Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
The King of Town: All right, gentlemen, this is how this is going to go down. I'm gonna write a number on this piece of paper.
Strong Bad: Uh, King, you wrote a piece of lasagna on this piece of paper.
The King of Town: And I ain't budging!
For some reason, perhaps to avoid the show becoming dated by inflation, perhaps because people's definition of "a lot of money" varies, large sums of money tend not to be specified on TV. They are written down on pieces of paper, whispered in people's ears, etc.
Also see the articles on Zillion Dollar Bill and Impossibly Cool Wealth.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- An episode of Naruto where, upon finding Jiraiya's checkbook, the titular character opens it and exclaims "Woah! That's a lot of zeros!" Apparently, writing erotic novels can pay pretty well...
- Word Of God says that Tsunade's gambling debts are around that high.
- Averted after the timeskip, when it is stated that Chiriku has a bounty of 30 million ryo on his head, and it is stated that one ryo is ten yen, and ten ryo is approximately one dollar, and databooks specify the rewards for missions.
Film
Literature
- In Mostly Harmless Ford Prefect "names a figure" as a tip for the bar singer (strongly implied to be Elvis Presley). The figure causes the barman to faint, but Arthur Dent doesn't react because he doesn't know how much it's worth. Ford says it would buy you "roughly... Switzerland."
Live Action TV
- In NewsRadio, Mr James shows Dave the amount he was offered for the radio station, written on a piece of paper, and we don't see it. Dave thinks it's not excessively generous until Mr James points out he has to unfold the paper.
- In Friends, Chandler cuts short of telling Monica how much money he has in his bank account, writing it down instead.
- Though this is more because he doesn't want Rachel and Phoebe to know; Monica tells them shortly afterwards anyway.
- But she still shows them the paper instead of saying the number out loud.
- And this is after he blows his savings account to buy new (leather!) furniture when he felt guilty about kissing Joey's girlfriend. Thus we get the feeling that in less than five years he has amassed a new savings account of at least five figures.
- In Seinfeld, Jerry buys a suede jacket with an unnamed but astronomical price which he refuses to tell to George. It's at least implied that the jacket costs something north of a thousand dollars.
- Another example would be in The Cadillac episode, where Jerry earns enough money to buy a Cadillac, from a single gig.
- On Nip/Tuck, Sean sells his share of the practice for "a lot of money."
- In Mad About You, Jamie makes a huge bet on a horse race; we only see Paul's reaction when she shows him the betting slips. The horse wins at very long odds, which presumably means the Buchmans won a small fortune, but this fact isn't even brought up.
- Subversion: On The Drew Carey Show, Millionaire Mrs. Lauder offers Drew 00 for his house in a land-grab. He is reeled, then responds that his house is clearly worth more. Mrs. Lauder says that she knew, but her accountants had scientifically calculated that exact amount as the minimum sum that poor people think is "a lot".
- The whole inflation deal is parodied in a Muppets Tonight sketch, in which a character inherits a "fortune" of "eighty-five dollars." (Miss Piggy: "What!? I've got more than that on me!")
- A similar device is used in one episode of The Sarah Silverman Program, in which the titular character is asked by a nurse how many times she has had unprotected sex. Rather than say it out loud, Sarah writes it down on a piece of paper. The nurse seems more confused by the fact that there are two numbers on the piece of paper ("One's for the front") and that they are both identical ("I'm kind of OCD about that") than surprised at the size of the figure, but given the content of the rest of the scene, it can be assumed that the number is very high.
- In Friday Night Lights' first season, the Street family's lawsuit's settlement is for a number written down on a piece of paper, after a whole scene of debating between two opposing, also never-spoken-aloud amounts.
- When Lily shops for her wedding dress in How I Met Your Mother, one of the dresses in priced at what Robin describes as "never ever ever ever ever times infinity", but it's revealed at the end of the episode that it cost $8000.
- A sketch on The Sketch Show played with this, which a woman discusses with a repairman his prices using onomatopoeia (whistles for high prices, "eh" for low prices, etc.) At the end of the sketch, the woman asks how much it would be if she helps install it, and he replies, "£50".
- On Buffy The Vampire Slayer, after a long series of episodes where Buffy is shown needing money, the problem is abruptly solved with some money from Giles. The money is implied to be a large amount, but its value (true to this trope) is never shown.
- Subverted on Leverage in "The Juror #6 Job" when Sophie writes $100,000,000 in the guy's Zen sand garden.
Real Life
- Real Life example: In soccer, clubs sometimes list the transfer fee paid for a player as 'undisclosed' this usually means 'more than he's really worth'
Video Games
- Played with in The Curse of Monkey Island: During an attempt to purchase a Plot Coupon, the character who owns it states that "it would cost you an awful lot of money," and then asks if Guybrush has that much money. If the player has already completed an insurance fraud quest (which yields "a lot of money" as the reward), Guybrush will offer "a lot of money," only to be turned down: The diamond cannot be sold for anything less than "an awful lot of money."
- Fortunately, you do have the option to play the men at poker for the Plot Coupon, and the buy-in is "not a lot of money", which, given that he very distinctly has "a lot of money," Guybrush can amply afford.
- Played straight in Mother 2, but averted in Earthbound. During localization, for some reason a couple of vague references meaning roughly "a bajillion dollars" were changed to real numbers (Ness' family's debt to Porky's family is "a hundred thousand dollars or more" and the Diamond "could pay off a million dollar debt easily").
Webcomics
- Both played straight and averted, on separate occasions, in the webcomic Scandal Sheet!. Played straight when Max shows Foster his first paycheque for working at The Comet - Foster's eyes grow large and he says "That's a lot of zeros." However, it's averted later when Foster receives a large amount of money from his former co-worker at the porn studio, who found his script for Thigh-tanic and produced it, with enormous success. The amount is specified to be ten thousand dollars.
Western Animation
- Cartoon shorts in World War II and The Fifties often threw around figures in the low millions when the subject of obscene wealth was mentioned. (Often in a On One Condition story.) This lead to the very datedness effect that many of these other examples strive to avoid.
- In the Disney cartoon series Young Hercules, Croesus, the King of Atlantis, writes out checks to buy off several people to stop the "rumor" that Atlantis is doomed to sink beneath the waves—- including the Fates and Hades, god of the underworld. This at first offends Hades, till he sees the amount on the check... "You think you can buy off HADES, GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD, with a wuh-wuh-whoa that is a LOT of brimstone...." (The in-joke being that Croesus was IRL the wealthiest king in Greek history....hence the phrase "Rich as Croesus")
- In Gargoyles, Xanatos tells his father the exact amount that the rare coin that started his fortune was worth... but then goes on to say that his current fortune is "well, considerably more."
|
|
