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alt title(s): WJT; Weird Japanese Thing 
"If you find the Japanese offensive, then you'll find this game offensively Japanese."
"Dear Japan, Please Stop. Love, America."
A Widget (WJT) is marketed as a Weird Japanese Thing, relatively offbeat compared to what is considered mainstream or popular at the time. This has of course become more inclusive with the more mainstream presence of anime recently, but usually exploits the culture difference for interest.
Often consist of the especially random brand of Gag Series. They can be tricky to localize, and this is done with either lots of care or not much care at all. The latter to preserve the oddness, naturally.
They can consist of small, short releases to test the waters of the audience, although they tend to have a guaranteed viewing among otaku (equivalent to a cult classic).
Somewhat difficult to define, but must have some meaning, considering that saying a series or game is "very Japanese" paints a similar picture in people's minds.
Japan has a culture outsiders may find pretty strange. In ancient times, Japan was a tribal culture. After making contact with China, they became an "eastern" culture, adopting a lot of Chinese cultural baggage but changing it to suit themselves while keeping older beliefs such as animism. The same thing happened during the 19th century, when Japan became an industrialized "western" culture. These three layers of culture interact in fascinating and unusual ways. Japanese cultural differences are both the reason this trope exists and the reason it's not more popular. Simply put, Japanese culture can be refreshing to an outsider, but too much may cause a feeling of overload.
Perhaps it should be noted that until about 1996 (with the advent of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball to American pop culture, if you don't go back to Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Robotech, Voltron and more from the previous decades), most anime was still out of the American mainstream — and therefore every anime of the time could be considered a Widget Series to some extent. Also, a weird series doesn't have to be Japanese to qualify as a Widget: some European and American series, like the ones from the examples below, are weird enough to compare with their Japanese brethren.
Exemplified by the Katamari Damacy video game series. Such games have also a noticeably larger presence on handheld systems than their console brethren.
Not to be confused with the animated series about an alien named Widget. Nor with the economic term (which is shorthand for an unknown unit of production. Product X, but economic slang)
Spinoff terms you'll likely see in this page include WTF (A Weird Thing from France), WHAT (A Weird Humorous American Thing), Wabbit ( Weird British Thing), Wicket ( Weird Canadian Thing), STANZA ( Strange Thing from Australia/ New Zealand/ Australasia), and WIT ( Weird Icelandic Thing).
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- FLCL
- Axis Powers Hetalia
- Cat Soup
- Excel Saga. The American release even has the title written in faux-Japanese letters.
- Paprika
- Haré+Guu
- Bobobobo Bobobo, in which the characters confuse their enemies into submission, confusing the viewer in the process. Even ignoring that, the main character is a Kenshiro knock-off with a blonde afro who uses "fist of the nose hair", and the enemy is an evil empire that wants to shave everyone's head, despite most of its members having hair. That covers the first couple of episodes, and it gets weirder from there.
- Sexy Commando (a.k.a.: Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoi yo, Masaru-san!)
- Super Milk Chan
- Pani Poni Dash
- Kujibiki Unbalance
- Lucky Star
- Though not quite marketed as a Weird Japanese Thing, Azumanga Daioh pretty much lives up to this kind of stuff.
- Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy
- Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge
- Macademi Wasshoi
- Moetan arguably qualifies, with its bizarre combination of lolicon, genre-parodies and English lessons. Yes, they try to teach viewers English. Really.
- Potemayo. A boy finds an over-possessive moe-blob in his fridge. And he calmly adopts it, naming it after what he had in the fridge. Then another one appears, except this one is a Tsundere, scythe-wielding moe-blob that Beam Spams from the worms on the side of its head, and leaves gifts of charred,bleeding animal carcasses on the desk of one of the boy's classmates. That's the first episode.
- Puni Puni Poemi. Two OVA episodes of sheer insanity.
- The 'magical girl transformation' involved shoving a rod up the bottom of a talking, dead, fish.
- Kamen No Maid Guy — that's Masked Maid Guy in English. A gigantic masked sociopath in a maid uniform terrorizes an absurdly well-endowed samurai schoolgirl for her own good. You just don't get that particular kind of "huh?" anywhere else on Earth.
- Gintama. Its humor relies on a lot of Japanese puns, references to Japanese pop culture, Japanese-style humor, and a basic knowledge of famous historical Japanese figures (Katsura's character becomes even more hilarious when you discover he's based on Katsura Kogoro, one of the three men responsible for the Meiji Restoration—basically if one of the Founding Fathers was a weirdo, dorky terrorist).
- Yakitate!! Ja-pan is a show/manga about bread. No, it does not teach you how to make the bread (one exception for bread-in-a-rice cooker). It focuses on tournament-style battles between bakers. And puns. Lots and lots of bad Japanese puns.
- Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Horribly suicidal homeroom teacher underpins various Japanese social problems by presenting them as Spoof Aesops, and his entire class' names directly indicate their personality, as well as the particular social problem they (hilariously) represent — with the exception of the delusionally optimistic Kafuka, named after Franz Kafka.
- Ryofuko-chan is the perfect example why some anime producers should refrain from reading classic novels.
- Ultimate Girls combines Magical Girls and Giant Mecha, throws in a robotic, talking phallic symbol for a mascot, and every episode is chock full of innuendo. Strangest of all, it's still really cute.
- Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan
- This troper recently exposed a friend to this series, who stated that "this could only be Japanese..."
- Why would you expose that show to a FRIEND??!!
- Because you want to lose them.
- Dai Mahou Touge, which is sort of a mix between Puni Puni Poemi and Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan, with a protagonist who compensates her lack of hyperness with pure evil.
- Penguin Musume Heart
- Kyouran Kazoku Nikki
- Hayate The Combat Butler
- The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is weird enough by itself (one arc deals with a "This time, kill him yourself!" reanimation service for your beloved's murderer), but it's also weird about Japan, showcasing vestiges of ancient traditions still practiced there.
- Yotsuba&!, although it is only intermittently weird — most of its moments come from the wild imagination of the title character; it is, however, deeply grounded in Japanese suburban life.
- Seven of Seven: normal schoolgirl is subjected to Cloning Blues when she's split into seven copies of herself... who then all try to go after the boy she was interested in. Eventually,they take turns being the 'real one'.
- Cromartie High School is a parody of old shounen shows, about a normal(ish) guy that starts going to school full of "badasses". And a gorilla. And a robot (that doesn't realize he's a robot). And a mute man that looks strangely like the deceased lead singer of Queen.
- Nerima Daikon Brothers, an anime from the director of Excel Saga that is an anime musical series, about farmers who want to become musicians but are constantly low on cash. One of the characters falls in love with a panda. Aliens frequently appear.
- Tokyo Pig
- Akikan is a series about about empty soda/juice cans doing battle to determine whether steel or aluminum cans are superior, for the standardization of cans into one format, strengthening the industry. Oh, and the cans take the forms of cute girls in strange outfits...
- Ninin Ga Shinobuden. Attempting to explain the weirdness (especially Onsokumaru) will get you some weird looks.
- Fireball
- Mari And Gali
- Strawberry Panic doesn't count but its second half ending does.
- Magical Play
- Tenshi Ni Narumon
- Midori No Hibi
Film
- The Takashi Miike film Gozu is a mixture of this and J-Horror making it even more weird and surreal.
- Tampopo is a western in '80s Japan about ramen, complete with John Wayne-alike, varmits, and dramatic string music, interspersed with other unrelated sketches about food. And it is hilarious.
- Funky Forest: First Encounter can best be described as a Widgit Robot Chicken: The Movie.
- Total Recall is, arguably, a weird American thing.
- Two words: David Lynch.
Live Action TV
- Combines with a Game Show and Cooking Show format in Iron Chef. Iron Chef America is a more "normal" but more fast-paced version of the original.
- LazyTown is a Weird Icelandic Thing (WIT).
- Power Rangers, Beetleborgs, and most other Saban sentai shows including Masked Rider originated in Japan.
- Takeshis Castle. MXC is a WHAT (Weird Hilarious American Thing) made from it.
- The works of Sid And Marty Krofft Productions are Weird Hilarious American Things that can match the weirdest of Widget Series weird for weird in being weird.
- Banzai was a British parody of Japanese game shows, deliberately designed to be strange and incomprehensible.
- SASUKE and Kinniku Banzuke, which air in the US as Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Banzuke, respectively.
- Fawlty Towers and anything by Monty Python are Weird British Funny Things (WBFT or "Wobbuffet").
- Black Books even moreseo. Dave "Mouse Ears" Smith, pesticide by coffee machine, and "Then it's left... at the dead badger."
- The six episode variety show, Vermillion Pleasure Night. Recurring skits included a drama about a family of mannequins, a spaceship boarding house with a tortured alien, and a bunch of actresses being Barbie dolls. These are then interspersed with one off stories about cannibal cuisine, bondage nurses, and things that just take a sharp left turn halfway through a given sketch. This show hits you with weird repeatedly and never lets you up.
- STANZA (Strange Thing from Australia/New Zealand/Australasia) is a term that would apply rather nicely to The Wiggles and much of Peter Jackson's early work. See also... Mr Squiggle.
- Bananas in Pyjamas, a kids' show about giant anthropomorphic bananas. That wear pajamas. And get cheated nearly every episode by the giant anthropomorphic rat that runs the corner shop. Oh,
that Rat-in-a-Hat those crazy Aussies...
- The issue o f their inherent desire to
molest chase and hug giant living teddy bears.
- Round The Twist. Plots include a skeleton's curse that forces the cursed to end every sentence with "without my pants" (from the episode of that title), gum leaves that can transfer injuries to anyone who can hear a song played on them ("The Gum Leaf War"), a ghost haunting an outhouse ("Skeleton On The Dunny"), and superpower-conferring underpants ("Wunder Pants")...in the first season. It gets weirder.
- Not to mention overarching plots including music played by ghosts who are trying to save their lighthouse, two ghosts wanting to save their loved ones from accidentally crashing on a boat thanks to human error 100 years ago, and doing so by possessing all of the regulars, including a young girl possessing a teenage boy and a viking love book.
- That "Human Tetris" game show lost much of its widgety charm when adapted for Fox as Hole In The Wall.
- Kids In The Hall is, to most Americans, a Weird Canadian Thing. ("Wicket", maybe?)
- I Survived A Japanese Gameshow plays on this. The American contestants participate in a Japanese gameshow, and are eliminated one at a time.
- Father Ted, an Excessively Irish Example of Intentional Oddity. Collectively had the entirety of England, Wales and Scotland asking "what does feck mean exactly?
- Pushing Daisies might count as a WHAT. It involves an explosive scratch-and-sniff card, Paul Reubens and an author of adult pop-up books - in the same episode. And then we have the red-and-white striped morgue.
- Doctor Who veers off into Weird British Thing territory every-so-often. Especially when they make jokes based around British humor or accents.
- One episode had Rose Tyler trying to get the Queen of England to say "We are not amused." Hilarious for British audiences (and probably several Western audiences familiar with that real-life meme) but to Asian audiences, it would be odd-sounding and out-of-context.
- Bernd the Bread: depressive, pessimistic, box-shapped Bread from a kids show whose hobbies include staring at his ingrain wallpaper and collecting TV test cards... and a weegeet (Weird German Thing) Just look at his profile!
New Media
Video Games
- Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and its sequel. Even the Americanized version, Elite Beat Agents, still thrives on quite a bit of WJT-ness.
- If Wario Ware doesn't count, nothing does.
- Gitaroo Man is another... interesting video game example.
- As said above, Katamari Damacy is a big blatant WJT.
- Much of Michel Ancel's output (Rayman, Tonic Trouble, Beyond Good And Evil...) also qualifies as W.T.F. (Weird Things from France) to varying degrees. Among the things he's responsible for: Limbless heroes who throw their own arms to attack, rabid tomatoes, screaming unintelligible bunnies that attack things with plungers, and talking pigs who fight aliens with wrenches and fart-powered jet boots. Yup.
- Hell, Rabbid Go Home is pretty much being described as the French equivalent to Katamari Damacy. And not just in the "collecting lots of junk" premise.
- The people behind Katamari Damacy would be very proud of Tim Schafer for his work on Psychonauts.
- NiGHTS Into Dreams could be considered an example of this - some of the weirdness comes from the fact it's about dreams, of course, but you can bet if it had been made in the West they wouldn't have gone half as weird, no matter what the subject matter demanded. Plus, the western-marketed sequel is considerably more generic.
- Super Galedic Hour seems to be a recreation of some kind of game show, but it's hard to be sure when one of the events is Butt Sumo, and all the contestants are voluptuous women in skimpy animal costumes. It really has to be seen to be believed.
- The Disgaea series.
- Ar Tonelico... boy howdy.
- If it's any consolation, even the Japanese think Ar Tonelico went a bit too far. Especially in That Scene.
- Cooking Mama fits this... heck, in the sequels they don't even try to get localized voice acting! It's still English, but the accent is all Japan.
- Cho Aniki.
- Lemmings (DMA Design), Worms (Team17) and Blast Corps (Rare) probably all count as W.B.T.s (Weird British Things... wabbits?)
- Arcana Heart, one of the few cute-schoolgirl fighters that plays well as a game, and the only one ever that made it to American consoles.
- Destroy All Humans probably counts as a Weird Humorous American Thing (WHAT), especially the second game.
- Make that a weird australian thing (WAT), the game was developed in Brisbane.
- Under the Skin is Capcom's version of a kid-friendly (Er, "Immature") Destroy All Humans-like game starring a Three-year old Alien named Cosmi. Includes Cameos from the Resident Evil Franchise.
- What strikes as odd is that it was released earlier than its own (WHAT) counterpart.
- The Typing of the Dead, the light gun shooter The House Of The Dead 2 without the guns. One of the few arcade machines to come with a keyboard, and the only one to truly capture the tension of trying to write "Disguised as a totem pole" while a blood-splattered corpse is charging at you.
- And then there's "English of the Dead", which is House of the Dead 2 repackaged for the DS as a game to teach English to Japanese speakers. You defeat zombies by writing the words you're prompted for on the Touch Pad, which causes a cartoony mallet to bang on the zombies. Bosses are fought in various ways, including rearranging words/phrases to make a proper English sentence and responding to a question with the proper English answer. Best of all, it reuses all the cut scenes from House 2, but adding on some sort of strange back-pack to the agents which puts a sketchpad in front of them... and in scenes where they use their guns, such as to break open a lock, it instead shows them sketching, which causes bullet sounds and the apparent effect of whatever the bullets would've done. So very Widget.
- Incredible Crisis is about a family that has the worst day ever trying to get home early for Grandma's birthday. You live through each family member's day (The father Taneo, mother Etsuko, son Tsuyoshi, and the daughter Ririka) and guide them through ridiculous scenarios by playing minigames, including, but not limited to, Taneo being chased through office hallways by a giant globe, Etsuko fighting a twenty-story tall stuffed bear in a jet fighter, Tsuyoshi being shrunk to the size of an insect and escaping a relatively gigantic mantis, and Ririka riding a bicycle to escape from a giant wrecking ball.
- The freeware game Arm Joe, a 2D fighting game that is, I kid you not, based on Les Miserables. It has, in addition to the standard cast of characters; Pon Pon, a Mini-Cooper driving rabbit from another dimension, Robo-Jean (who shoots lasers out of his chest, fires rocket punches and lightning bolts), and the physical embodiment of the concept of Judgment in the book.
- As with the previous Wario Ware and Incredible Crisis examples, most minigame compilations probably count, including games like Bishi Bashi Special and Rayman Raving Rabbids (as mentioned above, a WTF considering Ubisoft is French).
- Tenkomori Shooting (1998, Namco) is all about "shooting", but is a minigame compilation and WJT. Little easy on the “weird”, but hey, it’s about monkeys doing minigames to rescue their friends; that’s as weird as it needs to be!
- Doshin the Giant probably qualifies, especially the sequel, where you must save Doshin by pissing on things.
- You aren't just pissing on things, you're running around the show floor of a business convention “pissing” floaty pink hearts at the booth babes.
- Yume Nikki is one great big Nightmare Fueled-widget.
- Chibi Robo. GiFTPiA. Let's face it. ALL of skip Ltd.'s games fall under this trope. It's most telling when they use the popular idea of a Cross Over video game to make Captain Rainbow, about the title character and his Secret Identity Nick helping out second-rate Nintendo characters get their wishes granted.
- Vertical shooter example: the old NES game Gun Nac. Its stages are based on the Japanese days of a week, with appropriate enemies. So the first stage, being the Moon stage, has you fighting robotic moon bunnies that fire carrots at you. The second stage, being the Fire stage, puts you against giant match boxes and cigarette lighters. The third stage, being the Water stage, pits your ship against umbrellas and a giant mermaid. And so on...
- Similar to the above, the Parodius series, which plays like the Gradius games... except nowhere in the Gradius series can you play as a torpedo-riding Playboy Bunny who blasts a fifty-foot tall Vegas showgirl while dodging incoming fire from giant penguins.
- Chulip. One Let's Play thread author even prefaces his introduction to the game as "Violently Japanese". The object of the game? To kiss as many things as possible.
- Earthworm Jim is another fine example of a WHAT.
- Dynamite Headdy is definitely a widget, although some of the more aggressively widgety elements were excised in the North American and European localizations.
- Little Big Adventure. Weird Things from France, bow down before your incomprehensible King.
- Maybe it's a translation thing. This troper thought Little Big Adventure was awesome and entirely comprehensible, especially the sequel.
- Ace Attorney owes its success to lots of curious people wondering what the hell the Japanese were thinking making a game based entirely around wacky, over-the-top lawyers. The excellent localization helped, too.
- Sin And Punishment: Successor To The Earth for the N64. Since it arrived here, albeit seven years late, it should qualify.
- Abeit the sequel has already been announced for release outside Japan.
- The Ganbare Goemon (aka Mystical Ninja) series. The two localized N64 games provide a good sample of its feudal craziness.
- Metal Wolf Chaos. A game where you play as the President of the United States of America, behind the cockpit of a Humongous Mecha, as he launches a one-man counteroffensive to take back America, city by city, from his Vice President Richard Hawk, confident that he can win because he is The President of the GREAT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!! He does by destroying everything in sight with BURNING AMERICAN FREEDOM!!! And America doesn't get this game because....?
- ...Because after viewing it, SEGA laughed before claiming it impossible to export.
- Well what the fuck do they know?!
- Crimsoness, a short, weird, angsty, Japanese indie game.
- Swedish example: Mondo Medicals and Mondo Agency. Just what the fuck.
- While the first two games of Konami's Crime Fighters series were straight arcade beat'em ups with just a few oddball things here and there, the final game in the series, Violent Storm, goes all out Widget, it's a pastiche of Post-Apoc locales with post-apoc punks and all kinds of weirdness. culminating in a boss battle with a pre-fetus Tetsuo expy. And his bodyguard gives KEFKA a run for his money on the ridiculous-looking bishie clown angle, looking as a cross between him and Malcolm the Jester from the PC adventure game Legend of Kyrandia. There's also a shout-out to Cho Aniki with Julius the bodybuilder, possibly the funniest 'stampeding fat guy' enemy type ever created, the lollypops (yes that's their name. Like Andore, they come in regular and Jr. varieties), a Ninja Turtle expy in Sledge, a train conductor with a gigantic ticket puncher, and cameos by a few of the programmers who can be beaten up and knocked off the stage. And on said train stage, there's a momma pig with little baby pigs walking around. The baby pigs can be picked up, and when thrown become FOOTBALLS. (the American kind)
- Battle Circuit from Capcom is a lesser widget entry than the above, focusing more on anime/game references than the weirdness, though the final boss and Dr.Saturn more than make up for it. And one of the characters is a little girl riding a pink ostrich wearing an eyepatch. The ostrich, not the girl. And the ostrich is MALE. Also for no apparent reason one of the bosses is an Elvis impersonator.
- EarthBound
- Odd in the fact that it is a WHAT in Japan, and a WJT in the West, intentionally.
- Monster Party features the most bizarre assortment of Everything Trying To Kill You, including a Sequential Boss that starts as a shrimp and turns into an onion ring and then a kebab. Bandai never released the game in Japan; it sold poorly in America, probably on account of its awful gameplay mechanics.
- Imagination Reality Paradise, is an amazingly random puzzle game with a lot of Interface Screw and perhaps some Nightmare Fuel thrown in. Most definitely a WJT.
- Project Rub (aka Feel the Magic XY/XX) is absolutely mindboggling. At one point you have to get some goldfish out of a man's stomach, at another you follow a helicopter on a unicycle, and at another you dance with a girl at a campsite (incorporating the fire into your moves), and at yet another you have to bowl a man rolled into a ball at some people waiting for a bus. As you can probably guess, those who do buy the game are in for a real treat.
- Katamari Damacy + Cho Aniki = Muscle March. This is unadulterated silliness and ridiculousness at its finest.
- The flash game Death Dice Overdose as a bizarre and trippy western video game.
- Zeno Clash is a Wichet (as in, Weird Chilean Thing).
- Cross Edge definitely qualifies, as it's a Massive Multiplayer Crossover featuring the likes of a few of the other Widget Series games listed here.
- Kirby, anyone? The game about a constantly hungry pink puffball living in a dream land full of happy people, sentient trees, insane walruses, and chef potatoes?
- zOMG! is a game that has you fight, among other things, gift boxes, lawn gnomes, jackets that behave like wolves, and cyborg alien rodents. Your weapons are rings, which have effects such as launching beehives, wrapping the monsters in duct tape, and covering yourself or an ally in cooking spray. Pop-culture references abound. And the game takes place on a Planet Eris as it is. Definitely a WHAT.
- Pop N Music would lose half its charm without its silly cast of characters, including but not limited to: the rabbit- and cat-like mascots, a Cute Witch who can turn her broom into a guitar, a girl who runs continously runs left really fast as if hopped up on sugar, an angel disguised as a Hot Librarian, and a DJ who occasionally communicates with some sort of devilish spirit. And on top of that, the multicolored notes all have eyes and are called "Pop-kuns."
- Rose And Camellia and its sequel, two flash games about noblewomen bitchslapping each other.
- The Power Instinct Fighting Game series has, in addition to a retinue of Serious Business martial artists typical for the genre, not one, not two, but three little old ladies, a perverted old man, a hulking amazon (well, Reality Is Unrealistic; fighting game women tend to look like slender beauties, not wrestlers), a Magical Girl, her Stripperific roller-blading alter-ego, a man in a dog suit (really!), a fat kid... well, rest assured that’s not all. A usual fighting game might have one such character just for laughs. But these weirdoes are what Power Instinct is really about.
Tabletop Games
Western Animation
- Avez-vous déjà vu...? is a Weird Thing from France (W.T.F.) that can easily beat FLCL and Azumanga Daioh for the title of the weirdest series in the world! Although it seems like all the information about this... strangeness... is in French, you can find some videos on the Internet by googling the title.
- It was made by Alain Chabat, who's considered as king of the weird in France.
- Cartoon Network's Chowder definitely has elements of this.
- Fireman Sam (a series about a small Welsh village in which pretty much everything is A Job For The Fire Service) originated in Wales as Sam Tan (tan being welsh for fire, which is quite ironic seeing as Sam's job is to put out fires, so translated it could be Fire Sam).
- Any episode of Teen Titans that begins with its theme song in Japanese is pretty much this. Especially the one where it is sung by a one shot, otaku character, according to Andrea Romano's comments in a DVD Easter Egg.
- Fleischer Studios, pretty much anything they did, especially the ghost of a walrus singing a song written by Cab Calloway, as well as being rotoscoped from Cab Calloway's dancing, don't even get started on Koko the Clown's antics. Counts as a W.E.N.T, or "Weird Early Nineteen-hundreds Thing."
- How about "Weird Early Twentieth Century Animated Thing" (W.E.T.C.A.T.)?
- Parodied in The Simpsons, when an already manically bizarre promotional videotape for the Japanese cleaning product Mr. Sparkle includes, for no apparent reason, a brief clip of a reporter asking a cow, "Any plans for summer?"
- Also, the cow has two heads and disintegrates with a look of horror on its face(s) upon viewing Mr. Sparkle.
- The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack. Just watch the opening. Though, much of the oddness comes from the sheer amount of Nightmare Fuel.
- Cartoon Network has recently greenlit production of a show based on memetic short cartoon Adventure Time. Go and watch the original on You Tube and tell us this won't be the American Widget to end all American Widgets.
- Some Tom And Jerry cartoons would probably count, since only jazz music was an instant hit worldwide and the culture took a little time to catch up, and also purely American-centric television tropes like Mammy Two-shoes. (Granted, on that second part, minstrel show anything would count. Droopy had a crapload of those kinds of jokes.) Not that they didn't exist in other countries, it just existed in different forms. Errr, is there a trope for humour that plain doesn't translate well?
- Panique au Village (A Town Called Panic) is a bizarre Belgian stop-motion shorts series.
- The Ren And Stimpy Show... when it's not being Nightmare Fuel, anyway.
- King Of The Hill comes across to outsiders, even within the United States, as a Weird Middle American Thing.
- "Rejected Cartoons," by Don Hertzfeldt. Or just about anything by him. Or inspired by him, like the Pop Tarts commercials.
- South Park occasionally veers into this territory, especially in its more nonsensical episodes.
- Aardman animations are often filled with British terms that non-Brits might not be familiar with.
- In the first Robbie the Reindeer, Robbie is talking to Donner about how he always gets tongue-tied when he tries to talk to pretty ladies like Vixen. When Donner points out that he has no trouble talking to her he says "Well, that's different. We're mates." Robbie meant mates as in friends, but to Americans this could cause confusion since to them mate means an animal's love partner.
Other
- Most small Toyotas since about 2000 have this to some extent or another. Matter of fact, on the international front, ridiculous little dinky cars and hatchbacks from all around the world are perceived this way by Americans.
- The ultimate example would probably be the autorickshaw, a demented little car-thing built around a motorcycle.
- A western example would by the short-lived Yggdrasil 'green' motorcycles. I cannot link to an example right now, unfortunately, as the website has been down for about two years. If you've played or seen screenshots of the game series Xtreme G, they resembled those cycles but only went about 140-170kph and were sold in small numbers in mainland Europe as an environmentally conscious alternative to move from point A to B. They were cheap to buy, but annoyingly expensive to maintain, and attempts to sell them elsewhere were met with confusion and head scratching elsewhere (and even at home) due to the way-too-futuristic designs and odd seating arrangement. (ridden as if you were straddling a rocket Wile E Coyote style). They had other variants but I can't remember the names of those either.
- However, those outside North America likely perceive the lack of micro cars and the preponderance of big sedans, pickup trucks, and SU Vs for city dwellers as just as strange. This is caused by Japanese and European car makers not bothering to sell their micro cars and more left-field models in North America in a self-fulfilling cycle of lack of demand from lack of products from lack of demand...
- It isn't just those. This troper knows a few well-to-do people who are more than pissed the Phaeton phaded away before they had the funds to purchase it, being fanatical VW aficionados since the company's creation. VW believed the slow sales were due to a lack of interest. It seems much more likely nobody had expected VW to release a luxury car in the first place, and wanted to wait until all tests and reviews were in before making the leap...which was just about when they gave up on the model. Do'h!
- This is actually more due to fact that most micro-card don't can't meet the restrictive, and often bizarre, US federal automobile safety regulations. Not that US laws are necessarily more stringent than Japanese or European; but that they're based on a high-speed "freeway" commuter culture, rather than the lower-speed urban commuter culture that predominates in Japan and Europe.
- The whole Morgan car company is a weird British Car Company: two-seat roadsters with a 1930s design and wooden chassis? Three wheelers with the one wheel at the back?◊. A car with crossed eyes◊? Clarkson did a thorough investigation of the phenomenon of British sports cars and their drivers here.
- Japanese pop groups composed of cute teenage girls, such as Morning Musume and other Hello Project groups, come across to Western audiences as Weird Japanese Things.
- Not as WJT as non-pop Visual Kei bands though. The most common thing said about that style has to be "Wait a minute, is that a man?', and even putting the Viewer Gender Confusion to one side, there's still the crazy music videos, genre-jumping every other album, hair twice the size of the person underneath it and OTT engrish to deal with.
- Much like Lazy Town, Björk is widely seen as a Weird Icelandic Thing.
- This British troper finds that Flanders & Swann, a musical comedy duo he finds hilarious, comes across as a Weird British Thing to most Americans he subjects to it. There may be other reasons for this, however.
- Santa Claus lives in outer space with tone-deaf singing children from all over the world? His sleigh is pulled by laughing reindeerbots? He teams up with his pal Merlin to battle an effeminate poodle-poking demon in red tights? You can see all of this and more in the So Bad Its Good Cult Classic Santa Claus, a Weird Mexican Thing.
- All the movies starring the Mexican luchador Santo also definitely qualify as a Mexican Example Of Weirdness (MEOW).
- Men With Brooms is possibly more Weirdly Canadian than Kids in the Hall. It's a sports comedy about curling, that also features Paul Gross, Leslie Nielsen (as a retired curling guru and hallucinogenic mushroom enthusiast), a guest appearance by Canadian rock group The Tragically Hip, a bagpiper in a kilt with no explicit connection to the plot, and a running gag involving beavers.
- Cirque Du Soleil. A Weird French-Canadian Thing, which first caught attention in the U.S. because it was so different from the long-established, Ringling Bros.-dominated circus format. (No animal acts, one ring, little dialogue, New Age/world music, etc.) It actually took a lot of inspiration, and later performers, from established European and Asian circuses, but managed to make its own artistic statements and remain distinctive, to the point that their overall style has spawned its own imitators.
- In addition, their TV show Solstrom is exactly this: a mostly silent fantasy series that links acrobatic and novelty acts together via whimsical stories involving mischievous "sun creatures" (actually characters from the various stage shows) running amuck on Earth.
- Footrot Flats has touches of STANZA.
- TVTropes. A weird... internet... thing.
- "Hitsuji de Oyasumi" is a series of short talk C Ds featuring various Japanese voice actors counting sheep. Not just a few sheep, either; most of the albums go to 400, plus short openings and closings and occasional other mid-count comments. There are at least 22 volumes of this.
- The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy is a weird British thing, especially during the scenes when they use the Infinite Improbability Drive.
- Douglas Adams's himself alluded to how much cricket is a Weird British Game in Life, The Universe, And Everything with the commentators of Test Match Special not at all fazed by Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and a sofa appearing from nowhere on the pitch at Lord's. And only the British would be so insensitive to use the hallowed 'Wicket Gate' as part of a game.
- Although books of humorous stories and "laws" about how things go horribly wrong are a somewhat common genre, The Peter Principle, with its punny names and fantastically banal "case studies", is not only the most famous but the most uniquely wickety of all of them. (It was, however, inspired by Parkinsons Law, a hilariously turgid Wabbit.)
- Japanese Bento Lunch Tools. Ever see egg molds? Basically you take a boiled egg, while it's still hot, shell it, and place it into one of these. The resulting shape can be anything from a bunny to a fish to an ice cream cone. I also have one that essentially makes egg logs with the yolk in varying shapes, such as flower, star, heart ext.
- Some comments about the Handley Page Victor◊ bomber run along the lines of "Only the British would make their nuclear deterrent look like that". Ditto for the Russians and the Tu-95◊.
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