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What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?
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alt title(s): What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome; What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome 
Epic Writing: brought to you by the letter L"No one will be admitted during the breathtaking car-parking sequence!"
"I'll take a potato chip...AND EAT IT!"
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. Large Hams are the living embodiments of this trope. This trope is highly likely to contain Melodrama.
See also Mundane Utility (for awesome tools that are used to do mundane things), Badass Blink (which reminds you stealth and awesome do not mix). Contrast with Unusually Uninteresting Sight.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Every advert for any sporting event ever. Reaches egregious proportions when promoting the less, shall we say, eventful sports. Granted, sports like football (either of them), basketball, or hockey are fairly action packed, but curling?!
- The new line of Burger King adverts. A man eating a burger while describing it in a voice more appropriate for action movie trailers. "And this time... there is bacon." Made even funnier because all his mates look at him like he's lost his mind.
- An ad for the fruit juice Fresh Up features a man knocking back a can of the juice dramatically, while rock music plays and the wind blows up around him. The first time he does it on a ski field. Then he does it at work. Then he does it at the busstop. Then while mowing the lawn. Then- well, you get it
- There's a UK Coors Light advert which does the same action movie voiceover gag as the BK one. It ends with the tagline 'Damn, that's a light-tasting beer!' spoken by a pretty girl, in the same voice.
- Singapore armed forces commercials. Watch and be amazed.
- Michael Bay demands things to be awesome!
- A Fedex commercial parodied this here:
- The GRABIT. Listen to that EPIC MUSIC AND NARRATION as you REMOVE DAMAGED SCREWS.
- "Yeah... babies EVERYWHERE!"
- Segata Sanshiro.
- This japanese ad. (It's advertising satellite TV, by the way.)
- This old Windows ad featuring Steve Ballmer
- Many, many IBM commercials do this. See this one for example.]
- But nobody out-awesomes the United States Marine Corps!!
- The latest ad for Office 2010 is awesome.
- Even an Argentinian railway gets in on the madcap.
- Danish movie audiences are frequently, just before the movie starts, treated with a small snippet where a mixed choir sings a song to the tune of Also Sprach Zarathustra. The lyrics translates to: "Turn off your mobile/it is time to watch movies/and it is such a bummer/if it rings during the movie"
- The infamous ''Crossfire'' commercial turned an ordinary board game into an epic event which with the game being a life-and-death situation, complete with over-the-top dramatic special effects, voiceover, and music.
- The world is just awesome.
- Imagine for a moment this chicken is your hard drive, and the 80s metal band Dokken is a virus.
- Milk makes you strong
- 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.
Anime
Fan Fiction
- The Gatemaster would be an otherwise fairly typical Sonic The Hedgehog self-insertion fic if it wasn't for a massive dose of this trope, along with an insane length. Also a case of Tropes Are Not Good, as it only served to make the whole thing more pretentious and longwinded.
- Done in gloriously overblown epic-fantasy style with American politics here.
- Anything described with Purple Prose in ShinjiAndWarhammer40K.
Film
- 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. This is quite intentional, as the main character, as the title implies, is nuts.
- Not to mention the hilarious results of Luis Carruther, present to watch the first business card battle, getting his own gold business card just to be a part of the group (and whose card is also revealed in slow-motion and overblown dramatic effect). The result? A straight-faced Patrick puts on a pair of gloves and follows him into the bathroom to strangle him.
- Angel Heart: Robert De Niro, as Louis Cypher, eats the everloving hell out of a hard-boiled egg. Then again, he's just compared that egg to the human soul.
- Pretty much all of Michael Bay's Armageddon, of which critics complain it looks like a giant trailer.
- In a parody of one of the scenes in question from Armageddon, the various monsters of Monsters Inc walking on to the factory floor. Done with slow motion, dramatic music, and a strong backlight as they heroically...begin their typical day at work. The fake outtake from the end credits take it even further, having a character trip and start a chain reaction of the monsters falling, all without stopping the slow motion and music.
- The Batman films, including the Dark Knight Trilogy, are notorious for this. Apparently Batman putting on his clothes is worthy of dramatic camera angles and epic Danny Elfman/Elliot Goldenthal/Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard music. To wit:
- Bowfinger does it with the arrival of FedEx.
- 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.
- He doesn't drink it, he just splits it like the Red Sea.
- 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.
- Hey, they had a fax machine! How cool is that??!!
- 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.
- 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 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 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.
- 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."
- A notable scene in Inglourious Basterds shows the character Shoshanna in slow detail with a prominent soundtrack go through the task of...putting on makeup. Granted, it was probably meant to be ironic.
- She was putting on her war paint before going out to face Adolph Hitler. Still counts as this trope, though.
- 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.
- Hitting a giant with a potted plant isn't just dramatic— it's off the fuckin' chain!
- It was probably more about the Bond One Liner and the irony of beating someone down with a peace lily.
- Actor Michael York's entire acting method consists of intoning every line as dramatically as possible.
- 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.
- 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.
- Mike, Tom and Crow:"Nor-mal view! NOR-mal view! NOR-MAL view! NOOOR-MAAAL VIIIEEEW!!!"
- There is an eerie similarity between this melody and the opening to Antonio Lotti's Crucifixus.
- In the first two Star Trek films, turning on the Enterprise's exterior floodlights (especially the one lighting up the registry number), is given an EPIC treatment.
- 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 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!
- Mike: Does this tepid little scene really warrant DUHNN!!! DUHNN-DUH-DUHNN!!!?
- 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!
- Rocky turned running up the stairs into a cultural phenomenon!
- Wanted has some of this – though it's hard to see mundane acts in that movie (Wesley and Fox's kiss probably counts).
- Casino Royale had some very dramatic music playing during James Bond's drive from the airport to his hotel. The clincher was that he was driving in a Ford Focus, which is a far cry from 007's usual Cool Car.
- Dr No and From Russia With Love, being the first two Bond movies (not counting the original, unofficial "Casino Royale"), use the Bond theme at every situation possible, even simple ones such as Bond's airplane arriving and 007 driving to the beach.
- But to be fair, at the time international travel and beach holidays weren't as common place as they are today.
- "We want... [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. It's Scenery Porn music.
- The opening credits to Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Pies have never been so dramatic. There Will Be CGI Mince. Slightly logical, since they are of course murder pies.
- For three men standing around in a graveyard and doing nothing for five whole minutes, the final triello between the three protagonists of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is made awesome thanks to dramatic camera angles and aweseome music. Of course, it is pretty damn awesome.
- Tommy - Pinball: the new religion!
- Introduced by Pete Townshend to keep the Rock Opera from getting too "pretentious". He also wanted the concept to appeal to the president of his label, who he knew liked pinball. Townshend also wanted an element that was "slightly sleazy" and teenage.
- Then Keith Moon suggested to place Tommy's "miracle cure" following in a British holiday camp. Note, also, the goofy, singalong quality of the theme for "Tommy's Holiday Camp".
- The documentary The Nation State introduces all of the guest professors in the film by doing a black-and-white, slow-motion close-up as the professor turns his head toward the camera, with (in some cases) dramatic music playing in the background. And an entire anthropology class bursts into laughter.
- Stephen Chow plays with this in many films such as God of Cookery, Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, dramatizing in slow motion and special effect hyperbole cooking, eating, and playing soccer, among other more mundane activities. Also, musical numbers tend to break out at moments that wouldn't be as awesome without them.
- Dhoom 2 invokes this trope all the time. One of the most egregious examples also involves Product Placement. As Jai Dixit theorizes about the antagonist, we see Mr. A in his Super Villain Lair. One of his inventions is a bracelet that can pull anything magnetic towards him. So naturally... he pulls a can of Coca-Cola towards him, and drinks it as the movie's theme song plays. [[Critical Research Failure nevermind that Coca-Cola cans are made of aluminum.
- Kevin Costner, aka The Postman, awesomely delivers mail. Behold!
- Paul Edgecomb peeing for the first time after having his urinary tract infection cured in The Green Mile.
- Blades of Glory. Just... all of it. Unless of course you take ice dancing seriously...
- The Stinger of Monsters Vs Aliens features the most epic coffee request ever.
- Also, Doctor Cockroach's Ph D... IN DANCE!!!
- Trial By Stone consists f two old buzzard beating a rock with swords. The fuss they make over it, it should bebetter
- Documentaries about 2012 get into this. In one, the narrator is talking about the possibility of Earth's magnetic field shifting, causing technological breakdowns, spontaneous earthquakes, and other horrendous effects. Said narrator says all of this in suitably dramatic fashion...which is somewhat undermined by his giving exactly the same emphasis when he points out that "Your compass will not point in the same direction any more."
- If War Games is anything to go by, library research is incredibly cool and exciting.
- The climactic rugby match in Invictus ends with — the Springboks already being in the lead — the referee running out the clock, complete with slow-motion extreme close-ups of his watch as the seconds tick by with dramatic slamming sounds.
Literature
- English poet Byron, back in the late 18th century, wrote this marvellous piece on the death of the hated Lord Castlereagh:
"Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this.
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh
Stop, traveller, and piss"
- In one surviving fragment of a Greek poem by Hipponax, 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." That makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
- The Roman 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.
- 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 to both point out how utterly stupid it was to make a scandal out of the incident in question, and parody the WDYMINA tendencies of his contemporaries.
- Just to make clear how overblown it really is, the crimes described with an epicness that makes Death Note look mundane include a game of cards described in battle-field terms, a woman killing a man by frowning at him (and resurrecting him again by smiling), divine intervention as the villain tries to cut the lady's hair, and the finale, in which the severed lock of hair flies up to the heavens to become a star in the sky.
- The title itself in an exemplar of the trope. It echoes such Classical Roman tales as "The Rape of the Sabine Women" (rape used here in the sense of theft or capture). A story about someone stealing a lock of some girl's hair is thus elevated to the level of Roman Epic, before we've even started. Smart guy.
- The parody epic Batrachomyomachia (or Battle of Frogs and Mice), sometimes attributed to Homer (the author of the better known Illiad and Odyssey). "Frog-mouse war" (in Czech, at least) has become a term for a pointless, overblown conflict.
- 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 there's 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 sticks no matter what the hell I do/It is marked pull and indeed I am pulling/Perhaps it should be marked push?".
- 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).
- The gunshot that defines the second half of The Stranger is described something like this.
- The Eye Of Argon devotes about half a page to a guy falling over after suffering a Groin Attack.
- Florian and the otters in the Redwall book Marlfox perform a Play Within A Book detailing a Duel of Insults. The characters hurl verbal abuse at each other and react as if wounded when their opponent makes a particularly cutting remark.
- Secret House is all about this. Think Bill Nye in book form.
- Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. That is all. Plus, it has ninjas!
- The Catullus poem that starts 'Mourn, all you Venuses and Cupids...' and continues with a tragic description of the journey to the Underground. It could be summarised as 'I'm sad because my girlfriend's sad because her sparrow died.'
- In the book version of Cosmos, Carl Sagan makes the ability to read into an epic, astounding, time-and-death defying feat.
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person – perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds there ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contributions to the collective knowledge of the human species.
- A bit earlier in the book, he quotes Charles Sherrington, who makes the act of waking up hold cosmic importance.
The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the cortex becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns.
- Brisingr gives us the moment where Eragon's had his new sword made, in what I felt was a good scene- resolving an ongoing plot thread and simultaneously making Eragon a bit more of a Rider. Then Christopher Paolini had to go and spoil it by trying to make it awesome, instead of understated, and had said sword set on fire every time he says its name.
Live Action TV
- Lazy Sunday
- News Promos. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report of course parody this mercilessly.
- And then The Daily Show went Beyond The Impossible to bring us this.
- And then, on election night, they went further! CHUCK! JUICE IT!
- THE FINAL ENDGAME ALPHA ACTION GO TIME LIFT-OFF DECIDE-ICIDAL HUNGRY MAN'S EXTREME RAW POWER ULTIMATE VOTESLAM SMACKDOWN '08 NO MERCY: JUDGEMENT DAY '08
- This promo for WITI TV-6 News Update is possibly one of the most overdone promos ever created. It looks like an action-packed 80s police procedural.
- The Day Today, which did the over-the-top title sequence gag throughout every show in early 1994.
- WKRP in Cincinnati, where Les Nessman's promo for the farm news was so massively, enormously overblown that it was an Incoming Ham all by itself.
- 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 by John Facenda, and you've transformed a simple blocked pass into guarding the pass at Thermopylae.
- 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.
- One of the 2009 hour-long specials, "Planet of the Dead", tries to make the act of stepping on a bus tense and dramatic. Granted, it's a Classy Cat Burglar escaping the police, but she's not even running. It's just a few shots of the police looking bewildered, her approaching the bus and the bus driver noticing her, set to some painfully over-the-top music.
- Parodied in Scrubs where an episode began with a melodramatic portrayal of Dr. Cox's four-year-old son Jack receives minor 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!!".
- In "My Friend the Doctor", Dr. Cox (who has a hurt back) bends down and picks up his badge off the floor, in slow motion and set to "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias. Though Carla admits that it was impressive.
- 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 Star Trek The Original Series 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.
- 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.
- Well, yeah, but that was pretty darned cool.
- 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.
- This also commonly turns up in the original as a technique to punch up its montage scenes of late-night lab work, by overlaying rapid-fire close up shots of each step (usually involving such mundane tasks such as adjusting a microscope or heating a test tube) with fast paced techno music.
- The CSI "one-liner leading into a Who song" motif was parodied on an episode of Two and a Half Men. Alan's bubblehead ex got a role on a spin off playing a Grissom/Caine/Taylor Expy whose unbelievably groan-inducing one-liner led into "Squeeze Box."
- Garth Marenghis Dark Place
- 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.
- And then there's George's 2 MPH scooter chase, which ends when he figures out it's faster to just run.
- 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.
- 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 to an everyday family 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!"
- 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...
- It's... Bicycle Repair Man!!
- Top Gear: because it's not just a shot of a guy standing next to a stationary car, it's a desaturated shot of a guy standing next to a stationary car with forced perspective so he looks like a midget and the shot has been flipped upside down so you aren't quite sure which is the car and which is the reflection of the car in a puddle and also there is stirring orchestral music and a brief jump cut to some sort of atmospheric local wildlife before coming back to the car.
- A recent Discovery Channel show called Time Warp consists entirely of guys running around with high-speed cameras and filming random things, but very slowly. A lot Better Than It Sounds, since most things look significantly cooler when shot in 5000 FPS.
- The great thing about the show is they don't even pretend they're doing it for some higher scientific purpose, like the Mythbusters do. They straight up admit that they're just doing what they do because it's really, really cool.
- On Smallville, in a bathroom Lana Lang cuts her hair three inches . . . And she's ready for the world!!!!
- Did anyone else notice Danko's surprisingly emphasized shaving scene at the beginning of Heroes' "Cold Snap"?
- Anyone who thought the diablo couldn't be awesome, obviously wasn't watching the 2009 Grand Final of Australia's Got Talent; otherwise they would've seen this kid: William Campbell.
- Um, EVERYONE thinks the Diablo is awesome. Or did you mean the diabolo?
- The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien: TWITTER TRACKER TWITTER TRACKER TWITTER TRACKER!!!!
- The Stargate Atlantis episode "First Contact" features several completely unnecessary pans across the entire city with stirring theme music playing loudly in the background, which cut to Rodney and Daniel Jackson doing something mundane like looking at security recordings. It's so overblown that it's almost certainly intentional. This is Stargate, after all.
- Subverted in one episode of 30Rock: Kenneth the NBC page's blazer is accidentally destroyed and his only way to get a replacement is to beat his rival in an epic contest called a "page-off". Just as all the NBC pages are gathered to watch the hotly anticipated battle begin, Pete the producer arrives. He puts a stop to the silly event, points out that there are plenty of unused jackets available for Kenneth, and angrily orders all the pages back to work.
- The first season of Babylon 5 had an unfortunate tendency to end random scenes with dramatic musical stings, including many that did not remotely justify such treatment. Later seasons toned it down (or perhaps the series simply got epic enough to keep up with its soundtrack).
- The Big Bang Theory: It's a training montage! To "Eye of the Tiger"! About... physics!!
- An off-air example: In ***yMoney, it was decided that they would discover that one of the Darling children was actually the illegitimate child of Letitia and Dutch. Dutch's legitimate son, Nick, had been romantically involved with Karen Darling. The production meeting on this one addressed the gorilla in the room by writing the word "INCEST" on the board in huge letters and then dramatically X-ing it out. Brian turned out to be the illegitimate one, perhaps hinted at by the fact that he himself has an illegitimate son.
- When the first self-righting mechanism was accidentally discovered on Robot Wars, it was subject to no fewer than six instant replays, each from a different angle. Observe.
- Take a look at the intro to the Cosmos episode The Lives of The Stars, by Carl Sagan. Ominous music, startling shots, slow motion, sudden violence, all at larger-than-normal scale... Most epic, significant apple pie making ever. And then it turns to perfectly average baking and serving. Of course, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe...
- On Undeclared, the Chase Scene between Eric and Steven. A high-speed scooter chase is bad enough, but what propels it squarely into this trope (and Crowning Moment Of Funny) is the background music. MORTAL KOMBAAAAT!
- 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.
Music
Professional Wrestling
- 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.
Western Animation
- You would think that after having done that countless times Gargoyles would stop taking dramatic poses before petrifying at sunrise. Nope. And let's not forget The Most Epic Yawn In History.
- If you were going to pose for a statue that potentially hundreds of people would see for the next 12 hours, wouldn't you strike the most impressive pose possible? And if you could get a do-over every 24 hours, why not do it better?
- 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!
- 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 Krabby Patty without cheese, complete with a slow-motion sequence of Spongebob putting some cheese into the patty. It's a Dream Sequence, but still...
- How about any time the Crabby Patty is brought to the audiences attention by Spongebob, or at least when it focuses on him making crabby patties.
- 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 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 and horribly dying — while the kid who got the lice is taking a shower and washing his hair.
- There's also the Cartoon Wars episodes. In one example, after Stan learns that an Islamic terrorist attack may result from a portrayal of Mohammed in Family Guy and suggests they wait and see what happens, he follows it up by saying, "If we're still alive in the morning, (Dramatic Closeup) then we'll know we're not dead."
- "It'll be the end of the world! ... of Warcraft."
- In fact, the entirety "Make Love, Not Warcraft" fits this trope by somehow making the quest to kill one high-level World Of Warcraft player completely epic. Semi-justifiable, since this one player has somehow broken World Of Warcraft's Pv P rules, can kill Admins, and seems to be determined to kill every player in the game so many times that they get extremely frustrated and never want to play again.
- 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 occasionally in Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends, normally to emphasize 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 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!
Azula: That's a sharp outfit, Chan. Careful; you might puncture the hull of an empire-class Fire Nation battleship, leaving thousands to drown at sea! ... Because... it's so sharp.
- "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... and the door doesn't budge an inch.
- Sokka's Haiku Battle (which the background music made it seem more like a Rap Battle.)
- 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.
- 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"). But 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 was probably the only person in his or several previous generations to stand up, and he summoned the resolve to do so because the fate of humanity depended upon it, this was awesome.
- Ratatouille turns SOUP-MAKING into the coolest freaking' thing ever!
- 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.
- In an episode of Samurai Jack after the Scotsman has rescued Jack from a bunch of sirens they have a series of contests to decide who would be the one to row back. The contests culminated in a thumbwrestling match, complete with close-ups on their thumbs and faces all while in slow motion.
- The Tick's speeches.
- Danny Phantom, mainly in the episode Identity Crisis. Super Danny seems to permanently have a breeze around him, even when he's standing still.
- "This looks like a job for...the vacuum cleaner!" (Followed by him cleaning the room by riding the vacuum cleaner.)
- "I'm more than alright! I'm DANNY FENTON!" (Cue dramatic lighting.)
- Speaking of which, the aforementionned Zim Globs of Doom scene takes place in, yes, Amity Park.
- In The Marvelous Misadventuresof Flapjack, a huge monstrous ogre-type tries to defeat Captain K'nuckles in a poker game with, as he puts it: "Pair of... TWOOOOOOOOOOSS!!" (He loses, naturally).
- Fillmore! was built on this trope. Middle school is Serious Business!
- Phineas And Ferb practically runs on this trope. For example, the episode "Tip of the Day" ended with a crowd song about aglets (you know, those plastic things on the ends of a shoelace).
- John Redcorn on King Of The Hill is frequently introduced with blowing leaves and a signature musical leitmotif in the style of a Magical Native American, but he's usually just going about his mundane business.
- Also, there is the episode where Hank is constipated. Probably the only episode of any whow that can make pooping a dramatic and climactic event that ends the episode on a ridiculously positive note.
- Regular Show has this in the pilot...with rock, paper, scissors.
- Family Guy had that episode where Peter and friends became The A Team. They fixed a chair complete with heroic music playing.
- In The Simpsons episode "Rome-Old and Juli-Eh," Bart and Lisa wage an epic war with the American Shipping Service, directly referencing key battle scenes from The Lord Of The Rings, over the right to use complimentary shipping boxes to build a play-fort.
- In Justice League The New Frontier, after giving a bonafide rousing speech uniting superhumans and uniformed military for the first time since the Cold War started, Superman finishes with this:
"I'm going to fly out now and recon this thing. When I get back, we'll work out a strategy. Are you with me? [Cue assembled multitudes of hardbitten warriors, cheering loudly for the idea of sitting around for a while, and then figuring out what they're going to do later on that afternoon]
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.
- The very courtroom seems to be geared to a legal battle of wits, with the defense attorney and the prosecutor facing each other and the witness standing in the middle, as opposed to the standard "both lawyers facing the judge" courtroom.
- That's actually the standard layout for Real Life Japanese courtrooms, which pretty much look exactly like that. Not as much spiky hair and whip-swinging, though. There are other countries than America in the world, you know.
- Actually, it may be a subversion. It IS awesome.
- 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.
- Similar to 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 Bros. Melee, where Young Link's single-player victory montage consists entirely of shots of him drinking milk, and the final triumphant chord coincides with a mouth-wipe in slow motion.
- In the same vein, Toon Link's Baton-taunt ist so incredibly overdone that it makes his game-self look humble and modest in comparision. He waves that thing like the fate of the world would depend on it (OK, it once did, but that's not the case here).
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater plays this trope straight by inserting a vocals-only version of the game's theme song to an otherwise unremarkable ladder climbing sequence. This addition, however, has lead to the ladder sequence becoming one of the game's most memorable parts, as many of those as there are in the game to begin with.#
- Although by the end of it, it more closely resembles an Overly Long Gag, due to the fact that climbing said ladder takes up the entire duration of the song. And the part where the song is a thinly veiled parody of spy film songs.
- And This scene involves the local equivalent of Light's potato chips.
- Devil May Cry 3 has an Establishing Character Moment in its first cutscene, wherein Dante performs an utterly epic chair-sitting and phone-answering combo. Say this about Dante, he never does anything by halfs. Not even to answer a phone with nothing beyond "Sorry, not open for business yet."
- The fourth ends with Dante kicking down a door, making a Charlie's Angels pose with Lady and Trish, having an explosion right behind him, and firing his guns indiscriminately. For no reason.
- This scene. Both Dante AND Agnus got into the act of being as over the top as possible before their fight!
- The Pokémon games all feature cheesy elevator music while your character walks around. All very good and well... until Nintendo needed some music for the Pokémon levels of Super Smash Bros., at which point the songs gained a symphony orchestra's worth of strings, horns and electric guitars, and mutated into this, this and this. And that's before we get onto the Ominous Latin Chanting of the game theme itself...
- Ditto (pun semi-intended) for the Pokémon theme remixes in the Pokémon Stadium series.
- Brawl is made of this trope.
- Pokemon. World-destroying terrorist organizations can be utterly destroyed by a small child and his/her motley collection of brightly-colored pets.
- Also, Soul Silver's Arceus Genesis event.
- Mario Strikers: Charged takes soccer—yes, soccer—and applies a LOT of What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome to pretty much every aspect of the game. But don't take our word for it. And yes, everything—everything—in that video actually can happen in-game.
- The boss battle musics from Donkey Kong 64 are the music of their levels, with full synth orchestras. Common instruments include strings, vibraphones, panflutes, oboes, and clarinets. This has spread to popular remix site VG Music, under the moniker "Boss Remix". Example from Luigi's Mansion.
- In this interview the game's compositer Grant Kirkhope admited he likes to "write big melodramatic tunes that are a bit tongue-in-cheek" and that "Bosses are always a good opportunity to do this." It was only expected for this other projects like the Banjo games and Grabbed by the Ghoulies to follow this trend.
- It appears that every menu in this game is some kind of spinning wheel with loads of unnecessary animation. It gave this troper a headache.
- In Mega Man Battle Network 1-5 Lan jumps into the air and shouts "Jack in!! Megaman! EXECUTE!" every time he does what is simply putting a plug in a slot (and he isn't even doing that in BN 4, 5, or 6 due to the PETs being wireless). This is taken a step further when when he spins the PET it to make the "MegaMan Symbol".
- Or the officials' Mad Operation Skillz in EXE2 during the Shadowman chapter? Extreme keyboarding to the max!
- Viewtiful Joe. Joe's over-dramatic bullet time action poses can actually kill enemies.
- His "epic costume change" at the beginning of the second game (right after a male gaze of his girlfriend's new set) makes him perform a Ginyu Force style pose so a V can anticlimactically *poof* onto his hat.
Joe: "Go go phat-hat!"
*pof*
Joe: "SHAZAM!"
- Most of the Kunio-Kun series practically lives off this trope. Starting from River City Ransom, most of the series has lots and lots of comical violence, even the sports games, where it become so absurd it's just plain awesome. And it doesn't stop there. One game features a cross country event where you can run through people's houses. Super Dodge Ball involves players not just getting eliminated, they DIE - not to mention players and the ball go flying all over the place. And there's a lot more where that came from:
- And that's not even counting the other versions of Super Dodge Ball. The Neo Geo version could be mistaken for an SNK game, or another Pocket Fighter.
- Nekketsu Volleyball Dayo Kunio-kun had rather weird teams. The smile team bounces the ball off their asses.
- Nekketsu! Street Basket - Ganbare Dunk Heroes had not one, not two, but THREE hoops stacked on top of each other, reaching absurd heights. And that's not even mentioning the fact that you can break the hoops and used them as weapons. Mario's got nothing on this.
- The Kunio-Kun soccer games also had their insane share of violence, especially the second, which allowed you to jump, and you could pull off special shots and whatnot... And there's the weather changes, like lightning bolts.
- Downtown Nekketsu Baseball Monogatari allowed you to do things just as drop-kick and slide-kick people, and even throw the ball at the umpires!
- Being able to beat opponents silly in Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey is enough for the price of admission alone.
- Kunio no Oden is a puzzle game... That happens to be the visualisation of a food-eating contest.
- In Shin Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun - Kunio Tachi No Banka, you can play as Alex and Ryan's girlfriends and beat up enemies with them. So, What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome?
- Kunio-Kun/Alex himself. He's the freaking hero of the entire series, an incredible fighter (without pulling out any Ki Attacks whatsoever, except the stat-affecting kinds of techniques, which kinda makes sense), a super-star sportsman, and he's got a girlfriend who can kick ass. King of Video Gaming Awesome.
- Near the end of Zork Grand Inquisitor, Mir Yannick gives a speech, in which he praises the vast technological advances of the past hundred years. They're actually bloated praise for wonder knives, the Clapper, and ice cubes.
- The prologue of Dark Cloud 2 features a circus performance where an elephant bicycle-kicks a large ball (complete with The Matrix-style slow-motion pan-around camera work) and bounces it off two clowns' noses before catching it with its trunk.
- In The World Ends With You, players take part in a game for their survival, where they have to complete missions while facing insanely tough enemies, which can only be fought using reality bending, psychic pins. (Or a stuffed cat, a cell phone, or a skateboard...)
- Minamimoto activating his final attack by reciting pi to 150 digits!
- Sho is king of this trope. Who knew Math and Art could be pure awesome?
- The creators of Duke Nukem really take the cake with this one.
- Most, if not all of Osu Tatakae Ouendan! involved people with real, though non-dramatic problems, which were fixed by dancing! Problems that included getting into college, cutting hair, recruiting for a school choir club, and not wetting the bed.
- Elite Beat Agents, its Americanized spiritual successor, is just as weird. Getting help from an entire school, the Air Force and gorillas, foxes, bears and cows (just where are they anyhow?) while September is playing? Heck, one of the missions involves fighting off giggling zombies with peanut allergies. No, seriously.
- Trauma Center: During most of the game, you feel like you are playing space invaders on someone's stomach. But again that "is" indeed awesome. Also, the final GUILT parasite at Under The Knife 1 Is a giant spider parasite that creates a web that seems to "Absorb" heartbeats. Also, a doctor who begins an operation with a.... Ass Kicking Pose and/or hand gestures!
Nurse: There are deep lacerations along the sternum—WHERE ALIENS HAVE TAKEN OVER HIS BODY!!
Doctor: HUWHAAAAAAAAAAAAT???
Nurse: THEY'RE SHOOTING X-RAY BEAMS OUT OF THEIR RADIOACTIVE SUPERCORES! USE YOUR ZAPPY GUN TO STOP THEM!
- Heroes of Might and Magic V has a lot of this during the in-game cutscenes. The characters have very few scripted gestures they can perform, so you often see them waving their arms around and glowing with arcane power while holding a perfectly normal conversation. Narm ensues.
- The little-known DS adventure game Lifesigns Surgical Unit has this in ridiculous quantities, especially in the first game, which had dramatic cutaways practically every time you took a step.
- Also, when the main character, Tendo, finishes up an operation, he always comments on his sutures ("That's... Perfect!") accompanied with a light flash and sound effect for no apparent reason.
- Command And Conquer: Red Alert 3 Just... well, just this.
- How do you vent your frustration over Mega Man 2's Air Man? Put it in the form of a music video.
- The game Audiosurf generates levels based on audio files. You're able to induce this effect yourself once you realize that not only can you give the same effect to less energetic song, but for any audio file, from speeches, to a recording of the Argument Clinic sketch, to John Cage's 4'33''.
- One of Final Fantasy VIII's early cutscenes is of a satellite dish being turned on. It gets the full FMV treatment: dramatic camera motion, gratuitously complex machinery at work, the whole nine yards. It even finishes by beaming a frickin' laser into space.
- Final Fantasy X-2 features the same fetch quests that so dominate the RPG genre, save that this time they're all completely goddamn extreme. Complete with Charlie's Angels poses.
- In the early Persona games, the titular Personae were called forth by just sort of willing them into being. Perhaps with the occasional cry of "Persona!" or "Help Me!". In Persona 3, Personae are summoned by shooting yourself in the head. In Persona 4, the gun-shaped Evokers are removed, and Personae are now summoned by shattering tarot cards (typically via an over elaborate strike with one's weapon, though the protagonist uses his bare hands because he's just that Bad Ass)
- In Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight one of Kyle's Idle Animations is shaving his beard with a lightsaber
- In the same game, often times, you will be, say, walking through a perfectly mundane hallway with some of the most epic music in the game. Often with...amusing results. Probably unintentional, sadly.
- No More Heroes. The Coconut Collector guy says that coconuts are more important than human life and doing jobs gives you favour with the God of Mowing/Garbage/Whatever.
- The opening cutscene of Fable 2 has a small bird flying through a city, accompanied by epic music. It then poops. The cutscene focuses on the poo, and goes into Bullet Time as it falls...then lands straight on the Hero's head.
- The opening video for Gaia Online's MMO zOMG! features a character putting on some rings to epic music. The rings then burst into flame. Justified, as A) this is Gaia Online, and B) the rings in question are the Improbable Weapon being used to fight Everything Trying To Kill You in the game.
- Makai Kingdom: Corn.
Zetta: "I, Overlord Zetta, DO NOT FEAR CORN, KETTLE OR OTHERWISE!"
- In the PS 2 and Wii rereleases of Resident Evil 4, Leon can get a gangster outfit with a Cool Hat. If you hit the reload button while using the infinite ammo Chicago Typewriter, he'll instead reach up and adjust it. On the third push, the camera angle changes to low-angle, he flings the hat into the air, and catches and dons it with a pose more suited to someone from High School Musical.
- Destroying all humans is awesome in its own right. Being the alien, hiding among the unwitting humans as ominous theremin-laden music plays, and then revealing yourself and causing mass hysteria and humongous explosions.
- Disaster: Day of Crisis has natural disasters combined with battling an former elite special forces unit, which is awesome in itself. But Evans likes to try and take things up a notch whenever he can, and he does this in the final chapter, first fighting Ray in a Metal Gear expy, then following up with an epic hand-to-hand fight (also like Metal Gear Solid). And he does all this while the pair are in a hurricane. And then he tries to set off a nuke. I repeat, IN THE MIDDLE OF A HURRICANE.
- Dragon Quest Swords has the tombola sequence at the item shop, which is given all of the pomp and circumstance of unleashing a Mighty Strike to what amounts to spinning a wheel for a single ball to pop out.
- Rhythm Heaven is all over this trope, with games dedicated to picking vegetables, eating dumplings, and kicking soccer balls made incredibly awesome by the music and settings.
- Complete any level in Peggle (ANY level) and the game cranks up Ode To Joy.
- Castle Crashers. From fighting giant literal Cat Fish, weird..Giant fuzzy black things...Cute Teddy bears that attack you with dead fish, using a lolipop or a carrot as your own weapon. Not to mention..FIGHTING TO THE DEATH TO SEE WHO KISSES THE PRINCESSES AFTER YOU BATTLE HEROICLY TOGETHER TO SAVE THEM.
- In Tales Of Symphonia Dawn Of The New World, epic music plays as Regal does what can only be described as turning off the lights. Sure he's using special handcuffs, but Regal wearing handcuffs is not exactly something new.
- Taking the Daredevil trait in The Sims 3 allows you to go EXTREME versions of mundane things. 'Read something EXTREME' or 'Take EXTREME shower', for example.
- Taking the Evil trait gives you actions like 'Wash hands with evil soap' and 'Read something maniacal'.
- Mega Man ZX Advent is loaded with this. Here's an example, and a more X-TREME example! Keep in mind that during gameplay, MegaMerging takes less than a second.
- Street Fighter IV has its final boss. An evil clone who can teleport, use everybody's attacks, and has an absolutely epic voice, and is borderline Nightmare Fuel announces his name... "I... am... SETH!"
- Psychonauts in general tries - and throughout the game succeeds fantastically - at mixing the epic and the hilarious. Just have a look at the quote on the page for the game and its context. That's only the beginning - try Kochamara Calling His Attacks, a Milkman Conspiracy, fluorescent pink bulls wearing boots, a Dastardly Dentist sporting a shower cap and a steel claw arm that doubles as a pepper grinder among the antagonists, and that "in the end, aren't we all just dogs playing poker?"
- Deadly Creatures for the Wii takes this trope and applies it to ARACHNIDS. Seriously, the player controls a realistic-looking spider and scorpion, and both of them are capable of EPIC ARACHNID MARTIAL ARTS SMACKDOWNS on other arthropods, lizards, and small mammals:
- The Tarantula can use its spinnerets to make web zip lines, can spin-kick enemies into the air, and has a ninja stealth pounce attack that can hit a FLYING WASP.
- The Scorpion can block attacks and flip enemies with its pincers, and has the ability to perform insanely over-the-top finishing kills in very Kratos-esque ways. For example, it can spear a mantis with its stinger, use the tail to slam it into the ground, grab the mantis' claw with its own pincer, stab the mantis with its own goddamn claw, and finally drive the mantis' claw in even deeper with a slam of its pincer to finish the poor bastard off.
- The aluminum bat powerup in Backyard Baseball. The bat hits the ball, then the ball goes flying high (sometimes over a very, very tall wall) while a whooshing sound plays and immediately the character's Leitmotif (which is often Crowning Music Of Awesome) plays.
- Even if not on a over-the-top manner, Sonic and the Black Knight features quick-time events for trading presents with villagers.
- Gauntlet Dark Legacy does this with the names of its Legendary Items, all spoken with epic intonation in Sumner's booming epic voice. The item names themselves also feature this with gems as the SCIMITAR OF DECAPITATION, THE LEGENDARY ICE AXE, and THE LAMP OF DARK OBSTRUCTION!
- As far as flash games go, Bejeweled 2 and Bejeweled Blitz. A color-matching puzzle game that has more and cooler explosions than most action games definitely qualifies.
- Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII has scenes of Materia creation accompanied by battle music. This also applies to the squatting minigame.
- The cutscenes in Chrono Trigger are full of this, especially the scene where Frog draws his sword, a giant Pillar Of Light appears and he cuts the mountain in half with it! This mixed with epic music, random close-ups and constantly changing camera angles.
- Dante's Inferno. That is all.
Theater
- Compared to Greek drama, very little of Japanese Noh drama plays contained actual drama. Much of it featured characters going about everyday tasks and situations, with the actors extremely slow recitation of lines and expressive mannerisms allotting for drama portion.
- "Second" from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Who knew two prepubescent kids taking turns spelling words like "zoonosis" and "astrobleme" could be so epic?
- The Greek Chorus in the musical Allegro breathlessly anticipates a child's first steps and glorifies his learning to walk with the heroic marching song "One Foot, Other Foot."
- Youre A Good Man Charlie Brown has a complex, metaphor-laden quartet, crossing multiple musical styles, and has at one point four main characters singing four different melodies with four different texts, reaching an intense musical climax and showing off the vocal talents of the soprano lead. The subject of the song? A 100-word book report on "Peter Rabbit."
- Super Robot Wars Z: Doing the Monkey in a post-victory dance.
New Media
- The entire reason behind YTMND's Dramatic Reading of a Real Breakup Letter from a Real Person and, to a greater extent, the entire Epic Maneuver meme focused around adding an epic, half-orchestral Nightwish soundtrack to animated images of people performing "epic" acts.
- In The Angry Video Game Nerd's video on Die Hard: The Licensed Game for the NES, the nerd attempts to properly beat the game. The game proves to be so frustrating that everything around him explodes while the Die Hard music plays and he is constantly jumping and rolling away from the blasts, as well as sweating and bleeding. Eventually, sick of the game, he rips the game out of the NES, yells "Yippie-Ki-Yay, motherfucker!!" and throws it behind him and jumps Die Hard style from the massive explosion it causes.
- To say nothing of his Super Mario Bros. 3 review and the firefight between him (paired with Super Mecha Death Christ 2000) and the Devil (paired with an assload of newly possessed consoles). You just have to see it for yourself.
- In his Moonwalker review, he winds up going berzerk, kasplodes his room and......turns into a cat and walks away. Probably an appropriate Michael Jackson reference.
- That cat, aka Deathkitty, returns in the Atari Jaguar review to fight off the spinning Jaguar cube that comes out of the screen.
- This. Just... this.
- Search Youtube for "Duel of the Fates" (a song full of Ominous Sanskrit Chanting from Star Wars Episode I). Whatever isn't music videos is most likely a variation of this.
- At least one use has been piping it and similar epic orchestral music over a wargaming convention.
- "Because, mere mortal... this apartment... IS RENT CONTROLLED!
- Three words: Dramatic Prairie Dog.
- The Great Office War
- POWERTHIRST! ROCKET EDITION!
- "Subject verb object MADE EPIC!!!"
- This small Flash animation pretty much sums this trope up in a nutshell.
- Those with epilepsy should not press "random" on that page.
- The Most Dramatically Normal Day Ever trailer. Set to Lux Aeterna, of course.
- Arguably, the entire point of Batman Goes Shopping.
- Also Butterfly Man. Warning: Do not watch this video if you are eating or drinking anything.
- YouTube Dubber allows you to put your choice of Crowning Music Of Awesome to a video of your choice. Will you be wanting the Megalith Roll, sir?
- The Remarkable Journey of Higgins Von Higgins.
- Sharper FX. Websites for churches and christian organizations have never been so seizure-inducing epic.
- The Youtube Poop fad "X does Y while I play unfitting music" often invokes this, for example in This one, this one, and this one.
- The Nostalgia Critic tests just how far this trope can go towards the end of this video.
- In the middle of The Final Brawl, with epic battle going on around them, the Nerd dramatically bellowing and raising his fist... before placing a Geek Fight card on a table. The Critic responds in kind, and they argue about the power level...
- At some point, one has to wonder how much more ridiculous video game-to-film adaptations can get. Wonder no more: Minesweeper the film is here.
"You are here because you are the best of the best! You come to me as beginners! When I'm through with you, you'll be experts! You are here! To sweep! MINES!"
- Literal music videos are an Internet meme wherein the lyrics for a song are rewritten to describe what's going on in the video. Lampshade Hanging has never been so epic.
- There are many, many examples in AMV Hell, but easily the most dramatic is the first two minutes of AMV Hell 4.
Radio
- Parodied many times in The Goon Show, as in the following example:
Neddie Seagoon: (Portentously) Then... suddenly...
Orchestra: LONG DRAMATIC STING
Neddie Seagoon: (Feebly) ...Nothing happened. (Normally) But it happened suddenly, mark you!
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy had a moment like this in episode 20, when Arthur comes back home and finds a mysterious present: a fishbowl engraved with these words: "So long, and thanks for all the fish." The musical score gives one the impression of some legendary item.
- He later discovers an interesting message when he holds it up to his ear and taps it.
Webcomics
- Parodied in this Ozy And Millie strip.
- This Badass Muthas strip features AWESOME toe disinfection.
- An early Gene Catlow strip introducing us to Cotton Taylor shows him carrying out his tech duties, including paperwork, with unbridled enthusiasm.
- This El Goonish Shive strip arguably crosses the border into Narm.
- This xkcd strip features a guy who dreams up elaborate scenarios that fit this trope whenever he learns a new skill. In this case specifically, he dramatically saves the day with his knowledge of regular expressions.
- This Sugar Bits, though it's played for comedy.
- Parodied in this Penny Arcade strip.
- See also Paint the Line, a Cold War epic with the fate of the free world riding on a ping pong tournament.
- Kesandru's interrogation technique from Sluggy Freelance.
- The Adventures Of Dr McNinja and the Crater of Racial Tolerance.
- Maliki is the king of Awesome Overdosing. You don't even have to know French to see EPIC ping-pong◊ or how testing a brand-new litter box can become a bombastic display of magic◊.
- Daisy Owl: "All is not lost. There is still hope. There is still honey. That is my dream."
- This Chibi Miku-san strip.
- Girl Genius:
- MS Paint Adventures: "Pose as a team, because SHIT JUST GOT REAL."
- Art of Sequential Art cutting carrots.
- FW! Adventures parodies this with a
Scrabble Scramble Game!
- Starslip / Starslip Crisis has the solution to defeating the evil dictator's mind control be a simple instruction. WEAR IT LIKE A HAT!!!
- Questionable Content - Hanners, when arriving at Marigold's house.
- Subsequently, when Marigold has some trouble bringing herself to open the door of a bar where she has agreed to meet the gang.
- ''THE ULTIMATE CLEMENTINE PEELING TECHNIQUE!'' Complete with speeed liiines.
- At the end of the year-long Penny And Aggie arc "The Popsicle War," the title characters and their friends celebrate their social neutralization of the bully ringleader Karen with fireworks, a custom normally reserved for national holidays of independence.
Web Original
- In the lonelygirl15 episode "Foosball Battle", a game of table football is portrayed through epic close-ups and accompanied by the William Tell Overture.
- Sounds similar to a German film called Absolut Gigantisch. Although the physically impossible finishing move (yes, that's a table-football finishing move) was pretty freekin' cool.
- An epic battle between lifelike Mario and Luigi character models, grunting and growling through a battle with intense music... and squeaky hammers. [2]
- "Now let's begin by shuffling our cards in a needlessly dramatic fashion!" "Waaaay ahead of ya."
- "Michael Bay eating a bowl of cereal".
- This video.
- Japanese comedy troupe Ramens dramatizes origami into a mortal combat in this The Japanese Tradition: Origami.
- Dragon Ball Abridged:
Goku: "Gohan, follow Krillin. Get home to your mother."
Gohan: "Right, daddy. Is there anything you want me to tell her?"
Goku: "Yes, Gohan. Tell her..."
*Zoom in to Goku. Hardcore rock guitar.*
Goku: "...to put dinner on!"
*More zoom. Guitar continues.*
Goku: "..because I'm hungry!"
*Extreme close-up. Guitar continues and then dies out.*
- Barats and Bereta are quite fond of this trope and have turned ordinary things like children's games, the Neighborhood Watch Committee, April Fools' Day, and taking shots into unbelievably awesome things using dramatic music, dramatic lighting, and Narm.
- Rhett & Link write songs about the lamest things and make them seem fun and/or interesting. Some of their songs are sales pitches, rants, and casual dialogue put to a melody. When they are not writing music, they are taking on lame projects, promoting products that nobody would ever buy, and presenting confessions on another's behalf.
- "Shrimp on a Treadmill" is interesting enough as a study of how diseases and pollution affect the endurance of ocean creatures. Then You Tube got hold of it and started making music videos...
- Extreme rice.
- This depiction of the Japanese God of Studying (note the calligraphy brush in his armored hand). Apparently, in Japan, studying is badass.
- Death Note backs up this assumption. Eating chips is similarly badass.
- The interface to Apple's Time Machine backup software. A backup program is one thing, but a backup program that features a series of windows receding into the background to indicate which backup you're restoring from, all over a painstakingly rendered animated starfield backdrop, that's Epic right there. At the time of this edit, Apple had neither confirmed nor denied that the next version would play Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra while in operation.
- Does Howard Dean count?
- BWAAAAGH!
- Only in the way it was covered, not anything he did. As Diane Sawyer pointed out, you couldn't even hear him over the enthusiastic cheers of his supporters. It was only when the "news" people stripped out the crowd's voices that his yell seemed weird and out of place. Anybody who was there could attest to the truth of this.
- A piece of music called (depending on the variant) either "Entry of the Gladiators" or "Thunder and Blazes" must be pretty awesome, right? Well, actually, it's the circus clown music.
- Exploding Head Syndrome is much, much less awesome than it sounds. It doesn't even involve heads exploding!
- Apparently there is a condition where your head really can Asplode by thinking too hard and much. Supposedly mainly affects chess players and academics.
- Ohhhhhhhhh, the Alcatel OmniPCX phone exchange promotional video. What do you do when your engineers fail? You call James Bond to save the day, of course!
- Every single word spoken by Don LaFontaine, aka the original Trailer Voice Guy, ever. The man could make ordering a burger at McDonalds sound like the ultimate battle for the fate of the world. ("In A World where burgers are grilled, one man will rise to fight...for the fate of a cheeseburger.") Witness for yourself what happens when you put Don and four other famous Voiceover Guys in a limousine and tell them to drive to an awards show. R.I.P, Don, the world is a less Awesome place without you.
- Seconded. I ... could not believe my ears when I watched that. That was absolutely incredible.
- "It's never too early... for a salad." About 3:05 in this video.
- The Backside of Water at the Jungle Cruise in the Disney parks. Some skippers have been known to go off into a massive speech upon approaching it, declaring how incredibly amazing it is. Even the normal spiel generally involves referring to it as "The Eighth Wonder of the Natural World" and announcing "The back! Side! Of! WATER!!!"
- The skipper will, inevitably, be disappointed to discover that it looks a lot like the front side.
- This Troper's father once parodied this by pointing to rain falling onto the awnings of the Wilderness Lodge as THE TOP SIDE OF RAIN!
- In an essay in Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris details his aversion and hatred of computers, and among his complaints is their presence in movie scenes that fall under this trope. "Each tiresome new Thriller includes some scene in which the hero, trapped by some version of the enemy, runs for his desk in a desperate race against time. Music swells and droplets of sweat rain down onto the keyboard as he sits at his laptop, frantically pawing for answers. It might be different if he were flagging down a passing car or trying to phone for help, but typing, in and of itself, is not an inherently dramatic activity"
- Warhammer 40000 does this to anything worth mentioning, then paints it black, covers it in skulls, and sets it on fire.
- Unless it paints it red, because "red wunz go fasta!"
- Flair bartending.
- Billy Mays, from the various Ridiculously Loud Commercials for cleaning products he's done (RIP Beardman).
- Thisvideo sets a flooding storm drain to Latin. From the video:
"SHOUTING LATIN / MAKES FOR DRA-MA / THAT'S WHY YOU'RE ALL STILL WATCHING"
- Any store that has an electronic marquee display that tells of their wares.
- What, no cooking shows? Iron chef, maybe?
- Zinedine Zidane is even more awesome with Ominous Latin Chanting.
- The Physics Department of the University Of Wales has a "Centre for Explosion Studies". That can't really be as cool as it sounds.
- If sucha department needs to be made cooler, just see if Michael Bay is willing to lend a hand.
- Joel Bauer's business card.
Joel Bauer: It doesn't fit in a rolodex because it doesn't belong in a rolodex.
- That's because it belongs in the trash.
- Extreme Shepherding.
- Subverted with Bread Riots in the French Revolution. Starvation of thousands of people is a pretty serious issue. There was also The Bread March of Women later on because of the same reason.
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