Between Blanche's bedroom exploits, Rose's crazy childhood stories, and Sophia's "picture it" encounters in Sicily, The Golden Girls may have the most Noodle Incidents per episode in sitcom history.
Rose's St. Olaf Stories
- The plot lines of classic St. Olaf fairy tales such as "Gus and the Recliner," "Gunilla Gets a Catalog," and "Elsa, the Girl Who Could Make Bad Food Good."
- The tragedy that caused St. Olaf to never hold barbecues again. It's too painful for Rose to talk about, but she does reveal it it involved "barbecuing elk, a big fire, and someone who lost his balance."
- The notorious "Falling Leif" incident.Dorothy: Just get to the end part.Rose: ...splat!
- Rose had to transfer high schools because of a "field hockey incident."
- How a chicken once saved Rose's life.Blanche: They are the stupidest birds.
- The time that a man refused to sleep with Rose because she was radioactive.
- What Uncle Gunter did during the Great Beernut Shortage of '29 (in Rose's defense, she's unable to finish the story because Dorothy interrupts her).
- The end of her story involving two men being buried in the same grave, where Rose later laments they learned one of them wanted to be cremated, gets cut off by an exasperated Blanche telling her to shut up.
Blanche's Sexual Encounters
Blanche's recountings of her sexual encounters are usually described to leave as much to the viewer's imagination as possible.- The time she cost her date his party's nomination, though the pictures turned out nice.
- When they don't understand how to work a VCR remote and play a porn movie backwards, Blanche happily points at the screen.Blanche: I did that once! (Notices the other girls' stares) It was his birthday.
- The time Blanche got caught with the Orkin man.
- When Blanche claims to the girls that she lost her virginity in a bayou:Sophia: I thought you lost it in a hot-air balloon!Dorothy: I thought you lost it at a pancake breakfast!Blanche: Those times don't count!
- Whatever Blanche did to attract the attention of the Secret Service. This is revealed when an agent visits the house to evaluate it for an upcoming visit from the President:Blanche: Let me know if you want to know anything else. I've got pictures.Agent: Yeah, so do we.
- It's mentioned that Blanche has been arrested for various crimes, including driving topless, in Chattanooga.Dorothy: Blanche, are you ever allowed to go back to Chattanooga?
Blanche: Are you kidding? The sheriff still writes! - Blanche will never be the other woman, except for that one time a man's wife was pronounced dead, only to quip how "those paramedics never give up."
- Another time, Blanche answered Miles's question about whether anyone had seen a purple martin (the bird species
) early in the morning."Yes I have! Martin Gellman. Mr. "Watch-Me-Leap-Frog-Over-This-Parking-Meter". - The 1964 Tokyo Olympics — although as Blanche puts it, "So 80,000 people had to wait 20 minutes. The torch got there eventually, didn't it?"
- The time she lost her handcuff keys and had to go with a guy on his entire mail route.
- The Greyhound terminal incident.
- What happened between Blanche and the Flying Fanelli Brothers.
- What Blanche did with Buzz in the lunar module.
- When she introduces herself to a priest, he makes a comment about finally having a face to go with the name. When she asks him what he means, he says, "Anything said during confessional is strictly confidential."
- A classic moment in season seven's "Beauty and the Beast" when discussing a nurse Dorothy hired to look after Sophia:Blanche: Dorothy, at 2 am this morning, I was entertaining a gentleman caller, when she opened the door, at the most inopportune time. I could've lost my balance and chipped a tooth!
Rose: You think that's annoying? She came into my room last night when I was re-enacting the gang-plank scene from Peter Pan!
Dorothy: What the hell goes ON at night in this house?! - The "bizarre evening" Blanche spent with a jai alai team from Nicaragua.
- The time she brought those twins home from "The Jimmy Smits Look-alike" Contest.
Sophia's Sicily stories
- When Sophia is planning to try and sell many of her family recipes, and says it's important to have exposure, and all the greats had it: Mama Celeste, Chef Boyardee, and Chef Balducci. When the others say they never heard of the last one, she remembers that he didn't have television exposure, he had indecent exposure, and says he should have stuffed the cannelloni in the traditional manner.
- In the episode "Feelings", Dorothy is pressured by many people to pass a failing football star so he can play in a big game. One of those people is a priest.. Dorothy sticks to her principles and politely asks him to leave, but this still disgusts Sophia:Sophia: I can't believe I have a daughter who threw a priest out the door!
Dorothy: Ma, you have relatives that threw priests out of windows!
Sophia: That was business! - Sophia's murdered Uncle Mario: "Twenty-eight stab wounds during a block party, and nobody saw a thing."
- When she was younger, Sophia was engaged to one of her brothers for a very brief period of time, implied to stem from the two of them having to share a bed until Sophia was 17.
- Dorothy's favorite doll Mrs. Doolittle — her sister Gloria did something that not only broke the toy, but permanently kept Mrs. Doolittle's eyes open ("She made Mrs. Doolittle look like a morphine addict!").
- The Great String Cheese War of '47.
- Sophia's story about a Moroccan and a monkey, which according to her, "comes under the heading of 'lust.'"
- This exchange in "The Accurate Conception", when Blanche is upset about her daughter wanting to be artificially inseminated, and the girls start discussing how they conceived their children.Blanche: But at least what we all did was natural!
Sophia: Not all the time. There was some other stuff. [to Dorothy] But I probably shouldn't tell you until you're 70. - The full story of Uncle Nunzio and the goat he was able to legally adopt (alluded to in several episodes).
- From "Grab That Dough", after Blanche is awakened from an erotic dream by a maid cleaning the hotel lobby with a feather duster.Sophia: Your father used to do a thing with feathers when we were first married. But he was too lazy to take 'em off the chicken, so I put a stop to that right away.
Dorothy: Ma, do me a favor. The next time you want to take a stroll down memory lane, go alone. - The fact that no one in Sophia's family history ever left a body to be found.
- In the sequel series The Golden Palace, the girls get locked in a freezer, and Sophia remarks that the last time she was this cold, she was burying Jimmy Hoffa. It's never specified whether she means cold as in "emotionless" or cold as in "literally buried him in winter/a blizzard". (Possibly both.)
- Virtually everything that Dorothy's brother Phil did. One of these - his cross-dressing - received serious treatment after his death, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Present day
- In one episode, Sophia makes a reference to a Noodle Incident, when trying to get an annoying girl to leave Rose alone.Sophia: Excuse me Abby, I would like to inject some candor here. I would also like to inject a tranquilizer dart into your backside, but my dart gun was confiscated after the incident with the trick-or-treaters. In my defense, it was dark and I was unaware of this Ninja Turtle craze.
- When the girls are discussing getting Sophia a sitter while they go out to the class reunion, in the episode "Home Again Rose":Blanche: No more sitters! We're still in litigation with the last one.Sophia: She bit me first!
- While arguing about Michael's attempts to marry a woman twice his age, Dorothy asks Blanche how she would feel if her son were trying to do the same thing. Blanche's response?Blanche: Dorothy, when my son was five years old he nearly burned down our whole town. Since then, nothing he does shocks me. Hell, he could marry Lillian Gish and I wouldn't care.
- The fight that caused Sophia to hide under the sink to avoid Dorothy.
- What Dorothy ate for her confirmation dinner in Brooklyn. All we know is that Sophia thought it was chicken.Sophia: Your pop sure made everyone laugh when he made the little feet dance.
- When Dorothy needed surgery because she had a tumor called Morton's Neuroma:Blanche: Ooh, I had that once! But how the heck you'd ever catch it in your foot?
- Dorothy apparently once got so angry that Rose lost her car keys that she "uprooted a mighty Sequoia". And her past, unexplained incidents where she made both her butcher and a cop cry:Dorothy: If he's crying, then he's not that much of a cop.
- The reason why the police told Rose to never call them again.
- Exactly what happened all of those years at Shady Pines. The mere mention of "the east wing" is enough to get the notoriously stubborn Sophia to immediately follow orders.
- The incident with Sophia and the banana in the cop's tailpipe (all we know is that Blanche had to cover for her).
- Why Sophia once drank an entire bottle of Kaopectate.
- The things that made Barbara and Carol Weston feel betrayed, for which Sophia makes them each believe the other was responsible.
- Whatever Rose did to the girls' rock garden that caused it to die.
- The Great Denture Swap at Shady Pines.
