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"When you were controlling the feeds, did you notice the parabolic? Hey, it's important. Parabolas are important. Here, look at this. In all the equations that describe motion and heat... in all the Feynman diagrams, what's the one variable that you can turn into negative and still get rational answers from?"
— Primer. (If this made sense to you, your name has the letters "MSc" or "PhD" after it somewhere.)
"If you can't handle the complexity, I'm sorry you are stupid, because you are missing out."
"I accidentally bumped into a guy who was wearing a hat, had a ponytail, and had piercings in his eyebrows, nostrils, and lip. He tells me, 'Hey! You got a lot of nerve!' And I go, 'Hey! You got a...lot of...cranial accessories!' (crowd laughs) This is a smart crowd; I like smart crowds. When I get the dumb crowds I gotta go, 'Hey! You got a lot of shit on your head!'" — Mitch Hedberg
The public's been clamouring for some more intelligent television in the wake of Reality TV and Lowest Common Denominator Recycled Scripts. So, you go and write a series loaded with difficult quantum mechanics, quoting obscure 17th-century philosophers, with characters who are philosophical Magnificent Bastards who speak a dozen languages while conversing to each other by sending Shakespearean zen koans hidden into chess move patterns, and packed with allusions to ancient Sumerian religion. You make sure all your Techno Babble is scientifically plausible and go to great lengths to make sure all your ancient Roman soldiers are wearing exact replicas of period equipment. Now it's True Art, right?
So you sit back and watch the ratings — which plummet faster than a rocket-propelled brick in a nosedive. What went wrong? In trying to avert making the classic mistake that Viewers Are Morons, you went too far and ended up assuming that Viewers Are Geniuses instead. Of course, if you're working in a medium that doesn't need an audience of millions to be profitable, you may not care. Remember that Tropes Are Tools and that some people like stories that require effort on their part to understand. *
While a lot less common than its more insulting opposite (any show without the "mass-market appeal" that LCD stuff has will be Screwed By The Network without mercy), overestimating the audience can be more of a death knell than underestimating it, even without network sabotage. Some viewers really ARE morons it seems, despite their constant crying about not being so.
There's also the trap of being so consumed with the complexities that you forget simpler things like plot and characterization.
The most successful way to do this may be to make the more intellectual content into an Easter Egg; the series can be enjoyed without it, but those who get it will enjoy its hidden depths.
See also What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic and Mind Screw. Not mutually exclusive with Did Not Do The Research or Critical Research Failure - just because a show is crammed with obscure knowledge doesn't mean that said knowledge is correct, even when it comes from the show to begin with.
Contrast with Genius Bonus, which is applying this in small doses, so that the rest of the audience can enjoy the rest of the show.
Examples:
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Meta
- At times, this very wiki. In particular, The tendency of some tropers to refer to game/show titles as acronyms in examples (e.g. BtVS, TWEWY, AAtAFoVS), assuming everyone knows what they mean. Some of them nicely pothole them, though.
- Even worse are those who insist on using the Two Words Obvious Trope as an example with no explanation for those who might not have actually seen the work in question.
Universal
- Almost every Mockumentary and April Fools Day hoax ever, to the extent that they practically constitute a subtrope. Surely viewers are smart enough to work out that there isn't actually an alien invasion going on right now, without having to say "THIS IS NOT REAL!" every 5 minutes, right? Wrong, as these examples show:
- Panorama's legendary "Spaghetti trees" April Fools bit had people actually calling the BBC and asking how they could grow Spaghetti trees of their own.
- Likewise, Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real apparently convinced several people that dragons really existed.
- And Flying Penguins, although this was perhaps [[Lampshaded]] by it being a publicity piece for their online TV-on-demand service
- Many people were disappointed after finding out The Guardian's travel supplement on "San Seriffe" was an April Fools hoax, even though the entire article was clearly one typography pun after another.
- More people these days would recognise that as a hoax, as the rise of computers and word processing software means more people are exposed to typographical terminology in their everyday lives. At the time, it was quite an obscure field of knowledge and would only be used by (for example) people in the newspaper industry.
- As Daniel Handler found out when writing A Series Of Unfortunate Events, people will accept anything labelled as "based on a true story" as true, no matter how outlandish it is. Never mind that the series involves at various points a four-year old movie director, a bikini made of lettuce, eagles used as transportation, and a sawmill that pays people in chewing gum and coupons that will employ a baby to bite pieces of wood, people still criticise the movie (which is more obviously a comedy than the books) for disrespecting the memory of the (entirely fictional) Baudelaire children!
- A number of video game rumors got their start as April Fools' Day jokes in the video game magazine EGM.
- Equally defunct British games magazine CVG tended not to be much better.
- It should be noted however that most countries in the world don't celebrate April 1st as April Fool's Day. So, when some of the stuff that was fabricated in the English-speaking world reaches the rest of the world, it can't be expected that people will instantly recognize it as such if at all. Made worse that sometimes there's a delay, so even if the viewer, target audience, or whoever is aware of the English-language fondness for April's Fools, they may not have the time reference because it'll be April 12th. Or September...
- "Genetically, paedophiles have more in common with crabs than they do with you or me."
- Any show that involves multiple Chessmasters facing off against one another can suffer from this. The Wheel Of Time and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End both fall into this trap.
- Bilingual Bonus is usually a Genius Bonus, but overuse, often combined with having to "get" them in order to understand the plot, falls into this.
Advertising
- Byte Magazine used to run an ad every April advertising some form of "write-only memory", such as "erasable write-only memory" or "high-speed write-only memory". Every May they'd print some of the orders they had received.
Anime
- Partially averted by Death Note (which features multiple competing Chessmasters) by making every single side character into The Watson.
- Ghost In The Shell is pretty hard on the brain. Ghost in the Shell 2 is harder on the brain than MGS2. Stand Alone Complex discusses sociology and memes, and if you understood it fully the first time, you either already had a PhD in sociology, or earned one in the process of puzzling it out.
- My Psychology professor used the Ghost In The Shell manga as readings for the effect of advances in technology on the identity of humans.
- While difficult enough at parts the comparatively lightweight anime series has a tendency to have characters spout plot points (often convoluted political situations) at an accelerated clip. It then rarely, if ever, repeats itself. Example: In 2nd Gig the full source of the title 'Individual Eleven' and its supposed contents are explained once. Despite coming in in multiple episodes before and after the explanation.
- Has a happened a few times in Jojos Bizarre Adventure.
- Serial Experiments Lain. The central theme revolves around highly technical aspects of computers and networking, and the series is a well-known member of the Anime Mind Screw Club.
- And don't forget the extended Jungian metaphors.
- "Hey, you got NeXTstep in my shoujo!"
- "Lain's computer hardware is so cool. How come we don't get designs
 like those?"
- Lain lacks a plot at all until you do the research. The first time through, I was enjoying it for the pretty flashing lights. The plot only emerges at all once you get to the point where you're looking at the patent file for Microwave Audio Induction and trying to figure out if on Schuuman Resonance frequencies it can be used to trigger individual action potentials (nb: schuuman resonance is actually a massive frequency range — the number given in the show of 7.83Hz is actually the median).
- While Neon Genesis Evangelion starts off looking like a fairly ordinary Humongous Mecha animé, it soon becomes a dark and convoluted psychoanalytical and philosophical allegory involving a lot of Freud Was Right, allusions to Jung, Schopenhauer, and possibly existentialism, Kabbalistic allusions (half of which were intentionally bogus), and reflections on the nature of humanity, what makes a human, the status of sentient AIs, etc. Some call it a Mind Screw, which isn't totally unfair. Some even consider it as a precursor of the superflat movement, a form of Japanese postmodernism in the visual arts.
- Many anime series produced by the Bee Train studio (most famously, Noir and Madlax) require so much reading between the lines and background cultural knowledge that most viewers refuse to believe that something worthy was there in the first place. As a result, the rather small fan community deliberately positions itself as "intelligent fans", actively shunning whom they refer to as "fanboys" and "haterz".
- Suzumiya Haruhi. What starts out as a healthy amount of Genius Bonuses later falls straight into this. There are as many throwaway references to astrophysics as there are to pop culture, a Time Travel incident reaches near-Primer levels of complexity, and one novel features an in-depth discussion of Euler's planar graph formula—which is necessary to resolve the current situation. There are diagrams.
- Thank god Baka-Tsuki gave explanations every time Kyon gave one of his countless references and comparisons to history, mythology and advanced scientific concepts in his narration, most of which you don't know anyway.
- Of course, for some people this is exactly the reason that the series is so interesting. The books are obviously written for people who have widely varied and very geeky interests.
- Ergo Proxy. What was that gameshow thing was supposed to be about?
- You are a god (limited edition), you have a really small bunch of people under your control, and your goal is to create something society-like to keep your people happy for an undisclosed number of years in a fallout-like environment. All that follows is pretty much the consequences of the above setup.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena. Good heavens. Everything from Japanese mythology to German literature to Jewish mysticism.
Comics
- Just about everything Neil Gaiman has ever done hits this trope in some way. The Sandman oozes cleverness and esoteric references. And if you try to watch Mirror Mask without a reasonable grounding in psychology, you will miss most of what is going on.
- A great many Far Side strips do this. One notable example is one where two shipwreck survivors are clinging to a shellfish-encrusted rock in the ocean, and one says "Don't worry, we'll have plenty to eat; the oysters go all the way to the top!". If you're a marine biologist, it's hilarious. Otherwise, you may be scratching your head for a good while before you get it.
- Here's a hint: Oysters live underwater.
- Another Far Side panel had a cow standing proudly next to his work bench of miscellaneous items. The caption, "Cow Tools." Gary Larson said that no other panel he had done has caused more controversy, because absolutely no one understood it. (He explained later that in taking an anthropology class he learned that it was believed that what separated humans from animals is the use of tools. That idea has fallen away because some birds have been known to use tools. He wondered what a cow's tools would be like. He said his first mistake was thinking this was funny.)
- In the same book, he said his second mistake was making one of the tools look like a saw, so fooling readers into thinking they could figure what the others were. Not a chance, of course, but many people were frustrated in the attempt.
- Frazz. The author has actually stated that he believes his readers to be among the smartest in the world. Since he's the one getting the fan mail, we'll just have to take his word for it.
- Nearly every panel of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen features obscure references to English literature and/or comic art. The accompanying text-stories are, if anything, even worse/better.
- The stories themselves have been quite comprehensible, for the most part - until the ending of The Black Dossier jumped far off the scale.
- Dykes To Watch Out For is festooned with references to culture, history, and current events of all kinds.
- James Robinson's Starman is full of references to things this troper's never heard of. Lampshade Hanging in one issue:
Jack: There's nothing wrong with being elite.
Or another example.
This one isn't about collectibles but it's the same kind of thing. I'm in a book store ... for new books. I've gone a little bit crazy and I'm about to spend a couple of hundred bucks. I murmur under my breath "money's too tight to mention".
Now the guy behind the register, he hears this. He looks at me, nodding his head knowingly like we're in some "club of cool" together. He says, "Yeah, Simply Red" like it's a password, and now we do the secret handshake.
And I'm thinking "Simply Red"? Lame English band. More soul at a polka convention. And the book store guy thinks he's on some kind of inside loop with that.
Sadie: Jack, that's the smuggest thing I ever heard. A guy tries to be nice and you stand there hating him just because he hasn't heard of the Valentine Brothers.
You're like my ex-boyfriend. He was that way about authors. He'd deliberately drop obscure quotes and references. He'd take over conversations at parties. But none of what he read was for the love of it. His knowledge was like a weapon.
Don't tell me you're like that. I don't want another jerk. I've had...
Hey, why are you smiling?
Jack: Because you've heard of the Valentine Brothers.
(Naturally, since Jack and Sadie both know that the Valentine Brothers are a soul duo who originally performed "Money's Too Tight To Mention" before Simply Red covered it, they have no reason to tell the readers this.)
- A lot of Grant Morrison's works consciously operate on higher levels but Final Crisis expects you to have a pretty robust knowledge of the entire 70+ year history of the DCU to understand it.
- To be fair, most DC Crossovers are like that; though Final Crisis takes the cake for being both poorly paced (jumping from one sequence to the next with no segue) and including obscure scientific or philosophical references many people have never heard of. But it's Grant Morrison, so he gets away with it. This time anyway...
Fan Works
- Prinz von Sommerhoffnung, my goodness. What's supposed to be, if the author can be believed, a Mai-HiME AU novelisation slaps you with a questionably correct piece of translation-wordplay from the title on. The various character names, ostensibly attempts at Captain Ersatz-ing, run on translations, transliterations and wordplay that need some amount of bizarre lateral thinking to decipher; not to mention that Shout Outs both to modern and older works are handled in a roundabout way. Perhaps the worst part, though? The author knows his stuff is undecipherable, and seems well blasé about it.
Film
- The movie Primer was written by a math graduate who studied physics intensively to produce one of the most plausible Time Travel movies ever. In the words of one reviewer: "anybody who claims they fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar".
- Fortunately, you don't need to fully understand the movie to enjoy it; you only need to be able to follow the action as it unfolds. By the end, the characters themselves end up as bewildered as the audience.
- Hardly anyone understands all the vital plot points from The Descent first time 'round. Either they completely missed that Sarah went crazy or they didn't connect the dots and get that the crawlers were evolved from cavemen who stayed down in the cave or they would miss the subtext that Sarah possibly only imagined the crawlers or they would make a more simple mistake and forget the seemingly unimportant singular lines of dialogue which would explain things later on. To top it off, it's very difficult to tell who's who in the dark, and fans are still arguing over what the hell the ending means...
- Hopefully, the sequel will explain things.
- Spike Lee's 25 Hours has a deleted scene where a pair of gangsters explain the exact reasons why the protagonist has the afore-mentioned 25 hours of freedom. Pretty much every single review either couldn't figure out the reasons within the context of the film, or presumed said 25 hours were NOT Truth In Television (they were, at least at the time).
Okay, you have to explain why... ;)
- Trading Places is for the most part a very accessible film, but make sure you have at least a cursory knowledge of how the commodities market works or you'll be completely lost at the climax.
- Videodrome. A good understanding of Marshall McLuhan's media theory is required to really get it.
Literature
- Authors who put non-English phrases or sentences into their English-language novels and, instead of leaving them as a Bilingual Bonus, make them central to understanding the plot.
- Authors using the Literary Agent Hypothesis sometimes have this happen whether it is their intent or not. For instance, some early reviewers of the first Flashman novel thought it was an actual memoir (despite the fact that the protagonist is a character from Victorian fiction). Oddly, one book, Dickens of the Mounted, is a Spiritual Successor/pastiche of the Flashman series and actually has a Lawyer Friendly Cameo from Flashman was also interpreted as being the actual memoirs of the protagonist (who was in this case actually a real person, the n'er-do-well son of Charles Dickens).
- You can read all the way through Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands just for the gripping conspiracy that invented the modern espionage novel or the beautifully verbose and poetic descriptions of the sea... but having extensive knowledge of sailing in small boats certainly helps.
- Michael Crichton is notorious for this; many people who read Jurassic Park right after seeing the movie were overwhelmed with Crichton's stifling detail to anthropological and palaeontologic minutiae.
- Arthur Conan Doyle often had Sherlock Holmes end a case with a witty quip... in untranslated Latin.
- That's not exactly an example of this trope - most well-educated members of Victorian Society are expected to have a basic grasp of Latin. Modern readers, however do not as a rule study the language.
- It becomes this, however, when modern collections of the Sherlock Holmes stories don't include a translation. That or the editor just didn't care.
- Umberto Eco:
- Foucault's Pendulum is a Deconstruction of conspiracy theories that spans forty years or so, is told nonlinearly using flashbacks and a frame story, and references hundreds of names and concepts related to politics, history, science, religion, and occultism.
- The Name of The Rose includes monks arguing about classic Greek literature and philosophy, quarreling about medieval church dogma, and throwing untranslated Latin quotes at each other... yet all the discussions should be fully understood to get the whole book.
- T.S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land is either an example of this, or of True Art Is Incomprehensible. For example, it contains quotes from various famous sources, still in their original language. If you're not reading an annotated version, it will make no sense.
- The notes don't really help much; they have been described as "simply another riddle - and not a separate one". Eliot himself wrote in The Frontiers of Criticism that he started out just citing his quotations "with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism", before realising he had to come up with more material if the poem was going to be released as a book "with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day".
- Lampshaded in Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Casino Royale, when M complains to one of his underlings that the report the underling wrote has a French sentence without any translation.
- 'This is not the Berlitz School of Languages, Head of S. If you want to show off your knowledge of foreign jawbreakers, be good enough to provide a crib. Better still, write in English.'
- While they can still be enjoyed on a superficial level, William Gibson's novels (Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Idoru, etc.) rely on complex and multilayered metaphors, both pop culture and "learned" allusions, and a blurring of traditional concepts of "human," "life," "technology" and "reality", among others. On the other hand, Gibson admits in interviews that readers shouldn't look too deep into the technical aspects of computer science and cyberspace in his works, because he didn't even own a computer until well after he'd written Neuromancer, and was profoundly disappointed with it.
- However, he did do the research; he's known to keep track of "the invisible literature" - scientific research papers.
- Remember that this story is set in the future. Even extrapolating from the time that Gibson was writing, it states specifically that the Tessier-Ashpool clan had been in orbit for an unspecified but significant length of time; long enough for the clan's progenitors to establish the satellite and die of old age, as well as the next generation going into cryogenic freeze for a motal generation (Molly's lifespan at the time of the story), possibly having done so several times. The process of creating the Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis would require at least a full century, which in turn would allow solid-state (silent) desktop computers to become as common and inexpensive as their current real-world equivalents.
- Frank Herbert's Dune universe features wheels-within-wheels plots and dense mythology, although the poetic descriptions can make the book enjoyable even to those who fail to understand it.
- James Joyce's Ulysses requires intimate knowledge of the history of literature (especially English-language literature), geography of Dublin, history of Ireland and a genius ability at recognising allusions. Finnegans Wake requires ... surrendering the possibility of comprehension, which was perhaps the point.
- Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels may suffer from this thanks to the rapid-fire Shout Out rate. How many of the ten-year-old target audience will get references to Shelley, Coleridge, and Orwell, among others?
- Stanislaw Lem's works are usually loaded with science and philosphy.
- Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels feature an extraordinary level of use of complex physics and biology concepts considering that the books are mainly intended for children. However, it also qualifies as a Parental Bonus since they're mostly just used as plot devices and so the reader doesn't really have to understand how everything works and just accept that it does work.
- The works of author Cormac McCarthy. Some can be thoroughly enjoyed without being well-versed in McCarthy's interests or history — such as All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road — but it definitely helps to make sense of it all (especially with Blood Meridian and Suttree).
- His Border Trilogy (of which All the Pretty Horses is the first) has characters have whole conversations entirely in Spanish. There's a website where you can download a list of all of the translated dialogue, which this troper had by her side during the reading, as she doesn't know enough to understand beyond "something about a horse" in most cases.
- Ezra Pound. Try reading his "Cantos" without a way of translating Chinese, ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, and Basque. Yes, Basque!
- Even worse: Thomas Pynchon's Gravitys Rainbow. This troper, despite having the necessary knowledge in history, statistics, physics and linguistics to understand the background, couldn't get through the Mind Screw it is.
- Idlewild by Nick Sagan and its sequels, several times. For instance, the character of Fantasia averts The Schizophrenia Conspiracy, but you're assumed to know what hebephrenic schizophrenia is.
- Essentially every book ever written by Neal Stephenson. At one point, one of his books stops in mid stream to launch an attempt to create a function correlating a character's ability to crack ciphers with time spent since last ejaculation, with differing values depending on the type of stimulation employed, or summarize the working principles of an Enigma machine by analogy with a broken bicycle. Whatever the actual material, it is always treated with an attention to detail bordering on the unnecessary. Which side of the border the reader is on tends to indicate whether they enjoy reading Stephenson.
- Charles Stross' Accelerando
- S.S.Van Dine was even worse than Arthur Conan Doyle. Philo Vance uses quotations not only from Latin, but also from French, German, and Italian. They usually are at least somewhat important, and they may be a paragraph, not just a sentence, long. He had one multi-paragraph footnote in German.
- The Whateley Universe. Think about an 'ad' for a movie made based on Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (which see)... as directed by noted conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone. Or a classroom discussion of Lucan's Pharsalia when one of the people in the room is actually the avatar of Juno.
- Paradise Lost is filled to the brim with allegories, intended to be read by a medieval-era Rich Idiot With No Day Job with an extensive library of contemporary and ancient works. Modern readers can substitute said library with Google and The Other Wiki.
- The description of the Xunca superweapon in Flinx Transcendent, the final book in Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series, is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone without at least a basic grasp of string theory.
Live Action Television
- Alternative 3. A British documentary series decides to have a bit of fun for April Fool's day, and claim British scientists are being taken to a secret base on Mars to protect them from a terrible disaster. Twenty years later, the show is now a central part of a great many conspiracy theories by those who failed to get the joke.
- Carnivale had knights templar and tarot card mythology, obscure symbolism, cultural references from the 1930s, fabulous and expensive-looking recreations of the depression-era midwest, and refusal to provide helpful exposition to the audience. It got cancelled after two seasons.
- Doctor Who is generally pretty straight-forward, but the Seventh Doctor episode "Ghost Light" is an involved meditation on the concept of evolution that probably requires two or three viewings to understand.
- Firefly, Objects In Space. Most blatantly the opening, but the whole thing is a philosophical statement on existentialism. Whedon's DVD commentary might help the viewer to get the point (that objects have the meaning that people choose to give them).
- Ghostwatch, a BBC special Halloween show about celebrities conducting a séance which goes badly wrong. The show was later implicated in several suicides by people who believed that Michael Parkinson actually had been possessed by a poltergeist and was about to unleash his wrath upon Britain. It was done with much more care and attention to detail than the vast majority of the shows it was parodying, actually the buildup was done better than most Hollywood scary movies. Oh, and it was almost pure Nightmare Fuel.
- While most of the more obscure stuff in Lost falls under Genius Bonus, it does fall under this trope when it comes to the plot, which has become increasingly complicated as the show has gone on, with innumerable callbacks to previous episodes, making it extremely hard for new viewers to understand what the heck is going on. Not to mention flash forwards.
- And the fact that now The Island is skipping around in time. Literally. Lost requires the utmost of attention, or else the viewer will be utterly confused. In fact, it's not uncommon for a viewer to miss an episode and be completely... err.. lost.
- The 1980s TV Series Max Headroom, of all things, was short-lived largely for this reason.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 jokes about everything, from obscure songs most people have forgotten to classical history and famous works of art. Of course the fun of the show is that the riffs are so frequent, you can miss one or two and still get the jokes.
- Done by other, different-style riffers as well, such as "The Agony Booth". "Hey, it's The Death of Socrates! They told me there wouldn't be any French neoclassical paintings in this movie!"
- The riffs that revolve around these things are written so that they just sound funny even if you don't get the reference. ("It looks like a Frank Frazetta of Frank Zappa", "You look like Maude with a hellbeast", etc.)
- The Prisoner.
- In particular; the rest of the series, whilst surreal, is for the most part quite comprehensible, but the final episode goes completely mental.
- Commonly cited as a reason for the low ratings of The Wire, particularly with regard to its tendency not to spoon-feed information and its slow-burn pacing. Fortunately for fans of that series, it aired on HBO, where ratings for single episodes are somewhat less critical than they are for most networks.
- Australia's Playschool which was made to educate and entertain children between the ages of 1 to 6, once dicussed the concept of Time Travel with a story.
Close Live Action Television
Music
- In order to find the classical music parodies of P.D.Q. Bach (a fictional composer "rediscovered" by Peter Schickele) funny, apart from the occasional slapstick bits, the listener needs an encyclopedic knowledge of Baroque, Classical and Romantic music, as well as a grounding in music theory and scholarship. Conversely, listeners who only like classical and ignore popular music will miss many of the jazz, country and other non-classical elements Shickele sneaks in.
Other
- Dennis Miller's short stint as a commentator on Monday Night Football drew ire from fans who found his dry, academic wit hard to understand. Indeed, pretty much anything Dennis Miller says qualifies.
- The Encyclopedia Britannica website actually began a feature where they attempted to explain his references every Tuesday.
- Wikipedia articles on even slightly technical topics tend towards assuming that the reader has at least a degree in the relevant field.
Radio
- War Of The Worlds caused an uproar when Orson Welles turned it into a radio play even though: a) it was based on a well known book by a famous author. b) It featured disclaimers and was broadcast in a drama slot on Halloween. c) The protagonist walks from Princeton, New Jersey to Central Park in New York City (a 50-mile distance that takes a minimum of an hour and a half to drive) over the course of the half-hour-long second act. d) It was about giant alien robots attacking New Jersey!
- It made one disclaimer at the start and then didn't make another until panic had already begun. This was done on purpose, as Welles knew that many people would miss the very beginning due to other shows still going on, and would stick with that channel thinking they were hearing the news.
- Another War Of The Worlds broadcast was made in Quito, Ecuador a decade later, with similar results. In this case, the viewers had much more excuse... to heighten the illusion, they'd run bits in the newspaper about strange lights in the sky for several days beforehand. Were they trying to cause another panic? Oh, and the army bought into this one.
- There is evidence to the effect that the "mass hysteria" reported to have been caused by the War of the Worlds broadcast was itself largely a hoax. The motive? Newspapers wanted to cast doubt on radio as a medium. "The panic was neither as widespread nor as serious as many have believed at the time or since."
- The irony of ironies: years later Orson Wells reported the Pearl Harbor invasion in actual news...and people thought it was another hoax.
Real Life
- Many proprietary software end-user license agreements work under the assumption that the person installing the software is either a trained lawyer or can afford to engage the services of one every time they decide to install a piece of software. Though this is probably reasonable when the customer is a large company with lawyers on staff, it's definitely not when you're just selling to ordinary people.
- Completely averted by the (sadly uncommonly-used) WTFPL.
- Alternatively, they are working under the assumption that nobody reads the dratted things anyway. After the initial Google Chrome license fiasco, it was pretty obvious that a lot of companies that use them don't either.
- Diablo II: Lord of Destruction also had an easy-to-read EULA in the back of the manual. Only two pages long!
Theater
- Anything ever produced by The Firesign Theatre. If you think you even got all of Nick Danger the first time, you are probably wrong.
- Tom Stoppard's play Hapgood initially flopped because so much of the plot exposition is contained within one character's metaphorical double-speak about Quantum Physics. The re-write makes the metaphors easier to understand even if you've never heard of quantum physics, and the plot significance is better signposted. Many people can treat it as a straightforward who's-the-defector spy mystery, missing the revelation (in the first act, in another rambling metaphorical monologue) of who the bad guy is and the idea that the rest of the play is about how they prove it, not about finding out.
- In fact, Tom Stoppard continually walks the line on this trope, and most of his (theatrical) work can be argued to be either refreshingly intelligent and stimulating, or purposefully obscure and elitist.
- Plays by Bertolt Brecht. This troper once saw a (mediocre) performance of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in which most of the audience took the story literally. Here's a hint: none of Brecht's plays are meant to be taken literally. This troper has also had the extreme frustration of performing in The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, a satire of the rise of Hitler, in which Ui wore a toothbrush moustache and swastika and slides of various dictators, including Hitler himself, playing constantly in the background. No matter how Anvilicious we made the show, every night it played, someone came and asked us what was up with all the Nazi references in a play about gangsters. I'm not sure if this is Viewers Are Geniuses or Viewers Are Morons fodder.
- Brecht is perhaps the only playwright in history who considers a piece with a character named Swiss Cheese to be Serious Business. If an audience is unfamiliar with his Verfremdungseffekt, they're likely to be lost from the first line onward.
Video Games
- Metal Gear Solid 2 delves into meme theory so deeply that it is used to teach meme theory. Understanding this is hard. Very hard. It all makes sense, I promise, but don't try too hard, you will fry your brain.
- Persona 3 and 4 have a rather literal take on this in the form of various pop quizzes throughout the game. They tend to ask you random trivia facts about math, grammar, science, philosophy or Japanese history. Answering correctly gives you a permanent bonus to a particular out of combat stat. There is nothing in the game that tells you the answers, so you have to use your own real-world knowledge (or cheat). There are also midterms where you get a whole bunch of these in a row, but the midterms are composed entirely out of questions that they've already asked you so if you had been paying attention it should be simple to answer.
- Someone wasn't paying attention in class...
- This Troper doesn't remember having to translate, "Take my hand," into Japanese during high school. Persona 3 is full of similar esoteric nonsense questions, but Persona 4 is much better about using material that would actually make up a school curriculum for its quizzes.
- Most of the comments made about Neon Genesis Evangelion also apply to Xenogears, especially on the psychiatry and Kabbalah sides (with the multiple personalities, paradoxical split selves (see Lacan and Grahf), and overlapping selves that have postmodern and poststructuralist resonances). The plot is also impossibly convoluted.
- Ditto with Xenosaga, Gears' spiritual prequel. It includes numerous references to Jungian psychology, Gnosticism, classic Christianity, Kabbalah, quantum mechanics, etc.
Web Comics
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