alt title(s): Hollywood Scandinavia; Scandihoovia
A sort of generic northern blend of Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Everyone is liberal, blond and absolutely gorgeous. The streets are clean, the people are intelligent and creative, it always snows, they have Ikea, and the area pumps out an amazing amount of hot foreign exchange students (both male and female) with cute accents to tempt American high school students. The chances of meeting a pair of beautiful, buxom, blonde twins who won't rule out a
Twincest threesome with any given tourist is uncannily high.
Everyone either skis or snowboards, and eats a lot of chocolate. About the only other thing anyone remembers is that
Lego was invented here.
On the rare occasions when negative stereotypes of Scandinavians are shown, the stereotype of choice is to portray them as painfully naive.
Going back a little farther in time, one might have seen the region crawling with
Vikings and
trolls.
Named for a certain port of
The Lost Vikings II.
Examples:
- Hagar The Horrible
- Vicky the Viking
- The Swedish Bikini Team, who first appeared in Old Milwaukee beer commercials and became something of a pop-culture phenomenon in the early '90s.
- Beowulf. More trolls, fewer Ikeas. The 2007 film even has Grendel speak Old English, and one or two references to "sea raiders".
- Trading Places, lampshaded in:
Ophelia (In disguise): Hello I am Inga, from Sweden!
Coleman (Disguised, more accurately, as a priest): But you're wearing... Lederhosen..?
- UK children's animated series The Saga of Noggin the Nog. (As told by the Men of the North Lands.)
- Terry Jones's book The Saga of Erik the Viking which lent its name but not its plot to Terry Jones's film Erik The Viking.
- "The Lemming With the Locket" by Carl Barks has Scrooge McDuck, Donald and the nephews visiting Norway to catch the titular rodent.
- Ulla Inga Hansen Benson Yansen Tallen Hallen Svaden Swanson from Mel Brooks's The Producers.
- Very much averted in Wallander, a Swedish-set police drama.
- In Alias the protagonist at one point pretended to be Swedish. Her accent was awful, but mostly grammatically correct.
- It's possible that the now mostly-forgotten Trope Maker for the portrayal of Sweden (and by extension the rest of the Norselands) as "sexy" was the Mondo Movie Sweden: Heaven And Hell. Now much more infamous for being the original source of The Muppets' "Mah Na Mah Na".
- The Pusher series by writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn subverts the common stereotype of Norse/Scandinavian countries as blonde utopias by depicting the underworld of Copenhagen, filled with pushers, junkies, thugs, and immigrants.
- Kamen Rider Spirits had a chapter occurring in north Norway.
- The "gorgeous Scandinavian bikini babe" may be ironically subverted in Real Life: supposedly Sweden has the lowest average cup-size in Europe. So Yeah.
