Viva Las Vegas!

aka: Vegas Episode

"Wait! We can't stop here. This is bat country."

"We are treated to the customary CHARACTER WHO HAS NEVER BEEN TO VEGAS LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW OF A MOVING CAR AT ALL OF THE EXTRAVAGANTLY DECORATED CASINOS montage."

— The Editing Room, The Abridged Script for 21

The principal characters journey to Las Vegas. At least one has a gambling problem and will end up dead broke or winning a ton of money (bonus points if an urgent need for cash is why they go to Vegas). Most likely, one or all end up in jail and/or married. It's possible that someone might host their friend's Stag Party here. Don't be surprised if there's a Drunken Montage or Binge Montage. Don't be surprised either to see Wayne Newton (or an thinly-veiled Expy of him), the former teen pop star of the 1950s who popularized the notion of musicians relocating to Vegas in order to find steady work within the city's many high-profile night spots, and continued to perform off-and-on in the city well into the new millennium. If children are involved, expect some harsh Mood Whiplash when they confront adult themes for the first time, and hilarity may or may not ensue, although this story element has become obscure past the year 2000. In reality, Las Vegas has actually become much more open to people who do not gamble and / or who have kids, and they even have a support group people can call if they have a gambling problem!

This should be considered a separate genre from shows which are routinely set in Vegas, e.g. CSI. In other words, if the show is SET in Las Vegas, it does not belong here. If the cast decide to go visit Vegas and hit up casinos and the line "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" is mentioned, it belongs here.

Viva Las Vegas consists entirely of casino interiors (with rattling-change sound effects, although modern slots dispense credit slips), the Strip, high-roller nightlife in clubs, stage shows, and possibly Fremont Street. And, of course, every other person you'll meet is an Elvis impersonator who doubles as a clergyman or justice of the peace for quickie, no-questions-asked marriages. These many not be too far away from reality...

Television Geography is common when using Vegas, as are Brand X casinos, unless it's total Product Placement for a real casino or a company's family of casinos (most of the Strip is presently owned by two companies, although several other companies have stakes in either Strip or near-Strip properties). The "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign is the city's prime candidate for the Eiffel Tower Effect, given that its image is in the public domain while the likeness of the hotels themselves are privately held. Still, some movies will inflict Monumental Damage on the resorts themselves.

Ironically, very little popularly associated with Las Vegas is actually located in the City of Las Vegas, not the Strip, not the gigantic casino resorts, and not even the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign. They are actually located in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester; this was done intentionally to dodge paying municipal taxes. On the other hand, the Stratosphere tower, which is the tallest building west of the Mississippi River and which can be seen from practically anywhere in the city (and which shows up on innumerable souvenirs of LV), and the Downtown district, which contains the Fremont Street Experience and most of the casinos seen in older features and series about Vegas, are firmly within Las Vegas city limits. However, there are two things worth considering about these loopholes: First, the city of Las Vegas proper is the seat of Clark County (whose local government would be in charge of collecting taxes on the casinos), and second, the city of Las Vegas proper, Paradise, Winchester, and other surrounding suburbs and unincorporated communities collectively form the Las Vegas Valley, making the name of this trope technically accurate.

Another irony of this trope is that, while both in fiction and in Real Life, the Strip is a major attraction for tourists, most locals in the Las Vegas area actually avoid going to the Strip on their time off. The reason for this is pretty simple: The fact that the Strip is such a major source of the local economy (and, therefore, employment), they would feel less inclined to spend their free time at the Strip.

Contrary to popular belief, prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas, Nevada. By state law, any prostitution outside of a brothel is illegal, and a brothel must possess a state-issued license to operate legally. Every county is allowed a "local option" on whether to allow operations of brothels. However, the law immediately prohibits any county having a population over 400,000 from issuing brothel licenses, which excludes Clark (encompassing Vegas) and Washoe (encompassing Reno) counties. The end result of this is that in Nevada's largest cities, prostitution is illegal by default. From Vegas, one has to drive sixty miles west to Pahrump to find the nearest legal brothel. Of course, this doesn't prevent illegal prostitution from being rampant (much as it is in most other large cities in the United States overall).

A destination of a Vacation Episode, Road Trip Plot, and Vacation, Dear Boy.

Compare It Came from Beverly Hills, The Casino, Minigame Zone, Casino Park, and The Show Goes Hollywood. Las Vegas' European equivalent is the Freestate Amsterdam. See also Casino Episode, which need not be centered around a specific Real Life casino. Related tropes include Sinister Southwest or Weird West, which include using the American Southwest (where Las Vegas is located) as a setting for Horror or supernatural stories.

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Examples:

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• A 2010 Kia car commercial had a bunch of toys (including a character from Yo Gabba Gabba!) go to Las Vegas and cruise down the strip during a Super Bowl ad — in defiance of an NFL advertising rule against showing casinos.

Anime & Manga

• Early in Chrono Crusade, Rosette and Chrono are sent on a mission to Las Vegas to save a girl that's been adopted by an owner of a casino. On the way, Rosette gets in trouble because she can't resist gambling on slot machines. (Funnily enough, this series is set during The Roaring '20s, and gambling wasn't even legalized in Las Vegas until 1931.)
• In Eyeshield 21, the Devil Bats arrive in Las Vegas following the "Death March", where they try to win enough money to pay for air fare home and help pay off the debts of Doburoku Sakaki, Hiruma and Kurita's old sensei. Hiruma gets enough on his own by card counting in blackjack.
• Kyo Kara Maoh!: Yuuri and his harem visit their world version of Vegas and bring down a man who runs a crooked casino.
• Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~ had an arc set in Las Vegas and showed the Paris hotel without naming it.
• Samurai Champloo substitutes 18th-century Osaka for Las Vegas, but otherwise plays it similarly.

Comic Books

• The Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic 'Viva Las Buffy', which picks up where the original film left off, though with Joss Whedon's vision rather than the moviemakers'.
• Doctor Who (Titan) sends the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald to 1960s Las Vegas in the two-part story "Gangland". The Doctor runs afoul of the Earthly gangsters who run the casino where he wins big, alien gangsters are the principal villains, and Clara falls in with a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of the Rat Pack.
• Father Christmas Goes On Holiday: After spending a few days in the South of France and the Scottish Highlands, Santa decides he fancies a change of pace and spends an unspecified but lengthy period living it up in the Nero's Palace resort.
• The Incredible Hulk spent a year in Vegas when the Hulk worked as a mob enforcer. Whenever the Grey Hulk (a.k.a. "Joe Fixit") is dominant, expect him to head back to Sin City at the first opportunity.
  "Guess what, Vegas?! Joe Fixit's back in town!"
• Judge Dredd: Judge Dredd visited Las Vegas in the "Cursed Earth" arc, where he travelled through post-apocalyptic America to deliver a cure to the West Coast. The city was run by a corrupt Judge force before Dredd ousted them from power and outlawed gambling. Several years after he left they deposed the guy he put in charge and returned to the old system, but then Judge Death destroyed the entire city.
• In 1981's Superman #365, Superboy, after he left Smallville, kept which city he moved to a secret for awhile to avoid anyone suspecting Clark Kent also moving there at the same time (for college). This resulted in the entire country abuzz about which city Superboy would pick as his new home. A TV news story showed gamblers in Las Vegas making bets on which city the Boy of Steel would call his new home; besides the obvious choice (Metropolis), other cities bet on included: Gotham City, New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, and Chicago. Ironically, Las Vegas itself wasn't one of the cities being bet on.
• Zatanna (2010): The second story arc takes place in Las Vegas. Zatanna is there performing her world-famous stage act, and her cousin Zachary is trying to break into the big time himself with his own show. Ultimately, Zatanna comes into conflict with the demon Mammon, the personification of greed and wealth, who bought the soul of the man who helped build Las Vegas decades ago as a monument to greed.

Fan Works

• In the Calvin & Hobbes: The Series episode "Lightning Man", the protagonists journey to Vegas to find the titular villain's lair. No casinos are seen, though the fic doesn't lose an opportunity to comment on the strange people there.
• Evangelion 303: In chapters 17 and 18 the cast takes a trip to Las Vegas before their deployment. Bachelor and bachelorette parties are had, two soon-to-be-married characters explore further their sex life and other two characters get married.

Film — Live-Action

• 21 is about a bunch of MIT students who go to Las Vegas and make a lot of money via card counting.
• 3000 Miles to Graceland begins with four Kings pulling a casino heist.
• Army of the Dead is a Zombie Apocalypse movie set in Vegas, complete with a zombified bachelorette party and Elvis Impersonator, rabid zombified topless showgirls, a Liberace impersonator, and landmarks like the replica Eiffel Tower getting blown up. The opening credits shows the typical Vegas life being wrecked by the zombie outbreak (set to a reprise of the song "Viva Las Vegas!" by Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe) while the main plot revolves around a heist as the protagonists are sent into the city's walled-off ruins to empty a casino's vault.
• Blade Runner 2049 finds Deckard hiding out in a post-nuke Sin City.
• Casino is a long term version of this for the main character, who is a bookie working for the East Coast mob.
• The made-for-TV Disaster Movie Category 6: Day of Destruction opens with tornadoes destroying Las Vegas, with such sights as a Vegas wedding getting trashed (complete with the bride getting her dress ripped off by the wind), a man getting sucked out of his hotel room just as he's about to have sex with the gorgeous woman he picked up on the casino floor, various casino resorts (all fictional ones) getting destroyed, and a couple living in a trailer outside of the city getting rich when the storm dumps tons of money on them.
• Larkin & Poe chase Cyrus the Virus through the Strip in the climax of Con Air, after a suitable amount of Monumental Destruction. Nic Cage seems to really love that town.
• Destiny Turns On The Radio presents a seedy mythic Las Vegas with Quentin Tarantino as a sort of trickster god of luck.

• Domino ultimately concludes the main character's How We Got Here story through the desert with a gunfight in the Stratosphere, that ends up with a helicopter attacking the tower (eventually crashing into the resort below) and one of the protagonist's friends sacrificing himself to blow up the entire observation pod, causing Domino to rapidly fall down the shaft in an Elevator Failure. The real tower was used instead of a generic knockoff, though the Monumental Damage was of course CGI and an accurate recreation of the restaurant level. Didn't stop them from calling it Based on a True Story, though.

• When Go isn't about a drug-dealing checkout clerk going to Vegas, it's about what his drug-dealing checkout clerk friends decide do while he's gone to Vegas. Gambling isn't highly featured for use of this trope (casino gambling, that is; the characters gamble in plenty of other ways,) and a fair bit of off-Strip Vegas is shown.
• The Godfather, both Parts I and II. Vegas is where Moe Greene gets his special and where Fredo was caught "banging cocktail waitresses two at a time!"

• Honeymoon in Vegas (well, duh). Nicolas Cage loses $65,000 in a poker hand, but the guy he lost to is willing to look the other way in exchange for a weekend with his fiancee. Ends with Cage skydiving into Bally's with a bunch of Elvis impersonators.
• Hostel Part III transplants the Hostel series from Europe to Vegas.
• Buffy and Pike run off to Vegas in the end of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. It's explored more in the comics.
• The characters in Knocked Up take a trip here; the ladies try to get into a nightclub and the guys check out Cirque du Soleil's Mystère (the latter are high on mushrooms to enhance the experience).
• Last Vegas involves the Flatbrush Four staging a bachelor party in Vegas. Drag Queens, notable Vegas locations, improbably gambling winnings, and Vegas weddings are all in order.
• In Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage's character goes to Vegas to drink himself to death.
• The title creature of Leprechaun 3 awakens in Las Vegas, and goes looking for his wish-granting gold.
• Lost in America, in which David doesn't find out that his wife Linda has a gambling problem until after she blows their entire savings, over $100,000, in a single night.
• Looney Tunes: Back in Action: Yosemite Sam owns his own Wild West-themed casino. Bugs Bunny even sings the trope-titled song while on the way there.
• Miss Congeniality 2 takes place in Las Vegas, and even features a scene where a no-nonsense agent is forced to perform as a Tina Turner impersonator.
• Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Thirteen are about pulling a heist/con on a Las Vegas casino owner, the former for profit and the latter for revenge.

• Rain Man has Charlie Babbit take his autistic brother to Vegas to raise some quick cash, to the beat of some Awesome Music.
• Rat Race begins in Las Vegas as a group of bored billionaires select a group of random gamblers/tourists, and tell them that the first to reach Silver City, New Mexico gets to keep a bag full of money stashed there.
• The second half of Rush Hour 2 takes place in Las Vegas where the two main characters infiltrate a casino.
• The hero of the post-apocalyptic movie Six String Samurai spends the entire movie traveling to "Lost Vegas", the last outpost of civilization in America, to replace the recently deceased Elvis as king.
• Swingers starts with a Vegas road trip.
• This Is Not A Movie takes place in Las Vegas, although most of it is filmed inside a hotel room that the main character sequesters himself in as he waits for The End of the World as We Know It.
• Vegas Vacation concerns the Griswolds taking a vacation in the city; Clark receives the gambling addiction subplot, Ellen draws the Wayne Newton subplot.
• In Very Bad Things, the guys travel to Vegas for the Stag Party that goes horribly wrong.
• Actually averted by the Elvis Presley movie Viva Las Vegas!, which features the eponymous song; it's largely about car racing, and has little mention of casinos and gambling, the theme song's lyrics to the contrary.

• In Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies, the Jackass Genie heads to Vegas, due to it being the perfect wishing hotspot.

Literature

• Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is essentially a story made out of this trope on drugs — literally, and lots of them.

• Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand takes place here, and has many of the Vegas tropes, but with a paranormal twist.
• Secret Vampire: Ash takes Poppy to Las Vegas (which is only several hours by car from her hometown in California) to avoid people learning she's a renegade vampire. However, while he tries to show her the sights she's not all that interested, as she'd rather be there with James. Ash suggests they go to a Night World Summer Solstice party whereupon it's revealed he actually plans to turn her over to the Elders.
• The location of Flagg's base in The Stand. Eventually destroyed by a nuclear bomb.
• In To the Nines, Stephanie Plum heads for Vegas to capture a skip, with Connie and Lula in tow. Connie at one point thinks she got married to an Elvis impersonator while intoxicated (much to her relief, the photo she has of this event turns out to be a non-binding joke).

Live-Action TV

• The Season 15 finale of The Amazing Race took place in Vegas. It involved traveling from casino to casino, an Elvis impersonator in a wedding chapel, a visit to Cirque de Soleil, Wayne Newton, and counting out a million dollars in poker chips. The season also featured Maria & Tiffany, a pair of professional poker players. ^note Although by that time, they had already long been eliminated.
• In the Angel episode "The House Always Wins", Angel takes the gang to Vegas, where Lorne is doing a very Wayne-Newtonish show. Against his will. It's learned that Angel attended Elvis' Vegas wedding and that only one member of the Blue Man Group is human. Ironically, the episode did not feature Charisma Carpenter - who was actually born in Las Vegas.
• Parodied in Arrested Development, where Reno, Nevada — essentially the poor man's Las Vegas — is treated this way. Reno calls itself "the biggest little city in the world"; on the show, it has an equivalent slogan to "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" in "Make the biggest little mistake of your life in Reno" (also a variation on the show's Catchphrase "I've made a huge mistake").
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Leonard, Raj, and Howard visit Las Vegas in one episode, partly to get Howard's mind off a recent breakup. Leonard and Raj do wind up hiring a prostitute (willing to roleplay a "Jewish girlfriend") for Howard... but in a nod to reality, she only agrees after confirming that they aren't police.
  • In another episode, Bernadette and Amy invite Penny to Las Vegas for a girls' weekend. However, Penny, normally the resident Hard-Drinking Party Girl, is more preoccupied with completing a sales report than taking part in Amy and Bernadette's drunken escapades, which includes dancing with male strippers. The following morning, while Amy and Bernadette nurse severe hangovers, Penny decides to go down to the pool by herself.
• An episode of Bones takes place in Vegas. One of the characters DOES have a (mostly former) gambling problem (which, to be fair, was introduced long before the episode,) but it doesn't turn out to be a big deal, as he manages to control his urges.
• Two thirds of the way through the first season of Crime Story, the action moves from Chicago to Las Vegas... where it stays for most of the rest of the series, moving South of the Border for the last few episodes.
• The main characters of Criminal Minds all went to Vegas for two episodes to solve a crime. A different spin than the others because it's Reid's hometown (and, incidentally, also the hometown of his actor, Matthew Gray Gubler), although Prentiss was spectacularly hung over at the start of the second episode Absolutely hilarious.
• Deadly Class: The episode "Saudade" features the core characters going on a trip to Vegas for some fun. It's quickly complicated by Marcus getting stoned on way too much acid, Maria's psychotically possessive boyfriend Chico following the group, and the fact that Marcus and Billy arranged the trip as a cover for killing the latter's father.
• The Drew Carey Show had an episode where Drew lost a ton of money then ended up married to a cocktail waitress. This episode was part of a multi-series crossover orchestrated by ABC in which characters from Drew Carey, Coach, Ellen and Grace Under Fire appeared on each other's shows and interacted with each other. Drew was the only one to show up on all four.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: In the final season Will and Carlton go on a trip to Vegas where, inevitably, they lose all their money and Carlton pawns their plane tickets leaving them stranded. They resort to entering a Talent Contest run by Wayne Newton to try and earn enough money to get home.
• Friends had the very well-known two-part Vegas episode where the friends travel to Nevada to visit Joey (who they think is filming a movie there) and also to celebrate Monica and Chandler's one-year anniversary. There, Joey meets a man with identical hands to him and tries to persuade him to go into business with him; Phoebe is stalked by an elderly "lurker"; Monica turns out to be an excellent gambler; Ross and Rachel get drunk, draw on each other's faces, and accidentally get married; and Chandler nearly gets married to Monica, but the two decide against it when they see Ross and Rachel stumbling drunk out of the chapel.
• Full House:
  • The season 2 finale "Luck Be a Lady", although set in Lake Tahoe, is more like the traditional "Vegas" episode, where it features Jesse and Rebecca deciding to elope (and later changing their minds), and the girls playing on the slot machines.
  • In season 4's "Viva Las Joey", Joey has the opportunity to do a stand-up routine before Wayne Newton's concert in Vegas.
• Season 3 Hannah Montana episode, "Jake...Another Little Piece of My Heart" shows the main characters at a hotel in Las Vegas.
• How I Met Your Mother did a Viva Las Vegas episode using Atlantic City instead, with Lily and Marshall not realizing till the last minute that AC doesn't share Vegas's quickie marriage laws.
• In the Hustle episode "Big Daddy Calling", Albert is roughed up and has his hands broken by a vengeful casino owner. The rest of the crew come to Vegas to take revenge by robbing his casino.
• In the Knight Rider remake, one episode has Mike try to bust a money laundering operation in Vegas, and KITT poses as a prize car in a casino. Meanwhile, Billy hooks up with a girl he meets at the bar and tries his luck to earn some money to help pay her out of debt.
  • The classic series episode Goliath also took place in Las Vegas. Surprisingly there wasn't much gambling involved, besides computer poker games.
• LA To Vegas is a Work Com for the aircrew/regular cast, and this for the passengers/rotating guests.
• The Lexx episode "Viva Lexx Vegas" avoids the formula: rather than gambling or marrying, the crew gets mixed up in a Mafia casino's cage-fighting, prostitution, and antiquities-laundering rackets. Naturally, they don't even realize anything illegal is going on.
• In an episode of Lie to Me, Cal, Gillian and agent Reynolds go to Las Vegas to investigate the disappearance of a poker championship finalist. As Cal has a previous history of gambling (he was actually banned from the city of Las Vegas in the past), Gillian forbids him to gamble while they're there, so Cal has Reynolds do it for him instead.
• There was a MADtv (1995) commercial parody about Atlantic City where a woman is stalked by Las Vegas.
  • An Anthropomorphic Personification or Genius Loci? Or a stalker disguised as a casino?
• Malcolm in the Middle has an episode set in Vegas, where Lois falls in love with a crooner played by David Cassidy.
• Al Bundy has to try to win prize money by facing The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling after Peg loses all their money on Married... with Children.
• Monk: "Mr. Monk Goes to Vegas" has Monk and Natalie go to Vegas to solve a murder at the request of Captain Stottlemeyer (or rather, to help Stottlemeyer remember how he had solved the murder when he was drunk off his ass the night before), while Lieutenant Disher loses his savings at a blackjack table.
• The Pretender:
  • In "Curious Jarod," Jarod gets a job at a Vegas casino to discover who killed a showgirl and bring that person to justice.
  • In "Cold Dick," which was actually filmed in Las Vegas, Miss Parker and Broots pose as newlyweds while on a stakeout in a honeymoon suite in Vegas. Hilarity ensues, then Wayne Newton appears in the final scene.
• Roseanne had an episode where Dan and Roseanne go to Vegas with a couple of friends for their quickie wedding. After what was apparently hours of nonstop gambling, they go see Wayne Newton AND a Wayne Newton impersonator.
• On Roswell, a seriously stressed-out Michael attempts to drag Max with him on a getaway to Vegas; by the time they're ready to leave, the entire rest of the teenage cast has included themselves on the trip.
• The series finale of Saved by the Bell sees Zack and Kelly get married in Las Vegas, with pretty much every trope played to the hilt.
• In one episode of Seven Days Frank marries Olga in Las Vegas, complete with Elvis impersonator. Though it turns out it's not Olga...
• In the sixth season premiere of Scrubs, JD, overstressed about the fact that he impregnated his new girlfriend on the first date drinks himself into a stupor and promptly gets kidnapped to Las Vegas by the elderly gay men who had commandeered his porch, almost gets married to one of them, wakes up in utter confusion flees the chapel at the last second, stumbles onto a stage where the Blue Man Group is playing, gets covered in blue paint and confetti, and finally gets beaten up by security, arrested, and has to call Turk to bail him out... all in the three-minute-long pre-credits teaser.
• The penultimate episode of Stargate Atlantis, "Vegas", is set in the city, where John Sheppard is instead a police detective investigating a series of grisly murders committed by a lone Wraith. It later turns out to be an Alternate Reality Episode in which Sheppard's life turned out somewhat differently from the one we're familiar with.
• Starsky & Hutch has "The Las Vegas Strangler," in which the guys go to Vegas to investigate a serial killer who authorities suspect is Hutch's Beleaguered Childhood Friend.
• Titus: Subverted in an episode where Titus and his dad Ken are on their way to Las Vegas, but then their car breaks down outside of a road diner and they spend the rest of the episode dealing with a Maternity Crisis.
• In the third season of Veronica Mars, Dick Casablancas goes on a road trip to Vegas with a girl. He ends up married.
• An episode of Warehouse 13 sends Pete and Myka to Vegas to track down a pair of thieves who stole an artifact that can see the future (which they're using to get rich gambling).
• Wedding Season: Katie and Stefan headed to Las Vegas in the flashbacks of Episode 4, ostensibly for Katie's hen do. They gamble, Katie steals something, and nearly get married by a Prince impersonator in their escape.
• The X-Files: The episode "Three of A Kind", the second Lone Gunmen-centered episode.

Music

• Faith Hill's "Let's Go to Vegas" has her persuading her lover to run off to Vegas, where she hopes they'll get married.
• Gram Parsons' "Ooh Las Vegas" condemns the city for always making "a wreck out of me."
• The Killers play this up in the music video for "The Man", with the all the stereotypical behaviors of Las Vegas leading to crushing failure. "Shot At The Night" plays this more straight, with the story of a hotel cleaner falling in love with a young man in the city.
  • From Brandon Flowers' solo career, "Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas" takes the trope and tells it with As the Good Book Says... style language painting the city in religious imagery, comparing the casinos to temples and the men who hand out calling cards for escorts to religious disciples.

Newspaper Comics

• Safe Havens
  • The main cast travels to Vegas at pivotal moments in their careers: aspiring singer Bambi needs her Vegas show to do well if she doesn't want to get dropped by her label (and her agent Jenny needs it to go well as well or she'll be forced to close her talent agency), Remora and Thomas need to find jobs to support their newborn (especially complicated for Remora since she's temporarily Mode Locked in her 'mermaid classic' form), and Don and Dave are competing in the NBA Summer League to try to get contracts for the regular season. Gambling in the casinos only comes up in Thomas's story arc where he accidentally lost Remora's fish tank, but gambling as a metaphor (for everyone's futures) is played up, compared to Samantha and Luis's safer decisions to go back to school for a doctorate and masters respectively. Bambi's career is resurrected after five encores convince the label to keep her, Thomas's trapezing skills get him hired by Cirque du Soleil, which allows Remora to be a stay at home mom, Don gets a contract with the Havens Fastracks (formerly the Seattle Supersonics), and while Dave failed to do the same, an Italian basketball team offered him one instead. Oh, and Jenny and Luis eloped, but the others don't find that out until Jenny starts having Morning Sickness a few months later.
  • Years later, Samantha and Dave return so Dave can try out for Team USA to compete in the 2016 Olympics, where Samantha is banned from casinos because the dodos snuck in to gamble, they got busted counting cards, and the casinos believed them to be animatronics Samantha built. Dave makes it into Team USA, and would go on to help them to an Olympic gold medal.

Pinballs

• Las Vegas is one of the destination cities in Red & Ted's Road Show
  Ted: There goes Friday's paycheck.

Podcasts

• Mystery Show: Starlee goes to Vegas in episode two, but if she hit any casinos or got married, it's not mentioned. She does mention that her hotel lobby doesn't even have slot machines.

Video Games

• Big Mutha Truckers takes place in Hick County, but it features a few cities that are not indicative of such a place it resides in. One of them is Greenback, which is very Vegas-like, complete with casinos, nightclubs and the bright neon signs to go with it.
• The third game in the Castle Cat franchise is set in one of them.

• Dead Rising 2 takes place in a Vegas analogue by the name of Fortune City. The casinos, giant hotels, and malls are all accounted for; in fact, the only easily noticeable difference between Las Vegas and Fortune is the fact that Fortune has been overrun by zombies. The prequel establishes that Fortune City was a replacement for Vegas, the real thing having been overrun by the dead and firebombed into oblivion. The Big Bad confesses to starting that outbreak in the main game.
• Every Dragon Quest game after the first has a "casino town" where you can gamble to get new equipment.
• Duke Nukem Forever takes place in Nevada, where Duke has retired and set up a casino/strip club.
• Fallout: New Vegas is set in post-Great War Las Vegas (and, for a large portion of the game, its vicinity). Fallout 2 had New Reno which, while not being Vegas, overlaps with much of this trope nevertheless.
• Fate/Grand Order: The storyline of the limited event Las Vegas Official Bout takes place in a Las Vegas singularity, with a lot of Servants enjoying their vacation in various ways.
• The Finals features a map set in Las Vegas, where the action unfolds around four casinos in an area modeled after the Fremont Sreet Experience.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas features the city of Las Venturas, a dead ringer for Vegas, as the third big city in the state along with Los Santos and San Fierro.
• Hitman: Blood Money has the mission "House of Cards," in which 47 has to assassinate a white supremacist using conflict diamonds to buy genetic technology from a Middle-Eastern billionaire and his flunky, both whom are also targets, in a hotel/casino. Right after, there's the mission "Dance with the Devil," where 47 has to kill rival assassins in a hotel down the street while there's a rave going on in the hotel's ballroom and penthouse floor.
• Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards takes place in the aptly named Lost Wages, where Larry is destined to lose his virginity before sunrise. The only way to gain funds in the game is gambling, so expect to do a lot of Save Scumming.
• The penultimate level of Metal Wolf Chaos involves chasing the evil Vice-President to Las Vegas, where you have a climactic showdown with him involving Humongous Mecha, to the sound of slot machines EXPLODING.
• Need for Speed Payback features Fortune Valley, a pastiche of the usual Las Vegas settings and the surrounding desert lands.
• Phantasy Star Online 2, as part of its Urban Fantasy arc "EPISODE 4", travels to Las Vegas, Nevada for a level. The ARKS don't spend their time gambling, though (that's for the Casino Area), but rather beat down some Phantoms, ride Mini-Mecha, and fight a living Statue of Liberty replica riding a living Sphinx replica.
• Las Vegas is one of the cities featured in Project Gotham Racing 3 and 4, with its circuits going up and down the Strip with deviations that circle around the various casinos.
• Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas and its sequel hit all the high notes of a More Dakka tour of Las Vegas: Shooting your way through cacophonous casino floors, down the Strip, on Fremont Street, in a high-rise knockoff of The Stratosphere casino, and finally out to the Hoover Dam.
• In Wario Land: Shake It!, Wario visits the Shake Dimension, an alternate universe featuring analogues to several real places. Glittertown and Neon City are clearly based on Las Vegas, featuring lavish casinos and neon decorations. In one of these levels, it's actually impossible to collect as many coins as you need unless you stop to play at the slot machines.
• War of the Monsters has a level clearly based on the locale, called Gambler's Gulch.

Webcomics

• In Piled Higher and Deeper, Mike went to Las Vegas hoping to get more funding for the university. He ended up married.
• In the poker comic +EV, of course.
• PVP: Francis and Marcy go to Las Vegas on to compete in a gaming tournament on behalf of the magazine. They get drunk one night, get married, freak and ditch the rest of the tournament, in that order.

Western Animation

• The Flintstones made at least one trip in the original series (plus in several spinoffs and the live-action prequel movie) to "Rock Vegas", the prehistoric version of Las Vegas, complete with Stone Age casinos and entertainment.
• Family Guy:
  • The episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" climaxes when Peter takes Chris to Vegas for a quickie conversion to Judaism. Lois follows suit in a parody of The Graduate.
  • "Roads to Vegas" has Brian and Stewie heading to Las Vegas via the latter's teleporter. Problem is, the teleporter malfunctions and creates duplicates of the two — one pair makes it to Vegas, the other doesn't, and neither set is aware of the other's existence. The latter pair takes a plane to Vegas instead and goes through the miserable Vegas experience (they get stuck at a fleapit hotel, lose their money at the gaming tables, etc.) while the first pair lives high on the hog. Eventually their paths unknowingly cross, and the status quo is restored when one Stewie is murdered by a loan shark and one Brian kills himself.
• Subversion: Frisky Dingo has the cast go to Las Vegas for some kind of invention competition (long story), but they only visit a nearly abandoned hotel owned by one of the characters, miles from the Strip.
• Futurama has Mars Vegas built on Mars by the Wong Family.
• Gravity Falls: The Stinger of “Soos and the Real Girl” is a montage of Stan going on a trip to Las Vegas with a novelty toy named Goldie, who is meant to look like a gold prospector. In the montage, they are shown gambling and getting married, among other things.
• The Jackie Chan Adventures episode "Vivas Las Jackies" is set in Las Vegas, however it doesn't involve gambling at all. It does however feature a couple of white tigers in a magic show, an obvious reference to Siegfried & Roy.
• Sibling series The Jetsons has a futuristic Vegas counterpart, "Las Venus."
• King of the Hill when Cotton Hill escaped to Las Vegas due to not wanting to raise Didi's upcoming baby.

• The ¡Mucha Lucha! Movie: The Return Of El Malefico The ending of the film took place in Las Vegas.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Las Pegasus (the setting of episodes "Viva Las Pegasus", "Grannies Gone Wild" and "Friendship University") is the kid-friendly equivalent. It's a giant, glitzy and noisy resort city, full of extravagant shows, themed resorts with indoor rollecoasters, and highly... flashy... personailities, but the real life city's defining feature — gambling — is conspicuous by its absence.
• Inverted in Rover Dangerfield, where the journey begins in Las Vegas, but Rover ends up at a farm.
• The Rugrats go to Vegas in the special "Rugrats' Vacation". Unlike the series' other specials, it's somewhat hard to find; this is probably (like many missing episodes) related to its depiction of a certain magic act involving white tigers.
• The Simpsons invoked this trope in "Viva Ned Flanders". Homer and Ned end up married to two waitresses; this plot point is revisited in "Brawl in the Family".

Real Life

• Daniel Tammet, a real life mathematical savant visits Vegas (or maybe it was Reno) to see if he can count cards as well as the film Rainman. He gets a triple Black Jack by splitting up what would have been three 7s.
• The Las Vegas tourism board currently reinforces this trope in its "What Happens in Vegas" ad campaign. This came as a much-needed breath of relief (and reality) after their ill-advised attempt to market the city as family-friendly in The '90s.
• In 2017, Las Vegas got its first major league team with the National Hockey League's Vegas Golden Knights. While expansion teams are usually terrible, the Knights basically set a new standard for expansion team performance by making it all the way to Stanley Cup finalist, and won the most home games... the last part being something analysts, players and GMs attributed to this trope, as visiting teams will underperform after players spend their off-time getting distracted by the Sin City. Vegas would earn their first Stanley Cup in 2023 by beating the Florida Panthers in five games, only six years after their maiden season, and threw a hell of a victory parade.
  • In case you were wondering why Vegas got its first major league team in 2017^note For context, the city of Las Vegas was founded and incorporated in, respectively, 1905 and 1911, while professional sports first arrived in the West Coast and American Southwest with the relocation of the Cleveland Rams to Los Angeles in 1946 while many nearby major American cities (e.g., Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, etc.) have had pro sports teams for decades, this trope was historically the main reason. To wit, the Big Four leagues (the National Football League,^note Who would, in 2020, see the Raiders relocate to Vegas from their longtime home Oakland AND award the 2024 Super Bowl to Vegas, likely playing into this trope Major League Baseball,^note Who would, in 2023, see the Oakland Athletics (who shared the exact same stadium with the Raiders for decades) announce their plans to relocate to Las Vegas no earlier than 2025 National Basketball Association,^note Who would, in 2023, have Las Vegas host the final and semi-finals of their new In-Season Tournament, playing into this trope and the National Hockey League), for decades, staunchly believed that Vegas' gambling culture would undermine the integrity of the game, and that the casinos (the main tourist attractions) would have offered too much economic competition for pro sports.

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