Sir Elton Hercules John
I had never seen a more revolting spectacle... than those which were perched upon the bridge of his nose.
"Gurren Lagann: where irredeemably gaudy eyewear serves as a sign that you are the pinnacle of manliness."
There are
Cool Shades and there are
Sinister Shades. There are
Nerd Glasses and there are
Meganekko Glasses. And then there are these.
Perhaps it's the bright pink lenses. Perhaps it's the rhinestone-encrusted frames. Perhaps it's the way they jut out several feet from the wearer's face. Whatever it is these glasses have, the one thing they do
not have is subtlety.
These glasses come in a mix-and-match variety of styles, depending on the effect the costume department is going for:
- Coloured lenses mark out the user as eccentric or different - bonus points for having two different colours for the lenses.
- Shaped lenses can give the wearer a very 1970s aesthetic, especially if they are star or heart shaped.
- Fancy frames make the wearer seem kitsch or out-of-touch - the more decorated the glasses, the campier the individual.
Examples:
- The heart-shaped sunglasses from the Stanley Kubrick version of Lolita.
- The heart-shaped glasses never appear in the movie itself; only in publicity material.
- Dame Edna's glasses, with glitter stars hanging from the corners.
- Elton John is famous for these, and they appear in every parody of him.
- Kanye West's 'Shutter Shades' from "Stronger".
- Travis Touchdown from No More Heroes wears a variety of coloured shades... his default one are 'Sunflower Yellow', but they're also available in Peony Pink, Cobalt Blue, Pumking Seed Orange, and - if you're feeling particularly boring - traditional grey.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is famous for Kamina's over-the-top jagged orange shades, which have gone on to inspire an internet meme.
- Calvin wore shades that were remarkably similar to Kamina's in a Sunday strip of Calvin And Hobbes.
- Kamina's shades aren't even the most spectacular ones. They get topped about twenty episodes later with Simon's Kamina/Kittan homage shades. And this all ignoring the ones some of the mecha wear.
- Little known fact: Squirtle was wearing the pointed shades a good decade before Kamina ever donned them.
- Gary Oldman in Dracula (red glass)
- Meg Ryan in The Doors (blue hippie glasses)
- Spider Jerusalem of Transmetropolitan. One lens red, the other green. One lens round, the other square.
- In Terminator 3, Arnold ends up stealing his usual all-black & leather outfit from a gay male stripper and tries on a pair of gaudy star-shaped sunglasses that he finds in the pocket. He then takes them off and steps on them as he walks off.
- In the movie Mannequin, Hollywood Montrose is a Flamboyant Gay with the ultra 80's boxtop haircut and some really odd asymmetrical sunglasses.
- Miror B's ridiculous star-shaped sunglasses in the Pokemon Colosseum games definitely apply.
- Lee Phillips from KateModern is very fond of bizarre sunglasses. His favourite pair are pink, with guitar-shaped frames.
- Porter C Powell of Transformers Animated has pink sunglasses for God only knows why, even though he's a serious businessman.
- The Saturday Night Live sketches "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman" has Linda Richman (Mike Myers) wearing outrageously large tinted glasses.
- In Twin Peaks, the lenses of Dr. Jacoby's glasses have different colors.
- One of Count Olaf's disguises in A Series Of Unfortunate Events features oversized sunglasses. Esmé's "sunoculars" in a later book are a more extreme example— they combine sunglass lenses with huge binoculars.
- Togano Shozo of Eyeshield 21 sports a pair of oversized, orange-tinted sunglasses that somehow manage to escape notice or mention throughout the entirety of the series thus far.
- Bono from U2, after 1991.
- From Ace Attorney, you have Chief of Police Damon Gant and his hot pink sunglasses.
- Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter.
- Bootsy Collins
.
- The shades occasionally worn by Ray Person in Generation Kill are themselves mild compared to the other examples here, but become quite silly when worn by a US Marine in fatigues/MOPP gear invading Iraq while explaining the finer points of life in the Corps ("We pimpin'") or hitting on hot Iraqi women. It was enough for Person plus his shades to be the miniseries' cover◊.
- How could you leave out John Conlee. like Damon Gant and Porter C Powell, listed above he also has a pair of pink glasses (actually rose colored but close enough), the glasses actually appear on the covers for 3 of his albums (album pictures can be viewed by clicking on above link)
