Jonathan Morris has a dream: to be the first male Knicks City Dancer. There's only one problem...
...He's the President of the United States!
The plot is moving at a predictable pace toward a foregone conclusion. Suddenly, something shocking happens, disrupting the action and going off somewhere totally unexpected. With the sound of a record needle pulled violently across an album, the
background music, along with everything else, comes to a screeching halt.
The question occurs:
does the current generation know what that sound is supposed to be?
In commercials for comedy films, this is almost always followed by the opening of "I Got You (I feel good)," which for some reason indicates that, no this isn't a serious film after all.
It's hard to use this straight anymore, it's well on its way to being a
Discredited Trope.
Please note that if you wish to use the sound in a bit of your own, just buy a prerecorded version. It's insanely hard to actually produce this noise.
Examples
Anime
- Digimon has a verbal version of this when the the titular mons discover they can't Digivolve.
"Tentomon Digivolve to...(usual SFX, but no change)...Kabu—never mind."
- Samurai Champloo, of course.
- In the dub, it was used to censor certain profanities. (Did they do this in the original?)
Film
- The movie What A Girl Wants, where Lord Henry Dashwood plays some wild air guitar in leather pants until his fiancee walks in on him, bringing the dancing and the music to an abrupt halt.
- The very beginning of the film version of A Series of Unfortunate Events pulls this trope: The movie starts out looking like it will be a happy tale about an elf, but a few minutes later, when the happy elf is skipping over some rocks in the water, an abrupt record scratch is heard, along with a darkening of the screen, followed by the narrator apologizing and saying that this is "not the movie you will be watching."
- Stardust uses this on a couple of occasions, notably when Tristran attempts to jump aboard a coach: the music builds to heroic proportions, only to cut off when he slams into the side of said coach and falls flat on his rear.
- Attack of the Clones has a slight variant of this: when Anakin and Padmé first kiss, their Love Theme swells... and instantly fades out when Padmé hurridly breaks the kiss.
- Taken a step further in the Rifftrax (MST) version in which one of the riffers, Kevin Murphy, makes the sound of a needle scratch just as the music cuts out.
- An in-universe variant occurs in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Loud music is playing at a party, then someone bumps the record player. There's a loud scratch and the music stops, just as Arthur shouts over it, "They're all idiots!"
- About ten minutes into the movie Zoolander, the main character's best friends are trying to cheer him up with a trip to the gas station for drinks. The scene itself is very cheerful and Wham!'s Wake Me Up Before You Go Go only makes the scene seem happier. The mood ends quickly and dramatically when the song fades out in a distorted fashion and all four of his friends die in a "freak gasoline fight accident."
- The end of George Of The Jungle seems to be a parody of the Lion King's 'presenting the next king at Pride Rock as all the animals look on' scene, until the needle scratches and Ape cuts in with a musical segment of him performing in Las Vegas.
- The Lion King 1 1/2 has Timon's mom showing Timon the savannah at sunset, explaining how "everything the light touches" at which point Uncle Max pops out of the grass and interrupts, "Belongs to someone else!" The needle sound is actually heard.
- In The Addams Family (the film), Gomez and Morticia are having a tragic-romantic moment, complete with kissing and French, when the music abruptly cuts off and Gomez is ordered to get the money already.
- Down With Love shows the needle automatically scooting across the record.
Live Action TV
- Scrubs has one of the common subversions, where it turns out that the background music was being played by an actual jukebox until it broke.
- Ally Mc Beal; Hoo boy.
- This happens on Lost when Desmond is listening to "Make Your Own Kind Of Music" on the record player in his underground bunker. The needle gets knocked off the record when our heroes blow the hatch open with dynamite.
- In Malcolm In The Middle, Dewey's babysitter -played by the late, great Bea Arthur- is in the process of bonding with him by dancing to ABBA's "Fernando" when she succumbs to a heart attack. How do they keep that funny? Bea's ticker trouble is indicated by the film stopping and the sound of a record scratching to a halt, followed by a jump cut to an ambulance driving away.
- Played straight in the opening episode of WKRP In Cincinatti, at least within the show. Upon being told WKRP is now a rock station, Johnny Fever drags the needle across the easy-listening record that was currently playing and fires up a rock album. That he introduces by saying, "Boogers!"
- At the end of the Blackadder episode "Duel and Duality", the record needle is pulled off the sad music when Edmund's death scene is interrupted by his lack of dying. We later hear the needle placed back onto the record after the prince is shot, continuing the previously-interrupted death scene, though with a different character.
- One episode of Good Eats features Alton Brown trying to get a wedge of cheese to jump through a hula hoop, complete with circus organ. The scratch comes before he announces he'll have to make soup out of it.
Real Life
- Used spectacularly in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2008, when Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends abruptly cut off their song with this trope and gave the floor to none other than Rick Astley who then proceeded to Rickroll all of America.
- This Troper was once on an episode of MTV's Made (not as the main character). His rejection of the star of the episode combined the needle scratch with a Micheal J. Fox "hands in pockets, roll onto balls of feet and back". It was almost too brutal to watch.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Homestar Runner loves this trope, using it in at least ten cartoons so far.
- Parodied in a Sealab 2021 episode, after the second Record Needle Scratch it cut to a nearby character at an actual record player, who then apologized for doing it.
- Used in all the parody trailers for Rob Schneider films in the South Park episode "The Biggest Douche in the Universe". Also used for the spoof pseudo-trailers in "Stanley's Cup".
- Used straight in The Spectacular Spider Man animated series, as Peter Parker confidently walks up to the head cheerleader and asks her out, only to be bluntly rejected.
- A needle scratch interrupts the opening credits of an American Dad episode when the newspaper Couch Gag has been replaced by Stan seeing Roger the alien undisguised on the front page.
- Megas XLR: The sound of squealing car brakes replaced the traditional sound effects.
