Here's one to start the thread off, and yes, the example itself point out how wrong it sounds (from the Arthur episode "D.W All Wet"):
- Accidental Innuendo: While the title refers to D.W. swimming in Bear Lake, a few commenters on YouTube note have taken it the wrong way... completely ignoring the fact that D.W. is four years old, so thinking about her being wet in "that way" is extremely squicky.
Also, I wonder if we should put a blanket ban on (or at least heavy restrictions to) Accidental Innuendo examples related to shows intended for people below a certain age. By using the "Related" feature on the trope, I've seen examples for Arthur, Peppa Pig (which has since been removed), Barney and Friends, Caillou, Dora The Explorer, Littlest Pet Shop, and Strawberry Shortcake. That isn't even all of them, and most of the examples are shoehorned like you wouldn't believe. For example, the one regarding Caillou I removed a little while ago:
- Accidental Innuendo: "It's too hard..."
Edited by UFOYeah on Mar 1st 2023 at 4:53:12 AM
I wanna be a cowboy, baby
oh that's nasty...
Yeah I'd definitely support a ban on that. Why shoehorn innuendo into children's shows of all things...
Stan GaruKaru for clear skin
the Retromancer
I believe a good rule of thumb is checking if examples "could reasonably be mistaken for innuendos if somebody were to listen to the scene out of context". While it should be applicable everywhere, ZCE is ZCE and can't stay.
Following on ZCE, it's evident that people insert 5-grader jokes where they turn out to be illogical if the scene was considered. Not every mention of "hard", "wet", "lick", "come in" in an innuendo. If you can't describe the scene in a suggestive way, it's not an example.
Work's age rating would be another good reference point, though of course some poor phrasing can be considered "unintentional Getting Crap Past the Radar" that may count.
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
This line in "Randall's Reform". Randall: Kids of the playground! I give you... BALLS!"
writer/producer/director/visionary/troper Ai-Fan The Master Of The Romantic (But Deadly) Drinking Game And Haiku™
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
That tends to crop up a lot, whenever balls are mentioned in any context, in any show, expect someone to make an Accidental Innuendo entry about it.
It even extends to Barney
:
- Accidental Innuendo: Hard to avoid given the episode's topic, but the episode contains a few instances.
- "When You Have a Ball" includes the following lyrics note :
Because balls are for girls (Balls are for girls)And balls are for boys (Balls are for boys)That's why so many kids around the world are playing with these toys.There are big ones, there are small onesHard ones, soft ones,Bounce against the wall ones- The "Barney Says" segment has this in spades:
Barney: There sure were a lot of balls around Baby Bop! And a lot of friends too.Oh, I think that balls are just about the best toys in the whole world! I'm sure you'll love them.
She / Her
That reads as, at best, lacking context to me. Granted, it's more so in the way it was written because it's one of those entries that relies on a quote placed below the entry for context.
I sent that subpage to the Cut List because those entries lack context. EDIT: It's been cut now.
Edited by RandomTroper123 on Mar 3rd 2023 at 9:35:11 AM
Angry babby
Personally I don't think we should ban Accidental Innuendo from kid shows because that's where it's most likely to be accidental. If people make a vague joke about a line in a kid show then so be it, even if it's gross. But it shouldn't feel like someone forced it to be dirty, i.e. "D.W. All Wet" because "all wet" really isn't a predominantly dirty term.
I definitely think the fact the Barney lyrics were cut in later airings suggests it's a valid "woops" moment.
Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 3rd 2023 at 3:59:53 PM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
No longer active.
I agree with you there. Accidentally dirty moments in children's shows are extremely common subjects for listicles and countdown videos, to the point where they're practically cliché; a quick search for something like "top 10 dirty jokes in kid's shows" brings up plenty of results in that vein.
She / Her
Thirded. I just think one needs to be careful about what they're typing (like the D.W. thing).
I wanna be a cowboy, baby
Fair enough.
Still though I think there should be at least a comment or notice, something along the lines of “not every use of “balls” or “suck” etc. is an innuendo”
Stan GaruKaru for clear skin
Angry babby
I don't really know what kind of comment to make, this feels like it's best dealt with on a case by case basis.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
I wanna be a cowboy, baby
Case by case makes sense
Stan GaruKaru for clear skin
I wanna be a cowboy, baby
Anyway, I did a cursory look through the wicks myself and found this AI tree on YMMV.Barney And Friends:
- Accidental Innuendo:
- Multiple episodes have B.J. becoming Captain Pickles, who proclaims to make the world "safe for pickle lovers everywhere."
- One song in the show is about brushing your teeth. Unfortunately, the hand gestures that are being made... do not look exactly like tooth brushing. Can be seen in this video. The show's producers likely noticed and changed the choreography for "Brushing My Teeth" in future episodes. In the same season, in fact.
- The Israeli adaptation’s opening song translates to this in English, likely thanks to different word definitions in Hebrew:
Barney is a sort of dinosaur
In our imagination;
When he's big, then he can
Touch all of us.
The teeth-brushing one could probably stay, as it was noticed and changed, but the other two... iunno. Captain Pickles seems like a reach so I wanna snip that one alone
Stan GaruKaru for clear skin
(she/her)
Not sure about the other two but I agree that the pickle one sounds like a reach.
Macron's notes
The Recursive Translation of the theme song might also not qualify if it's a particularly bad translation back to English, but I obviously don't know Hebrew so I can't make that call.
No longer active.
I don't recall pickles ever being used as a euphemism for anything, so that one can be cut pretty easily.
Be kind.
The only place I've ever seen pickles used as a euphemism is in Sonichu, which has no bearing here whatsoever.
Angry babby
You'd think they wouldn't have to stretch for innuendo jokes when the character is already named BJ.
Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 11th 2023 at 6:14:28 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
I wanna be a cowboy, baby
but back on track, i looked through some of the YMMV wicks again and found this on YMMV.A Bugs Life that i’m kind of inclined to believe is also a reach.
- Accidental Innuendo: When Flik is showing off the telescope he's invented:
Flik: Hello, Princess! My, aren't you looking lovely this morning! ...Not that you'd need a telescope to see that.
i’m assuming the pothole to All Men Are Perverts is an attempt to “explain” the joke (the joke being Flik using the telescope to peep on the princess, apparently), but even with having not seen the movie in a while I doubt it was intended to be a peeper joke to begin with.
Stan GaruKaru for clear skin
Angry babby
Well, the point of Accidental Innuendo is that it's not intended. The real question is whether it's a reach.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
She / Her
I think that's a reach.
Angry babby
AccidentalInnuendo.Advertising is a bit of a mess, partly cuz all Advertising pages are, but also because examples from the Radar page were moved without checking if they were even accidental. I cut those but here's what's left.
- "The name of the game is 'Ball Buster'!" The bit with the mom and dad makes me doubt how accidental it was but it is a classic example.
- A Best Buy commercial offering a free "hook-up" if you buy an HDTV from them. "Hook-up" is an actual technical term but I can see the wording sounding like an innuendo.
- In almost every Danimals yogurt commercial, Bongo the Monkey gets a load of yogurt (shot out of a rather phallic container) splattered all over his face, which he happily licks off and declares it "fruity-licious". Keep
- Disney XD plugged its broadcast of a Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournament with the tagline of "Bros. Will. Be. Smashed." "Smash" is slang for sex in some contexts. Keep
- An ad for the Dyson vacuum cleaner features the rather effeminate-voiced James Dyson extolling its superior "suction". Craig Ferguson has taken to having fun with the ad in his monologues on The Late Late Show. Probably a keep
- There is a Huggies commercial containing the line "Did we just make babies too fast?" Keep, though I'd like to know the actual context.
- This ad for a Look Who's Talking t-shirt has the line "He's just a kid and his hand gets tired". Dead link, feels like a reach
- This commercial for Johnson on-board motorboats keeps mentioning "your Johnson", which is also a slang term for penis, and the commercial features men. One would think it was intentional if not for "You, your kids, and your Johnson!" Keep
- This infamous ad from a 1942 edition of Women's Day Magazine: "Gee, Bill! How come your mom lets you eat two wieners?" I think his smug look might sell this as valid accidental innuendo more than just "wieners = penis = funny."
- There was once a commercial for a kids' pager called the Little Bugger. In America, "bugger" means someone who bugs (i.e. aggravates) someone else, but in the Antipodes, "bugger" is slang for anal sex. Maybe
- Mr. Bucket. "Balls pop out of my mouth!" Played with in this video by James Rolfe. Could use more context
- And we have this Ortega Taco commercial, where the (underaged at the time) Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson says "My taco is the best" and that Ortega's sauce "makes [her] taco pop".note Uncomfortable that the spokeswoman is underage but I do think this is a keeper.
- Pixos, which is some sort of kid's art thing, has the tagline "What pops and sprays for fun that stays?". Eh, maybe?
- Play-Doh commercials end with the disclaimer, "fun to play with, not to eat!" Obviously it means what it means, but if you take it in another context with another certain act.... ...What? This is a stretch.
- Silk Soy Milk once ran an advertising campaign that has the tagline "Do Plants", which sounds like they want us to have sex with plants. Probably keep
- The Wet Banana. It's slippery, wet fun for the whole gang. Keep with more context.
Narrator: Could that be Mom on the Wet Banana?
- This◊ Wetzel's Pretzels poster. Apparently Wetzel isn't Jewish, judging by his dog. Uh yeah, if it's unintentional, this would fit with more context.
- A certain car dealership has the slogan "He just wants to get you a loan."note Sounds like a deliberate pun.
- Can happen when foreign companies produce marketing materials for a different country. Not so much Lost in Translation as something is added in the translation that shouldn't be there. For example, a children's toy that says on the box: "Will provide hours of ecstatic stimulation." General example
- Get your skis shined up grab a stick of Juicy fruit the taste is gonna move you! Take a sniff, pull it out, the taste is gonna move you when you pop it in your mouth! The comments on the video say this could be a drug joke? The entry should clarify that.
- How wet you get...?: Let's face it, from the very moment you hear that you're thinking in everything but the toy dog the commercial is actually talking about.note I feel very icky about people thinking "wet" always has to mean "aroused" when referring to kids.
- NSPCA’s I Saw Your Willy PSA has a bully text “ur willy is rubbish!” to Alex, which makes him come across as being gay and having seen other willies. Counts as Nightmare Retardant too, since the PSA was meant to Scare 'Em Straight, but the sheer immaturity of the insult made it funny. Well they are talking about penises in context, so it's not Accidental Innuendo so much as Alternative Character Interpretation, really.
- The tagline for this Mexican commercial for a very well known brand of antiacids is Reconciliate Con La Comida (translated as Get Along Well With the Food) but after watching this commercial, maybe this guy wants to get along with that pig in a very different way. Is this accidental, really? Seems they're deliberately making it look like a romantic reunion.
- This commercial for..... nuts. It refers to a bag of almonds as a "nut sack". No, he says nut snack. Do misheard ones count?
- This ad for hot dogs features the mascot singing, "Weenies! Weenies!". Hey I remember this! I think there's not enough to really set it aside from 'weenies' just being an Inherently Funny Word.
- "The backseat of my Subaru is where (our little girl) grew up." It was meaning to mean that she'd spent a great deal of her childhood there, but it unfortunately makes it sound as though she'd lost her virginity there. Could be kept
- "Don't squeeze the Charmin!" Obviously, Mr. Whipple's talking about the toilet paper, but when taken in other context, squeezing the Charmin also refers to when a person squeezes another person's butt, usually as part of petting and foreplay by couples or out of lust by single women. This is also on DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything.Advertising and suggests it could've been deliberately referring to butt squeezes.
- That old Canadian PSA that tells you, "Don't you put it in your mouth!" A bit of a reach but I have seen the joke made before.
- There was an infamous advertising campaign in the United States during the early 1970s for the now-defunct National Airlines that had as its slogan, "Come on and fly me." Sung by a myriad of beautiful women implied to be the airline's flight attendants. Eh, how accidental is it really?
- The early Nintendo DS advertising tagline was "Touching is good". The tagline was referencing to the touch screen, but everyone else took it a completely different direction. Keep
- A commercial for Mario Kart 7 features the guys of Big Time Rush playing. One's kart is struck by the lightning weapon which shrinks the kart. He asks "Hey, why am I small?" and his buddy replies, "Genetics". Lean keep. They're talking about size in general but it could be read as a dick joke.
- This ad has lines like "People will come! People will most definitely come!". The overuse of the word "come", which is sometimes used as a slang term meaning "to have an orgasm", makes the ad seem unintentionally saucy. Keep? The repeated focus on the word 'come' isn't sexual at all in context but using "come" on its own in that last line could raise an eyebrow.
- George Carlin pointed out the hidden sexual messages as well as open messages in commercials, what concerned him were the subliminal messages. Case in point: a commercial for Tiparillo cigars has the tagline "Should a gentleman offer a lady a Tiparillo?" with the scene of a train entering a tunnel. (Carlin: "You don't have to be Fellini to figure that one out!") Other taglines of dubious context: "Wouldn't you really rather have a Buick?," "Get your hands on a Toyota," "Taste me, taste me" (Doral cigarettes) and the filthiest one, "It's not how long you make it, it's how you make it long" (Winston cigarettes). Some of these don't sound as dirty as Carlin suggested, and his point seems to be that they're not accidental, so where would this go?
- This commercial for a toy called "Balzac". Not only is the name uncomfortably similar to "ball sack", but the jingle is all about how you can do things like "smack", "whack", and "clench" it. Keep, it's a kids' toy but... man.
- One of the Super Soaker squirt guns was designed to eject it in a slimy fashion. The commercial puts a suspicious amount of focus on the kids pumping the gun. Nostalgia Critic did make a joke about this but I've always been uncomfortable with it.
- This bumper for Barney & Friends features a simplified animation of the show's logo. Barney's large foot in the air doesn't look strange in the standard logo, but the scratchy line art makes it look less like a foot and more like a giant floppy penis. I added this and I still think it looked weird.
- Paramount advertised their line of Peanuts videos in the late '90s with this promo, which opens with a man asking the viewer "You wanna talk about Peanuts videos?" Unfortunately, he didn't enunciate the "T" in "Peanuts" very well. (The line was later redubbed with a better pronunciation of "Peanuts".) Keep if misheard lines count
- A Hallmark greeting card, one of the kind that speaks, had to be recalled because the talking characters, Hoops and Yoyo, were thought to have said "black hoes" instead of "black holes". Again, do misheard lines count? Also is this even advertising?
- Many years ago Sask Pork, the agency promoting Saskatchewan pork producers, started an advertising campaign with a new slogan: "Pork. The one you love." However the billboards (second entry on this list) featured a woman hugging a guy (with a bit of a goofy grin) presumably grilling some pork chops. The period seemed to disappear and suddenly most people read it as one statement. Probably keep
- The Slap Chop ad features Vince Offer chopping up food... but when he chops up some nuts, he says, "You're gonna love my nuts". Probably an intentional Double Entendre given the fact he makes similar jokes in other ads
- The Spanish dub manages to also have an Accidental Innuendo. This time, when he chops up the hard-boiled egg, he says, "¡Mira mi huevo!". Literally, this means, "look at my egg", but in Spanish, "huevos" (meaning "eggs") is also used as a profane term for the male gonads.
- This ad by the same guy also features an Accidental Innuendo. He was advertising a type of lint roller called a "Schticky", which sounds kind of suggestive already, but when he's talking about how it can remove cat hair, he says, "Problems with that shedding pussy?".
- The Spanish dub
- Kellogg's Rice Krispies unfortunately led into this route in Canada. Not even Snap, Crackle, and Pop were safe from appearing in this suspicious boy band parody.. ZCE but watching the commercial... you have to be actively seeing things, the framing of the straws isn't nearly as phallic like they seem to believe.
- Subway's ads have included referring to subs as "yum rockets". Manages to be a Narm too. Maybe?
- You'll see the "Suck da head and pinch da tail" slogan all over New Orleans. It's the technique for eating crawfish: break in half, pinch tail to get the meat out, and suck the juices from the head. Presumably keep but maybe the innuendo's intentional, IDK
- An older Burger King commercial, in which a Whopper sandwich is berating his son, Whopper Jr., for selling himself for only a dollar. Dead link but I remember seeing this ad and I think it may be deliberate Double Entendre.
- "Your dad's really throwing his weight around!" "All quarter-pound of it!" I don't get the innuendo here.
- The Spanish lollipop brand Chupa Chups, which is distributed to other countries, got away with their slogan "The Joy of Sucking" for many years before changing it to "Life Less Ordinary". Keep
- The Jello Pudding's "Pudding Face" commercial. The Urban Dictionary definition of "pudding face" gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "$#!+-eating grin". Unsure, I feel like that definition may be too obscure as I've only seen it used here, and Urban Dictionary tends to make terms up retroactively.
- One commercial for Fruit by the Foot has one kid claiming to have replaced something vital of another kid's with Fruit by the Foot while pointing at his crotch. His skis, what else? Keep
- The Wunder Boner, anyone? It's a product for easily removing a fish's bones. Keep
Dave: It's the Wunder Boner.
[everybody is snickering]
Man #2: The Wunder Boner?!?!
Dave: Aw, you laugh now. JUUUUST watch...
[later, the men are really convinced this product can work]
Man #2: The Wunder Boner!
Man #3: My wife would like that!
[even later]
Man #2: So, uh, Dave, where DID you get the Wunder Boner?
Dave: Funny you should ask! - An ad for Herbal Essences shampoo features women using the shampoo and hallucinating their fantasies with the slogan "Someone's been doing the Herbal". One example. This felt intentional to me.
- A Time Warner Cable commercial from 1999 has the tagline "We wanna turn you on". Does it advertise the Playboy channel in question? No. It's supposed to be a reference to actually powering a television on. Keep if unintentional
Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 13th 2023 at 8:52:30 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
Logic Girl
I agree that "His arm gets tired" and "Fun to play with, not to eat" are reaches. I feel this one is a reach too, but I'd like a second opinion:
YMMV.Daniel Tigers Neighborhood:
- Accidental Innuendo: Dad Tiger saying "What happened? You both look sticky and wet" during "Daniel Loves Tigey". He says this to Daniel as Margaret walks up behind him, as they were playing together. It becomes clear with preceding/following comments that "you both" refers to Daniel and Tigey and that Margaret spilled orange juice on them.
Angry babby
Ew yeah, that feels like a reach.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
This issue tends to come up fairly often in the P5 cleanup thread
, and as Macron also brought up, Accidental Innuendo has a lot of wicks that are probably misuse of the "Heh Heh, You Said "X"" variant (especially when applied to childrens’ shows).
(Examples are handled on a case by case basis, and for now there’s no talk of imposing any limitations on examples)
Edited by worldwidewoomy on Mar 9th 2023 at 11:33:03 AM
Stan GaruKaru for clear skin