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    For the Pink Floyd album/film 
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • The Trial sequence: Pink's personal despairing nightmare of being judged, or his subconscious' moment of personal triumph in having the strength to look at himself honestly at last and then destroy the Wall with the help of the "Bleeding Hearts and Artists" outside who never lost faith in him?
    • The album runs on it. Pink's biggest failing is that he never really stopped to think about why his bricks acted the way they did.
    • The film does this with "Young Lust". On the album, the song (which details Pink having casual sex with groupies while on tour) ends with Pink calling his wife from America only to have a man answer the phone and the phone operator having a very concerned reaction to the situation. In the film, the song starts with the phone call, which leads Pink to attempt to have sex with a groupie rather than already having him cheat.
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: If the idea of a rock star turning a concert into a neo-fascist rally sounds ridiculous, remember that Eric Clapton delivered a racist rant on-stage in Birmingham in 1976. In another parallel with Pink, he was very drunk at the time. David Bowie had also toyed with fascist imagery in the Station to Station era with his "Thin White Duke" persona, and once infamously advocated the idea of a fascist Britain during an in-character interview. One notorious photo also appears to depict Bowie giving the Nazi salute (Bowie and eyewitnesses attest that he was simply photographed mid-wave). Bowie deeply regretted the Thin White Duke fiasco and, similarly to Pink's predicament, attributed it to psychosis induced by heavy cocaine use.
  • And You Thought It Would Fail: When executives at Columbia Records, the band's U.S. label at the time, heard the finished album, they were apparently unimpressed. The label balked at releasing a double album, proposing reduced royalties. One exec even proposed flipping a coin with Roger Waters, but Waters refused, saying that he shouldn't have to gamble on something he owned. The label backed down, and the album became one of the band's most popular, becoming the highest-selling double-album of all time.
  • Award Snub: The only Grammy it won was for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical. The Grammys it lost, and what they lost to? Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal? Lost to Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band's Against the Wind. Album of the Year? Lost to Christopher Cross's self-titled debut album. The latter is particularly infamous among both fans and music historians thanks to the greater public longevity of The Wall compared to Christopher Cross, which despite its contemporary popularity is only widely remembered decades later for being the first digitally recorded album to chart in the US. Ironically, Christopher Cross was also one of the nominees for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Common Knowledge: Many people think that the "Happiest Days of Our Lives/Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2) sequence of the movie is the actual promo clip due to a VH1 Classic recording of it (identified by the channel as a music video) gaining nearly 400 million views and everyone can't name the "Happiest Days" song. In fact, it's actually this simpler one.
  • Creator Worship:
    • The reason this album was created. Roger (and the audience) started seeing himself as a godlike being, above and disconnected from the fans. This culminated in the spitting incident that inspired this album. As the analysis linked to on the main page put it:
      Waters was obviously horrified both by his own actions and the idea of an audience so blindly obedient to the idea of celebrity that they would gladly be "blown to bits"...or even spit upon.
    • The original demo lyrics of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)", as heard on the 2011 Immersion box set edition make the theme more obvious.
      First verse: We don't need your adulation
      We don't need your starry gaze
      How the years have come between us
      You should have seen them in the early days
      Second verse: They don't need your reminiscing
      They don't need your memories
      They don't want to hear who's missing
      Ya should have seen them when the boys were young
  • Cult Classic: The film adaptation of the album became a staple of the "midnight movie" circuit in the 1980s.
  • Epic Riff: "Comfortably Numb" and "Run Like Hell". It's no accident that David Gilmour co-wrote both tunes.
  • Fanon:
    • Pink's real name is Floyd Pinkerton. Never definitively confirmed, but the film does give his late father's name as "J.H. Pinkerton", apparently establishing "Pinkerton" as his surname.
    • Pink attempted suicide sometime after the events of the story, prompting him to finally seek therapy for his mental issues. This one is based on the popular interpretation that the title track from The Final Cut, which is about a man looking back on his life following an abortive suicide attempt, is an epilogue to The Wall. "The Final Cut" was originally written for The Wall (as were a few other songs on that album), so make of that what you will.
  • Faux Symbolism: A relative aversion in that the mind screw imagery actually has well thought out meaning behind it.
  • Funny Moments: Now has its own page.
  • Less Disturbing in Context: Sometimes understanding the meaning behind the bizarre imagery makes it a little less disturbing, or in some cases, just makes it more fucked up. This might help.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "If ye don't eat yer meat, ye can't have any pudding!"
    • "TEAR DOWN THE WALL!" Explanation 
    • Like everything throughout Pink Floyd's career, Roger's eccentric screaming between "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" and "Run Like Hell".
    • "We don't need no education!"Explanation 
    • "Oooh babe!"
    • "My balls."Explanation 
  • Misaimed Fandom:
    • Although the last quarter of The Wall was an attack on neo-Nazis, regrettably some individuals failed to grasp this, as the ADL's page concerning the Hammerskin Nation makes abundantly clear.note 
    • When Roger Waters took his solo Wall tour to Europe in 2013, concertgoers misinterpreted Waters' use of the Star Of David (along with other logos and symbols such as the Christian cross, McDonald's logo, hammer and sickle, Shell Oil logo and the Mercedes logo being dropped like bombs from airplanes) during the "Goodbye Blue Sky" visual, along with a Star Of David printed on the inflatable pig which is destroyed, and the Hammers/Nazis scenes, as being Anti-Semite and Pro-Nazi. Waters denied this, stating he was protesting it as a "symbol of the state" rather than the Jewish religion, and that his issue was with Israel conducing what he saw as a state of Apartheid within its borders since 1967.
    • To a lesser extent, grungy teenagers who use the album's songs as an actual rallying cry for their own social isolation are kind of not getting the message.
    • When it comes to individual songs from the album, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" has been a particular target.
      • "We don't need no education." has several meanings, to believe it is a song against learning or education is to miss the subtlety. In fact, the sentence is a double negative, which literally means "We need education", suggesting that yes, education can be a good thing in developing well-rounded individuals. The song is a protest, however, against cruel teachers and systems who mold the school children into mindless drones of society. It is saying "We don't need this type of education." It's a criticism against the types of teachers and systems that, as in Pink's case, ridicule an imaginative child for writing poetry, and are aimed mainly at crushing students' individuality to mould them into an "acceptable" shape.
      • Roger Waters explains that the song isn't anti-education, but against the kind of strict, demoralizing, condescending, conformist schooling like Waters suffered through, which discourages free thought and expression in attempts to keep its students in line and keep them subservient. This was more evident in the demo, where the original lyric was "We don't need your education".
        Waters: "Obviously not all teachers are what we have to fear. The school I was at — they were really like that. They were so fucked up that what they had to offer was their own bitterness and cynicism. Some of them, I may say, were very nice guys and understood what was going on."
    • "Young Lust" gets airplay on classic rock stations and is also likely taken at face value divorced from the context of the album, despite being a parody of Arena Rock.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Pink, when he forms an actual white supremacist movement. (This is if we take his perspective at face value.)
  • Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Tim Curry as the Prosecutor in the Live in Berlin version of "The Trial". The Judge in general is this, especially in the movie, where the main thing most audiences remember afterwards is the giant, singing ass.
  • Questionable Casting: Toni Tennille, best known as the vocalist for then-husband-and-wife soft rock duo Captain & Tennille, sang backup vocals for the songs in Fascist Pink's persona. Tennille even attended one of the live shows and a Pink Floyd fan recognized her but didn't believe she sang on the album until he checked the album credits, as his friend had brought a copy of the album to the show.
  • Retroactive Recognition: A teacher is played by Brenda Cowling, who would later be best known for playing Mrs. Lipton in You Rang, M'Lord?. Pink's Manager is played by Bob Hoskins, who already had a respectable acting career but wasn't yet the household name that Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook helped him become.
  • Signature Song: "Comfortably Numb", "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2", and "The Trial" are collectively the most famous songs on the album. Doubles as Signature Scene due to the film sequences associated with them also being highly iconic, particularly "The Trial".
  • Special Effect Failure: In a movie filled with horrific and visceral imagery, the "meat" coming out of the grinder the kids fall into in "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" is remarkably unconvincing.
  • Squick: Those dang genital flowers in "What Shall We Do Now?" (though they are beautifully animated!)
  • Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
  • Values Resonance:
    • The themes of social isolation and mental decay have taken on a new resonance during the COVID-19 lockdowns and subsequent psychological problems that many people suffered, as well as the resurgence of the far right in the '10s. The album's themes also resonate with the greater focus on mental health in the 21st century, to say nothing of its implicit condemnation of the mindless worship of celebrities.
    • On a musical level, the lyrics of "One of My Turns" could easily pass for the lyrics of an emo song, even though it was written around three decades before the genre existed—making it seem rather ahead of its time in hindsight.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome:
    • Both the original Pink Floyd version as well as Roger Waters' revival featured impressive stage shows.
    • Firstly, the wall was actually constructed across the entirety of the stage. Large brick-sized windows allowed the audience to see the band within, until the set got to "Another Brick in the Wall, pt. 3", when these would be closed off, and the open center portion began to be filled in. Waters would sing "Goodbye Cruel World" from the final brickhole, which would be closed by a stagehand at the moment the song finished. Additional notches in the wall would be revealed for the second half, including the trashed hotel room that Pink was staying in. Gilmour's solo in "Comfortably Numb" was performed on top of the wall, while the wall itself was tumbled from top to bottom by stagehands at the end of "The Trial".
    • Large puppets of the Schoolmaster, the Mother and the Wife appeared throughout the first half. Pink himself appeared as a tiny puppet atop the wall for "Stop".
    • A circular screen above and behind the band showed the animations provided by Scarfe; other projections would appear on the bricks of the wall, most notably during "Waiting for the Worms" and "The Trial", which played the same sequence from the film. For the 1990 performance on the "no man's land" section of the Berlin Wall outside Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, the call to "TEAR DOWN THE WALL" at the end of "The Trial" switched the animated footage to superimpose the actual graffiti from sections of the real Berlin Wall onto the fake one, before it was toppled over.
    • "In the Flesh?", as well as the Fascist Pink concert near the end of the album, were actually performed by a fake Pink Floyd band in front of the wall, complete with their own bombastic light show.
    • For the 1990 performance, all of the guest performers appeared in front of the wall in their own eccentric costumes, with Thomas Dolby as the Schoolmaster taking the cake: he was strapped to the wall in an enormous version of the costume, with the limbs containing large bungee straps for him to bounce around on.
    • For The Wall Live, Waters' 2010-13 tour, the puppets were updated, new animations were produced, and a drone-controlled inflatable pig were added.
  • The Woobie:

    For the Game Show 
  • Funny Moments
    • On one episode, a question about the Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up" comes up (specifically, naming the lyric that doesn't actually appear in the chorus), and of course, a clip of the video and song gets played as part of it. Hardwick mentions that he didn't think the Wall would ever Rickroll someone.
  • Padding: Of course, it would not be an NBC game show without it being excessively stretched out. The final round is the worst offender. There's also the fact that it almost seems scripted for the couples/families to play it up for the cameras where they yammer on about how they've gotten to where they are now before announcing whether or not they've torn up the contract, and then the other person drags it out by taking their sweet time to get to the meat of the conversation through working up to the reveal of their final total instead of it just being a direct "I did/did not tear up the contract", followed by "we won/would have won this much money", which is all we need to know. In other words, most endings will probably have you screaming, "Get on with it!"
    • On one episode, the contestant's father was prone to monologuing in the isolation room about personal experiences related to the question subjects, such as that one time they went hot air ballooning and he hated that there was no navigation system. Later on, a question comes up about car brands, and his daughter realizes he is sure to bore them all with a long-winded story about his Dodge Caravan. And wouldn't you know it, he does, completely stalling out the game.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Forcing contestants to take red balls in Rounds 2 and 3. They're seemingly added for no reason other than to potentially screw over contestants who play the question part perfectly.

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