Mundane Made Awesome / Real Life

• The Pastry War — whose name itself is a demonstration of this trope — was a conflict between the Kingdom of France and the United Mexican States which engulfed both the Republic of Texas and the United States. The entire Mexican navy was captured by French forces and the war lead to former dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna resuming his position as President of Mexico. Santa Anna's autocratic regime caused Mexico to disintegrate and contributed to Texas becoming annexed by the USA. How did this war arise? Because the Mexican Government refused to pay compensation to a French baker whose shop had been looted by Mexican officers ten years earlier.^note Although the files in both France and Mexico never mention the existence of said French Baker.
  • On a similar level: the Football (soccer) War between Honduras and El Salvador^note To be fair, there were already some bad relationship over the status of Salvadorans migrant workers and settled in Honduras being dispossessed to protect the rights of wealthy landowners. The violences at the qualifying rounds for the 1970 World Cup were just what pissed the Salvadorans (who had actually won the play-off match) enough to attack.
  • There was also a Toyota War between Chad and Libya. The Chadian army used ordinary Toyota pick-up trucks to great effect.
  • On the opposite side: Gino Bartali winning the 1948 Tour de France prevented a civil war.^note Political tensions in Italy in the aftermath of World War II were very high, especially after American pressures caused the government to adopt a heavy-handed anti-Communist stance. Then, on July 14 1948, the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti was shot by a madman, causing an acute crisis, a general strike and riots... And then Bartali won three stages in a row and conquered a lead in the Tour, and sportive fervor calmed the tensions long enough for Togliatti to come out of the coma and calm the situation, with Bartali then proceeding to win the whole competition.
• The Japanese tea ceremony would appear to be a simple matter: one person brews some tea and serves it to one or more guests, who accept it with gratitude. In fact the ceremony, chadō, is a staggeringly complex ritual with over a thousand variations which may require a lifetime to master.
  • The tea ceremony has degrees, just like martial arts.
  • Japan tends to make anything into ritualized awesome art: gardening, eating...
• From Fujian and Chaoshan in China, there is the gōngfū chá tradition - literally meaning to make tea with skill, but with the same concept of "kung fu this" that led to Foo Fu centuries later. Like the Japanese equivalent; the ritual requires careful selection of the water for its mineral content, precise temperature control, and up to a dozen different utensils. All to make little cups of tea.
• Fans of the Takarazuka Revue has specific rules for their equivalent of Western theatre "stage-dooring" ^note meeting theatre actors before and/or after a show. In the West, it's mostly a relaxed affair with performers and fans milling alongside each other, giving autographs, chatting, and taking photos. On Broadway, there's sometimes a barrier between fans and actors. As for Takarazuka? Well. It's called irimachi and demachi (seeing actors walk in and walk out of the theatre, respectively). It can be shocking to people who do not know Takarazuka well. Fans are not allowed to talk to the actresses, and must wait in a neat line. Members of actresses' fanclubs are given priority at the very front of the line, and there's rules regarding the order to line up for fan club members as well, based on the seniority of the actresses. About a week to ten days before a particular Takarasienne leaves Takarazuka, many fans dress in all white. Sometimes, the actresses give a speech to the assembled fans.
• A United States Air Force Special Operations Weather Technician What's more mundane than doing the weather report? How about from behind enemy lines!
  • They also have special forces air traffic controllers.
• 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.
  • Performed by a full military-style band, the music itself is pretty awesome. That still makes it an example of the trope, though, because the having a big, brassy march as background music for some guy in whiteface falling on his prat is perhaps a bit over the top.
• Ohhhhhhhhh, the Alcatel OmniPCX phone exchange promotional video. What do you do when your engineers fail? You call James Bond to save the day!
• 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.
  • "It's never too early... for a salad." About 3:01 in this video.
  • Paula Sala is a real GEICO customer, not an actor. So to help tell her story, we hired that announcer guy from the movies.
• The Backside of Water at the Jungle Cruise in the Disney Theme 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.
• 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"
• Flair Bartending.
• Billy Mays, from the various Ridiculously Loud Commercials for cleaning products he's done (RIP Beardman).
  • Also the ShamWow guy. His headset puts it over the top.
    "Stop having a boring tuna! Stop having a boring life!"
    • On top of that — introducing the Rap Chop (remixed, not original, sadly).
• 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 such a department needs to be made cooler, just see if Michael Bay is willing to lend a hand.
  • Syracuse University has (or had) the Center for Really Neat Research (which most of it really was).
• Several manufacturers of obscure industrial equipment are prone to this. Some people, nightly, have to deal with the terror of working with a machine called the Predator SS... which shrink wraps boxes placed on a pallet. And sometimes must wear a garment called the Revolution XR 55, a simple safety harness.
• BRIAN BLESSED.
  • Brian Blessed is exactly that awesome. A short read about his life is like the Cliffs Notes version of a Norse saga or something.
• Tim Pawlenty kicked off his presidential campaign with two ads that were just made of this trope. Stephen Colbert was quick to parody it.
• Google has recently made a tool called Search Stories which lets you upload videos of Google searches with epic camera pans and epic music if you like.
• EXTREME RICE.
• Extreme IRONING. Your whites will never be starched this way again.
• Apparently a GPS manufacturer created an application that turns the voice into Darth Vader's. A "making of" shows how it's a full-fledged example of this trope.
  • You can also get Norio Wakamoto to narrate your GPS for you.
  • The Brian Blessed SatNav
• Boris Johnson explaining the origin of Ping Pong
• A new sport from Germany: Sporthocking...EXTREME SITTING!
  • Parodied here.
• Indoor Cycling Gymnastic Championship
• As a rule, music from your favorite video games can greatly enhance your life experience. Try playing some of the synth classics or rehashes by The Advantage or The Black Mages while writing a paper or simply walking around. The fact is this genre was intended to make everything you do in games (shopping, hiking, fighting, talking, breaking vases) infinitely more exciting. This effect naturally translates itself into Real Life.
• CPR... with a toilet plunger!
• The Breaking Dawn Part I trailer. Wedding invitations, a ceremony, scenes from a honeymoon, and Bella's Dull Surprise scored with Ominous Latin Chanting.
• T.E. Lawrence wrote about how he once parodied Auda abu Tayi's way of telling stories like this.
  'This was a close parody of Auda's epic style; and I mimicked also his wave of the hand, his round voice, and the rising and dropping tone which emphasized the points, or what he thought were points, of his pointless stories.'
  —
  'I told how we left the tents, with a list of the tents, and how we walked down towards the village, describing every camel and horse we saw, and all the passers-by, and the ridges, 'all bare of grazing, for by God that country was barren.'
  —
  'And we marched: and beyond the what-do-you-call-it there was a what-there-is as far as hereby from thence, and thereafter a ridge: and we came to that ridge, and went up that ridge: it was barren, all that land was barren: and as we came up that ridge, and were by the head of that ridge, and came to the end of the head of that ridge, by God, by my God, by very God, the sun rose upon us!'
• ORRE NO CHYUU DORRE DA!? Courtesy from them playing a YuYu Hakusho game.
• And now, Alan Rickman making tea in slow motion to the soundtrack to Inception.
• Operation Paul Bunyan consisted in chopping down a tree whose position could have sparked a border conflict between the two Koreas without having North Korean soldiers hack to death the choppers as in the first attempt. The Americans sent sixteen combat engineers equipped with chainsaws, with a direct escort of sixty men armed with pistols and axe handles, an indirect escort including 64 South Korea special forces soldiers armed to the teeth daring the North Koreans to cross the nearby Freedom Bridge, an American M728 Combat Engineering Vehicle ready to blow it up and an American infantry company with twenty utility helicopters and 7 attack helicopters, and support from U.S. B-52 bombers and F-4 fighters and South Koreans F-5 fighters. Then, just to make sure, the aircraft carrier Midway and her task force had been moved in the area, and the whole South Korean military and the American troops in Korea (plus troops from Okinawa) were ready to intervene. The tree was cut without incident.
  • Some background is perhaps necessary. The tree was in such a place that it isolated a border observation post from being seen by the next closest one. This lack of visibility meant that something could happen to the soldiers at that post if it were taken by surprise without their neighbors able to see they needed help. At first a handful of Korean workers and American troops went to trim the tree but were confronted by North Korean soldiers who claimed that the tree had been planted by Kim Il-Sung and thus shouldn't be cut. Things escalated into a confrontation in which two American soldiers died. Operation Paul Bunyan was partially to deal with the original problem of the tree, and mostly to make a very clear threat to the North Koreans about what would happen if they tried any more shenanigans. It worked; not only did they cut down the tree, but North Korea also suddenly laid off the Never My Fault rhetoric and quit dragging their feet on apologizing.
• The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks is a painting of a real-life epic Strongly Worded Letter writing (although the latter was a self-conscious parody of the diplomatic etiquette which was most likely never sent).
• Board games. We've come a long way from the days of Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders. Titles like Prêt-à-Porter or the upcoming Tzokol'kin take mundane activities like running a fashion magazine or assigning workers and make them compelling enough for you to want in on the action.
• General relativity made just about everything awesome. For instance, that apple you ate for lunch? E = mc^2 reveals that you just ate something containing ten times more energy than the world's most powerful nuclear bomb.
• Walking Made Awesome
  • Oh yeah, life will never be the same
• You can even play the Home Game!
  • Get your favorite music conveyance such an iPod or CD loaded with "Enterprise Leaves Moorings" from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, "Leaving Drydock" from Star Trek: The Motion Picture or "Stealing The Enterprise" from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
  • If necessary, cue it up to the right part of the music where Enterprise would be leaving in the film.
  • Play it as you start up your car. Backing out of your driveway will never feel the same again. Cut your grass with it, paint the house, whatever. You'll be dying to do the chores.
  • Parallel park your car while the "Blue Danube Waltz" plays.
  • Just about anything by Two Steps from Hell works. As does a fair amount of E.S. Posthumus.
    • Along the same vein, Sabaton makes even doing the dishes awesome.
  • Play "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" next time you take a stroll anywhere.
  • Isn't this basically the function of driving music?
• Michelangelo illustrated his grocery lists.
• 24 hour sports news channels. Sky Sports News is a particularly egregious offender. Its overly dramatic theme music and presenters who constantly act excited, even in the off-seasons when nothing is happening.
• The Brazilian carnival is decided with a vote count two days after the parades. While in sports such as gymnastics they just show the grades after the performance, in carnival's case a deep-voiced announcer reads aloud every grade the 12 "samba schools" had - 10 categories, each with 4 judges (and like with sports, the lowest one is dropped from the count). And by the last categories, you can hear the glee of the schools' supporters with each "TEN!". In the case of the biggest ones in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, said count is broadcast nationally - that's right, Brazil's biggest network dedicates two hours of programming (each!) to a guy reading grades aloud.
• Any kind of macro photography. For example, a ladybug on a wet flower. Or a rusty nail.
• Starting lineups in sports can be just a bland reading of names. Or, you can combine with Theme Music Power-Up and a highlight reel for your home team, like this:
  THIS Is the starting five! For your Virrggiinniiaaa Cavalieeerrsss!
  • Subverted when introducing the line ups for the visiting team. The boredom in the announcer can result in extreme Mood Whiplash.
• The enthusiastic back cover blurb for the Computer Maniacs 1989 Diary software tries its best to make a calendar application sound awesome.
• The Kosciuszko Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Queens in New York City was given a new bridge to replace the old one, which was built in the 1930s. The first half of the project was completed on April 27th 2017 and rather than celebrate with just a typical ribbon cutting ceremony, the city went the extra mile by blasting music and showing off the colorful LED lights on the new bridge.
• While you're at it, a full Moon night is more appreciated when you think no other Solar System planet except Jupiter (and for a very narrow margin) has a satellite that appears on its sky so large as ours, and especially not as luminous, as for example the already mentioned Jupiter receives just 1/30th of the sunlight received by Earth.
• Air New Zealand created a The Lord of the Rings-themed airline safety video to celebrate the release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. And you thought those pre-flight videos would never not be boring.