Frank's 2000 Inch TV

"The picture's crystal clear and everything is magnified
Robert De Niro's mole has got to be ten feet wide
Everybody in the town
Can hear those 90,000 watts of Dolby sound
And I'm mighty proud to say
Now I can watch The Simpsons from thirty blocks away"

— "Weird Al" Yankovic, "Frank's 2000" TV"

Frank's 2000" TV. Still a relatively uncommon sight, but starting to gain in popularity as larger and larger screens are possible. This is really little more than a giant television, usually on the side of a building. There's one in Times Square in New York City, at least one in Tokyo, and often their slightly smaller cousins are present in Elaborate Underground Bases. Jumbotrons are a close, but comparatively tiny, relative.

Often used for advertising in the sort of Dystopian future that has a lot of Corrupt Corporate Executives in it. In a particularly bad one, it could also be used so that Big Brother Is Watching You.

In Real Life a 2000" TV would be a little over 80 feet (25 meters) high, assuming a 16:9 Aspect Ratio; the older 4:3 ratio would make it 100 feet (30 meters) high.

Note that in real life a screen that is too large is counterproductive - while the human field of view is nearly 180 degrees without moving the eye or head, the proportion of this that is comfortable to watch fast moving images on is smaller. It's the same reason that when choosing seats in a cinema people instinctively gravitate towards the middle or back - sitting at the very front is tiring as you constantly have to move your eyes and head to keep whatever action is happening away from the centre of the screen easily visible to you.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Kemeko Deluxe! the Mishima Industries headquarters has what appears to be a 2,000-foot screen, going by the relative sizes of the screen and the neighboring buildings.
• Often seen in Death Note, the most visible case being the broadcast of L's taunting of Kira - visible not only on TV, but also on large outdoor screens.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has them, both in mid-air film projectors (which works... how, exactly?) in the first half of the series, and on the building-mounted screens apparently all over the place in Kamina City in the second half.

Films — Animation

• The Times Square TV was referenced in Despicable Me as being one of Gru's biggest heists and was often seen at the end of NBC Nightly News broadcasts.
• In The Simpsons Movie, Big Bad Russ Cargill speaks to the citizens of Springfield through a giant video display on the dome enclosing the town.
• WALL•E's Buy n Large corp has giant hologram ads everywhere, including the moon.
• In the Ralph Bakshi animated movie Wizards, the Big Bad Blackwolf uses a magic movie projector to project old Nazi propaganda movies onto the sky to dishearten his enemies and boost the morale of his own troops.

Films — Live-Action

• Blade Runner, with the huge screens on the sides of skyscrapers showing endless looped ads for sushi Coca-Cola.
• The gigantic digital time-and-date clock in Freejack that tells the hero he just woke up in the future. Also, the gigantic screen with his "Wanted!" Poster displayed on it.
• The huge screen from which the Chancellor addresses his top lieutenants in the movie version of V for Vendetta.
• Seen in Times Square during the World Unity Festival in the first Spider-Man movie. This is actually a real life example, as there really is a large television in Times Square (owned by NBC and typically running their programming).
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has one that floats in the air and broadcasts ads for the eponymous Genetic Opera.
  • The walls of the GeneCo building show various ads.
• Used here when the main character leaves the building there are loads of TV screens everywhere. Clearly a shout-out to Half-Life 2, where Dr Breen broadcasts messages to the masses via large TV screens dotted around.
• In the first film of the Apocalypse series, electronic billboards displaying video feeds from WNN made their debut during the battle of Armageddon and continue to be used after Franco Macalousso, the series' Antichrist, makes his public announcement of being God made manifest in the flesh.

Literature

• The wall-sized TV sets in Fahrenheit 451. Definitely portrayed as a negative influence; citizens have gotten so involved in their TV watching that most of them don't really care that books are banned.
• In Feliks, Net & Nika series, the alternate-reality Polish Empire never invented TVs. Why? Because they project the image on *The Moon* and transmit the sound through megaphones.
• In the later books of Left Behind, a team of computer experts were able to project images onto a screen several stories high for all the people at Petra to watch and read.

Live-Action TV

• There's always a monster-sized viewscreen at the front of The Bridge in the various incarnations of Star Trek. The TNG screen looks particularly grand and impressive. Justified as this screen is intended to double up as the traditional car windscreen (a huge sheet of glass on a spaceship expected to enter combat isn't very practical). The screen also had holographic 3D depth. You can notice it when we are looking at the characters and the screen in the same frame. The holographic projectors can also be seen in some shots on Star Trek: Voyager when the screen is on the blink.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Shown in establishing shots of Cardassia Prime to give their society an Orwellian look.
• The Orville homages Star Trek (as it is want to do) by having the population of a planet obsessed with astrology congregate to view giant screens showing the planetary leader announce the new month and how blessed people born under the new star sign will be.
• How I Met Your Mother: Barney Stinson has two of these in his apartment, each large enough to cover an entire wall.
  Barney: See that wall? 300-inch flat-screen. They only sell them in Japan, but I know a guy. Had to ship it over in a tugboat like freakin' King Kong.
  Lily: It hurts my eyes.
  Barney: Yeah. That doesn't go away.

Music

• The Trope Namer is "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Frank's 2000-Inch TV," which is entirely about his neighbor getting such a huge TV. This is a good thing if you share Frank's taste in viewing material, and an incentive to move to another town if you don't.
• Pink Floyd was one of the first bands to use large screens in their concerts, with a circular screen with films rear-projected onto it. The concerts for The Wall had a crew constructing a wall and projecting films onto that.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone: The "Dadlands" one-shot revolves around a quest to find the remote control for an ancient plasma screen TV that is literally the size of a mountain. There is no record of where the TV came from or who built it.

Professional Wrestling

• The Titantron on WWE shows, besides being used to display entrance videos (which are often referred to as "Titantrons" themselves by fans), the match going on in the ring, and any backstage antics to the crowd, is often used by characters to address the crowd or other characters directly.

Video Games

• Splatoon:
  • Each game always features a large jumbotron or two in each game's Hub World, which broadcasts stage and Splatfest announcements.
  • Splatoon 2 introduces a few stages that have these. For example, two can be found above the stage at Starfish Mainstage, while a set of jumbotrons overlooks the central court at Goby Arena.
• The World Ends with You features an early mission that involves helping a young businessman advertise a certain pin brand, and making sure that people watch an ad for it played on one of these in Shibuya's famous scramble crossing. In fact, the Real Life scramble crossing has three of these.
• Half-Life 2 has jumbotron screens all over the city. Initially, Dr Breen makes announcements on them, then (after the fall) Dr Kleiner.
  • And with Garry's Mod, you can put whoever you want in the picture.
• The SeeDs interrupting a national broadcast and blowing their cover on one of these kicks off most of the plot of Final Fantasy VIII.
• Syndicate Wars features several billboard-size videoscreens showing ads as well as a digital drive-through theatre.
• You can potentially win one — a 2600" one — in the second arena of Smash TV.
• One of the prizes that you can win on the Billion Dollar Gameshow table, featured in Pinball Fantasies, is a 72"^note This game was released in The '90s, before Plasma/LCD TVs TV with no commercials.

Web Original

• In Look to the West, the optical telegraph system, which usually uses a 3x2 array of black and white shutterboxes, eventually leads to an 18x18 array on the wall of a building in Paris (Le Colosse), which can display images. It proves popular enough that it remains even after the OpTel network is superseded by later technology.
• Mentioned in conversation in Red vs. Blue, season 12.
  Tucker: If you like The New Republic so much, how come you still charge them for your help?
  Felix: Because when I retire, I want a television the size of a billboard.
  Caboose: Well, that's gonna be bad for your eyes.

Western Animation

• They're all over the place in the future Earth of Samurai Jack. 90% have Aku endorsing some product or other. How many times is he going to eat that burger!?
• Played with in various ways by Futurama, from the big screen the Planet Express Delivery ship crashes into during the opening credits Couch Gag, to the huge LCD digital clock display on clock towers.
  • There was a 300" screen on board the Planet Express Ship during the events of Into The Wild Green Yonder. It was smashed in frustration after it broadcast an ad for a 301" screen. Even later, in a blink and you'll miss it gag, they are watching a 308" television. Only for it to be advertising a 312."
• In the Goofy short How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, Goofy buys a massive set, so big his house has to be lifted up in order to deliver it.
• On Jimmy Two-Shoes, several large screens hover over Miseryville, which Lucius uses to address the public. One also appears in the Season 1 intro.
• In Ultimate Spider-Man, the one in Times Square often shows J. Jonah Jameson publicly dissing the Webhead as he passes by. It's as if JJJ knew Spidey was there.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Last Exit to Springfield", Mr. Burns gives Homer a tour of his mansion and shows Homer his TV, which according to Mr Burns is the largest TV in the free world.
  • In "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", Sideshow Bob appears on a Tyrannovision screen at the Air Force base when forcing Springfield to ban TV. (Yes, he was aware of the irony.)

Real Life

• Real life example: Many Strip-facing signs/marquees at the newer/better hotels on the Las Vegas Strip include giant TV screens (usually one for each side of the sign), each at least the size of a Jumbotron, airing looped ads for their shows, restaurants, etc. Much of the Strip exterior of Planet Hollywood consists of giant screens, each airing a different set of ads; Wynn Las Vegas adds the twist that its marquee is taller than it is wide, and the hotel sign travels up and down it to "change" the ads.
• Giant screens are common at stadia and other sports venues.
  • Until May of 2011, the world's largest video screen was at the Dallas Cowboys stadium, at over 25,000 square feet. (According to their official publicity; The Other Wiki calls it a 2100" TV.)
  • The HD video board currently at Charlotte Motor Speedway broke the Dallas Cowboys' screen's record when it was completed in 2011.
  • Then Texas Motor Speedway dethroned the one in Charlotte, with a 218 by 94.6 television screen, nicknamed "Big Hoss". It was finished in time for the April 2014 NASCAR Sprint Cup race at the track.
  • The New England Patriots have installed an even bigger one in Gilette Stadium measuring 370 x 60, making it the largest in the United States, and it will make its debut in the 2023-24 NFL Season.
• Giant electronic billboards are becoming more and more common by the day in cities all over the world.
  • This picture◊ from Ukraine shows the surreal consequence of such a device breaking down at night: a giant Windows error message floating in midair.
• Piccadilly Circus◊ in London has multiple neon and video signs covering an entire street.
• Too bad for consumers, though; the largest TV available in the market at the moment is a 110" LCD TV from Samsung, topping the former largest, a 108" from Panasonic, by two inches. However, if you take liberties with the word "TV," consumer projector sets can easily project 300" images, and probably bigger with supplementary lenses, location permitting.
• In 2021, Samsung have released a new model of "The Wall" TV that can go up to a thousand inches. We'll get to 2,000 soon. For reference, that's 28 yards, or 25m.
• French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre loves to include these in his concerts. That said, nowadays big projection screens have become a standard at big pop concerts. But when Jarre still played gigantic outdoor concerts, especially in The '80s and The '90s, he used entire buildings as image, laser and video projection backdrops, including but not limited to skyscrapers in Houston, TX (he actually had the entire skyline illuminated), warehouses at the Docklands in London, the skyscraper quarter La Défense in Paris almost in its entirety, the city hall of Vienna for one single piece of music on a German TV show (then again, said TV show had music guests including Michael Jackson and the very last live performance of Take That before their split) and the Moscow State University, the biggest building in all of Moscow. At least some of these are way bigger than 2000". Even when he toured in 1993, he had ten projection screens of various sizes behind the stage which mimicked a skyscraper skyline.
• Blinkenlights and similar projects turn entire buildings into giant screens, but instead of using projectors, they were originally based on hacking and remote-controlling the interior illumination of the buildings. Nowadays, they're achieved by installing special RGB LED lights inside the building which make color screens possible. Of course, the screen resolution is quite low but sufficient for Pong or Space Invaders.

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