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What?! That is it, I've had enough! This whole goddamn adventure has been nothing but pointless build ups towards pay offs that never happen.
A Shaggy Dog Story is a plot with a high level of build-up and complicating action, only to be resolved with an anti-climax or ironic reversal, usually one that makes the entire story meaningless. The term comes from a type of joke (called "gildersome" in The Meaning of Liff) that worked the same way — a basic premise, a long amount of buildup, and a deliberately underwhelming punchline. The classic example is a man trying to return a shaggy dog to a rich family in England for reward money — when he finally makes it there, he's only told that the dog "wasn't that shaggy" before the door's slammed in his face.
For television, these stories tend to be found in two varieties: serious and comedic.
Serious shaggy dog stories generally put the protagonist on a quest or goal, only to undermine the purpose at the last minute. For instance, a cop spends all episode trying to convict a criminal, only to have the perp get hit by a car and die at the end; or a doctor searches all episode for the cure to a mysterious illness, which miraculously cures itself. This plot highlights the futility of characters' jobs, or the cruel ironies of life. An even crueler variant is Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
Comedic shaggy dog stories are often parodies, undercutting typical plot structures by offering a ridiculous coincidence or unforeseen twist, or even just making the entire episode irrelevant. The Simpsons enjoys these (see below for an example). Comedic shaggy dog stories can be frustrating in their randomness, but often succeed in execution.
This could be cynically viewed as Truth In Television, since a lot of life's events don't seem to have much of a point to them either.
See also Wall Banger. Can compare to All Just A Dream and Overly Long Gag. Not to be confused with Scooby Doo, which is a story about Shaggy's dog. Also not to be confused with the Disney's movie The Shaggy Dog .
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In the "Valentine's Day Competition" arc of Maria-sama Ga Miteru, a whole episode is dedicated to Mifuyu, a minor character who cheats to win a date with popular Sachiko. We get an in-deep explanation of her motivations, which reach back to her childhood when she already wanted to gain Sachiko's friendship, but failed. She is jealous of Sachiko's "petite soeur" Yumi, but then finds her rival is "more special" than herself after all and she decides to give up on the date. In the end she is shown to have cut her hair, cheerfully accepting that she is of minor importance to Sachiko — and is never mentioned again. The sheer pointlessness of this episode, together with the Family Unfriendly Aesop about "accepting your lower position in life", makes it come dangerously close to being Filler.
- In Yes! Pretty Cure 5, the characters spend almost the entire series working on a plot point that is ultimately resolved in Shaggy Dog fashion: the wish-granting Dream Collet is finally completed, only to be promptly stolen by The Dragon and given to the Big Bad, who uses it up by wishing to be beautiful, of all things.
- The first series of Ojamajo Doremi has the three main characters working for the entire series to become witches- and succeed- only to give up their powers to save Onpu. This is then turned into a double Shaggy Dog Story when the first episode of the second series has them regain their powers anyway. Then in the finale of the last series, they decide not to become witches after all.
- Here's an analogy for MD Geist. Once upon a time, a man decided to climb a mountain. He fell down and saw a very shaggy dog. Turns out a rich couple lost a very shaggy dog and would give a reward for its return. A woman decided to tag along for the ride after hearing the man's story. When he got on the plane, he found that he couldn't take the dog without preparations, so he took it to the vet. He went to the couple's house, walked directly up to the door with the dog and the woman, and rang the bell. The owners of the dog were happy that they got their dog back, when all of a sudden the man pulled out a shotgun, killed the owners, and shot the dog in the head. The man then walked off into the sunset telling the very confused woman that the battle has only begun.
- Early in Midori Days, Seiji thinks that Midori has returned to her own body for sure (somehow, she ended up popping out of his right sleeve; replacing his real hand. It's less Nightmare-riffic when you actually read it); it's even a two-parter and he talks about how he misses her. As it turns out, Midori was just taking a nap. ...
- The Hayate The Combat Butler manga dedicated a whole chapter to such stories.
- Naruto's Three-Tails filler arc revolved around Konoha and Orochimaru's efforts to capture the three-tailed beast. In the end, the Leaf Ninja win, but then depart and leave the defense of Three-Tails to a bunch of Red Shirts, who are then killed when the Akatsuki show up to take Three-Tails for themselves. While this is a filler arc and it cannot go against what happened in the manga, knowing what happens in the manga makes the heroes' efforts seem futile.
- A possible subversion, though, in that three-tails isn't really important to the arc. The real driving force behind the story is the filler character Yukimaru, who Orochimaru is trying to use to control Three-tails. Essentially, the writers shift the focus of the narrative from the Three-Tails, whose fate they have no control over, to Yukimaru. As a filler character, they can control Yukimaru entirely.
- This also applies to the activities of the Konoha nin during the Hunt for Uchiha arc: they spend the whole time searching for Itachi, and while all kinds of plot happens behind their backs (including unwittingly running into Sasuke's group) they fail to make any leads in battling Akatsuki and by the end of the arc Itachi dies without them ever meeting him. The only purpose their involvement ultimately served was to demonstrate Tobi's abilities (which he uses to render all of their attacks useless and escape easily).
- Recently in Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds the entire Crashtown arc is one of these. In this Yusei comes to Crashtown in order to save Kiryu. After a series of events in which include turning Kiryu away from his path of self destruction, the arc ends with Yusei, Jack and Crow leaving Crashtown with Kiryu staying behind. What makes it even worse is that this took up a total of 6 episodes, cutting in on the actual plot of the season. I mean sure this troper saw it coming from a mile away but that doesn't cushion the blow of what a waste of time it turned out to be.
Comic Books
- Hellblazer had a mammoth 12-issue story spanning two arcs ("Empathy is the Enemy" and "The Red Right Hand") that ended in a manner that wasn't very well received: with the fate of the world being decided by the result of a World Cup football game - something that was entirely out of the hands of the main character.
- One issue of Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was ostensibly about the back story of the turtles' vigilante friend Casey Jones. After rescuing the victim of a gay bashing, Casey takes him to a bar and, when the guy wants to know why he does this, spends most of the issue talking about his family and how he became a vigilante after muggers killed his older brother. Only one problem, as the bartender explains after Casey has left...Casey never had a brother.
- The Crusader subplot in Avengers: The Initiative was quite compelling - Crusader was a Skrull advance agent who went native, and joined together with the heroes of Earth (in human form) to repel other Skrull invaders. At the end of the story, he has saved the day, gets congratulated by Nick Fury himself... and is shot through the head by 3D-Man, who can see disguised Skrulls. 3D-Man simply shrugs his arms and says "Skrull."
- I would say that Watchmen would qualify as this, considering that the "villain" had already carried out his plan rendering the actions of all the protagonists except arguably Dr. Manhattan irrelevant.
- Except for the little unresolved matter of Rorschach's Journal.
- The ex-mercenary Darca Nyl's arc in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. In the series where he was introduced, a Dark Jedi killed his son, a dying Jedi handed over his lightsaber and told him to stop Lycan, and all during the pursuit people assumed that he was a Jedi, and they needed his help. And he gave it, even at the cost of pursuit time, and it felt good. Even after tracking down and killing Lycan, Darca Nyl decides to keep helping people, because it's right and because he thinks that's what his family would have wanted him to do. ...And then a more recent comic came out, with an older, bitter, isolationist Darca Nyl who failed utterly at helping people and retreated to a cabin where he did nothing but carve statues of his wife and son. The "heroes" of the comic only got him to help by threatening to shoot all the statues. Sheesh.
- Recent Star Wars comics love this. Old Soldier Able was a clone trooper who survived alone on a forsaken planet for years before the Rebellion found him and recruited him and put him into a commando squad. He was by far the most practical and cynical man there, which sometimes irritated the other Rebels, but he tried to adapt and look out for the last Jedi, Luke. ...And then a comic came out where the whole squad got transformed into rakghouls by a Sith talisman.
- Averted by a set of the X Wing Series comics. Rogue Squadron and an element of the Empire both want a smuggler, and he'll be handed over to whoever wins a competition to get an orb out in the desert, guarded by a monster. Two Rebels and two Imperial special forces troopers were sent; one of the troopers got killed by the monster, and the smaller, faster Rebel sacrificed his lead to save the other Rebel. After the last trooper got to the orb, a heat storm came up and killed them all - but this was only a virtual reality simulation. The troopers, confident in their victory, congratulate the Rebels for a battle well fought, the man judging the contest says that maybe it was the Rebels who won that one, and then changes his mind. And then it turns out that the troopers' superior went behind their backs, grabbed the smuggler, and fled, leaving the troopers to be sold into slavery. Fortunately the Rebels were quite happy to assist a Help Face Turn.
- Ultimate Spider-Man #28: Peter Parker sees the Rhino tearing up Manhattan on the news, and rushes to go fight him. Over the course of the issue, he's sidetracked by various other problems, including a parent-teacher conference, Flash Thompson being a dick, and Gwen Stacy crying in a dumpster. By the time Spider-Man gets to the scene, Iron Man has already easily subdued the Rhino.
Film
- The Aristocrats is a film which features many stand-up comedians, comedy writers, and other entertainers and celebrities all performing variations on the same shaggy-dog joke, "The Aristocrats". The joke has long been a sort of "secret handshake" between fellow comedians, or an impromptu contest of improvisational skill. The structure of the joke is thus: a man goes into a talent agent's office, and describes (or performs) his "family act" for the talent agent. The content of the act is improvised by the teller of the joke, usually (but not always) involving as many varied, violent, obscene, or offensive acts as possible. The punchline, when the talent agent asks what the man's act is called, is "The Aristocrats!"
- There is a short story by Robert Bloch (title sadly forgotten) where a writer refers to a manuscript that's a grotesque parody of gritty, Mickey Spillane-esque mysteries (at one point the protagonist mentions his tragic past, which includes being raped by his grandmother). The working title of the manuscript is "The Aristocrats."
- A classic example of this trope is found in the Marx Brothers film, A Night at the Opera. Groucho and Chico spend several minutes haggling over a contract. Chico keeps objecting to the terms, and Groucho keeps tearing off the sections that Chico won't agree to. Finally, nothing remains but the space where Chico has to put his signature, and Groucho hands him a pen. "I can't write," Chico admits sheepishly. "That's all right," replies Groucho, "There's no ink in the pen, anyway."
- Time Bandits. In the end, it's revealed that everything that happened was part of The Supreme Being's plan. The villain defeats himself and the Surpreme Being appears to put everything back the way it was.
- In the Disney live action-animation mix Bedknobs And Broomsticks, most of the movie is spent searching for a powerful spell which could help the English in World War II, only to find out near the end that it was all in the children's book, making their excursion into cartoon land pointless.
- Not only that, but upon obtaining the needed object containing the spell's magic words and returning home, they discover that they can't take objects from one world into another, making it a double shaggy dog story.
- The French movie Chacun Cherche Son Chat (Released in English as While the Cat's Away) plays with this - most of the cast of the movie is looking for the protagonist's missing cat. The cat turns up on its own, midway through the movie, but it hardly ends the movie.
- At the end of A Shot in the Dark, Clouseau proves so incompetent that he can't complete The Summation, and shortly afterwards, all the suspects are simultaneously killed by a car bomb meant for Clouseau himself. But they were all murderers, except Maurice, who was a blackmailer.
- In The Strangers, the titular villains manage to overpower and kill the lead characters.
- Or did they? with a 'surprise' ending that does not make one inch of sense.for a sequel.
- Roger Ebert described M Night Shyamalan's The Village as a Shaggy Dog Story, saying "Critics were enjoined after the screening to avoid revealing the plot secrets. That is not because we would spoil the movie for you. It's because if you knew them, you wouldn't want to go."
- The film Run Lola Run ends with Lola arriving up just in time with the money Manni needed for his crime boss, only to discover that Manni managed to settle things himself without much fuss. The last scene is of them both walking off while Manni asks what's in the bag.
- In the second ending (before the second rewind Lola arrives with the money just to see Manni ran over by an ambulance.
- Of course, both of those outcomes, just like just about everything else that happens in all three storylines, are caused by Lola's very own interference, which in turn is caused by what happens in the stairwell, albeit one has to watch the movie several times to notice every single causality. It's basically 'Chaos Theory: The Movie'.
- Cabaret is a very long, drawn-out version of this trope with singing and dancing. Not only is the entire story totally pointless by the end, but none of the characters have developed in any way whatsoever.
- The Finnish Affectionate Parody film Star Wreck ends with Pirk, Dwarf and Info trapped in Hawaii during Earths Ice Age. Info says that if he goes into low power mode he can survive until modern day, at which point he will prevent everything in the film from ever happening... pan out... credits
- Murder By Death is an excellent example of this. After all of the chaotic happenings in the movie, it appears that no murder took place. One of the characters, when asked if one happened, says "Yes. Killed good weekend." The beauty of it is that the movie is hilarious in large part because of this.
- The Final Destination series movies are about a group of people who somehow escaped death and then find themselves dying from improbable accidents one after another. They spend the movie trying to figure out death's plan and finding a way to defy it and live. They invariably fail and succumb to the inevitable.
- "But there was no monster!"
- The climax of Medium Cool is set in motion by a search for the female protagonist's son. Later, he turns up safe at home. His mother and her boyfriend die in a car crash.
- The film of Bonfire Of The Vanities attempts this by changing the book's ending.
- ''Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Nazi empire on the cusp of war searching for an unimaginably powerful artifact. Mild-mannered professer-slash-nearly indestructible adventure hero attempting to recover said artifact. Treacherous sleazebag opportunist ostensibly in the Nazis' employ intending to use artifact's power for himself. Fistfights, sword fights, shootouts, near-poisoning, a massive search involving workers by the hundreds, a truck blowing up, a warplane blowing up, a cliffhanging vehicle chase, dozens of deaths, the love interest's fate changing seemingly by the minute. And in the end... Indy is tied up, completely helpless, while Belloq triumphantly invokes the power of the Ark and opens it...whereupon it promptly annihilates him and his fellow Nazis. In other words, 1. the Ark destroys anyone arrogant enough to attempt to control it, making it utterly useless as a weapon, and 2. because it's clearly far too dangerous to make known at all, much less publicy display, Indy will never gain any prestige for recovering it.
- The Big Lebowski follows a bizarre and convoluted Random Events Plot where ultimately the protagonist fails at everything he tries to do. Not only that, most of it turns out to have been completely pointless to begin with: the kidnap victim was just on an unannounced vacation, the ransom notes were sent by opportunistic thugs pulling a con, the Briefcase Full Of Money had been empty from the start, and the guy he was working for was just setting him up as the fall guy to cover for a bit of embezzlement. His car has been destroyed, his apartment trashed repeatedly, he's been drugged once and beaten several times, his best friend has caused much of the above by Millstoning him at every turn, his other best friend is dead from a heart attack, and he never got his freakin' rug back. All he has to show for the entire movie is a night of sex with the admittedly pretty hot Maud Lebowski. But hey, The Dude abides.
Literature
- An exemplar use of this trope is in Thomas Bangs Thorpe's The Big Bear of Arkansas. The titular character seems to follow the archetype of the romanticized American frontiersman, engaged in an epic struggle against nature. The narrator of the story sits in rapt attention while "Big Bear" regales him with the tale of his pursuit of a legendary giant bear; the story meanders pointlessly for a while, and ultimately Big Bear fails to kill the bear before it dies of shock. Why did it die of shock? Because it entered Big Bear's property while Big Bear was taking a shit, and died at the sight of it. That's right, the whole point of the story was to get the reader to listen to a twenty minute story about the narrator voiding his bowels. It gets better - the entire story of his "chasing the big brown bear" may have been nothing more than an extended metaphor for Big Bear's attempting to move a particularly bulky "load." B Bo A is effectively nothing more than a prank against the credulity of New Englander's who over-romanticized life on the frontier.
- Lawrence Sterne's The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy is probably literature's most famous example of this - the gist is that the book contains precious little of his life (it starts years before the narrator's birth and only ever gets to the stage that Shandy is around 6 months old before heading off back into the period before his birth again) and none of his opinions (his family get plenty of room to air theirs though). For a book written in the 18th century, it's also hilariously funny.
- Guy de Maupassant's 1884 short story The Necklace. You might have had to read it in lit class. Basically, a young, lower middle class couple borrows some nice clothes and jewelry from an upper class friend to wear to a party. During the course of the party, the lady loses a nice necklace. Hiding the truth, the two sell their house and all their possessions and basically work as slaves for the next twenty years to pay the friend back, only to be told at the end it was only costume jewelry, and worth only a couple of dollars at the most, resulting in an horrifyingly despicable Know Your Place Aesop that almost borders on Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
- Readers today can also see the Aesop as "Honesty is the Best Policy". If the borrower had simply told the truth at the beginning, they would have avoided all their problems.
- A particularly Downer Ending version is found in the Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts book Necropolis. The Ghosts, Vervunhive Primaries, Bluebloods, North Cols, and scratch companies all endure horrendous losses in the ultimately (if just, just barely) successful defense of Vervunhive... and at the end, Vervunhive is abandoned, as the city has been damaged virtually beyond repair and no survivor wants to return. Still, at least the Ghosts got some new blood in the end, as many of the Vervun defenders were impressed by the Ghost's heroism and elected to join them after the battle ended.
- Isaac Asimov was fond of these; he wrote several short stories that have no purpose other than to end in a pun. Among them are Dreamworld, A Loint of Paw, Sure Thing, Death of a Foy, and, most blatant of all, Shah Guido G.
- Not only is Shah Guido G a Shaggy Dog Story, the title even says so if you change the spacing: Shahgui Dog. Asmiov himself even points this out in one of his collections of short stories.
- Asimov once challenged Arthur C Clarke to a punning contest. Clarke's entry was "Neutron Tide".
- In the Dragon Age Prequel novel, Rowan is in love with Maric, who she's been politically arranged to marry. Turns out that Maric doesn't love her that way and falls in love with an elven woman, Katriel. Rowan is understandably upset by this turn of events but it gets worse. She gets over Maric and falls in love with his best friend, Loghain instead. However, near the end of the book, Maric kills Katriel for being an enemy spy and Rowan finds herself going along with the original betrothal agreement and ultimately marries Maric out of duty and not out of love. What was the entire point of that?
- Probably to introduce King Cailen, the son of Maric and Rowan, who is apparently ruling Fereldan by the time the Game starts. (and not doing a very good job, from the looks of it.) Loghain doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of the new king.
- Yeah, but Cailen would have been born anyway had circumstances been different. Only this time Rowan wouldn't have been in a position she hated. So I ask again: What was the point of that?
- The short story "God's Hooks" by Howard Waldrop, in the spirit of all stories about catching improbably large fish, ends with the fish not being caught, making the whole story pointless.
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (and the film adaptation) - Patrick Bateman becomes increasingly insane and homicidal and a lot of people die at his hands, culminating in him confessing to his lawyer... but in the end, no one believes him, and the book and film end as they begin, with him making boring small talk with boring, self-absorbed people.
- The Andromeda Strain; the entire book is spent trying to find a cure for said strain, only to reveal at the end that it had already mutated into a non-infectious form. Because of breathing quickly (but that's another matter entirely) Granted, it's still dangerous, but...
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, particularly the climax. Harry and Dumbledore go to an extremely dangerous seaside cave in a cliff, fight off inferi (like zombies but not) that are trying to drown them, and Dumbledore has to drink a potion that physically tortures him, all so they can get one of Voldemort's horcruxes, a locket. Dumbledore is then murdered by Snape, and Harry opens the locket to discover... It's not the real horcrux. Somebody else got there first and planted the fake one to mess with Voldemort.
- Also , take not that this actually does something in th plot. Dumbledore not being on the castle at that time makes it possible for the Death Eaters to enter; and gives Harry (and the readers) even more reasons to hate Voldemort. I doubt anyone couldn't feel bad for Dumbledores dieing wish to be unfulfilled, and that everyone hated the villians more
- My Sisters Keeper by Jodi Picoult: Anna was conceived to be a donor match for her sister Kate, who has had aggressive leukemia since she was 2. When her parents ask Anna to donate a kidney when Kate's kidneys fail, she sues them for medical emancipation. It is successful and she gains medical emancipation, only to be in a car accident on the way back from court one day with her lawyer. Anna is brain dead, so they pull the plug and give Kate her kidney anyway, thus rendering Anna's court case useless.
- The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway: Santiago spends the better part of the book fighting one fish as a classic stoic Hemingway Hero. In the end, he does manage to catch the fish, but it is simply eaten by sharks. To add insult to injury, a white resort guest simply mistakes the greatest fish he ever caught for a dolphin washed up on shore.
- In the Geronimo Stilton book, Geronimo Stilton, Secret Agent, Geronimo has to chase after the deed to The Rodent's Gazette, which was carried off by a very strong wind. Over the course of his search, he ends up going through the wharf, the dump, the sewers, and even his archrival's office, and only succeeds in nabbing the deed with help from his Secret Agent Childhood Friend. He gets the deed back to his grandfather's office by the exact deadline, only to find out the whole thing was just a test set up by his grandfather, who had the real deed in his office the whole time.
- In Michael Crichton's Sphere the main characters are investigating a most-likely alien ship, that landed on the bottom of the ocean. Inside they find a perfect sphere with strange markings on them, and after they've entered the Sphere, they can do stuff with the power of their minds! Which results in the underwater research facility being attacked by among other things, a giant squid. All but three of them die and at the end they figure out what's happening. When they are finally rescued, they decide that the power to do anything with just your thoughts is too dangerous, so they decide to forget everything that's happened, explain the deaths of everyone by a leak or something and just by thinking this, it becomes reality. So basically, everything that happened in the entire book has become irrelevant in the last paragraph or so.
- The War of the Spider-Queen is a series of six novels set in the Forgotten Realms world. The plot revolves around a small group of elite warriors, priests, and wizards who are send to investigate the sudden and total disappearance of the chief dark elf goddess Lolth. After traveling the world for months and visiting no less then three hellish dimensions, they have finally located her whereabouts. But as they approach the demonic temple in Hell, where her physical form is located it turns out that she was just undergoing a metamorphosis, from which she awakens all by herself only minutes before the protagonists reach her. Without anything that happened on the last two thousand pages having anything to do with it. After they've returned home, even the leader of the group is completely frustrated about the fact, that all she did was for nothing.
- Splinter in the Mind's Eye. The Kaiburr Crystal, which amplifies a Force-Sensitive's power many times over, was sought by Luke, Leia, and Vader. And it worked all right. But it also lost power the farther it was from a specific site on the planet, and was completely useless offworld. All that fuss and Brother Sister Incest vibes for nothing.
- The tragedy of Daisy Miller ultimately (intentionally) comes from this trope. Winterbourne realizes he misjudged Daisy and should have trusted his own opinion of her rather than everyone else's after she dies. There is nothing left for him to do but return to Geneva and continue to live just as he was at the beginning of the story.
Live Action TV
- Law And Order frequently uses serious shaggy dog stories, where the suspect avoids being convicted only to be caught for another crime, dying unexpectedly (and sometimes spectacularly), or otherwise being punished by the forces of Fate. Also, frequently the controversial issue of the day which the defense attorney's scheme is hinged around ends up being irrelevant when a simple, personal motive appears in the last five minutes.
- In an episode of Gilmore Girls, Richard and Emily are drawn closer as they try to find the owner of a stray dog that had happened upon them, leading the audience to expect that the experience will lead them to end their separation. In the end, though, the dog's owner claims it and it's back to status quo. The only real revelation to come from the affair is the gender of the dog, which was not what they had thought — it was a very shaggy dog.
- Professional Wrestling example: In a bizarre invocation of the Seven Year Rule, WCW's Halloween Havoc 2000 pay-per-view featured a Sting vs. Jeff Jarrett match, with Jarrett dressed up in Sting face paint. Throughout the match, several fake versions of Sting interfered in the match (reminiscent of 1990's Halloween Havoc, when Sid Vicious fought Sting and was later attacked by a fake), and the real Sting easily handled all of them. One would expect there to be a big payoff from all the fake Sting madness, but the match ended with Jarrett whacking the real Sting with his guitar to win the match.
- New characters Nikki and Paolo from season three of Lost turned out to be one big Shaggy Dog Story; after an entire episode spent setting up their circumstances and motivations, they are killed off (horribly) before they can affect the plot in any way. This is mostly the viewers' fault, though- they'd been planned to be more important but nobody liked them so they were quickly written out.
- In an episode of Red Dwarf, Lister tells Rimmer a story that at first seems to be a serious example of why it is cruel to give machines personalities. He discusses a pair of artificially intelligent shoes that are discontented with their existence and try to escape it by stealing a car. They then accidentally drive it into a canal and "die". A priest, however, comforted the shoes owner by telling him that the shoes had gone to heaven. Turns out the entire lecture was just an excuse for Lister to deliver the Incredibly Lame Pun "Shoes have soles". Rimmer, however, doesn't get it.
Rimmer: What a sad story... wait a minute. How did they open the car door?
- On Babylon 5, the character of Talia Winters was set up for a big arc from the first season. Kosh copied her personality, she was granted telekinetic powers, and she was growing increasingly disillusioned with the Psi Corps. When the actress wanted to leave, they wrapped up the "implanted personality" arc in one episode where her only significant role was in the last 10 minute "big reveal". She was then Put On A Bus and was never heard from again, except for the implication she was killed off screen.
- CSI: Ending Happy features a dead guy who five other people attempt to murder in a single night, but it eventually turns out that he died accidentally due to a lawn chair collapsing.
- An example with a twist from The Torkelsons: One character is in a contest to spend time in Paris with a family. As would be expected, she loses. But it's how she loses that makes it a Shaggy Dog Story: She had the highest scores... but the French family wanted to have a boy spend time with them, and there was only one boy in the finals. Meaning the finals had been meaningless before they had even started (Which counts as a Crack Defeat as well).
- The Wonder Years, the entire damn show. An important part of the plot, if not the most important part, was Kevin being in love with Winnie Cooper. How does the show end? The epilogue voice over said he married someone else.
- The Two Ronnies` famous monologues by Ronnie Corbett in his chair. Ostensibly all about telling a single, usually only moderately funny joke, the real joy was in the meandering way he eventually got to the punchline over five minutes, wandering off on a variety of bizarre tangents in the process.
- Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia: "America's Next Top Paddy's Billboard Model" is this from the perspective of the modeling contestants (especially the ones who had a threeway with Mac in order to win). The winning model's prize was supposed to be a place on the bar's new billboard, but it turns out that before the contest even began, Frank had already put the billboard up with himself on it.
- A two-episode arc of Power Rangers RPM focuses on Tenaya 7 trying to steal a rare diamond to power up her Monster Of The Week, which she claims will ensure easy victory for Venjix. Even though she does steal the diamond, the Rangers destroy the monster in their Megazords within 10 seconds without breaking a sweat.
- In an episode of Charmed, a summoner spends the entire episode working on a spell that would bring back a very powerful Big Bad from earlier seasons, the Source. It succeeds, but then Piper hits the summoner with her power three times and both the summoner and the summoned Source are vanquished. In less than two minutes.
- Charmed was made off this trope. In the 1st season, there was an episode in which they meet their male counterparts, supposedly as powerful as they are, only evil. They died in the last 30 seconds of the episode.
- An episode of Seinfeld details Kramer's quest to return a pair of pants. However, he falls in a tunnel, and ruins the pants he was trying to return. Elaine later asks what Kramer was planning to wear back after he returned the pants, but as a Cloud Cuckoolander, he doesn't understand the question.
- It's arguable that the entire show Smallville is one great big shaggy dog. Because, y'know, no matter what happens in the show, we all know how Clark, Lex, and Lois will end up and nobody else really, truly matters.
- NCIS's episode SWAK has Di Nozzo contract a variation of Y. Pestis (pneumonic plague). They spend the entire episode running around trying to find who did it and why, so they can get a cure, only to find out that it had a suicide gene, and killed itself off anyway.
- Even more of an example; the whole affair happened because a mother wanted NCIS to reopen her daughter's rape case, only for the daughter to admit at the end that she made up the whole story.
- The Joey-Rachel relationship in Friends. There's a few episodes centering around Rachel secretly having feelings for Joey. The cliffhanger of Season 9 has Joey and Rachel kissing. In the first two episodes of Season 10, there's some serious drama about how Ross will feel about the whole thing. And the episode after that...they decide they're better off as friends. The fact that they even went out at all is only mentioned once in the rest of the season.
- Charlie's little sub plot in Season One of Heroes. Hiro witnesses her die brutally, so he goes back in time six months to prevent the whole thing. Several months take place as the two of them fall in love. When Hiro tries to tell her that she will die, she tells him that she has a blood clot in her brain and will die shortly anyway. Oops. Waste of six good months.
- Not really, if only from the perspective that what he went through with Charlie forced Hiro to grow up a little bit and fully realize the ramifications of his powers. Would that he had remembered this AFTER the first season...
- It's also not that much of a Shaggy Dog story if you read the novel Saving Charlie, where the relationship is developed further. Also, Hiro's "accidental" teleports keep carrying him back to the task of saving Claire Bennett and Charlie eventually calls him on the fact that Hiro is neglecting his destiny just to spend time with her. That doesn't stop the two of them from losing their virginity to one another on the night before Charlie is supposed to die though.
- Of course that wonderful story was tossed in the garbage and this really DID become a Shaggy Dog story as of Volume 5 when Hiro went back to save Charlie and was successful. He somehow managned to get his past self to go to back in time to fall in love with Charlie, get Past Ando to hang around until Past Hiro gets back AND talked Past Sylar into using his powers to cure Charlie's blood clot (Dont Ask)... only to have Charlie get "lost in time" by this Volume's Big Bad!
- The search for a virus that occupies much of the first third of Season 3 of {{24}}. The virus was a decoy. Also, Jack's jailbreak was all part of a sting operation against the Salazars.
- On one episode of Taxi, Ascended Extra Jeff gets fired when he gets blamed for Louie's theft. Alex eventually guilts Louie into confessing to the boss ... except the boss doesn't believe his confession, and yet is so impressed by Louie's "sacrifice" that he re-hires Jeff.
- The Scrubs episode "My Princess". Dr. Cox tells his son a story about a patient from that day, but as a fairy tale. The patient is referred to as a maiden who is being attacked by a monster who can not be killed, and the entire episode is about JD and Elliot's search for a cure for her. At the end, Cox tells his son when asked that the "maiden" lived happily ever after - only to walk out and drop the bomb to his wife that the girl died.
Jokes
- Jokes such as the 'Banana And A Piece Of String' joke do this. In this tale a landlord is plagued by a leprechaun who, each evening prevails upon him to lend the leprechaun a half (then a quarter, then an eighth and so on, this joke can and has gone on for over an hour) of a banana and a piece of string. Each night, an explosion occurs in the room given to the leprechaun, increasing in violence as the quantity of banana decreases, beginning with a mere ruffling of the bedclothes and ending in the complete destruction of the inn. Finally, with his inn utterly destroyed the Landlord begs to know what the leprechaun has done and the leprechaun at last agrees to tell him but only on the condition that the landlord never tells anyone the secret.
- And to this day he never has
Music
Radio
Theater
- Pretty much the whole premise of Arthur Miller's plays The Crucible and Death Of A Salesman.
- The Crucible is about The Red Scare, and thus has a distinguishable point.
- And even more than that, after the deaths of Proctor, Rebecca Nurse, and Martha Corey, the witchcraft thing really blows over because everyone knew they were innocent.
- The entire play Waiting For Godot consists of two guys waiting for a guy named Godot, who never shows up.
- Which is the point of the play...
- Yes just because the point of the play is deliberately a Shaggy Dog Story hardly diminishes its value as an example. In fact it makes it a perfect example.
Video Games
- The endings of both Earthworm Jim games, of the comedic kind. In the first game, the cow launched by the hero in the first level suddenly plummets into the ending and crushes the newly rescued Damsel In Distress. In the second, it turns out the Love Interest, the Big Bad and the titular earthworm — were all cows in disguise.
- The plot of the Tower Defense game Immortal Defense is a Shaggy Dog Story of truly epic proportions. At the end of the game, after nearly a hundred missions of defending your beleaguered home world against increasingly impossible odds, you finally learn that the enemy really did wipe out all life on your planet at the end of the second campaign, your character has gone insane, all the "transmissions" you've been receiving from the planet were in fact hallucinations, and you've spent the past million years defending a lifeless ball of rock. Of course, it's arguably worse for your enemies, as this revelation also means that they've spent countless lives and lost thousands of vessels trying to invade that lifeless ball of rock. And to top it all off, unless you've gotten Hundred Percent Completion, it's implied that your character has given in to his madness, and will spend the rest of eternity defending the lifeless ball of rock from the enemy, who will continue to waste ships and men in an attempt to reach the lifeless ball of rock and find out what's so important about it. Damn.
- The game's creator has said that some or all of the last campaign is a hallucination, so the enemy isn't really wasting ships or lives at that point (it also explains how so many of the unique boss enemies reappear).
- Original The Longest Journey was this so much, it hurts: April goes on an epic quest, discovers that she is supposed to become the Physical God to Save Both Worlds, sees all her friends and acquaintances killed or maimed in process, screws up all her previous life... only to discover that she was , after all, only mistaken for The Chosen One and is, after all, not really needed anywhere. Of course, one could argue that she did save the Twin Worlds but... Isn't it really sad?
- In Final Fantasy X 2, the Mc Guffin of the game is the protagonist's boyfriend, Tidus, who disappeared at the end of the last game. They find a video recording of him in a dungeon, and in the course of trying to find him, the P Cs guide the outcome of a rebellion, put on a play, defeat a world destroying gun mech, and it turns out most of the way through the game that the guy in the video only looked like him. Turns the FFX duet into a Shoot The Shaggy Dog story if you get the perfect ending, where the real Tidus turns out to have been Alive The Whole Time, and traveling to meet them.
- And turns out Tidus wasn't Alive The Whole Time. He was only recreated because the Fayth gave Yuna that option after Vegnagun had been shut down and Shuyin Sent to the Farplane.
- In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Rydia's chapter. At the end of it, after all that adventuring and reclaiming the crystals, it looks like it's going to be going well, until suddenly a man in dark armor shows up and destroys the eidolon.
- In Hellgate: London, the humans are trying to kill Sydonai and expel all the demons from Earth. After you kill Sydonai, Murmur appears to tell you that he use you to kill Sydonai so he can get his position, and there's no indication that the demons are leaving just because Sydonai was killed.
- Prince Of Persia: The 2008 game.
- To wit: Elika, much to no one's surprise, is forced to use her own life force to restore Ahriman's can...But the Prince, in a true example of Love Makes You Crazy, proceeds to destroy said can to revive Elika, releasing Ahriman in the process...And given Elika's dialogue upon waking up, she probably hates him now. *cue audience going "Bra-vo"*
- To be fair, the game IS a trilogy, so not having a definitive ending is kind of to be expected. Plus, it doesn't seem like sealing Ahriman was actually the point, but rather what mattered was the Prince's transformation.
- I thought that was the bad end, i.e. you have the option to walk away from the can to get the good end. Or is Stupidity your only option? Or, worse yet, is it Cutscene Incompetence?
- To elaborate a bit, here's how the ending plays out - when you pick up Elika's body and slowly walk outside while carrying it, the credits start rolling. When you put Elika's body back down outside the temple, the credits stop. The official strategy guide for the game even states outright that this is a good place to stop if you don't want a bad ending. The player still controls the Prince, but there's nothing left to do aside from destroying the tree of life and freeing Ahriman - which the player must do themself, without any coaching from the game. Doing so leads to the downer ending where The Prince frees Ahriman and revives Elika, who responds to this by asking "Why?"
- The epilogue expansion turns this around. the prince does not believe that Ahriman can be properly sealed anymore so the choice ultimately came down to fight Ahriman now with Elika and Ormazd's help, or fight him later without them. Elika still thinks he's an idiot for making that choice.
- Diablo 1 did this. The protagonist finally defeated the Big Bad, only to become corrupted by it's Soulstone and become the new Diablo himself.
- And this is because the protagonist believes that they are strong enough to fight the spirit of Diablo. So Yeah.
- The plot of the obscure shooter Cyber-Lip has the protagonists being send to a space colony in order to destroy an insane supercomputer who controlled an army of androids supposed to protect humanity from marauding aliens. After destroying the titular computer, the ending shows that your Mission Control is actually an alien spy who sent you there to clear the way for an alien invasion.
- Both of the first two Monkey Island games deploy this trope comedically. The first involves the protagonist attempting to rescue a Distressed Damsel, only for her to escape the villain's clutches on her own. The second is about the protagonist searching for a legendary treasure, except it was All Just The Overactive Imagination Of Two Children Playing Together. Or Was It?
- In the first game, Guybrush spends a lot of time searching the potion which can destroy ghosts: but the potion is actually root beer, which can be found in the vending machine on the very island where the game begun!
- There are only two things that are clear from the ending of Contact: The bad guys weren't really evil, and- despite deceiving both Terry and the player- the Professor isn't either. So... why all the drama?
- Every entry in the Geneforge series, except possibly the last. Each game concludes its plotline with the player victorious- and usually on a hopeful note for the world at large, if you play right. But then the next game rolls around, and the world has gotten more Crapsack, the bad guys more threatening, the good guys less sympathetic, and your achievements in the previous games are barely mentioned. An air of hopelessness and futility hangs over the proceedings by the end of Geneforge 3, and never goes away.
- The ending of the obscure, bizarre PC-Engine game Legendary Axe II. You finally claim the throne from your ne'er-do-well brother, but shortly afterwards a topless assassin chick with purple hair and a scimitar the size of Shaq jumps out of literally NOWHERE and...it cuts to the credits! WHAT.
- At the end of the Ultimate Spider-Man game, you as Peter Parker/Spider-Man have to fight Eddie Brock/Venom to the finish to keep him from killing Bolivar Trask, the man who apparently had something to do with both of your parents' deaths and get your hands on the file which tells you the truth about the incident. During the cutscenes after beating Venom you don't actually get to find out what was in the file and Eddie tracks down and murders Trask in prison anyway.
- In the brilliantly-written Time Hollow, the intrepid hero finds himself in a completely altered reality, with no memories whatsoever of how it happened and no idea how to set things right. All he has is a mystical pen with the ability to alter something that happened in the past, each time changing his present time in drastic and unpredictable ways. Sometimes solving a problem creates an entirely different problem, which he must then seek out and fix. After countless twists, turns, harrowing confrontations, and narrow escapes, the pieces ever-so-gradually fall into place (with several pieces falling out in the meantime). It turns out that if the hero goes to a certain location to save a certain person's life, this will reverse the long chain of events which caused time to go out of whack and everything will return to normal. Of course, by then it should be readily apparant that had he just known that beforehand, he could've just done that in the first place and saved several weeks of trouble. Even better, once you finish the game, you can start a new one and do just that! Meet your enemy on the street, let him know that you're onto his scheme and offer to set things right. He'll grudgingly give you one night to make good on your offer, which is more than enough. Go to the school, get the pen from your dad, save the girl, done. You even get a special ending.
Webcomics
- The ending of the seven year long webcomic Bob And George shows that pretty much the whole comic was a plot by the title characters' mother to make George willing to kill Bob (his super villain brother) if necessary and for Bob to be aware of it. In a subversion or at least avoidance of Shoot The Shaggy Dog, however, a comment during the finale prevented the deaths of just about everyone in the Cataclysm.
- In GastroPhobia, all three of the completed chapters are rather humorously subverted at their end.
- Almost every single arc in 8-Bit Theater is one of these.
- The first season of Ansem Retort ended like this. After a demon invasion, fighting through FOX headquarters, one character fighting Ansem, another getting god-like powers, and using said powers to summon a dragon with a nuke on its back, the president of FOX was defeated by a stab in the back. Of course, this is lampshaded:
Marluxia: That's it? Axel stabs the guy and we all go home?
Zexion: Screw you. They're dead, we're alive. We win, they lose, end of story. Who's up for Chinese food?
Western Animation
- One Simpsons example is in "The Day The Violence Died", which has Bart and Lisa, having just gotten an animation studio bankrupted by the creator of the Itchy and Scratchy characters suing it, decide to save it by studying law books. Instead of revealing what Lisa discovered that could save the studio, however, it has two random kids swooping in to save the studio instead, and the ep ends with Bart complaining.
- Another episode parodied the phrase: Moe comments on how tired he is of hearing the barflies' shaggy dog stories, which prompts an offended Barney to leave the bar - a literal shaggy dog in tow.
- The GI Joe episode "The Viper is Coming" featured the Joes discovering several COBRA bases and plots around the world based on cryptic phone calls from someone calling himself "The Viper". Characters on both sides try to discover who the Viper is as he seems to predict COBRA's every move. Finally, the Viper's latest call warns them that: "This is the Viper. I be there at noon today. Be ready." The Joes call in reinforcements and barricade the house where the calls were being received. Right at 12 PM, an old immigrant in overalls shows up. In a heavily accented voice, he declares: "I'm the Viper. I've come to vipe your vindows." The cryptic hints were all coincidences. A good laugh is had by all, and the writers have taken an old joke to new levels of taxpayer expense, stereotyping, cartoon violence, and pointlessness.
- That story is actually based on a well-known urban legend.
- An episode of Animaniacs which spoofed the Three Musketeers used the same Vindow Viper gag.
- At least Animaniacs is the sort of show where you'd expect a stupid pun to be the point of a whole short. GI Joe is normally more serious than that!
- The GI Joe writers lampshaded their crazy plots all the time:
LADY JAYE: Can you set (COBRA's latest superweapon) to self-destruct?
FLINT: I think so: Destro always uses the same basic layout.
DESTRO (entering just behind them): I'll remember that in the future, Joes!
- The Fairly OddParents, "Odd, Odd West": Timmy steals a deed to a ghost town "Dimmsdale Flats" from "Vicky the Kid" in order to save the town (a childhood memory of Dad's) from bulldozing, and gives it to his dad. The town still gets torn down anyway after Dad then sells it to the bulldozing people for $8, and Dad tells Timmy that he's realized that his childhood sucked (after spending a day in the local jail).
- Spongebob Squarepants, after 10 minutes' screen time of "Procrastination", frantically writes a 800-word report for Mrs. Puff's driving school on what not to do at a red light and runs off to school to send it in. He encounters Mrs. Puff who tells him two things: There's a field trip to a red light today, and the assignment has been canceled. Probably a good thing, since the resulting report (filled with things like "karate chopping the TV" and "shooting the breeze with the mailman") would probably get him an F if it actually mattered.
- Not that Spongebob can ever get a passing grade anyway.
- In another, Spongebob and Patrick start their own business selling chocolate door-to-door, and one customer in particular goes crazy on them, yelling "CHOCOLATE!" over and over, and chases them throughout the episode. The two otherwise have no luck getting rid of the chocolate. By the end, the customer finally has them where they can't escape, and then politely says, "I'd like to buy all your chocolate."
- The Sealab 2021 episode "7211" is pretty much an old Sealab 2020 episode redubbed exactly like before, with the crew helping repair the nuclear submarine Aquarius, captained by a man who held a grudge against Murphy. Sounds odd for an Adult Swim comedy, huh? Well, until the end, where the only joke of the episode has Aquarius ram into Sealab, blowing it up, and making all the work the crew did pointless... as well as stranding them at the bottom of the sea.
- The South Park episode "Stanley's Cup" involved Stan coaching a pee-wee hockey team. One of the kids has cancer, and requires a victory for the team to recover. At the end, after a grueling training, during which they believe they will be put against another pee-wee team, the team is instead pitted against the Detroit Red Wings and beaten horribly, the kid with cancer dies, and the episode ends with their opponents celebrating as if the episode had been about them, with one of them (for example) being congratulated by his hard-ass father.
- This is made even more frustrating when compared to the earlier episode "The Losing Edge", which not only was already a subversion of these movies (wrapped in an inversion), but it was much more clever and satirical about it.
- It's important to note that the episode "The Losing Edge" was also a commentary on some truly atrocious parental behavior during the 2004-05 Little League season and the lengths some parents will go to ensure their child's success, even to the point of disregard for their child's well being.
- In another South Park episode, Stan doesn't believe his vote between a Turd Sandwich and a Giant Douche for school mascot is important, and in the course of being shown the importance of voting he is exiled from the town, hunted down by P. Diddy and his posse (Vote or Die and all that) and tries to live with PETA until Diddy and his boys shoot them all. When he goes back and finally casts his vote, it turns out the result would've been the same if he had voted or not. He proclaims his vote didn't matter, and gets a speech about how it still was important. The news of PETA's death then reaches town and the old mascot is brought back instead, with the punchline "Ok, now your vote doesn't matter."
- Made brilliant by the fact that it was actually Stan's refusal to vote that really mattered. Might count as a Broken Aesop.
- Even more metaphorical, as in the end it's the actions of a single person (Stan or P. Diddy, depending on how you look at it) that renders the votes of everyone else null and void.
- A Looney Tunes short featuring Porky Pig had him being "hounded" by a stray dog throughout the picture. When he finally gets home, he sees a news report asking for the return of the dog and offering a big reward. Porky gets the dog (who reversed himself from jumping over a bridge) and head over to the mansion where the owner lives. The dog replaces himself with a toy dog while Porky isn't watching, and Porky is told that the dog is not the owner's, additionally saying that the missing dog was a talking dog. As Porky ponders over this revelation, the lost dog, who up to this moment didn't talk, lifts up Porky with his arms and says, "Well buddy, you've got yourself a dog!"
- The third Futurama movie had this when the entire place shifts into a fantasy world. The villains win and it's back to normal with NOTHING coming out of it.
- Of course, one might argue that the Professor gained the important knowledge of who his son actually was, something he learned in the fantasy world rather than the real world, although this was never really made perfectly explicit.
- The Weekenders, "Tickets": Tino spends the entire story agonizing on who (out of the other three) to take to a concert after winning two tickets for it. After he makes his choice, the two find out that the two slips they're holding... can be redeemed for 4 tickets, and thus all four get to enjoy it. Moral of the day: Always read the fine print! (BTW, Carver got picked.)
- In "Party Planning": The gang prepares for a party by taking dance lessons. "Lateral gravity" takes effect at the actual party, meaning that the boys and girls stay on opposite sides of the room the whole night and those lessons were a waste of time. At the end Tino notes how they walked away from this party with no humiliation.
- Codename Kids Next Door: "Operation ROBBERS" sees Numbuh 5 rounding up a bunch of kids who are robbing them of their homework, but then Numbuh 4 (fighting another robber) crashes into the bus they're on making her heroics meaningless as the robbers escape.
- Although, at the end of the episode, the villains turn in everyone else's homework in an attempt to get on the teacher's good side. (Since everyone else didn't even turn any in, but they turned in 20 something copies.) The teacher reads one paper, NUMBUH 4 ONE'S and the worst in the class, and goes ballistic, telling them she'd rather they turned in nothing at all. So in the end, the villains lose, even though the heroes' actions had nothing to do with it. At least directly.
- Ben 10 gets one in an episode where Ben breaks Gwen's computer and enters a wrestling competition to get the money to replace it. At the end of the episode, he discovers that the computer was never broken. Gwen had put a security system on the computer so it only looked like the computer was completely dead. Result? An utterly wasted episode.
- Also, the episode where Grandpa sets out to find the Sword of Ekchuah, in the Mayan temple. They fight off Enoch and his forces constantly through the episode and even a Mayan guardian alien type thing. At the end, however the sword turns to dust as soon as Enoch touches it. What a waste of time
- An episode of My Gym Partner's a Monkey had Adam and Jake joining the hall monitors. It turns out that the force is TOTALLY corrupt, useless and tries to get rid of Adam when he tries to stop the corruption. So Adam goes and tries to get rid of their Dirtnuts by bribing the truck driver not to get rid of them to stop them from being corrupt. However, the force has Dirtarts and then Adam is blamed for the corruption, since the bribe was caught on video so the force gets away scot free.
- Used beautifully in the "Winter" part of the Samurai Jack episode "Four Seasons of Death". A tribe of yeti-like humanoids harvest a giant crystal from a cave and forge it into an Infinity Plus One Sword. They do battle with each other for the right to wield it, the most powerful of their tribe coming out on top. He stands on a mountain pass, bearing the mighty sword, and awaits Jack's arrival. Jack arrives... and defeats the yeti-man with one hit, shattering the sword. He walks on, oblivious to the effort the tribe had expended in trying to stop him.
- Done again in an episode focuses on a group of Bounty Hunters that gather and discuss their plans and reasons for going after Jack. When the moment of truth arrives, Jack defeats them all in the time it takes for a drop of melting ice to fall.
- One episode of Kim Possible features Kim, Monique, and Ron on a mission to recover some top secret clothing designs. When they finally return the designs, at the end of the episode, the designer says he changed his mind.
- Another episode features Ron going on a global trek to find an overdue library book he borrowed from Kim. In the process, he trounces the plans (and hideouts) of several of Kim's major enemies...only to eventually discover the book was in his backpack the whole damn time.
- An episode of Talespin invokes this trope TWICE in the same story; Baloo and Becky meet a fellow who claims to be a spy, and who has to get to Thembria (a fictional Soviet Union analogue country) as soon as possible. Baloo isn't convinced he's telling the truth, but Becky insists he's a spy because "look at his trench coat! That's a SPY'S trench coat!" After risking their lives to get him to Thembria, our heroes discover that he's not a spy, he's a mailman, assigned to deliver a package to the Chairman. But it turns out said package had been switched by mistake; instead of a gift of rare expensive fishing worms, the Chairman is going to get a frilly jewelry box. Fearing an international incident, Baloo and Becky reluctantly risk their lives AGAIN to try and switch the boxes, only to fail in the end. But it turns out the Chairman mistook the jewelry box for an antique tackle box, so no harm was done in the end; and as Baloo points out, even LESS harm would have been done if they had never gotten involved in the first place.
- One example is the Family Guy episode "The Juice is Loose", where Peter meets OJ Simpson, and, at first, attempts to prove that he murdered his wife and Ron Brown. But then, when he finds out, he despairs that he is innocent and can never get away from the accusations. So Peter lets him stay at his house, but the family is suspecious of him. The entire episode is set up as a twist on the normal narrative about OJ, with him actually being innocent. At the end, the town comes in an angry mob to kick him out, but then O.J. makes an emotional speech about how nobody is perfect, and we shouldn't judge people for making a few mistakes. It works, and the whole town is on his side. But then, he stabs and kills three people for absolutely no reason, and runs off. After which, Peter just nonchalantly says "Oh, I guess he did do it.", and the episode just ends.
- Transformers Animated episode "Decepticon Air" focuses on the Elite Guard returning to Cybertron with the Decepticon Prisoners. Sentinel Prime orders Jazz to fly at full speed through an ion storm in order to get there faster. What results is Swindle, who was previously Mode Locked, becoming free, who frees the other Decepticons, who take over the ship. This leads to Optimus Prime, answering Sentinel's distress signal, transwarping onto the ship as the Autobots and Decepticons fight which leads Lugnut being knocked away and Swindle escaping with parts to the Elite Guard's ship. The episode ends with Optimus being dropped off back on Earth (Implying that it took them even longer to get back), and Sentinel's coronation as Magnus on Cybertron. What makes this a Shaggy Dog Story is that not only did taking the shortcut to get back to Cyberton become meaningless, but they're now missing two Decepticons.
- The Penguins Of Madagascar, "Crown Fools": Skipper accidentally bumps King Julien's crown into a sewer and has to go in after it. After having to fight a giant rat for it, Julien discards the crown for being smudged and asks for his replacement crown.
- Most Squidbillies episodes end up like this.
Web Original
Other
Real Life
- The balloon boy hoax: a balloon built for science experiments flew off, and the police were tracking it over several hours because they thought a six-year old boy was trapped in there. It turned out the boy was hiding in a box in his home the whole time. Not only that, but the family staged the entire thing just to get on TV.
- It's up to you to make sure your life isn't.
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