Big-Lipped Cleanup Thread

Big-Lipped Alligator Moment has a strict definition that lists three criteria that must be met to apply those being "it needs to Appears out of nowhere, not make sense in context, and have no impact on the story whatsoever". However, many of the uses of the trope often fail to meet at least one of the criteria.

This was previously discussed in this Trope Talk thread, followed by this TRS thread; the latter was determined to be premature, so this thread was made instead.

This is from Glee. The show is known for being weird, but some of these seem a little forced.:

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In "The Power of Madonna", the club performs "Like a Prayer" onstage in front of a closed curtain. At the climax, the curtain opens and an entire gospel choir is revealed and sings along with the cast. This is never brought up again. This has been known to happen on the show. For instance, a lot of their performances included a band and it was rarely explained who they were.
  • "Make 'em Laugh" from "The Substitute" was just a dream sequence Will had from being sick and watching too much Singin' in the Rain.
  • Several Warbler numbers feel rather shoehorned. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" had little purpose aside from being Yaoi Genre fanservice, and "Bills, Bills, Bills" came right the hell out of nowhere after the commercial break with Regionals practice as its only Hand Wave. The example mentions that the show explained why they were singing.
  • While the shippers loved it, Kurt and Blaine's slow-mo run down a hallway in "Never Been Kissed" seems a little out of place. It also seemed that way to Chris Colfer, who said that the scene "was too gay even for me."
  • Near the end of "Guilty Pleasures", an episode about... an episode about... guilty pleasures, Tina reveals her love of Small Wonder by dressing as Vicki... and chasing Kitty down the hallway.
  • Even in Glee, most of the songs in "Puppet Master" were this. Half of them were gas-induced hallucinations, while the performance of Ylvis' "The Fox" at the end was completely unrelated to anything else in the episode, and was probably included to cash in the song's success. Since it happened multiple times and was given an explanation, I don't think this counts.
  • The appearances of Sugar and Joe in season six. They vanished at the end of season four with zero explanation, and appeared for single-scene cameos without any explanation for their return either. This isn't too weird, they were members of the Glee club. It's only odd because they were out of the show for so long.
  • "Suddenly Seymour" from the sixth season premiere. It's supposed to boost Rachel's spirit, but it's the most random, off-the-wall song choice. Literally any song could be used for the same purpose. Again, Glee was known for having a lot of random musical numbers.

The "Power of Madonna" one can be cut, the "Make 'em Laugh" one can be cut, the one about the Warbler numbers can have the "Baby It's Cold Outside" part stay but the rest can go, the "Never Been Kissed" needs a re-write to sound more neutral, "Guilty Pleasures" one can go, "Puppet Master" one can go, Sugar and Joe can go, and the "Suddenly Seymour" one can go.

I cut those examples. I don't know how to rewrite the "Never Been Kissed Example" since it's been a while since I've seen the show.

Two examples from Literature that seem shaky.

• Harry Potter's dreams and mental images can be downright WEIRD. Take, for instance, the dream Harry had in book 5 right before the attack on Arthur Weasley. In summary, Cho Chang tells Harry that Cedric had bought her tons of Chocolate Frogs, Hermione suggests giving her his Firebolt, he explains that it's currently locked in Umbridge's office, and he's trying to hang up Christmas ornaments shaped like Dobby's head. Yeah.
  • To be fair, his dreams are precisely like how normal dreams work, which helps establish the Mood Whiplash when he transitions from a normal (if odd) dream to a realistic, coherent vision of Nagini's attack.
• In The Help there is a scene in which a naked man attacks Minny and Celia at Celia's home in the country and tries to rape them. He immobilizes Minny, leaving Celia to fight him off by herself. Then he wanders away, never to be seen again. Presumably this scene was included to show that Celia is tougher than she looks and can fight for herself, but it's pretty jarring and really has no relevance to the rest of the story.

The Harry Potter one sounds pretty snarky and nattery and requires a clean-up to make it sound more neutral and explanatory.

I mean, they're dreams. By virtue of being dreams I don't think they can be BLAM because they're in a context that makes sense for them to be nonsense.

Agreed all-around.

Bringing this up from the film page for Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. It sounds way too whiny and also seems to involve some Narm misuse.

• During the third segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, the child with powers, Anthony, makes a strange, shape-shifting creature emerge from the television. It is both terrifying accidentally hilarious and pointless. It is also never mentioned again.

It doesn't count as a BLAM because it does make sense in context-Anthony has vast reality warping powers and he summoned a monster, not for the first time. The monsters don't need to be mentioned again because they're just a function of Anthony's powers.

It sounds more like they're trying to put in a Special effects failure, which might qualify, but as is it is a definite cut.

Edited by ArthurEld on Mar 25th 2023 at 2:34:46 AM

Agreed. Move it to Special Effects Failure, but re-written to be more neutral and less snarky.

These are on YMMV.Sponge Bob Square Pants:

Okay, so the Davy Jones cameo, the soda commercial gag, the perfume department scene, the hot sauce drop, the mailman scene, and the garbage creatures all lack context. As for the other ones, the werewolf scene is infested with "check" list word cruft; for Nosferatu, YMMV cannot be played with; and for the gorilla one, I'm pretty sure we don't list in-universe examples on YMMV pages. For the remaining ones, would they count as BLAMs or no?

Edited by ChillyBeanBAM on May 23rd 2023 at 2:36:59 PM

I think most of them can be cut, since SpongeBob is a series that relies on wacky set-pieces and jokes, so it's hard to say that any of them seem that out of place for the show. The only exception is probably the random apple chasing people from "The Chaperone", since that comes straight out of nowhere and is only a couple seconds long, so it's a pretty bizarre joke even by the show's standards.

Does the "no impact on the story whatsoever" criteria mean that music examples would automatically be disallowed outside something like a Rock Opera? Because I've seen some cases of BLAM being used for songs that simply sound out of place in the context of their parent albums or lines that seem out of place in the context of their parent songs, even when there's no plot to be found. For instance:

• On YMMV.The Beatles:
  • "Revolution 9", being an example of musique concrete instead of pop music, seriously clashes with the rest of The White Album (and the band's music in general), which is saying a lot considering how stylistically diverse The White Album already is. Lennon's decision to separate it from "Revolution 1" didn't help matters at all.
• On YMMV.Peter Gabriel:
  • "This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)", the penultimate track on So. The song is great, but very weird and comes out of nowhere in the context of the rest of the album. ^* The song is a remake of an unrelated collaboration between Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson, and was included in the album at the last moment, which explains its jarrringness.
  • "Excuse Me" is this for Car: a melancholy vaudeville-style song (complete with tuba!) in an otherwise (Prog) Rock-style album.
  • "Start", a short, jazzy saxophone solo with minimal backing, bridges "No Self Control" and "I Don't Remember" on Melt.
• On YMMV.Heroes David Bowie Album:
  • A lot of fans complain that "The Secret Life of Arabia" is too silly to fit with the rest of the album, and many of those who do enjoy it agree that it was an odd choice for a closing track, feeling it would've worked better earlier in the album.
• On YMMV.Queen Band:
  • "One Vision" — how many people who didn't already know to look for it were surprised when singing the track on Rock Band 2, and seeing that the last words were "fried chicken" instead of the repeated title? The story as to why they included it is well documented, but the line still comes out of nowhere.
  • Similarly, in their song "I'm Going Slightly Mad", the line "I think I'm a banana tree," which even the band found amusingly out-there.
  • "Get Down, Make Love", a raunchy hard rock tune that breaks into a fit of electronic weirdness about 2/3s of the way.

Edited by bowserbros on May 24th 2023 at 1:36:18 AM

We should have plenty of tropes about a song being an oddball in the track listing that's not BLAM. If the album follows a plot structure, maybe a song can count. Otherwise, no.

Does this meet the three criteria?

YMMV.RWBY

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Volume 2's post-credits scene with Yang meeting Raven in Beacon's courtyard is a scene that is never once referenced again in the entire show, and Volume 3 retcons it out of existence by having Yang specifically say she never spoke to Raven and only saw her when Raven saved her from Neo. While the coloring of the scene indicates that it could be a dream, it's an odd scene to end the season on. ^Explanation  Several production rumors have indicated that Rooster Teeth were strongly opposed to including the scene and pushed against Monty adding it, but he refused to budge.

The scene is The Stinger, which occurs post-credits at the end of the volume, so it's not interrupting any plot. It plays out as a heavily implied dream sequences, and the last time we see the heroes in the volume, they were going to bed. It's definitely had no impact on the show, but I'm not sure if it meets the first two criteria.

Yeah, ending scenes are complicated because, by design, they can't really be mentioned again unless the plot continues afterward. And they can't really "not fit" the story when the story's over.

Couldn't find any alternate tropes that they would be good fits for, so I elected to remove them, citing this thread.

From Sam & Max:

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The mariachi scenes in "Ice Station Santa", "Moai Better Blues", and "Night of the Raving Dead" (though an explanation for these events is offered in a later episode). If you count the individual episodes separately, the scenes are a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. If you count the whole Season, they aren't.

The whole joke is that not only do the mariachis play a role in the plot, they're one of the main antagonists (Well, loosely anyways) of the season with an entire elaborate backstory. Easy cut i assume?

Edited by DoodSlayer136 on May 25th 2023 at 2:58:32 AM

I found this entry on Freddy Got Fingered:

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: To be fair, the movie could be argued to be 99% made of this, but the Institute of Sexually Molested Children scene with the kids and Freddy watching an excerpt of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre while a creepy rendition of "Boys and Girls Come Out to Play" plays in the background is a particular standout (which is ironic considering that it's one of the few scenes with any sort of bearing towards the film's non-indicative title).

It's bad enough that this entry includes a justifying sentence at the beginning that basically says "much of this movie can arguably be one ginormous BLAM" (even though entire works can't qualify by definition), but it's made worse by the fact that I can't really tell if this is supposed to qualify.

Edited by OmegaPC777 on Jun 10th 2023 at 9:18:51 AM

It's an unsure Partial-Context Example that looks like misuse.

Okay, I'll remove it and cite this thread in the edit reason.

Trash Taste has two BLAM entries, one on the YMMV page:

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Right after one sponsor segment, there was a several seconds long clip wherein Connor pretends to be masturbating, complete with hand jerking motion under the table, head tilted backwards, closed eyes and moaning. Meanwhile Joey and Garnt stare in the other direction at something off-camera, only to be turning their heads around when they first hear Connor, wearing dull expressions. Then it cuts towards the conversation of the podcast, and this incident is never mentioned again.

and one on the work page as an invoked example:

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Invoked in episode 53. The discussion of Kyoushi to Seito to includes the boys going on at length about a chapter in which one of the male protagonist's classmates shows up at his apartment trying to escape his predatory sister, only for the sister to find him there, have her way with him, and then they leave together. All three of them agree that this chapter is jarringly out-of-nowhere in the overall story, but Joey finds this funny while Connor and Garnt find it exasperating. Connor and Garnt are further thrown off by this chapter being all about Brother–Sister Incest; Connor generally hates incest as a hentai theme, while Garnt tends to like it but hates it in this particular instance because of how random and pointless to the overall story it is.

I feel like both of these are valid, but I wanted to bring them up for review in case they do need to be removed.

Here's a "BLAM" from Yo Gabba Gabba!:

• Some mysterious person named Do-It, who dresses in silver, splits into three and is much smaller than the Gabba folks, shows up for only a few seconds in the "Dance" episode. And that's the last we saw of them.

He was introduced by the characters, so his appearance must have been foreshadowed, and he seems to fit in with the standards of the dance scene (if you know what I mean). So with that being said, is it okay for this example to be removed?

Edited by OmegaPC777 on Jun 14th 2023 at 11:12:53 AM

Late response, but

~Dood Slayer 136 If what you are saying is correct (I haven't played Sam & Max), you can probably cut.

Assuming you are also correct, cut.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jun 28th 2023 at 12:49:00 PM