Pinching Pain - Television Tropes & Idioms

An innocent bystander is enjoying a day at the beach without a care in the world. Suddenly, you feel searing pain as you scream in great pain and agony, sometimes even screaming like a little girl. You then discover that a crab pinched you either on the finger, foot, groin, or any other body part.

Oftentimes when you're at a beach or river or any body of water, you get pinched by a crab, a lobster, or any kind of pincered crustacean. This also happens often in Real Life... God forbid.

Subtrope of: Amusing Injuries

Examples:

Advertising

This Bud Light commercial.

Anime and Manga

Happens to JP in Digimon Frontier in the Beach Episode.
Pok�mon: Ash Ketchum fell victim to this trope with Krabby in one of the earlier episodes, before catching it.
- And in a later episode May's brother, Max, gets pinched in the butt by a Corphish that may or may not be the one Ash catches in a future episode.
In the Beach Episode of Zoids, one of the pilots fell victim to a Beach Bury, and had his nose nipped by a very opportunistic sand crab!
In the Beach Episode of Bleach, Yachiru uses a crab to pinch Ikkaku's butt after he ends up buried under a mound of sand.
Commonly in Anpanman, if a character dunks their head into the river, a crayfish will pinch them on the nose. An unfortunate example happened to Baikinman in an edutainment special: he dunked his head into the lake to ease the pain of getting stung by a bee on his nose...and gets pinched as soon as the bee sting had healed!

Film (Animated)

The Genie in Aladdin briefly gets pinched by a crab that looks suspiciously like Sebastian.
- The original Sebastian pinches Louie in the nose to keep from being eaten.
In Fantasia 2000, Donald Duck is pinched by a whole mess of crabs.

Film (Live Action)

Happens to Chance in Homeward Bound The Incredible Journey while trying to catch fish, except with a crawdad.

Newspaper Comics

Hawthorne did this lots of times to the hairless beach apes in Sherman's Lagoon.

Web Comics

Nip and Tuck. After a Humiliation Conga involving enduring multiple bites from fire ants in the root cellar, grabbing a branch, only to find a bee's nest on the other end of it, streaked past Thelma as she snapped a photo of a vase, Tuck dives into a shallow part of the swamp to escape the bees. Unfortunately, Tuck found out the hard way that there were crawdads in it!
Nip: An' that's how Tuck found th' new crawdad hole...

Western Animation

Happens to Pluto in the Classic Disney Short "Hawaiian Holiday".
A crab goes after both Tom And Jerry in "Salt Water Tabby".
The Garfield and Friends episode "Maine Course" had Jon receive a lobster from a seafood company. The minute the lobster is released, he promptly pinches Jon, Garfield, and Odie. When they've successfully had the lobster subdued, they realize, however, that they don't have the heart to cook him. Instead, they keep him as a pet and name him Therm. After that, however, they have to take him back to his natural habitat after discovering that he was very sick.
Hanna-Barbera's Moby Dick. In the episode "The Crab Creatures", Moby has his tail pinched by a Giant Enemy Crab under the title creatures' control.
Rolf from Ed Edd N Eddy is at one point set upon by lobsters that were running loose in his garden (long story), and positively flips out.
Rolf: Scourge of the sea, release Rolf! Nana, find the pliers!!
In Deputy Droopy, Tex Avery's last Droopy cartoon, a pair of crooks are constantly thwarted by Droopy inflicting pain on them when they're trying to be silent — at one point, a crook sits in a chair where a strategically placed lobster repeatedly snaps into him with a sound effect like heavy-duty shears.
Dr. Zoidberg rarely uses his pinchers defensively, but he does chop off Fry's arm in "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love", cuts Bender's legs at the feet on "Anthology Of Interest I", and literally disarms robot gangster Clamps in "Silence Of The Clamps".
A Pink Panther cartoon has a crab disrupt Pink's fishing trip.