Magic Countdown - Television Tropes & Idioms

In the Naruto OVA Battle at Hidden Falls. I Am the Hero!, Shibuki is told he has 10 seconds to reveal his location before Suien kills a villager. Naruto's short speech about bravery takes considerably longer.
- During her fight with Sasori in Naruto Shippuden, Sakura counts down the time left before her antidote wears off. Apparently one entire episode is just under two minutes.
On Dragon Ball Z, during the final fight between Goku and Frieza during the Namek saga, the planet Namek was minutes away from collapse for 10 episodes. Ridiculously, one episode actually says "two minutes" at the beginning and "one minute" at the end.
- Lampshaded later by the fact that Freiza flat-out admits he screwed up the whole "destroying Namek" thing, and it was supposed to explode instantly... he just made up the "five minutes left" thing to not look like an idiot.
  - This troper also remembers him saying he was genuinely surprised by how well Namek was holding together, and hadn't expected it to last as well as it did. Of course, he proceeded to state an only slightly longer revised estimate...
- A lot of this sort of thing on the show is implicitly explained as the fight being slowed down so that the audience can actually follow it. As early as the battles with the Saibamen, the already superhuman Gohan expresses trouble following the action, implying that every major fight that happens afterwards would be too fast for the human eye.
- In a later episode, they even comment on this when Goku needs time to regather his energy and asks Vegeta to stall Kid-Buu for one minute. Vegeta comments that this is a really long time for a fight against Buu and the minute does last at least an episode.
  - Somewhat justified; Goku does (at least in the manga) note that it shouldn't be taking so long and tells Vegeta that he got close to full power for a second but had actually started losing ki by the time anyone said anything.
In episode 139 of Bleach (which was titled "Ichigo vs Grimmjow, the 11 Second Battle"), Ichigo can remain a Hollow for 11 seconds. Just the scenes with Ichigo as a Hollow already take up about a minute, so even assuming everything's simultaneous doesn't explain it. The concept of events happening at extremely high speed is rather stretched.
- Why is it stretched? Moving at extremely high speed is basically all Ichigo does.
  - Because he says more then 11 seconds worth of words in that time, but I guess Talking Is A Free Action.
  - Didn't Ichigo actually state that for some reason he was holding out a lot longer than usual during that fight in the manga?
Factoring in all ecstatic collapses, dramatic slow-motion door-opening, and lengthy yet vital inner expository monologues, the forty seconds in the Death Note finale are inflated by approximately 850%.
- In the anime at least the inner expository of Light is justified, as every other movement is shown to stop. So his thoughts actually happen "instantly". Although I don't care how smart Light is, you'd have to be on all kinds of crap to be thinking that fast.

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DC Challenge #2 (1985). The bomb, which is far away, is about to detonate in 8 seconds. Batman is confronting the villain at a power plant. The following exchange takes place:
Villain: Now do you believe me, Batman? You can't radio for help because I'm jamming all the channels — and all the phones are dead as well, so you cannot contact your butler!
Batman: You lousy little maniac!! You're going to tell me how to stop that bomb, or I swear I'll—!
Villain: Really, Batman — wasting what precious little time you have left on empty threats? Frankly, I had thought you above such childish displays!
Batman: (thoughts) He's right... can't afford to lose control now... have to focus... have to think... there has to be some way to disarm that device...

: At this point we see the bomb again, and it's down to 5 seconds left. (Batman does disarm the faraway bomb, by cutting the power at the power plant.)

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The inverse variety occurs in the movie Apollo 13. The loss of communications during re-entry is said to last 4-1/2 minutes, but actually takes about 3 minutes of movie. Given how tense that scene is watching the movie, knowing how it comes out, one can imagine how tense it was in real life, taking half again as long.
- But the 14 second manual course correction burn of the LM engine was changed to 39 seconds, which still took 63 seconds of screen time in the movie.
Goldfinger: During the countdown to the detonation of the nuclear bomb in Fort Knox. It manages to get stopped at 007, too. Imagine that.
- Octopussy, another James Bond movie, uses it in a detonator instead of an entire bomb (and since Science Marches On, the counter is digital).
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service features a detonator set for 5 minutes. Then the camera cuts to other characters talking for 10 seconds. When we cut back to the detonator, only 10 seconds have passed. Cut to a fight scene for 10 more seconds. OK, now 2 minutes have passed on the detonator. Cut to another 10 second scene. Now the detonator has 10 seconds left before detonating. Cut to a character counting down 5,4,3,2,1. Cut to both Bond and Blofeld jumping out of the building scheduled to blow up. Only a good 20 seconds after the countdown is supposed to be over does the explosion actually happen.
Independence Day: "Can you get us out of here in 30 seconds?" More like two minutes. Yet cut back to the bomb, which still has five seconds on it.
The film Stargate (the original one). When O'Neil sets the timer on the nuke, it also beeps constantly in all the scenes. Subverted slighty, in that in most scenes, counting the beeps is pretty accurate between timer shots. Played painfully straight though, in that the time between beeps varies widely between shots. In one scene, it counts down normally, in another it's almost rapid fire.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan features the title character counting down 60 seconds to the Enterprise crew before he does something really nasty. Naturally, this takes a good deal longer than 60 seconds, giving our heroes enough time to come up with a bluff.
- Somewhat justified as this was a character counting, not a timer. There's plenty of precedent for a counting person who doesn't really want to reach 0 to slow the counting somewhat. (Think parents counting down to a punishment. "One... Two... Two and a half... Two and three-quarters...")
  - The "60 seconds" is roughly only two whole minutes, starting from when Khan turns his back and when the info is first sent.
- However, the Genesis countdown later in the movie takes longer than its advertised four minutes. Not by much, interestingly enough, and one could justify it by saying that the events in different cuts were happening at the same time.
  - This troper seems to remember the countdown actually resetting slightly — in one shot the countdown stood at somewhere around two minutes, and then went back to 3:30.
  - This troper had a very hard time with that scene until he realized that they were counting up, not down.
Star Wars: From "The Rebel base will be in range in thirty minutes" (not seconds as visibly seen), through the power-up of the Death Star's superlaser, to the destruction of the Death Star at least feels like it takes five minutes — when before, the Death Star could power up and blow the shit out of Alderaan in less than a minute.
- The planet was in the way. It was taking that long to move into place to get a clear shot. (Instead of, y'know, shooting the planet Yavin and then shooting Yavin Four, or just going faster, considering how fast the Death Star has to be able to go to get anywhere since space is big. So, not much less problematic...)
  - Yavin was a gas giant. Perhaps, the laser would just not be as effective on it.
  - Actually, the new Death star was also improved to be rapid firing and more acurate (it hits a fleeing Corvette).
  - And the laser needed time to power up, ~1 hour IIRC. Which doesn't explain why they didn't shoot through the gas giant.
- Another example of this in the same movie. At some point, when they say X amount of time until in firing range (I kept track after every time they stated the time), it took more than X time time until they got to firing range.
- Ret Con: As of the Death Star novel, the gunner was stalling with "stand by... stand by... stand by..." hoping someone would destroy the Death Star before he was forced to destroy Yavin 4.
The opening credits of the GI Joe movie have Cobra attempting to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Duke moves the bomb from the statue to their airship, taking about 20 seconds longer than the clock should have allowed.
Happens in Van Helsing: it sure takes that clock a long time to strike twelve.
The Mask: the countdown to the detonation of the conventional explosives in the club.
The 30 seconds that Grandpa Seth freezes time for in Troll 2 must be some of the slowest seconds in the history of the world.
The "one minute" it takes for the DeLorean in Back to the Future to reappear is actually about one minute and twenty seconds.
- Also, in the third movie time runs very slowly after the engine and time machine crash through the sign marking the last half mile of track. Covering the remaining distance at 88 mph should not take more than 20 seconds, but the engine takes the plunge much later.
Sports version: Space Jam.
Played both ways in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: when the nuclear bomb is about to go off, an announcement says "one minute to zero time." The first 45 seconds take 30 seconds, and then the last 15 seconds take another 30 seconds.
"Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!" A movie magazine worked out that the difference between the time stated and the time it appears to take would mean a 57-hour day.
The Little Giants "There's four seconds left, we can beat these guys!" Feel free to amuse yourself by seeing how many times you can count to four in the remaining game time.
- Someone doesn't know the rules of American football... to wit, if the play goes off, the scoreboard could count to 0 and stay there for a half hour; so long as the play keeps going, anything that happens during the play counts.
In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Kirk et al. activate the Enterprise's 60-second auto-destruct sequence and then go down to the transporter room where they beam off the ship. The Klingons then beam onto the ship and cautiously make their way to the bridge, where they find the countdown nearly complete and promptly get blowed up real good. But of course, roughly 100 seconds of film have elapsed between the beginning and the end of the 60-second countdown, and even at that, the trips to and from the transporter room have obviously been compressed.
In The Manhattan Project, a nuclear bomb's timer is damaged by radiation, causing it to start the timer... With 999 hours until detonation. It seems the army have more than a month to deal with it, until they discover that the timer counts down exponentially, to the point that it eventually counts down several hours per second. Might be a justification or outright parody.

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Funnily enough, 24 has some examples of this: sometimes an episode ends with something important (like an explosion) and the next episode begins with the timer exactly following, but the events ahead — the emergency units have already arrived, etc.
In the first episode of Power Rangers in Space, Dark Specter has captured Zordon in a jar, which gradually fills up with a lava-like substance. When it is full, Dark Specter will have drained all of Zordon's power. At the rate that jar is filling up, Zordon ought to be history before that episode was up, yet somehow he held out until the end of the season.
- In the last episode, Zordon's tube goes from half-full at the beginning to empty at the end.
- In Power Rangers Ninja Storm, the rangers have a more agile alternate mode for their Humongous Mecha which can only be maintained for sixty seconds. The first time it's used, it stays transformed for precisely sixty seconds in the end, though Cam's countdown is often wildly off. Almost every use after that, though, had battles carry on for much longer than one minute.
- In Power Rangers RPM, one Monster Of The Week throws bombs as his whole schtick. The bombs have no visible timer but beep faster and faster leading up to kaboom. At one point, when the monster throws a bomb, the beeping accelerates... and then stops when a Ranger catches the bomb. It starts over when the Ranger throws it back.
The Makai Knights in Garo can only remain in armour for 100 seconds. This is enforced in most episodes, but once in a while it is blatantly broken with no explanation.
In the Lost episode "The Other Woman", Daniel is attempting to neutralize poison gas. "Forty seconds to contamination," the computer says. Forty seconds later, it says, "Twenty seconds to contamination."
Doctor Who, episode "Destiny of the Daleks". The countdown runs at normal speed when demoed, but too slowly when Romana is actually in peril from the bomb.
- Also, in "The Daleks", a Dalek suddenly stops counting down when it became clear to the director that the action sequence would take much longer than the countdown.
Lampshaded by the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the episode Time Chasers:
Tom Servo: (after establishing he was counting down earlier) ...zero... four... three... two... one... z— THREE... two... one... ... TWO... [plane crashes, destroying time machine] ...one... whatever.
On the children's TV show The Big Comfy Couch, one of the usual devices employed in every episode was that Lunette would look around for items inside the couch while making a mess, and then at the end of the episode she would clean the mess up in a "ten-second tidy". Usually these would last over a minute. Very likely this was done under the assumption that children can't count.
Knight Rider (2008) "Knight Fever": Trying to abort the destruction of a recently nanovirus-infected command center, Carrie and Alex find that the security device has malfunctioned and won't read their handprints. It repairs itself just in time to stop when the countdown reaches 1 second.
In Kamen Rider Decade, in order to counter the Super Speed ability of Kamen Rider TheBee, Tsukasa/Decade uses Kamen Rider Faiz's Accel Mode, which is explicitly stated (both in Faiz and Decade) to last ten seconds. The fight actually lasts about a minute, but it can be semi-Handwaved by the fact that they never specified whether the ten seconds are inside or outside the perspective of Super Speed - that, and the fight is damn cool.

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In the recent Met performance of Doctor Atomic, about Dr. Oppenheimer and the Trinity nuclear test, a voice announces five minutes to the test firing. Eight minutes later, the two minute buzzer sounds. Eight minutes later, the bomb goes off.

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In Sonic Adventure 2, Eggman explicitly instructs that a bomb be set to blow in fifteen minutes. Cue two Dark Story stages which have timers which total 15 minutes, two boss fights and several cutscenes leading up to the stage where one minute's left until detonation. And the following stage for the Hero story permits eight minutes. If a player gets through the levels/bosses fast enough, it can all be in under fifteen minutes, though.
Metal Gear Solid 2 - Fatman's bombs do it, as does Emma's countdown.

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A variant of the fast burning fuse is seen in Batman the Animated Series. In "Dreams in Darkness", the Scarecrow has a huge machine mixing fear inducing chemicals to dump in Gotham's water supply. Batman shuts it off, stopping the big clock at 01:45. Scarecrow starts it up with the backup controls and the clock begins counting down again, from 20 seconds.
- This isn't event he worst part (if that even counts as "magic" to begin with) — the timer beeped with every passing second, even when it was offscreen, but the beeps didn't correspond to how much time had passed. At the 20-seconds mark, it plainly beeped more times than there were seconds remaining.
This Troper distinctly remembers the episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, "Invasion of the Secret Santas!", where, after noticing a doll is a bomb with a 10 second timer, Batman exclaims, "Its a Bomb!" for 5 seconds, before cutting to a commercial break.
Happens in an episode of The Fairly Oddparents where roaches have taken over and are going to destroy the world. Cosmo and Timmy plead with Wanda to help save them as the clock ticks down ten seconds, which takes more like thirty.
- Happens again in another episode while Mark contemplates whether or not to destroy the Earth with a Time Bomb. He's clearly taking more than a few seconds to do this, while the timer counts down about 5 seconds. Of course, being Fairly Odd Parents and all, the timer in question might have actually been magic, So... Yeah.
This happens all the time in Code Lyoko Season 2 and 3 with the countdown before hitting the key to avoid the reconfiguration of Sector 5. It is supposed to be 3 minutes, but it jumps forward, and sometimes backward, quite haphazardly.
- And in episode "The Secret", where a detonator for a series of charges set to destroy the Factory has a digital clock. Once, it advanced only 15 seconds while almost 2 minutes went by. Afterward, it seemed to have hurried back and caught up exactly with the lapsed time... but then it jumped forward 45 seconds while William and Ulrich were speaking, that is with no jump-scene in-between, only a change of focus.
In the Captain N The Game Master episode where Simon is marrying Mother Brain, Mega Man and Kid Icarus have 30 seconds to shoot Simon with an antidote arrow before the spell becomes permanent. It takes them one minute and 17 seconds to hit him.
- In this fanfiction parody of the episode, Samus Aran (who wasn't in the series) Lampshades this by telling Mega Man that he needs to get his chronometer fixed.
An episode of Total Drama Action has the contestants being given the task of escaping a building set to blow up in 30 seconds. After 1 minute and 13 seconds, the timer is at 15 seconds. When the countdown ends, a total of 2 minutes and 10 seconds has passed.
Played For Laughs in a Tiny Toon Adventures short, "One Minute Till Three", which has a ten minute running time. There's one minute left in the school day, and Granny is asking all the students impossible questions and assigning increasingly large amounts of homework as punishment for wrong answers. The focus is on Plucky Duck, as he desperately hopes that the clock will reach 3:00 before Granny calls on him. Highlights include Plucky saying "This must be the longest sixty seconds in the history of Acme Acres" and the clock (which has no second hand) moving backwards while Plucky watches.

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Attempt any file transfer in any version of Windows and watch the time remaining jump about like a nervous salmon in a particularly fast river. Lucky Star poked at this.
- The same principle applies to file downloading, especially a torrent, since the estimate for time remaining assumes that the current speeds will remain constant, which is almost never true.
- And let's not forget the windows install which seems to take a very long time between 39 and 38 minutes left for no good reason.
- Also lampshaded by this XKCD strip.

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Averted in one Hokuto no Ken episode, in which Kenshiro used the Zan Kai Ken on the King Mook of the Week. After explaining the Mook he would die seven seconds after being released (3 in the manga ITTRC), he removes his thumbs from the mook's temples. A counter appears on the bottom on the screen, and the mook suffers a painful and gruesome death at the near-exact moment the counter reaches zero. Badass indeed.
On Neon Genesis Evangelion, in the episode "Both of You, Dance Like You Want To Win!", the timer that counts down until the EVA units run out of power is actually shown on screen as the action sequence is played out.
- The timer counts down starting from 30 milliseconds, though.

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Notably averted in Aliens. When the computer announces how much time there is until the place goes up, that's exactly how much in-movie time it takes for the place to blow up.
Somewhat averted in Virtuosity, because Sid's last bomb speeds up the countdown whenever it detects countermeasures... and then breaks down.

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Subverted in the Doctor Who episode "Forest of the Dead." River Sun takes The Doctor's place when he intends to use his brain for storage to restore the "saved" humans in the Library's memory core. During a 2 minute countdown (that actually takes 2 minutes) she says a tearful farewell to him. Great scene... and exactly on time.
- Mostly averted in the episode "42" of the new series. After the initial setup scenes, the counter and the depicted events happen in real time, as much as possible.
Subverted in an episode of Stargate SG-1, where the bomb does this, but it's because of a time dilation field.
- Also mentioned in the 200th episode ("200") in which a movie writer proposes a scene in which SG-1 has to escape a situation in ten seconds and debates on how long the time should be.
Daniel: What difference does it make, I mean it's not like you have an actual ticking clock on the screen.
Marty: That's brilliant!
Daniel: That's ridiculous...
Also Averted in the Stargate Atlantis episode "Thirty-Eight Minutes". It really is 38 minutes from the Gate opening to it closing, and the countdown towards the resolution is accurate.
- The whole "38 minutes to Gate shutdown" thing is Lampshaded in "200" as well, where they go on to discuss how the countdown timer can be set to something completely arbitrary.
Averted in the Chuck episode Chuck vs the Third Dimension, which kept a digital timer in the corner of the screen throughout the (hilarious) disposal sequence.

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Nicely averted in the Thunderbirds episode "The Perils of Penelope". Near the end, it is said that 3 minutes are left until Penelope is hit by the monorail. It takes exactly 3 minutes for the train to come (they save her at the last second).

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Very subtly averted in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods. If you check the complete vocal score, you'll discover that there are actually twelve chimes that lead up to each midnight, and that they're timed and written into the underscore.

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Averted in Super Smash Brothers: Brawl with the first Subspace bomb. When the picture cuts away from the bomb, it has 7 seconds to go. Exactly 5 seconds later, the timer is at 2 seconds. This Troper checked.
Averted in Resident Evil 4: during the final escape scene, the three minutes countdown takes cinematics into account. Skipping said cinematics will NOT give you three full minutes.
Averted in Metal Gear Solid 3. After Snake plants the C3 to blow up the Shagohod, a timer starts which can be checked in the following cut-scene by looking at a hidden countdown. It's promptly played straight, though for the mid- and post-Volgin battle cutscenes.
Mostly averted in Paper Mario 2. After Crump sets the timer to destroy the tree, it's possible for the timer to expire of a dialogue scene.

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Averted, Subverted and whatevered in Justice League Unlimited: In "Wild Cards" the Joker has hid 25 bombs throughout Las Vegas and he's televising the Justice League's attempts to stop it. He even has the timer in the lower right corner that stays consistent throughout the episode. Subverted when Batman disables the first bomb. The timer stops, then drops to 3 seconds and starts again (it was a fake bomb).
Averted in the Batman: The Brave And The Bold episode "Mayhem of the Music Meister!" when Batman and Black Canary are in a death trap which includes a time bomb. The timer counts down in real time.
- It better be accurate. The timer runs on a metronome!

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Spoofed in Bobobo-bo Bo-Bobo: Denbo-Chan can only stay for... two hours.
- Played straight, however, with Mr. Bo-Jiggler and Patchbobo.
Spoofed in Keroro Gunsou episode 23. Kururu shows a countdown that has 72 minutes left... then, a few minutes later, he announces 70 minutes have passed.

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Spoofed in the film Spaceballs, with the countdown on Mega-Maid's Self Destruct Mechanism:
Computer: Ten... nine... eight... six...
President Skroob: Six? What happened to seven?!
Computer: Just kidding!
- Also averted, since the actual three-minute self-destruct countdown only runs ten seconds too long, even with the argument over "seven".
Parodied in the movie Galaxy Quest, where the self-destruct bomb is disarmed well before it goes off, but the timer continues counting down until it reaches 1 second. This happened because the alien race that made the bomb was imitating a sci-fi TV show.
Parodied in Monsters Vs Aliens when the countdown ends with nothing happening. The Talking Computer starts saying that it must have made a mistake... then the spaceship blows up anyway.
In Citizen Toxie: Toxic Avenger IV, a bomb is set off with only four seconds on it. Those four seconds are just long enough for Toxie to go home and impregnate his wife, have a heart to heart with young drug addict, and then get the survivors out before his sidekick eats the bomb.

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Subtly spoofed in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Xander is having a Circle Of Extinction with the bad guy as a nearby bomb timer is counting down. It switches between them and the bomb, and the timer seems to jump around at random, gaining and losing time, until it is of course stopped at 1 second left.
Each installment of the Saturday Night Live sketch MacGruber, a parody of Mac Gyver, involves a countdown (usually of twenty seconds) before a bomb goes off. The twenty seconds tend to last about a minute.
In the Red Dwarf episode Bodyswap, the self-destruct is accidentally set off. Kryten's plan to stop the countdown fails, and everyone braces themselves for the explosion...which never comes. Turns out Holly threw out the bomb months ago.

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Parodied in the book and game Starship Titanic, wherein a nuclear bomb (voiced by John Cleese) can be made to forget its place during the countdown, at which point it starts counting down from one thousand again.
Brutally subverted in the Freehold novel. A trainee is trying to disarm a bomb with a timer. He takes a moment of respite, as there's plenty of time left... then the (fake) bomb goes off. An Aesop on how bad guys in the Freehold future have read the Evil Overlord List.
A similar twist than in Galaxy Quest happens in one of The Destroyer novels. When Chiun makes an attempt to disarm a nuclear bomb, the timer keeps on ticking down to zero (causing everyone else to become rightly worried) and then nothing happens...
Chiun: Of course it's still ticking. I destroyed the bomb, not the clock.

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Spoofed in Ratchet And Clank 3:
Biobliterator CPU: 60 seconds untill core implosion.
Dr. Nefarious: Lawrence, engage the teleporter.
Lawrence: Would you care to specify a destination sir?
Dr. Nefarious: Who cares? Just get us out of here!
Biobliterator CPU: Time's up!
Dr. Nefarious: What? That wasn't even close to 60 seconds!
Biobliterator CPU: Bye-bye! (explodes)
In the timed bonus levels of Gauntlet (the original), the narrator's voice (you know, the Wizard Needs Food Badly guy) would count down the last ten seconds before you failed to clear the level and get the bonus. Sometimes he'd mix up the numbers as a joke.
In Starship Titanic, a bomb that counts down 1,000 seconds to explosion can get so distracted by mocking the player's attempts to disarm it that it forgets what number it was on, and has to start its countdown all over again, from the top.

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Spoofed in the Futurama episode "A Tale of Two Santas", where a random number generator is used instead of a timer. Added fun for negative numbers popping up.
- Also spoofed in the episode "A Big Piece of Garbage": The crew is sent to destroy a giant ball of garbage heading directly towards the Earth along with an explosive set to detonate after 25 minutes. Once they activate it, the digital timer counts down "25...15...05...6h" to the crew's surprise. The reason? The timer was upside down and thus set to 52 seconds. Way to go, Farnsworth.
- Truth In Television. The LFSR, a common random number generator, makes a better counter than normal counting.
Subverted on South Park in the episode "The Snuke": In a parody of 24, a bomb is set to go off when a digital clock with the requisite seven-segment display reaches 1:00. With just minutes to go, the authorities cut the power... and when it comes back, the digital clock controlling the detonator is flashing 12:00.

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