Worthless Yellow Rocks / Live-Action TV

• In one episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, Dick decides to buy a diamond ring, but is horrified when he finds out how expensive diamonds are. His exclamation sums it up: "Where I come from we use the big ones as door stoppers!"
• In ALF, Alf bails the family out of a financial jam by hocking some of the plumbing fixtures on his ship, which are made of gold (which is more plentiful than foam on Alf's home planet).
• In Auction Kings, art tends to sell for a fraction of its value. Some people bring in gold or silver pieces and are annoyed when they go for little more than scrap value. Specifically, Paul tells sellers to expect to get only 20% of the appraisal value.
• Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction: Inverted in the episode "Ghost Town". A photographer gets sent to the Wild West but hasn't noticed yet. He goes to a bar and tries to buy a beer with $20 bills. The bartender doesn't recognize the money and refuses to accept it, demanding gold or silver instead. When the photographer cannot provide any, he gets thrown out.
• Cowboy Bebop (2021): Spike Spiegel makes an offhand comment that diamonds are hard to move on the black market, but doesn't say why. A later episode has a boss of The Syndicate eager to forge an alliance with a rival crime cartel on Neptune, saying it rains diamonds over there. If so the Syndicate couldn't deal in diamonds as their rivals on Neptune could flood the market at any time, sending the price of diamonds plummeting, hence their eagerness to establish a monopoly and control the price.
• In a segment of The Daily Show, Aasif Mandvi is explaining how bad the economy is, and what to invest in. When Jon Stewart says, "What about gold?", Aasif replies, "It turns out that gold is just a shiny metal. Very shiny, but still just metal."
• Doctor Who:
  • Gold is as common as dirt on the planet Voga. Unfortunately, this makes the Vogans a target for both greedy human prospectors and Cybermen who hope to eliminate a source of weapons against them (gold dust is to Cybermen as silver is to werewolves).
  • The citizens of the "The Pirate Planet" give away gems like they don't matter because they can be found everywhere and periodically replenish themselves. This is because the planet, as the name indicates, loots other planets.
  • In "Planet of the Dead", the Doctor has one of the people he's stranded with retrieve a giant yellow crystal suspended in some mundane-looking clamps. He then discards the crystal, because the anti-gravity clamps are what he needed.
• Played with in the first episode of Firefly. At the start we see the main characters raid the wreckage of a spaceship for some boxes containing large metallic bars. Towards the end of the episode we find out this is food (wrapped in coppery foil), although admittedly in the form of single bars capable of feeding a family for a month per bar, and giving them immunization boosters to boot. The point being that something like that would be far more useful to settlers on a frontier planet than 'valuable' metal.
  • Though it's worth noting the currency of frontier planets is platinum, while more advanced and civilized alliance planets use "credits", consisting of bills.
  • In the Serenity tabletop RPG, it's established that while gold isn't worthless, it's not worth a whole lot either. Platinum is the currency of real business; gold and silver are pocket change.
• Game of Thrones
  • There was a memorable scene from season 2 where Bronn explains that during sieges, the price of luxuries goes down while the price of commodities goes way up.
    Bronn: Noble ladies would sell all their diamonds for a sack of potatoes.
  • In the Blu-Ray History & Lore video "Dragonstone", Stannis does not understand why House Targaryen settled on Dragonstone since the only thing its rich in is dragonglass. He has no idea that the stuff is the only thing that can kill white walkers.
• In the NBC's Gulliver's Travels mini-series, the Houyhnhnms are puzzled as to why the Yahoos love certain common rocks (actually gigantic diamonds), Gulliver explaining that "primitive creatures love shiny things." In secret, he collects some for himself to sell in England only to throw them away when he decides to stay with the Houyhnhnms.
• On Jericho (2006), while visiting a camp of refugees from Denver, it is noted that precious metals and jewelry have become less than worthless after the nuclear attack. Not only has basic survival taken priority, but gold picks up radiation easily, making much of it actively hazardous to handle.
• Kung Fu (1972): While Kwai Chang Caine understands the concept of money, he doesn't really care about it and doesn't understand why people assign value to money, gold, silver, and jewels instead of useful things like food. In "The Stone", when Isaac Montola turns murderous because he believes his diamond was stolen, Caine points out it's just a rock.
• Logan's Run: In the pilot, Logan starts a fire using 200-year-old bills of various dominations and confidential papers that he found in the ruined Capitol Building.
• Loki (2021): The Time Variance Authority has secured so many copies of the Infinity Stones from various timelines that staff tend to use them as paperweights. It helps that they are all depowered curtesy of being on the TVA premises, so they aren't actually worth that much in practice.
• Present-day variant: in the Lost episode "Expose", Nikki and Paolo essentially die because of some diamonds. When Sawyer finds the diamonds, he and others (including Sun and Hurley) decide they're worthless on the island and scatter them in the grave. This is horribly painful to watch once one knows that Sun and Hurley get off the island about two weeks later, not to mention that Nikki and Paolo are actually paralyzed and are being buried alive.
  • In Hurley's defense, back home he was trying to get rid of the millions he already had because he believed it was cursed.
  • And Sun's financial situation didn't turn out too shabby, either.
  • It worked out pretty well for Miles, assuming he doesn't die, because he found out about the diamonds, dug up the graves, and took them.
• In one episode of Lost in Space, treasure hunters come looking for the treasure of a man from a planet where gold and gems were extraordinarily common. The treasure chests contain objects of aluminium and tin - to a man who had handled gem-encrusted gold objects every day of his life, they were treasure.
• The History Channel TV Show Modern Marvels had an episode on recycling where the plant manager of a metals recovery firm was displaying to the audience a box containing gray chunks and dust which looked like, well, worthless dirt and rocks and admitted that's what most people thought it was. You'd be surprised to discover that the box contained two and one-half million U.S. dollars worth of recycled platinum.
• An episode of The Munsters featured Herman's Evil Twin, a Con Man who claimed to have invented a machine that could remove uranium from water. When Grandpa tries to use it only to find it doesn't work, he thinks he broke it. When trying to fix it, at one point he's disappointed to find it only extracts gold and tosses it aside with other gold.
• In the original My Favorite Martian, Tim O'Hara accidentally breaks some ordinary drinking glasses, and Uncle Martin muses that it's a pity because, on Mars, objects made from glass are exceptionally valuable.
• The Diffys from Phil of the Future bought their house with a bag of diamonds produced as a waste product of the magnetic bottle containment system on their Time RV. They were going to throw them out. Keeping with both sides of this trope, aluminium foil is apparently extremely valuable in the future.
• Subverted in "The Conveyor Project", a fourth season episode of The Red Green Show. Miserly shopkeeper Dalton Humphrey has been given the (now broken) eponymous conveyor belt and is weighing bids of as much as $10 for the metal interior. Red Green points out that if he instead sells the steel, nickel axles, and copper wire to a scrap metal dealer, he could make up to $10,000. Dalton is absolutely delirious with glee at this news.
• Inverted in one episode of Stargate SG-1. The SGC has captured a Goa'uld who's a major glutton, and he agrees to provide them with information as long as they keep him well fed. They manage to convince him that chicken (one of the most common foods there is) is a rare delicacy but of course they'll try to keep up a steady supply.
  Nerus: And these watermelons... how do you get the seeds out?
  General Landry: State secret, I'm afraid.
• Star Trek:
  • A few episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series play with this trope:
    • Oddly, in "Arena", Sufficiently Advanced Aliens put Kirk and the captain of an alien ship unarmed on a planet, where they must fight it out. When he comes across a deposit of diamonds, he notes: "a fortune in precious stones, and I'd give it all up for a hand phaser".
    • In "Catspaw", aliens try to tempt Kirk with a pile of precious jewels. He tells them that he could manufacture a thousand of them on Enterprise.
    • In "Elaan of Troyius", the Federation has no idea why the Klingons are so interested in a certain planet inhabited by a low-tech race. When they happen to look at a necklace worn by one of the natives, they discover that the "common stones" it is made of happen to be dilithium crystals, which are a key component of starship power generation and highly valuable to space-traveling races.
  • Starting in Star Trek: The Next Generation (and after some Early-Installment Weirdness), it's established that gold-pressed latinum is the universal currency (in spite of the The Federation being a cashless society). Because the Alpha Quadrant is largely a Post-Scarcity Economy due to Matter Replicators, latinum is the only thing that has universal intrinsic value, as it cannot be replicated. The substance itself is a liquid at room temperature, so standard coinage is made by sandwiching it in slips, strips or bars of gold. The gold itself is worthless. Gold's fall from grace in Star Trek does have some real-world parallels, see the Real Life section regarding aluminum.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone", the crew comes across some 20th Century citizens who've been cryogenically frozen. Among them is a financier who at the end of the episode has trouble dealing with the knowledge that his trade (and as someone who always pursued wealth, his purpose in life) has become meaningless.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • When Quark, Rom, and Nog wind up in the 20th Century in "Little Green Men", Quark considers gold a perfectly good commodity for which to trade with the humans. Although the episode doesn't mention it, this makes sense in context, because he knows it's a time before replicators were invented.
    • "Who Mourns for Morn?", the episode whose quote is at the top of the main page, involves Quark coming into possession of a large number of gold bars that have had all their latinum extracted, making them worthless (though he does note at the end of the episode that gold does still have some value with some less developed species, presumably the ones without replicators).
  • Star Trek: Voyager played with this in the episode "Alice". The crew gets conned into buying a worthless beryllium crystal, but Seven reveals that several nearby races use them for currency, and to the right buyer it's worth an entire fleet. They end up using the crystal to bribe the same guy they bought it from (they weren't going in that direction anyway, so it's not worth it to them to make a detour just to sell it directly).
  • Star Trek: Enterprise inverts the trope in "Rajiin". In order to get their hands on the formula for some Applied Phlebotinum, Archer gives an alien merchant a selection of Earth spices, presumably from the kitchen. While spices aren't exactly worthless on Earth (as Trip says, "on our world, wars were fought over these"), Archer could probably have replaced the sample set for about 50 bucks. But to the alien merchant, they're exotic spices from a distant world, which he can probably sell for significantly more than the value of the formula he trades.
• In the Tales from the Crypt episode "Dead Wait", the protagonist explores a remote location, searching for a legendary black pearl in the hopes of getting rich. In the end, a local voodoo priestess (Whoopi Goldberg) murders him, celebrating that collecting his scalp full of red hair will increase her status immensely. She notices the pearl and throws it away like it was trash.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", Farwell is the last survivor of the four criminals who stole £1 million in gold bars and placed themselves in suspended animation for 100 years. Dying of dehydration in Death Valley, he offers all of his gold to a passing motorist named George in exchange for water. He dies before George can do anything to help him. George is surprised that he offered him gold as if it were really worth something, since a way to manufacture it was developed decades earlier. As he and his wife drive away, he throws the worthless bar of gold to the ground. This trope was also invoked on the trip through the burning desert, where a drink of water was sold for one gold bar each.
• An episode of Wonder Woman (1975) dealt with this concept: how do you establish a galactic currency when wildly varying worlds use gold or steel or wood. The rather squicky solution that some unethical individuals come up with is using minds sucked out of their original bodies.

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