Mood Whiplash - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Fruits Basket manga loves this. After a serious chapter or two, it'll switch to one that's light hearted. Those chapters usually involve the student council.
The ultimate heavyweight champion: My Neighbor Totoro and Grave Of The Fireflies were originally released as a double feature.
- My Neighbor Totoro has this on its own. Satsuki and Mei meeting their fun new next-door neighbors that live in the woods around the shrine, with ten minutes of Satsuki running around town trying to find Mei, who appears to have drowned in the river, before the end (which has more mostly-lighthearted fun).
Elfen Lied has a lot of similar whiplashes, intermixing light-hearted comedy, sweet romance, heart-wrenching drama, and sadistic carnage.
SaiKano: The mood often switches radically on the same page. Repeatedly.
Same for Neon Genesis Evangelion, intermixing thrilling Humongous Mecha action with highly painful drama. And penguins.
All of Kodomo No Omocha deals with tears and laughter, usually in the same episode. Most consider it a well-done portrayal of growing up.
- WELL DONE POTRAYAL OF GROWING UP?! DAMN YOU LOLICONS!!
Martian Successor Nadesico TV Series and movie intentionally created Mood Whiplash, often to make fun of the audience for taking things seriously. Especially later, when the Writer On Board started sacrificing characters for their Aesops.
Mai-HiME had a humorous beach episode right after a female character's boyfriend disintegrated in her arms, and she went catatonic.
- An even more drastic example in the same series is episode sixteen, where literally seconds after the HiMEs are declaring their eternal friendship, the Lovable Traitor Nagi tells them that they must fight each other in a Battle Royale, in which defeat causes the same disintegration to the person dearest to the loser.
Entire series Mood Whiplash include Gatekeepers and its sequel, Gatekeepers 21.
Also seen in Jinki:Extend which was one series, but based on a manga and its sequel.
Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl whiplashes back and forth between sweet, thoughtful Love Triangle romance and over-the-top slapstick comedy.
Naru in Love Hina is a champion (it is the lead in for her Megaton Punch), but Motoko is also well versed in it. Keitaro plummets into anguish with equal speed.
Clannad is guilty of this in the second half of the After Story series. To give an example, take the episode where Nagisa died. Heart wrenching, of course, with Tomoya quickly becoming a crying wreck while holding his newly born child Aaaaaaand cue the upbeat happy J-pop ED!
Bleach takes this to a whole 'nother level. While it already had standard Mood Whiplash episodes following dramatic episodes (usually revolving around Kon, Ichigo's sisters, or Fake Ultimate Hero Don Kanonji), during the Filler arc a brief clip comic relief snippet, titled Shinigami Cup, was placed after the credits of each episode. The clip displayed various of Bleach's numerous characters doing all sorts of things, from managing their hair in the morning to attending club meetings.
- Something similar happened with Naruto after Shippuden started, although omakes weren't shown after some of the more serious episodes (especially around the time Asuma died).
- There's also the ending credits song "Happy People" (as upbeat as it sounds) which premiered at the end of what is probably the least appropriate episode possible. The episode ends with Ichigo falling over in a puddle of his own blood after having been stabbed through the chest. "Happy people! Happy people!"
Some anime series make use of detached, noncanonical OVAs for the Mood Whiplash feel. For example, the Chibi Party OVA of Full Metal Alchemist.
- Personally, I think the random comedy moments within the show itself count as well. It'll be serious, serious — ten seconds of comedy that come out of nowhere — back to serious. There seems to be less of this in the latter portion of the series, which could probably be attributed to many things including the darker tone of the show overall and the anime having overtaken the manga.
- The manga has significantly more humor than the anime, and often includes humorous moments in the middle of fights. The author herself stated that manga is supposed to be entertaining, and thus wanted to minimize the focus on sad scenes (then again, this is the same manga that has Hughes' well-known Tear Jerker funeral scene).
- The manga has gone so far as to actually throw in a humorous moment right after a character meets a gruesome fate, in the same scene, namely, Yoki charging in right after Heinkel rips Kimbley's throat out, or having characters crack jokes about political propaganda right next to Mrs Bradley breaking down when told her husband and child are apparently dead. As the series progresses, things get darker and more serious, but instead of cutting the humor, it refuges in more extreme mood whiplashes and Gallows Humor.
Cowboy Bebop generally doesn't change moods in mid-episode, but episodes have been in every possible style — from romantic fairy-tales to moody Deconstruction to classic Heroic Bloodshed.
- An in-episode example would be "Speak Like a Child". Most of the episode is lighthearted and silly as Spike and Jet attempt to find the right equipment to watch a mysterious videotape. When they finally succeed, they find out that the tape is a message which Faye made as a child and sent to herself in the future, telling her never to lose her younger self. She doesn't remember a thing. Ouch.
- Used quite well in "Waltz for Venus". Towards the end of the episode, Spike and Roco, who Spike met in that episode, confront a gang that Roco stole a valuable plant from (to cure his sick sister). As the fight starts, it plays typical, upbeat fight music. Eventually a gang member comes after Roco, but he quickly defeats him by using a technique that Spike had tried to teach him earlier in the episode. He is so happy that he did the technique right that he gives Spike a thumbs up. Spike returns the thumbs up and immediately after, Roco is shot and the music stops. The Mood Whiplash makes Roco's death hit the viewer pretty hard, even though he was only introduced that episode.
Excel Saga, while mostly a parodic anime, does this later in the series, having moving moments almost directly followed by comedy.
Mahou Sensei Negima - the first series went for a Gecko Ending when it killed Asuna on her 14th birthday. The very next episode sees Negi examining something on the headteacher's desk, then breaking down upon realizing that it's one of her bells, out of her ashes. Of course, by the end of the series, with help from Chao Lingshen and others in 3A, she gets better the moment Negi and company use the machine Lingshen invented to permanently terminate her deal with the demon king, but still...
- The manga does this too, the most extreme one occurring when Ala Alba arrives in Magicus Mundus. Fate appears, impales Negi (who nearly dies of blood loss) with a stone spear, scatters the group across the world, and frames Negi as the person responsible for the whole incident. The next few chapters show that the various members of the group end up selling themselves into slavery, becoming horribly ill, and getting amnesia, among other things.
- It also does this in reverse. After about 20 chapters of drama, fights, long-speculated-upon backstory, and a build up to The Reveal, we get a Fan Service-heavy Breather Episode / Furo Scene. It is very funny though.
- And then slammed us all with Ako breaking down in secret.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann - slams very rapidly from sad to inspirational to very, very sad when Kamina is mortally wounded, but gets back up and destroys the remaining opposition in a stirring scene... then he dies. Later, during the first few post-Time Skip episodes, after a fast-paced rollercoaster ride of over-the-top badassitude, it seems like the show actually jumped off the same slippery slope that took Neon Genesis Evangelion. Fortunately, that was just to build up momentum to fly up even further Beyond The Impossible.
- And it continues increasing the awesome up to previously unknown levels of epic, badassness, and screwing fate with sheer willpower. Until the last episode's very last part (epilogue included), which left viewers across the globe with their mouths hanging open in disbelief, shock, and denial. Then came the tears. And the screams of "WHAAAAT?!" And more denial.
- If you're watching Gurren Lagann on the Sci-Fi channel, you get an additional whiplash if you stick around after the show's end to see...Now And Then Here And There. Talk about mood whiplash!
  - And after that's over we still have half of Gurren Lagann left, and it'll be followed by the ultra-violent, super-depressing, often very-disliked MD Geist.
Gravitation regularly flip-flops between comedy and angst, depending on how Shuichi reacts to the events happening to him. The most extreme example was after a slapstick sequence of Shuichi and Aizawa being chased by fangirls, then getting drunk together, when three other men hired by Aizawa come in, and they beat and rape Shuichi.
- Schoolgirl cosplay directly post brutal assault, anyone?
- How about the end of the anime when Eiri's suicide attempt is interrupted by Shuichi bursting through the ceiling in a dog costume.
Zeta Gundam, the darkest entry in the Mobile Suit Gundam saga, was followed up by Gundam ZZ, a comedic hijinks series. Following negative reactions, ZZ shifted gears halfway through its run, focusing on drama and politics.
- To be fair, Tomino had a history of following up epic tragedies with comedies, and depressions caused by Executive Meddling can be attributed to at least a few of his Kill Em All endings anyways.
- Speaking of Gundam, the ongoing story arcs from the parody manga Gundam-San are the absolute king of this. Best example would probably be Garma of the Space Island, a goofy Slice Of Life story about the Zabi clan as a poor family living in a Japanese-style shack. Things take a turn for the worse after Zeon Deikun shows up, but the absolute biggest Audience Sucker Punch comes when it turns out the whole thing was Kycilia reminiscing about her dead family, right when Char shows up to deliver her memorable death scene.
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni generally starts each arc with someone dying horribly (or at least a mutilated corpse in plain sight). And then on the other side of the opening credits, lighthearted comedy. And then things go steadily downhill again.
- For This Troper, the first season's ending theme provides this effect, especially with the ending of Meakashi-hen:After an episode of bloody carnage, the last shot we see is of Shion falling to her death, so taking Watanagashi-hen into account, the entire cast of main characters save for Rena and Oishi are now dead. The screen goes black, and we hear the splat of her body hitting the ground. Cut to a light, soothing piano piece.
- There's probably at least one person who tuned in to the first episode right after the first scene and opening credits, knowing nothing about the show, and assumed the series was a comedy. It must be like playing Eversion blind.
Then there's Tenshi Ni Narumon, which does the reverse: silly and random 90% of the time, but with the occasional Wham Episode tossed in.
Prince Of Tennis does this so violently (and very, very deliberately) that if you aren't ready for the Mood Whiplash between high-stakes tournament finales and alternate universe chibi adventures, you're liable to end up in a neck brace.
Done near the end of Lucky Star, when the normal sequence of slice-of-life gags is broken by a touching segment on why Konata's late mother chose her father.
Yu Yu Hakusho does this occasionally, interspersing their tense battles with weird and unexpected humor, such as when Kuwabara is about to die in his fight with Risho, and Yukina's appearance suddenly makes him super strong; he knocks Risho out with one blow and then proceeds to do muscle-man poses to impress her. Another one of note was when Chuu, in the middle of the power-up which will herald his ultimate technique, runs to the edge of the ring and starts throwing up.
The Slayers adores this and makes full use of it, including hanging lampshades on it at every opportunity. In a particularly memorable scene, Lina has been put out of action and is possibly dead despite Sylphiel's efforts, the rest of the cast are facing the season's Big Bad with various injuries and no hope of winning — and Amelia's overprotective father, the ridiculously over-the-top Prince Philionel, arrives from nowhere and makes a fool out of himself by challenging the enemy in the name of justice. Zelgadis explains this by commenting, "Well, they can't let these episodes get too serious."
School Days starts as a charming romantic comedy and decays into an angsty nightmare.
Arguably the entire point of the weird broadcast order of episodes in The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya is to recreate the mood whiplash that occurs in the novels, but on a Twelve Episode Anime timescale. More directly, though, the Wham Episode probably qualifies as mood whiplash, as a series about the personal weirdness of its title character suddenly turns out to be about the very real dangers that puts the rest of the cast into.
The 8th volume of D.Gray-Man features this trope in a particularly jarring way. After the last page, when everyone on the ship dies cheering on the main characters after Miranda deactivates her innocence, from the woman and her bodyguard that were set up to be main (or at least reoccuring) characters to the nameless crewmen celebrating for the last time belowdecks, the very next page is an omake featuring the wacky hijinks of the creator and her assistants.
Tsukuyomi Moonphase flips from the light-hearted, daily life of a cute monster girl and her surrogate family, to dark, full-out battle sequences between the villains that almost look like they're from another show! The main title sequence doesn't help any.
Jubei-Chan uses this to great effect. One moment Jiyu's engaged in some heart warming highjinks the next she's plummeting down a cliff face with high velocity blood loss.
Violinist Of Hameln is the king of this trope. Accept no substitutes. The series flips from drama, tragedy, and angst to heartwarming romance and then to outright ludicrous gags pretty much with the turning of a page; to list every instance of Mood Whiplash would be to summarize every page and line of dialogue. The real kicker is that it's pulled off surprisingly well and the characters become very complex as a result. Note that this only applies to the manga, the Anime starts out horribly sad and pretty much stays that way.
Rozen Maiden much? The series mixes the daily antics of a group of immature, childish dolls trying to acclimate themselves to and enjoy their new life, with much hilarity ensuing...except that these same dolls are forced to compete in a Highlander-style fight, forced to kill their own sisters or be killed by them.
Kanon keeps bouncing between Tear Jerkers, Sit Com- style humor, and Crowning Moments Of Heartwarming.
Naru Taru starts out looking like a cute and perky Mons series, but then just a few episodes/chapters later, the adorable mascot spears a boy through the chest with a big pointy object... and it keeps getting darker and darker from there.
Honey And Clover is a series that handles the whiplash from madcap comedy to rather dramatic introspection, then to near melodramatic romance quite well throughout the entire run, and even within the same episode.
Gintama will often do this several times within a single episode.
Solty Rei has some episodes where the transition between comedy and serious, somewhat-noirish action takes place in a matter of seconds.
Strike Witches is, for the first eight episodes, a light fanservice show with regular Neuroi attacks, albeit with reference to the war going on in the background. The end of episode eight shows the titular unit's commander pointing a gun at her second in command, demanding her resignation. Things get even worse from then on, up to and including a conspiracy to pull the Witches out of battle.
Busou Renkin starts with the main character getting stabbed right though the chest to the main character waking up and causing a mess in the dorms screaming that he was killed and that he will be avenged. The series flip-flops between the hilarious and the deathly serious fairly consistently.
Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto ~Natsu no Sora~ is a rather lighthearted slice of life-affair, until the reveal that Sora has a terminal illness and will likely die soon.
Believe it or not, Ouran High School Host Club has tons of examples of this. Mixed in with the Genre Savvy characters and banana-skin related tomfoolery, there are some pretty tear jerking moments there.
- And MUCH moreso in the manga.
Code Geass often had this, either ending comic episodes on a jarring twist or following a Breather Episode with a tragic Wham Episode. A fairly low key example early in the series was a humorous episode about trying to catch a stray cat that got Zero's mask stuck on its head, which ended with the Emperor delivering an unsettling Social Darwinist speech broadcast on every television in Britannia, talking about how evil equality is. The kicker was in the second season where the very last comic episode focuses on Milly's graduation celebration, wherein boys wear blue hats and girls wear pink hats, and if someone steals someone else's hat and puts it on, those two have to become boyfriend/girlfriend. There had been a Will They Or Wont They looming over Shirley and Lelouch for the entire series until that point, when Lelouch essentially handed his hat over to Shirley, showing that he was finally willing to return her feelings. The episode ended with Shirley regaining her memories, causing her to become aware of Japan's and Britannia's Thirty Xanatos Pileup, leaving her with literally nobody to trust. It Got Worse.
Even the various incredibly FanService heavy Burn Up series' have moments of this.
The OVA of Johji Manabe's Capricorn has this in spades. One example: The Cute Monster Girl happily flies an Ordinary High School Student out of the Big Bad's castle like they're close friends and nothing's wrong, but turns panicky when mooks start chasing after them, and then she gives same student the cold shoulder when he tries to talk to her soon afterward. And the evil general the masses know is manipulating the king still cheer for him at a massive rally as he takes control of the planet. As it's a 45-minute adaptation of an entire manga series, however, these kinds of issues are to be expected.
Trigun marks the end of its comedic side with the introduction of Legato.
- A more straight-up case of whiplash comes in episode six, where after a series of largely comedic episodes, the mood shifts gears and actually shows the audience the consequences of Vash (somehow) having destroyed a city without killing anyone inside.
Gakuen Alice jumps from a light hearted ten year old school girl life to Someone is going to die in five second if you don't do something, someone is missing, probably death, someone is kidnapped and so on.
Full Metal Panic did this in the first season, alternating between wacky high school hijinks and Real Robot action arcs that could get rather grim. The sequels compartmentalised the two halves with all comedic Fumoffu and more action/drama oriented The Second Raid having far few comedic moments though it wasn't entirely devoid of them, partly thanks to Gates.
At first glance, The Noozles seems like an innocent, light-hearted anime about talking koala bears- until you get to it's surprisingly deep Myth Arc and it's apocalyptic Nightmare Fuel-laden final episode.
Axis Powers Hetalia is usually a cute and silly series, but occasional has strips that are very serious and very Tear Jerker (such as Russia's History and America Cleans the Storage). Interestingly, in a Japanese poll for the first volume, one of these serious strips ranked first.
The various Getter Robo series are known to violently slam between mind-blowing Hot Blooded Super Robot badassery and pure Nightmare Fuel, bringing in themes of fatalism and the cosmic horror.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle could be considered an example of this. Most of the first arc contained a light-hearted, action-y atmosphere, like what you'd generally expect from some Shounen manga. However, it takes a left turn when the original Syaoran wakes up, and "Syaoran" is revealed to be a clone that suddenly falls into a trance-like state, in which he also takes Fai's eye for his own, and leaves the group.
In Ghost Hunt most episodes are strait-forward paranormal research/horror, except for those bits of romantic comedy that seem to pop out of nowhere.
Shakugan No Shana. The series tends to shift between a dark, supernatural action show, to a Moe Moe school-yard romantic comedy.
Zombie Loan. The manga more so than the anime, but in both cases, the series gravitates between slapstick and character-driven comedy to scenes of extreme violence and gore.
Sengoku Basara is full of this. The series shifts between Hot Blooded action taken Up To Eleven (with generous amounts of Foe Yay and Ho Yay included) and scenes showing the bodies of countless fallen soldiers. And that's not even including the occasional dramatic death scenes.
Amazingly, Azumanga Daioh. Watch some episodes. Laugh. Then watch the ending.
Recently Naruto has the title character coming back to the village from a particularly arduous battle to find the entire village congratulating him and recognizing him as a hero. This is then followed by a rather amusing scene of a squad of Cloud nin coming the village to inform them their village plans to take care of Sasuke and Akatsuki while one of them talks about theoretical girlfriends he would get while traveling but upset when he leaves them. But then we find out that Tsunade's attempt to save the villager's from Pain's attack didn't just render her unconscious, but put her in a coma so the village council decides she needs to be replace in the meantime and Danzo successfully pushes his way into the becoming the acting Sixth Hokage. All of this in one chapter (which is called "The Joyful Village").
Ranma One Half has at least one moment of this. For most of the series, threats of death and massive destruction have been thrown around and treated comedically. Even though some characters have tried killing their enemies, they have never succeeded, and nobody seems to mind when the main characters level a house or smash through a wall. Then, we get the Ryuu Kumon story arc, where we get to see as a young boy is orphaned when his house collapses on his father, explictly crushing him to death and leaving him with nothing but the clothes on his back, his father's last words, and a scroll of martial arts techniques. Another mood whiplash, or a reaction of a different sort, may result when you realise the fact that the cause of the tragedy was stupidity of a Darwin Awards level. Seriously, what kind of idiot practices a move explicitly stated as a back-breaking bearhug on the central support pillar that happens to be the sole thing keeping the building from falling down on top of them?
Two chapters in, and Magical War Chronicles Lyrical Nanoha Force is already using this. We open with the happy, fun travels of protagonists Tohma and Lily, and after the sequence ends with a cheerful Puni Plush panel of the two, we cut to another planet... where Enforcer Teana is investigating a devastated village while the TSAB unit accompanying her assesses the damage and lays out rows and rows of the dead. As Teana questions the heavily injured survivors, it is then implied that Tohma and Lily were the ones responsible for this incident.
Contrast episodes 33 and 34 of Digimon Tamers. Episode 33: Shiuchon goes to the Digital World, happily running around, meeting her Digimon partner... everything's great. A baddie shows up, but he's easily driven away and no one really gets hurt. Episode 34: Beelzebumon kills Leomon, triggering Juri's state of depression that lasts for most of the rest of the anime, and Guilmon evolves the wrong way into a bringer of apocalypse-type creature. Are we even talking about the same anime here?
Darker Than Black pulls off a pretty hardcore case of whiplash by accident in episode 6. The episode features a Broken Bird Woobie girl who wants nothing more than to stop killing, and live a happy life by herself. Of course, any Genre Savvy viewer knows that she dies tragically by the end of the episode. Which she does, courtesy of several large ice spears through the lungs, followed by the sad 'dying in the rain' scene. Quiet/Sad ending theme. Then the preview for the next episode is presented by a hyper-active Moe character with pink hair.
The second season of Black Lagoon has the wisecracky Greenback Jane storyline sandwiched between the (tragically horrific) Vampire Twins and (horrifically tragic) Fujiyama Gangster Paradise storylines.
The Kuroshitsuji ending themes. The first half has I'm ALIVE! which is an upbeat song that's accompanied by adorable, brightly colored animations of chibi versions of all the characters. The second ending, Lacrimosa (which means "Tearful" or "Mourning" in Latin), has a much sadder tone and the animation features a regular Sebastian rowing a boat along a river with Ciel laying in a bed of white flowers; the colors of the whole image are rather muted, too.
Parodied in Ninin Ga Shinobuden. The series is more or less entirely comic, but the ending of episode six is treated entirely dramatically, complete with hints at a dramatic backstory and overarcing plot line. The rest of the series completely ignores this scene until the last episode, when the characters realize that they forgot to follow up on that plot thread, and attempt to create a Magical Girl storyline as a cover.

Close Anime and Manga

Pixar in recent years is the undisputed master of this trope, and are able to pull it off well, more importantly. Case in Point: Wall-e and Up
Mulan goes from a happy go lucky (if slightly misogynistic) Disney Song to the devastation of war in less than one second. The mood literally changes mid-verse.
- To be fair, that was entirely intentional. The contrast was emphasized in order to to make the destruction that much more heartbreaking.
Saving Private Ryan intermixes thrilling battle scenes with thoughtful scenes featuring rookie soldiers breaking down in tears after realizing the horror they've gotten themselves into, while the more veteran soldiers start pondering about the purpose of war.
- Don't forget the soldiers telling funny stories before the final battle.
The 1960 movie Where The Boys Are starts out as a frothy Annette Funicello-style beach comedy and climaxes with the rape and attempted suicide of one of the leads.
The Disney version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame yet. A dramatic sequence is immediately followed by the comic musical number "A Guy Like You", which undermines the effect of both scenes.
- And then it's promptly followed by another fairly serious scene (though far lower-key than the previous dramatic sequence).
- "Heaven's Light"/"Hellfire". That is all.
The Great Escape starts off as a cheerful, fun escape romp. Until the part when Ives commits suicide. Then it leads to having the entire cast except Charles Bronson and two other guys recaptured or killed off. Yikes.
- Two other guys? One of them was fucking James Coburn! Plus both Steve McQueen and James Garner survive, albeit recaptured. Still though.
Of all places, The Passion Of The Christ. During a flashback in between the movie's extended torture scenes, it shows Mary asking Jesus about a table he's building. She comments, with a smile, that It Will Never Catch On.
95% of the first Indiana Jones movie is a fairly light-hearted adventure with not too much of a body count. The last 5% features God melting the faces off of an island full of Nazis. Which would be bad if they weren't dirty, stinking Nazis.
- Er.....93% actually. You forgot about the guy getting impaled at the beginning and the death of the giant mechanic.
  - And the Nazis threatening to torture the girl with a red-hot poker. "Light-hearted" indeed.
  - *Shudders* The airplane propeller scene... I'd say that was about when I fully realized where the movie was going. Still didn't prepare me for the infamous melting scene, of course...
Superman Returns is similar — in the middle of a relatively light-hearted movie, there's the truly uncomfortable scene where Lex Luthor and his goons kick the crap out of Superman. And to top it off, Lex stabs Supes in the back with a Kryptonite shiv. Compared to the rest of the movie, it's unsettlingly brutal.
Kung Fu Hustle. The scene that starts the whole Axe Gang versus the Tenants debacle begins with Sing getting his ass handed to him by the tenants and the landlady, accidentally attracting the attention of the Axe Gang with a misplaced flare ("Who threw that firecracker?"), and the Landlady comically fleeing at what got Sing's ass handed to him (calling the Landlady fat). There is a brutal fight scene, interspersed with Brother Sum hitting his Assistant comedically. A Looney Tunes tribute ends with a dramatic/funny scene of Sing (with his lips swollen from snake bites) in a fit of rage.
Shaolin Soccer also contains a lot of silly slapstick comedy. One scene, however, dwells on a scrawny soccer player bursting into tears as maudlin music swells in the background.
The Korean film Save The Green Planet can be described as "Men In Black meets Misery," with all the mood dissonance that implies.
The Serbian epic The Underground mixes a comic farce with the horrors of World War Two and the tragedy of Balkanization.
The Last American Virgin starts off as a teen comedy with situations on par with American Pie. In the last third of the movie, the main character's best friend gets a girl pregnant and breaks up with her over the news. The main gets into a fight with his former best friend over this, and because the girl is his love interest, he helps her "take care" of the baby over Spring Break at great expense to him. The movie ends with a party after Spring Break where the main character sees his old friends after staying behind for the vacation. He walks into the party and sees his former best friend got back together with the girl even after everything that happened. Considering the type of movie most thought it was, it had quite the Downer Ending in the form of a Kick The Dog Moment.
Shaun Of The Dead uses this trope, flipping between a mad-cap comedy and an earnest disaster movie with plenty of high tragedy played straight.
- Perfect example: After it has been set up that Shaun's stepfather is a stodgy old man who despises rock, metal, and rap, Shaun's father becomes a zombie. The resulting, rather tense scene where Shaun attempts to explain to his mother that "there's nothing left of your husband in there" is punctuated by the old man promptly crawling into the front seat and turning off the metal playing on the radio, the exact same thing he would have done in life.
- Even Better Example: In the previous Tear Jerker as Shaun's stepfather passes away just after giving his last words to Shaun - to the effect that "I've always loved you... look after your mother, Shaun..." - Shaun tearfully begs for Ed to stop the car. Ed obliges... by swerving off the road to ram (comedically) into a zombie, and then pulling a racing-car slide-stop. Shaun calls him out on this though.
- Even better example still: Once they finally get refuge in the local pub, they are quickly beseiged by zombies. As Shaun and the others try to keep the zombies at bay with a shotgun, Shaun's mother admits to Liz (Shaun's ex, although his mother isn't aware of the breakup) that she was bitten by a zombie earlier in the movie, dooming her to death and resurrection. She dies in Shaun's arms as he begs her not to leave him. This is followed by a genuinely tense Mexican standoff over what to do with Shaun's mother - David reckons they have to shoot her, Shaun and Ed are hysterically protective - which is puncuated with some of the movie's funniest dialogue.
The 1984 Chinese movie Fantasy Mission Force, helpfully recapped here by The Agony Booth crew. The movie starts out as crazy low-brow slapstick "humor", with plot twists that make no sense, and then suddenly there are people being bloodily massacred on-screen, including most of the main characters. What? You can't blame all that on the American dub, or on some cultural humor thing. But don't take my word for it.
La Vita è bella (Life is Beautiful), starts out as a comedy in Mussolini's Italy, and ends up as a comedy in a concentration camp. See also Genre Shift.
And don't forget the comedy Burn After Reading. We start at casual, there are some laugh-out-loud moments, some tense scenes, followed by some shockingly funny scenes or shockingly sad scenes (Like the scene where Richard Jenkins, who has the only sympathetic character is shot and has his skull split open by a crazed John Malkovich) or merely absurd scenes. After all, every single character is absurdly stupid.
- Except Tilda Swinton. She's a cold bitch.
  - And the two CIA officers. And the Russians.
- The scene where Jenkins dies deserves a special mention for turning the most tragic part in the entire movie into one of the funniest in under a second with the scene change. I witnessed the entire cinema crack up in simultaneous laughter at this utterly genius transition.
Click starts off as a typical Adam Sandler flick. Fart jokes, Rob Schneider cameos, and Jerkass moments ahoy! And then, Henry Winkler dies. The whole film starts turning into a rather bleak overview on life.
In the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, there is a genuine, touching Tear Jerker moment between Mathis and Bond when Mathis dies. Then, several seconds later, Bond dumps his body into a dumpster and loots his wallet, pointing that "he wouldn't care". The audience wasn't sure whether to laugh or not.
Another Bond example: On Her Majestys Secret Service has newlyweds Bond and Tracy drive off happily. Bond pauses to get rid of the flowers and whatnot on the car. Then Blofeld and Irma Bunt drive up to them and fire several shots at them. Bond survives. Guess who doesn't?
And another Bond example: In For Your Eyes Only, Bond has a baddie trapped in a car slowly sliding off a cliff. Bond takes out a pin and says "You left this with Ferrara [one of Bond's allies, who the baddie murdered and left the pin of another (eventual) ally so as to frame him], I believe", tossing it over to the baddie. He can only stare at the pin as the car starts sliding off some more before Bond kicks the car off himself. This badass moment is immediately ruined by Bond noting "He had no head for heights...".
Serenity: "I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I die"
- Seriously, that and the reaver attack were the only times in the entire movie that This Troper jumped.
Bambi. As The Nostalgia Critic said in his list of saddest movie moments, the movie goes from Bambi finding out his mom is dead in the winter to SINGING BIRDS AND UPBEAT MUSIC IN THE SPRING!
In Ghosts of the Abyss, an IMAX film by James Cameron detailing his return to the Titanic, one of his two probes loses power while inside a stateroom. After almost losing the other probe in a rescue effort, Cameron's team gets both back outside the ship to the tune of "Just The Two Of Us." It's the CMOH of the film. Then, as the submersibles are returning to the surface, the camera cuts to a crewman in one of the submersibles who reports the time as 6 o'clock on September 11, 2001. The crew in the submersibles find out about the attacks on the World Trade Center as soon as they get back on board their ship.
The Land Before Time goes from the death of Little Foot's mother to a scene in which a bunch of baby flying pterosaurs (including Petrie) fight over a cherry, complete with catchy music in the background. Of course it goes back to Little Foot and his sorrow soon enough, but still.
The Graduate is a satirical comedy up until the scene where Elaine discovers the truth about her mother and Ben. Things get considerably heavier then.
The Boys In The Band starts out as a comedy and ends as a tearjerker, with plenty of yoyoing between "hilarious" and "depressing" in the middle.
Being a pitch black comedy, In Bruges does this expertly with some frequency.
Tyler Perry. His most recent film, Madea Goes To Jail, is the best example of this as the plot frequently switches focus from the comical, over-the-top Madea getting into trouble in amusing ways, to a young prostitute's trials and tribulations that are handled in a dead serious manner. It's enough to give you...oh, you know.
Played brilliantly straight in The Fifth Element. The opera scene jumps from a somber, classical mood to a fairly humorous fighting scene with pop/disco music in the background. The camera cuts repeatedly between the Diva singing in the opera house and her alter ego fighting the baddies.
Mrs. Doubtfire was adverted as a wacky romp, which it was, except for the scenes where Robin Williams and Sally Field were tearing each other apart, sometimes in front of their kids.
The new Star Trek movie has a killer instance of this. Kirk has to prove that Spock, in the wake of his planet's destruction (and his mother's death), is not emotionally fit to be Acting Captain, so he goads Spock by mocking his apparent emotionlessness and saying it proves he never loved his mother. Cue Spock almost beating Kirk to death before he recovers his wits and resigns. It's a tense, horrible scene that has everyone on the bridge in shock... except newly-arrived Scotty, who proclaims, "I LIKE THIS SHIP! It's exciting!"
JCVD varies between scenes of a police chief and a doctor being forced to walk through a crowd of onlookers cheering Jean-Claude Van Damme, who they believe to be in the process of robbing their post office (it was his home town, so he was still an icon), and court room scenes of his custody battle over his daughter.
The Taiwanese horror film Re-Cycle hopscotches around moods like a meth-crazed grasshopper. Starting off as a suspense-driven horror film, about midway through the horror gives way to dark fantasy followed by Squick in the form of a cavern full of aborted fetuses and then a few genuinely touching moments, a brief return to horror, and then a Bittersweet Ending sandwiched in between TWO separate Mind Screws. Add a couple of AssPulls—because what else can you call the helpful figures having been her previously unmentioned aborted daughter and Grandfather??—and you're there.
The final third of North doesn't just involve the youthful hero trying to return to his parents — another kid, his conniving, power-hungry friend from back home, has sent assassins out to kill him. The film has been a light fantasy up to this point, and indeed continues to be, but the plot development is so dark that it invokes this trope nevertheless.
Incident at Loch Ness is a documentary (...but not really) about director Werner Herzog attempting to film a project about the Loch Ness monster and the nature of folk tales. Herzog has to deal with the undercutting of assistant-director Zak Penn constantly. Penn is trying to stage things for dramatic effect, such as getting an animatronic Nessie to scare the crew members, much to Herzog's consternation. Then, after Zak Penn draws a gun, the REAL Loch Ness monster attacks the crew and all hell breaks loose.
Up has a cutesy Musical Montage showing Carl and Ellie after their marriage, with the two doing heartwarming activities together, like building their house out of the abandoned one they met in and saving up to travel to Paradise Falls, but during this montage, we also see Ellie crying at the doctor's because of either a miscarriage or learning she cannot have children, and Carl standing alone at her funeral.
- Then, for further whiplash, right after this tragic image fades away, we see another, purely comedic Musical Montage set to Habanerna from Carmen of Carl getting up in the morning, complete with an Overly Long Gag involving a stairlift.
- Also, there's another scene that begins with Carl and Russel having dinner with Charles Muntz, Carl's childhood hero, that was prepared by his dogs, who also eat the food they prepared off of Russel's plate when his back is turned. It ends with Carl and Russel running for their lives from said dogs after Muntz showed them the skulls of his last visitors. Also, all of this is in a Disney movie.
  - Technically, it's a Pixar movie...
  - And besides, I think Disney had already done it a few times.
In the Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince book, the scene with Ron's humorous love potion antics already has an extreme case of this, but the movie takes it a step further by having Ron comically toppling out of frame first. The audience giggles. Cut immediately to him convulsing on the floor and foaming at the mouth.
Jaws manages to successfully switch back and forth between comedy and horror, sometimes in the space of a single line: "Come down here and chum some of this shit!"
9 example: the Fabrication Machine's factory has just exploded violently, the dolls are rejoicing, the twins are playing a recording of Over the Rainbow—and then the Machine rises up from the wreckage and kills a screaming 5 while Over the Rainbow continues to play.
Minor example in the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night and Day: at one point you get Busby Berkeley-type numbers intercut with scenes of Porter on the operating table getting major leg surgery after his riding accident.
V For Vendetta, Gordon's hysterically funny TV show and then BOOM He gets beaten with a stick and Evey gets kidnapped.
Gold Diggers of 1933 ends with a happy scene of all the lovers finally ending up together, followed by a somber Depression-themed musical number that closes the film. (Had it not been for Executive Meddling, the film would have ended with a happier song, which instead got pushed to the middle of the film.)
Zombieland. The Bill Murray scene crosses the line between funny and sad so many times it uses said line as a jump-rope.
Though the use of this trope is a longtime staple in Coen brothers films (see Burn After Reading above), probably the most extreme example is in Fargo, in which hilarious deadpan comedy is interspersed with graphic killings, brutal violence, and a surprisingly haunting musical theme. The sheer extremity of the film's Mood Whiplash is personified in the character of Gaear (played by Peter Stormare), who rarely speaks except to nag Steve Buscemi's character (repeatedly) about going to "the pancakes house", tears up over TV soap operas - and is a terrifying, cold-blooded killer who murders anyone and everyone who gets in his way (including his own partner) without a moment's hesitation.
An intentional use: the beginning of Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events features an animated short called "The Littlest Elf"... followed by Jude Law's grim narration.

Close Film

The Kalevala is Finland's national epic, compiled in the mid-19th century from oral traditions that in turn date all over the previous centuries/millennia. At one point, it features the Eternal Sage, in search of words of power, descending into the Netherworld until he stands before its black river and meets the daughter of Death itself. She's short and fat, and washing clothes in the local equivalent of Styx. Yeah, that's right. At least to a modern audience, the prehistoric sagas subvert themselves when they start getting too serious.
- An Epileptic Tree: this was the inspiration for the Discworld character of Ysabell, Death's adoptive daughter, who, yes, is short and fat.
Done deliberately in the novel Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger of 8-bit Theater. In a nod to Cerebus Syndrome, the enemies Nuklear Man fights suddenly go from the usual comedic supervillains that never accomplish anything to one who gets some seriously horrible moments, including killing off major characters and firmly establishes that things aren't funny any more.
Many of the short stories of Sholom Aleichem have a weird combination of humor and depressing reality. For example, in the short story Two Dead Men, we leave two of the main characters, one of which is so drunk he can't even remember the holiday it is, clumsily trying to get themselves out of the mud and look at his wife, who is worried her alcoholic husband's going to be found dead in a ditch.
The Discworld series is usually billed as 'uproariously hilarious' or the like, and in many places it is. However, there are many parts that range from dramatic and moving to outright Nightmare Fuel—for instance, the torture rooms of the Particulars in Night Watch.
- Pratchett also manages to do utterly hilarious and tear-jerkingly dramatic at the exact same moment. I'll only say: "THAT! IS! NOT! MY! COW!"
The Time Traveler's Wife has moments like this. Towards the end of the book, there are some fairly depressing scenes, such as Henry discovering he will die in several years, or Charisse acknowledging Gomez's feeling towards Clare. This is followed by a fairly comical scene where Henry travels a few months into the future and ends up locked inside the library, which forces him to reveal his time traveling nature to the entire library staff. A few pages later, Henry almost freezes to death in another time traveling incident, and ends up losing his feet. And lets not mention his death scenes....
- That was not Played For Laughs. One of the worst scenes in the book up to that point, in light of the Fore Shadowing.
Fools Crow by Richard Welch has a very strange ending: in the penultimate chapter, the main character Fools Crow (A Pikuni Blackfoot) finds a village of another band of Pikunis that had been slaughtered by white men. He reflects on the essential hopelessness of the Pikunis' situation with the white men. Previous chapters dealt with the ravaging of the Pikunis by smallpox. In the last chapter, Fools Crow and his tribe celebrate joyously a Blackfoot ceremony, the buffalo return, and everything is put back in equilibrium. Huh?
George Pelecanos' novel King Suckerman does a meta twist on Mood Whiplash: The book starts out as a light-hearted take on '70s exploitation films with a strong hint of Quentin Tarantino, with pop-culture riffs and catchphrase-spouting badass drug dealers and ex-cons. About halfway in, some of the characters go see a hotly anticipated blaxploitation flick (the titular King Suckerman) which abruptly ends on a depressing note. From that point on, the novel itself takes on a darker, more menacing shift of its own; the previously cool-seeming criminal characters turn out to be rather monstrously evil.
T. H. White's The Once and Future King started as a light hearted parody of Arthurian Legends, with anachronism, Merlin as a bumbling magician, Arthur turned into various animals, and Pellinore's ineffectual quest for the Questing Beast. Slowly each following chapter got less and less humor and got darker and darker, until the tragic last chapter that ended just before King Arthur's fight against his son Mordred as he reminisces the good old days.
Mark Twain's works often suffer from this, the most notable example occuring in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where we are treated to a humorous drunk, a cold blooded murder, an attempted lynching, and then a circus, all literally in the same chapter.
One of Jim Butcher's signature tropes.
Bridge to Terabithia: The book (and by extension, the movie) starts out relatively lighthearted and without drastic conflict...and ends up becoming completely tragic and melancholic following the revealing of Leslie's death.
Catch22 practically runs of this trope. The author seems to have taken a particular liking to ending chapters by revealing critical bits of information that cause the reader to re-evaluate the events of the chapter, which had up till then been Played For Laughs, in a much more sinister light.
Book five of Virgil's Aeneid. The first half describes the funeral games for Anchises, in a generally light-hearted and sometimes humourous manner, ending with a running race in which the contestants start tripping each other up and get into an argument about who really won, which Aeneas cheerfully settles by bringing out extra prizes for those who feel cheated. He then gets the news the Trojan woman have become so disallusioned and tired of the constant travelling that they have set fire to his fleet, leading to his emotional low point - even his own people have now turned against him - and the realisation that he must now descend into the world of the dead.
Kids' novel Jennifer the Jerk is Missing. Starts out very suspenseful, with an 8 year old boy who has a reputation for telling tall tales and being a brat, trying his best to convince his 13 year old babysitter that he did in fact witness the kidnapping of his 8 year old classmate, bratty Jennifer "the Jerk". Played totally for suspense for the first half of the story, but things start to get silly when Jennifer is encountered. Bound to a chair and gagged, she actually lets out a muffled bratty "ha ha" under her gag when her rescuers mess up, and things just mostly get sillier from there. One of the kidnappers even merely pretends to have a gun by pointing his finger through his pocket (and Jennifer can even tell). Totally shoots the suspense in the first half of the book to pieces. (Then later, it starts taking itself seriously again)

Close Literature

Many of Shakespeare's plays do this.
- Othello starts as an apparent domestic comedy - a couple marrying despite the intentions of the bride's parents, a hopeless young suitor to said woman, and the dock / drinking scenes in Act 2 are all staples of comedy.
- A Winter's Tale turns from tragedy, to comedy, to uneasy reconciliation.
- Twelfth Night does this, too: Malvolio's treatment transforms from simple humiliation to something far less easy-going, as Feste takes an increasingly sadistic pleasure in his imprisonment (and 'treatments') as a supposed 'madman'. Malvolio ends the play planning his revenge on his peers.
- The Scottish Play, Act II: Scene III Starts off with an amusingly drunk porter hamming it up while Macduff and Lennox knock to be let in, and ends with Macduff finding King Duncan's dead body, Lady Macbeth passing out "from shock," and the Crown Prince and his brother deciding to flee the country out of fear for their lives.
- Romeo And Juliet actually starts off pretty light, despite the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets and the brief mention in the introduction about 'young lovers did take their life'. But then the previously comic Mercutio is mortally wounded, and dies cursing the two families, and Romeo ends up killing Tybalt and being exiled and ... well, you probably know what happens next.
The radio play All Is Calm, being about the Christmas Truce of 1914 during World War One, feels like nothing but this trope. It goes from some painful parts to some hilarious parts at breakneck speed and right back 'round again. High points include a tearjerker Christmas radio broadcast that's propaganda, supposedly a singalong from the soldiers in the trenches telling their family that they're all just glad to be there doing their noble duty, being drowned out by a hilarious Last Minute Word Switch Bawdy Song, and a scandalised-sounding German officer's account of playing a game of football against Scottish soldiers and discovering exactly what was being worn under their kilts being read in much too close proximity to another reader talking about everyone heading off into No-Man's-Land to bury their dead friends from back in November. The worst part of it is, all the material is real.
In The King And I, the King becomes closer than ever to Anna when he learns to dance with her. He is eagerly leading an encore of "Shall We Dance?" when Kralahome bursts in and announces the arrest of Tuptim. Anna's sympathies obviously lie with the fugitive, and so the King is "now miles away from her" (according to the stage direction). The confrontation that follows is the most serious part of the play.
The Vagina Monologues consists of, well, a series of monologues about vaginas. They range in mood from "My Angry Vagina," a humorous rant about tampons and OB/GYN tools, to "My Vagina Was My Village" and "Say It," which are about the experiences of women in serial rape camps, and boldly straddle the line between Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel. Now imagine if your local production decided to arrange the monologues so that "My Angry Vagina" was between the other two...
The Wedding Singer musical goes from "A Note From Linda" (sad), to "Pop" (perky) and back to "Somebody Kill Me" (pretty self-explanatory).

Close Theatre

Xena Warrior Princess and The X Files both tended to have goofy/stupid episodes in the middle of serious, depressing arcs.
Supernatural had goofy, self-referential episodes right in the middle of incredibly dark and bleak arcs. Season Two and Three are the guiltiest of this.
- Forgetting certain episodes for a second, the basic premise and the actual tone jar together so much that it makes the show the western king of Mood Whiplash. Because, honestly, would you believe that a show that has the premise of two brothers hunting down demons with rock salt could be one of the most unbelievably downerish shows around?
- Supernatural also had a case of internal Mood Whiplash in the episode "Mystery Spot." The episode starts out like a normal Groundhog Day Loop episode where everyday Dean dies a different hilarious death (piano falls on him, hit by a car, accidentally axed by his brother) until Sam figures out the Trickster is behind it and Dean dies for real. Then the episode goes into a months-long journey with Sam hunting the Trickster until he finally finds him. In the end, everything is reversed, but Sam is just a little more unstable.
- Simon Said had this in spades. It starts with Sam having one of his painful death!visions, then Ash comes in for some comic relief and Dean sings REO Speedwagon, then Sam angsts some more and someone gets killed, then they find Andy's "Moby Dick Bong", then Dean gets mind-fucked (for the second time) into admitting he's scared for Sam and Sam has another death!vision, then Evil!Twin humor and then full-blown angst with Tracy's Mind Rape, seriously-painful-in-hindsight foreshadowing of Dean's wish for death (he gets forced by Webber to put a gun to his head), more Sam!Angst and a not-so-nice twist in the "psychic-kids" storyline. Oh, show, you're a manic-depressive but we love you anyway.
Scrubs features this rather prominently, being a comedy set in a hospital where people have a tendency to die occasionally.
- The most egregious example must surely be: a pregnant couple find out that it is likely either the mother will die and their baby will live or vice versa, when the show suddenly cuts to J.D.'s fantasy that they are on Candid Camera, complete with laughter and pointing at the show's actual camera before cutting back to dealing with the dilemma. Mood Whiplash so strong you'll be massaging your neck for hours.
- And as a comedy set in war-torn Korea, M*A*S*H is even worse (or better, considering your point of view). You could be laughing hysterically one minute and within seconds, you could be left like you've just been punched in the gut.
  - This was parodied in Futurama; one episode had a robot surgeon clearly based on Alan Alda's character, which had an actual switch that it would flip to jump between jovial goofing around and war-weary angst (labelled Irreverant and Maudlin respectively).
Joss Whedon does this All. The. Time:
- Firefly has a tendency to quickly and unexpectedly shift from intense action to engaging drama to heart-wrenching sadness to laugh-out-loud hilarity to warm and fuzzy, within the space of a single episode.
  - It's even got an example of a character getting the brunt of the whiplash. River is dancing, actually happy for once, while the others are having a wild west shootout, unbeknownst to her. Then Shepherd Book is wounded, and both the audience and River have the same reaction.
- On Angel, the writers would frequently place an amusing or lighter-hearted episode before starting a dark story arc. More memorable episodes include the ballet episode that aired before the "Father will kill the Son" arc and the seriously amusing "Angel is a Puppet" which aired before the Fred/Illyria episode.
  - The start of the Fred/Illyria episode also qualifies. It starts off on a light note - Wesley and Fred are together, while Angel and Spike are arguing over whether cavemen or astronauts would win in a fight. Then Fred starts coughing up blood...
  - After the Darker and edgier second season plot arc of "Darla and Angel", the creative team indulged in a whimsical 3-part season ender, set in a fairytale kingdom, to deliberately offset the grimness of preceding episodes. This troper firmly believes that they misjudged the timing however- Angel is supposed to be edgy, and the clashing styles just didn't pay off.
  - And then at the end of that arc, Angel returns to earth and gets the news that Buffy died while he was away.
- Buffy is rife with examples. Oh, where to start....could it be with the part in Innocence where it goes from passionate love story to "zomg, Angel is EVIL!"? Or how about season six, where it went from a musical episode to a magical addiction fueled angst-fest?
  - Or Tabula Rasa, with its 37 minutes of madcap memory-loss hilarity (including a kiss between Anya and Giles) followed by Giles going back to England and Tara leaving Willow. Only episode of television that has EVER had me literally laughing one minute and crying the next. Very well done, though.
  - Or how about the zany madcap jaunt about a geek and his robot girlfriend that ends with Buffy finding her mother's dead body? And then, of course, the geek turns out to be the bastard son of Lex Luthor and Max Cady.
  - Storyteller is pretty much pure comedy... Then they get to the seal, and Buffy threatens to kill Andrew:
  Buffy: When your blood pours, it might save the whole world. What do you think about that? Does it buy it all back? Are you redeemed?
  Andrew: No. Because... I killed him. Because I listened to Warren and I wanted to believe it was him, but I knew it wasn't. So I killed him, and now you're gonna kill me, and... this is what Jonathan felt. (he starts to cry)
  - "End Of Days" has a serious dialogue where Buffy and Faith contemplate the loneliness of being a Slayer ending with the following line:
    Faith: Thank God we're hot chicks with superpowers.
- Even Dollhouse has some:
  - In "Omega", Echo's line upon arriving at Alpha's lair:
    Echo: Say, you got a bathroom?
Ashes To Ashes. Just... Ashes to Ashes. The season 1 finale goes from farcical to heartwarming to OH SHIT in the space of about fifteen minutes.
The last 10 minutes of the Season 1 finale of Queer As Folk (US). Wow.
In a bizarre case where it's used for comedic effect, (and I may be wrong about the exact show, but I think I'm right) the old UK sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News where two politicians are in a shouting match until one of them drops dead on the stage, resulting in a line to the effect of: "How can you believe these lies! This man... *URK* ...will be sadly missed, and our condolences to his family."
Doctor Who embraces this trope wholeheartedly whenever it would cause the Doctor the most angst. The most recent example (as of 2008) is "Journey's End", which has triumph, reunion and celebration followed by the Doctor being forced to Mind Rape one of his companions to prevent her from dying and being all alone again as a result. The whiplash actually occurs in mid-scene, as Donna is babbling her newfound Time Lord knowledge in a rapidfire manner and just generally being hilarious as the Doctor starts to look sadder and sadder, and then, in mid babble, Donna starts to repeat the same word over and over in a stuck-record fashion and you start to realize that something is very very not right.
- This also applies if you compare the show and its two spinoffs - The Sarah Jane Adventures is incredibly light hearted and optimistic, Torchwood is incredibly depressing and cynical, and Doctor Who itself strikes a balance between the two.
- It's not limited to the New Series, either. In "The Green Death", after the menace has been destroyed, the Doctor companion annouces she is going to leave the Doctor and UNIT to get married and explore the Amazon. There are smiles and congratulations all round, even from the Doctor. But when the companion walks away to talk to someone else, the Doctor sadly downs his drink, leaves quietly, and drives off alone
Tonight, on a very special episode of "Popular," Harrison must resolve his mixed feelings about his mother when his friends discover that she's gay...
- ...and Mary Cherry chains Gwyneth Paltrow's personal shopper to a pipe in the school boiler room.
Battlestar Galactica - "Sometimes a Great Notion": after discovering that Earth is a radioactive wasteland Duala cheerfully reconciles with her estranged husband then puts a bullet in her brain.
Blackadder - The finale of the fourth series suddenly takes an abrupt swerve out of comedy territory in the final five minutes. The entire final episode features Blackadder once again attempting to get out of "The Big Push", that is, everyone in the trenches entering No-Man's Land assaulting the German front. In previous episodes, he and the other characters have gotten out of these assualts, but at the end of this episode he realises that there's no way to get out of it this time, and he, George, Baldrick and unexpectedly Darling, end up going over the top with everyone else, Blackadder's last words before going over being "Good luck, everyone". All of them are killed within seconds of going over, and the final, silent shot of the series is of an empty field of poppies in spring. There are no jokes in these last few minutes whatsover, it's entirely dramatic, and in a comedy series, this comes as being a very unexpected Tearjerker.
- A specific example of a beautifully-executed mid-sentence Mood Whiplash in this episode comes when Captain Darling, about to go "over the top" to his likely death, is listing all the things he'd hoped to do when the war ended. "Go back to work at Pratt and Sons" gets an audience laugh, but is followed by a brief pause and a wistful "Marry Doris". A character who'd been portrayed as just a petty comic foil to Blackadder up to that point suddenly gets humanised.
The Hogans Heroes episode "Operation Briefcase" was surprisingly dark, featuring an agent actually dying (offscreen) while in Hogan's care, when most involved escapes by the skins of their teeth. Even more unpleasantly, this episode dealt with an attempt to assassinate Hitler—an attempt, as everyone should know, that failed.
Stargate SG-1's most prominent comedy episode "Window Of Opportunity" ends with one of these. The episodes all wacky time-loop fun until we find out why the archeologist is looping time; he's trying to bring his dead wife back to life, which of course leads to an outburst from the usually jovial O'Neill
Malachai: You don't understand...
O'Neill: I lost my son!
Power Rangers RPM. Jesus. For a season that has unquestionably the darkest plot Power Rangers has ever done, this series also seems to have some of the most off the wall humour. Highlights include Ranger Green attempting to use his teleportation ability, only to teleport his suit, leaving him in his helmet and underwear, Ranger Green getting a wedgie from a disembodied robot hand, Ranger Green fumbling his one liners, Ranger Green...y'know what? I think you get the idea.
- Likewise with Dr K. At first she just seems a little strange and kinda funny, being protective about the ranger tech and even wearing bunny slippers in one episode. Though all urges to laugh at her behaviour suddenly go away when you think of her back story...
Night Court did this from time to time, often going all the way around back to funny in the same scene. In "Leon, We Hadly Knew Ye" Judge Hary's foster son (and recurring character) Leon successfully runs away when he can't stand his nice, but prudish new adoptive parents. He's not seen again for the rest of the season. "The Hurricane: part 2" goes all the way back around to funny again. After helping deliver the babies of four couples during a thunderstorm and blackouts Harry slips away to have a deep and emotional talk with God in front of a cross someone left in the courtroom.
Harry: (speaking to God) You remember that one guy? Of course you do, you remember everything. I tell ya, that one shook my faith to the CORE. Then you drop this brand new life, right into my hands... But if I could just have the answers to a couple of questions, like if you've always been here than where did you come from? And does man have the capacity to rid himself of his own evil? And why IS the sky blue anyway? Well, maybe I can look that one up. But all this baby stuff... that's no accident, after all you gave us Mozart, Van gough, Confusius, and LARRY BIRD!" *pulls a basketball from under his robes and tosses it through a hoop nailed on the cross*
Dead Like Me lives and breathes this trope... Ahem.
Sesame Street, Mister Hooper.
Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger had one episode where the Blue Ranger had to kill his girlfriend's little brother because he was killing women to cure his sister's fatal disease... Which she was already getting better from in the first place. The scene ends with him watching his girl cry over her brother (in a rubber monster costume) in the rain with this sad whistling song... And then you get a neck sprain from the series' usual jazzy nightclub-ish end theme.
Band Of Brothers did this with episode to episode continuity. The last two episodes go from finding a Nazi concentration camp to them going into Hitler's summer home and hilariously looting it of everything of value (up to and including the photo album of his summer vacations).
Common in Pushing Daisies, as it takes place in an extremely bright, beautiful universe and has some hilarious dialogue, but all the main characters have pasts that vary from the merely sad to the downright traumatic.
The "Polar Special" on Top Gear, in which the three presenters attempt to reach the North Pole, two by truck and one with a dogsled, is out of tone with the light and rather silly stunts the gang usually pulls, sometimes jarringly. The danger involved and the fear and discomfort of the presenters is simply too real to be played for humor.

Close Live Action TV

This was one of the reasons that Beethoven's 6th (The Pastoral) was not well received in its day, as while the 5th (which was very popular even then) was firey and passionate the 6th was decidedly not, and instead switched to a more lighthearted mood. His 3rd, however, was popular precisely because of this, as it evoked an immense range of varying emotions on its own.
Parodied in the Bill Bailey mini-rock opera song 'Insect Nation', which opens as a paranoid hard-rock track declaring how insects will one day overthrow and subjugate humanity, suddenly switches into a tender, gentle ballad wistfully bemoaning the breakdown of human-insect relations, before then instantly switching back to paranoid hard-rock ranting once more.
- And again in his 'Proper Ballad', which starts as a man bitterly bemoaning his lonely way of life with a bit of lightly angst rock, becomes a sweet ballad once he finds the girl of his dreams, and then turns into a hard-rock nightmare detailing the man's almost psychopathic reaction to his girlfriend cheating on him.
  - And yet again in 'Beautiful Ladies'. The song starts as a parody of Chris de Burgh, then switches to a growled chorus of "Kill kill kill kill kill the trolls! Hunt them down, there shall be no clemency!" and then straight back to pop. Or when he added an upbeat cockney piano riff into Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Or his black metal segment of The Magic Roundabout. In fact, just Bill Bailey period.
The track listing of volume 2 of The Wedding Singer soundtrack is interesting. "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode is followed by "Love Stinks" by The J Geils Band... which is then followed by "You Make My Dreams" by Hall & Oates. Sheesh!
Straight to Hell by Hank Williams III. The first disc: "Outlaw country! Hell yeah!" The second disc (barring the first very first track): "Disturbing aural collage! What the hell!?"
The album Coming Up to Breathe by Mercy Me has "I Would Die for You" as its last track, followed by the hidden track "Have Fun". And the contrast is obvious even without the song names.
The Beatles' White Album: The end of LP/CD 1 - "Julia" a tearful ballad written by Lennon for his deceased mother. Beginning of LP/CD 2 - "Birthday", an uproarious cheery rocking tune that's about, well...yeah.
Magic by Mick Smiley. For the first 2 minutes or so, it's an upbeat early 80s pop ballad, then...well, you may recognize what it turns into from Ghost Busters ...you know, the sequence where all the ghosts break out of the containment unit?
Blue by The Birthday Massacre. One minute the song's all light-hearted, next minute the sweet-sounding words turn into deep growling and the music changes to match.
Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N Roses is all sweet and euphoric in the first part (which developed out of an "circus melody" the band made while fooling around), until the ending kicks in and it gets all angsty. No, not Wangst, but genuine and convincing angst.

Close Music

This American Life: One episode ("Fall Guy", aired June 28, 2009) jumps from a comedian talking about his beatdown-filled freshman year of high school as part of his routine, to a sobering story about Lynndie England and the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal.

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Quintessence - The Blighted Venom - When scenes abruptly change from a Vikon (might or might not be with Salory) comic relief moment to something dead serious.
Final Fantasy X-2 veered sharply away from the angst and tragedy of its predecessor, going for a more lighthearted, fun experience. The game itself slides up and down from drama to comedy, though the switching points are rather clearly marked.
The tragic yet inevitable ending of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core in which Zack dies is rather jarringly offset by the peppy Jpop playing over the game credits.
- The song is called "Why", nothing about it sounds happy. At all.
Tales of the Abyss has whiplashing as optional. In the in-between moments of all the cutscenes of the game, there are some skits of random talk between the party that can be heard by pressing "Select". While the talk sometimes is serious, it is mostly comments about trivial subjects (the characters outfits, for example), plot commentaries, shipping, and so on. It helps to get the players head out of the whole apocalypsing storyline, altough there are too many damn skits.
Kingdom Hearts fails in this, specially Kingdom Hearts II. In some worlds, serious conversations are interrupted by some "humorous" moments between the heroes' party. They are not out-of-place (after all, this IS a Disney game), but some of them just don't make sense (for example, there is a moment in the Pirates of the Caribbean world where Sora and Goofy comment that they are surprised that Donald didn't give up to the treasure's curse (implying that Donald is greedy, altough Donald never showed signs of being greedy in that world). And please, do I even have to mention Atlantica in Kingdom Hearts II? "Let's forget about our mission and... SING!!".
- Even though it does seem to play it straight in 358/2 Days.
  - The original scenarios generally play Mood Whiplash for drama, even in Kingdom Hearts II, like Sora dancing around with Donald and Goofy right after Roxas disappears. 358/2 Days, however, thrives on this trope, even using its platform of choice to create dual-screened Mood Whiplash by simultaneously playing a scene where Axel, Roxas, and Xion are messing around over ice-cream and Riku's capture of Roxas.
The Kirby franchise follows the adventures of the titular bright pink, insanely cute fluffball through a primarily Sugar Bowl world. The Final Bosses of many Kirby games, however, are significantly darker than the rest of the game. 0 and 0^2, two of the final bosses in the series, even attack Kirby by squirting blood.
Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Al Revis, for the past seven chapters, has been very non-serious and lighthearted; everything's played for laughs. Just last chapter, for example, your workshop leader recruited an adorable pink blob alien thing that may or may not be intent on taking over the world. Aww. But wait, what's this? "This was the last time I really enjoyed being at school..." in the end of chapter summary? Well, crap. On entry into chapter 8, cue descent into more serious grounds, like a close friend's ailing physical health, learning some slightly offsetting facts about the history of alchemy, a teacher murdering one of your Nakama, and watching the mental stability of the Posthumous Character decline in the beginning chapter flashbacks. Oh, by the way. The main character isn't human. Watch as everyone in the school but your friends reject/accuse/fear one of the most timid/nice characters in the game. Oh, did we mention that Posthumous Character? Yeaah... turns out he committed suicide by having the main character kill him because he was guilty of an act he did. And at the very end, attempted (and possibly successful depending on what ending you got) suicide because he'd thought it'd be better for everyone! Curse you, chapters 11 and 12.
.hack//G.U.. After some 2 or 3 missions regarding the plot, you can be sure one of your friends (who, probably, was already thrown out of the main plot) will call you to play some random quest. While in the first game this is optional, in the other two it isn't. It doesn't help that the quests are not even a little bit fun.
- There are other examples, for example, the flowers and lace addition to the camera when Saku gushes over Endrance, and the flying friendship glomp that Haseo is subjected to by Silabus and Gaspard, in contrast to some of the more intense moments (someone becoming comatose or realizing how badly you're being manipulated).
The violently Japanese Chulip is based around a young boy trying to kiss as many people as possible in order to win the heart of his crush. He's lucky if the characters are human rather than animals, eggplant-headed boys, or people with telephone poles for bodies. The game is unapologetically nonsensical. However, there's a section of the game where he encounters the spirit of a very sweet girl who was in a car accident, but prayed that she would live no matter what. Over the course of several visits it becomes clear she's stuck between life and death in a body that's slowly falling apart and a mind that's beginning to fade. You eventually set her free by helping her remember who she was by bringing her tea to her boyfriend, the stone lion who runs the bathhouse, with her eye in your pocket and drinking her tea where she can see him. It's very touching. ...and then you're right back to kissing men in gimp suits and small Godzilla parodies.
Part of the reason for Beyond Good And Evil's poor sales reception may lie in its mixture of Funny Animal characters and silly gags straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon with a number of touching and intensely emotional scenes. Then again, most of it works pretty well, since the funny generally stays far away from the most poignant scenes, and if it doesn't, it works to enforce the friendship between the characters.
Super Mario RPG: After defeating the Giant Bipolar Medieval Knight From Nowhere Boomer, you're treated to an overly dramatic, somewhat depressing cutscene featuring Boomer effectively committing suicide, accompanied by the game's "Mallow is sad" theme. The next second, your party is doing a goofy dance to the happy, bouncy Midas River music as you ride a Shy Guy-powered chandelier up to the roof of Bowser's Castle. Kind of jarring.
- It's Mario, the same guy who was (much later) overjoyed at the sight of Bowser being horrifically burned into Dry Bowser in New Super Mario Bros. So Yeah, he could care less about traumatic deaths.
- Also Chapter 8 of Paper Mario: TTYD does this. Up until now, it was a pretty lighthearted, funny game. Then you enter the door and things get DANGEROUS. Mario even pulls something that would only be seen in The Exorcist.
- And what about it's sequel Super Paper Mario? It's like a giant, continual mood-whiplash, including Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Bowser getting killed. Yeah, that's right. Whereas Peach goes to the Mario equivlent of heaven, Mario, Bowser and Luigi get chucked down to the game's version of Hades. Great.
While the seemingly mandatory slapstick quotient in point-’n‘-click Adventure Games makes Mood Whiplash pretty common to the genre, this editor feels that Beneath A Steel Sky takes the cake:
Your mother dies when you're stranded in a chopper crash, you're named after a Foster's beer label by the feral garbage gatherer tribe that adopts you and build a cute robot pal, your entire tribe is murdered by stormtroopers sent to kidnap you, funny shinanigans with a mechanic and your snarky robot buddy, a man is brutally sawn in half by a beam from one of the omnipresent and previously innocuous security cameras, funny shenanigans with an upper class nitwit boss and a cute girl, you discover that the city is being taken over by biomechanical clones of the citizenry as part of a scheme by an Evil Computer (oh, and the cute girl? You find her corpse LITERALLY stuffed in a locker like garbage after she dies offscreen… Due to radiation poisoning from the thoughtless orders of her boss, totally unrelated to the Big Bad's conspiracy!), more funny shenanigans, You descend into a Womb Level full of Body Horror and your once snarky and wisecracking robot buddy is forced into a new body that leaves him incapable of expressing any emotions, funny shenanigans with a Ralph Wiggum clone, you upload your robot buddy into a monstrous half-formed human clone body, discover that the Evil Computer corrupting the city is in fact the Enemy Within of the computer's unfortunate creator, who accidentally turned the computer homicidally insane after attaching a neural interface and exposing it to the evil lurking in his own unconscious mind. Said creator is revealed to be your now emaciated father, who dies at your feet begging forgiveness after having been trapped in the interface chair for the last two decades. The evil computer disconnects him from life support and demands that you take his place, which will result in a horrifying Nonstandard Game Over. After you figure out the solution? Funny shinanigans with the mechanic from the start of the game and the cute girl's boss. Seriously Revolution, what were you thinking!?
The game Grim Grimoire starts off seemingly as a relatively light-hearted Magic School drama... but towards the end of Lillet's five days there, it rapidly turns dark, with the Sealed Evil In A Can escaping, culminating in everyone but the main character dying. The player actually knows this is coming in advance, but it's still shocking in its suddenness and intensity—and the fact that, afterwards, the first Groundhog Day Loop unexpectedly and suddenly turns the mood back to merely serious doesn't help matters.
The bizarre way No More Heroes operates simultaneously on Rule Of Cool, Rule Of Funny, and Rule Of Fun inevitably leads to this. The most jarring example is a moment when it goes from Travis whining comically about how his entrance fee to fight Dr. Peace went to giving him a fine night on the town... to a serious discussion of how Dr. Peace's life as an assassin and dirty Private Investigator has estranged him from ex-wife and daughter, and how both he and Travis are ruthless sociopaths "addicted to blood".
The endings of both Pokemon Mystery Dungeon titles are really sad, complete with the really emotional music and copious amounts of crying. And then the credits start rolling and a cheerful rendition of the theme music starts playing. It's kind of funny, really.
Elite Beat Agents: You play the game for a while and the tone of the game sets itself fairly clearly, it's downright whacky with Automobile CEO heirs playing Ninja, a speed freak taxi driver outruning the law to get an expecting mother to the hostpital et al, and then you get to Mission 12: A Christmas Gift. The opening FMV looks simple enough, a father heads out to a job and his young daughter asks for a girl teddy bear to go with her male one for Christmas. No problem there, will probably be some hillarious level dealing with geting the bear in question. The FMV jumps to a few months on, the mother states that the father's "had an accident" and "will not be able to come home". Wait, what?
- This is a once-a-game tradition for the Osu Tatakae Ouendan series of which EBA is an American counterpart. All three are considered extremely effective, at that.
- Three Panel Soul nails it.
- The notable part is that in the final song for both EBA/Ouendan 2 had the young daughter and the sister of a figure skater who died after she had an argument with earlier participating in the final song in a hot-blooded fashion, neither Tetsu (the deceased husband of a widow whom they had an argument with) or his wife was in the final song (they do appear in the credits, also the song maintained a sadder tone then the other tear jerkers (For example, no Ouedan style OMG moment when you get 50s in that song, rather it was Tetsu being even more distant from his wife as he tries to say he loves her but wouldn't listen.)
Painkiller was a straightforward first-person shooter until the Asylum level, which was almost completely devoid of lights and filled with invulnerable ghosts that could damage Daniel. It was like a light version of Shalebridge Cradle from Thief. After that, the game went back to its normal intense tone.
- Don't forget the amputees. *shudder*
- The Orphanage anyone? Decapitated children, schoolgirls that burst into flame and scream in agony while attacking you, a giant butcher who devours the childrens' souls and cooks their bodies, children wrapped in bedsheets that explode into gorey mist...to say absolutely nothing of the iron maidens and other torture implements in the environment. One of the squickiest is the giant teddy bear in one room whose stomach has been split vertically, with a gore patch underneath it...
Used to bewildering effect in the Great Bay area of The Legend Of Zelda : Majora's Mask. You've pushed poor Mikau to the shore, but you've come too late, and he's dying! His last words will surely be dramatic and plot-important, right? If by dramatic, you mean "Hopping up and pulling out a guitar and singing about how his girlfriend got pregnant and won't talk anymore, before collapsing and asking you to 'heal his soul'" then yes. It is very "dramatic".
Mother 3 begins with the usual Earthbound-style humor, even amid the search for Flint's missing family in the first chapter, right up to the moment when an NPC tells you he's got good news and bad news: the good news is that he found a Drago's tooth which could be used as a weapon. The bad news is that it was found pierced through the heart of Flint's wife.
- The endgame could also count as well. You arrive in the bustling, amusement park-like New Pork City, go up the strange and whimsical Empire Porky Building and are even shown a welcome bit of nostalgia from Earth Bound in the form of a boat ride. Then, suddenly you encounter the sinister Big Bad, Porky (who was The Dragon in the last game and abused time travel, causing him to age unnaturally until he became the bed-mech ridden manchild we see in this). After a battle with Porky's 'bots a trapdoor opens causing the party and Flint to fall, Tower of Terror-style, 100 stories down into an underground cave. Battles commence and eventually we see Claus, Flint's son and Lucas' twin, finally come to his senses, but commits suicide right after.
- Earthbound itself had its moments. The generally happy-go-lucky nature of the game made the abrupt switch to Cosmic Horror at the end all the more terrifying.
  - To elaborate, the game is bright, happy, goofy, and random for the most part, until an abrupt shift near the end where your heroes find out that organic matter cannot withstand time travel and have to be turned into robots to fight Giygas, who has gone mad and lost his body and mind. Even worse, Giygas' lines are inspired by what the creator remembered as a rape scene from an R-rated movie that scarred him as a little kid.
  - Heck, we can probably pin this trope down as the entire point of the Mother/Earthbound series. It looks cute and cuddly, with this undercurrent of dissonant weirdness, then you get to the ending and suddenly it's pure psychological horror and Nightmare Fuel. This is probably the cause of it's small, yet super-devoted fanbase - if it were either pure cuteness or pure horror, it would have been much more forgettable.
In Episode 4 of Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, the case seems to be building up to a triumph as Mia is on the verge of proving her defendent innocent and the lying witness guilty. Victory is at hand. Then the defendent begins coughing up blood. He reveals that he'd promised Dahlia that if they ever couldn't trust each other, he would drink the poison hidden in a bottle in her necklace. This is in the courtroom. On the witness stand. Right in front of you. While the game does depict corpses due to most of the cases being murders, this scene is particularly horrific.
- The Phoenix Wright games as a whole invoke this trope often. The overall tone of the games is fairly light and satirical; but remember that all cases are framed around often horrible, grisly murders. The fact that the games typically jump right into the snappy comedic dialogue the series is known for mere moments after a corpse is found can be rather jarring.
Shadow of the Colossus. You finally took down that HUGE Colossus that took half an hour just to climb. Yeah, good job asshole.
The Jak And Daxter series pulls this off to an almost masterful degree, with the two most notable back-and-forths being the change of mood from "Jak and Daxter" to "Jak 2," and two scenes in "Jak 3" that happen within 5 to 60 minutes of each other depicting a major character death and revealingwhat the precursors really are. Going into a C Mo F angry is rarely satisfying, but it works with these scenes.
Liable to happen often due to players in World Of Warcraft, but one jarring example where the game itself presents this is the death knight starting sequence. From the get-go, the player and his/her npc allies happily slaughter screaming and pleading innocent peasants, torture crusaders to death, and wreak havoc and destruction across the land. It's cruel, it's evil, it's fun. Then comes the execution quest...
- Then, immediately AFTER the execution quest, you hide behind a hilariously obvious cardboard tree to ambush a courier.
Call of Duty 4 has a amazingly brutal and tragic ending. Then during the end credits, it then switches to a rap song by Griggs. Then there is the epilogue which is a Time Crisis style mission on a plane that starts off with an Airplane quip. Seeing those two moments after the ending you have just witnessed is just so jarring.
Persona 4 gives us two examples. First of all, the game loves to alternate between a suspenseful supernatural murder mystery and a Slice Of Life/high school comedy. In addition, for a Shin Megami Tensei game, a series known for it's dark tones and depressing endings, Persona 4 is extremely idealistic and upbeat.
- Parodied in a fan webcomic:
"Mayumi Yamano was found dead on a TV antenna and that's why you're eating dinner alone tonight. In other news, Junes commercial!"
"You became friends with Yosuke. >Yosuke will now die for you."
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune plays as a mix of Gears of "War and Prince of Persia for most of its length (its mix of run-and-gun and exploration with a male protagonist led some to dub it "Dude Raider"). About the 80% mark it makes a sudden left turn into the survival horror genre, when the protagonist discovers that the Mac Guffin is not just a rather large slab of gold, but is also a sarcophagus containing what apperars to be an ancient South American mummy and some kind of airborne virus or fungus that turns people into mindless killers within seconds of exposure. The upshot of this is that the gun-toting pirates and mercenaries of most of the game are suddenly replaced with screeching grey super-zombies. Your Mileage May Vary.
Eversion. To explain why would spoil things, but suffice to say that there's a reason that warning is on the game's opening.
- Just in case those who haven't played the game need a further hint, said warning shares the screen with a quote from HP Lovecraft.
At the end of Gokujou Parodius, you find a cartoon bomb that proceeds to blow up the place; nothing out of the ordinary, considering every other bizarre thing you just witnessed... and then you are treated to a slow pan across the wreckage, and see your character's lifeless body float by, all accompanied with depressing music.
Grand Theft Auto IV: The serious story and dramatic moments clash somewhat with the goofy radio stations and ads.
- So does every other damn Grand Theft Auto.
Conker's Bad Fur Day has a pretty big swing. The game is ridiculously non serious and comical, until just before the final battle, when Conker's girlfriend Berri is fatally shot by The Puma King's right hand man (although the act itself is actually pretty funny because she is riddled with machine gun bullets for a good 30 seconds straight). After Conker defeats the Alien, the game ends with him becoming king of the land the game takes place in, surrounded by his new subjects (characters he met throughout the game). Instead of being happy, he's incredibly depressed because he's stuck in his new position ruling over people he doesn't like, along with his girlfriend being dead. The credits music adds to it by being incredibly somber.
- The original ending was even worse, with Conker walking into the bar's bathroom, walking up to the mirror, and breaking down in tears. We would then see him raise a gun to his head, and the screen would fade to black, followed by a gunshot. If that doesn't completely contrast the game's funny moments I don't know what would!
Mega Man Star Force 2. One of the villains is a Replacement Goldfish who sacrifices himself because he loves the woman the man he replaced loved, but he knows he can never take his place. Another one of the villains, for comparison, threatens to tickle the main character's friends.
Both Secret Files game has a serious story, and very humorous ending.
Fate Stay Night, and quite frequently too. Example, in Heavens Feel first we have Sakura, Shirou and Rider in a goofy fight based on Sakura's jealousy - which is less amusing a few days later - before Shirou goes off to get Ilya's help. Berserker gets eaten (and its a bad thing this time) and we have the return of Saber, and now she's all evil and stuff. Plus, Shirou's arm gets disintegrated or something and Archer uses his arm to save Shirou, then he dies. Oh, and the arm will kill Shirou if he uses it. Plus Kotomine points out it's even worse for Sakura. And then Ilya and Tohsaka start arguing about which one of them owns Shirou based on how many times they either saved him or avoided killing him when they could have while light music plays in the background. All in the space of about 6 game hours and significantly less reading.
- Two Words: Tiger Dojo.
In Trace Memory after you find out that Ashley's mom is dead, eat the candies you got at the start and she makes a joyful comment of "I love candy!"
Psychonauts is a game that can be mildly disturbing or depressing at times, but is also very funny and enjoyable. Then, you get to the final level. Suddenly, you're in a circus made entirely out of meat. You must help save a small child from mutilated bunny monsters (that come out of meat grinders) and eventually fight his dad, a gigantic butcher with meat cleavers. Then, you must deal with an evil version of your own dad, who throws flaming clubs at you while you navigate a very difficult obstacle course in a circus tent which is quickly filling up with instant-death water. Then, the butcher and your evil dad get tossed into a meat grinder and come out as a gigantic, mutilated, two-headed monster. But, hey, the game has a happy ending.
- There's also a level taking place in the mind of a very happy camp counselor named Milla Vodello. The level is a very upbeat dance party/ levitation training session. However, if you happen to find a hidden room in Milla's mind, you can find a memory that shows her working at an orphanage, which eventually burns down with the children inside. Then, you can ignore Milla's advice not to mess around in that room and enter another room that contains her nightmares about that incident. It's pretty creepy.
- There's also a level inside the mind of a woman suffering from bipolar disorder. You can manipulate a spotlight to literally switch the mood of the level from happy and carefree to depressing and dangerous.
In LEGO Star Wars, Vader's death is treated seriously, while most of the rest of the cutscenes verge on parody. (Even the destruction of Alderaan is Played For Laughs.) Well... seriously until Luke closes the shuttle's ramp, and Vader slides into the shuttle headfirst.
Brutal Legend alternates between rock-fueled awesomeness and tragedy. The Mood Whiplash hits first after the final epic battle with Lionwhyte and his hair-metal army, when the demon Doviculus appears, thanks his spy among the heroes, kills Lars, and summons dozens of Bleeding Deaths to destroy the palace, after which Eddie abandons Ophelia and the heroes spend three months in hiding while Doviculus takes over the world and Ophelia throws herself into the Sea of Black Tears and becomes The Dragon. Then the game goes back to heavy-metal awesomeness for a while, at least until Doviculus tears Ophelia's heart out.

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Gunnerkrigg Court did this in one chapter, with the mood shifting from lighthearted to sad in a single page. The author even commented on it:
That's right, it's the end of the chapter! I hope I successfully tricked you all into thinking something weird and wacky was going to happen, but in the end, it was just about a girl crying for her mum.
- Similarly, chapter 19 gets intensely creepy, which makes the sudden Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming all the more effective. Which in turn makes Annie getting the rug yanked out from under her—on the very next page—all the more shocking.
- See Also:
College Roomies From Hell. It began when a Mushroom Samba turned into an all-out battle with Satan that nearly ended with a main character sucked into Hell, and just kept getting more extreme from there.
Doubling as a Wham Episode, the wedding of Brent and Jade in the webcomic PvP, which featured Jade's Rich Bitch mother nearly ruining the entire occasion on a whim (by cancelling all their reservations because she hadn't been consulted on any of it), Skull's abrupt departure from the cast (complete with Brent nearly getting murdered by one of the Gods sent to fetch Skull), and Francis and Marcie losing their virginity to each other.
This DDG strip features the standard Man I Feel Like A Woman moment and moves swiftly on to Zip's reaction to finding out his funeral wasn't well attended. To be honest the comic itself does tend to swing between the wacky hi-jinks in the afterlife and sudden angst filled strips which are slowly revealing how Zip got there.
Sluggy Freelance is the drunken master of Mood Whiplash, still mostly light hearted both during and after events that would cause others to go down as having Cerebus Syndrome. http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=060612 is one of many that features a sudden mood shift within the same comic.
Penny And Aggie. One strip has the Girl Posse being farcically evaile as they plan to use a target's unannounced homosexuality against her. In the next strip the psychotic one is making a false lesbian rape accusation when the worst the posse had done before was a Party Scheduling Gambit. In the next strip she turns out to have no idea of how people speak as she gives her assailant lines that would be at home in a 1950s Scare Em Straight flick. In the next strip the accusation snaps back into plausibility, and she implies body parts that women don't have before starting to tear up...
It's Walky! Every. Last. Storyline. The other Walky Verse comics tend toward this as well, but Walky is indisputably the gold standard. One week - tortured angst. The next - week long Toilet Humor!
Minus is a story about a young girl with godlike power. What makes it so creepy is how often her (ab)use of it switchs between whimsical, mischevious, accidentally creepy, and flat-out evil. For instance, early on she pops all the balloons a vendor was selling, and when he yells at her for it she casually kills him.
- And then there's this one.
El Goonish Shive... From the comedy of Gender Bending to the drama of Ellen's creation, to the comedy of the following strips, back to the drama, this time starting with Elliot's capture, and the revelation of Grace's background...it goes all over the mood spectrum, and is currently see-sawing between the two, all part of the author's tug-of-war against Cerebus Syndrome.
In Looking For Group, some characters occasionally sing in battles, particularly against large mobs. These battles tend to get particularly bloody, but the songs chosen are generally happy themes, such as Lean on Me and Some Say Love.
- And then there's Richard...
- "Some Say Love"? ...Oh, you mean The Rose...
Something Positive has a very evil tendency to do this. It's quite possible that no long-run storyline has ever quite gone without banging up the readers' emotions at least to some extent.
- Three words, the catgirl arc... *shudder*
RPG World both used this straight and parodied this. The dramatic death of one character was followed in-comic by Jim (the player) reacting and posting about the game on a message board. While within the game itself, the death is followed by a butterfly-catching minigame, prompting the characters to complain about not getting sufficient time to mourn.
Order Of The Stick #640 brings us the genocide of 25% of the Black Dragon race. And a college basketball gag.
- With a Black Dragons being quite unpleasant creatures it's rather unclear if reader should consider their departure to another Plane all that tragic. After all permanent imprisonment for his children souls is something to make protagonist's reaction justifiable
This strip of Darths And Droids shows the scene of Shmi dies and Annie as Anakin makes her character filled with rage and go on killing Sand People...the punchline?
Sand Person: Ow!! My splanch!
Done frequently in Mountain Time, as shown here.

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This Cyanide&Happiness short does this over the course of 30 Seconds
Doctor. Flipping. Horrible. Not only does the tone do a complete 180 from lighthearted comedy to straight-up tragedy in the space of 45 minutes, during the most heartbreaking moment of the entire series, the Really Dead Montage shortly after Penny dies, one of the newspaper headlines which flash across the screen says, "COMMUNITY MOURNS DEATH OF WHAT'S-HER-FACE". And this is during a dramatic scene.
- In that same Really Dead Montage, we have "CAPTAIN HAMMER DEFEATED: Hero 'Unavailable for Comment' For First Time Ever."
- Not that the earlier parts of the series are immune to this: the Act II song "My Eyes" features Dr. Horrible spying on Penny and Captain Hammer's dates via some extremely transparent disguises (including one use of Mobile Shrubbery). Pretty funny...and then you hear what he's singing:
  Anyone with half a brain
  Could spend their whole life howling in pain
  Cause the dark is everywhere
  And Penny doesn't seem to care
  That soon the dark in me is all that will remain...
- Joss Whedon: your one-stop shop for Mood Whiplash.
  - Dr. Horrible? Mood whiplash? This troper disagrees. The whole point to the story is to make us feel for the bad guy and despise the hero. Superheroes should be caring individuals fighting for the common good, but Captain Hammer is a vain, self-centered creep. On the other hand, for Dr. Horrible, it was rags to riches. He wanted to become a supervillain, but he was just a bit too sensitive and caring in order to be one. After the whole ordeal with Penny getting taken by Captain Hammer and her eventual death, he had become the perfect supervillain and was accepted into the Evil League Of Evil. He got everything he had ever wanted!
  - Yes, but only at the expense of the only thing he ever REALLY wanted.
Survival Of The Fittest, being an RP board, can have this happen with someone barging in during a dramatic moment.
There She Is! from http://www.sambakza.net/. The first three episodes are pretty light-hearted, but the fourth episode, "Step 4 - Paradise" takes on a darker mood. This shift was likely alluded to at the end of "Step 3 - Doki and Nabi" when a rock gets thrown through Nabi's window.
- Specifically, in the fourth episode, Doki and Nabi are subjected to constant persecution because of their, erm, mixed dating. Doki gets injured by an angry mob, and one of her pets is actually killed, though it was probably an accident.
- Then, in this series' second instance of mood whiplash, the fifth and final episode goes back to being cheerful and action-oriented, but is still more serious in tone than the first three. Incidentally, if you've seen the whole series, then the street-punk rabbit handing Nabi the plane ticket probably qualifies for a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming.
The D&D PHB PSA series on Youtube does this, interspersing the comedic interviews with D&D characters with the lonelymal69 subseries, where Villain Protagonist Malcanthet the Succubus Queen attempts to avoid being executed by Order of Saint Cuthbert. And the lonelymal series itself does this, mixing scenes of drama with ones where the demon lord of the air Pazuzu attempts to prove to Mal that chickens are the deadliest creatures on Earth
Happens in Alexander Leon's Mario Brothers, especially the last one, where Mario effectivly kills himself by letting a flowing pool of lava burn him to death, after nearly everyone else and their mothers were already dead... and then cut to the happy underwater level music for the credits.
Tiberium Wars. Annual Black Hand Taco Fiesta.
Monstro_draw brings us "Cat Rackham and the Comforts of Life", a lighthearted, NSF56K story about a cat who wants some coffee and AHH! AHHHH!
A Very Potter Musical is mostly a light-hearted parody of Harry Potter but there is the occasional moment where-based on it following the series's plot of all things-you will get serious whiplash.

Close Web Original

Moral Orel, once a lighthearted farce of small-town America, has now fully transformed into a dark character study of its characters' depressing lives.
- Which is made even worst with the occasional heartwarming episode. This trooper isn't sure if it'll end with them all killing themselves or finding some kind of redemption...
Teen Titans was fond of these, although fans eventually picked up that any Theme Tune switches meant the episode could be much darker.
- On the flip side, if the intro song was in Japanese, that meant the episode would be wacky (featuring Mad Mod, Larry, etc.)
Avatar The Last Airbender follows an episode that reveals the largest city in the entire Earth Kingdom is ruled by a Government Conspiracy that has no intention of helping them win the war with an episode about the various everyday activities of the characters in that same city.
- And one of the shorts in that Day In The Life episode has Iroh cheerfully dancing and singing through the city on a shopping errand, with the short ending on him, still singing that happy song, breaking down sobbing over a small memorial shrine for his dead son; ending with a dedication to Iroh's deceased voice actor.
- Season 3 has the ninth episode. It's a Breather Episode after one with a slight Downer Ending and before an event the show had been leading up to for a full 20 episodes. The episode also contains internal Mood Whiplash: Aang has some weird dreams, then a freakish and creepy one, then a bunch of crazy hallucinations!
- The last episode before the Grand Finale is "The Ember Island Players"; a Breather Episode where the Gaang watch a (very poor) play based on their adventures. Most of it is hilarious Flanderization of the main cast, but during the intermission, it whiplashes when the Gaang considers the mistakes they've made and their regrets. Then it goes back up, and then, appropriately enough, it has another Mood Whiplash at the end when the play ends with all of their characters dying and Ozai conquering the world, the crowd cheering, and the Gaang severely disturbed.
Ben 10 Alien Force has a couple of episodes of this. The sixth episode, "Max Out", is very serious, with the kids discovering that the DN Aliens are actually people infected by an alien xenocite and ends with Grandpa Max blowing up himself and the Highbreed Overlord. The seventh, "Pier Pressure", is very upbeat - it's about Ben's date with Julie, and is only minorly inconvenienced by the alien Ship's antics; there's no real villain. The eighth episode, "What Are Little Girls Made Of", is fairly serious, and gives a nod to the ending of episode six with Gwen moping a bit at the beginning. The sad thing is, by production numbers, "Pier Pressure" should have been aired sixth, and then "Max Out" seventh; as it is, Gwen spends an entire episode happily encouraging her cousin to ask his crush out, and then bantering with Kevin on why he's slow to ask her out, before suddenly snapping back into grief.
Garfield: His Nine Lives goes from standard Garfield humour, to a surreal take on the Garden of Eden story, to a sad story about a pianist's first cat, to a nightmare inducing scenario involving a lab cat, to a tribute to Krazy Kat. And at the end Garfield meets God.
- You think that's bad, try to find the graphic novel it was based on. Most of the stories made it into the animated special, but not the one that ends with Garfield, drawn as a realistic orange tabby that's either driven crazy by time travel or possessed by evil spirits, leaping with fangs bared and claws outstretched right into the face of his owner, an elderly woman. (who's not even looking at him, and saying "come play with maw maw" right as he's pouncing.)
Transformers Animated does this a lot during the third season. The first two seasons were relatively light-hearted, with most every death being an Or Is It. "Transwarped" rolls around and we have Blurr crushed into a cube, Sari nearly killing Bumblebee after accidentally overupgrading herself, and Omega Supreme begging Ratchet to shut him down after he's possessed by Starscream. Then it's on to "Three's A Crowd", featuring the wacky antics of Bulkhead and the Constructicons. Then it's on to "Five Servos of Doom" where Prowl's ninja mentor Master Yoketron dies in Prowl's arms during a flashback.
Courage The Cowardly Dog, Last of the Starmakers, that is all.
Futurama is notorious for sudden mood whiplashes, and for doing it numerous times within an episode, not just the show's infamous tear-jerker endings. "The Sting" is probably the best example — you could be severely depressed, sniffling, and in agonizing pain as a guilt-consumed Leela descends into madness, her hopes dashed for the THIRD time, yet laugh your ass off as her warped mind imagines the entire crew launching into a broadway-style musical number, complete with flashing lights, and then be knocked into a shivering, sobbing mess by the following scene.
- Let's not forget the episode with Fry's dog. The entire episode, you're built up to expect that he'll get his dog back, wacky hijinks ensue, and then Fry discovers that his dog lived for twelve more years after he was frozen, so he had a full life, it's not right to bring him back, and the dog probably wouldn't even remember Fry anyway. Then we discover that the dog spent those twelve years waiting faithfully for Fry to come back, only to die of old age. Good God, I'm tearing up right now. Damn you, Futurama! That ending was so unpopular with fans that they eventually went so far as to give the dog's story a happy ending in Bender's Big Score, revealing that it ended up living with a time-shifted Fry who went back to the 20th century.
  - Or the episode where the protagonist Phillip J. Fry begins lamenting for a seven leaf clover he had that used to bring him luck. Flips continuously from past (1970's-1990's) to present (the year 3000), detailing both the search for the clover, and how Fry got on with his older brother Yancy. After finding out that the first man on Mars (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Fry's brother) was pictured with Fry's seven leafed clover, Fry, Leela, and Bender go grave robbing, only to learn that it's not Yancy's grave, but that of Yancy's son, who was named Phillip J. Fry in Fry's honor. The episode then ends with a song from the Breakfast Club soundtrack, an Ironic Echo to a line Yancy said earlier, regarding emptying out a wedding reception.
Justice League Unlimited did this on occasion, one notable example being the episode "Kid Stuff," which manages it with one line of dialog. After a relatively lighthearted adventure featuring magically pre-teen versions of Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Superman, and Batman, Wonder Woman comments that it was nice being a kid again. Batman responds with, "I haven't been a kid since I was eight years old".
- And it's followed almost immediately with the scene of Mordred, a shriveled old man, being taken care of by his mother. In contrast to how he was in the entire episode as a kid, it's kind of a shock.
Batman The Animated Series does this from time to time. Robin's constant puns and one-liners can be a bit distracting in serious fights or chases. It also may have been intentionally invoked with Baby Doll and her rapid switching back and forth between her real voice and her disgustingly cute persona.

Close Western Animation

Happens often in American Football commentary. A player will hit another one really quite hard, and the commentators will hoot and holler about it, with phrases like 'Wow, what a great hit!' 'he almost took his head clean off!' till they realise that the player who was hit isn't moving, and the medics are coming on to the field. Suddenly, they start speaking quietly, with phrases such as 'of course our thoughts are with (Player X) and his family at this time'
- Interestingly, soccer and rugby commentators don't go to either extreme: we get "well, that was a messy tackle", followed by "well, I hope he'll be OK" as the messy tackle's recipient gets stretchered off and "I think he deserved that" as its perpetrator gets sent off.
Overheard has a number of examples.
This news clip. Aww, lookit the cute squirrel! - Now, on a serious note...

Close Real Life

It's been said that the Joker, written properly, should frighten you one minute, have you laughing the next, then hating yourself once you realize just what you're laughing at.
One of the better known issues of Fantastic Four featured Sue Storm having complications during her pregnancy. They decide to engage Doc Ock, appealing to his intelligence and so forth, and have a typical superhero-on-supervillain battle at one point, only to return to find that they were too late, and Susan already miscarried.
Nite Owl's snow suit. The story in general is depressing as hell, but....when he puts on that ridiculous fluffy white coat, it's hard to take it seriously.
- The best part? It's (of course) an owl-suit.
Double freakin' Happiness. Starts off as a light Fish Out Of Water Slice Of Life story. Then, just as the protagonist starts to fit in and gets a date with a cute girl, he gets cornered in an alley and gets beaten to a bloody pulp by hoodlems. Worse, he realizes why this happened: all his new friends are Tongs—rivals of the gang that beat him up.
Keith Giffen and J.M. De Matteis' Justice League International was a very good example, where a comedic quip, a Deadpan Snarker, or a hilariously drawn expression by Kevin Maguire would come out of nowhere in a dramatic scene. Issues ranged from pure comedy to action/drama at will.

Close Comic Book

There are two things that Ken Matsudaira is well-known for. One of them is starring as a tough samurai in the Japanese TV series The Violent Shogun, in which he saves village after village from different menaces like corrupt officials. He occasionally did stage shows where the first act involved samurai dramas along a similar line. The second act of his show quickly became the other thing Matsudaira is famous for.
This happens all the time with television commercials. One minute, you're nearly bawling at the sad, dying animals, and then "HAVE YOU GOT DIARRHEA?!?!?!" Cue upbeat music. Yes, you can go crawl in a hole and die now.
- Many of you feel bad for this lamp...
- This troper would like to see the aforementioned "HAVE YOU GOT DIARRHEA?!!?!?!" commercial.
  - Happens during TV movies too. This lurker and her family were watching Full Monty, and it cut to commercial right after the scene with the gnomes and the job interview. '3000 children will die tonight...' complete with sad piano music.
One Sentence splashes itself all over the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, with one entry providing definitive proof that Humans Are Bastards, and the next stating unequivocally that Rousseau Was Right. Read down the front page, and you will find yourself punching your fist in the air, weeping uncontrollably, awwwwwing and laughing hysterically. Often at the same time.
Can happen to you easily if you have a wide variety of songs on your mp3 player and have it set on random.
The Post Secret books. One page will be a hysterically funny postcard, and the next will be about someone purposefuly miscarrying their baby.

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