History Main / JoinTheArmyTheySaid

* The other does not downplay the danger and may in fact emphasize the risks and harsh conditions that servicemembers endure. It instead asks you, are you BadAss enough to take it? [[DareToBeBadass Do you want to be?]]

--> '''Det. Mackey:''' Ah, shit. I joined the wrong thing.

* A running gag in ''SFDebris'' is that, following Starfleet adopting a more military stance in the later days of the shows, the lower decks of the ships are filled with scared and angry scientists who joined up in more science and exploration focused times to study alien botany or similar, only to find themselves serving on what are essentially warships.

* In ''TwoAndAHalfMen'', part of the Army recruiter's pitch to teenage slackers and mallrats is, "So d'ya like video games?" It sure hooked Eldridge and Jake....

* A recruitment advert once showed a camera's eye view of a woman in a war torn house while subtitles informed us that the bad guys had killed her husband and gang raped her, the last thing she needed to see was another man. Luckily the soldier giving her a blanket was a woman. So... women should join the army to help rape victims...

** They had to change it to "Army Strong" when the Iraq War started to ruin their re-enlistment rates. Too much TruthInTelevision, as it were.

* In ''Bloodmoon'', the second expansion to ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind'', the the legionnaires at Fort Frostmoth will occasionally mutter to themselves:

* ''PrivateBenjamin'' has Judy Benjamin joining the Army thinking it is all travel and fun, like the adverts (an image reinforced by an unscrupulous recruiter).

* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'': "Join the Grey Wardens," they said. "Be a hero across Thedas," they said. To be fair, a lot of it is [[BigBad Loghain]] screwing over the Wardens after [[PlayerCharacter the Warden]] joins.

* [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] in the book ''Literature/StarshipTroopers'', where recruiters try to ''discourage'' people from signing up. Since only veterans can vote, the constitution says everyone who volunteers must be allowed to join, even if they are useless incompetents. The military wastes a lot of money trying to train and support the low-quality recruits.

* The ''MagicTheGathering'' card [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=20396 Border Guard]] parodies the "...and kill them" thing. "'Join the army, ''see foreign countries''!' they'd said."
* The NEG in ''CthulhuTech''.

** There's a British "Police. Could You?" ad series, which featured [[ButIPlayOneOnTV actors who play police officers on-screen]], saying they couldn't do the job in real life.

* This is a RunningGag in ''{{Asterix}}'', as the Romans have a tendency to mutter, "Join up they said... It's [insert recruiting promise here], they said..." after getting beaten up by the Gauls.

* The famous WorldWarOne-era "I want YOU" ads involving [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Kitchener-Britons.jpg Lord Kitchener]] and [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Unclesamwantyou.jpg Uncle Sam]]. Oft-imitated and parodied (including an anti-Vietnam War version).

* From the WorldWarTwo period, [[http://store.doverpublications.com/0486592170.html "Gee! I wish I were a man! I'd join the Navy!"]], with lady in fetishistic navy uniform.

* Billy Connolly's "[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk7T-NTUIeE Sergeant, Where's Mine?]]" savagely criticized the then current British Army advertisments, from the perspective of a young man who'd believed them and found himself in the middle of TheTroubles.

** GreatBigSea's [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knxR-Q2VoBE setting update]] [[{{Deconstruction}} deconstructs]] this. [[spoiler: The new recruits all wind up getting killed in the battlefields of WorldWarI.]]

* In the WorldWarII RTS ''{{Company of Heroes}}'', selecting an allied engineer squad will sometimes prompt a response of "Join the army they said... It'll be fun they said..."

* In the 1970s UndergroundComics ''Merton of the Movement'', one of the would-be radicals watching an Army recruitment ad thinks the prospect of world travel and $288 a month sounds pretty sweet, and goes to enlist. He's such a drugged-out little wizened husk of a guy, however, that he drives the interviewing desk sergeant into an apoplectic rage - when he asks "Ya got any openin's in Denmark?" the sergeant boots him out.

** ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' satirized this ad, in a sequence where the knight then turns into a helicopter that shoots at Nazis, Communists, Hippies and ''a Hurricane'' in a video-game like sequence, then lands in front of a screaming audience and unloads a rock & roll band. The closing tag? "The Army - it's ''everything you like''."

** The Canadian Armed Forces once had the slogan, "There's no life like it." Now, the current campaign is having commercials with Canadian personnel doing things like stopping smugglers - "Fight chaos" - rescuing people trapped in a crashed plane in the Arctic - "Fight fear" - and ends with "Fight with the Canadian Armed Forces". However, some do still have shots of (presumably) hostile gunmen, [=IEDs=] exploding, and soldiers removing rubble from a bombing in addition to the standard Canadian Forces scenes of search and rescue and humanitarian assistance.

* One episode of ''TheHollowmen'' dealt with the decline in military recruits with the main characters attempting to create an recruitment campaign that appealed to young people. The Prime Minister wanted an old-fashioned ad, highlighting the qualities of "mateship"; The military wanted one that showed people having a good time - neither of which would work, as nowadays people know what they're getting into. In the end, they just make an old-fashioned ad featuring plenty of explosions.

** Connolly himself served in the Parachute Regiment - until Bloody Sunday happened and he began asking himself hard questions, such as why, after that, a Glaswegian Scot of Irish Catholic ancestry should be in the British Army.

* Music/ThePogues do a version of "The Recruiting Sergeant" that is pretty much definitive from an Irish viewpoint - that is, the narrator dismisses the blatantly false promises made by the (British) recruiting sergeant and instead turns the song into a recruitment ad for the upcoming fight for Irish independence.

* The Imperial Guard of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' can - depending on the world the troops are from - be made up of all-volunteer forces with much propaganda and patriotism, fitting this trope to the letter. Never mind the daemons, soulless ghost-robots, giant bugs, and the other denizens of the setting they'll be sent to fight against...Although ''generally'', worlds that raise regiments from volunteers are more likely to provide competent soldiers than ones that press-gang conscripts. And if they do get freaked out a bit by what they're up against, the MartyrdomCulture the Imperium has going on may give some of them some solace for putting up with it.
-->"Join the Imperial Guard! Travel to fantastic new planets! Meet exotic new life forms! And then shoot them! Serve the Emperor today - tomorrow you may be dead!"

* Satirised in ''MetalGearSolid4'', which has fake military recruitment ads during the opening scene that are based on the style of real ones, exaggerated with tons of [[DerangedAnimation psychedelia]] and ValuesDissonance until it ends up right in the UncannyValley. Notably, the ads, like real ads, repeatedly use video-game like imagery like FirstPersonPerspective and unthinking, unbleeding, identical enemies - ''MetalGearSolid4'' is in some ways a comment on video games being used to recruit young people into fighting real wars.

** Along with "superliminal" advertising - yelling out the window at random strangers.

-> ''We joined the Navy''
-> ''To see the world''
-> ''And what did we see?''
-> ''We saw the sea''
-->-- "We Saw the Sea", IrvingBerlin

* A recurring theme in the old Marvel comic ''StrikeforceMorituri'', largely because the process for converting people into supersoldiers had the minor flaw of being 100% fatal, and your survival time decreased sharply the older you were. Potential volunteers got asked a LOT of questions, but only one mattered: "Why do you want to die?" (A solution to the problem was found, but the last stage of the conversion process, that actually activated the superpowers, still had a high fatality rate, and couldn't be changed because only the lethality of the environment could bring out the powers.)

*** Especially since his stated goal was to be a pilot, so the Navy would've been the natural choice. (At the time the Air Force was part of the Army.) The closest he comes to flying is being tricked by Sergeant Pete into boarding a paratrooper training plane in "Sky Trooper".

* An odd episode of ''WesternAnimation/TimeSquad'' parodied these commercials. (Mixed with a bit of infomercial.) It showed a Time Squad unit rescuing ''George Washington'' and his men from a Redcoat ambush. Fans of the show know that the team's average assignment is a lot less glamorous. The commercial even becomes HilariousInHindsight after the episode with the "[[AIIsACrapshoot Virtual Washington]]" cold opening...

* The Imperial Guard of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' can - depending on the world the troops are from - be made up of all-volunteer forces with much propaganda and patriotism, fitting this trope to the letter. Never mind the daemons, soulless ghost-robots, giant bugs, and the other denizens of the setting they'll be sent to fight against...Although ''generally'', worlds that raise regiments from volunteers are more likely to provide competent soldiers than ones that press-gang conscripts.

* In [[LarryNiven Niven]] and Pournelle's ''TheMoteInGodsEye'', right after a particularly dangerous mission, a naval rating quips "My brother wanted me to help him with his wet-ranch on Aphrodite and I thought it was too dangerous. So I joined the flipping Navy." The {{SPACE Navy}} that is!
** In a perfect example of Niven's Law (Anything worth writing is worth selling repeatedly.) he used an almost identical sentence in the dialog of a Star Trek comic strip he wrote, just replacing 'Aphrodite' with 'Mizar'.
* [[InvertedTrope Weirdly inverted]] in the book ''Literature/StarshipTroopers'', where recruiters try to ''discourage'' people from signing up. Since only veterans can vote, the constitution says everyone who volunteers must be allowed to join, even if they are useless incompetents. The military wastes a lot of money trying to train and support the low-quality recruits.
* Gently prodded in the Literature/{{Discworld}} novel ''Discworld/MenAtArms'', and with all Watch novels afterwards (and some that weren't), with Detritus being a particularly enthusiastic, if [[{{Malaproper}} malapropism-prone]], evangelist of such slogans (as well as other military book/movie/TV cliches).

* [[HandOfThrawn Shada Du'kal]], high-quality bodyguard and commando (the two go hand-in-hand in Star Wars), while climbing a filthy wall to get in position to cover her employer for a transaction with someone.

* In ''OldMansWar'', Colonial Defense Force recruits aren't even told what they're going to be fighting, all they know is that the CDF can probably restore their youth (recruitment age is 75).

* ''VideoGame/MassEffect'': If you speak to the surviving marines on Nepmos after helping them HoldTheLine, they'll say, "'Join the marines, see the galaxy.' Hell."

* IrresponsibleCaptainTylor starts with Tylor joining the intergalactic army after seeing an ad consisting entirely of a sultry (if frighteningly artificial) woman expressing her sexual desire for soldiers, followed by the eerie repetition of "I'm waiting for you!".

* A recurring theme in the old Marvel comic StrikeforceMorituri, largely because the process for converting people into supersoldiers had the minor flaw of being 100% fatal, and your survival time decreased sharply the older you were. Potential volunteers got asked a LOT of questions, but only one mattered: "Why do you want to die?" (A solution to the problem was found, but the last stage of the conversion process, that actually activated the superpowers, still had a high fatality rate, and couldn't be changed because only the lethality of the environment could bring out the powers.)
* In the 1970s UndergroundComics "Merton of the Movement", one of the would-be radicals watching an Army recruitment ad thinks the prospect of world travel and $288 a month sounds pretty sweet, and goes to enlist. He's such a drugged-out little wizened husk of a guy, however, that he drives the interviewing desk sergeant into an apoplectic rage - when he asks "Ya got any openin's in Denmark?" the sergeant boots him out.

* In TwoAndAHalfMen, part of the Army recruiter's pitch to teenage slackers and mallrats is, "So d'ya like video games?" It sure hooked Eldridge and Jake....

* A ''{{Simpsons}}'' example would involve the Navy and a [[SubliminalSeduction subliminal music video]]: Yvan eht nioj, people!

** Actually, Status Quo's "In The Army Now" might be even more famous worldwide.

* A corporate version in the remake of ''Film/TheFlightOfThePhoenix2004'':