History Main / MagicCountdown

** During the final fight between Goku and Freeza during the Namek saga, the planet Namek was minutes away from collapse for ''[[InactionSequence 10 episodes]]'' or ''9 chapters''. Ridiculously, one episode actually says "two minutes" at the beginning and "one minute" at the end. Lampshaded later by the fact that Frieza flat-out admits he screwed up the whole "destroying Namek" thing, and it was supposed to explode '''instantly'''...[[IMeantToDoThat he just made up the "five minutes left" thing to not look like an idiot]].

When applied to a TimedMission in VideoGames, it becomes AlwaysClose (and when applied to non-timed missions in video games, TakeYourTime). See also ExactTimeToFailure, which may give us the countdown in the first place, and InstantCooldown or MagicAntidote for the miraculous events that occur when it is stopped. May be also applied to a DescendingCeiling or when TheWallsAreClosingIn --the crusher keeps conveniently moving back between shots. Compare ClockDiscrepancy. It sometimes involves WeaponRunningTime, when the time a projectile takes to hit its target stretches so things can happen.

* Lampshaded in ''Radio/TheHitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy1978'' when Eddie the Shipboard Computer is counting down to an inevitable fiery explosive doom at the hands of the Vogons. Zaphod Beeblebrox has decided this is a really good time to all hold hands and conduct a seance, and has summoned the spirit of his great-grandfather, Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth, for help. Ford Prefect expresses bafflement that they've managed to fit all this into their last 10 seconds of existence and asks why the count has stopped. [[note]] Zaphod's deceased ancestor explains that he needs longer than that to berate his great-grandson for being such a waste of space, so he's stopped time for just long enough[[/note]]

* ''VideoGame/TheDarksideDetective: A Fumble in the Dark'': At the climax of the section set in Castle Dooley, [=McQueen=] and Dooley have to fix a problem before a mechanical countdown reaches zero. The game doesn't have real-time progression, so the countdown is implemented in a way where each time they move to a new location the countdown voice announces the next number, no matter how long they actually spend in that location. The geography of the castle is set up so that the number of locations between where they are when the problem is discovered (in a basement) and where they need to be to fix it (up on the roof) uses up the whole ten-second countdown, with the countdown voice announcing "One" as they arrive on the roof, so if the player does the obvious thing and heads directly for the roof as quickly as possible the countdown will play out in a fairly natural manner. Except that then they will almost certainly discover that they're missing at least one of the objects required to actually solve the problem and will have to climb back down off the roof and go fetch it. No matter how long that takes, when they return to the roof the countdown voice will announce that there is, "inexplicably", still one second remaining.

* Lampshaded in ''Radio/TheHitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy'', when Eddie The Shipboard Computer is counting down to an inevitable fiery explosive doom at the hands of the Vogons. Zaphod Beeblebrox has decided this is a really good time to all hold hands and conduct a seance, and has summoned the spirit of his great-grandfather, Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth, for help. Ford Prefect expresses bafflement that they've managed to fit all this into their last 10 seconds of existence and asks why the count has stopped. [[note]] Zaphod's deceased ancestor explains that he needs longer than that to berate his great-grandson for being such a waste of space, so he's stopped time for just long enough[[/note]]

* ''Film/IndependenceDay'': "Can you get us out of here in 30 seconds?" More like 1 minute and 30 seconds. Yet cut back to the bomb, which still has five seconds on it.

* Justified in VideoGame/CallOfDutyModernWarfare2 with the DSM file transfer, just like in real-life file transfer the countdown fluctuates wildly, though having enemies shooting the DSM merely pauses the transfer instead of canceling or outright destroying the device.

* Each installment of the ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' sketch ''[=MacGruber=]'', a parody of ''Series/{{MacGyver|1985}}'', involves a countdown (usually of 20 seconds) before a bomb goes off. The 20 seconds tend to last about a minute.

* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', during the Alabasta arc, there's a bomb. Not just any bomb, but one to destroy the entire town and everyone inside of it. The countdown read 5 minutes... for two episodes.

* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', during the Alabasta arc, there's a bomb. Not just any bomb, but one to destroy the entire town and everyone inside of it. The countdown read 5 minutes... For two episodes.

* Temporal perception and memory formation in the brain are regulated by stress hormones; the more intensely we feel a sense of impending doom (i.e. the amount the adrenaline in our systems) the more events around us which are perceived by our senses get marked for remembering. This causes us to remember 'time slowing down' during stressful events. On the opposite end, rote behavior is never marked for memory, so habitual things become completely forgotten, like driving home from work every day, or walking up the stairs (you suddenly find yourself where you intended to be with no recollection of the journey.)

* The inverse variety occurs in ''Film/Apollo13''. The loss of communications during re-entry is said to last 4-1/2 minutes, but actually takes about 3 minutes of the movie. Given how tense that scene is watching the movie, [[ForegoneConclusion knowing how it comes out]], one can imagine how tense it was in real life, taking half again as long. But the 14-second manual course correction burn of the LM engine was changed to 39 seconds, which still took 63 seconds of screen time in the movie.

For instance, the large digital readout on a TimeBomb may show thirty seconds to detonation, but after cutting to and from a climactic two-minute fight between TheHero and the BigBad, the clock somehow has ten seconds left for TheHero to defuse it before it goes off.

Sometimes the reverse effect takes place — the character has a good forty seconds to stop or get out of the way of the destruction, then six seconds later the timer starts counting down from ten, which is a fairly cheap way of ratcheting up the suspense. This version, at least, can ''occasionally'' be explained by the LawOfConservationOfDetail — the action we saw isn't necessarily all the action that took place.

This doesn't have to involve an actually displayed timer. Sometimes a character will just yell that "There's only ten seconds left!" and the heroes will prevent the calamity 25 seconds later.

* ''Manga/BakiTheGrappler'': In ''Baki Dou'', Sukune boasts that his most powerful attack can defeat Baki within ten seconds, and their subsequent fight in Chapter 147 is accordingly accompanied by an on-page timer counting the passing seconds. However, the depiction of the passing time seems symbolic at best: between the panel where Sukune swings at Baki, and the panel where his blow lands, the timer goes from 4 seconds to 6 seconds -- that would be an absurdly slow attack.

* Factoring in all ecstatic collapses, dramatic slow-motion door-opening, and lengthy yet vital inner expository monologues, the forty seconds in the ''Manga/DeathNote'' finale are inflated by approximately 850%. In the anime at least the inner expository of Light is justified, as every other movement is shown to stop. So his thoughts actually happen "instantly".

** In ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'', the Tournament of Power is stated by the Grand Priest to last 48 minutes. 1-2 minutes pass by every episode and it took 14 episodes for the 24 minute mark to pass the tournament.

* During the climactic arc of ''Anime/MagicalGirlLyricalNanohaStrikers'', it's established that the heroes have two hours to prevent [[PoweredByAForsakenChild the Cradle]] from reaching orbit, or else all of Mid-Childa will be in danger. At the end of Episode 22, the timer stands at one hour, 44 minutes. At the end of Episode 24, forty minutes of screentime later, the timer has advanced by just nine minutes. Possibly justified by the [[FourLinesAllWaiting sheer number of parallel plot threads]] the anime bounces between during those episodes, but it's still kind of jarring.

** At the end of their battle, Pain notes he still has four seconds left until he can use his Shinra Tensei ability again, thinks on Naruto's strategy for a bit, then notes he has three seconds left. The entire sequence takes twelve seconds. While the whole five second cooldown taking over a minute could be handwaved as multiple things happening at once and the characters moving superhumanly fast, that moment was nothing but Pain thinking on how much time he has left.
* ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'' lives by this trope. Whenever an Eva gets disconnected from its umbilical cable, huge digital timers show up to indicate how much internal power is left. The amount varies with the activity: at full-blown battle, it only lasts one minute - in theory. In practice, battles always last longer than one minute - especially if the Eva goes berserk. For example, in episode 19 Shinji topped the minute with a good 14 seconds and he was fighting like a madman. Once he ran out of power, the Eva had gone berserk, curbstomped [[spoiler:and ate]] the Angel in another three minutes.
** Partially justified - Berserk is stated multiple times to allow an EVA to act on its own without any power supply. Don't ask how does that work, we're talking about pilotable giant cyborg alien clones here, that's not the weirdest thing [=EVAs=] can do.

* Arc BigBad Shishio of ''Manga/RurouniKenshin'' is only capable of fighting for fifteen minutes at a stretch before he is in danger of his pre-existing health condition killing him. The duel between him and Kenshin (with other members of the cast joining in) lasts five half-hour episodes before said health condition kicks in.

* ''Anime/SonicX'' has the timer on Eggman's detonator during his second attack on Prison Island. We see it count down to ten seconds, then nine... then we cut to Chris pleading with Shadow to go back and rescue Sonic... about thirty seconds later, the timer ticks down to zero.

** There's a smaller-scale example at the end of this; the anchor is supposed to drop thirty seconds after one of them loses the duel. It's actually more like two minutes, [[TalkingIsAFreeAction most of which is monologuing]].

* Lampshaded in ''Fanfic/CalvinAndHobbesTheSeries'', where a malfunctioning transmitter chip is successfully extracted with ten seconds to go before it explodes, leading to Calvin remarking:

* The bakery mini-game in ''WesternAnimation/WreckItRalph'' is supposed to take precisely "one minute to win it", yet it lasts about thirteen seconds longer. Most of the extra time comes from the Mixing stage, where the clock starts to count down about half as fast as it should to hide that it takes a majority of the time. Toward the end of the Baking stage, the timer jumps down so that it's at 0:15 by the time Vanellope announces "Fifteen seconds!", but then it actually stops for a few seconds during the Decorating stage to leave enough time for the kart to finish.

* The "one minute" it takes for the [=DeLorean=] in ''Film/BackToTheFuture1'' to reappear is actually about one minute and twenty seconds. Also, in the third movie time runs very slowly after the engine and time machine crash through the sign marking the last half mile of track. Covering the remaining distance at 88 mph should not take more than 20 seconds, but the engine takes the plunge much later. A possible in-universe example towards the end of the first part: The Doc sets a timer to indicate the precise moment Marty should begin his run at the cable so he'll hit it at the same time as the lightning strike. Although the Delorean cuts out causing Marty to leave late, he hits the cable at the right time anyway.

* ''Film/TheDarkKnightRises'' has a timer that obligingly slows down to let people hear one character's last words and for another to have a brief farewell conversation, while still having time left to [[spoiler: fly a nuclear bomb far enough from the city to leave it untouched.]]

* In the climax of ''Film/TheFly1986'', the countdown to [[spoiler: Romantic Fusion between Brundlefly and Veronica]] is set for two minutes, but the actual elapsed time to zero is about two minutes and 45 seconds. Beyond it not being ''that'' much longer, it could be justified as cross-cutting between the timer, Seth/Brundlefly's final OneWingedAngel transformation, and [[spoiler: Stathis managing to come to, get his gun, and shoot out the cables to Veronica's telepod]]. (Interestingly ''averts'' TransformationIsAFreeAction; the OneWingedAngel moment unfolds in less than 40 seconds of screentime and no one stops what they're doing during it ''because'' of that countdown.)

* Subverted for comedic effect in ''Film/GalaxyQuest'', where the crew have to cancel the ship's self-destruct. They press the big red button with 20 seconds to spare, but it continues to count down. As they panic, the countdown reaches 1 second and then [[spoiler:stops all by itself - because "it always stops at 1 on the show"]].
* ''Film/Godzilla2014'': A soldier sets a nuke's timer to about an hour and a half in what appears to be midday. The active bomb gets stolen and has to be taken out of the city before it detonates. The soldiers assigned to retrieve it enter the city at sunset and find the nuke with 30 minutes left on the clock. By the time it reads five minutes (and it's nighttime), the nuke manages to be put on a boat and driven out of range from the city. The nuke was earlier stated to have made the 15-ton Castle Bravo, which produced a 7.2-kilometer fireball within one second, look like "a firecracker". Assuming a one-second fireball size of about 10 kilometers for the ''Godzilla'' nuke, and an end fireball size of, perhaps, twice that, the boat would have had to be moving at '''240 kilometers per hour''' (almost 150 miles per hour) to reach minimum safe distance in time - and that's not even accounting for the ''shockwave''! Talk about [[OutrunTheFireball Outrunning the Fireball]].

* In ''Film/TheManhattanProject'', a nuclear bomb's timer is damaged by radiation, causing it to start the timer... With 999 hours until detonation. It seems the army has more than a month to deal with it until they discover that [[spoiler: the timer counts down exponentially, to the point that it eventually counts down several hours per second]]. Might be a [[JustifiedTrope justification]] or outright parody.

* ''Film/ScaryMovie4'' parodies the ''Saw'' example above, when Dr. Phil and Shaq in the opening needs to sever their feet. Dr. Phil claims there's "one minute left"; the subsequent scenes with Shaq's remaining attempts to score a basket to release a pair of handsaws, him stopping to momentarily argue with Dr. Phil, Phil having a breakdown that Shaq needs to talk him out off, the two of them struggling to cut their chains before Phil decides to cut his leg instead, all that takes around a minute and thirty seconds.

** ''Film/StarTrekIITheWrathOfKhan'' features the title character counting down 60 seconds to the ''Enterprise'' crew before he does something ''really'' nasty. Naturally, this takes a good deal longer than 60 seconds, giving the heroes enough time to come up with a bluff. Possibly invoked: Khan was counting down similar to a parent counting down for a child on a time limit they KNOW is too short - "I'm going to count to three and it better be done - one, two, two and a half, ''pause'' - task finishes - good you just made it." Khan is basically saying, "You have until I feel like blowing you up to get me what I want" - since he really wanted the Genesis data so he could use it as a weapon, as long as they (so he thought) were giving him what he wanted, Khan was willing to stretch his countdown.

* Happens in ''Film/VanHelsing'': it sure takes that clock a long time to strike twelve (specifically, it takes at least three minutes).

* ''Series/H2OJustAddWater'': It's established in the first episode that in the event that the girls don't want to transform, they have ten seconds in between [[WaterTriggeredChange getting splashed]] and forcibly turning into mermaids. The actual time varies, with the most egregious instance being Rikki getting splashed by Nate, followed by forty seconds of her freezing up, getting reassurance from Zane that he'll cover for her, and running across the pier to transform off-screen.

** The timer in the Hatch tends to do this a lot. "Henry Gale" gets from the armory to the computer in under ten seconds (although we can't see the timer, another alarm starts to sound when the counter reaches ten seconds.)

** In ''Series/PowerRangersNinjaStorm'', the Rangers have a more agile alternate mode for their HumongousMecha which can only be maintained for sixty seconds. The first time it's used, it stays transformed for precisely sixty seconds in the end, though Cam's countdown is often wildly off. Almost every use ''after'' that, though, had battles carry on for much longer than one minute.

* ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid2SonsOfLiberty'' has a truly bizarre example. All the gameplay countdowns do this, but during one of them, there's a codec conversation in which [[spoiler:a bomb is announced to have less than thirty seconds left on the clock. Twenty-odd seconds later, it blows up, averting the trope]] while the other countdown is frozen until you reach the next area.

* Zig-zagged in ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2''. Eggman explicitly instructs that a bomb be set to blow in fifteen minutes. After the five minutes of the Security Hall stage go by, we see that Rouge is in a holding cell with the bomb counting down past 10 minutes. The following stage has a time limit of 10 minutes, so not counting the duration of the boss battles and cutscenes it's accurate… then there's a stage with an eight-minute timer. A more traditional example occurs when Shadow reaches the bomb. The bomb bleeps to indicate when a second passes, even when the camera isn't facing it. There are more bleeps than there are seconds on the clock. The 8-minute level is on the hero path, however, while the 10-minute level is on the villain path. It's possible to complete the 10-minute level in under two minutes, followed by a quick boss fight, leaving eight minutes for the hero path to get out of there (and for Shadow to actually reach Rouge in the vault).

** In "The End", the countdown to the eclipse shown makes no sense whatsoever: it starts counting down from 24 hours after recess, indicating the eclipse is at the same time the next day, but the eclipse seems to happen the evening of the same day. Gumball and Darwin get three hours' detention between two scenes, but the time shown for both indicate about thirty minutes passing. After dinner Gumball, Darwin, and Richard seemingly rush to get supplies, but the time stamps show it took them ''eight hours'' just to get into the car, and it's somehow still daytime.
** In "The Bet", Bobert counts down to ten seconds to detonation, but each "second" takes more like three to ten seconds.
* ''{{WesternAnimation/Amphibia}}'': In “Olm Town Road”, a massive robotic drill announces that it will dig through the earth and reach the underground city of Proteus in ten seconds. It counts down from 10 to 6, then we don’t hear the timer at all as Anne and friends try to stop it. After 14 seconds of them futilely mashing the controls, the countdown is heard again, going from 5 to 2. This is followed by a full 25 seconds in which Lysil and Angwin jam the drill, seemingly all in the timer’s last second. All in all, ten seconds on the timer lasts up to a minute.

** Happens in an episode where roaches have taken over and are going to destroy the world. Cosmo and Timmy plead with Wanda to help save them as the clock ticks down ten seconds, which takes more like thirty.

* PlayedForLaughs in a ''WesternAnimation/TinyToonAdventures'' [[ThreeShorts short]], "One Minute Till Three", which has a ten-minute running time. There's one minute left in the school day, and Granny is asking all the students impossible questions and assigning increasingly large amounts of homework as punishment for wrong answers. The focus is on Plucky Duck, as he desperately hopes that the clock will reach 3:00 before Granny calls on him. Highlights include Plucky saying "This must be the longest sixty seconds in the history of Acme Acres" and the clock (which has no second hand) moving ''backwards'' while Plucky watches.

* In the ''Franchise/{{Digimon}}'' (a kids' show!) movie "Our War Game", a virus called Diaboromon has launched a missile somewhere in the world. Diaboromon sends a menacing but childish email to them, asking, "which one has the clock?". They then have ''ten minutes'' to destroy him and the '''million''' copies he's made of himself. Despite not actually showing the clock constantly, it keeps counting with near-perfect accuracy. When the missile crashes in full view of their ''window'', they find that they prevented the detonation of a '''[[NuclearWeaponsTaboo nuclear warhead]]''' by 1/100 of a second. Justified because it took ten minutes for the missile to reach ''Odaiba, Tokyo'' from the US.

** In the episode after that, he goes up against another minion belonging to the same group named Club. He hits a point that causes Club to contort in such a way that he will break his back in thirty seconds. While it’s debatable about how long it takes for the first twenty, when Ken leaves and we hit the final ten seconds, a counter appears just like before, and Club dies once it hits zero.

* In the climax of ''Film/{{The Avengers|2012}}'', [[spoiler: two minutes and thirty seconds of screen time actually pass between the deployment and explosion of the nuke intended for Manhattan.]]

* It's averted in ''Film/FightClub'' although it does not seem to be at first. In the final sequence waiting for the bombs to go off Tyler states "Two minutes" but [[spoiler: it's two minutes later that he shoots himself (non-fatally) in the head]].

* In ''Film/RurouniKenshinTheLegendEnds'', the BigBad is told that his anhidrosis will kill him if he spends more than fifteen minutes in intense physical activity. The final climax battle lasts about that long, at which point it kills him.
* In ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'' Picard sets the auto destruct for a fifteen-minute silent countdown. It is deactivated by Data after about 11 minutes.

** Also mentioned in the ''Series/StargateSG1'' episode "[[Recap/StargateSG1S10E6200 200]]", in which a movie writer proposes a scene in which SG-1 has to escape a situation in ten seconds and debates on how long the time should be.

* Very subtly averted in Music/StephenSondheim's ''Theatre/IntoTheWoods''. If you check the complete vocal score, you'll discover that there are actually twelve chimes that lead up to each midnight, and that they're timed and written into the underscore.

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': [[PosthumousCharacter Tock's]] Semblance renders her indestructible for one minute at the cost of using up all of her Aura at once and uses a clock to help her keep track of how much tie she has left. The one time she is shown using her power, it lasts for exactly sixty seconds, complete with a ticking sound in the background.

* In ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', Rainbow Dash says she can clear out the clouds over Ponyville in "ten seconds flat." It indeed takes exactly ten seconds in real time.

* Done in two different ways in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg-TLE8N_js François Pérusse's skit "Cricket sauve le monde"]]. First, the nuclear bomb mentioned at the beginning is said to explode in ten seconds, yet only counts down when Cricket reaches it at the end. Second, when Cricket actually reaches the bomb, the countdown goes down to three then "A bit less than three", "not quite two yet", "well, let's say two", "back to three", "two and a half" and then only "one".

* In ''Film/AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me'', Dr. Evil stops Frau from the usual ten-second countdown to his rocket blasting off, as he won't be able to get inside in time. He has her start over at thirty, but this leaves quite some time to go after everything's ready. Finally, he tells her to just say "Go" when the doors close.

** Also averted, since the actual three-minute self-destruct countdown only runs ten seconds too long, even with the argument over "seven" ''and'' an additional "Have a nice day" tacked on to the end.

* Each installment of the ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' sketch ''[=MacGruber=]'', a parody of ''Series/{{MacGyver|1985}}'', involves a countdown (usually of twenty seconds) before a bomb goes off. The twenty seconds tend to last about a minute.

* Lampshaded in ''Radio/TheHitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy'', when Eddie The Shipboard Computer is counting down to an inevitable fiery explosive doom at the hands of the Vogons. Zaphod Beeblebrox has decided this is a really good time to all hold hands and conduct a seance, and has summoned the spirit of his great-grandfather, Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth, for help. Ford Prefect expresses bafflement that they've managed to fit all this into their last ten seconds of existence and asks why the count has stopped. [[note]] Zaphod's deceased ancestor explains that he needs longer than that to berate his great-grandson for being such a waste of space, so he's stopped time for just long enough[[/note]]

* At the beginning of Act 1, part 4 of ''Theatre/{{Starship}}'' the computer announces three minutes to drop down. 30 seconds later, the computer correctly announces two minutes, thirty seconds. About three minutes later, the drop down is in two minutes, and two more minutes progress to get to one minute left. Two more minutes later, there are five seconds on the clock, then to one second (30 seconds later), before jumping to ''twenty seconds''. It takes about ten more minutes for them to land.

* In the timed bonus levels of ''VideoGame/{{Gauntlet}}'' (the original), the narrator's voice (you know, the WizardNeedsFoodBadly guy) would count down the last ten seconds before you failed to clear the level and get the bonus. Sometimes he'd [[UnreliableNarrator mix up the numbers]] as a joke.

* ''WesternAnimation/DuckTales2017'': In one episode, [[spoiler:Della]] ends up trapped in a room with a DescendingCeiling while Dewey is in the other room with a video counting down to crushing. The video takes a comedically long time to count down from ten to the point where entire seconds pass between counting ''fractions'' of seconds.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheFairlyOddparents'': In "Scary Oddparents", Crash Nebula arrives in the nick of time to stop the evil Pumpkinator: "I can stop you in LESS than ten seconds!" Unfortunately, the Pumpkinator reacts by cheating and speeding up the timer. (Cue Big Kaboom followed by BigNo.)

** The last episode "[[Recap/FuturamaS7E26Meanwhile Meanwhile]]" involves a button that rewinds the Universe by exactly ten seconds, but takes exactly ten seconds to recharge, resulting in a scene with the same ten seconds taking place over and over. The writers clearly don't care about the accuracy of "ten seconds", which varies wildly during the episode.

** In "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS7E7KingSizeHomer King Size Homer]]", Homer is charged with manually venting the gas on a reactor [[NoOSHACompliance (the switch placed on top of the reactor in question)]]. The plant's workers are currently occupied doing Mr. Burns's exercise routine, and their current and final stretch is set for ten reps. These reps are then treated as a substitute countdown timer despite no causal link between the exercise and the reactor.

Any kind of stated time limit or countdown in fiction seems to know when it's BeingWatched, and will cheat accordingly for maximum drama. This phenomenon tends to occur especially as a countdown starts approaching zero.

* Invoked in ''Film/GalaxyQuest'', where the self-destruct bomb is disarmed well before it goes off, but the timer continues counting down until it reaches one second. This happened because the alien race that made the bomb was imitating a sci-fi TV show.

'''Freeza:''' Bu—I—uh—

** During the final fight between Goku and Freeza during the Namek saga, the planet Namek was minutes away from collapse for ''[[InactionSequence 10 episodes]]'' or ''9 chapters''. Ridiculously, one episode actually says "two minutes" at the beginning and "one minute" at the end. Lampshaded later by the fact that Frieza flat-out admits he screwed up the whole "destroying Namek" thing, and it was supposed to explode '''instantly'''... [[IMeantToDoThat he just made up the "five minutes left" thing to not look like an idiot]].

* ''Film/JohnnyMnemonic'': If Johnny can't get [[MacGuffin the 320 gigs of data]] out of his head in 24 hours, he will die and the data will be lost forever. However, Johnny ''always'' seems to have the maximum 24 hours available to him to complete his quest. After Johnny travels halfway around the world from Beijing to Newark (which should take up a chunk of time one way or another), the EverythingSensor at customs in Newark still estimates that Johnny has a full 24 hours to seek medical attention. Then, later, halfway through the movie and after Johnny has survived three further attempts by the yakuza to capture him and/or cut off his head and takes a nap in a subway tunnel, Takahashi still gives the Street Preacher a 24 hour deadline to bring him Johnny's head when, at this point in the movie, it would be much more plausible if there are only 12 or 13 hours left (at best) before the data is lost.

* The inverse variety occurs in ''Film/Apollo13''. The loss of communications during re-entry is said to last 4-1/2 minutes, but actually takes about 3 minutes of movie. Given how tense that scene is watching the movie, [[ForegoneConclusion knowing how it comes out]], one can imagine how tense it was in real life, taking half again as long. But the 14 second manual course correction burn of the LM engine was changed to 39 seconds, which still took 63 seconds of screen time in the movie.

* ''Film/TheDarkKnightRises'' has a timer that obligingly slows down to let people to hear one character's last words and for another to have a brief farewell conversation, while still having time left to [[spoiler: fly a nuclear bomb far enough from the city to leave it untouched.]]

* ''Film/Godzilla2014'': A soldier sets a nuke's timer to about an hour and a half in what appears to be midday. The active bomb gets stolen and has to be taken out of the city before it detonates. The soldiers assigned to retrieve it enter the city at sunset and find the nuke with 30 minutes left on the clock. By the time it reads five minutes (and it's nighttime), the nuke manages to be put on a boat and driven out of range from the city. The nuke was earlier stated to have made the 15-ton Castle Bravo, which produced a 7.2 kilometer fireball within one second, look like "a firecracker". Assuming a one-second fireball size of about 10 kilometers for the ''Godzilla'' nuke, and an end fireball size of, perhaps, twice that, the boat would have had to be moving at '''240 kilometers per hour''' (almost 150 miles per hour) to reach minimum safe distance in time - and that's not even accounting for the ''shockwave''! Talk about [[OutrunTheFireball Outrunning the Fireball]].

** ''Film/OnHerMajestysSecretService'' features a detonator set for 5 minutes. Then the camera cuts to other characters talking for 10 seconds. When we cut back to the detonator, only 10 seconds have passed. Cut to a fight scene for 10 more seconds. OK, now 2 minutes have passed on the detonator. Cut to another 10 second scene. Now the detonator has 10 seconds left before detonating. Cut to a character counting down "5... 4... 3... 2... 1.... Now!" Both Bond and Blofeld jump out of the building scheduled to blow up, with Bond only just making it out a good eight seconds after the countdown is supposed to be over, and only then does the explosion actually happen.
* In ''Film/TheManhattanProject'', a nuclear bomb's timer is damaged by radiation, causing it to start the timer... With 999 hours until detonation. It seems the army have more than a month to deal with it, until they discover that [[spoiler: the timer counts down exponentially, to the point that it eventually counts down several hours per second]]. Might be a [[JustifiedTrope justification]] or outright parody.

** Not so much in the second with the countdown to Sirleena's ship with Laura in it being launched; J's fight with Jarra takes a bit longer than the alotted time and ends with J awkwardly on a pile of flimsy tubing that he has to fight out of...and the countdown actually goes ''quicker''. He stops it with 1 second left, naturally.

* ''Film/SupermanII''. The H-bomb is supposed to have a 1 minute timer. It takes at least 1 minute 24 seconds to detonate after the timer starts.

* In ''Film/{{Timecop}}'', there's a bomb in the protagonist's house with a mere 10 seconds left on the clock. Even though the scene is going in slow motion, he somehow manages to make it from the second story to the outside the house while carrying his wife in both arms. He isn't even running down the steps, either.

* The Makai Knights in ''Series/{{GARO}}'' can only remain in armour for 99.9 seconds. This is enforced in most episodes, but once in a while it is blatantly broken with no explanation.

* ''Series/TheProfessionals'': A lunatic holds a nurse hostage via a grenade with the pin removed shoved down her blouse, and Bodie says it has a ten second fuse. It takes the grenade ''25'' seconds to explode. You ''could'' {{handwave}} this as the grenade's safety lever being caught inside her blouse and not springing free until Bodie cut it loose.
* In ''Series/PushingDaisies'', Ned can bring the dead back to life by touching them and make them go back to being dead with a second touch, but failing to touch them again within a minute results in someone else in proximity dying. This minute doesn't always equal a real life minute.

* In the Met performance of ''Doctor Atomic'', about Dr. Oppenheimer and the Trinity nuclear test, a voice announces five minutes to the test firing. Eight minutes later, the two minute buzzer sounds. Eight minutes later, the bomb goes off.

* In the original ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'' during the final battle, Liquid starts a 3 minute countdown and proceeds to explain how it works for 30 seconds, giving you only 2 1/2 minutes for the actual battle. Should you die and continue, however, the game skips the exposition and goes straight to the battle where you have a full 3 minutes instead.

* The boat you are trapped on in ''VisualNovel/NineHoursNinePersonsNineDoors'' is supposed to [[RaceAgainstTheClock sink in nine hours]], but you can [[TakeYourTime take as much time as you want]] solving the puzzles needed for your escape, and characters often engage in [[TalkingIsAFreeAction lengthy conversations]] that definitely should make them go over their nine hour time limit if you added them all up. [[spoiler:Part of this can be justified by the fact that you aren't actually on a sinking ship in the first place, and the players are meant to survive, so there really could be an artificial countdown that starts and stops when it's necessary. However, it's still played unambiguously straight in the final puzzle, in which you explicitly have six minutes to save young Akane, but the game lets you take as much time as you want like normal, instead of making it a TimedMission.]]

* Zig-zagged in ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2''. Eggman explicitly instructs that a bomb be set to blow in fifteen minutes. After the five minutes of the Security Hall stage go by, we see that Rouge is in a holding cell with the bomb counting down past 10 minutes. The following stage has the time limit of 10 minutes, so not counting the duration of the boss battles and cutscenes it's accurate… then there's a stage with an eight-minute timer. A more traditional example occurs when Shadow reaches the bomb. The bomb bleeps to indicate when a second passes, even when the camera isn't facing it. There are more bleeps than there are seconds on the clock. The 8-minute level is on the hero path, however, while the 10-minute level is on the villain path. It's possible to complete the 10-minute level in under two minutes, followed by a quick boss fight, leaving eight minutes for the hero path to get out of there (and for Shadow to actually reach Rouge in the vault).

* ''VideoGame/SCPSecretLaboratory'': C.A.S.S.I.E. states that the Decontamination Process (which renders the Light Containment Zone inaccessible and kills all players inside) is set to begin in 15 minutes at the start of the round, and the displays the Light Containment show a 15 minute timer. In actuality, Decontamination begins in 11 minutes and 45 seconds, and the timers are slightly sped up to account for this (slowing down at the 10-minute, 5-minute, 1-minute and 30-second marks).

** In "The End", the countdown to the eclipse shown makes no sense whatsoever: it starts counting down from 24 hours after recess, indicating the eclipse is at the same time the next day, but the eclipse seems to happen the evening of the same day. Gumball and Darwin get three hours detention between two scenes, but the time shown for both indicate about thirty minutes passing. After dinner Gumball, Darwin, and Richard seemingly rush to get supplies, but the time stamps show it took them ''eight hours'' just to get into the car, and it's somehow still day time.
** In "The Bet", Bobert counts down to ten seconds to detonatation, but each "second" takes more like three to ten seconds.

* A variant of the fast burning fuse is seen in ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries''. In "[[Recap/BatmanTheAnimatedSeriesE28DreamsInDarkness Dreams in Darkness]]", the Scarecrow has a huge machine mixing fear inducing chemicals to dump in Gotham's water supply. Batman shuts it off, stopping the big clock at 01:45. Scarecrow starts it up with the backup controls and the clock begins counting down again, from 20 seconds. And furthermore, the timer beeped with every passing second, even when it was offscreen, but the beeps didn't correspond to how much time had passed. At the 20-seconds mark, it plainly beeped more times than there were seconds remaining.
* In the episode of ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'', "Invasion of the Secret Santas!", where, after noticing a doll is a bomb with a 10 second timer, Batman exclaims, "It's a Bomb!" for 5 seconds, before cutting to a commercial break.

* This happens all the time in ''WesternAnimation/CodeLyoko'' Season 2 and 3 with the countdown before hitting the key to avoid the reconfiguration of Sector 5. It is supposed to be 3 minutes, but it jumps forward, and sometimes backward, quite haphazardly. And in episode "The Secret", where a detonator for a series of charges set to destroy the Factory has a digital clock. Once, it advanced only 15 seconds while almost 2 minutes went by. Afterward, it seemed to have hurried back and caught up exactly with the lapsed time... but then it jumped forward 45 seconds ''while William and Ulrich were speaking'', that is with no jump-scene in-between, only a change of focus.

** In the first episode, a SealedEvilInACan is due to be released WhenThePlanetsAlign -- specifically, the stars are supposed to aid in her escape from the moon that very night. As Twilight Sparkle reflects on this, she looks at the moon, and four nearby stars can clearly be seen approaching it at a visible rate. Then the viewpoint shifts, the scene switches to another place and the events there go on for a moment. And then Twilight looks at the sky again, and the stars continue practically from where they were when last seen and merge with the moon.

* PlayedForLaughs in a ''WesternAnimation/TinyToonAdventures'' [[ThreeShorts short]], "One Minute Till Three", which has a ten minute running time. There's one minute left in the school day, and Granny is asking all the students impossible questions and assigning increasingly large amounts of homework as punishment for wrong answers. The focus is on Plucky Duck, as he desperately hopes that the clock will reach 3:00 before Granny calls on him. Highlights include Plucky saying "This must be the longest sixty seconds in the history of Acme Acres" and the clock (which has no second hand) moving ''backwards'' while Plucky watches.
* An episode of ''WesternAnimation/TotalDrama'' has the contestants being given the task of escaping a building set to blow up in 30 seconds. After 1 minute and 13 seconds, the timer is at 15 seconds. When the countdown ends, a total of 2 minutes and 10 seconds has passed. Some possible FridgeBrilliance : since that season's challenges were based on movies, of course it would follow this.

* The more of your attention you focus on any process the more of it gets marked for analysis and memory, causing your brain to perceive it as taking more time to accomplish; ignoring something will cause it not get marked. Thus a watched pot seems to take longer to boil than an unwatched pot. In other words, the LawOfConservationOfDetail and TravellingAtTheSpeedOfPlot are both neurological imperatives.

** The same principle applies to file downloading, especially a torrent, since the estimate for time remaining assumes that the current speeds will remain constant, which is almost never true.

* The time remaining clock in an American football game. The closer it gets to zero, the more the losing team will call time-outs in order to plan out strategy. The final two minutes of the game can take a half an hour to play.

* Averted in one ''[[Manga/FistOfTheNorthStar Hokuto no Ken]]'' episode, in which Kenshiro used the Hokuto Zankai Ken on Spade, the KingMook [[MonsterOfTheWeek of the Week]]. After explaining to Spade that he would die 7 seconds after being released (or 3 in the manga), he removes his thumbs from Spade's temples. A counter appears on the bottom on the screen, and Spade dies painfully and gruesomely at the near-exact moment the counter reaches zero. Badass indeed.

* Its averted in ''Film/FightClub'' although it does not seem to be at first. In the final sequence waiting for the bombs to go off Tyler states "Two minutes" but [[spoiler: its two minutes later that he shoots himself (non fatally) in the head]].
* Averted in ''Film/JudgeDredd''; in order to get back into Mega City 1, Dredd and Fergie need to run through a furnace which activates every 30 seconds (as Dredd explains). Upon running in, Fergie begins counting down until he falls over, leading to Dredd having to create an impromptu exit as the fire reaches them. Counting down from where Fergie left off yourself reveals that it was 30 seconds and they both narrowly avoid being roasted.

* In ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'' Picard sets the auto destruct for a fifteen minute, silent countdown. It is deactivated by Data after about 11 minutes.

** Averted in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E9ForestOfTheDead Forest of the Dead]]": [[spoiler:River Song takes the Doctor's place when he intends to use his brain for storage to restore the "saved" humans in the Library's memory core. During a 2 minute countdown (that actually takes 2 minutes) she says a tearful farewell to him.]] Great scene... and exactly on time.

* Many sports games will have a clock that starts with the same amount of time as a real life game, but the clock will run at very fast speed ''except'' at the beginning of each play, and for the last minute or so. This results in oddities in some games, such as EA's line of NHL games that, on top of the above examples, also slows down during penalties (so the speed of the penalty clock matches that of the game clock); a game with more penalties will actually last longer.

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': [[PosthumousCharacter Tock's]] Semblance renders her indestructable for one minute at the cost of using up all of her Aura at once and uses a clock to help her keep track of how much tie she has left. The one time she is shown using her power, it lasts for exactly sixty seconds, complete with a ticking sound in the background.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}'', in the famous "[S] Cascade" flash, [[TimeBomb The Tumor]] displays a countdown to its detonation as the flash goes on. This countdown is fully accurate, and even remains on screen for some events that are happening elsewhere.

* Averted in the ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'' episode "Mayhem of the Music Meister!" when Batman and Black Canary are in a death trap which includes a time bomb. The timer counts down in real time. It ''better'' be accurate. The timer runs on a metronome!

* Played with heavily in the ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague'' episode "[[Recap/JusticeLeagueS2E21And22WildCards Wild Cards]]". The Joker has 25 bombs hidden throughout Las Vegas and he's televising the Justice League's attempts to stop it. He even has the timer in the lower right corner that stays consistent throughout the episode. Subverted when Batman disables the first bomb. The timer stops, then drops to 3 seconds and starts again (it was a fake bomb).
** It was also a Zigzag in that the Joker introduces the Clock, it's either been counting down for some or was set to a really arbitray number, but Joker is aware of the time and lampshades it by pointing out that people really shouldn't have expected a round number from him. The actual start time is the run time of a typical episode... halfway through the current episode. Given that almost all stories were [[{{Cliffhanger}} Cliffhangers]], it was hardly a spoiler that the episode was going to be a cliffhanger at this point. Turns out that the final bomb was disabled before the final second... but it didn't matter as Joker only wanted the clock to keep the audience hooked on watching the TV... his real plan was to use a metahuman's powers to make the viewing public hallucinate. [[XanatosGambit If the Justice League failed to stop the bombs, he destroys a large part of Vegas and induced mass hysteria... if the Justice League did stop them, he's still got the mass hysteria.]]

* Spoofed in ''Manga/BoboboboBobobo'': Denbo-chan can only stay for... two hours. Played straight, however, with Mr. Bo-Jiggler and Patchbobo.

* In ''Film/AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me'', Dr. Evil stops Frau from the usual ten second countdown to his rocket blasting off, as he won't be able to get inside in time. He has her start over at thirty, but this leaves quite some time to go after everything's ready. Finally, he tells her to just say "Go" when the doors close.
* In ''[[Film/TheToxicAvenger Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV]]'', a bomb is set off with only four seconds on it. Those four seconds are just long enough for Toxie to go home and impregnate his wife, have a heart to heart with young drug addict, and then get the survivors out before his sidekick [[HeroicSacrifice eats the bomb]].

** It is explained [[OverlyLongGag at length]] that when the HolyHandGrenade is primed one should hold it for a count of absolutely no more than three. King Arhur proceeds to count 1, 2, 5. Then when someone corrects him says three. ''Then'' he throws it. It blows up at the right time anyway.

* ''WesternAnimation/DuckTales2017'': In one episode, [[spoiler:Della]] ends up trapped in a room with a DescendingCeiling while Dewey is in the other room with a video counting down to crushing. The video takes a comedically long time to count down from ten, to the point where entire seconds pass between counting ''fractions'' of seconds.

** Spoofed yet again in "[[Recap/FuturamaS1E4LovesLaborsLostInSpace Love's Labors Lost in Space]]". Leela tells the team they have to hurry, because the planet they're on will implode "in approximately two hours ago."

* The "one minute" it takes for the [=DeLorean=] in ''Film/BackToTheFuture'' to reappear is actually about one minute and twenty seconds. Also, in the third movie time runs very slowly after the engine and time machine crash through the sign marking the last half mile of track. Covering the remaining distance at 88 mph should not take more than 20 seconds, but the engine takes the plunge much later. A possible in-universe example towards the end of the first part: The Doc sets a timer to indicate the precise moment Marty should begin his run at the cable so he'll hit it at the same time as the lightning strike. Although the Delorean cuts out causing Marty to leave late, he hits the cable at the right time anyway.