Pooled Funds - Television Tropes & Idioms

"I dive around in it like a porpoise! And I burrow through it like a gopher! And I toss it up and let it hit me on the head!"

—Scrooge McDuck

The greedy character finally has his desired fortune piled under his feet, he couldn't be any more glad. So how does he enjoy this moment? He dives into the pile and gleefully swims around like it was the best swimming pool ever, or rest on it like you would while floating peacefully.

It doesn't have to be actual currency, it could be jewels, treasures, some valuable fluid or pretty much anything the character wants.

May overlap with Money Fetish and Sand is Water.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

In Medaka Box, the goal of the swim team is to garner enough money to fill a swimming pool and then swim around in it.
One of the Q&A sections in the Vol. 0 Mahou Sensei Negima! that was distributed in the Anime Final movie showing revealed that Haruna became rich in the Magic World by successfully introducing the Boys' Love Genre to its citizens. She's then shown wearing a swimsuit and gleefully swimming in the money she gained.

Comic Books

In the Hellboy story "Box Full of Evil", one of the people opening the titular box demands from the demon within "Enough gold to lie down in and a crown for my head". He gets it Sort of. The demon posesses his sister and turns him into a monkey first, and it's only at the end of the story, after he's died, does his body come to rest on a large pile of money, with a crown at his head
As pictured, Scrooge McDuck of the Disney Ducks Comic Universe does this all the time. This originated in the comics, but is probably more widely known because of his animated incantation in DuckTales. This is such a well-known trait of the character that it's played around with a fair bit:
- Lampshaded in that Donald Duck and his nephews will occasionally try it, and break their heads on the metal. Scrooge even managed to trick the Beagle Boys into trying this in Only A Poor Old Man.
- Also, it only works with money, even for Scrooge. While diving around in his cash-filled train wagons in the second-to-last album of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, he comes to an abrupt halt on a pile of coals.
- Subverted in The Last Lord of Eldorado. After having found a pile of coins on a treasure cruise, Scrooge tries to dive into it. Instead he cracks his head because the coins were fused together after spending hundreds of years on the bottom of the sea.
- Deconstructed in this parody video, where Scrooge accidentally breaks all of his bones after jumping into his pool of money, resulting in him being immediately rushed to the hospital where he then dies. A funeral is held for him, where he is buried with all of his money, and as a result his grandnephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie go crazy over their granduncle's death and end up in prison, their uncle (and Scrooge's nephew) Donald Duck becoming very angry with them and refuses to pay their "duck bail", before finally going bankrupt and committing suicide.
  DuckTales! (Whoo-hoo!)
  Get to the ER before his brain swells! (Uh-oh!)
  Stabilize his neck, Oh, no! His heart failed!
  Book a funeral, time for mourning
  Happened so fast without warning
  This peaceful bird's now a duck angel! (Uh-oh!)
  Kids can't cope and wind up in a duck jail! (Uh-oh!)
  Donald's pissed and he refused to pay the duck bail! (Uh-oh!)
  Family falls apart, now there's no more DuckTales! (Boo-hoo!)

Film

Brutally subverted in Saw II with the dirty needle trap. Despite summaries suggesting that Amanda was wading through a pool of used hypodermic needles, it's more like a level ground surface that she's just sifting through.
According to the Studio 54 movie, Steve Rubell would take his nightclub's receipts home in cash, dump it on his bed, and roll around it. Then he'd likely throw up.

Literature

In the SF novel Rocheworld, a multimillionaire discovers she's been selected for a one-way interstellar expedition. Since she'll never need money again, she instructs her broker to liquidate everything into cash. She also contacts the owner of a staggering rare gold coin, and arranges to purchase it for a number equal to her approximate net worth. He shows up at a warehouse with the coin in a protective briefcase, expecting a check or similar. She emerges from the warehouse adjusting her clothes, and says, "Don't try to swim in the bills. Paper cuts." She then puts the coin in her pocket, walks away, and takes it with her when she leaves the Solar System.

Live-Action TV

A Dutch lottery show once had a game where people were standing knee deep in a big tank of coins and had one minute to grab as much coins as they could and stuff it into their pockets (in overalls covered with pockets). And yes, they could keep it too.
- Similarly, in the UK in The Nineties, Noel's House Party featured "Grab A Grand" in which the contestant was placed in a wind chamber full of banknotes with the goal of collecting £1000 in a minute.

Tabletop Games

In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Queen of the Black Coast", Belit does this.
With a cry Belît dropped to her knees among the bloodstained rubble on the brink and thrust her white arms shoulder-deep into that pool of splendor.
The Western Paladin in the Magic: The Gathering card Greed does this.
Like Smaug (see below), this is considered standard behavior for dragons in Dungeons & Dragons. One book devoted to them, the Draconomicon, points out how improbable this is considering the volume of the coins and the size of most dragons (even taking into consideration that they are typically 3x as rich as monsters of the same power level). The book even mentions that some dragons will convert their treasure into smaller denominations just to make wallowing in their wealth more practical.

Video Games

In Super Castlevania IV's Block 9, you go through the treasury, which at several points have piles of gold. You can sink into the gold, and completely submerging yourself in it has the same effect as submerging yourself in water.
If you watch the Orkz' Pile O' Gunz in Dawn of War long enough, a gretchin will take a dip in it this way.

Web Comics

VG Cats shows us what Gabe Newell of Valve does with all that money.

Western Animation

Scrooge McDuck of DuckTales does this as his main pastime. See the comics section for more information.
On Sponge Bob Square Pants, Squidward does this on a pile of Krabby Patties after he becomes addicted to them.
- Mr. Krabs does this with money, and in one episode, a vault full of diamonds.
On South Park, Cartman proves Kyle wrong and wins money in the process, so he turns it into change and makes a swimming pool out of it so Kyle can see him swim in it.
In The Hobbit Smaug sleeps on his treasure as if it were a bed. Many areas of fiction now depict this as standard dragon behaviour.
Daffy Duck does this with piles of gold coins in Ali Baba Bunny starting at 2:15.
Subverted on The Simpsons when Homer is told he could become a "moderately wealthy man" and has a a daydream of rolling around in not quite enough cash. Daydream Homer commented that, as a "moderately wealthy man", he could rent anything he wanted.
Deconstructed in Family Guy. Peter jumps into one of these after hitting the lottery and winds up bloody with bones sticking out. Turns out gold is quite dense, so even though it's malleable, you don't want to jump into a pile of it.
Peter: Aaahhh!! It's not a liquid! It's a great many pieces of solid matter, that form a hard floor-like surface! Ahhh!!

Real Life

Hugely-talented-but-wasted N.I. footballer George Best. On being discovered one morning by room service at the London Hilton, on a bed covered with both cash (won at gambling) and the newly-crowned Miss World (1974 Miss USA Marjorie Wallace), the waiter asked: "George, where did it all go wrong?"
Hank Williams, a country music singer, after finally getting out of the poverty that plagued him for much of his life, did this when his first hit record sold a million dollars.

Poor Communication Kills