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alt title(s): Goes To Eleven 
Try to top this.
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Often, some people have the need to top things. It could be because of dissatisfaction with something, a need to best someone else (often known as "Keeping up with the Joneses"), or some other reason. Either way, you would like to take something, and push it beyond what's been done before.
Unfortunately, things like time, money, technology, and/or other factors will only allow that so far. So you just end up topping the last thing by a small amount. So you've been forced to leave room for your own thing to be topped later on. Then you top that new thing, this can lead to an all-out "topping" war. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on the circumstances.
Exactly what is topped can vary. It could be a commercial product ( like computer and gaming tech), an architectural feat, a world record, or something else. Whatever thing, this trope is taking the highest bar set, and taking that "Up to Eleven".
Conspicuous Consumption often involves this.
Compare Sequel Escalation, Beyond The Impossible, Tim Taylor Technology, Exaggerated Trope, and The Same But More. A guiding principle behind Rank Inflation. Often appears with music if a Loud Of War is on the rampage.
Examples:
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Advertising
- RAZOR BLADES. O Gillette, why would anybody need five blades with only either one chin or two legs?
- And once again, Irregular Webcomic plays with it
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- Saturday Night Live had a great commercial parody about The Platinum Mach 14 — A razor with 14 blades.
- One-upped by a real razor ad. The 15-bladed Quintippio is of course a parody, the actual product is an electric razor.
- A long time ago, Saturday Night Live, in response to the 'two blade razors' showed a three-blade razor parody commercial. The fake ad looked completely real until the final line: "Because ... you'll believe anything!"
- Mad TV one-upped SNL and did a skit with the fiction Spishak Mach 20 which had 20 blades and shaved the man to the bone. Watch it here.
- The Onion did a parody article called Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades shortly after Schick introduced their four blade razor in response to the popular Mach3. This is made extra hilarious by the fact that this is what Gillette actually did a few years later.
- And they added one more on the back.
- Michael Mc Intyre once did a bit on Mock The Week on Gillette ending with "For that closest ever shave. In fact, this one's too close. It'll cut off your face like a potato peeler. Buy the previous Gillette razor, we couldn't get it any closer than that."
- The Economist published this graph◊ estimating the rate razor blade technology's increase into the future. We will soon have razors with infinite blades.
- The Other Wiki's article on technological singularities used to predict this would happen in 2015, illustrated by a picture of the Schick Infini-T. Then some humourless bastard got hold of the article, obviously.
- "Our Games Go to 11!" was the tagline of defunct publisher Working Designs, known for publishing niche Japanese RPGS in the US with expensive packaging.
Anime
- Accelerator's gamebreaker of a power is essentially telekinesis turned Up To One Hundred Eleven.
- Dragonball Z went all the way up to eleven, then way past it, all the way up to OVER NINE THOUSAND!!
- Detroit Metal City offers this less-than-subtle Shout Out - Krauser attempts to push his record of yelling 'rape' ten times a second Up To Eleven.
- Kakashi Hatake from Naruto is one of the most powerful ninja his village has to offer, due to his knowledge of techniques, martial arts abilities, determination, and tendency to take it up to eleven. Even though his dial only has about eight notches.
- Pretty much everything in Gurren Lagann is an example of this. The (Pent)ultimate example being the final episode, where the HUMONGOUS Humongous Mecha is large enough to use galaxies as shuriken. In the second movie it was revealed that there is ANOTHER combination the size of the literal universe. And yes, it's still AWESOME.
- Mahou Sensei Negima starts using this a lot in it's more recent chapters, most notably with Jack Rakan, who exists solely to continually ramp up the amount of 'AWESOME' the series contains. He starts with summoning a sword the size of a building, and only gets more ridiculous from there. He also seems to be rubbing off on Negi, as the entire Negi/Kotaro vs. Rakan/Kage fight in the tournament was essentially a contest to see who could turn the awesomeness knob higher. After five separate I Am Not Left Handed moments from Negi, Kotaro turning into a Big Bad Ass Wolf, and Rakan nearly destroying the arena with one punch, the knob gets broken off and the match ends in a draw.
- At one point in the Digimon series, the protagonists considered it "cheating" when the main antagonist reached a power level one higher (Mega) than the one they had been told was the apex (Ultimate). Since then, we've had DNA Digivolution of two Megas, Mega Mode Change, Ancient Spirit Evolution (the fusion of ten Ultimate-equivalent level Digimon) and (most recently) Burst Evolution.
- One end-of-episode teaser in Yu Yu Hakusho claimed things would be going Up To Eleven in the next episode.
- In the Pokemon episode "A Promise is a Promise," Dr. Namba tells his Electabuzz to "turn it up to eleven," as he turns up his rage machine to greatly increase the pokemon's power.
- Seto No Hanayome has a tendency to make things as absurd as possible (like a Schoolgirl Rival literally declaring war on another girl), but the Finale takes the cake. It involves...well, just read this.
Comic Books
- In the Marvel and DC Comics crossover, Jla-Avengers, Superman tells Thor, "Tell yourself that, Mister... Ease yourself to sleep at night while you let your world go to hell! Where I come from, though, LIVES MATTER!" When Thor tries to bring Mjolnir on his head, Superman catches the hammer, causing an astonished Thor to react, "Odin's beard! How can you...? The mightiest... mightiest in Nine Worlds cannot..." Superman retorts, "S-sorry... sorry to disappoint... but in... my world, it looks like the dials GO UP TO ELEVEN!" and crushes Thor with a roundhouse punch, knocking him out cold. This caused a LOT of controversy among comic book fans.
- Which is silly, since the comic itself says that Supes was Not Himself (nor was Captain America); the two heroes were so "in-tune" with their home universes that the merger was causing them psychic stress and making them needlessly critical and antagonistic towards the other universe, Supes saying that the Marvel heroes were letting their Earth go to pot while Cap said the DC heroes had virtually set themselves up as rulers of their Earth.
- The issue was the relative strength of the heroes, not the behavior. And, basically, it's true. Just ask Scarlet Witch. However, the Marvel Universe is full of doomsday devices that dwarf those of the DCU.
- The Casket of Ancient Winters from the Thor comics is weird example of this. It created a winter so cold when opened that frost giants started freezing to death.
Fan Fic
- Shinji And Warhammer 40 K is this trope, Up To 121.
- In An Entry with a Bang!, the Americans and Russians announce that they are massively, massively increasing nuke output for the Deus Ex Nukina defence against intruders into the solar system. We're looking at at least 10,000 warheads a year, compared to a mere 2,700 (!) per year as US peak production during the Cold War. A mercenary leader converted to Clancy-Earth's side, already apalled by the talk of Nuclear Rearmament since C-Earth alone has many more nukes than any of the Inner Sphere houses, realises that he needs a stronger alcoholic drink than beer after this.
Film
- Named, of course, for the amplifiers used in This Is Spinal Tap. It's then promptly parodied when Marty asks why the amps literally go to eleven when they could have just made ten louder. Nigel's brain breaks. "These go to eleven."
- Make ten louder? You mean by buying a bigger amp, or adding more speakers, like everyone else? Or by putting in a little psychological reserve tank, to be dipped into in case of emergencies?
- For an example of how this works, see Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny. The entire movie is attenuated by a few decibels, except for the rock-off at the climax of the movie. So the rest of the movie tops out at 10, and they turn it to 11 for the final battle.
- In The Princess Bride, Christopher Guest plays a character who also goes to eleven.
- Well, perhaps up to five someday. But definitely not to fifty!
- You could almost say Darth Maul's dual blade saber is like this.
- The villains of The Frighteners are going for a murder world record even from beyond the grave.
- Zurg's Ion Blaster in Toy Story 2 goes up to 11.
- The Hunt For Red October has Captain Tupelev: "Inquire with the engineer about going to 105% on the reactor".
Literature
- A character in Sewer, Gas and Electric goes Up To Eleven in both lavish extravagance and in attempts to impress one's date with one's wealth, investing $10,000 in a top-of-the-line pack of condoms.
- In Dune Messiah, Alia Atreides engages in a sparring match with a mechanical swordsman, which gets faster, and creates more lights (which reflect off its prismatic body to distract its opponent) every time it is struck. Its noted that the greatest swordsmen in the universe can strike it seven times before it becomes too fast to safely continue. Alia manages to strike it eleven times, before Paul stops her. Note that this book was published in 1969, which makes Up To Eleven Older Than They Think.
- Matthew Reilly bypasses eleven in his books and goes straight to sixteen. One example: the heroes are in a truck and being chased in a tunnel barely wide enough to hold a car. The solution to get rid of the bad guys? Call in a plane, have it fire a missile down the tunnel, and drive the truck hard against the wall so that the wheels on one side ride up the wall, allowing the missile to shoot below the truck and kill the bad guys.
Live Action TV
- Mythbusters has a policy of "Duplicate the myth, replicate the results." They first test a myth under the claimed circumstances, then ramp up the test to see just what it would take to produce the results the myth claims. And then sometimes they'll take it up to ridiculous levels after that, just for the sake of making a really big explosion.
- One episode had them taking many of their previous myths and just pushing it up to insane levels. For example, the myth about the exhaust of a jet engine flipping a car. They confirmed it in the original show (if only through archive footage) but then they decide to see if it could flip a bus. (It could.)
- Or the "Shooting Fish in a Barrel" episode: it turns out that shooting fish in a barrel is, indeed, quite easy (the shockwave will knock them out even if the bullet misses). So why did they then attack the barrel with a Humvee-mounted Chaingun? Because.
- No live fish were harmed testing this myth.
- And we must mention the episode where they tried to find out if you could clean out a cement mixer with explosives. Then filled it with the most powerful non-nuclear explosive in existence. Just because.
- The cement company accidentaly overfilled that truck, and the entire load had set. Tory had unsuccessfully tried to loosen it using a jackhammer, and it had pissed him off. The truck deserved everything it got. At the time it was the biggest explosion ever done on the show (now it's only 3rd or 4th biggest but still one of the coolest). There was very little left of that truck afterwards.
- The build team did this literally when they busted the myth that a sheet of paper can be folded in half only seven times. It culminated in producing and folding a huge sheet of paper, turning up the maximum number of folds... to eleven.
- Another person got it up to twelve. It's one-up from 11, which is better.
- They folded it the same way each time. You're supposed to alternate.
- The Hindenburg episode had them using scale models of the Hindenburg to test the myth that it was the chemicals on the skin of the airship rather than the hydrogen that destroyed it. It turned out to be a "contributing factor". Then - just for the hell of it - they took the last scale model, pumped it with hydrogen, and coated it with seventeen pounds of pure thermite. It burned. Oh yeah did it burn.
- Another episode has them trying to cause two tractor-trailer rigs to fuse together in a head-on collision, with a compact car being crushed between them and literally lost in the wreckage. They crashed the trucks into the car at highway speeds, but there was no fusion, and the car was still partially there. Next, they built a rocket-propelled sled with the proper mass and crashed it into the car at seven hundred miles per hour. Still no fusion, though it did successfully make the car vanish, bend a piece of one-inch-thick steel plate in half, and throw a multi-thousand-pound block of concrete about thirty feet. They eventually resorted to explosive welding.
- Another favorite motto of theirs: "if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing"
- In Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Force of Nature", LaForge is found to be engaged in friendly competition with Commander Donald Kaplan of the USS Intrepid over their respective ships' power conversion levels. He does manage to one-up him by 0.1%... shortly before a speed limit of Warp 5 is imposed.
- The House season 6 episode 'Epic Fail' includes House joking about this to Wilson:
Wilson: Doesn't this seem a little bit obsessive?
House: Should've been here when I was butchering the ox. What do you expect? I'm an addict. I turn everything up to eleven.
- In 'TB or not TB' House and Foreman have a bet going on whether a test will gain any results. As soon as it looks like House is losing, he turns the dial up to 11, gets expected results, as well as $20.
- Top Gear has a few examples of this, a recent one coming from episode 12x03 where Jeremy Clarkson presents to the audience a food blender powered by a 6.2L Corvette V8.
- Not forgetting its manliest ingredient, a brick.
- Another Mock The Week answer: In If This Is The Answer What Is The Question, the answer was "Serious, Risky and Heroic". Frankie Boyle's question was "What are the settings on Mae West's vibrator?"
- In the Doctor Who episode "The Lazarus Experiment", the Doctor uses an organ as a sonic weapon. When it fails to produce the required results, he says to himself "Need to turn this up to Eleven", before using the screwdriver to do exactly that (the readout changes from 100 to 110).
- Brainiac: Science Abuse, a British show somewhat similar to mythbusters, investigated the danger of using a mobile phone ina petrol station by filling a caravan with petrol vapour and a mobile phone and calling it. They then turned it up to eleven by adding a lot more mobile phones and calling them simultaneously. Then somewhat subverted the trope by blowing up the caravan - by having a man dressed in nylon dance in a bucket then touch the end of a long wire running to the caravan.
Music
Professional Wrestling
- King Kong Bundy has, as a central part of his gimmick, the "five-count". Normal pinfalls go to a three-count; when Bundy pins someone, to show how badly he's beaten them, he holds up a hand and yells "FIVE!", demanding the referee count to five instead.
Real Life
- Skyscrapers were often this, like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were basically a race to see which would end up taller.
- More recently, the Burj Dubai (now named the Burj Khalifa) averted this. Rather than going 'up to eleven' to top the tallest building before it, the new tower went straight up to twenty. It's half a freaking mile high.
- Leo Fender's first amplifiers indeed went up to eleven. And it still sounded too clean. Then we have Marshall who decided to one up it by giving it more watts, more speakers, more preamplification for that hard rock sound, and then later going to twenty. Then Mesa Boogie, inspired by Marshall, makes it go even further, creating one of the loudest metal amps.
- A lot of the Ermine Cape Effect is due to this, where royalty would do their best to show the most elaborate outfits and dresses they could get tailored, especially in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
- One particular king commonly ate his dinners either plated in gold, sprikled with ground-up pearls, or soaked in expensive perfume. However, the source is Ripley's Believe It or Not, so this idea is probably an exaggeration or taken out of context, at best.
- A far more reliable source (my grade X chemistry schoolbook in the 1970s) stated that Napoleon III, French emperor in the 19th century, used aluminium plates for himself and the empress at official banquets, this metal being the most expensive available in his era.
- On that note, the Age of Imperialism was around those centuries, and all about getting the most colonies.
- How many times have you heard a supervisor or a coach demand a "110% effort"?
- The economic theory of Conspicuous Consumption, which basically says that people buy useless luxury items like diamond-encrusted dog collars to show off their wealth, which prompts others to find even more extravagant ways of showing off, et cetera.
- Best exemplified by the infamous iPhone application "I Am Rich", which was an application which cost $999.99 (the maximum possible at the iPhone store) and did nothing useful.
- The Free BSD unix based operating system had some problems switching from the 4.x to the 5.x version, forcing them to release a 4.10 and 4.11 "production" versions. They lampshaded it releasing promo material with "4.11, ours goes to eleven" on it.
- Overclocking computers with the help of liquid nitrogen. Liquid motherfucking nitrogen. This is quite possibly the only thing in the computer industry that will never be topped.
- Until somebody does it with liquid helium.
- Or liquid sodium. Like a nuclear reactor. “My CPU has to run at 100% every time, lest the coolant solidifies!” Yay.
- I really don't see how it would work out well - sodium melts at 98* C
- The Big Ten college sports conference added an eleventh member (Penn State) in 1987, kept their name as the Big Ten, and added an 11 buried in their logo.
- The Atlantic 10 sees your eleven and raises you 14. Given its members in Missouri and Ohio, the name appears to have become The Artifact.
- The Badwater Ultramarathon: (from Sports Illustrated) Think of Badwater as five consecutive marathons, only they're uphill (from 280 ft. below sea-level and 8,360 ft. above), held inside a blast furnace (the temperature hovers above 115 degrees — at night) and capable of frying runners' brains like a fistful of peyote (hallucinations caused by sleep deprivation are part of the event's charm).
- The featured runner, Arthur Webb, has run the thing 12 times and has finished around 48 hours (with a record 36 hours being fourth place) each time, rips his big toenails out so they won't crack as his feet swell in the 130 degree daytime heat, and once lost consciousness... and his pulse (he got better). Oh, and he's 67 years old.
- Maybe it's just me, but I'm impressed how the Rubik's cube world record took almost a 2 second leap, courtesy of Erik Akkersdijk. This doesn't sound like much, until you realise the previous record was 8.72 seconds. 2 seconds is a huge leap.
- In a West Indies vs Australia cricket match from the early 90s, specialist bowlers Mike Whitney and Bruce Reid (both infamously bad batsmen) were in the Australian side. Whitney came to bat at number 10 (second-last), and after he'd swung wildly at a few deliveries, West Indian commentator Michael Holding (who'd never seen either of them play before) said "can you believe this guy's at number 10?" Ian Chappell replied, "Just you wait. There's someone worse to come."
- In the 2010 Australian Open, Andy Murray went up to eleven in the third set tie-breaker, but lost to Roger Federer who went up to thirteen and consequently won the championship
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 takes the amp, scrawls twelve and thirteen on the amp in gothic script and then plugs it into a Slaaneshi Noise Marine's Blastmaster, causing heads to explode all over the planet.
- And the Orks would cheerfully turn it up to seventeen if any of them could count that high.
- The card game Munchkin has a card named "Mine goes up to Eleven!" If you play it, people have to reach level 11 instead of 10 as usual.
- Magic The Gathering has a mechanic called "protection" which made a card essentially immune to a certain source (A card with "protection from red" can not be blocked or damaged by red creatures, or targeted by red spells and abilities). Until recently, the mechanic was limited to phrases like "protection from black" or "protection from red" or "protection from artifacts", or occasionally "protection from creatures". Then along came this card.
- Most MTG cards at the new "Mythic Rare" rarity level fall under this trope. Progenitus is "protection up to eleven," Kresh the Bloodbraided is "gets-stronger-when-something-else-dies (a common ability on Jund creatures) up to eleven," Sedris the Traitor King is "unearth up to eleven," Rafiq of the Many is "exalted up to eleven," Conflux is "card-search up to eleven," Maelstrom Nexus is "cascade up to eleven," Godsire is "token-producing up to eleven," et cetera. Although not all Mythic Rare cards make use of an existing mechanic, it's basically not worth making a card Mythic Rare UNLESS its potency is cranked up to eleven.
- Darksteel Colossus goes up to eleven literally. It has 11 power, 11 toughness, and costs 11 mana. Oh, and it's indestructible. Not only that, but if it is somehow sent to the graveyard, it's shuffled into its owner's library instead. This ability (which also appears on the aforementioned Progenitus) is actually meant as a drawback, as it prevents players from discarding or milling it and then reanimating it.
Theater
- There is a game in improvisational theater called "Toppers", which is basically this trope.
Video Games
Video Player Applications
- The volume on the BBC iPlayer goes up to 11.
- However Sky's goes up to 12
- VLC media player's volume percentage goes up to 200% in the menu bar then goes on to 400% if you use the scroll wheel over the main window. This isn't just cosmetic, either: The default 100% setting is at the same level as other software, and cranking it higher will manipulate the waveform, clipping and even brickwalling it as needed.
- This is probably for files that were transferred from the (usually non-digital) source at less than full volume — somewhat common for bootleg media ripped from VHS tapes and the like, which also tends to use the weird formats only VLC and a few other obscure players can read.
Webcomics
Web Original
- "This is my top eleven list... Why top eleven? Because I like to go one step beyond."
- And it is cranked up to a whole twelve in the Christmas lists. Eleven is better than ten, but twelve? He is a MADMAN!
- Movie-related podcast All Movie Talk has Top 6 lists because 6 is one more than 5,
- Episode 16 of the web series Pure Pwnage opens with the main character activating a series of amplifiers and overdrivers attached to his Xbox360 and dialing up the volume past the labeled 'Max' setting as well as the labeled 'Dude', and 'Srsly' marks to reach 'WTF' before rocking out to Guitar Hero.
- With the revamp of ScrewAttack's website, ratings can be given up to eleven. If you care enough.
Western Animation
- In an episode of ReBoot, Megabyte gatecrashes a concert and produces a powerful electric guitar. Unsatisfied with the sound after a couple tests, he reaches for the dial and cranks it up to 11.
- Bubbles got sick of being the "kid" in the group, so she turned the simulator up to eleven to prove she was "hardcore".
- In the opening sequence of Bump in the Night, Mr. Bumpy actually uses a crayon to add an 11 setting to his amp before jacking it all the way up.
- In The Simpsons, Pete Townshend (Guitarist for The Who) has an amp with a setting in place of 11 reading simply "Whuh-Oh", that's strong enough to partly demolish a wall made of solid garbage.
- In the Veggie Tales video "The Star of Christmas," Seymour (Pa Grape) sends Bob and Larry's characters to the church where a Christmas pageant is going to be held in a Rocket car. He warns them that although the car has 11 engines, they should only fire engines 1 through 10, and that under no circumstances should they fire the untested rocket 11. Larry does anyway when the car shows that the church is out of the range of 1-10.
- In the "S'Winter" episode of Phineas And Ferb, Doofenshmirtz builds a laser that has a melting capacity of seven...on a scale of one to five.
- In Home Movies, Duane's band SCAB scrawled the number 11 on the far end of their amps' volume dials.
- In one episode of the Teen Titans, Cyborg complains that, as a machine, he cannot go beyond 100% of his ability. By the end of the episode, he does, and throws away the corresponding indicator.
- In the episode "Ruby Gloom Out of this world" of Ruby Gloom, Frank and Len crank the volume of their music up to eleven. Cue fireworks and an explosions that sends them in orbit around the moon.
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