Needs Help: Road Movie

Don't see the need for another crowner. The option in this one included the name to be changed to and still had a strong consensus.

Yes, when the first crowner already had a name proposed as part of a solution, voting on it again is pointless.

Cool. In that case, let's get this moved and tweaked. Should be fairly easy.

I can do the tweaking after it's moved.

Any decision on what to do with Road Trip Episode. I'd prefer a merge there, redirecting both Road Movie and Road Trip Episode to Road Trip Plot.

That seems like a good idea.

Just to get a step ahead of things while we decide what to do with Road Trip Episode, I'm gonna go ahead and add and sort examples as shown in the YKTTW I made, linked on the previous page.

Okey dokey, non-movie examples ported over from YKTTW discussion, examples sorted. I guess now all that remains is the move. I will tweak the definition as I did in the YKTTW, and will make sure that the definition references "road movie" as a cinematic industry term.

Are we ready for the move now?

Yes. That's wha the star means.

Bump!

Someone needs to write up a text for the new trope. It's a combination of this YKTTW and Road Movie, for the record.

Done! Did that as part of the Road Trip Plot YKTTW I started during previous discussion. Link is here. Essentially the same verbiage as Road Movie, only tweaked for the new plot name. Should I paste it into the Road Movie trope now or wait for the move?

When's the move?

—R.J.

Once someone does it.

Might be easiest if gallium posts the new description here, then someone can just do the move and paste it in.

—R.J.

->Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car. —>— E.B. White, One Man's Meat

A Road Trip Plot is a work about characters taking a trip to go from point A to point Z. Along the way, they stop by points B, C, D, et all while things happen to them at each point. Oftentimes a comedy, but occasionally a drama. The things that happen often teach the characters things they didn't know about themselves. Unsurprisingly, this type of plot opens itself wide to Cliche Storms and Narm, but directors conscious of what kind of movie they are making can defy these and create very original and poignant tales.

An important distinction needs to be made between a Road Trip Plot and a Walking the Earth story. If the heroes encounter an adventure at every stop and end up staying at each location for a while to solve some major problem or deal with a big event, it's Walking the Earth, especially if each location can be considered an Adventure Town. If, on the other hand, each location is merely a brief stop along the way, and the story is more about the journey than the specific locations, then it's a Road Trip Plot.

Not all Road Trip Plots involve use of a vehicle, but it's often what one associates with the genre: a family or group of friends traveling in a car—or a van, or on horseback, maybe even on a boat—from one place to another, with stuff happening at each location.

Films with a Road Trip Plot are called "road movies" and are a distinct cinematic genre. Because of the vastness of the continental United States, and its wide road network and car culture, many Road Trip Plots take place there.

Compare Blake Snyder's description of this plot, under the title Golden Fleece. Also compare The Quest, along with Booker's version of the archetypes behind it.

If the work is part of a tightly networked franchise and is the only / one of the few film(s) to feature a Road Trip, it crosses into the Road Trip Episode lane.

See also the Music equivalent of this trope, Wanderlust Song.

Examples:

Comic Books

• Asterix and the Banquet is about Asterix and Obelix on a "Tour de Gaule", collecting speciality food from various cities throughout France in a bid for freedom from the Romans, who are enclosing their village from the rest of the world with a stockade.
• The "Hard-Travelling Heroes" arc in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, where Hal and Ollie travel across the US so Hal can reconnect with ordinary humans and the problems they face.
• Likewise with the "Superman: Grounded" arc of Superman.

Film - Animation

• Bolt has the title character trying to travel back from New York City to Los Angeles, with a notable stop in Vegas.
• Finding Nemo is a story about a fish swimming in the ocean, so there aren't any roads. But otherwise it fits this trope exactly, as Marlin travels across the ocean to find Nemo, meeting many colorful sea creatures along the way.
• A Goofy Movie is about Goofy (yes, the Disney character) taking his son Max on a father-son trip, while Max attempts to take a trip to a concert he wishes to attend. After Goofy discovers what he's been up to, they end up doing both.

Film - Live Action

• Dogma is about a trip/chase from Illinois to New Jersey. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is about their shenanigans on the way from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
• Dumb and Dumber, Harry and Lloyd travel from Rhode Island to Colorado on a dog shaped van.
• Easy Rider centers around the main characters' road trip to New Orleans. It isn't a comedy.
• The Trope Maker, as far as the "road movie" sub-genre is concerned, is It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert is a spoiled heiress who wants to escape her father's detectives and make her way from Florida to New York to get married. Clark Gable is the newspaper reporter who aids her in exchange for the scoop on her story. Naturally, romance ensues.
• Knockin' on Heaven's Door: Two terminally ill guys with just a couple of days left to live get to know each other and refuse to just sit in a hospital and await their fate. They steal a car and go on a last road trip to see the ocean for the first and last time in their lives. The thing is, the car was used by gangsters to deliver a substantial amount of money to a kingpin.
• Little Miss Sunshine is about a family who travels across state lines and has various misadventures along the way, while trying to get to a beauty pageant in time for their daughter to participate.
• The Muppet Movie, in which Kermit sets off from the swamplands of the American South on his way to Hollywood to become rich and famous, picking up all of his Muppet friends along the way.
• National Lampoon's Vacation, in which Chevy Chase takes his family on a disastrous road trip from Chicago to Southern California to visit Wally World, a Captain Ersatz of Disneyland. The sequel, National Lampoon's European Vacation, is basically the same plot, but with the Griswolds in Europe instead.
• Paul is about two bumbling nerds who are on their way to a Sci-fi convention to pitch a comic one of them's written, only to wind up picking up a Grey named Paul who escaped Area 51 and was trying to get to an area where he could contact his people to leave. Hijinks and an accidental kidnapping ensue.
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which is all about a businessman's frantic efforts to make it from New York to Chicago for Thanksgiving, while all kinds of bad luck and complications get in his way.
• All of the Hope/Crosby On The Road pictures, which always featured Bob and Bing as comic partners getting in various misadventures as they traveled from A to B.
• Rain Man. After the Black Sheep brother finds out that he's been disinherited, with his late father having left all his money to an unknown older brother in an institution, he kidnaps the brother and goes off on a cross-country trip.
• Rubin and Ed comically relates a trip made through Utah to give a man's deceased cat a proper burial.
• Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird has Big Bird traveling to the fictional Ocean View, Illinois, to live with Dodo family, only to find he doesn't really fit in with the family, and flees to return to Sesame Street; at the same time, his friends embark on a journey to try and meet him half way.
• The Sure Thing is a great example from The '80s, combining this with Quest for Sex, as a college student travels from the east coast to California in search of nookie with the eponymous "sure thing".
• Tommy Boy follows Tommy and Richard's travels as they attempt to sell brake pads. Complete with singing along with the car radio, hitting a deer, and other events typical of the genre.
• Zombieland is pretty much a Road Movie set after the zombie apocalypse. Initially, Columbus is looking to get to Columbus, Ohio to find his estranged parents (mostly for want of anything else to do) and the girls are going to Pacific Playland. Tallahasee is mostly just in it for the zombie killin' (and the Twinkies). Halfway through, Columbus finds out his parents are very probably dead already, and once the climax at Pacific Playland is over, the end of the movie seems to signal the four of them starting their Walking the Earth.

Literature

• Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon is a nonfiction chronicle of the author travelling around the US in his camper-outfitted van on back roads (highways that were often colored as narrow blue lines on old gas-station maps), visiting many obscure or ideosyncratic small towns, in the 1970s.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both the book and the film.
• Generation Kill is effectively described as a combination of this genre with a war movie, as it deals with the members of Marine Recon driving through Iraq during the 2003 invasion.
• Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn may qualify, in that while Huck and Jim didn't go "across" the country, they did journey down the Mississippi River from the North to the South on a crude raft, with plenty of perils (particularly for Jim in the Antebellum South).
• The Odyssey, in a way. It's basically about a king and his men on their journey home from war. By sea, of course.
• The Road, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and film starring Viggo Mortensen about a boy and his father following an abandoned highway After the End.
• The Stand turns into an After the End version of this, as the characters make harrowing journeys to either the rallying place for the protagonists (Boulder, CO) or the rallying place for Satan and his antagonists (Las Vegas, of course).
• Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance details a motorcycle journey by him and his son across the western US, along with a journey of philosophical and spiritual discovery.

Music

• Havalina Rail Co.'s album America is a concept album about a road trip across the US, with each song corresponding to a different area traveled through. The back cover of the album has a map depicting the route traveled.

Pinball

• Red & Ted's Road Show has its titular protagonists traveling across America, wreaking havoc along the way.
• World Cup Soccer had the player progressing through the cup in different locales in the U.S. (matching those of the 1994 World Cup, which the game was made to promote).
• The much-maligned pinball game Vacation America was all about this.

Video Games

• Pictured above is the SNES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, which had stages all over... what is probably supposed to be the United States.

Web Video

• While the first Chris and Scottie's Road Trip (made by the same man behind The Irate Gamer) was a World Tour, the second installment is focused on the US instead.

edited 31st Oct '14 5:56:22 PM by gallium

Per request, here's the description for Road Trip Plot, which as you will see is only slightly revised from Road Movie.

I understand there's some sort of forum bug that prevents photo captions from properly displaying.

edited 31st Oct '14 5:57:33 PM by gallium

Tropes moved and merged, Road Trip Plot is now live. If someone can eyeball it for mistakes (or missing entries from Road Trip Episode), that'd be great.

—R.J.

Moved the discussion. The only thing missing now are the notifications in the FAQ forum, the discussion page and Renamed Tropes.

Thanks to all for your help. I'll be closing that ykttw since it is now moot, and going through the non-movie examples on the page and adding Road Trip Plot to their pages.

Does anybody still have the original Road Trip Episode examples list?

Here's a link that will give the history of Road Trip Episode before the migration.

—R.J.

All right then, I will commence adding the Road Trip Episode examples to the trope. I have also added a paragraph with a condensed version of the three types of Road Trip Episode to the description.

EDIT: Done.

edited 7th Nov '14 6:24:22 AM by gallium

Noticed there are wicks that still needing to be migrated, so will be starting on that. Is there anything else this page needs?