight in a small room, or anything like that. The villain was making threats against them, and used the word "tomb." Storm proceeded to flip. out., and spent multiple issues of the fight cowering in a corner. He wasn't even trying to prey on her phobia, he was just talking to them and accidentally incapacitated her.
And when Storm finally managed to pull herself together and fight, her first attack sends a lightning bolt at The Juggernaut, which bounces off of him and strikes her, knocking her unconscious and back out of the fight.
Happens to members of Spider-Man's rogues gallery whenever their Villain Decay is played for laughs. But Lightmaster takes the cake: in one appearance, he announces his appearance in front of the Wall-crawler, then immediately gets knocked out with a falling duffel bag full of money.
How did One Moment In Time explain Spider-Man missing his own wedding? A fat man fell on him and he couldn't get him off. No, really.
It becomes a lot worse once you remember that Spidey has Super Strength and should logically be capable of pushing off the man with ease—hell, he's seen at one point throwing a car at somebody.
Charlie Brown of Peanuts is well known for failing in ways that are utterly impossible through no readily apparent fault of his own. Blockhead.
Linus: That's the first time I've ever seen a kite explode."
Also lampshaded in The MovieA Boy Named Charlie Brown, when the girls mock Charlie by singing the song "Failure Face." They quip that, if trying to fail were like running a race, Charlie Brown would actuallywin.
There is a line of Epic Fail t-shirts displaying his greatest failure moments.
The Host is full of this. Probably the best example occurs when the monster is covered in gasoline, Nam-Il is about to throw a Molotov cocktail at it... and he drops it. Played for extreme tragedy in an earlier scene, when a simple counting error gets the dad killed.
Back To The Future has Marty McFly embark on a simple quest: Go back in time, turn around, come right back. What happens is: Go back in time, get stuck there, meet your Mom and have her fall in creepy Oedipal love with you, jeopardize the time-space continuum by creating a temporal-paradox, and figure it all out before the end of the movie.
In the sequel, Marty is about to escape with the Grey's Sports Almanac, when he encounters young Biff, itching for a fight. As soon as he gets called out on being a "chicken", and is about to fight Biff, his past self hits him with the door on the way out. Really, any time Marty falls for being called "chicken", expect him to fail. Hard.
In other words, he got beat by himself in a situation where he really should have been able to predict what he was going to do. Or at least get into trouble that he could've easily avoided if he kept on walking. There's also the number of times a Tannen ends up face first in a pile of manure after an already humiliating defeat.
Batman Returns: The Penguin is confronting Batman outside the "Arctic World" zoo exhibit where he and his gang have been holed up. Penguin gloats that he has in his flipper a sword-umbrella, while Batman is unarmed except for some worthless-looking handheld console with a red button on it. As Penguin is waiting for Batman to make his move, he suddenly realizes that the "useless" console is blinking in and out and beeping. He then sees Batman's eyes shift off to the middle distance, prompting him to turn around - and sees his entire army of rocket-launching pet penguins that he had earlier sent out to blow up Gotham Plaza, now returned to the zoo and standing by, as the electronic signals being programmed into their headsets have been jammed. Penguin, knowing that his birds must be in terrible pain as their brains are bombarded by all the static, has a particularly undignified Villainous Breakdown and attacks Batman in a rage, causing our hero to drop the console. Penguin breaks off the attack and gleefully scoops up the console, then points it at Batman and hits the button, thinking he must be holding a weapon of some kind...only the device isn't a weapon, but a transmitter sending an electronic cue to the penguins to stop keeping their missiles on standby. Just like that, what have to be at least 100 penguins fire the rockets at Arctic World simultaneously, reducing the entire ancient exhibit to smoking rubble, killing any criminals who happen to still be in the area (including Penguin himself), shorting out Penguin's climate-control system, and blowing out a fuse box and exposing its wires, thus providing Catwoman with a means of both electrocuting Max Shreck and causing a massive power failure that temporarily plunges all of Gotham City into complete darkness.
And in Batman Forever, the sequel to the above film, Two-Face tries to shoot Batman but succeeds only in killing one of his own henchman - twice.
The Gods Must Be Crazy is pretty much a collection of epic fails every ten minutes of the movie. Ay ay ay ay ay.
What's worse, roughly half the wacky predicaments ensue simply because at the beginning of the movie, someone throws an empty Coca-Cola bottle from an airplane. Seriously. We never even learn the litterbug's name.
The Ex-Wife. Hammer's special bunker-busting bullet that was finally used in the climactic battle... and did absolutely nothing but bounce harmlessly off Vanko. Best summed up by Tony and Rhody:
Tony: Hammertech?
Rhody: [dejectedly] Yeah...
Also, the footage of the faux-Iron Man testing, especially the Hammer armor spinning 180 degrees and snapping the guy's spine. Hammer then claims that the guy is still alive.
In the Fantastic Four movies, Ben mentions that Johnny "washed out of NASA for sneaking two Victoria's Secret wannabes into a flight simulator. They crashed it into a wall. A flight simulator."
A scene in Mouse Hunt had the brothers Ernie and Lars Smuntz arguing over who gets the sole bed in a bedroom. They eventually decide to flip a coin. The coin lands on its edge and stays there.
Mulholland Drive has a scene where a hired killer kills his victim and then tries to fake suicide by putting his gun into the victim's hand. While trying to do so, he accidentally pulls the trigger and the bullet goes through the (fairly thin) wall into the neigbouring flat, hitting a fat, ugly woman. He then goes into said flat and attacks the woman, which turns out to be stronger than he expected. He eventually overpowers her and tries to drag her into the flat where he killed the first guy in order to fake a suicide-with-murder scenario. While passing the floor, he is observed by a detergence who apparently doesn't speak English, but slowly follows him into the flat. Back there, the killer first kills the woman, then the detergence enters the room with his vacuum cleaner. He also shoots the detergence, but by accident, the vacuum cleaner is turned back on again. He then pulls the detergence into the room. Finally, he tries to turn off the vacuum cleaner...by shooting at it. The vacuum cleaner catches fire, which sets off the fire alarm.
In Snatch... pretty much anythingSol and Vinnie put their minds to. In their defining moment, they were hired to take a briefcase from a man who had been sent to place a bet at a bookies. They get the cash from the bookies, their employer gets the case. Unfortunately, their escape driver Drives Like Crazy and backed into the van their victim had used to get to the scene, knocking him out and trapping him inside it. Later that night they see someone carrying a case go inside, and without attempting to verify the target, they enter the bookies, only to find that it's (obviously) the wrong person, and furthermore that the bookies has no cash because all bets are off. Then the cashier lady turns out to be a Badass Bystander who deftly disarms Sol of his shotgun and trips the alarm. Then they attempt (and fail) to open the front door. Reasoning that it's a security door that locked when the alarm was pushed, they try to Shoot Out the Lock. The door turns out to be bulletproof, and Vince gets his leg grazed by the ricochet. They fall down in exhaustion and take off their ski masks, at which point they notice the security camera that's just caught them both unmasked. And then, to top it off, the getaway driver shows up to get them... it turns out the reason they couldn't open the front door is because they tried to push the 'pull' side of the door. The pincher is that the pair are completely unknown in that part of the underworld, and the camera fails to be of any use because the owner doesn't recognize them... but the getaway driver is recognized. Epic Fail indeed.
One of the last two survivors of the Norwegian base in The Thing ends up killing the other one and destroying their helicopter by accidentally tossing an incendiary grenade backward onto box he was keeping the other ones on.
Pretty much every single plan Jason conceives in Mystery Team. Most notable is when a speech on how a certain character won't shoot them gets him shot
In the new Get Smart movie, Maxwell Smart is given a tiny grappling hook launcher, and while using it to free himself, manages to hit everything except what he was aiming for, including a secret button that drops him out of an airliner. In flight.
Made slightly more epic by the fact that the grappling hook launcher was part of a Swiss Army Knife. You know, the thing with a blade on it! For cutting!
Live Action TV
Storage Wars: "NES-001, guys. I want you to look at this very carefully. This is the first Nintendo DS built. The last one that sold with five games in the internet for $13,000."*
That was the model number, not the serial number. It was worth maybe ten bucks.
Big Time Rush: A few times, but the biggest has to be when the boys cook up a scheme to get Carlos a girlfriend. In order to impress the girl, they plan for James, disguised as a robber, to rob Logan's handbag, who is disguised as an old lady, then Carlos jumps in, saves the day and gives the girl flowers put out by Kendall. Only when Carlos jumps in, he punches Logan, gives James the flowers, and the girl the handbag.
The IT Crowd: one time Jen has to give a presentation on her work in the IT department. Roy and Moss set her up for a fail by giving her a black box with a little flashing light and pretending that it's the internet. Yes, the entire internet, responsible for all of modern communications and civilization, specially flown in by Stephen Hawking. The entire audience buys into it until her boss comes bursting through the wall in a fist fight with his transsexual girlfriend and smashes the little black box. A riot breaks out, people run for the doors, some start crying, some start fighting and some start to get busy in the middle of the lecture room floor.
And that's Jen, the most sensible of the trio. Roy managed to turn a trip to the toilet into a road trip to Manchester pretending to be a disabled homosexual.
iCarly. In many episodes, something Spencer (older brother) is doing catches fire, asplodes, and more. Notably, in one, he touches a bell on a desk. It burns, and puts it out with soda. It catches fire again!
Spencer: "Why does this keep happening!?"
Just...This...
(Spencer hits a cymbal on his drum set with a drum stick, it catches fire) Spencer: How is that even possible?!
It's Played for Drama in the episode iGot A Hot Room. The present Spencer built for Carly burned her room to a crisp. It's heartbreaking to see the looks on everyone's faces when they realise what caused it.
Reaches new heights in "iOMG" when the fire department sends Spencer and Carly a fire extinguisher out of frustration with their many, many calls. When Spencer tries to demonstrate how to use it, it sends out a jet of flame at the table. Spencer made a fire extinguisher set something on fire.
Top Gear: It's not for nothing the motto of the challenges is "Ambitious but rubbish". Thanks to Jeremy Clarkson's devotion to Tim Taylor Technology, when he fails to achieve Epic Win, he winds up with Epic Fail. Two shining examples: the Toybota amphibious truck, which crossed a two-mile stretch of water and then capsized next to the dock when he turned too quickly; and the Fiat "Giant" Panda stretch limo, which was too long to manoeuvre and passengers required a The Great Escape-style sliding-board contrivance just to get into the back seat. Yes, folks, Jezza built a two-door stretch limo. And then it broke in half...
You have to be impressed with convertible people carrier that ended up causing a fire in a car wash.
Speaking of which, and regarding the amphibious vehicles, "None of us were seaworthy. Mine was still on fire."
In the literal drag race during the tractor challenge, he decided that the best weight to pull was...a 747 jet airliner. It led to his turbocharged tractor taking 20 seconds to go from 0 to 1.
After they turned a combine harvester into a snowplow, they decided to test it in Norway. They destroy a house, burn through a road sign, run over a car, and may or may not have set a person on fire...
When they tried to make their own RVs, the whole thing was the definition of this trope.
InThe West Wing, Josh's hilariously craptastic attempt to brief the press when CJ has a root canal that renders her incomprehensible somehow ends with Josh telling the press to shut up and stop asking him questions, because the President has a Secret Plan to Fight Inflation. Bartlet, Toby, and especially CJ's reactions are priceless:
Bartlet: Are you telling me that not only did you invent a secret plan to fight inflation, but now you don't support it? Toby: Have you fallen on your head? Have you fallen down and hit your head on something hard? CJ: What the heww happened in thewe? You compwetewy impwoded! You wewe vague, you wewe howstiwe, you wewe bewwigewent!
In the NUMB3RS episode featuring the hacker on the run from various criminal groups, the Israeli hacker/arms-dealer gets cornered by an FBI agent while said Israeli hacker's muscle is elsewhere. You see the hacker's eyes dart over to the glass window and you know he's gonna make a break for it— But you don't expect for the break to fail so spectacularly, as the hacker's body (appropriate for his specialty, and thus not made like a linebacker's) bounces off the window not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES. He's caught, obviously, no doubt wondering why the breakaway glass didn't breakaway, like in the movies.
Done in Corner Gas when Oscar made a salad...that then exploded.
Hank: How do you blow up a salad?
Oscar: Happens more than you'd think!
Lampshaded in "Mr. Monk Is Underwater", where Monk discovers that a couple of years ago, the submarine he's on hit a mountain. He's gobsmacked and can't believe that anyone could possibly be that incompetent.
In an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Malcolm goes bowling. Despite numerous failures, his mother continues to enthusiastically cheer him on. This eventually frustrates him so much that he grabs a ball, walks right up to the pins, yells that he'll give her the strike she wants...and gets a gutter ball. From half a meter away.However, it turns out this is the happy scenario. We get to see an Alternate Universe in which his dad takes him bowling instead of his mum and he ends up bowling pretty well...except he gets stuck in the pin machines. Epic Fail either way.
Attack of the Show! ends most episodes with an "Epic Fail" segment, showing a video usually from YouTube or break.com, followed by hate hosts mocking the subject of the video.
The "Kitten Warrior" competition they did, it took Keven's kitten around 40 of the 60 given seconds to even leave the starting box.
They epic failed themselves when their attempt to skywrite the world's largest ascii penis turned up utterly meaningless smoke scrawl across the sky to their complete dismay.
In the Deadliest Warrior episode "Musketeer vs Ming Warrior", the leader of the Mings lets out a war cry, only to get shot by a Musketeer.
In the "Medellin Cartel vs Somali Pirate" episode, a cartel member leaves his hideout and locks the door. A Somali Pirate with a RPG-7 rocket launcher notices him and aims the rocket. The cartel guy tries to open the door to get inside the buidling, but...he just locked it! The Pirate's rocket hits him directly.
In the "Ninja vs Spartan" episode, the last ninja jumps out of a tree, in plain sight of the Spartan, in a last-ditch effort to... be impaled on the Spartan's spear, which the Spartan only had to extend. This may be more of an example of Too Dumb to Live than epic fail, though. Unless you're the Spartan, then the failure is pretty impressive for you.
Particularly glorious examples of Epic Failures are chronicled in the episodes 976-SHOE and God's Shoes.
In one episode, jealous Kelly plans to get rid of a French exchange student by letting her cheat off her. The poor girl fails every single subject, including French.
Then there was the episode in which a buff fitness guru tries to get the slovenly Bundys to lead healthful lives. Not only do the Bundys remain lazy, but they turn the instructor himself into a fat couch potato!
Comedian Bob Einstein combines this trope with Informed Ability in the character of Super Dave Osborne. Super Dave is continually lauded as one of the world's most brilliant stuntmen, whose death-defying feats are "astronomically sensational". Of course, when the audience actually sees Super Dave perform a stunt, it inevitably backfires in an Epic Fail manner. Sometimes Super Dave doesn't even need to be performing a stunt, as more than one Epic Fail resulted from him simply trying to show off some new attraction at the Super Dave Compound.
If Super Dave ever plays a piano, expect a car or truck to come crashing out of nowhere and take them out both.
Mike from Desperate Housewives had this to say about Susan's macaroni and cheese: "How did you...it tastes like it's burned and undercooked."
Survivor: Cook Islands: In the final episode, a tie at the penultimate Tribal Council led to the traditional tiebreaker: a fire-building challenge. Both Becky and Sundra were to build a small fire high enough to burn through a rope about three feet off the ground or so. Some contestants have trouble building fires (see Reality Show Genre Blindness), but in this instance, neither contestant could get their tinder to light using the flint-and-steel, despite throwing sparks nonstop for an hour. Jeff eventually stopped them and told them they were moving on to matches. Even with matches, they continued to fail at keeping a flame going long enough for their teepees to catch light for another half-hour. One of them ran out of matches. This was especially annoying because they made fire earlier in the season.
Strong Bad: Hello, my name is piece of wood and I don't want to catch fire. Hello, my name is little match, and I don't want to make a fire! Hello, my name is fire, and I'm not comin' to your stupid party!
Partway through the challenge, the sound guys realize where this is going and change from dramatic music to comedic.
Russell Hantz came on for the third time. However this time he doesn't have the advantage of being unknown to his fellow players this time since the production staff practically shoved him down our throats during the previous two times he was on. You would expect that he would have wisened up and realized that he's at a disadvantage due to being with people he doesn't know (like in Heroes vs. Villains) and that they know who he is and how he plays the game; so he wouldn't start playing the same game he was known for. Instead, he assembled his usual harem...started hunting for the idol without making sure people opposing him weren't watching first, then tried to get a tribe-mate to be a third wheel in the alliance on flimsy promises. Result? Third person voted out...second person eliminated in total in the series.
This Epic Fail is underscored by the fact that "Boston" Rob was placed in a similar situation in the other tribe and managed to play a masterful game where he ended up completely dominating the entire season and winning it all.
The worst team in Amazing Race history is widely credited to be Dana & Adrian from Season 16 who were eliminated from the race without even completing a single task. While they were the third team to be eliminated without completing a leg, the other two were at legitimate elimination points, whereas Adrian was foiled by a wire walking challenge, something that's been completed by every other racer to ever attempt it on pretty much every other season, including an old, out of shape man with bad knees who could barely walk.
Frank Spencer from "Some Mothers do 'Ave 'Em" pretty much embodied this trope. He tried to fix a toilet in a hightech house (which he'd broken when he found using it to be trickier than one might expect) and ended up stuffing it full of various household goods (including, if memory serves, a plant), flooding the house's electrics, causing every piece of equipment to go crazy and basically resulting in it nearly killing the occupants.
In Red Dwarf, the broken drive plate that killed the crew was Ret Conned into being a trivially easy thing to fix. Rimmer's failure killed the crew, sent Lister 3 million years into the future, and created enough ambient radiation in the sealed hold to allow a race of cat people to evolve from the descendants of a single cat without severe inbreeding problems.
Rimmer's astrophysics exam results are the stuff of legend. Shown onscreen is his failed attempt to write answers on his arms, only to smear them uselessly when rolling up his sleeves and stamping a huge handprint as his final answer. Another example mentioned by Lister was Rimmer writing I am a fish four hundred times before fainting.
Eddie and Richie from Bottom manage to get themselves trapped on top of Western Europe's tallest ferris wheel, in a conveniently deserted carnival (the wheel is scheduled for demolition the next morning), beat each other senseless, set fire to their carriage, break the cables holding it up, and when rescued by God, deny his existence, causing him to vanish in a Puff of Logic.
The Japanese game show DERO! has a round where a team of contestants stand on metal beams over a pit and take turns solving puzzles, while the active players' beam gradually retracts into the wall every second they can't come up with the correct answer. They're also given sink plungers to stick on the wall behind them to stabilize themselves when the beams become short. Players who fall down are out and win nothing for the round, while if the team gets 9 correct answers between them, they win money for each player left standing. However, on one occasion, celebrity contestant Sashihara Rino freaked out and panicked as the floor started retracting to reveal the pit and didn't even manage to walk onto one of the beams before she fell down and got herself disqualified - and took one of the team's plungers with her, all before the announcer even got a chance to give the Rules Spiel. Even host Yamasato Ryouta was astonished upon making his entrance on the video intercom.
Yamasato: Everyone, welcome to the Beam Room...huh? You're short one person...
Another non-fictitious example from a game show. On an episode of Wheel of Fortune, the contestants were given a Proper Names puzzle to which the answer was REGIS PHILBIN & KELLY RIPA. All three contestants botched the answer, with one of them doing so twice and another screwing it up with the whole puzzle filled in. Watch the carnage here.
An unintentional one came about on Jeopardy!. In one episode, they had an "Oops!" category in which all five clues were related to facts that the show had gotten wrong on previous episodes. One such clue referenced a clue that called the St. Louis Globe-Democrat a defunct newspaper, and the paper was re-established by the time the episode aired. However, by the time they aired the episode with the correction, the paper went under again!
Yet another game show example: March 31, 2008 on Tokyo Friend Park II was a special two-hour episode with the Japanese band Arashi as contestants. Instead of the usual 5 games for a 2-player team, they play 7 games taking turns between their 5 members. They pull off a Flawless Victory through the main game, earning an astounding 9 gold medals (each one being about 100,000 yen worth of gold) and a trip to Disneyland Paris for all 5 of them (for comparison, most teams get usually only manage 2-3 medals and no trip across 5 games). Then came the endgame, and this trope took full effect. As usual, they were given the option to trade each medal for a dart to throw at a dartboard where each space corresponds to a prize. Most prizes are usually worth about 200K yen, plus one space being a grand prize (in this case, a tour of the world), but a couple spaces are labeled "tawashi", the show's trademark Zonk. They proceed to trade all 9 medals for darts...and land 7 of them (across 4 different team members, no less) on the exact same "tawashi" space.
There's a current British comedy game show called Epic Win. Contestants perform various challenges based on their unusual skills, and are awarded either an Epic Win trophy or Epic Fail sticker depending on their success.
One of the funniest moments in the history ofFrasier is the first act of "Three Valentines", which consists of Niles managing to turn a minor adjustment of his pants while sitting on the couch waiting for his date to arrive into a six-minute-long, wordless catastropheset to the diegetic score of a symphony orchestra that ends with the couch on fire, everything but the couch covered in fire extinguisher fluff, and Niles sprawled in the middle of the floor half-naked in a dead faint with the door wide open while Eddie the dog wolfs down his date's meal. While it may have been an Epic Fail for Niles, it was a Crowning Moment of Awesome for David Hyde Pierce.
Also, Daphne's attempt at throwing a dinner party in "Daphne Does Dinner". The Crane family, who are notorious for having all their parties end in disaster, proudly take the sheer massiveness of her failure as a rite of passage to her becoming "officially a Crane".
In fact, the show literally thrives on this very trope. Anything that any of the main cast try to do will descend into hilariously over-the-top, convoluted pandemonium two-thirds of the time (the other third of the time it will end in a Crowning Moment of Awesome).
While many MythBusters experiments end in failure due to the myth tested being, well, a myth, some fail in such a spectacular fashion that only epic fail is strong enough to describe the result. One of the most memorable ones happened in the JATO rocket car supersize revisit, where every single test and planning step went perfectly well until the final run: when the car reached the ramp and the rocket was activated, it blew up sky high, shredding apart the car completely.
Jamie: Well, let's reset.
Adam: I think someone owes me 10,000 bucks.
In-universe example, but just fortuitous in Real Life: Michael Richards was once reminiscing about how, on the set of Seinfeld, he performed an impromptu pratfall while walking through Jerry's door as part of his "Kramer" character. As Richards's feet flew out from under him, one of them went completely over his head, curled around the doorknob, and closed the door all by itself. Richards regretted that he would never be able to do that again.
The second season of Wipeout had a contestant declare her love for one of the hosts, then run the qualifier. She slipped on the first corner, fell, and yelled "I'm done!"
Taylor's attempt at a political seat on the first season of Benson.
Governor Gatling: So, how did Taylor do?
Marcie: He lost. He came in sixth.
Benson: How did he come in sixth? There were only five candidates.
Marcie: There was a large write-in for "none of the above".
In Home Improvement, Tim and Jill Taylor went to visit a marines base, and the soldiers offer to allow Jill to test drive one of the tanks due to her desire to be in one. Tim then cautions that trying to drive it is something else. Just then, Tim somehow manages to activate one of the Abrams' machine guns simply by touching it.
Literature
In Isaac Asimov's The Caves Of Steel, Elijah Baley is investigating a murder and has a robot partner that appears physically identical to the murder victim. He goes to the people who reported the murder, announces his theory that the robot is, in fact, the murder victim, and gives an extended justification. The entire "murder" was a scheme, it was the robot that had been destroyed to produce the "body," and here are the point-by-point reasons why all the supposedly "robotic" actions of his partner actually match perfectly with a human impersonating a robot. All the while, his boss is watching via a teleconference. After the completion of the detailed and rational accusation, said alleged non-robot opens up his sleeve and then calmly opens his arm as well. Elijah faints.
There is an article on Cracked that lists sex self-help books...one of them being what to do if stuff goes wrong. Included? What to do if there are burns, the house is on fire, the authorities are knocking on your door...
The book F in Exams: The Funniest Test Paper Blunders showcases hilarious examples of exam answer fails. Take a look at an excerpt. (Site NSFW due to an odd amount of hentai galleries which are completely unrelated. )
Likewise, Non Campus Mentis, a collection of horrible errors taken from college exams and papers.
There is a cookery book (called, logically, The Something Went Wrong What Do I Do Now Cookery Book) dedicated to correcting various kitchen emergencies. Naturally, it includes a chapter called "Total Failure". One piece of advice therein — if you've tried everything else, if you haven't got enough ingredients for an emergency meal and you have no other recourse, at least make it a memorable failure, one that will be recounted with awe through the generations.
"If you've burned the house down, Mission Accomplished."
In David Eddings' The Belgariad the character Lelldorin manages to extend an epic fail over the course of several weeks. When he announces that he's going to get back to the main group, his beloved refuses to stay behind. During the departure and trip he manages to break her father's leg, run his cousin through the leg "just a little bit", punch out all of a priest's teeth, and cause enough assorted mayhem to get a bounty put on his head by the crown. And all of this was without trying. This is also an example of Disaster Dominoes.
He did successfully marry the girl in the process, though! (Only because traveling alone with her would cause more trouble.)
In The Mallorean, Garion has to stop a war threatening to engulf the entire kingdom of Arendia. He magically summons a storm that helps him single-handedly stop two charging armies in their tracks, force an old friend to marry the loveof his life and resolve the dispute. He’s very pleased with his hard day’s work. A few chapters later he finds out that he sparked off blizzards, hurricanes, droughts and tornados right around the world, and even triggered a new ice age. It took the combined efforts of the Gods themselves and two of the most powerful sorcerers alive over six months to fix it. Needless to say, Garion is banned from touching the weather again for two thousand years.
David Weber's Safehold series features a triumphant example of this. The first book, Off Armageddon Reef, featured the Church of God Awaiting attacking the protagonist kingdom of Charis by creating an alliance of every single other naval power in the world. Unfortunately for them, thanks to Charis' own strong naval tradition coupled with Merlin Athrawes giving the galleon (among other things) to the Charisians, what actually happens is Fail so Epic it takes the Church two and a half books (a good two or three years in-story) to finally recover enough to make any kind of counterattack. That fails hard, too. Though not without a more sizeable cost from Charis' forces.
In the Discworld books, anything created by "Bloody Stupid" Johnson is likely to fall into this to such a degree it crosses over into Achievements in Ignorance. Anyone can create a garden fountain that doesn't work. It took Johnson to create one that creaked for half an hour then shot a stone cherub a hundred feet into the air. Or crazy paving that committed suicide. A badly designed apartment block is easy. But only Johnson could draw plans so bad the resulting building warps space-time.
In all fairness, his inventions usually work quite well, just at something entirely unrelated. Such as mechanical nail clippers which make a very handy automatic potato peeler.
The short story Wolfie by Theodore Cogswell is supernatural thriller meets caper gone wrong. A man in New York City goes to a sorcerer for help in murdering his rich cousin. His idea is to take the form of a wolf and rip his cousin's throat out. There is a slip-up at the veterinary hospital he has tricked a wolf blood sample out of; they give him a sample from an old, toothless, mangy poodle named Wolfie by mistake. To make failure even more certain, as a precaution to protect the witch doctor from You Have Failed Me at the hands of his familiar should our Villain Protagonist get cold feet or a Heel Realization, he [the would-be murderer] cannot change back until he has tasted his cousin's arterial blood. In the end, he is put down by the Animal Rescue League.
Tabletop Games
Sometimes, if the dice are with you and the DM has a sense of humor, it's possible to bring an Epic Fail right back around to an Epic Win.◊ Indeed.
In Magic: The Gathering, this is pretty much the goblin race's hat. Expect them to carry grenades over to their enemies, launch themselves out of cannons, and other hilarious deaths. Oddly, this even applies to things like Skullclamp, where there's an assumption that the head has something in it before you crack it.
RuneQuest has a melee fumbles table based apparently on the experience of reenactment groups. A surprisingly high number of rookie combats end when one of the duelists chops their own head off.
Anytime a Heel character is trounced in a way that instantly enters the record books. One instance that was truly for the ages occurred at the 2009 Royal Rumble Match to Santino Marella. He entered the contest, climbed over the ropes - and was instantaneously knocked back over the ropes by Kane, resulting in the shortest ever Royal Rumble time of one measly second. Predictably, Marella suffered a Villainous Breakdown as a result and screamed "I WASN'T READY!"
Video Games
Arguable, but many people consider the term/meme "Fail" (and by extension, "Epic Fail") to have been popularized by the game Blazing Star. If you failed to beat a boss in time, the Engrish words "You fail it! Your skill is not enough, see you next time, bye-bye!" appeared on screen, showing you how much you sucked at fighting the boss.
Sometimes when fighting the Ice Climbers, killing Popo but leaving Nana alive results in Nana smashing you off the stage by herself. Especially funny when it happens on the last stock, netting Ice Climbers the victory.
Reportedly, it is possible in the X-COMspiritual successor games UFO: After* to throw a grenade so poorly that it lands yards behind your thrower. Without bouncing.
In the Wii version of James Bond 007: Quantum of Solace, it is all too possible, should you forget how to throw a grenade, to essentially pull the pin out of said grenade and stick it in your pocket. Not even kidding here.
A variant in Nethack: YASD (Yet Another Stupid Death) exists mainly due to the fact that you barely know what anything is in the beginning and have to figure it out without by killing yourself. You can also do stuff that's just plain dumb without so much as a warning. This leads to such Epic Failures as:
<name>, killed by kicking a wall <name>, killed by a bolt of fire (which he/she cast at a wall) <name>, killed by a potion of acid <name>, killed by a newt while helpless (it attacked him/her while he/she was paralyzed) <name>, killed by a grid bug (even weaker then a newt) <name>, killed by a blast of disintegration (by a black dragon created from polymorphing a nearby half-dead jackal)
Many of the above deaths are considered common to the average player; deaths considered more epic would be:
<name>, killed by a fall onto poison spikes (the canonical YAAD, a One-Hit Kill which happens without warning) <name>, quit while already on Charon's boat (quitting the game while polymorphed into another species while one's actual species has been genocided) <name>, petrified by deliberately meeting Medusa's gaze <name>, petrified by elementary physics (combining a dead cockatrice with the rule that what goes up...) <name>, teleported out of the dungeon and fell to (his/her) death <name>, unwisely ate the body of Death (who only appears on the very last level of the game) <name>, escaped (in celestial disgrace) (offering the Amulet to the wrong deity)
These all pale in comparison to the following death sequence:
Salutations Lancealot, welcome to NetHack! You are a lawful male human Knight. # ride You slip while trying to get on the saddled pony. —More— You die...Do not pass go.Do not collect 200zorkmids.—More— Lancealot, slipped while mounting a saddled pony.
In the Space Quest series likely half of the deaths were epic fails of some kind.
I Wanna Be the Guy: Oh, look, a sword to collect! YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD! YOU RETARD!
Annoying trainers in Pokémon Gold and Silver (and the remakes) will call you every once in a while...and some call to say that they failed to catch a Pidgey. Yes, a Pidgey. You have about a 33% chance of catching Pidgey that's at full strength with no status conditions and a plain old Pokéball, yet they were trying and couldn't catch it!
"Hitmonlee used Hi Jump Kick! Hitmonlee kept going and crashed! Hitmonlee fainted!"*
Hi Jump Kick has a 10% chance of missing, and when it does it deal a fairly large amount of damage to the user. Using this move can easily result in knocking your own Pokemon out.
"Foe Geodude used Self-destruct! It doesn't affect Gengar... Geodude fainted!"*
Self-destruct is a move that deal massive damage to the opponent(s), but also knocks out the user. As a Normal-type move, it does not affect Ghost-types such as Gengar. Similarly embarassing is using Self-destruct against an opponent using Dig, Fly or Dive - moves which make the user (mostly) invulnerable for one turn).
Entering "Epic Fail" in Scribblenauts creates a nuclear explosion that kills everything onscreen, including the player.
Actually, it appears to be some weird hybrid of a volcano and a bottomless pit.
Dragon Age: Origins, toward the end of the Orzammar plot arc, has the losing candidate for King attempt a coup right there in the meeting chamber with all the guards and the heroes who just got through carving up a thousand Dark Spawn. Needless to say, it doesn't go well for them. Listen to the town crier afterward. He'll shout out about what happened and throw in his usual color commentary which goes like this, quoted word for word:
Town Crier: Harrowmont is king! Bhelen is stupid and dead! EPIC FAIL!
While that is the biggest example of Epic Fail; if the other candidate is chosen and he chooses to order the execution of his rival. The Town crier then adds Epic Fail but it's not quite as epic.
In Ace Attorney Investigations you manage to so utterly and completely prove a man to be the real murderer that Miles Edgeworth, the last person you'd expect to hear it from, say to him "I believe the correct term is 'you fail'!"
Kirby Super Star: When Kirby gets Bomb ability, he immediately pulls one out. Forget to throw it immediately? Boom.
In the Portal universe, it is revealed that the attempts of the Aperture Science researchers to put Restraining Bolts on their AIMaster Computer GLaDOS approaches the level of this trope. When they first attempted to wake her up, she went homicidallyberserk within 1/14 of a picosecond. Their solution to this was to attach all sorts of personality cores to her to modify her behavior, including one that fed her a cake recipe; another that was, if anything, even more murderous than she was; and one that fed her stupid ideas to counter her intelligence. Yet after all this, they were easily suckered into giving her access to a deadly neurotoxin, with which she killed them. Their epic failure comes full circle when the aforementioned "Intelligence Dampening Sphere" ends up taking over the Enrichment Center from GLaDOS and nearly destroying it, thanks to the same built-in imperatives designed to control her.
It's best to say that Aperture Science only succeeds through epic failure. The portal gun was originally intended as a shower curtain. The acceleration and repulsion gels were intended as dietary aids, and some supplementary materials indicate that GLaDOS was originally intended to de-ice fuel lines. Literally nothing Aperture Science ever built functioned as intended, and they were too poorly managed to turn lemons into lemonade with what they did have.
They instead took the lemons and turned them into incendiary grenades.
In Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, when dueling Bandit Keith, he can and will tribute three monsters to summon the Winged Dragon of Ra...in Sphere Mode. A Divine Monster with 0 Attack and Defense. This is even funnier if beforehand, his monsters had been defeating you.
Parodied in Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 3: Lair of the Leviathan: at one time when Guybrush guesses the answer to one of De Cava's three-out-of-six questions wrong, Morgan rolls her eyes and says, "Fail," in a Shout Out to the "FAIL" meme from Blazing Star. (Even De Cava says "Failure!" when the question is guessed wrong.) However, this trope (and imminent death) is averted as many times as possible, when De Cava will always repeat the same first series of the three questions thanks to the repeated pleadings from Guybrush.
In the Last Story of Sonic Adventure, when Perfect Chaos starts rampaging, Dr. Eggman flies in with his Egg Carrier 2, a new version of the huge ship he piloted for most of the game. Eggman made it specifically for if Chaos went out of control like he was doing at that moment. Chaos took it down in one blast.
After defeating the boss of Chemical Plant Zone, it's very possible for a player who has let their guard down to fall through one of the tiles.
Gilgamesh'sEX Burst in Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy. Every character's EX Burst has a perfect and failed version, with the failed version doing less damage, but Gilgamesh takes failure to its extreme. A recurring joke in the series is Gilgamesh's continued search for the legendary Excalibur, but he always confuses it with the counterfeit Excalipoor, which only ever deals 1 point of damage when it hits the opponent. In his EX Burst the player must pick the Excalibur out from several Excalipoors. If they fail, Gilgamesh takes up one of the Excalipoors and performs a series of epic, over-the-top attacks on them...then realizes his attacks aren't doing anything and throws it away, moaning that he picked the wrong one.
Of course, thanks to a bug in the original Excalipoor, it did as much damage as the Excalibur when thrown. So when Gilgamesh's opponent is inevitably hit by the sword that Gilgamesh threw away, it hits For Massive Damage.
Team Fortress 2: Lose an Arena round without killing a single opponent, and you get the message "FLAWLESS DEFEAT!"
The Administrator: "You didn't kill any of them!"
Rune Factory 3: Failing to cook a dish that you have a 90% success rate for will result in a Super Fail. The game plays with the trope in that not only are Super Fails a favored gift for Sofia (one of your potential brides) but they're a powerful poison, that can take chunks of life off even bosses.
During a PlayStation Vita press conference in Taiwan, Sony Computer Entertainment Taiwan's spokewoman claimed that her favorite PlayStation game is Super Mario Bros.. and proceeded to hold the Vita upside-down. The crowd bursted into amazement at the fiasco unfolding in front of them.
In the Gran Turismo series, failing a licensed test results in the display of the word FAIL in big white letters, sometimes with Soundtrack Dissonance.
In the Total War games, when an assassin, spy, gentleman, or ninja fails in a mission, the video of their attempt shows them attempting and then failing in some hilarious fashion. Sometimes its an amusing or unfortunate error, like stabbing the shadow of a kneeling samurai but just hitting his armor stand, or getting caught trying to set a house on fire. Other times, the failure will be something hilariously epic. For example, a ninja making a running leap at a target's back to kick him over a railing, only to miss and fall to his death. Or a gentleman engaging in a duel, but his weapon misfires, and while investigating the faulty pistol he ends up shooting himself in the face. Or an assassin waiting behind a door to stab a target, only to end up stabbing himself when the target slams the door into his face.
In Batman: Arkham City, the Joker is severely wounded from losing the boss fight of Batman: Arkham Asylum. So he and Harley Quinn escape custody to avoid a transfer to the new prison, but in the ensuing chase they wind up breaking in to Arkham City by accident.
Webcomics
In 8-Bit Theater, Black Mage finally gets into a strong positionto kill his hated allies, as he has attempted many times before. To assure his success, he aimed his Kame Hame Hadoken not at them, but at the volcano they're standing on, which he plans would cause it to erupt and kill absolutely everything in the local and not-so-local vicinity. But, as the universe's Butt Monkey, he fails. How does he fail? He misses. He misses an entire freaking mountain. He misses anything on the entire planet and ends up killing the dinosaurs.
Thief: Not that I'm complaining about it, but... HOW DO YOU MISS A VOLCANO?!
Earlier, when they were captured, BM tried to kill his allies, it was in a small corridor, easy to hit, reflecting walls. What happens, he hit something, himself. It was the same attack as the volcano.
"How did you not only manage to miss us, but also hit yourself?"
Due to Red Mage's unfailing belief the world works like a Tabletop RPG, this occasionally comes up for him, too.
Black Mage: You pushed Red Mage [...] Onto Fighter's sword. Fighter: Which is weird because it started out sheathed. Red Mage: I botched my Athletic Roll...Big time...
One time Fighter lost a game of Drownball. He spent several minutes underwater wearing heavy armor, yet...
Fighter: I did a thing where I didn't drown.
Aaron Williams' Full Frontal Nerdity has, among other delightful slices of Gamer Life and other nerd instances, the occasional example of truly epic fail for the everyman. This is a decent example of how bad this guy can roll. He has also jinxed a die so badly it infected other d20 with the "1" virus, rolled a "1" when it was buried, and started making "1" show up everywhere. Further, Williams even has a collection of Nerdity out titled the Big Book of Epic Fail.
Matt from Murphy's Law did this on his Test of Hidden Traps.
In the first book of Goblins, Fumbles fumbles a to-hit roll spectacularly. He trips, sends his spears flying into a lantern, which sets a hut on fire, which sets a bird on fire, and said bird retaliates by gouging the hell out of Fumbles' head.
Forgath: I just wanna know what kind of fumble chart he's using, so I could avoid it.
In a non-canon Problem Sleuthdonation page, Team Sleuth strikes back at the Midnight Crew with the insanely powerful Catenative Doomsday Dice Cascader, a weapon that calculates damage by rolling a die for result X, and filling the remaining popomatic bubbles with additional X-sided dice. This is repeated until all dice are rolled, with the final die determining damage. The final result? One. Out of Fifty trillion.
Helix managed to blow out a bulkhead on the spacecraft he and Sam use while making microwave popcorn.
Stef Murky of User Friendly is absolutely awful at video games. He once fell in the lava in Neverwinter Nights (something not possible without modding the game) and also once fell in the lava at the startup screen of Quake II.
Cleo from Bobwhite discusses this. While her dad tries to teach her how to fold clothes, Cleo talks about how funny it would be if her terrible clothes-folding skills accidentally set her clothes on fire.
Thog in The Order of the Stick failed his will save against a Zone of Truth spell (which normally only prevents telling lies) so badly that he started spouting every truth he knew, resulting in several Too Much Information moments.
The Ho'aku tribe in Survivor: Fan Characters was truly an epic fail, filled with a) weak and easily influenced members, b) jealous and power-hungry contestants who wanted to lead and voted out the first two leaders, and c) Russell Hantz, who sabotaged their tribe. What happened was one of the worst losing streaks in the comic's history, with the Ho'aku tribe losing ten out of thirteen challenges, going to every single Tribal Council but one, and ultimately being whittled down to two members. However, the tribe's plight is spectacularly subverted when a member of the Ho'aku tribe manages to go on an immunity run and win the game!
xkcd: These twocomics. Failing to throw a boomerang correctly is one thing. But this guy eventually managed to throw it so badly he broke the ozone layer.
Not many LP'ers die on the first part of a sometimes incredibly easy part of a video game. That's where CrazyCommentaries comes in, in their first video, one of the members dies by losing health to bob-ombs, rolling balls, and not getting any health. The thing that really cements this into Epic Fail territory, though, was how he died. He jumped directly into a rolling ball, not even trying to get away from it.
Parodied in The Nostalgia Critic's crossover review of Child's Play with Phelous. Phelous tosses a sock at Critic, it hits Critic's forehead, Critic "falls" out of his chair and twirls around his house on his feet as he somehow takes up a random gun, loads it, and shoots himself in the head.
Amusingly, a lot of the contributors fail at understanding the concept of a fail, instead posting situations that are merely ironic or even triumphant. They've rectified that by designating some things Win or even Epic Win.
Red vs. Blue invokes this in the case of Church's time travel excursion. In his attempts to better the timeline, he ends up causing everything to go wrong. As he tries desperately, and fails miserably, to shoot Donut he sums it up fairly well:
Church: Oh my God, I suck!
Caboose setting fire to anything and everything in Relocated.
Caboose: hhh! Now I am burning! That is much worse than other things burning! [A fire starts for absolutely no reason] Caboose: Oh, come on! How did that even start?"
The time Tucker ruined the Dynamic Entry on his Cool Bike by flying several feet over the bad guys and crashing into the wall.
From Rooster Teeth also comes Fails of the Weak, a weekly chronicle of clips of people failing in Halo 3, Halo Reach, and Halo ODST. Special mention must go to PR Punk Skater, who was apparently headshot by God in volume 34.
The Darwin Awards are pretty much given to Epic Fails that ended in fatality. There are certain cases where the victim survived, but was left unable to pass on their genes.
Todd in the Shadows: When Todd reviewed Train's Hey, Soul Sister and found a quotation saying they were trying to make something like INXS...well he throws up comparative clips of the two groups (hint: nothing alike) and then analogises thus:
That's like if you try to make scrambled eggs...and instead you caught syphilis.
The Spoony Experiment: The Spoony One had some harsh words concerning the enemy AI's inability to hit a completely motionless ship in PC game Privateer 2: The Darkening. The entire tirade, however, can be summed up in the very last sentence of said speech.
Congratulations guys, your enemy AI is less effective than the fucking UFO in Asteroids.
Rules of the Internet: Rule 16: If you fail in epic proportions, it may just become a winning failure.
In the MSF High Forum roleplay, there was once a round of combat where eight people, of the same level, were fighting each other...and no one hit ANYONE.
Matt from Two Best Friends Play has two. The first one, from when they play Donkey Kong Country Returns, happens at the end of a Minecart Madness level that they had lost all their lives on, when Matt jumps off a cliff right at the end of the level, in full view of the exit, because he thought there might be a token under the cliff. The second one is during Dead Rising 2 when Matt fails to complete any objectives, which Pat rubs in his face.
Atop the Fourth Wall: When Linkara is trying to break open a champagne bottle to christen his new spaceship.
Linkara: Break, damn you!
YouTube personality Tobuscus does a weekly video clip series called "Cute Win Fail" in which users vote on the most epic clip of three, one of which is from each of the aforementioned categories. Needless to say, the "Fail" clips are a celebration of this trope, and if they are chosen are glorified with the honor of "Epic Fail".
At the climax of season two in Penny Arcade's D&D Podcast, Binwin and Jim are down and the party is barely alive. Omin, as a final resort, try to use an encounter power. And proceeds to roll an one. With some divine intervention from Aeofel he gains a re-roll and try to attack again. And the rolls another one.
In "Homer the Smithers", Homer Simpson has to cook breakfast for Mr. Burns at 4:30 in the morning and is out to make sure it's the best damn breakfast he can provide. He starts off with a Shish Kebab on a burner which he doesn't know how to use and it catches fire; he goes to a simple microwave and smashes the window open and sticks in the kebab and rather unsurprisingly that catches fire. Like a drunken student on a night out in Manchester, he has failed in his kebab quest and settles for a bowl of cereal. See the page image.
In "Homer Goes to College," he's put in a truck containing a simulator of his work station and somehow causes an actual meltdown.
Inspector: I'm still not sure how he caused the meltdown. There wasn't any nuclear material in the truck!
When Homer attempted to build a barbecue, he has several epic failures in short succession. All he managed build is a chaotic pile of the grill's components (including, somehow, his wristwatch) embedded in a slab of concrete. Angrier than usual, Homer charges the debris with an umbrella like Don Quixote; with about the same measure of success.
Homer, (screaming in rage): WHY MUST LIFE BE SO HARD? WHY MUST I FAIL AT EVERY ATTEMPT AT MASONRY?
A similar incident happens in "Marge Be Not Proud". After Marge doesn't put marshmallows in Bart's hot cocoa because she though it would make him feel like more of an adult. She then suggests that he do it himself. His attempt results in the marshmallow absorbing every drop of the liquid to form a sort of jello, which Bart gloomily eats with a knife and fork.
Of course Grandpa views it differently and even asks if he can have a slice of the marshmallow
In another episode, Homer crudely creates an alternate gas main in order to allow him to do pytotechnics with a Tiki idol that he got as a result of rummaging through garbage, resulting in a massive gas leak in the kitchen. While ranting to Marge as the tiki idol, he accidentally drops it, causing it to combust, and it is also implied that the house was going to end up destroyed shortly thereafter.
Homer's encounter with the wrecking ball in The Simpsons Movie crosses into this by the end, when it resumes swinging for no apparent reason a couple of seconds after seemingly coming to a stop.
Bart's film in the film festival episode, The Eternal Struggle, had Homer struggling to get his pants on to no avail. He then realizes that he hadn't unbuttoned it yet and does so, only for him to still struggle in putting up his pants.
Dr. Zoidberg attempts to fix his beloved slinky, presumably re-coiling it himself (offscreen) after it was all straightened out. Placing it on a staircase made of books, the mangled slinky topples down the books clumsily, and somehow catches fire at the bottom. Dr. Zoidberg bursts into tears.
Nearly everything Zoidberg loves catches fire. For instance, his house which was destroyed by a cigar end, three kilometres underwater.
In the episode "Future Stock", when Mom's children are voting on the Momcorp-Planet Express merger, Ignar has a controller with two buttons, "Yes" and "No." He somehow casts his vote for Pat Buchanan. His excuse: "The ballot was confusing." *
If you don't get it, it's a reference to the 2000 presidential election in Florida, which saw an above-average amount of votes in heavily Democratic counties like Palm Beach for Buchanan which Buchanan himself attributed to the confusing nature of the ballot, and ultimately gave Bush the presidency.
In the epic, absolutely nothing on the line except the shame of defeat basketball game between Earth and the Harlem Globetrotters planet in "Time Keeps on Slipping", one of the genetically-engineered basketball playing super mutants accidentally gets splattered. Fry offers to substitute. When asked if he's any good, he says that it doesn't really matter because they're up 35 points with two minutes left in the game, so it's not like he could seriously screw things up. Cue a timeskip where the game is over and somehow the Globetrotters are now ahead 244 to 86.
The sixth season has an episode where Fry is building a machine with Leonardo da Vinci. The blueprints keep rolling back up after being spread out, so Fry gets the idea to tape them to the table. The table snaps in half like a bear trap.
In "A Pharaoh to Remember", a depressed Bender decided to spray paint a blank building wall with a picture of himself and the phrase "Bender lives large and kicks butt." The building is then demolished, changing the picture to a person's behind and the phrase to "Bender licks butt."
In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Gutter Balls", Ed Bighead has a Flash Back to his final frame on a bowling tournament. With the scores tied, he only needs one pin to win, and he deliberately wasted his first roll on a gutter ball. He throws the second ball, but instead of rolling down the lane, it flies off and ricochets all over the place, demolishing the alley. At the end, the only thing left standing are Ed's pins, completely untouched. He could Never Live It Down.
When SpongeBob SquarePants has to temporarily give up his job as fry cook for reasons irrelevant, Squidward takes over temporarily, and epic fail ensues. The customers cry out "He burnt my krabby patty," "He burnt my fries!" and finally: "He burnt my shake!"
In another instance he took over for Spongebob, it resulted in this exchange:
'Customer 1:This sandwich tastes like a fried boot! Customer 2: My sandwich is a fried boot!
In "Band Geeks", Squidward tells the flag-twirlers to speed it up, which then leads to their flags acting like propellers, sending them up hundreds of feet and crash into a blimp, which then explodes, followed by another band member playing Taps (poorly) and Squidward quietly going into the Troubled Fetal Position.
In The Jetsons, Mr. and Mrs. Jetson once left their kids home alone for an extended period of time and Judy tried to serve ice cream. She burned it. She didn't melt the ice cream, she burned it without melting it.
Which is not actually impossible especially since sugar is highly combustible. [1]
In the very firstTransformers episode, Starscream shoots at the stasis locked Autobots...and revives them. Oops. He goes on to make a long, long career in Epic Fail after that.
During a tap contest in South Park, Butters loses one of his shoes onstage, unleashing Disaster Dominoes that end up destroying the stage and killing over a dozen audience member, traumatizing him*
As Stan later informs him, this was even worse than it seems because a woman killed was pregnant and two family members of victims committed suicide.
. After getting over it and entering another contest, this becomes an epic win as the same thing happens, this time killing his opponents (and retraumatizing him).
Superman: The Animated Series has an episode where Mr. Mxyzptlk tries to harass Superman. He is basically a Physical God, even compared to Supes, but he promises to return home for three months if he ever says or spells his name backwards. This episode consists of Superman as a Screwy Squirrel, constantly fooling Mxy into banishing himself. At one point, his totally hot wife tells him to simply kill Superman before he can say anything. Thus Mxy spends the next 3 months building a killer robot. He marches off, full of vigor. His wife counts to three, and Mxy reappears, already defeated. At the end of the episode, Mxy is tricked into spelling his name TWICE, backwards. In a row. Using heat exhaust from the kryptonite rocket he turned into to chase Superman across Metropolis. Superman goes straight into Smug Super territory as he mocks Mxy before banishing him for good.
The entire episode is Crowning Moment of Funny, but one particular instance stands out as severely Epic Fail:
Superman, as Clark Kent, is eating breakfast when Mxy shows up. Myxzptlk: I'm back! And this time there's no way that you're going to get me to say Kltpzyxm!Oh da-(vanished) Clark continues eating breakfast.
Moose #1: I can't believe you totaled a mammoth. Moose #2: That mountain came out of nowhere. It was in my blind spot.
In Cats Don't Dance, the animals set up an audition with studio head L.B. Mammoth that is sabotaged by the villainous Darla Dimple far beyond what should be probable or even possible. Flooding the stage? Well, maybe. Flooding the entire studio? Pretty far-fetched. But wait, there's more: accidentally dragging L.B. himself behind you on your anchor as your prop boat floats through the streets, crashing into buildings? Ouch. Accidentally getting him tied to the mast when the boat sinks? Epic Fail.
In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "Over a Barrel" Pinkie Pie's solution to a conflict between a group of native American alike buffalo and some settlers is to sing an extremely Tastes Like Diabetes song about how they are all the same deep inside and should just get along. Afterwards the two leaders agree…that it was the single worst song they had ever heard, and that they still intend on fighting over the land. Later, when the buffalo leader has a crisis of conscience, Pinkie figures it would be a good time for a reprise, which only provokes him into going through with the attack.
Sweetie Belle: Um, I'll just stand over here off to the side and not get in your way, like you said earlier... Rarity:*eye twitch*
In "Swarm of the Century", Twilight Sparkle tries to stop the Parasprites from eating every scrap of food in Ponyville by casting a spell. The Parasprites start eating everything in Ponyville but the food, completely demolishing the town. At least she saved the food...
"Winter Wrap Up" is basically a marathon of Epic Fails for poor Twilight Sparkle (until her final Epic Win), but the worst of them must be when she uses the one thing she's supposed to be good at - magic - on a snowplow in an attempt to help clear the snow, loses control of the thing, ends up irritating everybody and causing an avalanche, undoing everyone else's work. Somewhat justified by the fact that the spell she casts is not the mere telekinesis she usually uses, but a come-to-life spell. Reminds you of someone else?
Subverted in "A Bird in the Hoof", where Fluttershy starts trying to take care of Princess Celestia's pet bird, which seems to be in awfully bad shape. The bird only keeps getting worse until it croaks and spontaneously combusts into a pile of ashes right in front of her face… at which point the princess shows up and tells her pet phoenix to stop fooling around.
Pretty much all of Sweetie Belle's attempts to help Rarity in "Sisterhooves Social". For starters, there's her attempt at making breakfast in bed: a bowl full of black tar-like liquid turns out to be not burnt applesauce, but toast. As for the drinks...
Rarity:I didn't know you could... burn juice.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders are this as a group whenever crusading. Of especial note may be their efforts at repairing a table in "The Stare Master". Complicated somehow (Subverted?) in that each of them are individually highly capable at certain things (especially ironic for the fact that Apple Bloom likely could have fixed the table had she been working alone).
Pinkie Pie's attempts to babysit the Cakes' twins in "Baby Cakes" steadily deteriorate into this. While trying to put fresh diapers on them, she ends up wearing one on her own hindquarters and the other on her head. And this is before the babies' flight/magical abilities start to kick in.
Derpy has one in her first speaking appearance when she creates two big holes in the town hall (though it was in bad shape to begin with): first by knocking a column over, then by sitting down out of the way and cracking the floor open.
A King of the Hill episode has Peggy doing the famous "Stick a flower in liquid nitrogen and watch it shatter" experiment, which goes off well...until she drops the flower on the floor and it doesn't break, after which, she tries bashing it against a desk and it still doesn't break.
In the ending of the Kim Possible episode where Ron Stoppable ended up becoming a multi-millionaire (and gaining a personality change to match), Dr. Drakken managed to create a lair with a large laser cannon from the funds he acquired from Ron. He then demonstrates the weapon's abilities by firing it at the moon, deflect on mirrors installed there and start his fiendish Evil Plan. Instead, it returns right back to the source and demolishes his own lair. Shego then tells him that it was a colossal waste of money.
In the Justice League Unlimited episode "Panic in the Sky", the Ultimen, an expy duo of the Wonder Twins, tried to defeat AQUAMAN by turning into: A) water, in an attempt at Drowning Aquaman; and B) a land-based dinosaur that could barely move in the water, let alone breathe in it. Aquaman's response: "King of the Seas, remember?"
Hans: You should know that I kissed your sister! On the lips! Skipper: I don't have a sister. And if I did, she wouldn't have lips. Hans: ...Really? Then who did I kiss?
Mentioned in the first season finale of G.I. Joe: Renegades when Mindbender's Bio-Viper is destroyed in an experiment he was sure would work.
Richard Scarry's Best Learning Songs Video Ever: After Freddie Fox finishes his song about numbers, he slips on a Banana Peel and grabs onto the curtain, accidentally pulling it down and ruining the stage. This results in him and some of the other kids getting buried under the curtain.
Huckle Cat: Ladies and gentlemen, we're experiencing technical difficulties. Please take a fifteen-minute intermission.
In the Taz-Mania episode Deer Taz, when the black bear appears, Taz tries to attack the black bear with his usual attack, but the black bear is way too strong for Taz, and the attack epically fails.
Also, in Boys Just Wanna Have Fun, in one scene, Hugh, Taz's dad, tries to play a game (using a sponge football) with Taz and Jake, Taz's brother, but as soon as the painting of a woman appears, Hugh ends up running RIGHT INTO THE FLIPPING WALL!
In Frights of Passage, in one scene, Francis X Bushlad epically fails when he says that he always triumphs, but ends up falling off a waterfall.
In Hypnotazed, Bull tries to hypnotise Axel into thinking that he is like Taz, but Axel's eyes reflect the beam right back at Bull, causing epic fail to occur.
Was done in one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, "Le Big Switch" where Crabs exchanged his number 1 fry cook for a french chef from a high quality restaurant during an exchange program in hopes that customer demand for fine expensive food will increase his profits. Things don't go well for Spongebob in his new surroundings initially since SpongeBob is quite literally incapable of cooking anything but Krabby Patties, to the degree were he can't even fry an egg without it instantly transforming into a burger. However his epic fail becomes an Epic Win when both his boss and his rich clientele both enjoy his Krabby Patties so much they literally latch onto his ankles begging him not to go back to the Krusty Krab after the exchange ends.
Other
The LSU Tigers manage an undefeated season in 2011, ranked #1 going into the BCS Championship, and then get shut out, 21-0 by #2 Alabama.
He cut off the leg of his patient in record time, but his final cut was so enthusiastic that it also sliced two fingers off his assistant's hand and cut through a spectator's coat, which was splattered with blood (not from the spectator's body). The patient died due to gangrene, his assistant died for the same reason, and the spectator was so terrified that the knife had cut into his vitals that he died from fright. Chapeau!
Explanation for that explanation.
The reason he had to go quickly is because anesthesia did not exist at the time, so the patient was not only conscious, but could feel everything. The quicker the surgery, the better for the patient's comfort.
UFC 83 saw Kalib Starnes and Nate Quarry, both recently returned from injuries, face off in Starnes' home country of Canada. Starnes spent most of the match running from his opponent, even when a visibly frustated Quarry began running on the spot. The crowd quickly turned on their fellow Canadian, a disgusted judge gave Quarry a perfect score (despite never having Starnes in a losing position and only landing a handful of punches) and Starnes himself was fired the next day.
The town of Lauderhill, Florida hired James Earl Jones to speak at their Martin Luther King Day celebration. In his honor, they commissioned a plaque for him. Which came back praising James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated MLK.
1904. Russo-Japanese War. A Russian Imperial Navy fleet engages the enemy at Dodger Bank, near England. The opposing force? Fishing boats. The fleet then went on to fight in the Battle of Tsushima. Where they were sunk. At the time, the incident sparked such outrage in Britain, they almost decided to go to war with Russia. So not only did the Russian fleet fight a fishing fleet and—arguably—lose, then get sunk by a real navy, they almost started a war while already losing badly in one. This quote from the article on The Other Wiki sums up the whole pathetic affair nicely;
More serious losses on both sides were only avoided by the extremely low quality of Russian naval artillery fire, with one battleship reported to have fired more than 500 shots without hitting anything.
Mind you, with Tsushima what happened was that they lost the fortress where they had planned to dock while on their way around the planet, and by the time they arrived they had to pass through the Straits of Tsushima to get to the remaining base, even though it was perfectly obvious this made an awesome site for an ambush. So it's kind of insulting to the Japanese who took that fort and managed that strategy to describe this as the Russians failing epically.
Creationist Ray Comfort made a video called "Atheist's worst nightmare" that argued that the banana was so perfectly shaped for the human hand, tasty, had a pull-tab to open it, etc., it was clear evidence of intelligent design. Even other creationists were yelling at him for not doing any research that would have shown him that the modern banana was shaped by thousands, of generations of human breeding and artificial selection (it's been so thoroughly changed that it has no seeds and cannot reproduce by itself, only through cuttings - essentially a natural form of cloning). This◊ is what a natural, wild banana looks like. Comfort has since tried to claim the video was a "satire", though few (read: none) believe him.
