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A completely nude character's naughty bits are blocked from the camera by a convenient prop or oddity of architecture, yet every other character in the scene gets an eyeful. Sometimes used just out of cultural necessity, but it can be turned into a gag due to the increasing absurdity of the covering elements, as seen in the Austin Powers films. Even when technically played straight, overuse of this trope tends to break the audience's Willing Suspension Of Disbelief and effectively become a gag.
There's also a variant where the hidden part isn't really "naughty": for example, see the Full House episode "I'm Not D.J." where Stephanie gets her ears pierced for the first time. The actress who played her, Jodie Sweetin, had gotten her ears pierced years earlier but the in-show explanation was that the earlier earrings Stephanie wore were clip-ons despite them being obviously not.
Also used when the actress is pregnant but the character is not. Big purses, big coats, and big furniture all come into play, as well as long, lingering closeups on the actress' face.
Another common example is when a female character takes a bath. The bubbles will generally cover her naughty bits.
Bowdlerized is when the original footage is censored to allow normal viewing for a different audience, which contains some overlap with this.
For hidden faces, see The Faceless. For bedtime Peek A Boo techniques, see Modesty Bedsheet. Related to Godiva Hair and to the sonic phenomenon of The Modest Orgasm.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- One of Lucille Ball's pregnancies was hidden during the very early episodes (possibly just the pilot?) of I Love Lucy.
- Power Rangers regularly engages in the "non-naughty" variant: Jason David Frank was not allowed to wear short-sleeved shirts in Power Rangers Dino Thunder, though he regularly wore tank tops in earlier seasons. The reason? He'd gotten several tattoos on his arms in the intervening years. Likewise, one of the actors on Power Rangers SPD always wears gloves to cover a tattoo on his hand. Superheroes aren't allowed to have tattoos.
- SPD's original version, Dekaranger, used this one a lot too, especially since the Pink Ranger loved taking baths, requiring very, very lucky groupings of bubbles. (In one episode, this was played with a bit by having the new, male addition to the team cheat her out of her bathtime, whereupon the same bubbles covered his same areas.)
- Aversion: The Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) clearly had a snake tattoo on his arm which showed up from time to time. There was no way to defend the Third Doctor's having this, nor did the writers even try. (Although some rather desperate fanon claims it's a Time Lord prison-brand, marking him as an exile.)
- There was a particularily humourous example by Mr Bean, the titular character being naked in a hotel, had an 'exit' sign covering his buttocks in a scene where he was on his stomach.
- Actress Roxann Dawson became pregnant during the run of Star Trek Voyager. The writers considered writing her pregnancy into the plot, but decided against it, resulting in a long period in which her character was never shown from the chest down (except for a two part episode set in the holodeck where the character was forced into portraying a pregnant woman by aliens who had taken over the ship). In a curious turn of events, her character later became pregnant.
- In the new Doctor Who, after a pair of (parody) robot TV show hosts hit Captain Jack Harkness with a defabricator ray, which does just what it says on the tin, his naughty bits are concealed from the camera by a strategically placed... TV camera. When the robots confirm that he is, indeed, naked in front of millions of viewers, he announces, "Ladies, your viewing figures just went up."
- JAG has an example of the bubbles version.
- And when actress Catherine Bell became pregnant, they appointed her character a judge, to allow her to sit behind a big judge desk. (Military judges don't wear robes)
- The Bill had a nude model's genitalia covered by a bit of wood from an artist's easel.
- While Diane Farr of NUMB3RS was pregnant, her character, FBI Agent Megan Reeves, was mostly limited to desk jobs.
- When Traylor Howard got pregnant during the fourth season of Monk, she was usually filmed chest up in the usual way. However, in one episode her character Natalie is uncomfortable being around an old, obsessive boyfriend (played by Sean Astin!) and stuffs a pillow under her shirt so he'll think she's pregnant, allowing them to shoot her normally.
- Ea, the main character of the Japanese made-for-TV drama Invisible Girl Ea, is found nude by the main male character, and she stays that way pretty much the entire series. Partially justified as clothing (or anything touching her skin) causes her invisibility superpower to malfunction. Regardless, no effort is made to conceal her nudity, outside some clever camera work and the occasional lens flare blocking things that are too much even for late-night Japanese TV — which, apparently, isn't much.
- When the actress playing Clair on The Cosby Show got pregnant, she had to stand behind various household objects, such as cereal boxes. One scene had her sitting down behind a gigantic teddy bear, strange as that may sound.
- Used as a gag in a hilarious episode of The Nanny, when Lauren Lanewas pregnant. She parades gigantic objects around in front of her belly (including large potted plants and a poster with the word "baby" printed on it) while commenting on the exact same situation happening to Susan from Seinfeld.
- From what this troper hears, Gillian Anderson's pregnancy during the second season of The X Files was mainly concealed by putting Scully in loose fashions and lab coats as often as possible. When delivery time came about, the abduction plot happened, and Scully vanished for a few episodes.
- Frasier treated Jane Leeves' pregnancy the same way as the X-Files did - a running joke in the eighth season was that Daphne was getting fatter and fatter until she went to a health camp and, eventually, returned as thin as ever.
- Firefly uses this quite a bit; River's out-of-the-box scene in the pilot episode, Saffron showing up naked in Mal's bunk in "Our Mrs. Reynolds," and Mal himself strutting about in the cargo bay stark naked at the end of "Trash."
- The Serenity: Better Days comic miniseries also played with this. When River kicks an enemy soldier in the teeth without looking at him, the angle of the panel would have shown a clear shot up her dress...if it weren't for the kicked soldier's hand flying up to block the view.
- Doesn't River wear bike shorts under her dresses/skirts anyways? Or was that just in "Safe"?
- In the second half of The Office's fourth season, Angela Martin was strictly confined to her workspace behind a chest height wall due to her pregnancy.
- In the Eureka first-season episode "Purple Haze," Taggart is running around the woods au naturel (his phrase) under the influence of an intoxicant. Somehow there's always a conveniently placed branch between his hips and the camera, full of leaves larger than those of any tree native to the Pacific Northwest.
- In the TV show Cheers, Rhea Pearlman, wife of Danny DeVito gets pregnant, so they decide to write her character Carla, as being pregnant (she had a reputation for being easy). When Shelley Long also gets pregnant, the producers felt this would cause too many problems for the show, so they more-or-less hid her pregnancy behind the bar and in other ways.
- James Doohan of Star Trek fame lost a finger when he took part in D-Day as a Canadian infantryman. During most of his career he and his directors took pains to not show the missing finger, despite the fact that as an engineer on Star Trek, at least, it wouldn't be a stretch for a man who spends most of his time around machines to have lost a digit at some point.
- Ah, but then they'd have to explain why they hadn't just fixed it with 25th century medical technology.
- 23rd century actually, but point is still valid.
- Similarly, Gary Burghoff's withered left hand was concealed throughout M*A*S*H.
- Subverted in Armstrong & Miller's first appearance of their sketch "Nude Practice." All the props were "off-target." This could have been a genuine mistake as it was never repeated in following sketches and during the sketch you could see the cameraman trying to position the camera in the "correct" position but Alexander Armstrong was moving with the camera, possibly thinking he was still covered.
- In the series finale of Six Feet Under, Brenda has just given birth to Willa, but the actress Rachel Griffiths was still pregnant. She carried a very large purse and wore baggy clothes.
- In the series premiere of Stargate SG-1, a kidnapped USAF sergeant is stripped naked and evaluated as a Goa'uld host; she gets this treatment rather unsubtly as she's hauled all over the room. After she's rejected, Daniel Jackson's wife is similarly appraised... And this trope is utterly averted. Full frontal nudity is already extremely unusual in a scene filmed for American television, but the contrast with the first scene made it downright shocking in this case.
- The production team have made it clear that they regret this scene (it was forced on them by Executive Meddling)- it will be altered when they do a do-over of this episode, starting from scratch with the original footage.
- Stargate SG-1 was originally aired on Showtime which allowed for the full-frontal nudity, which also appears in the DVD, but all airings of "Children of the Gods" on regular TV (mostly Sci Fi channel) have that bit (or those bits, if you prefer) edited out.
- Not in Australia, they don't.
- An episode of New Tricks has this with a nudist chopping logs.
- The CSI episode 4x4 involves Sara and Greg forced into a shower due to a potential exposure to hazardous materials/disease. The camera spends a lot of time on closeups of their face and feet.
- When actress Anna Belknap, who plays Lindsay Monroe in CSI: New York became pregnant, they used the close-up method with varying success.
- Wilson's face in Home Improvement.
- Another from Star Trek. TNG used the big coat trick to hide Gates Mc Fadden's pregnancy. Interestingly enough, they ended up keeping the coat as part of her wardrobe for the remainder of the series.
- This happened with Patricia Heaton throughout Everybody Loves Raymond seasons one and three, due to her pregnancies. On top of that, all her scenes in season 3 had to be pre-filmed.
Anime and Manga
- Neon Genesis Evangelion plays with this trope in one episode. Shinji, panicked and shocked by discovering a penguin in the bathtub, confronts his new roommate Misato while he is still undressed. As he rants, his "naughty bits" are hidden by a beer can on the table in the foreground. During the conversation that ensues, Misato picks up the can, revealing that Shinji's modesty is still defended — by a much smaller container clearly labeled "toothpicks". Click here
 ◊ for image.
- Puni Puni Poemi has a scene with at least half a dozen naked women in a (tiny) Japanese communal tub, but no matter what camera angle is used, the one rubber duck in the tub with them is always blocking the naughty bits that would otherwise be visible.
- The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, episode 9: Each time Haruhi undresses Mikuru, Yuki's books block the nudity. Also, Yuki only changes her book when Haruhi undresses Mikuru.
- In the series Marine Boy, the mermaid Neptina wears nothing; her breasts are concealed by her long hair, a technique also used in the Japanese animated version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." It is perhaps worth noting that the mermaids in the Disney version were also originally intended to be unclad; this was only abandoned late in the pencil test stage of the feature's development.
- Well-placed steam clouds in Kaito's shower in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch qualify, particularly the manga.
- One Piece used this when some of the crew stole Franky's speedo in order to force him to join.
- The Sexy Jutsu from Naruto used by Naruto and Konohamaru. They use this to transform into nude females (and sometimes nude yaoi guys in Konohamaru's case), but the naughty bits are always covered in smoke, which dissipates instantly with other transformations.
- In at least one of the licenced Fighting Games, the creators probably judged the smoke was not enough, as this troper has seen some Sexy Jutsu avatars from the back with what was obviously the straps of a bikini.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann does this during it's Hot Springs Episode. Kamina is covered by Boota hovering in between his legs, while Simon's drill key necklace inexplicably becomes about 7 times larger, while the chain triples in length so it can cover him. In fact, it looks less like "covering" and more like temporarily "becoming" said part.
- What's really funny is that the Sci-Fi channel broadcast still blurred the first shot of naked Kamina, presumably because you could still see his ass. This has the effect of making Boota's presence less obvious and it seems that that one shot originally showed his penis.
- It was actually Simon's drill. Not the small one on the necklace, but the actual tool he used in the first episode. This is a bit more obvious in the original, unedited episode (Unaired on Japanese Television, even) where he used the drill to make a hole to the girl's side of the bath. The entire gratuitous flashback sequence was actually to replace a rather long, fanservice-y segment, involving a lot of Modesty Towels and some bait and switch. Oddly, it managed to show nothing (besides Gimmy's penis) the entire episode, so one is left to wonder why exactly the Japanese found it unairable.
- According to this interview, the scene where Kamina and Simon where trying peak on the girls (specifically the fact that what they were doing is illegal) was what prevented them from airing it at the show's (child-friendly) time slot. Also, this all happened because the television station approved the episode without reading the script and waited until the animation stage to complain.
- The American broadcast dub of Dragonball Z would sometimes censor the random nudity that wouldn't fly on cable TV. Sometimes it worked okay, such as putting in an additional tree in a forest scene or fluffing up an area of the flying nimbus. Other times it was just too painfully obvious.
- Parodied with singular joy in Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu's Onsen Episode. It starts out subtly enough, with a peeping hole in the womens' changing room being just out of focus of the girls' bits, or the logs in a fence being the right height to cover their breasts and crotch... but then you get increasingly absurd methods, like ladybugs landing on nearby leaves, hands moving in synch with characters in the background, and ending up with Tessa slipping and falling spread-eagled on her rump, a rubber ducky covering her crotch from the camera.
- Happens on occasion in Mahou Sensei Negima, where characters will be covered by random objects like leafs, plants, and, in extreme cases, the shredded remains of their clothes.
Comic Books
- Parodied in the comic strip Bloom County: After Opus the Penguin got a nose-job, the results were concealed from the reader for about a week by a series of increasingly improbably placed household objects.
- Happens all the time in Italian comics Dylan Dog, Nathan Never and the like, which often feature staggeringly beautiful women. Since Italy is not as prudish as America, breasts (with *gasp* nipples!) and butts (both female and male) are always shown in full, but the genitals still need to be covered with strategically placed items, pieces of furniture, or (during showers, baths and similar) implausibly high splashes of water... especially hilarious since the rest of the water is often not splashing at all.
- Bloom County once did an entire week with all the characters naked (purportedly as a ratings grab) and covered in this fashion. The last strip has Milo standing behind a potted flower, ordering Opus to remove his bow-tie; when he does so, the flower stretches across the panel to cover up his neck.
- This trope is used quite often in the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, much in thanks to the more realistic depictions of certain supervillains. It is almost always very well done and almost never distracting—it took this troper two read throughs to realize that the Hobgoblin was naked during his entire first appearance.
- Between the sex scenes, bondage, and titular heroine's catastrophically delicate super-suit, Empowered gives this trope a massive workout. We once see Ninjette take off her top to reveal shuriken pasties on her (admittedly indistinguishable from a boy's) chest.
- In Batman and the Outsiders #3, Batgirl casually walks into the kitchen nude in front of two lesbians. The orange juice she takes out of the refrigerator prevents the reader from seeing anything.
- Tarot Witch Of The Black Rose has full-frontal nudity for almost all of its female characters, but Jon (the one male comic character who gets molested more often than Kon-El gets increasingly strange and improbable means of hiding his penis, topping off with having a lilypad laid over it, and a frog sitting on top of it. The Double Standard is not lost on the readers.
- In Wild Act, volume 3, Yuniko's... lower half... is covered by a shovel. Ryu Eba doesn't see what we see, and we see quite a bit.
- Comics in general do this all the time with strategically placed word balloons.
- Averted in Watchmen - We see full frontal shots of naked Dr. Manhattan several times. Said shots have given rise to a Fan Nickname for his gear - The Big Blue Junk.
Film
- As mentioned before, Austin Powers. Two times in a single film.
- Not to mention the entire opening sequence of "Austin Powers - The Spy Who Shagged Me."
- Played straight in Daniel Craig's wonderful nude scene in the first Tomb Raider movie, in which he paces back and forth behind a table that just covers up his modesty.
- Lampshaded in the pre-Soccer Stephen Chow film, Look Out, Officer! (released post-Soccer on American DVD as The Shaolin Idiot). Ordered by a doctor to disrobe for a physical examination, Chow's character, Hsing, runs around the room rearranging items on shelves and tables seemingly at random, finally citing "decency" as his reason. When the doctor points out that he can still see Hsing, Hsing points out at the audience and replies, "But they can't." And sure enough, throughout the following scene, Hsing's lower extremities are hidden at every angle by one of the items he'd placed.
- The titular character of 2007's CG-animated Beowulf fights the monster Grendel in the altogether, with his goods blocked from view by his leg, a sword and a table, among other things.
- In Eyes Wide Shut, many obscuring props were deliberately added into the movie's nude scenes in post-production so as to avoid the dreaded X-rating (which, in practice, would have made the movie borderline pornography) and bump the film back into an R-rating.
- In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is left mostly naked after her transformation into a human: She's on the shore, wearing nothing but her seashell brassiere and Godiva Hair, and the audience never sees anything but her legs and upper body until she finally gets dressed. However, her three (male) best friends, a crab, a seagull and a fish, are with her all the time and presumably see everything. (When her father Triton transforms her into a human at the end of the movie, he also gives her a sparkling dress to wear.)
- The Jackie Chan movie "The Accidental Spy" has one of that actor's usual combat sequences running, then fighting, then running some more, then fighting some more, all the while stark naked in the middle of a Turkish street bazaar. The entire scene is lengthy, and is an unending combination of this and Hand Or Object Underwear with extra credit to the film editors for keeping it clean with near-impossible difficulty.
Western Animation
- In an episode of The Simpsons, used to censor a painting Marge had made of Mr. Burns. On the commentary, everyone talks about how much fun they had making those objects as small as possible.
- In another Simpsons bit, Homer and Marge's nudity is concealed by wind-powered lawn ornaments. When Homer notes that the ornament in front of him is two men sawing a log in half, he asks, "Can we trade? I don't trust these guys."
- In The Simpsons Movie. Bart, skateboarding in the nude, passes by several dozen conveniently placed objects... and then they subvert it when he passes a fence with a hole in the middle, resulting in a lengthy, uncensored shot of his animated genitalia.
- Avatar The Last Airbender gets a scene of Katara bathing on screen using water and Godiva Hair.
- This troper has to argue that she was bathing so deep that probably wouldn't shown anything even if her hair had been someplace else.
- There was also an earlier episode where Zuko tells Iroh to get out of a hotspring, but when he comes out, a visibly Squicked Zuko cringes while our view is blocked by the same hand he's using and he tells Iroh to go back in.
- In Tex Avery's "The Shooting of Dan McGoo", the bartender, strategically positioned in front of a nude painting, announces, "I don't move from here all through the picture." When a fight breaks out, though, he ducks behind the bar — revealing that the woman in the picture is missing everything from chest to mid-thigh. (In its place she holds a sign reading "I ain't got no body.")
- Spoofed in Sheep In The Big City, in which General Specific changes his uniform while walking past a box, which is labeled "RANDOM BOX" in flashing neon lights.
- The Spectacular Spider Man's Flint Marko is depicted as nude when he serves as an experimental subject. He is mostly shown from the waist up, but anything lower is obscured by someone standing in front of him, the glare of a pane of glass, or the process of his transformation. After he becomes the Sandman, his lower half initially remains a shapeless mass, until we cut to him maintaining human form, complete with manifested clothes.
- Spongebob Squarepants has an unusual case of this when Spongebob decides to shirk clothing and return to nature. Various objects cover the lower part of his body, as usual, but proceed to cover less and less over the course of the episode, until it becomes clear that there's really nothing there to cover.
- In Justice League Unlimited, after Flash goes really fast and knocks the Brainiac out of "Brainithor," Lex Luthor is left naked which is blocked by Flash and Superman standing in front of him (and makes for an odd scheme were Supes almost strangles a naked Luthor.
- This troper remembers an episode of Weekenders where they went to see the Venus de Milo. Of course, they only showed its head at the beginning. When the camera finally zoomed out, guess what was obscured by a conveniently-placed plant.
Video Games
- Subverted in Devil May Cry; Dante has a sword which appears to cover the a poster of an apparently-topless woman; he takes it off, and strategically blocks the view of it, but right before the "camera" changes angles, it is revealed that the woman's breasts were covered (by stars, but still).
- Metal Gear Solid 2, plays with this, possibly as a homage to the Neon Genesis Evangelion toothpick scene. Raiden is stripped of his clothes towards the end, and has to run around preserving his modesty - he can, however, press himself to the torture rack he was originally strapped to. He reverts to an arms-stretched out pose, and the camera changes view - to behind a drinks can, the close-up protruding straw◊ completely preserving Raiden's dignity.
- If you pay attention, at some point during this whole sequence, there's a frame or two where Raiden's dangly bits aren't covered... but his character model doesn't have dangly bits.
- In Bikini Karate Babes the character Venus finds herself tied to a tree after removing another fighter's top. Aphrodite (that character) finds her and rips off her top to reveal a bra. She then rips that off and Venus's dignity is preserved only by Aphrodite holding her bra like a trophy. Oh, and did I mention it's live action?
- A Mortal Kombat: Deception promotional image shows Mileena in her second costume (where she is basically nude) or presumably naked holding her sai weapons. The thin blades manage to cover just enough to make it not explicit.
Web Comics
Web Original
- In one live-action segment of Homestar Runner, all four members of Limozeen appear on a Thanksgiving e-card. There is a conveniently-placed turkey in order to hide the fact that one of the members is played by the creator's wife.
Music Videos
- An example would be Jem's "They" where Jem's nude bits (she's doing a homage to the zero-gravity striptease in Barbarella) are hidden by a strategically placed lens flare.
- Holly Valence's Kiss Kiss is another variant on camera effects, although apparently she was wearing flesh-coloured underwear.
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