Black Sheep Hit: Thoroughly averted. The band's biggest mainstream hits ("Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Istanbul" (from Flood), "Boss of Me") remain fan favorites.
A somewhat straighter example is "Stuff Is Way" becoming a viral hit on YouTube and Tiktok, after its usage in an animation meme catapulted it to being one of the band's most streamed songs. While not hated or anything, very few TMBG fans will cite it as one of their favorites, and it's not ranked especially highly on the wiki.
Breakup Breakout: The band itself, for John Linnell. In the years prior, he was part of a Rhode Island group called The Mundanes, a New Wave group in the Blondie/Motels/Waitresses mold. They built a local following, tried and failed to get a major record deal, and then broke up in 1983.
Fake Brit: In "Los Angeles/Hollywood", Linnell puts on a Scouse accent, which itself is perhaps most famous as the accent all the members of The Beatles had.
One of the first music videos that the band made, for the song "Rabid Child", has never been made available to the public in its entirety, outside of a short clip in the documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns.
The first recording the Johns made together—a cover of “Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For A Hand In The Snow)” by Yoko Ono recorded during their teenage years, well before the actual formation of TMBG, which was apparently performed by the Johns doing Rod Serling impersonations. As of 2020, Flansburgh has confirmed that the tape still exists; however, it remains uncertain as to whether it will ever see the light of day, primarily due to the quality of tapes in the 1970s (and self-admitted improper storage practices) making it sadly quite possible that it’s degraded too badly to bother releasing.
No-Hit Wonder: Never hit the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, though they scored hits in the UK and Australia as well as the Alternative Airplay charts in the US. They also didn't have a Top 40 album until Join Us in 2011, 25 years after their debut album.
Official Fan-Submitted Content: There are times the band would have a contest on music videos created by fans. Both "Can't Keep Johnny Down" and "I Left My Body" had several entries.
They Might Be Giants was actually the group's second name, after one so embarrassing that John and John refuse to disclose it, even to their children. They did one show under it, although the organizers wisely billed them as "El Grupo de Rock and Roll" instead.
The music video for "Rabid Child" apparently counts as well, as it's never been show in its entirety, and the Johns have not only rejected requests to show it, but refuse to even discuss it. The one brief clip that's surfaced, in the Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns documentary years later, has Flansburgh lip-syncing in an apartment, with Linnell playing accordion in the background, and it honestly doesn't look any worse than any other low-budget DIY indie rock video from The '80s, leading fans to wonder why it's been suppressed for so long.
At some point in the late 80's, an MTV VJ claimed that the Johns were former roadies for The Replacements based on the b-side "We're The Replacements". The band themselves mocked the legend in an article they wrote for Spin: in a list of questions they wanted to hear from interviewers, one of them was "If you're not roadies for The Replacements, which band is?"
The Dial-A-Song exclusive "I Need Some Lovin" was once believed by some fans to be a remix of a song found on a free cassette tape included with a Jem doll. The female vocalist is actually a friend of the band's named Jennifer Neff, and in the full Dial-A-Song recording (which played it back to back with another exclusive called "I Find It Hard to Believe") Linnell introduces her by name.
Real Life Writes the Plot: An attempt to politely avert it. As they were coming up on the end of filming the documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns one of the last scenes was a release party for their new album, Mink Car, which was held at 11:30pm on September 10th, 2001 in New York City. On the DVD Commentary they say they had a rough time figuring out what to do - 9/11 wasn't important to the story, so to mention it would be "cashing in" on it, but to not mention it when it affected the lives of those presentnote one attendee actually stayed near the World Trade Center and was evacuated from their hotel room the next morning. They were uninjured, but they lost all their belongings from the room would also be rude. A compromise was made to simply have a Title Card listing the date, letting astute viewers make the connection, but leaving 9/11 intentionally Out of Focus.
Science Marches On: Scientists used to think that the sun was a mass of incandescent gas (as in "Why Does the Sun Shine?"), but now scientists believe that it's better described as a miasma of incandescent plasma. So just to be safe, TMBG wrote another song, called "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?".
Screwed by the Network: After a strong debut on Elektra Records with Flood and Apollo 18, their relationship with the label quickly went downhill. This started when A&R rep Sue Drew left the label in 1993; Drew had signed the band to the label and represented them and other quirky alt-rock bands on the roster like Ween and Phish. Her departure robbed the band of their biggest advocate at Elektra, though label president Bob Krasnow, a respected industry vet, also was sympathetic to them.note Krasnow had a long track record of championing non-mainstream acts, most notably signing Captain Beefheart to his first recording contract. Then, on the eve of the release of John Henry, Krasnow abruptly quit, as part of a massive leadership shakeup at Warner Music Group. After that, there was no one left at the label who really understood what They Might Be Giants were about or how to market them. The growing rift between band and label came to a head during their 1995 tour of Japan, when Elektra asked the band to play an impromptu gig at a coffee house on one of their days off, but they declined in order to take some much needed downtime. When they got off their train, they were met by an Elektra representative who was there to take them to the coffee shop: The label had went ahead and booked the show anyway without their permission. The Johns refused to play. Elektra did almost zero promotion for Factory Showroom in 1996, despite it being the band's most mainstream-sounding album to date, so they asked to be released from their contract, which Elektra agreed to.
Serendipity Writes the Plot: While TMBG has always had their signature sound, the short, staccato sound and clearer enunciation of the songs on their debut album were mostly a result of working around the limitations of recording songs on an answering machine for Dial-A-Song (notably that long, sustained notes would cause the tape to rewind).
Shrug of God: The band doesn't often confirm or deny theories about a given song. An example: when asked what their first single "Don't Let's Start" was about, they responded that it was "about not let's starting". In 2015, Linnell admitted he doesn't remember what he was trying to get across at the time.
The band has done two different songs with the name "She Was A Hotel Detective" that have nothing to do with each other except the title and being TMBG songs. The version on the first album is "(She Was A) Hotel Detective" and the version on the Back To Skull EP is "She Was a Hotel Detective" (note the lack of parentheses). They also did a third song with a callback title, "She Was a Hotel Detective in the Future."
They also have the occasional song that has the same title as a song by another artist. Sometimes this has been deliberate ("Welcome to the Jungle", "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love"—previously used by Mahavishnu Orchestra). Other times it's been accidental. They weren't aware that The Beach Boys had already done a song called "Santa's Beard" when they wrote and recorded theirs.
Their children's albums No!, Here Come The ABCs, Here Come The 123s, Here Comes Science, and Why?. There's an EP that goes with the book Bed Bed Bed, the title track later reworked for No!.
A couple of the songs also have this going on. The version of "Four Of Two" that you hear on No! is much more child-friendly than the original, and "Robot Parade" plays with the trope with a Heavy Metal version called "Robot Parade (Adult Version)" that has the exact same lyrics.
Two-Hit Wonder: Out of their four charting singles in the UK, only "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Boss of Me" reached the Top 40, peaking at number six and number 21 respectively.
Working Title: I Like Fun could have been My Murdered Remains, after a lyric from "Mrs. Bluebeard". They then used the title for their next album, which consisted of songs produced during the same period as I Like Fun itself.
The Dial-A-Song exclusive "Tumbleweed" was written for use in Recess: School's Out, but got replaced with "One" by Three Dog Night for the final film.
They Might Be Giants were supposed to write an entire movie's worth of songs for the film version of Coraline, but this plan was scrapped early in development. Before TMBG were removed from the project, they completed one song, "Careful What You Pack", which was released a year later. The final version of the film did retain one musical number, "Other Father's Song", though TMBG didn't write it—it was a scratch track the band liked too much to replace, and John Linnell sings it in the finished film.
Joe Strummer was supposed to sing the bridge of "Cyclops Rock", but he was unavailable for some reason, so the band instead settled on Cerys Matthews, singer for Welsh indie band Catatonia because she just so happened to be in the same studio at the time.
Elvis Costello was initially slated to produce Apollo 18. The Johns disapproved due to thinking they'd earned the chance to produce it themselves and to the tension that would occur from working with a hero of theirs.
Flansburgh's then-girlfriend (who sang on "Boat Of Car") was supposed to appear on "The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)," but wasn't available for the recording, so instead they got Laura Cantrell.
Four songs, titled "Dawn Divine", "Stalker In Reverse", "Prepare", and "Lucky You", were recorded for Nanobots, but scrapped before the album's release. Only one ("Prepare") has been released as of now, as a Dial-A-Song exclusive in 2015. Little about the other songs is known, except that Dawn Divine was to feature Mike Doughty.
A compilation called Superfueled Freaksicklenote (or Superfueled Freaksicle, or even Superfueled Freakcicle - official sources varied on the intended spelling) was first announced in 1994: First mentioned as a DVD/VHS music video compilation, it somehow turned into a second B-Side album (following up Miscellaneous T). The release was officially canceled in 1997, in part because its intended release date was right around the time TMBG were releasing another compilation, Then: The Earlier Years and there was concern about flooding the market... So fans started coming up with their own track-listings and album artwork instead.
After winning a Grammy for the Malcolm in the Middle theme, FOX commissioned them to make a new theme song for America's Most Wanted. They rejected it, and it remains unreleased. According to an NPR interview, the theme was "styled as an update on the 'crime jazz' sound of 50's TV themes with a pretty wild electronic rhythm track"
They were one of several groups contacted to write and record demos for a title song for That Thing You Do!. Their demo eventually leaked - while still sounding like something from a 60s one hit wonder, their take on the idea was more indebted to American Garage Rock than the early Beatles, which was actually closer to what the original pitch called for than the Adam Schlesinger-penned "That Thing You Do" that ended up in the movie.
"Elephants" is a holdover from a planned kids' album about animals, which got cancelled early on for unknown reasons.
When the band were contacted to submit a song to the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack, it was suggested they should parody their own "Dr. Worm" as "Dr. Evil". They didn't like the idea, so they composed an entirely new song, still titled "Dr. Evil", in the style of a Bond theme with guest vocalist Robin Goldwasser imitating Shirley Bassey. The song was nearly rejected, but Mike Myers heard it and wanted it to be used, so it was. The decison was last-minute enough that, despite being the first song heard in the movie, it wasn't licensed in time to be on the first soundtrack album, appearing on the followup More Music from the Motion Picture Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me later the same year instead.
"Bangs" was considered for a UK-exclusive single from Mink Car: The song was produced by English Record Producer team Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who previously worked on "Birdhouse In Your Soul", the band's biggest hit in the UK, so it was thought it could have similar success in that territory. The band scrapped the idea when they learned that, in the UK, the title hairstyle is instead called a fringe, so the target audience wouldn't be able to make sense of the lyrics.
Miscellaneous trivia:
Both Johns are originally from outside of Boston, so they both will slip into a New England accent on occasion in songs. Linnell most blatantly does it in "A Self Called Nowhere" and "Wicked Little Critta."
They were parodied in Discworld as with the dwarfish group "We're Certainly Dwarfs". They were also partially responsible for Foul Ole Ron's Catchphrase "Millennium hand and shrimp" in the same setting, by way of Terry Pratchett dumping a Chinese restaurant menu and the lyrics sheet for Particle Man into a travesty generator. Pratchett was a fan of the band.
They also sold blue nightlights as promotional material for Flood, but they didn't really look like canaries.