Frothy Mugs Of Water - Television Tropes & Idioms

In Sailor Moon, Zoicite catches Nephrite with a brandy bottle, and he says something like "You're very relaxed". In the dub, she catches him with it and sarcastically says, "Your plan is to poison Sailor Moon's lemonade?" Both Usagi's instances of Lemon Wacky Hello have her drinking what's obviously a ridiculously small amount of wine, which was changed into her getting "hyper" from drinking "too much juice".
- An episode unaired in the US has her walk into a bar and order cream soda. Apparently being responsible about what you order is a bad thing.
- Yes, but it's also funny.
Tenchi Muyo also frequently had sake turned into tea. Of which Ryoko drank. And on which Ryoko got drunk. Yep. Some people just can't hold their tea.
- To be fair, this was only in the re-bowdlerising of the dub done for Cartoon Network. Note that it did get some Lampshade Hanging in a sequence with Tenchi's father and grandfather:
  Nobuyuki: I've brought us some *pause* tea.
  Katsuhiko: Oh, that special tea.
- At one point, Ryoko is said to have gotten "sick" from drinking "bad tea". Tea goes bad?
  - Iced tea does, but that's neither here nor there.
- An especially humorous aspect of this was that different voice actors had been brought on for some of the characters by the point the edits were done, so voices would completely change, mention tea, and change back.
Minami-ke has its characters drinking 'imported juice' at New Year. Doesn't even pretend to be convincing censorship, since it leads to some rather peculiar behavior on the part of one of the characters.
- And let's not forget in Minami-ke Okawari, where it happens again. The crew get some suspicious-looking cans of juice for a picnic, leading to interesting results...
- This is surprisingly common in Japanese manga-to-anime adaptations when the drinkers are underage. In Love Hina, there's a scene where two underage characters are in an izakaya drinking their troubles away. In the manga it's unambiguously draft beer, in the anime...big frothy mugs of oolong tea.
One of the main characters in Kiddy Grade is Really Seven Hundred Years Old, but looks like a kid. She's often drinking grape juice, which may lead her to blush as if it was wine. This one was also in the original Japanese.
During the Sasuke Retrieval arc of Naruto, there's a bit where Lee leaves the hospital early, grabbing what he believes is his medicine so he can take it on the way to join the others. It's actually some of Tsunade's sake, and Lee winds up using secret Drunken Boxing techniques after he gets buzzed on it. The manga translation changes it to Tsunade's "secret potion" instead — written in bold italic every single time it gets mentioned, quite possibly a lampshading of the edit. (The anime refers to it as "personal elixir", which almost sounds like some sort of euphemism, as well as removing the "drunken flush" on Lee's face and calling the technique "Loopy Fist".) This is odd, because Naruto generally has a fairly liberal translation — extreme violence, poisonings, sexual content, and adult drinking have all been left in at various points. Only underage drinking is a no-no, it seems, even by accident.
- Particularly bizarre, because in the original version, at one point during Lee's drunken rage, Kimimaro wonders out loud, "Is he drunk?", prompting an angry response of "I'm underage! Children aren't supposed to drink!"
- They also erase the word "sake" written on the drunken bridge builder's bottle. In kanji.
- In the tenth uncut DVD box set, they use "sake" and "drunken fist," but mistakenly call it "elixir" the first time.
4Kids's Macekre of Yu-Gi-Oh turned wine into "grape juice" too. Also, consider this line: "Gorgonzola cheese, and the world's finest fruit punch." Note that Pegasus is extremely childish (having his cheese and "punch" while reading the Sunday comics for example), so drinking juice would be pretty in character for him.
- In the movie Pegasus actually admits it's wine and (in a subtle way) that he's a drunk ("No more spritzers before bed!").
- Yu-Gi-Oh GX has sake changed into hot sauce. The related "Drunken" monsters ended up becoming "Dizzy" monsters, as a result... how does one get dizzy off of hot sauce?! This really gets crazy when they mention that hot sauce causes a hangover. Lampshaded repeatedly.
- Later on, a one-shot pro duelist uses a Wine deck, and while the names of cards are changed to less ridiculous titles ("Wine Token" becomes "Crimson Token", for example), the glass of wine he's holding is colored to look like orange juice.
- This Troper thought that Pegasus' gorgonzola cheese scene was a deliberate parody: First we see Pegasus Laughing Evilly with A Glass Of Chianti in his hand. A cut, and we see he's laughing to his favourite children's comic book. He's so like a child <3
Star Blazers had the doctor constantly soused on spring water. Given the context, though, it might as well count as Woolseyism.
Samurai Pizza Cats had Guru Lou's drunken behaviour explained as the effects of MSG in the food he was eating.
A Digimon episode had a villain (a monster alcoholic Salaryman) getting drunk off bottles of soda. "The bubbles go straight to his head." Also, Cody's grandfather seems to be a two-fisted prune juice drinker.
- Another Digimon episode featured Wizardmon bribing Demidevimon with "a bottle of green chili sauce".
- In yet another episode, Mummymon is cooking. He comments, while slopping what's clearly vast amounts of red wine into a pot, that he's adding "Just a dash of vinegar."
- And in yet another episode, a Digimon based on the mythical Orochi (who was defeated through drunkenness) constantly demands vats of milkshakes. Additionally, his "Sake Breath" attack is dubbed as "Inferno Blast".
- Tamers had its own instance where a guy is being helped off the subway by a man telling him that he should know not to eat the sandwiches in the vending machines.
In the 4Kids dub of One Piece, Sanji is seen with a lollipop instead of a cigarette. This has cropped up elsewhere. The broadcast version of the Funimation dub just removes it entirely (which is a lot easier when it's one of the only edits).
- This was actually lampshaded in the 4Kids dub. When "Zolo" stole Sanji's lollipop (actually a recolored version of something he was using to sharpen his sword), he says "I want to find out what it is he's always slurping". Jokes about nicotine lollipops have been made by the fandom, so this might be similar to when they broke out the Abridged Series-esque humor for their Yu-Gi-Oh GX dub.
- Also, in a restaurant scene, a drink referred to as "grape juice" is then described in exactly the same way as a bottle of wine would be, even down to the year and vineyard name.
- In an early episode, alcohol is simply referred to as "the strong stuff", while in another dub, Nami claimed Buggy and his crew "passed out from acid indigestion".
- In the Spanish sub, alcohol is at least once called "jugo de poder" (Power Juice), which actually sounds more like an euphemism for the real thing.
- During Usopp's fight with Chu, he throws a bottle of sake at him and then shatters it with his slingshot. A short time later, he fires a Flame Star at Chu, which ignites the alcohol on him and sets him on fire, forcing him to run to a rice paddy, where he beat him unconscious with a hammer- like in many of his fights, his seemingly useless move helped guarantee his victory. In the 4kids dub, he throws soda at him, and its role in his strategy is never mentioned.
- In the Baratie arc, Fullbody tries to use his sense of smell to guess the brand of the wine and impress his date. In the 4kids dub, it's grape juice.
- Easy on the bug juice, Doc! it's loded with sugar!
- Then when the (far better) Funimation dub came to the flashback episode about Luffy's past, Shanks and his pirates are drinking lots of sake and rum. Also, when Shanks offers kid Luffy some juice and Luffy drinks it, he turns around and exclaims "I don't know one pirate who drinks juice!" Maybe a Take That, but probably not, as the exact same joke was in the original version.
In ~~Azumanga Daioh~~ Japan, the loanword "juice" is a catch-all to describe a variety of flavored drinks, whether they contain actual fruit juice or not. "Ahh... dear Koyomi, buy some juice, will you?" precedes her purchase of milk tea. In another episode, Yomi is going for juice and asks if there are any takers. Only Osaka requests what we would consider "juice" in the usual sense; other responses were "cola", "oolong tea", and... "beer", prompting Minamo to admonish Yukari not to ask for that.
The American dub of Sonic X had a scene with a group of journalists being offered some salami at a political party to keep them there until Sonic shows up. In the original, it was a bottle of wine. Exactly what audiences who don't know that make of the inevitable gag when Sonic finally does show up and all the journalists are too drunk for the photo-op is a mystery.
- During the Metarex saga, Eggman goes to a bar Vector is running and has a nice refreshing glass of prune juice.
When Gundam0080 aired on Cartoon Network, all the alcohol bottles had the word "Soda" digitally painted onto them. Given that an important secondary character is a bartender, this made the editing rather surreal.
In Zoids Fuzors, a character walks into a tough frontier bar and orders... a raspberry soda. This was, once again, in the original Japanese.
An episode of Dragonball Z has Mr. Satan (sorry, Hercule) wandering in the desert till he finds a bar with a sign showing a mug of beer and the word Beer. In the dub, the word "Root" has been badly drawn above the word Beer, and shifts around in different frames.
- There's actually one beer kept in the dub. When Goku goes to find something to drink, he finds a beer, but dismisses it in favour of a Sports Drink. Of course, the dubbers played the scene up for its PSA value.
- "Now it's a Nestlé Crunch bar! Now it's a gummi bear! Now it's Nappa!" "Wait, what the hell?"
- For those who are wondering, the card inspired by that scene comes from an actual collectible card game called Ani-Mayhem.
There's an episode of Pokemon during Hoenn where Team Rocket gets drunk off of water in both the Japanese version and the dub. The dub makes no serious attempt to downplay this, and the voice actors actually add a slurred effect to their speech similar to the Rock Lee example from Naruto. Other episodes, however, have had wine recolored, particularly for Boss Fantasies. (Criminal masterminds sure love their... juice? Yeah, let's go with that.)
Variant: In the Buena Vista dubbed and dubtitled versions of Kiki's Delivery Service, have an offer of coffee changed to hot chocolate, presumably because the heroine is only thirteen.
- Then she puts sugar cubes into said "hot chocolate." So Yeah...
  - Ironically, This Troper puts sugar in her Hot Cocoa on a regular basis.
- Ahem. Hot chocolate is not pre-sugared cocoa powder, but molten pure chocolate, unsweetened, served much like coffee with optional sugar on the side.
Averted in the Latin American dub of Patlabor. The episode where Noa, Asuma and the others go out for dinner and get plastered was not only kept in that particular dub without censorship, but the VAs made all the efforts to portray the characters' drunken states believably. And it was aired in local and cable TV stations normally, including Fox Kids (now Jetix).
The Macross portion of Robotech has Rico, Bron, Konda, and the "punch" at the SDF-1 landing celebration. Surprisingly, a few other references to alcohol were left intact.
Parodied in "Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei", when Maria is seen polishing off a mug of beer in class and Ishido pops up in front of the screen and hastily explains, "This is children's beer!"
- Note that there is children's beer in Japan, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Not just fake beer, but fake wine and cocktails too.
  - They exist elsewhere too.
  - Like here you simply attach the word "virgin" in front of the drink name. Example: Virgin Bloody Mary = Bloody Mary without alcohol, Virgin Pina Colada = Pina Colada without alcohol. Not sure if it's call virgin outside the U.S. though, English terms tend to change depending on where they're spoken.
Subverted in Hidamari Sketch. The underage main characters throw a welcoming party for their new neighbors, toasting each other with orange juice- which one of them has surreptitiously spiked with beer. The Yonkoma where this occurs includes a reminder box for readers that "Alcohol is only for those aged 20 and above!", while the incident was quietly omitted from the anime.
- Which is kind of a pity, since the said incident is directly related to the picture in two articles here: It Just Bugs Me and Engaging Conversation.
In the third episode of Slayers on this troper's dvd, Gourry has stopped in a town while trying to find Lina. A man at a bar pours him a glass from a white bottle clearly, if poorly, labeled in English as 'MILK', and it comes out light blue. Odd cows in those parts...

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Early Swedish translations of Tintin albums have Captain Haddock drinking a lot of "kalasmust" ('party juice', with ridiculously family-friendly connotations).
- The Finnish translation of Tintin called Captain Haddock's drink "malspiikki", which in reality is the name of an obscure rope-weaving tool. Rather clever, in that by using a made-up name they allowed the reader to draw their own conclusions about the nature of the drink while avoiding having to explicitly mention alcoholic beverages.
  - Oddly enough, in English, a malspiikki is called a marlin spike, which is the name of the Captain's ancestral home.
  - In the later Finnish translations, he indeed drinks whiskey (specifically, of the Loch Lomond brand) without shame.
- The English version actually let it be called whiskey, since his rise from a hopelessly drunken sot to a heroic figure is an important subplot. However, they did request that Herge edit the panels so we never actually see him drink any of it.
  - The godawful Tele-Hachette animated version tones down the Captain's drunkenness in The Crab With Golden Claws to having his coffee spiked with sleeping drops. The drug smuggling becomes diamond smuggling, too.
Speaking of Swedish translations of comics, whenever the denizens of Duckburg want to make a toast, they seem to open a bottle of "läskeblask". The name suggests it's soda (läsk), but it comes in champagne bottles...
- Finnish translation has "Sihijuoma", which basically means "Sizzling drink" ("Sihistä" means "to sizzle")
Very strangely, this effect was achieved without any Bowdlerisation nor parody at work by Frank Miller in All-Star Batman and Robin. The goddamn Batman finds some armed thieves guarding bottles of a certain liquid and uses one of said bottles to set the thieves in fire. While this sequence only works if Gotham is under some sort of prohibition, the liquid is actually bleach. A very logical theory is that this scene encompasses two of the most common reactions to ASBAR, grabbing the Brain Bleach and killing it with fire.

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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within has a man drinking from a giant can of Pepsi, and the DVD commentary mentions it was supposed to be a big can of beer.
Being originally intended for older audiences, none of the Muppet movies really shy away from drinking (in The Muppet Movie, Rolf tells Kermit that an average evening for him generally consists of a couple of beers and a good book), but a particularly notable exception/quasi-example appears in The Great Muppet Caper. In one scene, Fozzie is seen fiddling with his martini. He takes a sip, then turns around to the couple at the table behind him, and reports, "Hey, if you add enough sugar to this, it tastes just like ginger ale," which he considers an improvement.
- Also averted in Muppet Treasure Island, in which Billy Bones is shown not only craving rum but actively going into delirium tremors without it. Smolett prohibits drinking on his ship, but only because it was done in the book.
  - And because it helps set up a joke, as most of the alcohol end up on the shuffleboard court.
  Rat: Will you knock it off with the booze, please?"
There's a scene in the 1960s Batman film where Bruce Wayne is out on a date, and at one point we see him in a restaurant holding a brandy glass full of... milk.
In the SpongeBob SquarePants Film of the Series, a dejected Spongebob, visiting a kid's theme restaurant, mopes at the "soda bar" (which for all intents and purposes looks like a regular bar). There, he enjoys huge ice cream sundaes to excess, grows chin stubble, gains reddened eyes, and proceeds to spend the rest of the night as an unruly drunk. The next morning, he even suffers from a hangover until the next plot point shocks him to his senses.

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Amusing subversion: at one point in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, Uncle Andrew takes a steadying swig of something described as "some nasty grown-up drink."
Harry Potter averts this, wizard kids drink "Butterbeer" (which is never stated to be alcoholic), "Firewhisky" (which is) and mead. Hagrid gets drunk regularly
- It even has them experiencing (pleasant) effects of being slightly drunk, guess the wowzers were too distracted by the whole 'witchcraft is evil' religious controversy.
- Butterbeer actually is stated to be alcoholic, in Goblet of Fire.
  Dobby: "Winky is getting through six bottles a day now."
  Harry: "Well, it's not strong, that stuff."
  Dobby: "'Tis strong for a house-elf, sir."
  - That's because it's actually stated that house-elves CAN get drunk on butterbeer, but humans CAN'T.
  - So it's like apple cider then.
- And again mention in Half-Blood Prince when Harry wonders what Ron and Hermione might do under the influence of butterbeer.
W. E. Johns's Biggles stories were originally written for adults. When they were republished for children, references to whisky were changed to lemonade. Pilots would willingly risk their lives on dangerous missions when offered the reward of a crate of lemonade.
Older Than Radio, thanks to the temperance sects of Protestant Christianity, who took all references to wine ("yayin" and "oinos") in the Bible to mean unfermented grape juice... except in verses that warned against drunkenness.
- Unfermented grape juice only became available from the 1860's. For the 1800 years previous, all Christian churches everywhere used wine. Jesus Himself used it in one of his parables: grape juice does not ferment, and thus can't burst out of it's sack. To claim otherwise ignores reality and undercuts Jesus' point.
- The above is accepted, but note that the Last Supper (where the bread and wine was shared, thus initiating communion) took place during the Passover festival - during which, according to Moses' laws, all food or drink which contains yeast is forbidden. Yeast is the fermenting agent for alcohol.
  - Absolutely untrue. It's not yeast that's forbidden, it's leavened bread. You can use yeast all you want in Passover as long as you keep it away from the grains mentioned below.
  - this says yeast is only forbidden with wheat, barley, spelt, oats or rye. So beer is obviously out, but wine is OK.
  - Not to say that it would have been impossible to serve grape juice at Passover in Biblical times. Without modern refrigeration or additives like sorbates, grape juice will begin to turn into wine all by itself almost immediately after pressing, because grape skins are naturally coated in yeast. Grapes were only harvested in the fall; Passover is in the spring. If anything, wine would have been the only beverage drunk at Passover seders at the time, since "pure" water was unsafe and beer was forbidden.

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Blackadder II: inverted in "Potato", after being forced to produce a gift for Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Melchet or face beheading, they reveal two bottles of "fine wine". It is in fact water... frothy water. Baldrick's water, to be precise.
In the Pushing Daisies episode "Dim Sum, Lose Sum", Chuck translates the old Chinese man's story about illegal gambling at the dim sum restaurant. She translates his phrase as "you'd have a woman on each arm, and all the milk you could drink!" and then immediately acknowledges that milk may not be the right word as her Mandarin is rusty.
Subverted in Frasier, where Martin would go on stakeouts with a flask of "clam chowder" when Frasier and Niles were children. When he goes on a stakeout with Niles during the episode, he brings one along, only for Martin to choke on it.
Martin: This is clam chowder.
Niles: Well what were you expecting?
Martin: Irish whiskey.

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Calvin proposed a "toast" to his friendship with Hobbes—and then he and Hobbes proceeded to eat pieces of actual toast rather than the wine-drinking that is usually used for "toasting."

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The producers of The Lone Ranger voluntarily eliminated almost all mentions of alcohol from the show. Instead of saloons, the local toughs would instead meet in "cafes."
- Hey, you do not mess with the Metrosexuals of the Wild West!

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in a hilarious ingame joke in Square-Enix's Final Fantasy XII, one of the bartenders will offer you a "frothy mug of scuttlebutt." For those who don't know, scuttlebutt is an old sailor's term for water. If your character turns him down he laughs uproariously and says that your not very quick on the uptake for jokes. Then again, this joke is somewhat serious; after accepting the "frothy mug of scuttlebutt" the bartender relates to you how he almost died of thirst one time and how sweet tasting water truly is.
Dark Cloud 2 provides us with a bottle of "grape juice".
Earthbound features a man walking around Fourside with flushed cheeks and a yellow mug in his hand going on a weepy tirade and crying into his "cappuccino".
- In fact, all references to alcohol are changed to coffee, turning a bar into a cafe and creating dialogue like "Kids shouldn't drink espresso! It'll stunt your growth, stubby!"
  - Although considering that sometimes cups of coffee would become animate and murderous, maybe he's got a point.
The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask has some fun with this trope. One of the major establishments in Clock Town is the Milk Bar. It only opens at night, and only serves adults and patrons. One NPC goes there to drink away his troubles. And yes, they're drinking very expensive milk. This isn't censorship; in one sidequest, you actually save the dairy farm that supplies the bar. To make the joke go even further, the "infinite magic milk" you can buy has the wine-like name of Chateau Romani. In the Japanese version, however, Chateau Romani is supposed to be spiked with a special liquor.
- It's even very overtly Lampshaded. If you talk to the NPC at the right time, he'll mutter "It's milk... how can anyone get tipsy off of miiiiiiilk?!". He then starts getting the hiccups.
- The French version of The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker replaced "A good refreshment at the local Cafe" with "A good coffee".
- Phantom Hourglass features a Milk Bar too, one that the bartender said Link was too young to be in. Due to the importance of milk-based healing items in Zelda games, it seems plausible that people really like their milk in the Zelda-verse.
  - This troper always figured that they just evolved differently than us, being elves of some sort, and therefore had the same reaction to milk that we do to alcohol.
- Averted in Twilight Princess. One of the reasons it was T-rated.
Averted in Bioshock, where the player can drink alcohol to restore a little health (and lose a little EVE) or even smoke cigarettes to restore some EVE and lose health.
- Unless you activate the "Boozehound" plasmid, which will give you EVE and health whenever you drink alcohol.
- Note that drinking more than two drinks at a time will cause wavering double vision.
At least two different Japanese RPGs use tea as a stand-in for alcohol. The old Grandia is a particularly toe-curling example, when the hero finds several bottles of "tea" in his (approximately 8-years-old) cute-little-girl-sidekick's room, and she tells him that her father hides it there so her mother won't find it. His reaction? "Phew, for a moment there, I thought you were more mature than me."
- Don't forget Jin the Drunken Master being changed into Java, the kinda-hyper coffee fanatic. Yes, Sony actually thinks that a Japanese name and a Dutch alcoholic beverage are synonyms of one another.
Lampshade Hanging in Star Ocean: The Second Story, where several "Tea" food-items are produced from Grains, but only adult characters can do so, and they're served in bottles with their "year" marked out.
In Wario Land II, Wario turns into drunk Wario when he comes into contact with a beer bottle. In the translated version, he turns into "Crazy Wario" after coming into contact with a "crazy ball".
- It's apparently just "Dizzy Wario" in both regions in Wario Land III; Wario receives this status effect via being spun 'round by a hummingbird enemy.
The Mega Man Legends prequel, The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, had a Servbot getting drunk from a fountain of root beer. Well, at least they kept the beer part.
From Skies Of Arcadia, we get Loqua. It's just juice. Really. We swear.
- In the original, Loqua (or rather, Liquor) is supposed to be made from the juice of berries, mixed in with a bit of the universe's Green Rocks. The translation just omits the fact that the juice is fermented.
- When you acquire your new ship, The Delphinus, a talk with Aika reveals that she thinks the new boat is great—"It's even got a kitchen!" Walking a few feet past Aika reveals... a minibar.
Mario And Luigi: Superstar Saga has a hilarious segment in which the characters are involved with what is obviously a wine-making business, with grapes and grape vines, fermenting, vintages, etc. — which all the characters describe as "soda". It's not so much blatant censorship as much as it is Lampshade Hanging for the sake of a joke. (Wine making is Serious Business in the real world. Soda making as Serious Business? Funny.)
Chrono Trigger has a couple of these as well. When questioned about his excessive "soda" consumption, a random NPC in a bar asserts that he knows when he's had enough "sugar".
- There's also the famous incident of Toma's Pop: you get a bottle from the adventurer in 600AD, and he asks you to pour it on his grave, which you do in 1000AD.
- Always make sure to have one character in particular in your party when going to 65,000,000BC for the first time, strictly for the scene where they develop a hangover after a long night of drinking soup.
  - The new DS translation reverses this, having the characters drink a beverage called "Skull Smash" at the prehistoric party, so named because when you drink it, "Next day, skull feel like smash." The other alcohol references are back in, too.
  - The party was a case of this trope working correctly, then. This troper always assumed they'd just stayed up until three or four in the morning stuffing themselves on thick soups and undercooked dinosaur steaks, so that being out of it the next morning made sense anyways...
Tales Of Symphonia, as shown in the quote above, had a series of items with identical effects that, with the possible exception of the generic brand, were obviously various local alcohol beverages (ex. Mizuho had Mizuho sake). Even though it was rated "T", the English version changed these all to "potion", possibly because anyone could drink them, even the twelve-year-olds Genis and Presea.
- Interestingly, in Tales of the Abyss, which was localized later, all alcohol references were left intact. Jade is even depicted drinking in a bar at certain points.
- A Duel Boss in Tales Of Phantasia is justified by most of the team hung over after a big party the previous night. In the official translation? They "ate too much". It takes place on a sea voyage, so it's not that implausible... except both the mages very clearly got drunk out of their skulls during the partying, as evidenced by the dialogue.
- This is repeated with Symphonia's sequel/spin off, but the ESRB's new rating summaries still consider it alcohol. Load of good that did Namco.
In Final Fantasy XI, orange juice is made by dissolving oranges... apple juice is made by dissolving apples... pineapple juice is made by dissolving pineapples... melon juice is made by dissolving two types of melon... and "grape juice" is made by decaying bunches of grapes. Uh, yeah. Sure, guys.
- Best part? Mulsum, another item in the same game, is made with Water, Honey, and "Grape Juice". For those of you who don't know what Mulsum is, it's a real beverage, and a quick check on Wikipedia reveals the ingredients to be... Water, Honey, and Wine.
  - Also the Yagudo Drink, which is "a secret brew loved by the Yagudo" (bird-men). It's made by decaying three parts grape to one part cherry. All these drinks regenerate MP, with the Yagudo Drink as the strongest -— in two senses of the word, it seems.
The Four X game Europa Universalis has an advisory rating for alcohol and tobacco references. These amount to the presence of "tobacco" and "wine" as trade goods within the game.
In Final Fantasy VI, in order to get an old man on his side at one point, Locke needs to bring him some "cider". Note, though, that in America (where the translation was done) there are two kinds of cider, one non-alcoholic and the other alcoholic, also known as hard cider. In British English, "cider" exclusively refers to the alcoholic kind, so the trope's averted.
The online RPG Dragon Fable hangs a lampshade on this at one point by having two background characters converse, with one saying "I would surmise that things did not go well, considering this is your 5th mug of Exotic NON-alcoholic beverage."
At one point in the Japanese SaGa 2, your characters investigate an opium smuggling ring. In the American release, Final Fantasy Legend II, the contraband the smugglers are smuggling is... bananas.
In the Sims 2 games, the kegs are apparently "juice kegs" and the bars serve juice and bottles of water. It's even referred to as "juice" in-game, ridiculously enough. With the latest expansion pack, there's also "nectar" for certain "higher-end" bars.
- Not to mention that in both The Sims and The Sims 2, there is an item called the bubble blower, which has Sims sit cross legged around what is essentially an enormous hookah pipe, ~~inhale the "bubbles"~~, and begin to float up into the air and giggle. A lot.
  - It gets even more ridiculous — Word Of God has revealed that the programming of the game causes "juice" to lower Sims' inhibitions, making it easier to build up relationships between them.
  - In The Sims 2 bubbles are clearly blown, complete with silly raspberry noises. Which of course doesn't change the GIANT HOOKAH aspect (nor the fact that the item is most often desired by college students and sims with a life goal of "pleasure").
  - In their defense, The Sims tried to avert rules as much as it can with these little 'word-plays', (the player can practically 'WooHoo' anywhere, including cars and public changing booths) they had to make a realistic game that is also appropriate for the younger audience.
The Shadowrun game for SNES features several bars and nightclubs, in which hard-ass, embittered covert-ops mercenaries relax between jobs involving murder and theft and drink... iced tea.
By Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix has been clocking in at a loser job after being disbarred due to presenting forged evidence, which wasn't even his fault. He keeps an entire crate of grape juice by his side at work at all times; they come in wine bottles. (It's not censorship, at least not on the translators' part — it's grape juice in Japanese, too.) One wonders why, when this series has a track record of four to five murders per game; alcoholism seems minor in comparison. But hey, it's Phoenix... maybe he just... doesn't drink...?
- In the second game, there was a wine bottle full of "tomato juice". Considering the fact that the drinker was the star of a kids show, it's possible that the execs make him drink tomato juice instead of wine to keep his family-friendly image. In the Phoenix Wright world, children's television shows are Serious Business.
- The bigger issue would be with Justice for All, where Matt Engarde's evil persona swirls around that unidentified fluid in the ~~big wine glass~~ Brandy balloon.
  - This Troper always liked to think it was Chocolate Milk.
Lunar had some fun with this: "Mmm... hic Donuts."
Sly Cooper, in the third game, gets in a drinking contest Mini Game with some Dingo miners, at an Australian "Lemonade Bar." The Sly Cooper games are American-made, so this may just be a gag.
A particularly egregious case occurs in the obscure Saturn game Dark Savior. As the game takes place almost entirely on a prison island, normal money isn't used. In the Japanese version, you instead use porno magazines, cigarettes, and liquor. In the US version, this suddenly becomes scary magazines, chocolate, and jalapeno juice. All references to alcohol consumption in the storyline were similarly changed to this obviously unpalatable beverage.
Soda Popinski, from the NES version of Punch-Out, is from Russia. And carries a bottle with him into the ring. It's soda, really. They even changed his name (originally "Vodka Drunkenski") and everything. They don't even attempt to hide it outside of the name, however. His skin is a glowing red, and his between-round taunts consist of blatant drinking jokes. "I can't drive, so I'm just going to walk all over you!!"
Tapper, a game about bartending, spawned a kids' version named Root Beer Tapper.
Yoshi's Island (Super Mario World 2): Coming in contact with spores makes Yoshi walk around drunkenly, while the background becomes wavy and changes to all the colours of the rainbow. One might dismiss it as a simple Interface Screw, if Yoshi wasn't so darn happy while it's happening.
In the US version of Monster Rancher 2, the Kato species apparently likes to drink olive oil. And get stumblingly drunk off of it. Even though its "Oil Fire" attack still shows a "triple X" symbol on its "olive oil" bottle. Oddly, it can still request an uncensored "Cigarettes" item.
One of the items you can pick up in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was translated to Grape Juice in the US version. Said item is dropped by a ghostly priest, and its icon looks suspiciously like the Eucharistic bread and wine.
- The Green tea was originally sake, and the Barley tea was beer - however, this troper does commend the writers for sort of sticking to the theme of the drinks.
The Harvest Moon series entirely averts this as all references to and items involving alcohol are kept in-tact in the localized version. Drinking the alcohol items results in the main farmer character's decrease in his fatigue or stamina bar. This can get a bit weird in the Distaff Counterpart versions, though... when your farmer is pregnant.
- To expand on just how booze-friendly the series is, take the example of the New Year's Festival in Harvest Moon 64. All the adults gathers in the town square, and every time you talk to them, you have to chug a mug of wine. The "lightweight" characters like the priest and librarian will go home after being talked to just once, while the bar workers require multiple shots to get to leave. You're also classed by how much your character has drunk over the year—if you seldom frequent the bar, you'll end up quickly passing out. If you're diligent and binge all year, though, you can drink the entire town under the table with no ill effects. This is actually a vital goal if you want to marry Karen.
- Played straight with "berry juice" in the original SNES game, though. Berry juice. In a bar.
- Also played straight in Magical Melody, in which you can consume "soda". There's even a soda-related achievement with an title that makes an alcohol-related pun ("High Spirits").
- Wine is also available as a gift in many of the games. You can even make your own.
The title of a recent WiiWare game simulating beer pong was changed from Beer Pong to Pong Toss: Frat Party Games, because only frat boys play generic-yellow-liquid pong.
- Similarly (actually, almost identically), this troper was looking at an ad for a gimmicky Wii minigame compilation when a screenshot of what was clearly beer pong caught his eye. He glanced to the list of minigames in the compilation and saw "Ping Cup" listed. "Ping Cup"? At least "Pong Toss" still rolls off the tongue...
Advance Wars: Dual Strike pulls this hilariously. After seemingly defeating the villains, the commanding officers gather for a party back at base. Rachel holds up a mug and proposes a toast with "glasses of Omega Land's finest water!" It briefly became a meme around the AW boards. Then again, considering the game was basically one big Green Aesop, this might have been serious.
- At one point, Max complained that Black Hole had "ruined my root beer and bratwurst tasting hour!"
- Look at the mugs in question◊. If that is Omega Land's "finest water," maybe they should stop buying so many tanks and invest in some purification filters instead.
Back in Boktai 2, when the Black Django form was freely usable, the unique restorative item (because the normal Solar Fruits just give him a stomachache) was called "Tomato Juice." More of a jab at this than anything, as it was like this in the JP version as well. Meanwhile, Django was given the ability to somehow suck blood from pretty much any enemy, even skeletons, though it was never explicitly called blood.
- Also a coincidental reference to Duckula, a British cartoon about a vampire duck which drinks tomato juice instead of blood. Yeah.
Thousand Arms features a "chili drinking contest". Chili is yellowish and served in mugs, and causes the characters to get wobbly and finally pass out. It does cause them to breathe fire, though. A funny thing to censor in a game full of non-subtle sexual innuendo.
Completely averted in the Play Station tie-in of Star Wars Episode I. On one level, the only way to progress is to persuade a drunken spaceship dealer to request an audience with Watto. The bar he appears in sells a beverage named "Juri Juice"; the way to persuade him is to buy him and his drinking buddy some more of the strong stuff. It's also possible to give another character a glass as a goodwill gesture. Attempting to buy one when you already have two in your inventory leads to the bar droid talking about the health hazards. Another level features a drunken pilot who boasts of his capacity for alcohol.
Averted in Digimon World 3, although drunkenness is generally portrayed negatively. The main cities feature a bar - which clearly sells alcohol if the fact there's a drunken man who attempts to flirt while intoxicated is present at one is anything to go by. Later in the game, there's another drunk who gives up. Subtle encouragement against drinking too much, perhaps?
Utterly averted in DwarfFortress, where your dwarves will become miserable and sluggish if you do not keep them constantly drunk.
Averted in Donkey Konga - well, the UK version at least. While the Chumbawamba song Tubthumping was slightly bowdlerised to replace profanities (taking the lyrics of the radio version), the lyrics where the singer reels off various alcoholic beverages and describes the drinker singing nostalgically of "the good times" were intact.
In Star Ocean 2, the extensive list of food items includes a number of teas which can be produced by cooking grains... but only by characters that are 21 or older, and one of them is Opera's favorite food. And then there's the "seltzer" which continuously appreciates in value throughout the game.
The obscure NES Eurocom game Magician features this trope. In towns, you'll come across "Ye Olde Guilde", establishments you can enter to listen to patrons' gossip, as well as buy liquid that comes in what is obviously a tankard or beer stein. Buy said liquid three times, and the game tells you the protagonist, Paul, has wiled away the rest of his afternoon drinking in the guild, allowing the Big Bad to destroy the world unhindered. The liquid in question? Goat's milk
At Arfur's Inn in Viva Pinata!, everyone drinks milk. Surprisingly though, the only thing you can do there is hire helpers.
Brave Fencer Musashi for the Playstation changed a raging alcoholic to a man with an overbearing love for pork chops.

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Parodied extensively in Adventurers!

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Parodied in The New Adventures of Captain S. After suffering a crushing defeat, Captain S gets wasted drinking milkshakes.

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In the Tiny Toon Adventures video special "How I Spent My Summer Vacation", the "99 Bottles of Beer" song gets bowdlerised (by Hampton Pig's family) with "beer" awkwardly replaced with "non-alcoholic beverage". Plucky calls them out on it, and Hampton's mom replies indignantly "We don't drink in our family, Plucky."
- This troper often sang "99 Bottles of Pop on the Wall," pop being the Midwestern U.S. name for soda.
An episode of the Woody Woodpecker revival has a ghost pirate talking about drinking ale, adding "That's ginger ale, kiddies," with an implied wink.
The first Ragdoll episode of The Batman has Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle (Catwoman) ordering water and lime from the bartender at a party. Though likely a Shout Out to how the comic version of Bruce Wayne is known to pretend to to get drunk on ginger ale as part of his Rich Idiot With No Day Job... c'mon, water?
- Maybe it was fancy mineral water, like San Pellegrino or Voss?
Apparently, the US dub of the British Christmas Special Father Christmas has Santa getting a bottle of alcohol changed to him getting a bottle of cologne. In the UK, the traditional thing for children to do on Christmas Eve is to leave a glass of sherry for Santa and a carrot for Rudolph, so Santa's drinking is something we've all come to accept. Europe in general is somewhat more liberal than the US when it comes to alcohol and depictions thereof.
Interesting twist: An episode of the Winx Club dub has a character drinking what the show refers to as courage brew. In the original... it's grapefruit juice.
- Not that the original is completely innocent: the dub makes a point of having a character say "I like milkshakes" before drinking from a stein in the first season finale, and then replaces cappuccino with cocoa in the 2nd season finale.
Many cartoons set in the Wild West will invariably end up in a bar, where the protagonist will ask for either milk or a sarsaparilla, aka the "root" in root beer.
- This trope did not, however, stop many a Gargle Blaster joke involving Daffy Duck. Apparently you can only get away with implying alcohol consumption if it's so absurdly strong it almost kills you.
Disney deserves a special mention here because of its consistent refusal to bow to this trope. Disney's animated movies predate many of the examples on this page, and they often show the consequences of excessive drinking in a bad light. Just goes to show how ridiculous this type of censorship is.
- Sleeping Beauty has the Jester get badly drunk on wine, hiccup and pass out while the two kings celebrate.
- A scene in The Aristocats features a very drunk goose.
- Dumbo has the titular character accidentally get drunk and start hallucinating. Off half a bottle of Champagne diluted in an entire tub of water, which Dumbo only drinks a few trunkfuls of. Lightweight.
- In Pinocchio, the kids drink beer and smoke cigars, and it turns them into donkeys. This is from the original book as well, not a Disney moral-pitch.
- In Beauty and the Beast, Gaston says that more beer won't cheer him up, so he tosses the mug into the fire. But the subsequent song and dance number does cheer him up.
- In Disney's Robin Hood, Sir Hiss is stuffed into a cask of ale and comes out extremely drunk. Later, Prince John storms into a room in a rage carrying what appears to be a crystal flagon of wine, which he winds up throwing at Sir Hiss and the Sheriff.
- In the DuckTales episode "Sir Gyro de Gearloose", Gyro cools down a fire-breathing dragon with "cider," with no mention of whether it's hard or soft. Apparently, it's hard, as the dragon begins hiccuping and stumbling around with a very happy expression.
- In The Movie of Disney's Kim Possible, Shego is shown drinking something◊, and although it's never stated what the beverage is, it's unlikely that the criminal-underworld nightclub was serving Pepsi.
- Fantasia uses Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (#6 in F, if anyone cares) to a weird pastiche of Classical Mythology, including grape harvest and winemaking. There's a big fat guy who wears grapes on his head and spends most of the segment quite drunk.
  - That fat guy would be ~~Bacchus~~ Dionysus, Greek god of wine and merrymaking. Makes sense that a festival in his name would include getting sloshed!
- In "The Sword and the Stone", the neglectful adoptive parent of Arthur celebrates his bad ideas by getting quite drunk with his hiccuping messenger friend (while Archimedes mocks them from on high).
- In The Great Mouse Detective a mouse drinks excessive amounts of champagne, becomes very drunk and ends up blurting out a phrase that angers the Big Bad Ratigan. He is then executed.
Parodied in Super Duper Sumos. The villains, toasting their success, offered around "Politically acceptable sparkling fruit drinks".
In Hey Arnold, according to Word Of God Helga's mother Miriam is a textbook alcoholic, even though you never see her drink liquor. All you see is that she makes smoothies. Lots and lots of smoothies. With "tabasco sauce" added.
Possible Lampshade Hanging in an episode of The Powerpuff Girls. One scene features the Mayor using wine glasses filled with liquid as musical instruments. He then takes a sip from one, looks straight the camera, and says, "Mmm, apple juice!"
- Then again, given the character of the Mayor, it's extremely likely those glasses actually were filled with apple juice.
In The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack, Captain K'nuckles is always carrying around of flask of maple syrup and is constantly taking Quick Nips of it and shuddering as if he downed some whiskey. The fact that he spends all his money on it (and candy) makes look something of an alcoholic.
Parodied in an episode of Codename Kids Next Door, where an episode opens in a speakeasy — after soda is banned for kids, in a spoof of Prohibition.
Robots in western animation seem to have a perference for oil as a beverage. Such examples occur in
- My Life As a Teenage Robot with Jenny
- Buzz Lightyear of Star Command with XR
- Transformers Animated with the Contructicons
- Inverted in Futurama's Bender, who runs on alcohol, and drinks it regularly, if not excellively, in EVERY context.
  - As with many other tropes in Futurama, it's unclear how, exactly, to take this; there are episodes that show if Bender doesn't drink alcohol then he begins to act intoxicated (as his systems run out of fuel to burn), such that drinking alcohol is, for him, sobriety and abstaining is going on a bender. But then get's addicted to electricity and becomes religious to help him get over it. This involves teetotaling, and he is apparently able to drink mineral oil (while a previous episode established robots also consume oil, it indicated that it was used for lubrication, not fuel).
  - Being Futurama, even this confusion has been Lampshaded:
    Fry: Bender, I think you drank too much. Or too little, I forget how it works with you. The point is, you haven't drunk exactly the right amount.
- It's used for a Does This Remind You Of Anything in AOSTH with Sonic telling Scratch, "You robot chickens make me sick. Get a couple of pints of motor oil in you and suddenly you're tough guys!" Of course, Scratch and Grounder Can't Hold Their Liquor when it's real.
Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog offers this line after Sonic and Tails walk into a tavern: "Couple of chili dogs and a beer. Root beer, that is!"
- And then it was completely averted with the Sonic Sez about liquor. "I wanna try this booze!"
Lampshaded and subverted for laughs in the Justice League animated series episode 'Flash and Substance', where three villains discuss taking down the Flash and boast about how they're real macho, tough guy villains. Immediately after, the waitress comes and takes their orders, which are all family friendly drinks (e.g. milk - "Uh... I have an ulcer.").

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Venezuelan breweries get around the ban on promoting beer products like this. They show all your elements of a typical beer commercial (parties, girls in bikinis, etc.) then, bam!. Everything is safe, since it's a Malta commercial.
This blog post. ( It turns out that the root beer was mixed with vodka)
Actors will generally use a lookalike substance when drinking in character onstage or onscreen. Reasons for doing so are fairly obvious, from performance concerns to budgetary concerns to legal concerns if the actors are underage.
- For instance, Dean Martin, who affected the performance of a drunken playboy, but who in real life was a temperate drinker, would have his highball glasses (a near constant accessory for him on his TV show) filled with apple juice. Partly this was because of personal preference, but also because of the professional concerns of being genuinely drunk on camera.
- Similarly, smoking cigarettes indoors is illegal in California, thus affecting a majority of TV shows and movies. For shows like Mad Men which require characters to smoke, herbal cigarettes are used.
  - "Herbal cigarettes"?
- On the other hand, actor Ben Miles (Patrick) on the British Coupling consistently drinks pints of Guinness on-screen because he was told that it's very difficult to fake on camera with non-alcoholic substances.
- Also, John Mills in the film Ice Cold in Alex. The final scene, where he celebrates getting the ambulance safely back to Alexandria in a bar, by having an ice-cold pint of Carlsberg - it was real Carlsberg, because there wasn't anything else that looked convincingly like ice-cold Carlsberg. The script calls for him to down it in one, and they had to do about half a dozen takes.
There are personal anecdotes available in TroperTales: Frothy Mugs Of Water.
In the Absolutely Fabulous DVD commentary, Jennifer Saunders admits that the large quantities of Champagne that Edina and Pasty consume are, in fact, ginger ale. She also says that there is no product placement of their drink of choice, so it is unlikely that their production budget would cover the enormous cost.
- This isn't always the case: the gag reel from the episode set in Provence shows the result of multiple takes where real French wine is called for...
This trope was common during the Perestroika in the USSR, when Gorby had the bright idea to ban not just all alcohol in the country, but all depictions of alcohol, too. This troper's father, a childrens' book illustrator, remembers how the censors forced him to redraw all pictures to eliminate all depictions of bottles, jugs, goblets etc. from a book he was illustrating at the time. The funny part? The book was set in a medieval muslim country, where any alcohol was banned anyway.
- Banning alcohol in Russia sounds a bit like banning sand in a desert.

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