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What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?

redirected from Main.WhatDoYouMeanItsNotAwesome

alt title(s): What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome
''I'll take a potato chip... AND EAT IT!'
— Light Yagami, Death Note

"No one will be admitted during the breathtaking car-parking sequence!"
— Crow T. Robot, Mystery Science Theater 3000

So you have yourself a situation that might be important, but it just isn't awesome enough. There's something missing. What could it be...?

I know! Let's throw in some gripping orchestral music, lighting changes, different camera angles, something! Don't write like a man, write like an Evil Overlord! Exaggerate your expressions and gestures, speak with excessive intonation, and if all else fails, throw in some closeups, slow motion, and Ominous Latin Chanting! With practice, even you can turn something like eating a snack into an epic battle of light and dark. Anything can be Serious Business. And anything can be a martial art.

Get enough of these in one place, and you've got a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot. In especially bad cases, this can fall into the Narm.

If you've ever seen a guy doing macho posturing, or a preacher playing even the mundane parts of The Bible, you'll know this is Truth In Television.

When this gets overdone, you often end up with Get On With It Already.

See also Mundane Utility for awesome tools that are used to do mundane things, and Badass Blink, which reminds you stealth and awesome do not mix. Contrast with Unusually Uninteresting Sight.
Examples:

Anime
  • Death Note loves doing this. You'd be surprised how epic eating chips or writing in a notebook can really be. You obviously aren't trying hard enough. Granted, said notebook is an Artifact Of Doom that kills people when their names are written in it, but is dashing across the desk (complete with red/blue after-effects!) really necessary?
    • Mikami Teru takes this even further by making slashing motions with his pen as if it were a sword while writing names in the death note while saying "sakujo" ("delete" in the English dub) to himself when he finishes writing a name.
    • It should be noted that while the Japanese version of the potato chip eating was similar, but the people dubbing decided to go full out and added freaking manical laughter.
  • Akagi will freight the outcome of a simple round of Mahjong with an amount of drama and symbolic content roughly on par with the Book of Revelation.
    • The Spiritual Successor, Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji, is as advertised.
      • In fact, characters are displacing wind while placing down playing cards and create small tornadoes while pounding down with their fists!
      • Kaiji has a sound effect for silence.
      • To be fair, the "zawa zawa" sound effect tends to be used in cases where the silence comes right after some horrible omen of DEATH AND DOOM.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh does roughly the same thing with a children's collectible card game. Though in that case, the fate of the characters involved (or even that of the world) really does hang in the balance. Still, the amount of drama that goes into picking up a card and putting it back down is almost laughable.
    • Taken to the next level in the Battle City Arc: apart from the usual dramatic catch phrases and exaggerated arm gestures, the use of an Egyptian God Card also requires Ominous Latin Chanting, lightning flashes and ancient Egyptian laser beams.
    • Duel Masters is almost as bad about this; however, this is intentional, as it's an Affectionate Parody of Yu-Gi-Oh.
    • And, just like everything else about Yu-Gi-Oh, the Abridged Series lampoons this mercilessly.
      Arkana: "Now lets begin by shuffling our cards in a needlessly dramatic fashion."
      Yugi: (shuffling his cards with an utmost serious look) "Way ahead of ya."
  • Played straight *gasp!* in an episode during the Battle City arc. Joey and Mako Tsunami were set to duel in what was apparently the local version of Sea World. Since they had an audience (which they shanghaied by somehow interrupting a killer whale show), Joey attempted to play to the crowd by drawing his card in an even more dramatic fashion than usual, pirouetting and rotating like a champion ice skater. Mako interrupts this display of card-drawing prowess by demanding Joey get on with it, after which both duelists continue their duel at the standard, slightly less ridiculous level.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds takes this insanity to new hights with card games on motorbikes AND Chosen Ones.
  • Lelouch Lamperouge of Code Geass is a textbook example of this. With a fabulous, stylish Batman-esque costume, Lelouch, with his flair and love for drama, fired up his popularity amongst Japanese resistance cells against Britannia with his exaggerated gestures, speeches, and ability to pull off outrageous plans that most would consider suicide.
    • Lets not forget his keyboard-controlled Knightmare Frames, which let him show off his AWESOME typing skills. Suck it, GUI.
  • Hikaru No Go relies on this in order to keep the interest of viewers who aren't familiar with Go.
  • Any time someone tastes the hero's home-made bread in Yakitate Japan, it's an event which makes the parting of the Red Sea look minuscule in comparison, replete with dramatic music, flashing lights, and vivid hallucinations. (One might wonder if the hero is actually slipping psychotropic drugs into his creations...)
    • In fact, in one episode Kazuma makes a bread composed mostly of cannabis derivatives... and it was so delicious, the judge who tasted the bread was sent back in time and saved his own mother from Death By Childbirth.
  • Gao Gai Gar combines this with the Invocation in Mission Control, whenever the heroes need to use the Forgotten Superweapon or start a Transformation Sequence:
    Taiga: Final Fusion... (points dramatically) APPROVED!
    Mikoto: Roger! Final Fusion! (Closes eyes, opens them with determined expression.) Program DriiiiiIIIIIIIIve!
    (Mikoto smashes through the "molly-guard" safety glass covering the Big Red Button. Every time. Cue Transformation Sequence for the titular Combining Mecha.)
    • Later in the series, she also swipes a keycard to release the Goldion Hammer for use. She does it so epically that one wonders what it looks like when she goes to the ATM!
    • Taiga Koutaro is equally dramatic about turning the key that activates the card reader, but he's the living embodiment of this trope. Later still, he has a key that, when used in tandem with its partner, activates a super weapon that's basically a Goldion Hammer big enough to extinguish a sun. You can imagine how understated he is when he uses it.
      • No, you can't. Taiga defies imagination. Of course, given the situation and stakes, I'm surprised that Entouji managed to keep such a straight face during the transformation of the battleships. (Yeah, the hammer has a tiny handle made of battleships.)
      • Taiga is apparently ready to go with this sort of thing at all times. During the OVA sequel, he makes his grand appearance in the middle of a battle, carrying the key which can override the lock on Final Fusion... which is embedded into the grip of a golf club. That's right, he slams a golf club into a console as a valid command decision. The club's named the Taiga Wood, no less.
  • Ishida from Bleach occasionally displays lightning-fast, incredibly accurate... sewing skills, knitting away with the same stern concentration he has when battling.
  • Kamen Rider Kabuto took a (quite literal) Cooking Duel between the titular character and a Masquerade monster, and used dramatic camera angles, speed-lined ingredient chopping, and gratuitous usage of the show's rock theme for actual battles to boost the action of preparing a bowl of soup to epic levels. Considering the normally serious tone of the show, this skirted dangerously close to Narm levels. Though to be fair, cooking mastery was a major part of the lead's character.
  • The trope is taken to its logical extreme with Lucky Star's Meito Anisawa (Anisawa Meito: Ani Me), who turns his pursuit to sell something to "Legendary Girl A" Konata into something almost Dragon Ball-like.
    • Hiyori turns something as simple as tripping into an epic battle for the survival of one's drawing hand.
    • And don't forget: shopping for trading cards is Serious Business.
  • In Prince Of Tennis, a mere tennis serve is illustrated by a sequence including the extinction of the dinosaurs by a meteor shower of tennis balls.
  • Eyeshield 21 does this a lot too. Although the way techniques in the manga are portrayed in a way such that you realize that the cool effects are purely symbolic, the anime features fast runners becoming surrounded by bright colorful battle auras.
  • Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan plays Sakura-kun's death and resurrection in this manner in the final episode of the first series. Normally, this would be a legitimately dramatic scene... but in this series, this happens at least once an episode and is played purely for comedy, so handling it as if it were actually dramatic only makes it funnier — which was probably their intention.
  • Spoofed ruthlessly in the second season of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei: Itoshiki, tired of casual conversation, tries saying an incredibly casual phrase in an earth-shattering dramatic way. It turns out to be very fun to do, and all of his students take turns saying casual things extremely dramatically. It gets even better when they start practicing extremely dramatic reactions to the above statements.
    • Chiri, however, subverts this right off the bat in the same scene by saying that she gave her sister a lethal vitamin injection in an overly dramatic tone, acting like it's actually no big deal at all.
  • Minor example, but genre-savvy Haruhi of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya fame manages to make a table tennis serve appropriately EPIC. In the same episode, Kyon adds a brief burst of light to placing down what he thinks is a winning mahjong set.
    • To say nothing of the epic Space Opera that ensues in everyone's imagination when they battle the Computer Society in a doujinsoft Real Time Strategy game. Complete with orchestral soundtrack and Deep Immersion Gaming.
      "GLORY TO THE COMPUTER CLUB!!!"
  • On the matter of epic ping-pong, one can hardly forget the fighting manga-esque ping pong battle in Yamato Nadeshiko Shichihenge.
  • Ever silly, a Recap Episode of Excel Saga had quite possibly the most epic scene of setting up dominos that has ever been made.
    • Actualy, this troper thinks V For Vendetta takes that cake.
  • Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure has an Epic match of Rock, Paper, Scissors complete with people floating in the air, windows breaking, powers being stolen from people, and a kid throwing himself in front of a big rig truck because he lost and getting saved by the arrogant manga-ka he was playing against so that the kid couldn't steal his power (which, by the way, is the ability to read people, quite literally, like a book and write commands into people that they have to follow).
    • Earlier in the story there is a epic poker match that involves fighting for souls, people being turned into poker chips and two people trying to out-cheat each other. Oh yeah, and the hero breaks the villain's finger for what seems like nothing at first (but is quickly shown to be interrupting a cheating attempt). The last wager quite literally knocks the villain out.
      • Part Two has the chariot race between Joseph and Wham, which involves vampire horses, a giant warhammer, a pillar being used as a weapon, massive crossbows, Wham blinding himself to avoid being tricked, and several Improbable Aiming Skills. And it truly is awesome.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann pulls out dramatic music and slo-mo at the end of episode 6 when Yoko loses her top.
    • To say nothing of what they do when the giant robots actually get involved...
    • This Troper remembers nothing short of ten full seconds of seizure-inducing color-flashes in the second episode when one character sees a skull (granted, that skull turned out to be that character's father).
  • Azumanga Daioh - Who knew test scores could be so action-packed?
    Osaka: Forty-two points!
    Kagura: Thirty points!
    Tomo: Thirty-one points!
    'All three: By our three scores combined, we have a hundred and three!
    • In a color chapter of volume 4 of the manga, Tomo, in a daydream sequence about what she would do if she had her classmates' abilities, makes an epic entry into the classroom in which she backflips from the classroom door into her seat, answers a question asked by the teacher, and says she forgot her textbook. Then back in reality, Tomo blames Osaka for the end of her daydream sequence, saying "her powers got mixed in there, and everything got all weird."
      • This scene was adapted into the anime thusly: Tomo announces the disbanding of the Bonklers/Numbnuts/Knuckleheads, given that she's found a way to get out of being one herself: by stealing Sakaki's athleticism and Chiyo's intelligence. Osaka chimes in, saying that Tomo can have her lateness and forgetfulness. Tomo explains the consequences of absorbing these "abilities" as well, pretty much the same as described above for the manga. Osaka apologizes for these additions.
  • In Air Gear, Agito symbolically turns into a shark occasionally when he's just riding around. Similarly, Bucca turns into a tank (and other characters can apparently see this transformation) and Kazu turns into a jet at times, even if they're just riding to school, or something.
  • Black Jack is to Medicine what Phoenix Wright is to Law. Never will you find more epic surgery prep than in this anime.
  • The first episode of FLCL shows "CPR" in Bullet Time. We're then told by the characters that it was shot in real time.
  • Like the Bleach example above, Gunnm: Last Order fetches at least one instance of supersonic needle point but that hardly holds a candle to two battle androids engaging in a truly epic round of thumb wrestling supplemented with flip kicks and century old Martian kung-fu.
  • A frequently used comedic trope in Ranma One Half. See: Fine Dining Martial Arts, Takeout Delivery Martial Arts, Rhythmic Gymnastics Martial Arts, Tea Ceremony Martial Arts, Calligraphy Martial Arts...and so on.
    • "I will NEVER forgive this offense of the CURRY BREAD!"
  • Keroro Gunsou parodies the living daylights out of this trope. About once an episode, Keroro tries to turn his dialogue into a dramatic declamation... about vacuuming... or model building... or going to the toy store...
  • Employed several times in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, most notably in the hot springs episode: Kurz Weber's Lovable Sex Maniac antics collide with Sousuke's always-excessive security measures, with epic results. Kurz delivers not one but two "inspirational" speeches to Sousuke's classmates, the second of which sends Kazama into SEED mode.
    • Another episode of Fumoffu features Humongous Mecha engaging in fierce battles of tug-o-war and ping-pong.
  • In Full Metal Alchemist, the day Colonel Roy Mustang becomes fuhrer, all female officers will be required to wear: tiny miniskirts!
  • The dodgeball match in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha supplementary manga of the second season, which had Fate vowing to protect Nanoha, performing a Super Jump to keep said promise, and having a final showdown with Suzuka, who had now been completely absorbed in the competitive atmosphere ("As expected from Fate-chan!"), complete with internal Combat Commentary. It ended with Fate losing both the match and her consciousness after Suzuka successfully countered her nigh-impossible to dodge attack, which was depicted in slow-mo.
    Arf: ...what kind of strength does that kid have...?
    Amy: I wouldn't expect any less from one of Nanoha-chan's friends.
  • The third episode of Welcome To The NHK turns googling porn into a magnificently epic adventure on the high seas.
  • Kyoko Mogami, the heroine of Skip Beat, is prone to exaggeration and flights of fancy. For a talent demonstration, she opts to peel a radish with what amounts to BURNING SPIRIT, complete with intense roaring and dilated eyes
  • Digimon shows (at least, presumably most of them. This troper isn't that familiar): digi-modification. You're swiping a card!

Western Animation
  • Various characters in Invader Zim made frequent use of the trope, in conjunction with stylized expressions and loud vocalizations. The very first instance would have to be:
    Professor Membrane: Quiet, son! I'm making (large field of electricity crackles)... toast!
    • Also the episode title (rendered in foot-high solid lettering, one word at a time, while spinning through space) - "ZIM EATS WAFFLES"
    • And also the episode "Germs", where Zim embarks on the vital and life-threatening mission of... cleaning his house.
    • Also, let's not forget the one episode where Dib gets powers, and showed off how awesome it was by sliding from the 2nd floor to the first, outside of his house, threw toast, butter, and orange juice in the air, all forming to make breakfast, which he also ate in the air.
  • Spongebob Squarepants, in the episode "Procrastination". As the name implies, Spongebob grapples with his denial for hesitation in writing a 800-word essay. In one of his many time-wasting gimmicks, he spends an implied ludicrous amount of time and effort writing the "The" at the start of the paper, so the sequence ends up just looking "awesome" instead of being the Hard Work Montage it initially appears to be.
    • The opening scene of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie features a dramatic scene based around the "crisis" of a customer being given a crabby patty without cheese, complete with a slow-motion sequence of Spongebob putting some cheese into the patty. It's a Dream Sequence, but still ...
  • South Park episode, "Good Times With Weapons". The boys playing around with weapons is turned awesome with an Art Shift and the use of shonen fighting anime tropes, complete with an upbeat makeshift J-pop song in the background.
    • The South Park episode "D-Yikes!," a parody of 300, features a sequence of Mrs. Garrison making coffee with sporadic slow-motion and intense, 300-esque music
      • In that same episode, an unknown lesbian character takes a potato chip... and eats it.
      • Lice Capades is worth a mention. KEL-LAY! And cutting to the lice being blown away, while it cuts to the kid who got the lice in a normal.
  • Doctor Orpheus, in The Venture Brothers, has the ability to make his speech sound awesome (complete with dramatic music) — regardless of what he's saying. ("Do not be too hasty in entering that room — I had Taco Bell for lunch!")
  • Done occassionally in Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends, normally to emphasise or Lampshade how low-key the goings-on are for a show where fantastic beings spring to life on a whim.
  • In Perfect Hair Forever, anything Astonomicat does other than sitting around is accompanied by dramatic music - even performing a background check on a computer.
  • Rocket Power replaces such things as Ominous Latin Chanting with embarassingly exaggerated attempts at being cool, especially in regard to extreme sports (being the premise of the show). Or, as the show puts it sick!!
  • Mildly spoofed in Avatar The Last Airbender:
    Sokka: I do believe it's my turn. I'm going to spend my vacation IN THE LIBRARY!!!
    • Azula also employs the trope a couple of times during the third-season Beach Episode by taking the same approach to (what's basically) beach volleyball and flirting with boys that she takes to world domination. It involves fire, loud declarations, and explosions.
      Azula: We have defeated you for ALL TIME! You will never rise from the ashes of your shame and humiliation!... (cheerfully) Well that was fun!
    • "The Ember Island Players" was a recap of the series as a play, and they represented bending with streamers. It actually looks cooler than you'd think (choreography and special effects were about all they had going). There's also the fact that most scenes parodied are accompanied by the appropriate music (ex. the recreation of Aang getting hit by Azula's lightning has the same dramatic music playing despite how completely undramatic their performance was).
    • There's also when they were invading the Earth Kingdom palace and Sokka tried to kick down a big fancy door. He gives it a flying kick with a Stock Footage-esque background... which does not move at all.
  • The duel over dumplings between Shifu and Po in Kung Fu Panda which ends the panda's training, starts out as this—but by the end of the fight, when Po proves his mastery (and lack of upset) by claiming he's no longer hungry, it has crossed over to become a full-fledged Crowning Moment Of Awesome—as evidenced by the spontaneous applause when this editor saw the movie on opening day.
  • The movie WALL-E somehow manages to make the act of a fat guy standing up look unbelievably awesome. Complete with Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (AKA "That really epic monolith music from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey").
    • Considering the fact that it was probably the first time in his entire life that he managed to stand under his own power, not to mention the fact that he summoned the resolve to do so because the fate of humanity depended upon it...
      • Considering he was probably the only person in his or several previous generations to stand up, this was freaking revolutionary!
  • Ninja Handyman, from Planet Sketch, solves mundane problems and, being a ninja, of course has to behave as if he had saved the day, big time.
  • Most Transformers' kibble (the bits of alt-mode that don't have a purpose in robot mode) just hang off their bodies uselessly. Bulkhead of Transformers Animated, however, can transform his kibble into a chair.◊ This is considered by the fandom to be pretty awesome, especially since one of his toys can actually do this.

Live Action TV
  • Two words: Lazy Sunday
  • Two words: News Promos. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report of course parody this mercilessly.
  • Standard operating procedure for any sports retrospective film, such as the NFL archive: a spoonful of slow-motion, a cup of the orchestral styling of Sam Spence, and season liberally with stark-voiced narration in the style of Grantland Rice, and you've transformed a simple blocked pass into guarding the pass at Thermopylae.
  • Virtually all commercials to count do this with their products.
  • Any feud summary used in Professional Wrestling marketing of upcoming events. It's often less interesting to actually watch pay-per-view extravaganzas than it is the promotional videos explaining them. Extra points to TNA's promos for their annual Lockdown pay-per-view, which do a pretty convincing job of making a six-sided cyclone-fence cage look like it should be banned by the Geneva Convention.
  • Fans of Doctor Who often complain that the "chase scene" music continues after the chase scene is over, particularly in the last few seasons of the old show, and all of the new one.
    • Almost all episodes of the revived series rely heavily on this trope; season-ending episodes routinely bury Dei ex machina and related flaws under mountains of insistence from the writers, actors and the score that whatever is occurring is Awesome.
  • Parodied in Scrubs where an episode began with a melodramatic portrayal of Dr. Cox's four-year-old son Jack receives mild stitches on his forehead complete with epic music with Dr. Cox threatening Turk (who is doing the stitches) coldly that he better succeed. Once Turk finishes and everything is okay, Dr. Cox declared "The Surgeon lives!"
    • Another parody in Scrubs, also involving Dr. Cox, is J.D.'s imagined flashback of Dr. Cox in his intern days as a head-swaying, rebelious punk-rocker intern who responds to a colleague's greeting with, "Shut-up jackass. I rock!!".
  • Hilariously parodied in the "nWo Saturday Night" segments of WCW Saturday Night, which would see an nWo member take on a Jobber in a five-minute match; each and every move done by the nWo member would be augmented by over-the-top special effects, replayed from at least 5 different angles, and get thunderous, deafening applause and cheers from the (nonexistent) crowd.
  • The Title Sequence of Dexter shows his normal morning sequence, but filmed in a way to seem like horrific and brutal parts of a murder sequence: a blood orange is viciously sliced then viscerally disemboweled, dental floss pulled like a garotte, a small cut while shaving has us watch the slowly spreading blood... watch here.
  • The reality show Who Wants To Be A Superhero likes to toss in special effects during editing — objects appear in a blast of lightning instead of being brought out normally, etc. Granted, the show is about people coming up with concepts for superheroes, so it's thematic, but when the object is a boring old laptop, it just decreases the "reality" portion of the program.
  • In the original Star Trek episode Journey to Babel, in which Sarek is introduced, Sarek's shuttlecraft slowly arriving in the hangar gets louder, more dramatic music than even most battles.
    • Another Star Trek example: In the first two films, turning on the Enterprise's exterior floodlights (especially the one lighting up the registry number), is given an EPIC treatment.
  • Japanese example: Iron Chef. Dramatic orchestral music is used for almost all the musical cues, and the lead cameraman is apparently in love with crane shots that pan over the entire kitchen.
  • Pick an NBC reality show. The word "is" is... *20 seconds later* ...contractually obligated to have a pause that is... *we'll be right back*...*after commercials* ...longer than the show itself. Most could, in fact, be comfortably edited to run in a half-hour Time Slot instead of an hour... if the network were willing to give up the extra commercials (yeah, right) and the whole idea wasn't to fill up as much Prime Time as possible as cheaply as possible.
  • Parodied in the Whose Line Is It Anyway game "Improbable Mission," which puts an everyday task to Mission Impossible drama standards and plays it for laughs.
  • Myth Busters played inspirational/awe-inspiring music when Adam and Jamie successfully created a lead balloon.
  • Two Words: Horatio...</Glasses>...Caine. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!
    • Jim Carrey parodies this beautifully here.
    • Self-parodied by the original series in Fight Night — Grissom delivers his one-liner at the end of the teaser ("And a death during a felony? ... That's murder"), and the theme music revs up, but it's cut off by Grissom's beeper. Grissom looks really annoyed, and has to look into a second case before the credits roll.
  • GarthMarenghisDarkPlace
  • Spaced at many, many points, including Brian taking Marsha's coat, and heroically power walking it into the bedroom with stirring heroic music.
  • Spoofed in Seinfeld. Elaine starts dating an aspiring author whose manuscript she's editing, until he neglects to put an exclamation point in a message that her friend had a baby. This causes Elaine to go a little overboard in adding exclamation points to the book, which her boss chews her out for while reading some samples in a mock-dramatic narration.
  • In this youtube video special effects are used to spice up a sumo match. Really, really spice up. At one point a wrestler delivers such a mighty blow that the Earth is split in two.
  • Would you believe subscribing to a magazine will not only make Your Head Asplode, but also make Your Entire World A-splode?
    • Parodied with typical relish here.
  • The How I Met Your Mother episode "Monday Night Football" uses this technique as the main characters try not to find out who won the superbowl.
  • Done a lot on the PBS mini series The 1900 House. The new residents of the 1900 house would have a WDYMINA moment whenever something that would have been commonplace in 1900 (but unusual in 1999) happened. "The chicken laid an egg!" "I made toast!(without electricity)" or, conversly, when something that would be odd in 1900 happened. "I bought shampoo!" "I'm not wearing underwear!"
  • Milk makes you strong
  • While most of Planet Earth is nothing but sheer awesomeness, the ending section of one episode features the aerial camera crew climbing into the helicopter in dramatic slow motion.
  • Tomica Hero Rescue Force, which makes the Rescue genre much cooler then it has any right to be.
  • Not that it wasn't epic already, but Roy and HG managed to make Eric Moussambani's ridiculously slow swim in Sydney even more epic. YouTube, anyone?
  • Epic Shogi!! Note the name of the video; apparently trope awareness has gone global.
  • Bill Nye The Science Guy is a Science Show built around this trope.
  • Johnathan Burking of America's Got Talent makes baton twirling, of all things, look awesome. With fire.
  • In what is possibly the most awesome (and random) channel ident ever, BBC 1 brings us dogs doing stunts to a soundtrack that seems to have been borrowed from an action movie.
  • Supernatural has one of these in the episode "Mystery Spot". Sure it was awesome when Sam drove the Impala, cleaned the weapons, and (especially) stitched his own bullet wound in a Time Passes Montage, but the dramatic music didn't really work with the other scenes of Sam brushing his teeth, eating chicken, and making his bed. That's right, Sammy, you show that bedspread who's a badass!
  • The block trailer that showcases some of Animal Planet's latest shows (Whale Wars, It's Me or the Dog, Living with the Wolfman) features stark silver and black text for the Animal Planet logo and the names of the shows and a soundtrack that could have come right out of a trailer for an action movie. And the final scene is a woman whipping out what looks like an extendable baton. Complete with Ass Kicking Pose.
  • In 1970 the British Empire lay in ruins...

Literature
  • English poet Alexander Pope wrote The Rape Of The Lock as a satirical, thinly fictionalized account of a contemporary society scandal... in mock-heroic, ludicrously overblown EPIC VERSE. He did this as a way of pointing out how utterly stupid it was to make a scandal out of the incident in question.
  • Even older, in fact - this editor recalls reading a surviving fragment of a Greek poem where the poet wrote in Homeric verse, complete with the stylistic invocation of the Muse. The subject boiled down to, "Boy, that guy's a jerk, and I hope he dies." For the curious, the poet was Hipponax. That makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
  • Another ancient example: Latin poet Ovid wrote a poem in which he dramatically curses everything (the maid who delivered it, the wax and wood it was written on, the bees who made the wax, etc.) remotely connected with the letter his girlfriend sent him saying she didn't want to see him that day.
  • The book The Wizard, The Witch, And Two Girls From Jersey spoofs this (along with most existing fantasy tropes) when the elves' epic poetry turns out to be about drinking a glass of water. It's hilarious. Really.
  • The whole point of the bizarre NaNoWriMo novel The Best Story Ever. A little robot, a little robot ferret, and a little robot sheep. Also cowboys, pirates, ninjas, Spartans, cave Vikings, samurai, inferno bees, jetpacks, velociraptors, wailing electric guitars, repeated fourth-wall breakage, and next to no grammar. At one point, the author actually says there's only been six sentences in the whole story. It also helps that the story has no idea whether it's a video game or not.
    • Don't forget the boxers who live at the south pole. They have an entire chapter devoted to them. Also, the planet the story takes place on is SO EXTREME that theres only an EXTREME HIGH NOON side and an EXTREME NIGHT side.
  • At one point in the Discworld novel Maskerade, the protagonist has to learn the famous "Departure aria", in which her character sings about how difficult it is to leave her lover. This stunning piece of opera music (one of the opera masters is moved to tears to the point of being unable to speak by a talented rendition) turns out to roughly translate as "This damn door sticks! This damn door sticks! It is marked pull and I am pulling. It is marked pull and I am pulling... maybe it should be marked push?".
    • Wintersmith features the semi-literate, word-phobic Rob Anybody Feegle performing probably the most dramatic spelling of the word "marmalade" ever.
  • A signature feature of Neal Stephenson's fiction is the grandiose, ridiculously detailed, and long digression describing some mundane or tedious activity. Examples include delivering a pizza (Snow Crash) and eating a bowl of cereal (Cryptonomicon).
    • Actually, the pizza delivery was a case of deadly Serious Business - if it had not arrived on time, Hiro Protagonist, being introduced in that scene, would have died.
  • The gunshot that defines the second half of The Stranger is described something like this.

Film
  • Parodied in the beginning of Bruce Almighty, using slo-mo as well as "cheesy inspirational music" to celebrate the creation of the world's biggest cookie. Later on, Bruce turns drinking a bowl of tomato soup into an awesome moment.
  • The movie Elektra suffers intensely from this. At one point, Elektra, moving into a house, unpacks her toiletries to the accompaniment of the kind of disjointed editing and tense, thumping background music that usually accompanies things like billion-dollar heists and the assembly of home-made death-traps.
  • The 2005 King Kong. Jack Driscoll typing the letters to spell out "Skull Island" onto his typewriter.
  • 300 used slow motion, camera effects and a voice-over to add AQ (Awesome Quotient) to many scenes. Not all of them worked out.
  • Mocked in Shaun Of The Dead. It takes the "tooling up" segments of horror movies (specifically the Evil Dead films), and makes them things like getting ready for work. XTREME TOILET FLUSH!
    • Also heavily used in the director's later parody/homage of cop movies, Hot Fuzz. The concept is taken and beaten into the ground, with dramatic paperwork, dramatic murder-via-baked-beans, dramatic hitting-somebody-over-the-head-with-a-peace-lily, dramatic travelling-across-England, dramatic putting-change-on-a-counter, etc. It's somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
      • And evidently very hyphen-in-word.
    • Hitting a giant with a potted plant isn't just dramatic—it's off the fuckin' chain!
  • Pretty much all of Michael Bay's Armageddon, of which critics complain it looks like a giant trailer.
  • American Psycho and business cards. Extreme close-ups, slow motion reveals, tense narration - hell, the main character even breaks down mentally and starts sweating and shaking when someone has a better business card than him.
    • The overwrought nature of the motif is its entire point within the movie.
  • The Star Gate movie The Ark Of Truth has an injured Teal'c trudging along the mountaintops to overly dramatic orchestral music complete with Latinish words sung by a chorus. The scene is dramatic, but not that dramatic. One viewer just started laughing and sang the opening words to Climb Every Mountain from The Sound Of Music.
  • Actor Michael York's entire acting method consists of intoning every line as dramatically as possible.
    • Ditto Glenn Shadix.
  • The opening of The Ipcress File has the main character getting up, getting dressed, making and eating breakfast, all to the accompaniment of one of the most haunting movie themes ever composed. However, this is totally deliberate and emphasises the unglamorous take on spies found throughout the movie.
  • The commercial for "Brawndo" energy drink from the film Idiocracy has an over-enthusiastic announcer who shouts every other set of words. It's got electrolytes!
  • The Wizard loves to play mundane things as godlike artifacts. For example, the Power Glove is made to look like some high tech cybernetic enhancement, which is about the opposite of what it really was. Ironically, that scene shows just how "bad" it is, with the footage of Rad Racer being a mediocre at best performance (so much for his Informed Ability). And let's not forget SUPER! MARIO! BROTHERS! THREEEEEEEE~! (Then again, that game is pretty awesome.)
    • And let's not forget the truant officer's equal parts mystified/horrified cry of "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING?!" as the kids escape his clutches by boarding onto an elevator.
  • In the film Dungeons And Dragons, Jeremy Irons' acting was two notches above everyone else- and his eyebrows' acting was five notches over him. Those eyebrows deserve an award of some kind. He wasn't used to having so much green-screening done, and felt the need to compensate for the then-absent dragons, magic, and other factors by making everything as Damn Awesome as he could make it. The results can be seen here.
    • Plus, he was clearly having a blast, and is by far the best thing about the film...
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie calls out "This Island Earth" for doing this at one point. Having shown the characters close up images of his devastated homeworld on the viewscreen, the alien character orders "Normal view" and we are treated to a static ten-second shot of our characters looking at a viewscreen now simply showing a planet, while the orchestra gives it the full dramatic PAH PAH PAAAAAAH!! PAH PAH PAAAAAAAA!! treatment.
  • In one scene just before the climax of Iron Man, Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane turns the act of taking a sip of whiskey into a long, intense, incredibly menacing event. As one reviewer put it, "he drinks the shit out of a glass of Scotch."
  • The 2008 Comic Con footage of Punisher: War Zone definitively qualifies. Hardcore speed metal + random people's heads exploding + everyone being shot like 50 times + A guy getting a chair leg jammed in his eye = Textbook WDYMITA. Here, take a look for yourself.
  • Star Trek: Insurrection combines this with Conservation of Ninjitsu. After the bad guys send down a bunch of small, flying robot drones that shoot darts, the heroes' encounter with dozens of them is treated like a standard mid-movie action scene. Their later battle against just five drones is given a far more epic treatment, including a Spaghetti Western style staredown with the drones before they draw their weapons.
  • A scene near the climax of Bullitt (a film which notably featured one of the most legitimately awesome car chases in the history of cinema, shot in a fashion that would seem almost minimalist by today's action movie standards) revolves around EXTREME DOCUMENT PRINTING.
  • A recurring joke in Mystery Science Theater 3000 was to punctuate scenes like this with comments along these line:
    (A teenager starts drink a coke as if he were in some kind of soft drink commercial)
    Tom Servo: (As the teenager) I'm gonna drink the hell out of this coke!
  • Rifftrax, the spiritual sequel to MST 3 K, has used the joke in a similar manner:
    Woman: I am so taking the stairs.
    Bridget Nelson: So taking the stairs, I'm gonna take the hell out of those stairs!
  • Wanted has some of this - though it's hard to see mundane acts in that movie (Wesley and Fox's kiss probably counts).
  • Rocky turned running up the stairs into a cultural phenomenon!
  • Casino Royale had some very dramatic music playing during James Bond's drive from the airport to his hotel.
    • Dr No and From Russia With Love, being the first two Bond movies, use the Bond theme at every situation possible, even simple ones such as Bond's airplane arriving and 007 driving to the beach.
  • Bowfinger does it with the arrival of FedEx.
  • "Bring us... [dramatic chord] A SHRUBBERY!!"
  • Stardust has an odd habit of putting very dramatic music and sweeping wide shots in scenes of everyone travelling. Okay, fair enough when it's a flying pirate ship. Not so much when it's just people walking.

Webcomics

Music
  • The Weird Al Yankovic song "Trapped In The Drive-Thru" acts as if getting dinner at McDonald's has the same impact as breaking up with a girlfriend.
    • The song is a parody of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet", which is an epic-length "Hip-Hopera" (22 separate chapters and counting...) about the inhabitants of an apartment complex doing little worthy of the drama. It features Kelly throwing his full vocal might into lines like "And then he said, 'I'ma heat this chicken!'".
      • Which, ironically, sounds like it could be a line from the aforementioned parody...
  • The Shy Child song "Drop the Phone" features fast-paced, anguished, barely intelligible yelling over an EPIC electro track - until you listen closely to the lyrics and realise it's about a guy checking his voicemail: "Then I just used a landline, to call my phone and check on my voicemail. The message is wiped!". Even worse, the chorus is an angry Rage Against The Heavens... about the fact that everyone else's cellphone can get a signal and his can't!
  • James Blunt's music video for "You're Beautiful", as parodied on Mad TV. "Now I'm putting a bunch of stuff on a line on the floor, have you ever seen such a kickass video before?"
  • Grunt: Pigorian Chant sounds exactly like something from a Pure Moods compilation… until you read the liner notes and realize it's nursery rhymes about barnyard animals being sung in pig latin.
  • Parts of Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio. There actually is some important drama of some sort going on in that sequence where the female lead is singing "Cancel my appointment to the squash club"—but it proved hard to get past that line. And if you don't already know the true implications of "making an appointment with the Minister of Love"—a section that really is meant to be climactic—you might get baffled.
  • The music video to the AnJ song "Gorbachov". Hot Russian women are under attack by Communist zombies, who get their asses kicked by a Conanized Mikhail Gorbachev wielding everything from his shield and axe to machine guns to laser eyes.
  • This troper would like to direct your attention to Eileen Ivers, who dares to ask the question, "Would you like your traditional Irish fiddling with a freakin' wah-wah pedal??" (The answer: Yes.)

Video Games
  • All instances of Overly Long Fighting Animation.
  • Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney lives off this trope. While trials are important and serious affairs in real life, in the game a trial is an epic battle of wits. With theme music, action lines, people reacting to arguments as if they have been physically struck, and finger pointing... lots and lots of finger pointing. That it remains hilariously self-aware of its over-the-top nature only makes the games that much more appealing.
    • Contrast to This is Wonderland, the most unglamorous courtroom drama ever attempted. Most of the lawyers are either woefully unprepared or dealing with very severe personal problems. Or just bastards. This form of cinematography is frequently used for the purpose of extremely dark satire, complete with romantic, life-affirming theme music, a switch to commercial breaks that borders on the Neo-Classical, and lots of architectural shots.
  • In the game Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time, everything the Prince does is awesome. Even a relatively mundane act, such as taking a drink of water, is accompanied by a dramatic bullet-time camera rotozoom closeup, heroic music, and whooshing sound effects. It's the coolest water-drinking animation ever devised.
    • This reminds me of the potion-drinking in the 3D The Legend Of Zelda games, where the camera closes on Link, who quickly "draws" the bottle, and after drinking, does an heroic lip-cleaning (sometimes breathing a fog colored as the potion). Only lacks different music and slow motion (though Time Stands Still as you drink) to try being more awesome.
      • Taken even further in Super Smash Brothers: Melee, where Young Link's single-player victory montage consists entirely