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Strong Sad: And this part here represents Rondell's transformation into a new man. Homestar Runner: I thought you said that was just an accident that happened because you loaded the film wrong.
The preservation of ad libs, improvisations, and the occasional accident or mistimed what-have-you for dramatic or comic effect, sometimes at the cost of continuity.
These are often some of the most memorable scenes, for better or for worse, due to their spontaneity.
Differs slightly from attaching Hilarious Outtakes to the ends of shows. Related to No Fourth Wall. See also Rule Of Funny, Rule Of Cool.
If the script and direction is directed entirely towards being spontaneous see Improv and Harpo Does Something Funny.
See also Enforced Method Acting, The Show Must Go On, and Good Bad Bugs.
Compare Sure Why Not, Ascended Meme.
Examples
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Anime
- It's not dialogue, but when the Digimon Tamers head writer saw that Jenrya's little sister was included in the opening song's shot of characters holding up their Digivices, he decided to make her a Tamer; when he saw that the character designer had drawn so many pictures of her infamous "Terriermon torture," he decided "it would be criminal" not to include scenes of it. Shiuchon and Terriermon even have an Image Song together.
- In-universe example in Midori Days: Seiji and his gang of delinquents get hired to play minor parts in a movie starring their favorite actor. During the final scene, the hero is mortally wounded. The boys are supposed to have a big mourning scene as he dies, but get a little too into the moment, and beat the crap out of the guys who "shot" him in revenge first. The director decides to keep it.
- When Norio Wakamoto was brought in to record the voice of Chiyo-chan's "father", all of his scenes had already been scripted and animated. While he kept to the scripted lines, his delivery invariably ran longer than the animation (in one case, if this troper recalls correctly, over a full minute longer). Rather than rerecord his lines, they reanimated the scenes to match them, because he's Norio Wakamoto, bitch.
- The Lupin III special "Crisis in Tokyo" isn't a particularly funny movie in the native Japanese, but the dub had a ton of ad-libbing done by the actors (though not to the point of it being a Gag Dub), particularly Christopher Sabat who voiced Jigen. It worked, it's one of the funniest Lupin movies ever released in the states.
- The Funimation dubs of the Lupin III films and specials feature a lot of this.
Film
- In the film version of Titanic, there was a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio telling Kate Winslet to get on the daybed in preparation for him sketching her nude portrait, saying "Get on the bed — errr, couch!" According to the director's commentary, the original line had no reference to a bed, but DiCaprio's nervous flubbing of the line seemed just too perfect to leave out.
- Also, supposedly, when the ship is sinking and Rose comes to save Jack, when he jumps in the rising water, he says, "Shit, that's cold!"—apparently, unscripted. Rose goes "GAAAAASP!" in the same scene. This was also a little Enforced Method Acting, as the actors were told the tank of water would be warmer than what it was.
- Robin Williams is also notorious for ad libbing a large part of his dialog — it's said that often the writers ended up saying, "Well, that's funnier, let's go with it" to his improvisation on-stage. Good Morning Vietnam and Patch Adams also feature examples of Williams ad-libbing. Mrs. Doubtfire actually starts with his character, a professional voice actor, quitting his job because they won't allow him to "comment on the situation."
- More specifically, they won't allow him to comment on the cartoon's message that if someone offers you a cigarette, you should take it.
- Allegedly, a significant portion of a monologue from Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams' character is counseling Matt Damon's on relationships and trying to give him the courage to go further with dating was ad-libbed. This is particularly true in a bit where Williams is describing his dead wife and her tendency to be flatulent when sleeping, which is why Will responds by laughing almost hysterically - Matt Damon himself had no idea what was coming.
- His last words ("Son of a bitch, he stole my line") were also improvised.
- During filming of The Birdcage, Robin Williams and Nathan Lane were so thoroughly into ad-libbing and bouncing off one another that they were forced to promise they'd do one take exactly as scripted before they were allowed, in subsequent takes, to say whatever they wanted.
- In addition to the scene where Robin Williams trips carrying the pot of soup. This was not supposed to happen, but how hilariously appropriate it was to the mood made it into the film. If you pay enough attention, the actor playing Agador nearly loses it at Robin falling.
- There were huge sections of the script for Disney's Aladdin that simply said "And now Robin says something funny."
- In fact, there was over 16 hours of recorded material for Aladdin that had been ad libbed by Williams - most of it far too rude to be allowed in a children's film.
- Actor Robert Prosky described his approach for the restaurant scene in Mrs Doubtfire as "hold on for dear life" since he never knew exactly what was going to come out of Williams' mouth during any given take.
- A lot of Jack Sparrow's mannerisms were not actually written into the script, but improvised by Johnny Depp. Sparrow's epic ending line "Now, bring me that horizon" was also an improv.
- In fact, Depp's whole demeanor differs greatly from the creators' original vision of the character; he was intended as a far more conventional dashing rogue. When Depp interpreted the character differently, Michael Eisner even went so far as to say he was ruining the film. Depp's response was essentially "Trust me or fire me."
- Depp said himself that he chose to add the 'campness' as he thought that the other actors applying for the role were better than him. He chose to just go crazy and have fun.
- Apparently the reference to Will being a eunuch was also an improvised line that was kept in the script, and expanded upon as a running gag.
- Also, Jack's statement that he used "human hair - from my back" was an ad-lib. You can see Bloom trying not to laugh, and McNally chuckling in the movie.
- Another example is in the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Will says to the other characters "I'm not leaving without Jack!" while getting on the Black Pearl. When he sees that Jack is on the other side of the beach getting chased by a large group of natives, he says, "Never mind, let's go!" This line didn't make it into the movie (because they did indeed wait for Jack, more or less), but its creation was actually from a blooper where Bloom flubbed his line, and "Never mind, let's go!" was an effort to just keep going and say the line again without hesitation. This factoid can be found on the Dead Man's Chest DVD commentary.
- Charlie Chaplin was renowned - and hated by his crew - for this. He would often begin the shoot with no script, instead making up and trying stuff on the fly until something worked... Which some days, wouldn't happen. He also had a bad temper which showed when he got frustrated not being able to find just the right gag.
- Of course, Charlie Chaplin is still Charlie Chaplin. There's a set-piece gag in The Great Dictator where Chaplin's barber shaves a customer in time with the (frighteningly fast) Hungarian dance on the radio. The intention was to do the shave repeatedly and then patch it together with the music in editing. Chaplin had the music playing on-set, though. Result: The shave was filmed perfect in one take. The first one.
- Buster Keaton generally worked from an outline instead of a complete script, and was famous for playing baseball with his crew while waiting for inspiration to strike.
- In Three Ages, Buster attempts to jump from one rooftop to another using an improvised springboard and doesn't quite make it. Instead of reshooting they kept the fall and created a sequence involving multiple awnings, a drainpipe and a firefighters' pole to get the character to ground level in one piece.
- The actor playing the drunken uncle in Its A Wonderful Life is accompanied by a loud crash on one of his exits; the noise was actually caused by a grip tripping over a prop table and scattering its contents, but the timing was so serendipitous that director Frank Capra decided to use the take anyway.
- The way I heard it was that they were GOING to re-take it, but the actor playing Uncle Billy shouted "I'm alright! I'm aallllll....right." That saved the take, as it made it look like he'd just done an off-screen collision with a garbage can.
- There was supposed to be much more dialogue in the scene where George and Mary are both talking to Sam over the phone—but that long kiss was so much better than the dialogue Capra scripted that it got used instead. Technically, that might be "Throw It Out" as much as "Throw It In," but it's close enough.
- In the building and loan panic scene, the woman asking for $17.50 wasn't originally in the script. Capra fed the actress the line before shooting without telling James Stewart, so he could seem genuinely surprised when she said it. He was, and the grateful kiss afterward was an in-character ad-lib on Stewart's part.
- In the film The Fellowship of the Ring, Ian McKellen as Gandalf accidentally hit his head on the ceiling while entering Bilbo's residence. This was kept in the final cut as a joke.
- In the second film, The Two Towers, Aragorn comes upon a scene that seems to indicate that two of the other characters are dead. On the extended DVD, they show several takes of him snarling in helpless anger as he kicks an Orcish helmet. Then, they try one more take...and he collapses to his knees, screaming in fury, grief — and pain. Mortensen broke two toes kicking the helmet and decided to use it. They finished the shot, and then brought the medics in.
- In the same vein, in First Blood, protagonist John Rambo jumps off a cliff into a tree, then falls down, hitting branches on the way down, to hit the ground with a blood-curdling scream. That's because Stallone broke three ribs doing the stunt.
- In Silence Of The Lambs, Hannibal Lecter's famous hissing was completely improvised; indeed, was enough of a joke that the actors didn't expect it to be kept in the film. You'll notice that there's a nice long pause between "A nice Chianti" and the hiss, presumably so that it could be cut without damaging the line.
- No surprise that the director decided it struck the right tone, as Jodie Foster was quite genuinely creeped out.
- Additionally, Hopkins improvised the bit where he briefly mocks Clarice's accent during his Hannibal Lecture; this overlaps with Enforced Method Acting because he did not inform Foster that he was going to do this, so the surprise on her face is genuine.
- Several scenes in The Film Of The Series of Bewitched were directly scripted from development-period improvisations between Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, including, in an amusing recursion, the scene where Isabel and Jack "improvise" an interview with a witch. According to Nora Ephron's DVD Commentary, this scene was essentially unchanged from the original improv, right down to Kidman's line, "Do we have to keep doing this?"
- X-Men The Movie: Reports suggest that the actual script of the movie didn't have Wolverine saying "bub" but Hugh Jackman, as a fan of the character, threw it in.
- Some reports state that he actually 'threw it in' many, many times. They just only kept some of them.
- When Wolverine meet Professor X, he says "What do they call you — Wheels?" where the Wheels part was ad-libbed. The scripted line was "What do they call you - Baldie?"
- Ray Park meanwhile channels Darth Maul, for the hell of it, by twirling the pipe like a lightsaber.
- Not quite. That twirl is actually Ray Park's "signature move," he's been known to put into just about everything he can.
- More dramatic than comedic, but after the famous lobby fight scene in The Matrix, there is one final shot of the collateral damage in the lobby; a piece of one of the pillars collapses, which hadn't been originally intended, but it looked cool, so they kept it.
- According to the director, much of the humor in Death at a Funeral was based on deliberately exploiting this trope. He explained that scenes would often be repeated until something funny went wrong, and then that take was used.
- The "You know how I know you're gay?" scene from The 40-Year Old Virgin sprang from an improvisation about a completely different subject.
- Lots of scenes in Apatow's movies are improvised by the actors.
- Groucho Marx did this quite frequently; many Marx Brothers movies have noticeable blips where the makers shaved off a few seconds to make room for things like the Animal Crackers speech which begins: "Pardon me for a second while I have a strange interlude."
- Speaking of the Marx Brothers, there was a story that some scripts simply had "Harpo Does Something Funny" because his improvisations were often better than what the writers could come up with.
- Their first major film (The Cocoanuts) had to be shot with multiple cameras because every take they did was different, so normal single camera techniques didn't work. The "viaduct" gag was not in the original script of the play the film was based on.
- More of a funny mistake than an intentional improvisation, the film Hot Fuzz includes a scene where Simon Skinner, Timothy Dalton's intentionally-played up bad guy who is in fact merely a Fake Boss raises his glass and for a split second looks right down the barrel of the camera. Director Edgar Wright decided to leave the outtake in, and even timed the sound of a bell in the background to accompany it. Additionally, Danny Butterman's "I'm not made of eyes" was ad-libbed by the actor.
- On a related note, Nick Frost ad-libs during the scene in Shaun of the Dead, where Ed describes the pub regulars in an effort to cheer Shaun up. There are several different takes of the scene where he describes the old woman as an ex-pornstar, all apparently unscripted. Simon Pegg's laughter is genuine as a result of this.
- The most famous example of all time:
Rick: Here's lookin' at you, kid.
- Borat: the naked wrestling scene. Sacha Baron Cohen told the director that if he ran short on oxygen from having a 300lb man sit on his chest he'd hit the mattress three times fast. If you look you'll find he does that about halfway through the fight.
- Annie Hall: the scene where Alvy sneezes, blowing away a boxful of his friend's $2000/oz cocaine ran much longer, but was cut back because the laughter from the audience made the rest of the dialog inaudible. The sneeze was real, and unrehearsed.
- Aliens: "Game over, man! Game over!"
- A example that has become a legendary scene: Indiana Jones shooting the swordsman. Harrison Ford had diarrhea problems and wasn't up to fight him with his whip as originally scripted. A version of the story exist that Ford improvised the scene while filming. A slightly more plausible version says that Spielberg said sarcastically to Ford that the only way the scene could get shortened is if he just shot the guy. The crew began laughing at the idea and they worked it out.
- One from Star Wars is that when Han's reply to Princess Leia saying that she loves him was originally supposed to be "I love you too," but Ford ad-libbed "I know" because he felt it to be more like the character. The director Irvin Kershner said they had ran through several different lines because the "I love you too" line felt too lovey-dovey for someone like the Loveable Rogue Han Solo, so eventually he just asked Ford to say what felt natural. Kershner loved the result—"I know" was the final take, at least before lunch—but George Lucas was afraid it was a Level Breaker. Lucas was proven right when airing for a test audience - but the audience also felt the line was classic Han Solo, so he agreed to leave it in.
- In A New Hope when Luke and Han were rescuing Leia disguised as stormtroopers and Han was forced to respond via radio to their commander, Ford intentionally did not memorize his lines and only briefly looked at what he was supposed to say. So while the scene as written is supposed to be Han improvising, "We're all fine here, thank you... How are you?" Ford played it panicked and grimacing at the last line. Again, it was good enough to keep, and provides a great bit of comic relief in the middle of a tense sequence. Harrison Ford just seems to be a magnet for these.
- Xkcd shares some of Ford's other improvs that didn't quite make it into the final cut
 .
- Apparently Luke's remark "I can't see a thing in this helmet!" regarding his Stormtrooper disguise, was made by Mark Hamill after he thought the cameras had stopped rolling.
- This led to another Throw It In moment, when the Stormtrooper smacks his head on the door.
- A moment that's so famous, recent DVD releases apparently add a "thud" sound effect when it happens. You just can't get the help these days, can you Lord Vader?
- And Jango Fett gets banged slightly by a descending ship door in Attack of the Clones in homage of the above, even though that scene is done in CGI.
- It might be noted here that one of the alleged explanations for the difference in dialogue quality between the 1977 Star Wars film and, well, the remainder of the other five films is that a lot of the dialogue was either ad-libbed or "improved" on by Harrison Ford and the other actors more or less on the spot.
- Alan Rickman, who plays Big Bad terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard, when he can't get the information from a character, shoots him in cold blood without second thought. Later, he tells the rest of the terrified hostages, "I wanted this to be easy, simple, but nooo, your Mr. Takagi couldn't go along, so he won't be joining us for the rest of his life." This line was an ad-lib by Rickman.
- Not a Throw It In, but related; when the filmmakers heard Rickman's American accent when pretending to be a hostage they quickly added extended dialogue for him.
- In Monty Python's Meaning of Life. Michael Palin ad-libbed the line "I didn't even eat the salmon mousse!" Of course, this does destroy the logic of the scene. As if it matters.
- Anyone looking for logic, in any form, in a Monty Python production is almost certainly Doing It Wrong.
- In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the "He hasn't got shit all over him" line was one of the only improvised lines in the entire movie.
- The Right Hand Cat in the opening scene of The Godfather was not in the script. It was just some random stray cat that Marlon Brando befriended, and argued Coppola into letting him work it into the scene. And it works.
- In the same movie Lenny Montana, playing Don Corleone's henchman Luca Brasi, actually flubbed the line where he congratulates Don Corleone on his daughter's wedding. Coppola liked it, and inserted a scene earlier in the film, where Brasi is rehearsing his congratulation.
Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter... 's wedding... on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child be a masculine child. I pledge my ever-ending loyalty.
- The famous classical music from 2001: A Space Odyssey was just supposed to be a placeholder used while they edited the movie. But Stanley Kubrick liked it so much that he kept it in as the movie's score.
- Cogsworth in Beauty And The Beast originally just mentioned flowers and chocolates when advising the Beast about what present to give Belle. David Ogden Stiers ad-libbed the line "Promises you don't intend to keep."
- In the film Armageddon Bruce Willis improvised the famous line: "The President of The United States just asked us to save the world...anyone want to say 'no?'" Michael Bay liked it so much he made sure they put it in the trailer.
- A surprising amount of the jokes in Superbad were purely ad-libbed by the cast, usually until something was funny enough to cause the actors to break down laughing, and thusly added to the script.
- In the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, when they're whipping up a batch of anti-mutagen, each of the turtles reacts to how bad it smells. The last one is Mikey, pizza in hand, and as he reacts to the smell, the piece of pizza falls into the mixture. You can tell it's a mistake left in by the way Mikey frantically looks at the camera as everyone tries to cover it up.
- In Spider-Man 3, Topher Grace ad-libbed the quip, "My Spider Sense is tingling, If You Know What I Mean." Apparently, he also added all sorts of jokes that didn't make it in, such as a needlessly creepy "I've just upgraded from a vanilla to a strawberry!" addressed at the red-headed Mary Jane.
- In The Hours, when Meryl Streep goes to the sink and turns it on, the faucet explodes and shoots water up into the air; Meryl just went with it, and they kept the take.
- "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
- Certain short, one-or-two-minute scenes in the Austin Powers movies were edited together from literally hours of footage of the actors improvising off each other. One scene of note was the initial scene at the Evils' table in Goldmember, where Seth Green and Mike Myers just kept on playing until the cameras ran out of film.
- In Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Phoebus naming his horse Achilles was an ad-lib by Kevin Kline, first cropping up in his line "Achilles, heel!"
- In Serenity Mal's "Faster! Faster would be better!" is such a Whedon line. It turns out it was ad-libbed, when Nathan Fillion was asked just to "say something Mal would say."
- The rather strange opening sequence of A Knights Tale was filmed on the second unit as a joke, and then the director decided to use it as an opening sequence. Later in the film, a moment happened where the crowd was supposed to cheer, and didn't until one of the main characters did. This happened because the extras were all Czech, didn't understand English, and at first actually didn't realize they were supposed to cheer. It too was just kept in.
- Also, in one shot where in response to how to beat William, Adhemar's page says that "With a lance, on a horse..." "...he's unbeatable." This shot was actually the result of a cameraman not realizing he was supposed to be doing a close-up until right as the action began.
- In Give My Regards To Broad Street, many of Ringo Starr's lines are ad-libs. Possibly the majority.
Ringo:: Is it cold in here, or are we just practicing to be Canadians?
- Peter Sellers often improvised on set, though he was more careful than most to do so in character. Stanley Kubrick used three cameras to shoot his Dr. Strangelove scenes so the best material could be edited together; most famously, much of the hotline telephone monologue is said to be improvised, as is the behavior of his Evil Hand in the second-to-last scene.
- The most spectacular Sellers example might be The Party, which was mostly improvised from an outline provided to him and the other actors with the director's help. In Being There, his response to the television producer's declaration of how many people will be watching him and the producer's reaction are also ad libs.
- Speaking of Peter Sellers, according to IMDB, Inspector Clouseau's "rit of fealous jage" line in A Shot In The Dark was an actual slip of the tongue by Sellers. It was so Clouseau-esque, however, that the director kept it.
- Another Strangelove example: General Turgidson's tumble in the War Room was unscripted and accidental.
- Most of R. Lee Ermey's dialogue in Full Metal Jacket was improvised, thus making him one of the very, very few actors allowed to go off-script in a Kubrick film. Allegedly, after the first take featuring the line "I'll bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around!" Kubrick approached Ermey and asked what the term meant. Ermey explained. Kubrick's reply was something to the effect of "Oh. Do some more of that."
- Malcolm McDowell also claims Alex's use of the song "Singin' in the Rain" during the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange was another improvisation on his part which Kubrick approved. During rehearsal, the scene had not been working as scripted, so Kubrick told McDowell to try dancing. While trying this, McDowell spontaneously began singing the song. Kubrick realized it worked and immediately left the set to call New York and secure the rights to the song.
- The crowd rushing the stage during the "Pinball Wizard" number in Tommy was not scripted, in one of the most spectacular "throw it ins" this troper's read of.
- Most of the dialogue in Iron Man was ad-libbed with encouragement from director Jon Favreau who approved of the "naturalistic feel." The film was subjected to so many numerous re-writes that the script changed daily. In the end, scenes were shot with a skeletal script outlining important plot points and action with the actors creating the lines as they went. Robert Downey Jr., who joked about balling up the script and throwing it against the wall on numerous television appearances, was credited for improvising many of the movie's notable moments, including Tony Stark's speech for the "Jericho" demonstration and getting the reporters to sit on the floor at the press conference.
- In the romantic classic An Affair to Remember, several of the dry-witted exchanges between Terry and Nickie were ad-libbed by Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.
- In The Dark Knight, the Joker clapping sarcastically with everyone while in his cell when Gordon was promoted to Commissioner was an improvisation by Heath Ledger that Nolan immediately told the camera crew to keep filming.
- The Joker was supposed to walk out of the exploding hospital without flinching. When the secondary explosives didn't go off, Heath Ledger was confused. He fiddled with the detonator, THEN it exploded, visibly shocking him. Note the hand that quickly pulls him into the school bus.
- In Citizen Kane, Joseph Cotten mispronounced the word "criticism" and quickly corrected himself, due to his exhaustion in acting in the ambitious film at the same time that he was starring in The Philadelphia Story on Broadway. Since his character was drunk in the scene Wells decided to use that take, and in fact you can see that he is initially surprised and then pleased by the mistake.
- Probably the most bizarre example on this page: this gargantuan Level Breaker from Shark Attack 3 Megalodon was a John Barrowman ad-lib, to try and make his co-star laugh. They "kept it in the freaking movie!". Why? Well, honestly, what did they have to lose?
- In Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, one stunt involved a motorcycle hitting an embankment, whereupon the stuntman was to flip over the handlebars and land on his back on padding in a standard stunt move. The stunt went wrong, the stuntman flipped head-over-heels two or three times, and wound up breaking both legs. The scene made it into the final film without reshooting, because it was that awesome.
- The lineup scene in The Usual Suspects was scripted as a serious scene, but the actors didn't play it as such. Bryan Singer was initially pissed off about it, but ended up using some of the funniest takes in the final film.
- Similarly, Fenster's bizarre mumbling accent was entirely improvised by Benicio del Toro, who felt the character as written was boring and one-dimensional. With the change, it ended up being del Toro's first breakout role.
- And in the scene where Redfoot the Fence flicks a cigarette into Mc Manus' face, the reaction is entirely genuine: he was supposed to be aiming for the chest.
- Obscure example: in the French movie Il y a des jours et des lunes, a priest who acts in amateur plays is at one point complimented on his acting skills. The actor playing the priest was supposed to answer with a joking "You're telling me you want to be my agent?" but flubbed the line into "You're telling me you want to be my apostle?" When he realized, he started laughing hysterically but tried to stay in character by apologizing and talking about Freudian slips and blasphemy before repeating the real line. The director decided to keep it because the slip was just too good.
- In all of the Muppets movies beginning with A Muppet Christmas Carol, Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat have been presented as a comic double-act. This is because of the friendship of their performers Dave Goelz and Steve Whitmire.
- In Star Trek II The Wrath Of Khan, the design of the Starship Reliant was not supposed to look like it did in the movie: the visual effects team sent the design sketch to producer Harve Bennett for approval, and he signed off on the sketch upside-down. The vis-effects people realised that it actually looked better upside-down, and was more distinguished from the Enterprise with the nacelles angled down rather than up, so they built the model according to the "upside-down" view. That design of starship has been used in subsequent movies and shows.
- In Star Trek III The Search For Spock, when Kirk learns the Klingons have murdered his son he seems to be so deep in shock he completely misses his chair and falls on the floor. Director Leonard Nimoy wasn't sure if Bill Shatner simply made it up or if he really missed the chair, but he felt that it was perfect for the scene and left it in.
- Pretty much all of Bill Murray's dialogue in Tootsie is supposedly improvised.
- According to the DVD trivia, half the dialogue in Ghostbusters, including the famous "Twinkie" scene, were completely ad-libbed by the cast.
- According to the DVD info for Black Knight, one of the female lead's faceplants was entirely unintentional, but kept in because it looked awesome.
- While he was writing Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson accidentally mixed up two words while writing dialogue about Little Bill's cheating wife. He decided to leave it in, as Little Bill is angry when he says the line and would have mixed the words up.
- Norman Mailer directed a small number of films where he threw in unplanned bits:
- In Wild 90, an improvisational movie, about twenty-five minutes of the soundtrack became muffled due to a technical error. Mailer decided to release the movie with the soundtrack muffled, rather than redub it, saying it "sounds like everybody is talking through a jockstrap."
- During the filming of Maidstone, a movie about a director attempting to become President, Rip Torn attempted to hit Mailer over the head with a hammer. The two of them then fought viciously, all while the cameras rolled. The fight appeared in the movie.
- While making Tough Guys Don't Dance, Ryan O'Neal gave a poor line reading which Mailer put into the movie, over the protests of various people, including O'Neal himself, because he felt the poor reading added something to the picture. See it for yourself here.
- In Young Frankenstein, Marty Feldman started covertly switching his prosthetic "Igor hump" from shoulder to shoulder between scenes, until someone on the production crew finally noticed, and a bit was added where Frederick notices the change on-camera. Also, the "cat hit with a dart" sound-effect was Mel Brooks's on the spot improvisation.
- According to the commentary track on Spaceballs, Rick Moranis ad-libbed the entire "Dark Helmet playing with his action figures" scene.
- While filming The Princess Diaries, Anne Hathaway slipped and fell on her butt while filming a scene on some bleachers. Garry Marshall put that cut in the movie as her character was a Dojikko anyway. You'll notice Heather Matarazzo briefly slips out of character when this happens.
- In the 2004 Dawn of the Dead film, an early scene filmed with a fixed camera on a car roof as it drives around the wrecked apocalyptic neighborhood almost caused an accident when the car drove in front of another vehicle, forcing the other driver to slam their brakes and barely avoid hitting it. Everyone agreed that it added a great touch to the apocalyptic feel of the sequence.
- The scene from Mystery Men in which a burning trash can suddenly flares up behind the Spleen who jumps in surprise, then sheepishly says "Excuse me" to the other characters was a total improvisation on the part of Paul Reubens. Apparently, one of the workmen on the set didn't know the garbage can was a prop that would be later set on fire, and had thrown a disposable lighter into it.
- The word "Shpadoinkle" from Cannibal The Musical was originally a placeholder for the song "It's a Shpadoinkle Day," but when Trey Parker first played the song for friends they loved the word so much that it was kept.
- One morning in 1986, San Francisco native Layla Sarakalo discovered her car had been towed because the public parking space had been made available for a film crew truck. She figured the best way to get money to pay the towing fee was to work on the film that day as an extra. She managed to get hired that day to join the other extras. She was feeling a bit nervous, having never worked on a film before, so the other extras told her to "act naturally". When she got stopped by a "Russian" asking her how to get to the naval base in Alameda where the "nuclear wessels are", she naturally responded, "Ooh, I don't know if I know the answer to that. I think it's across the Bay. In Alameda." The director, Leonard Nimoy, loved that moment so much, he threw it in and it became one of the most frequently broadcast clips from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
- Although the way Leonard Nimoy tells it in his autobiography I Am Spock, that shot was really just Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols accosting random passers-by and asking them about "nuclear wessels". Sarakalo was apparently just passing by, listened, and gave the instructions, and it's that shot which remains in the film — they made a contract with her afterwards. One genuine ad-lib in there is the impassive police officer being asked questions: he was a genuine police officer there to provide security, and his reactions were just recorded on film and got in there.
- The whole "I love Italian, and so do you" exchange between Kirk and Spock in the car was supposedly improvised as well.
- In Being John Malkovich, in the scene where John Malkovich is walking away from John Cusack, a passenger in a car driving by yells "Hey, Malkovich, think fast!" and throws a beer can at Malkovich's head and hits him. Apparently, it was an extra that had gotten drunk and just decided to do it at the spur of the moment. It was kept in, and the extra got a pay raise because he now had a line of dialogue in the film.
- According to the DVD Commentary, while Iggy Pop was recording the "voice" of the Cosmic Horror at the end of the 1983 animated feature Rock & Rule, he actually dropped the microphone, but didn't miss a beat and worked it into his performance.
- "It just be rainin' black people in New York!", said by Edwards as he drops onto a tour bus in Men In Black, adlibbed by Will Smith.
- Harold Lloyd's silent 1928 comedy Speedy climaxes with a high-speed chase through the streets of NYC by a horse-drawn trolley. At one point during location shooting for the scene, the trolley crashed into a pillar holding up an elevated railroad platform. This was kept in the final film.
- Randall's line in Clerks 2 of "What smells like shoe polish?" in the scene where Dante is painting Becky's toenails was meant to be "What smells like nail polish?"
- The shoe polish was a callback to the first Clerks.
- The "tears in the rain" line from Roy Batty's Tannhauser Gate speech, in Blade Runner, was ad-libbed by Rutger Hauer, according to writer David Webb Peoples on the Blade Runner: The Final Cut commentary.
- When The Narrator exits from the Tyler Durden-controlled police station in Fight Club, he threatens the police officers with a "lead salad." The line was improvised by Edward Norton on the spot, as were the dubious expressions of the threatened officers.
- From Tom Jones, according to the IMDB: "Hugh Griffith was reportedly drunk through much of the production; the scene in which his horse falls on him was not planned, and many believed he was saved by virtue of his inebriated condition. The film incorporated every frame of footage before rescuers entered the frame to save him."
- During filming of Midnight Cowboy, a taxi driver managed to break into the section of town that had been closed off for filming and nearly ran over Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman didn't miss a beat and banged on the hood while shouting "Hey, I'm walkin' here!" in the character's voice. It's since become the most well-remembered part of the film and one of Hoffman's signature lines.
- In Field Of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson accidentally hits a ball close enough to make Ray Kinsella jump aside with a "Whoa!" It also knocks over the nearby bag of baseballs.
- One of the most famous comedy line improvs appeared in the movie Wayne's World. During a scene where the main characters Wayne and Garth are sitting atop their car watching airplanes take off, when suddenly Garth asks a strange question:
Garth: Did... Did you ever find it attractive when Bugs Bunny dressed up like a girl bunny? Wayne: No. Garth: Yeah... me neither, I was just asking...
- As it turns out, the entire exchange was improvised. Dana Carvey, Garth's actor, visibly snickers right before asking the initial question and Mike Myers bursts out laughing after responding. The director decided it was too funny to cut and so left it in the final version.
- "I'm here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum." from They Live!
- The famous "you talking to me?" monologue in Taxi Driver was completely improvised by Robert De Niro. The original script just said "Travis looks in the mirror".
- Also the scene where Scout dances with Iris while playing soul music was based on an improvisation Harvey Keitel came up with while rehearsing. He asked Martin Scorsese to include it in the movie, because it added so much to the character. Scorsese was reluctant to do that because the rest of the movie is from Travis Bickle's point of view, but once he realized Travis could be outside the apartment watching from his taxicab, the scene stayed.
- In the original 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, the scene where Major Marco overrides Sgt. Shaw's brainwashing by showing him an entire deck of queen of diamonds has Major Marco slightly out of focus. Director John Frankenheimer later claimed to have heard theories this was done intentionally to show Marco from Shaw's hazy, brainwashed point of view. In fact, it was a technical glitch. They had tried to reshoot the scene with the camera in focus, but according to Frankenheimer, Frank Sinatra's performance was at its best in the first, out-of-focus take, and it deteriorated in take after take. In the end, they decided to use the take with the best performance, out of focus or no.
- In the Transformers Film Series Michael Bay is known for encouraging improvization among the actors, which led to Steven Spielberg talking to the cast saying he would be looking at the dailies and saying "That's not in the script." Apparently in the first film, the reason Mikaela was mostly looking away from Sam while he was driving her home is because Shia LaBeouf improvised this long line of dialogue where she wouldn't recognize him because he lost 100 pounds at fat camp and the friends he met there have died from diabetes. Megan Fox could not keep a straight face.
- And if you didn't figure out that the "Were you ... masturbating?" sequence wasn't completely ad-libbed, you weren't watching the characters' reactions closely enough. Shia Leboeuf and the actor playing his father both start repeating their lines for want of being able to think up anything else on the spot.
- In The Road To Morocco, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby share a scene with a live camel. During one take, the camel spontaneously decided to spit in Hope's face. The "attack" and Crosby's resulting ad-lib went into the film.
- The final scene from I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang had Paul Muni disappear into darkness as he said his final line "I steal," thanks to the lights being turned off a bit too early. Everyone agreed it was the perfect touch to end the film on.
- In Kill Bill, Daryl Hannah went off-script when she started screaming and flailing around in the trailer after the Bride vs. Elle battle. Apparently, Tarantino liked it.
- She did similar screaming and flailing in Blade Runner. No idea if that was on or off script.
- Reputedly, the crowd flooding the arena at the end of the Ben Hur chariot race was an unplanned move by enthusiastic extras.
- When Jim the gunfighter is telling Bart why he'll never be accepted in Rock Ridge, Gene Wilder's line goes, "These are simple folk, people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know: morons." Clevon Little starts breaking up, because Wilder had improvised the "morons" part.
- In Walk The Line, Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash rips a sink out of a wall while portraying Cash as being affected by drugs. The sink-rip was not in the script.
- In The World Is Not Enough in the scene where Renard is told by Bond that Elektra is dead the actor Robert Carlyle's make up is actually slipping, but the director thought his performance so powerful that he kept the shot in. It's actually easy to mistake the slipping make up for tears, such is how it comes across!
- The line in Scream where Stu screams at Billy "OW! You flipping hit me with the phone, you dick!" was 100% improvised, and made director Wes Craven laugh so hard, he chose to keep it in.
- Deliberately cultivated in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, where the actors were given very little rehearsal time, and much of the dialogue consists of them interrupting each other or stumbling over words.
- Christopher Walken's trick shot in "Poolhall Junkies" was accidentally filmed. As he was being taught how to perform it, he tried for the first time as practice and sunk the shot. Luckily they were filming, since he was unable to sink the ball in any following take. If you watch you can see all the actors in the scene gasp and begin to laugh, even Walken looks surprised.
- Walken asked that his practice shot be filmed "just in case" he made it that time and then wasn't able to repeat it. Good thing they took him up on it!
- While not a great film, The Score did have its moments. Several of them were the back and forth between Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, who were purposely given only key points to hit in dialogue and then simply left in front of a camera.
- While filming White Heat, the crew ran into a problem. The scene takes place in the prison cafeteria, where Cody Jarrett has just been informed of his mother's death. As written it was falling flat until Jimmy Cagney seated the two biggest extras on either side of himself and told the director to follow him with the camera no matter what.
- While filming Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles obtained a permit to set a car on fire for a scene he wanted to shoot that weekend. Unfortunately, he got the permit on a Friday, and the city hadn't filed it by the time shooting was scheduled. He did the scene anyway and when the fire department showed up, he filmed it and left it in the finished movie.
- One of the Crowning Moments Of Funny of Monsters Vs Aliens was originally an adlib by Stephen Colbert during filming: "Huh. Apparently they eat lead."
- Would you believe: Leave the gun, take the cannoli." - A fast supposedly revealed in the DVD commentary.
- According to IMDB, in the graveyard in Zoolander, right after Prewitt explains why male models are trained to be assassins, Ben Stiller completely forgot his line, and ad-libbed his next line—"but, why male models?" "Are you serious? I just told you that a moment ago!"—creating one of the funniest moments in the entire movie.
- From a scene between John Cleese and Jamie Lee Curtis at the end of 1997's Fierce Creatures (bonus points for Curtis' very visibly suppressed laughter immediately afterwards):
Willa Weston: Willa.
Rollo Lee: —Willa...!
- In the old film Pretty Woman, there's one scene where Richard Gere is showing Julia Roberts' character a very expensive necklace in its open box. The original scene as written simply required Roberts to tentatively touch the necklace and say it was beautiful. Instead, as Roberts touched the necklace, Gere clapped the box's lid down on Roberts' hand, scaring the hell out of her and making her laugh. Because of the way it looked on film, the take was left in — watch where Roberts turns to when the joke is played on her — she's looking offscreen at the crew, not anywhere near a camera.
- In the film of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (as opposed to the TV series) this also comes up in what is probably the film's single genuinely funny scene. Buffy, played by Kristy Swanson, stakes the Big Bad's (Rutger Hauer's) second in command, who is being played by Paul Reubens. The scene as written simply required Reuben to say "You're gonna wish you died" and then slide out of shot. Which he did. And then, two seconds later, stood up again with stake still in his chest, putting on a bunch of fake but hilarious "ah, ooh, eee, ah, ooh!" noises and even looking directly at Swanson for one second before going off at it again. The fact the shot was ad-libbed is clearly visible in Swanson and Hauer's faces: Swanson turns to someone offscreen as if querying what's going on — and the shot cuts to Hauer, on whom another camera was already rolling, and who has a vaguely amused look on his face and who shrugs as if to say "Just roll with it." Which they did, and the shot stayed in. A part of the performance even got into a postcredits sequence.
- In the film version of East of Eden, Cal was supposed to deck Adam after he rejects his present. When shooting, James Dean had the impulse to instead hug Raymond Massey. This became a moment of Enforced Method Acting for Massey who, unpracticed in improvisation, came across exactly as stiff and uncomfortable as Adam ought to be under the circumstances.
- When Kevin Kline's character in A Prairie Home Companion opens the bottle of champagne, it was director Robert Altman he hit in the forehead with the flying cork. Kline's "sorry!" was improvised.
- "Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!" was reportedly not in the original script for The Shining, but was just Jack Nicholson adding in something to make Jack Torrence seem just that little bit crazier. And thus, a legend was born.
- Bela Lugosi was just beginning to learn English during filming of Dracula. He learned all his lines phonetically, and his odd mispronounciations have since become a very well-remembered part of the character. At least one reviewer has also noted they give the impression that Dracula isn't used to speaking at all.
- Two flubbed lines by Robert Redford made it into the final cut of All The Presidents Men, thanks to Redford's ability to work the mistake into his performance. One was Redford on the phone with a person who spoke only Spanish, asking the others in the newsroom: "Does anybody here speak English?" when he was supposed to ask for someone who spoke Spanish. The other is at the end of a six minute take with Redford on the phone (again). He calls the person he's talking to by the wrong name but keeps going.
- In the final shot of Barton Fink, the seagull diving into the water was unplanned.
Live Action TV
- Again observed in The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, and also at the end of Liar, Liar.
- In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Giles walks into a tree when Buffy reveals that she knows he had sex with her mother under the effects of magical chocolate. This was unrehearsed and done at the last minute, to comical effect.
- Two more hilarious examples come from the first season episode, "The Puppet Show". Nicholas Brendon screaming REDRUM!!! while playing with the puppet suspected of being a killer was shot between takes and thrown in, while Willow suddenly running offstage during their talent show performance of Oedipus Rex was improvised by Alyson Hannigan.
- On the commentary for the season 2 DVD of Scrubs, the creator comments that scenes written for the Janitor often had the addendum "or whatever Neil decides to say," due to his frequent habit of improvising usable material.
- In John Ritter's guest spot, he improvised the line "I pooed a little" after his pull my finger gag. Zach Braff immediately had to bite down on his cheeks to keep from laughing.
- In the "STOP FINISHING MY AWESOME JOKES!" scene, J.D.'s "Oh, my God" while holding his ears was unscripted — he actually didn't expect Sarah Chalke's voice to get as high-pitched as it did.
- In Mystery Science Theater 3000, the puppet characters occasionally malfunctioned; Tom Servo's head, in particular, would often fall off during production. Sometimes this worked well enough to keep; for example, in a sketch where Tom and Crow were Secret Service agents getting increasingly worked up about protecting Mike, Tom's bubble jarred loose and fell off at the climax, leading them to shout "HEAD! AHHHHHHH!" and panic.
- Perhaps the greatest example of this was during the riff filming for a first season episode, when Josh Weinstein, still performing Servo at the time, sneezed violently. Nobody missed a beat.
- In an example that combines this trope with Enforced Method Acting, Joel Hodgson was really tired during the filming of the first KTMA episode because he had stayed up late the night before building the set and the robots which caused Joel Robinson to have a dopey laid-back demeanor. The crew decided to keep this as a character trait for Joel.
- Columbo's famous And Another Thing mannerism was a sort of Throw It In. While writing the play Prescription: Murder, which introduced the character, writers Richard Levinson and William Link had just written Columbo's exit from a scene when they realized they had forgotten to include an important plot point. Rather than retyping the whole scene, they simply had Columbo come back in and ask "one more thing."
- In the original scripts for The Addams Family, Lurch was a mute — but Ted Cassidy ad libbed his Catch Phrase "You rang?" while filming the pilot, and the producers like it so much they gave Lurch a voice.
- William Hartnell's habit of flubbing his lines on Doctor Who was left in due to limited budget.
- And the actor playing Ian Chesterton was able to ad lib so well off of Hartnell's frequent hashings of the character's name that it was eventually written in the scripts that the Doctor would mispronounce it.
- In the Seinfeld episode "The Parking Garage," the characters spend almost the entire episode trying to find their parked car in a parking garage. The original ending was for them to find it at the end, drive off, but then be unable to find the exit to the mall. However, when filming the scene where they were supposed to drive off, the car wouldn't start up. Deciding that was funnier, they used that as the ending instead. If you look closely before they cut away to a long shot, you can see Julia-Louis Dreyfuss and Jason Alexander shaking with laughter as the car refuses to start.
- In another episode, Jason Alexander sneezes just as Jerry tells him "I blamed it on you". They felt it was funnier that way and kept it.
- In an exception to the comedy rule, the last episode of the third season of M*A*S*H had, at the end, the characters having a moment of silence upon learning that their former commanding officer Henry Blake's plane was shot down, with no survivors. At the very end of the scene, someone drops a tray of surgical supplies, shaking everyone from their thoughts; this was unscripted and just left in.
- Enforced Method Acting. The end of the episode was kept a secret from the cast, so that their reactions would be genuine. A second take was done after the tray dropping, but it was deemed not as emotional and the first take was kept.
- In Star Trek Voyager, non-Trekkie Robert Picardo ad-libbed "I'm a doctor, not a night light" in his audition for the role of The Doctor while having no conscious idea that "I'm a doctor, not a [something]" was Dr. McCoy's famous Catch Phrase. The particular line didn't make it into an episode, but was liked enough that The Doctor went on to use "I'm a doctor, not a [something]" phrases as much as McCoy had, and other Trek doctors would use it on rare occasion as well.
- Similarly, Amanda Tapping was cast as Samantha Carter on Stargate SG-1 after ad-libbing how the dialing computer for the Stargate had been MacGyvered to work, since it was an acknowledgment of Richard Dean Anderson's previous role as MacGyver. Unlike the Star Trek example, this one was kept in.
- Farscape apparently had quite a bit of this going on, starting at around about the time Ben Browder ended a scene of armed guards chasing him by whirling around to face them, putting his gun to his own head, and shouting "Nobody move or the white boy gets it!"
- In Gigi Egley's first appearance as Chiana, the character wasn't intended to stay on the show so she was given painful contact lenses that severely restricted her vision. When it was decided to make her a main character the lenses were modified to be more comfortable, but all the exaggerated head movements Egley had done to be able to see what she was doing were kept in as a character trait.
- The Grand Finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has one of these involving the villain-turned-not-quite-hero-but-honorable-and-somewhat-admirable-leader Damar. When he and his followers storm the Dominion HQ on Cardassia, he is fatally wounded. His final word was "Keep..." That was not scripted - the actor who played Damar felt that a silent death scene wasn't right. And even he isn't sure how he would have finished the line.
- At the end of a sketch on The Electric Company where Rita Moreno plays a director trying to get Bill Cosby to get his line right, Morgan Freeman cracks up and walks off the set.
- And in another sketch about a boxing match between the letter combinations "ea" and "ee", Cosby is handed a trophy... which falls apart in his hands accidentally. Skip Hinnant ad-libs: "Sorry we couldn't have sprung for a better trophy." Morgan Freeman cracks up again.
- This article talks of One Life To Live having unscripted interactions between real-life drug addicts and one of the characters.
- The Red Dwarf episode D.N.A. has a scene where Rimmer, planning to clone himself to come back to life, is examining some of his own dandruff under a microscope while the Cat looks over his shoulder. During a rehearsal, Danny John-Jules accidentally sneezed on the microscope at the end of the scene. The timing was so perfect that the writers put it in the episode.
- In another moment courtesy of Danny John-Jules, the episode "Bodyswap" features Lister's brain being recorded onto a casette tape and given to the Cat for safekeeping. Almost immediately, he accidentally drops it in his mug of coffee.
- In the Supernatural episode, In The Beginning, Samuel is being possessed by the YED and after Dean unwittingly tells him everything, he pins Dean to the wall and smells his neck while asking him if he's one of the "special children." According to Mitch Pileggi, the neck-smelling wasn't rehearsed beforehand so Dean's squicked-out reaction is completely genuine and the sexual subtext is even more creepy.
- How about throwing in an entire interpretation of a character? As noted under Playing Against Type, Marc Warren, known for smooth cockney scoundrel Danny in Hustle played a frightening Psychopathic Manchild as Jonathan Teatime in Hogfather. What's interesting is that he was hired to play Teatime similarly to Danny, but instead chose an interpretation inspired by Johnny Depp's creepy Michael Jackson-esque Willy Wonka.
- In a form of inversion, Yes Minister star Paul Eddington had a number of lines cut after he demonstrated that he was capable of expressing everything of significance in the discussion with expressions alone, particularly in the later episodes.
- The night-time soap opera Knots Landing had an entire episode that was improvised by all the actors. The "script" for the episode merely gave the actors guidelines as to what should have happened by the time the episode was over, but in no way limited the actors on how they were supposed to accomplish their character's agenda.
- In the US version of The Office, all the actors are given complete scripts, but are allowed to improvise as they go along. The absolute greatest adlib in the series is the kiss between Michael and Oscar, in Michael's failed attempt to show how tolerant he is of Oscar's homosexuality.
Jenna Fischer: "Those looks of shock/giddiness/confusion on our faces are real. We were all on the edge of our seats wondering what would happen next. I can't believe we held it together for as long as we did. I'm not sure we've ever laughed so hard on set."
- While most of Whose Line Is It Anyway is improvised to begin with, the 100th episode had a notable incident where the electronically-synthesized bass rhythm suddenly sped up in the middle of a song, and Hilarity Ensued. They redid the game with the intention of throwing out the first take, but in the end, the second take was thrown out and the first take was used. It featured Wayne trying to spell out the subject's name "Howard" in rhythm, and being flustered from the tempo change he ended up spelling out H-O-R-W-A-R-D. Drew gave him a hard time about it, leading to Wayne responding "It's hard to spell at 210 beats per minute."
"Watch out for those tempo changes, man, 'cause once we go into the second bridge, this shit takes off!"
- And later on came the "broken desk light" incident. During a "Party Quirks" game, Ryan's quirk was that he was Carol Channing, whose head keeps sticking to things. Ryan, at one point, acts like his head is drawn to Drew Carey's dais. Ryan's head slams into the rectangular light built into the front of the dais, shattering it. Everyone else cannot control their laughter, and the game eventually ends when his quirk is figured out. During the whole ordeal, Ryan stayed in character even with broken glass in his hair. And yes, the game was aired as it was.
- Should any of the performers, Drew
included especially, say or do anything while between games that is hilarious, it will become a running gag for the remainder of the show. One of the best known is when Drew flubbed a line from a scripted card, introducing "African Chant", and stated that "Africa is a country". Greg Proops, the forth chair that episode, busted up and immediately corrected him that, "It's also a continent, if you're a geographer!." Drew didn't live that down for the rest of the show.
- An audience member got one: When asked for a pair of unlikely roommates, a member loudly yelled out "Cosby and Hitler", prompting jokes the rest of the night. Most were directed at the producer who nixed the idea from making it to the screen.
- Star Trek The Next Generation - In a Lwaxana Troi episode Captain Picard has to pledge his undying love for the lady he clearly dislikes. Extremely dislikes. Looks like an episode of "This isn't Working!" judging by the actor's obvious frustration, leading up to him throwing out some Shakespearean lines — which were obviously better than the script, as they made the final cut.
- In an episode of Angel the cast had their memories regressed to when they were 17, with Angel being over 200 years old, he thought he was in the 18th century. A scene was written with Angel going outside only to run back inside in a panic because the cars freaked him out. David Boreanaz and Alexis Denisof could not look each other in the face during that sequence without laughing so the dialogue and staging had to be redone. You can notice at one point Alexis just looks off in a random direction to avoid spoiling the scene.
- In an early season two episode of House, House is mad at Wilson for having sided with Stacey, and Hugh Laurie ad-libbed "Bros before hos, man" during one take. You can clearly see Robert Sean Leonard cracking up at the line.
- The famous 'foot in the face' scene in the Merlin episode The Moment of Truth was at least partly just a joke Bradley James came up with - he deliberately waited for Colin Morgan's take, and then... stuck his bare foot in his face. The disgusted reaction is completely genuine, and they did a take without it, though thankfully that's not what ended up in the episode.
- Sifl & Olly often had these moments whenever one of the duo would laugh. These moments were usually caused by Liam Lynch. An example can be seen in the music video for "Baby For Gravy". These were also very common in segments featuring the character Chester.
- Doctor Who, "The Hand of Fear": after Sarah has been freed from Eldrad's mind control, she says "Eldrad must live! ... Just testing." That was an ad-lib.
- When auditions for Cheers, John Ratzenberger originally read for the role of Norm. After badly botching his audition, he asked the producers if the show included a bar know-it-all, and proceeded to wander around the room ad-libbing lines that might be appropriate for such a character. A week later, he was called back and offered the newly-written role of Cliff.
- During the twin fight in Skins, Kathryn Prescott and Giles Thomas were supposed to just make it look like Emily hit Doug; however, Kathryn got a little too into the scene and inadvertently lamped him. Giles was so gobsmacked that, in his subsequent confusion and surprise, he trod on Megan Prescott (Katie)'s foot, who spent the rest of the scene desperately trying not to cry. All of that made it to the final cut.
- According to Mark Harmon, the first-ever Gibbs Slap wasn't scripted; he just broke off in the middle of a scene to whack Michael Weatherly on the back of the head. Not only was it not cut, it rapidly became one of the character's trademarks.
- In the first Christmas episode of That70s Show, Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) spots Laurie, runs towards her, tries to jump over the couch, but slips on it and hurts his legs with the table, almost knocking over the punch bowl that was on it. Kutcher however manages to keep the straight face and to continue the scene afterwards. This shot was kept, and Kelso's hurting himself later became his trademark.
- In the episode where Donna tries to convince Jackie to move in with her, she at one point says: "Jackie, help me be more like you" and she sounds weirdly when she says it (like if she is running out of breath, or trying to hold a burp, or both). After a few more unsuccessful shots where neither Laura Prepon (Donna) nor Mila Kunis (Jackie) could keep from laughing, the first shot was kept.
- When filming the fifth episode of Glee, when Kristin Chenoweth (April) finishes her first take of Maybe This Time, Chris Colfer actually cries at her performance. He was surprised to find out that they would use a shot of him crying as his character Kurt's reaction to April's performance.
- An episode of Friends dealt with a woman calling Chandler and Joey believing she's calling a guy named Bob, and Chandler picks up, pretends to be Bob, sets up a meeting with her and then shows up to win her over when she's "stood up". The tag scene for that episode had the woman calling again, looking for Bob, this time with Joey hearing the message. The script called for Joey to pick up and say "Bob here", but Matt Le Blanc tripped and fell, desperately trying to grab the phone as he went down. This ended up a lot funnier than the scripted version and was kept for the episode.
- In the season three finally of How I Met Your Mother Barney is in a meeting with a bunch of Japanese men when Lily calls him to tell him that Ted has been in a car accident. He gets up, tells them in Japanese that his best friend needs him and he has to go, and hurries out the door. One of the men then turns to the others and asks, in English, "What did he say?" That line was ad-libbed during rehearsals by one of the extras in the scene, however it was given to one of the others to say in the actual episode.
Music
- At the end of Riding Into Work In The Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now) by The Flaming Lips, while the singer is going "Aaahhh..." over and over, someone can be heard saying "Alright... stop."
- After I'm Still Alive by Stratovarius, two people can be heard talking (though I have no idea who they are or what they're saying (it's in English, but the accents make it hard to understand).
- At the end of the Sonata Arctica song The Power Of One on the Silence album, there's about a minute of silence, followed by someone (not from the band) muttering "And I fuckin' touched the mic, hold on." Draw Me from Winterheart's Guild has a conversation among the band (in Finnish) at the end of it, when a bird flew into the recording studio. If you can't understand it, the (clear) lines translate to "You should get an award from Greenpeace." "A bird roast." "A bird roast... (Laughs)"
- Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess played the last note of In The Name Of God with his nose. Apparently Mike Portnoy liked it so much they decided to keep it.
- One famous example is Australian band Jet's Are You Gonna Be My Girl, which begins with the lead singer clearing his throat.
- When Buddy Holly's group The Crickets recorded one of their songs, a cricket chirp was also recorded. It was later twisted into them taking their name from this.
- George Gershwin found out about his being booked to write and perform a new piece for an upcoming concert only three weeks before the concert was supposed to go on. The score he turned in for "Rhapsody in Blue," which he'd composed in those three weeks, had blank spaces where his piano solos were supposed to go, with the notation "Wait For Nod" to tell the conductor when to bring the rest of the orchestra back in.
- In the Ben Folds Five song "Steven's Last Night In Town," a barely audible phone ring is heard just before the last line of the chorus is sung. The placement is absolutely perfect and they kept it in.
- Outkast's music video for "Ms Jackson" contains a plethora of animals. In one scene, an owl moves its head perfectly to the rhythm of the words. This was completely accidental, and was kept in because it just looks so damn cool.
- In popular music, it's common for recording artists to include "breakdowns", asides to the engineer or producer, and other unrehearsed bits, in the final version of a song. Some examples:
- "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," from the album Bringing It All Back Home, opens with a take that quickly breaks down as Dylan bursts out laughing and says, "Start again, start again."
- "To Be Alone with You," from Dylan's Nashville Skyline, opens with him saying, "Is it rolling, Bob?" This is not a self-reference but rather Dylan asking an engineer whether the tape was rolling. For a short time, the line became a fan catchphrase.
- Elvis Costello messes up the intro to "Running Out of Angels" before saying "Sorry, I blew it" and starting over.
- In Janet Jackson's early hit "Nasty," she ad-libs the spoken line, "Oh, I like this part."
- Towards the end of "Runaway," as she repeats the line "I just know we'll have a good time," Jackson flubs a note and says, "Mm, didn't quite hit that note; that wasn't such a good time."
- The opening of System of a Down's "Chop Suey" is two drumstick taps and the engineer saying "We're rolling 'Suicide'," the song's working name.
- Green Day's "Good Riddance" begins with Billie Joe Armstrong playing the opening notes wrong, twice, then whispering, "Fuck."
- At the end of Relient K's "Mood Rings," lead singer Matt Thiessen quietly adds, "That was terrible."
- After the breathtaking scream that ends Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s song "Let's Make Out," you can hear a voice going "Okay, that was great, but, uh... do it again." Another voice responds with "Ahahahahaa... no."
- The "false start" at the beginning of "Old Time Rock and Roll" was a recording error, but Bob Seger liked it.
- The Monkees, being comic actors as well as a band, did lots of these: some by accident, some by improv, & even some by design.
- Gotta Eat by Lupe Fiasco, a three-minute running food pun, ends with a barely audible "so stupid."
- Which may actually also be a Take That at Soulja Boy. Before the "so stupid, he mimics Soulja Boy's trademark "Yoooouuuuu!"
- In the intro to Frank Zappa's Muffin Man, he flubs a line, breaks down laughing, and mutters "Let's try that again," before repeating the sentence.
- The Hush Sound, "Love You Much Better" ends with improv crowd. During the clapping, you can hear a very loud "YES!" from opposite lead singer Bob Morris. After the applause dies down, you can hear Greta laughing hysterically and mocking Bob, "That yes was ridiculous. YESH."
- The Who's "Happy Jack" ends with Pete Townshend shouting "I saw ya!". This was apparently his response to Keith Moon making faces outside the vocal booth while the rest of the band were recording backing vocals.
- On the bonus track Pure And Easy from Who's Next you can hear Pete Townshend scream: Stop reading your girly magazine!
- Ronnie Van Zant saying "Turn it up!" from Sweet Home Alabama was because he wanted the producer to turn up the volume in his headphones.
- The Led Zeppelin song "In My Time of Dying" was highly improvised. When Plant "ends" the song John Bonham gets a cough fit, causing Plant to say cough into the mic. Bonham then says "That's the one, isn't it?" and the studio engineer says: "Come and have a listen." with Bonham saying "oh yes, thank you."
- "Black Country Woman" begins with the sound of a plane passing overhead (the band were recording outside). Someone in the background says something and Robert Plant replies, "Nah leave it." before launching into the song. The hum that threads "Celebration Day" to "Friends" was a production screw up. In fact, a large amount of the Led Zeppelin catalogue is just the band jamming.
- Downtown with Pearl Jam & Neil Young starts with Neil saying: I fucked up, let me just play in the groove for a bit. It ends with Neil saying: Well we know that one!
- In Van Halen's "Unchained", David Lee Roth pointing out the producer Ted Templeman's suit, Templeman telling him to give it a break, and Roth's response of "One break, coming up!" was completely unscripted. I think most of David Lee Roth's talking breaks in Van Halen songs are unscripted.
- Chicago has several of these scattered amongst their albums, but the 2004 Rhino remaster of Chicago VII removed the breakdown from the beginning of "Happy Man." The fans were not pleased.
- The original mono mix of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds features a few engineering errors. "Here Today" is probably the main offender — a quiet instrumental break features the faint sounds of conversation in the background, after which Brian Wilson can be heard saying "No talking!"
- Korn's song "Clown" from their debut album opens with a bit of random chatter, the band messing up the intro, yelling obscenities at the engineers and finally playing the bloody thing.
- The whole second side of the second record of Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything was done live in studio, so breakdowns and banter are included before and after nearly every song (though the single version of "Hello It's Me" cuts out it's false start). And because the liner notes make a tongue-in-cheek claim that the whole side is an operetta about a musician, all the banter is transcribed and presented as dialogue next to the lyrics.
- The Velvet Underground's song Temptations Inside Your Heartis almost completely strange ad-libs between Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, kicked off by the line "you can talk during this" and then proceeding to mention how "in New York buildings are very high- and not at all offensive" and something about the "Pope in the silver castle."
- At the start of Slipknot's "Get This", someone (possibly vocalist Corey Taylor) whispers "fuck", then the producer says, "Gimme a scream, Corey." There's a loud click, and then Taylor obliges him to start the song.
- Pretty much the whole first minute of "Don't You Evah" by the indie band Spoon is requests for recording talkbacks and for the producer to record vocal queues.
- While recording "I Am the Walrus," John Lennon randomly flipped through radio stations and came across a BBC production of King Lear. He added snippets of dialogue from the scene being broadcast at that moment to the mix, most of which appear in the song's coda.
- Also, at the end of "Helter Skelter" you can hear Ringo Star throw his drumsticks across the room and famously scream "I got blisters on my fingers!". Your hands would be sore too, if you had played a 27 minute long version of Helter Skelter earlier in the day
- The final line of the Barenaked Ladies song "One Week" was inserted as a placeholder. The lead singer saw an LED sign in front of a high school displaying "Birchmount Stadium: Home of the Robbies." One of the band members commented that they are waiting for the sign to be changed to read, "Birchmount Stadium: Home of 'Home of the Robbies'."
- When the Mamas and the Papas were making I Saw Her Again there is a part of the song where one of them begins the line "I saw her, again last night" but stops at the comma when one of the others starts up. So the line ends up becoming "I saw her. I saw her again, last night." Reportedly, Paul McCartney said to one of the members of the group, "That was an accident, wasn't it." When asked how he knew that it was, it's told he said, "Nobody is that good."
- On the song "Polly" by Nirvana, Kurt Cobain whispers "Polly Said" once during the interlude'. This was originally a too early start on the next verse, but they liked it and left it in. It then became an official part of the lyrics and Cobain sung it (intentionally this time) on the alternate "Polly (New Wave)" version of the song found on Incesticide.
- Similarly "Come As You Are" has an "I don't have a gun" a little too early, near the end of solo. Again they kept it in because they liked it
- In his song "You're Beautiful", James Blunt sings the opening line too early, pauses, and restarts once the music comes around again.
- Of course Weird Al exaggerated & lampshaded this in "You're Pitiful." Blunt was amused. Atlantic Records was not, so they don't get copyright royalties for the free track.
- While Stavesacre was recording an acoustic version of their song "An Eclipsing" for their Greatest Hits album Collective, lead singer Mark Soloman broke out in laughter after an unexpected vibraslap hit. The take broke down, and one of the other members quipped, "A rattler just invaded our campfire!" The false start and ensuing hilarity were left in the final cut.
- The famous Beatles song "A Day in the Life" has an example of this. The producer had brought in an alarm clock to signal when the first orchestral interlude would end, but it fit so well with the beginning of the second theme that they left it in.
- Not to mention the fact that it also goes very well with the next lyric: "Woke up, got out of bed / Ran a comb across my head."
- Several songs on Songs to Wear Pants To contain improvised or unplanned bits. Perhaps the most notable of them comes in When A Cow Snapping Over Friend Chicken XD—already a funny song to begin with, it reaches Crowning Moment levels when the singer's guitar suddenly malfunctions in the end of the song.
- The beginning of "Shadows In the Rain", on Sting's Dream of Blue Turtles album starts with the drummer giving the beat, then a guitarist asking, "What key is it in? WAIT, WAIT; what key is it in?" Apparently they were so strapped for time in the studio they didn't have time for another take, so it was left in.
- Near the beginning of The Police's smash hit "Roxanne", there is the sound of a piano and Sting chuckling. The dissonant piano chord was a result of Sting accidentally sitting on the instrument during recording.
- Given the song's subject matter, this troper is surprised that it hasn't become a major source of Epileptic Trees.
- The Frogs' songs are often improvisation heavy, and sometimes this will include clearly flubbing a lyric, then quickly trying to find a way to make it still work, often while in character. One particularly obvious case of this is the following passage of "I'm Hungry": "You can't eat food with a bent throat! YOU try fooding eat - You eat... Yeah, you eat all right! I watch you eat! I never get no food...."
- The presence of a lo-fi sample of Dixie in The Clash's Rock The Casbah is attributed to the drummer's Dukes Of Hazzard watch alarm.
- Near the end of "Armagideon Time," there's an exchange between the engineer and Joe Strummer. Trying to keep the song from veering into "raga territory," they told the engineer to tell them when four minutes had gone up. Then Strummer changed his mind ("Okay, okay. Don't push us when we're hot!").
- The Fall's "Paintwork" goes through a couple of odd, abrupt sound collage breaks where the music suddenly becomes distant-sounding and gets drowned out by a program about astronomy and later, a brief snippet of classical music. This was because Mark E. Smith accidentally taped over parts of the song.
- Compared to some of the things which Mark E. Smith has thrown in over the years, this is a relatively mild example of the trope.
- There's a Metallica song out there with a video that looks distinctly like this trope, ending with US soldiers in Iraq or somewhere fixing a car engine. Perhaps it made more sense with the lyrics, but being a Metallica song…
- I believe the song's called "The Day That Never Comes"
- In U2's "I Will Follow", drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. kicked over a beer bottle mid-take, and it was picked up by the kick-drum mic - and kept because it bounced perfectly in time with the music.
- Led Zeppelin's "Carouselambra" has a guitar multi-string bend tracked in at the beginning and in the middle of the guitar solo. This was the result of an earlier take where Jimmy Page's guitar strap broke, causing Page to hold on to the neck to keep the guitar from hitting the floor.
- While recording his anti-suicide song "You're Only Human (Second Wind)", Billy Joel briefly forgot the words for a second then added them and laughed. Since it fit in with the song's theme of accepting your mistakes, it was left in.
- The famous opening of "Rhaphsody in Blue". During a rehearsal, the clarinettist added a glissando as a joke — Gershwin loved it and added it to the piece.
- At the end of "Nudsie's Wedding Reception" by Michigan comedy band Da Yoopers, you can hear then-guitarist Joe Potila mumble "I messed up" at the end.
- The Tractors, a country music band, left the tape running between songs on their debut album, including several ad-libs and chatter.
- Alan Jackson began whistling the melody at the end of his recording session for his 1998 single "Right on the Money", unaware that the tape was still running. When he heard the whistling, he and producer Keith Stegall decided to leave it in.
- Brooks & Dunn's "Lucky Me, Lonely You" contains at least three false starts. Whether these were accidental or intentional has yet to be determined.
- The invention of the fuzzbox, a type of amp that creates distortion, was the result of this trope. During the recording of Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry," the guitarist's amp went on the fritz, causing a distorted sound. Robbins like the sound and decided to have him play it as-is.
- One story has it that the "knocking" sound that comes out of nowhere right before Van Halen's guitar solo in Michael Jackson's "Beat It" is the result of someone accidentally knocking on the studio door during a recording session.
- In the music video for New Found Glory's cover of "Kiss Me", one of the band members hands a kid with a cape his guitar during the solo. The kid, who was one of the many extras that were recruited to simply run around the set in a crazed manner, just happened to be right in front of the band at that instant and froze in confusion, so he was given the guitar in an improvised moment.
- Megadeth's cover of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" contains a flub by then-drummer Nick Menza, who keeps playing after everyone else had stopped at the very end of the song. Mustaine yells, "Nick...Nick...Nick!"; the drums stop, and then faintly in the background, Menza can be heard yelling, "Fuck...me...running!"
- Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put A Spell On You" was originally intended to be far more sedate, but Hawkins and the rest of the musicians got blind drunk before recording it. The resulting Nightmare Fuel came to be Hawkins' signature tune.
- At the very end of Dragon Force's "Through the fire and the flames," guitarist Herman Li broke a string while doing a whammy effect. They've kept it in the final cut.
- In Queen's song "One Vision", the final line is supposed to end with "one vision". During recording, Freddie Mercury jokingly yelled "fried chicken" instead, as they had eaten it for dinner that day. They ended up keeping it in, despite the echo of the final line still saying "one vision".
- The distinctive guitar crunches in the pre-chorus of Radiohead's "Creep" were actually an attempt by guitarist Jonny Greenwood to ruin what he thought was an awful song. Unfortunately for him, the rest of the band liked it and it stayed in the final mix.
- Country music singer K. T. Oslin accidentally set her keyboard to the guitar patch when she recorded "Come Next Monday." She liked the sound and decided to keep it in.
- At the end of Pinmonkey's "Stay with Us," one of the guitarists says, "That better be it, because I just broke my A string on the last ''bar."
- The Butthole Surfers' "Creep In The Cellar" has a disorienting backwards fiddle part that almost-but-not-quite fits the chords of the song. It's just disorienting enough to seem deliberate, but in fact it got there because they had erased over and reused tapes from the previous band to use the same studio, and somehow while they were recording the song, a stray fiddle track running in reverse ended popped up in the mix. By the time they figured out what track it was on, they had decided to just keep it in.
- During the coda for the song Just Like Noah's Ark, from Elton John's 2006 album, The Captain And The Kid, a pet dog of one of the band members, sensitive to the volume of a electronic cowbell sound played on the click track, begins to bark at the sound as the band is recording the track live. As the barking fit in well rhythmically with the track, the engineers left it in, and the dog is credited in the liner notes of the album with "woof-bells".
- Yet another Beatles example: while recording "Oh Bla Di, Oh Bla Da", when Paul first gets to the line "Desmond lets the children lend a hand", George and John can be heard chiming in with "Arm!" and "Foot!". Paul managed to keep going, but as a result, got Molly and Desmond's roles backwards in the final verse.
- On their song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," Paul can be heard laughing at the start of the line "...writing fifty times I must not be so..." around 1:21. This is rumored to be because John mooned him from the control room during the recording (the line preceding it was "so he waits behind").
- About three minutes into "Hey Jude", Paul Mc Cartney mumbles "Fucking hell!", apparently because he messed up a note on the piano.
- Frankie Sparo flubs a line in "Akzidenz Grotesk" on Welcome Crummy Mystics, but the lyrics are double-tracked, so in one channel he continues singing, and in the other he curses extravagantly.
- In Fall Out Boy's "Dance, Dance", bassist Pete Wentz can be heard whispering "We're going into D minor" just before the chorus at one point.
- The recording of "Modern World" by Wolf Parade has a very audible sniffle 44 seconds into the song. However, it was most likely left in there because it occurs precisely in time with the music.
- Colbie Callait's "Can you count me in?" from Bubbly is arguably one of these.
- The famous riff of Guns 'N' Roses "Sweet Child O' Mine" originated from Slash mucking around. He never intended the riff to be recorded, let alone immortalised.
Theater
Video Games
- When creating the character model for Lara Croft, creator Toby Gard was trying to make a minor adjustment to Lara's breast size. The mouse slipped and they increased 150%. The team loved the new look and Lara's famous physique was born. (This one may be apocryphal, as it's unlikely they had a "cup size" slider in the mesh editor. However Gard himself made this claim.)
- Perfectly possible if he was morphing between two meshes though... doing it that way would allow the modeler to choose the exact ammount of, er, inflation.
- Early on in Half-Life 2: Episode One, player character Gordon Freeman and NPC ally Alyx Vance must cross an immense chasm to get into the Citadel. Alyx's Robot Buddy Dog indicates that he has the idea of throwing them across the chasm in a car. Alyx is dubious, but, confident that Dog's robotic brain has calculated that it's safe, mutters, "You did do the math, didn't you?" Due to a bug, Dog's programmed set of idle movements included shaking his head, which he just happened to do at this point as if to say no. Playtesters thought it was so amusing that the developers left it in and changed Alyx's reaction to be more fitting.
- Somewhat less humorous: The gunships in Half-Life 2 were programmed to attack the greatest threat, which is usually Gordon. However, a mild programming error, referred to by the developers as a ghost in the code, accidentally caused the gunship to consider a fired rocket as the greatest threat - which it is - and try to shoot it down. Although unintentional, the behavior was kept in.
- In a similar act of serendipity that ended up making the game more interesting, during the airboat vs. helicopter battle, the "mine spam" dropped on the player was originally a programming glitch.
- In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, at one point you come across a fast zombie in a dumpster. In order to hurt it, you have to throw in two grenades - it throws the first one back out. This was a glitch at first, but the playtesters loved it, so Valve programmed it to happen every time.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 - Ocelot's trademark hand gesture was an improv by the motion actor that made everyone laugh so hard it became the character's Catch Phrase - if a hand gesture could be a catch phrase.
- In a similar vein as above, the Honest John character of MSG4's pet Monkey was thrown in when they realized that Raiden's motion actor did a pretty good imitation of a Monkey. Insert your own "Raiden is the Butt Monkey" joke here.
- Maybe to invoke this, Hideo Kojima had the Motion Capture actors for Naked Snake switched so that the one who specialised in action sequences did the dialogue scenes, and vice versa. In one scene EVA leans in to kiss Snake, and Snake's actor- unused to doing romantic scenes- instinctively edged away. They kept it in since the response was cute.
- Kirby as we all know him was only a placeholder character for Kirby's Dreamland. They ultimately went with the little blob.
- Wii Sports was originally set up to be a Mario title. The test audience surprisingly preferred the Miis. Try not to think too hard about what boxing would have been like.
- ...or if you really wanna know about Mario Boxing, play the DS version of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. It had a boxing event which the Wii version lacked.
- One of the levels of Portal can be finished in mere seconds, by using shortcuts to skip the entire level. When playtesters figured this out, the developers decided to keep it, since only advanced players would know how to utilize it. In fact, in the advanced versions of that chamber, the qualifications for gold medals require that you do this.
- In a non-gameplay example, many of Raz's lines in Psychonauts were ad-libbed. They were so funny, the folks at Double Fine decided to keep them.
- Guybrush Threepwood's first name came when Monkey Island was in development. Since he had no name yet, his character art was simply named "Guy," while the file extension for it was ".brush." They eventually just went with it, and had a great deal of fun commenting on his weird name.
- According to Tim Schaefer, most of the dialogue in Secret of Monkey Island was thought by him and the other writer to be placeholder, and that the bigwigs were going to hire some "real" dialogue writers to do the actual stuff, but the humorous placeholder dialogue was so funny that they decided to leave it in. This actually had quite an impact on the gameplay itself and lead to the "rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle" bit.
- Non-comedic example. The game Tribes had a bug that let players travel frictionlessly, sliding across the ground at great speed. The bug was so liked by the playerbase, it was quickly put back in after being fixed, and the sequels actually made it a gameplay feature.
- Rocket Jumping was at first an unintentional side effect of the Quake engine where explosions would impart some lateral momentum to nearby players. Once the multiplayer crowd mastered the technique, there was no longer any question of "fixing" it. Nowadays many FPS games feature deliberately-engineered rocket jumping mechanics.
- The name of the god Armok from Dwarf Fortress was taken from a variable used in the limb damage system: arm ok.
- Most of Kefka Palazzo's dialogue in Dissidia: Final Fantasy was actually ad-libbed by his voice actor, Shigeru Chiba, and his tendency to change the tone of his voice mid-sentence was also due to Chiba.
- The famous Post 217 in a Neo GAF thread about Scribblenauts became popular enough for official artwork◊ to be made of it. Soon after, the developers confirmed that "Post 217" was an object in the game's dictionary.
- Warcraft The Frozen Throne's Pandaren were originally an April Fool's joke that people responded to, so they were thrown into the game, with a side mission and a hero in the orc campaign.
- In Quest For Glory 4, every evening in the Inn there are three villagers who convene. The voice actors had great fun ad-libbing lines for them, including a rant on how one of them used to be an Elephant herder (the game is set in a country based rural medieval Romania, BTW, filled with forests and swamps) but the elephants all started dying out. The ad-libbing is quite apparant as on many occasions their speech do not even match what's written in the dialogue boxes. At one point the characters even speak out of order of what's being seen at the screen.
- In the So Bad Its Horrible game Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, there is a scene where the male protagonist Narmfully flubs a line leading the crew members off screen to laugh about it. And they decide to leave it in anyway. The Angry Video Game Nerd points it out, although you may want to keep this link in mind.
- Many of Nathan Drake's one-liners in Uncharted Drakes Fortune are the result of voice-actor Nolan North's improvisation while watching gameplay footage of his character.
- Team Fortress 2's got a few of these, mostly because Valve will do seemingly anything for the lulz.
- In April of 2008, Valve released a character interview called "Meet the Sniper". In it, the titular Sniper is shown waiting patiently for a shot all day via time-lapse footage. Sharp-eyed viewers will note that in the foreground, a jar of decaf is slowly drained, and in the background, mason jars begin filling up with urine. Much laughs were had, and all was promptly forgotten. Fast-forward a year later, and Valve releases an April Fool's joke poster about the urine-filled jar being used as a weapon by the Sniper- they call it "Jarate, the Jar-Based Karate"◊. Much laughs were had again. Fast-forward to the Sniper vs. Spy update, where it's revealed that one of the Sniper's new weapon unlocks will indeed be the Jarate. Fans are divided on whether this is a Crowning Moment Of Funny, Crowning Moment Of Awesome, or pure Squick.
- The Classless Update brought with it a new game mode, "King of the Hill", in which both teams fight for occupation of a central point in the map for 3 minutes. If one team manages to run the 3-minute timer, but the other team has begun trying to occupy the point, the game goes into Overtime until the central point is completely unoccupied. The overzealous announcer immediately screams "OVERTIME!" whenever an opposing player steps on the central point during this period- she screams it every time. Hilarity Ensues when a steady stream of opposing players keeps stepping in an out of the besieged central point, with the announcer cutting in through her own lines trying to keep up- "OVE-OH-OVERTI-OVERTIME-OVER-OVER-OV-OVERTIME!" This was removed a few days after the update, but due to popular demand, was left in as a server-side option.
- The Onyxia encounter in World of Warcraft was intended to have her Deep Breath ability used as a finisher on groups that had a significant number of players already dead. Due to a programming bug, it was used much more frequently, and was only left in because it didn't stop people from killing her.
- A couple of bugs in The King Of Fighters made their way into canon. One of them is Leona’s respect for Chang (she salutes him starting with KOF ’98; it cued some nice Wild Mass Guessing back in the day, Or So I Heard). Another one is Kim’s midair super in KOF ’94; it was definitely a bug that affected other characters with midair command moves in KOF ’94 and KOF ’95, but Kim’s ability to do the Ho-o-kyaku in midair has been an intentional ability in many later games.
- Most of the swearing in Brutal Legend (especially on the part of Ozzy Osbourne's character) wasn't in the original script. But Tim Schafer decided to keep it because, well, it fits in.
Web Animation
- The voice actor for Donut in Red Vs Blue took to ad-libbing several lines during production, which were often left in because they were funnier than the original script. One notable example occurs after Sarge orders Donut to "scream like a woman" as part of a battle plan; while the script only called for a girlish shriek, Donut begins to scream and babble incoherently, and continues doing so while running back and forth in the background as the other characters deliver their lines.
- Also, the often hilarious dialogue that plays after the "official" end to each episode is primarily ad-libbing.
- According to Guitar Hero 2, where it appears as a bonus song, the "Trogdor" song in Homestar Runner originated when, as one of the Brothers Chaps was finishing the cartoon, the other began singing the chorus out of nowhere as he made eggs.
Web Comics
- Maxim, the Bishonen Jägermonster of Girl Genius, was originally created as a joke. But he was found so funny that he was added to the comic as-is.
Web Original
- Less funny than dramatic, but Brittanny Ashworth's death in V2 of Survival Of The Fittest. The character's handler said, in an OOC note at the end of his first post with her 'Anybody after a kill feel free to take a shot at her' of course, somebody interpreted this a bit too literally, godmoding the character's death at the hands of his villain character. After a little debate, it was left in.
- Also, an important part of V3 character's Adam Reeves' backstory revolves around him having his lip torn by a fish-hook hold in a fight. It was suggested the culprit of this injury was the older brother of Maxie Dasai. The more the handlers thought about the idea, the better it sounded, and it was simply thrown in.
- The website Bloggingheads.tv has a lot of this. Cats, children, doors, phone calls, and various other interruptions have been known to occur, and are sometimes left in.
- The Fobbies Are Borange spinoff Loids Are Not Christmas is completely improvised, leading to such memorable lines as "I'MMA HIT IT... WITH MY HAND."
- This. Part Two was originally meant to be uploaded here, but the camerawoman thought the dissonance would probably be taken as an excellent piece of satire. See also the adverts on the same channel, which are almost completely Made Of Trope.
- While tinkering with Ganon's clothes during the production of The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage, Ganon's robe fell off for no reason. The creators decided that the thought of the Great Evil King's robe falling off was too funny to leave out.
- According to one of Linkara's video logs on the filming of an episode of The Nostalgia Critic, the Zuul joke in the Pagemaster review was originally a throwaway joke from Doug's brother, and the two decided to keep it in the video anyway. It got to the point of becoming a proper Running Gag in future That Guy With The Glasses videos, and Doug and his brother can apparently no longer watch Ghostbusters without shouting "Zuul, muthafucka! Zuul!"
Western Animation
- On The Simpsons, the often-quoted sung line: "I am so smart! I am so smart! S-M-R-T! I mean, S-M-A-R-T!" This was an actual mistake by voice actor Dan Castellaneta, but it was just so "Homer" they left it in.
- Megatron's famous "yeeeeeeeessss..." from Beast Wars wasn't originally scripted, but was improvised by voice actor David Kaye, who thought it fit the character. It did, and quickly became his Catch Phrase.
- Most of the Constructicon's dialogue during their first appearance in Transformers Animated was ad libbed by their voice-actors, as was a lot of other things, including Blitzwing's German accent the entirety of The Stinger in the season two finale.
- Futurama's famous Hypno-Toad sound effect is an example, similar to the 2001 example given above. The sound was meant to just be a placeholder until a proper sound effect could be edited in. However, the placeholder noise sounded "so wrong" that the creators decided to keep it.
- The first episode of Invader Zim contains the line 'Invader's blood marches through my veins- like giant, radioactive rubber pants!' The line was supposed to say 'ants'. But it's the kind of show where "pants" actually fits better.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, Sokka was supposed to be a more serious warrior character. However, the improvisation of his All That cast-member voice-actor lead to him becoming the Plucky Comic Relief.
- According to Bruce Timm, Terry's revelation as Bruce's biological son in Batman Beyond and the Justice League Unlimited episode "Epilogue" stemmed from the earlier realization that, with his established redhead and light-brunette parents, Terry's black hair was genetically implausible. Apparently, We Will Not Use Hair Dye In The Future.
- Shego from Kim Possible was originally created as a generic, boring Dragon to Dr. Drakken, but after the creators heard Nicole Sullivan’s performance as Shego they gave her a bigger role, making her sarcastic, more competent and far savvier than Drakken.
- Freakazoid's voice actor was supposed to refuse a plot hook with a "No," and the sequence ended up twenty seconds longer because of what he did say.
Jeepers: Hehehehehe... You want to see something strange and mystical?
Freakazoid: NO! Get out of here with that watch! Lay off the poor beavers, will ya?! Sheesh! You're a creep! Go away! We were having a good time until you showed up, Jeepers! Urrrg! Go have some coffee with cream or something! Because I'll tell you something: this is a happy place!
- Looney Tunes - Bob Clampett's 1943 short An Itch in Time has a scene of a dog, having been irritated by a flea, scooting wildly around a carpet on its rear end. As an "inside" joke, Clampett and his animators added an off-color gag of the dog pausing to tell the audience, "Hey, I'd better cut this out, I may get to like it!", fully expecting that either the studio or the Hays Office would have it removed. Astonishingly, they didn't.
- The episode "Shrabster" of Sealab 2021 involves an hammy, over the top announcer declaring "Indeed!" along with a linking remark with each scene change. The hammyness ultimately becomes too much for the announcer when leaving a clip involving a a starving 14 year old African boy.
Announcer: Dead African child indee-hee-hee-hee-heed... [uncontainable laughter], I'm sorry. It's just so f- bleep-ing awful.
Real Life
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