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"And this is a 6 from somebody's house, or is it a 9? Ya don't know!"
If you turn the figure 6 upside down, you get a 9, and vice versa. We all know that.
This trope is about those cases where confusion between these two numbers becomes a plot point. The most common (but not the only) scenarios:
- Causes some sort of confusion in the plot, that doesn't allow it to advance (like the example below).
- It's used for The Reveal or a Plot Twist. Often, but not necessarily, is the Number of the Beast.
For example:
Alice is a detective and has learned from a phone call that weird things are happening in Apartment 6. She goes over there, investigates, but finds nothing. But the phone calls continue, so Alice goes again to to Apartment 6, only to find out that the apartment where she was investigating was number 9, but the "9" somehow was unscrewed before and looked like a 6.
Expect SPOILERS
Examples
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General
- This is why you'll occasionally see a line beneath these two digits, or their glyphs are otherwise distinct.
- In many schools in the United States, students are taught to write their 9s with straight lines, making it look like a lowercase sans serif 'q'.
Advertisement
- Star Trek: Voyager had an ad for its 30th anniversary episode where they showed the number 1966 (Star Trek TOS's first year) and rotated the first 6 into a 9.
- In The Line Of Fire used this quite well in one of their trailers
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Anime and Manga
- In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the title character notices a '90' tattooed on her arm that wasn't there before. It isn't until she time leaps a few more times that she realizes it was the number of leaps she had left, and it was actually '06'.
Comics
Film
- In National Lampoons European Vacation, the Grizwolds spend some time with German-speaking relatives. As they leave, they slam the door and the 6 swings down and becomes a 9, they'd been staying with strangers and didn't realize it.
- In End Of Days, the Number of the Beast is really 999.
- Something like that happened in the French/British Film La Grande Vadrouille, set during World War II, with hotel rooms 6 and 9.
- In the film version of Minority Report, there was a scene where John Anderton gets Crow's hotel room wrong due to the figure 9 or 6 having a screw loose.
- This happens to Lenny in Memento, causing him to bash a random motel resident in the face.
- In The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Pluto interrogated the body clinic specialist to find the identity of the crime boss and was given "WZW" initials as a clue, but found no results upon searching. Until realizing it was read upside-down and found the result with the initials "MZM".
- The plot of Ruang Talok 69 is set off when the 6 on a flat door keeps flipping accidentally to resemble a 9, resulting in all kinds of mayhem.
Literature
- In The Mona Lisa Mystery, Jessica, staying in room 9, sees someone enter her room at night. Turns out that her roommate had earlier slammed the door, so that one screw came out and the 9 fell upside-down.
Live Action TV
- In the How I Met Your Mother episode "Bad News", the numbers 50 to 1 are hidden in the episode as a countdown until Marshall receives the news of his father's death. A file folder Barney is holding is marked with the number 9, and later the folder is picked up upside down, now representing the number 6 in the countdown.
- In a Halloween episode of Quantum Leap, Sam leaps into the body of a horror writer whose street address is 669. Near the climax, the 9 flips upside down to reveal that the devil is amongst them.
- Parodied in an early episode of Saturday Night Live, one sketch was a parody of The Omen. Late in the sketch, one character accuses the child, Damien, of being spawned from Satan, and they should check for the Number of the Beast on his forehead. One character checks by standing behind the child, and declares that everything is okay with him, because the number on his forehead is 999.
- Cheers: The bar has a raffle using numbered pingpong balls. Number 99 gets chosen, but Sam points out that the 99 looks like a 66. Hilarity Ensues.
- Parodied in 3rd Rock from the Sun:
Harry: "Dick, I've lost all feeling in the left side of my body. [looks at can upside down] Could somebody please call "1-1-6"?
- In episode 9 of The Unusuals, the cops find out that the perpetrator of the case they're investigating lives in apartment #6. They go to the apartment, and find the wrong person entirely. Naturally, the apartment they knocked on was actually #9, and the nail had fallen out of the top of the sign. (Cue chase scene, set to "Tunak Tunak Tun", as the actual perp has had plenty of time to prepare to flee...)
- In a short sketch on The Benny Hill Show, Benny as a jealous husband breaks into a hotel room and shoots the man & woman in the bed. Then he takes another look at them, looks at the room number, rotates the 6 to a 9, and sheepishly exits.
- In an episode of cult The Seventies British cop show The Sweeney, the "6 with a screw missing turns into a 9" gag is used in a scene where a very respectable family are eating dinner when armed policemen crash into their home, and are just as surprised as they are because they were expecting to meet armed criminals. After the mistake is cleared up, the officers leave with apologies and the family calmly return to their meal. Moments later, a crash is heard in the distance, and the father comments that it sounds as though they've found number 9.
- In an episode of Diagnosis: Murder, a woman found a dead mime in the house she was staying at. She then noticed the 6 in the house number had a nail missing, making it a 9, and she deduced that whoever killed and left the mime got the wrong house. It turns out it was a Red Herring.
- Doctor Who episode "Terror of the Vervoids":
Rudge: Uh, no. The other way round, I think. You are in cabin 9, and that is where you will find your luggage, Professor.
- The Electric Company: A sketch about a lucky number versus an unlucky number.
- Kutner tries to pull a fast one on Dr. House by flipping his candidate number (6) over once he'd originally been eliminated.
Music
- Jimi Hendrix referenced this trope in his song "If 6 Were 9". In 1994, a group called The Beautiful People created a club-mix called "If 60s were 90s".
Other
- Comes out many times in riddles like in Riddle 58 here, as seen in the solution.
- Episode 4 of Retarded Animal Babies featured a fake TV screen as a bonus feature, and selecting Channel 666 will lead to a video of Satan eating children from a bowl. Channel 999 is this upside down.
- Victor Borge, during his Phonetic Punctuation sketch, would pull out a book and read a passage. "It starts on page nine." He would look at the book, realize he's holding it upside-down, turn it around and say, "Page six."
Radio
- In Old Harry's Game, there is a bit where Satan received a phone call intended for the emergency services because the caller had the phone upside down.
Video Games
- Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors makes the Number 9 a plot point by having June's bracelet [a 6] actually being a 9, which allows her to open any of the doors in the game, making it an important hint to who Zero actually is.
- In the fifth case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, a piece of evidence contains a note that reads "6-7S 12/2." However, the note was apparently written upside down and it actually reads "2/21 SL-9," tying it to another case altogether.
- In Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), a Timed Mission puts police detectives Carla and Tyler in a hotel attempting to find the protagonist, Lucas, who is hiding in room 369. The player controls Carla/Tyler, but the first "room 369" you enter has someone else inside; the lettering on the door un-sticks and swivels to reveal that they're actually at room 366. The mistake gives Lucas just enough time to get his own objective done and hide.
- Pops up every so often in the Professor Layton games. If a puzzle requires you to manipulate a set of numbered tokens which can be freely rotated, it's probably a good idea to assume this trope is in play.
Western Animation
- An episode of Rugrats involved Tommy being kidnapped as a result of criminals succumbing to this trope.
- In Veggie Tales, Larry the Cucumber never got his pizza in one Silly Song because the house number (16) on his door was broken.
- When April O'Neil of the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series was posing as a news reporter, she wore a badge saying she represented Channel 9. When it was damaged, it flipped down, making her a reporter for Channel 6, referencing the original series. One of several shout-outs in that episode.
- In Hey Arnold!, after Arnold visits Eugene in a hospital room from a bike accident, the loose screw on the 9 of the door's room number causes it become a 6. Eugene therefore gets his tonsils and his spleen removed by mistake.
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