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"I have no idea what just happened."
Candace Flynn after going through one of these in Phineas and Ferb: Summer Belongs to You!

These scenes were animated for your viewing pleasure, but probably won't be spoken of again in-universe.

Clarence has its own page.


  • Canhead: When hiding in the drainage space, Jay falls into a pool of slime and becomes covered in gunk, which briefly crawls all over him and causes him to transform into a red-eyed, clawed, fanged ghoul that rears back and roars in fury. He instantly turns back into his normal self afterwards, and this transformation is neither referenced again and has no effect on the rest of the short's events.
  • Code Lyoko: Jeremie inserts what he thinks is the CD holding Aelita's materialization program. It turns out, it's Odd's music video that features some pretty weird stuff like Odd's head, Odd flying across the screen, and random girls dancing with hearts around them. That and the never ending, poorly sung "BREAK! BREAK! BREAK DANCE! HERE WE GO!"
  • Kevin Spencer had scenes like this every episode. They're usually something small (like Allan passing wind so hard he takes off like a rocket) or take up a whole scene (such as when Anastasia molests a bunch of trees, throws up, passes out, then is accosted by wildlife.) This makes sense, considering Kevin himself regularly loses his train of thought, and deviates from his plans rather quickly.
  • Transformers: Armada: The time/dimension travel sequence that happens without explanation (despite the gobs of mystical advanced technology lying around), is never mentioned again, and really does little to advance the plot. The only thing we learn is that the Mini-Cons rejected Unicron and gained sentience because the kids went back in time and showed them how much they cared about their beepy robot friends. And since it's never mentioned again, it's ultimately a pointless plot twist.
  • Arcane: The show makes use of modern music to generally good effect, but in the second episode of the second arc, the show's theme song by Imagine Dragons starts to play. This wouldn't be a big deal, except the band members also appears in the show playing the song in-universe for brief moments. It's generally agreed that this sticks out like a sore thumb since the characters don't actually do anything else in the brief time they are onscreen.
  • Chowder:
    • Some episodes feature at least one instance of a pink fuzzy gorilla-looking thing named Kiwi appearing without mention to deliver a one-liner or a piece of exposition, then disappearing. He was only acknowledged once or twice.
    • One time they ran out of money for the animation, forcing the voice actors to start up a car wash.
    • There's also the time when Chowder was trying to get Mung to try his nauseating new dish, "foofinscoops". Mung balks at the prospect. The camera then cuts back to Chowder, who is suddenly in drag, with a blonde wig and makeup, and he says "Pretty please?" in a sultry voice. Mung shouts "WHAT THE-?!?" One second later Chowder is back to his normal appearance and voice and it's never mentioned again.
  • An in-universe example comes from the Family Guy episode "8 Simple Rules for Buying My Teenage Daughter"; a cutaway shows Meg walking onto an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond to tell Neil Goldman that she hates him before walking out, and the show goes on like nothing happened.
  • Invader Zim:
    • In "The Girl Who Cried Gnome". Zim unleashes a robotic gopher on a Girly Ranger who's trying to sell Ninja Star cookies to him. After trapping her leg in a tunnel dug by the robot, it begins dancing and is spontaneously sucked into another dimension.
      "Huh... I don't remember programming that..."
    • Played for laughs in the Halloween episode. Right before the mook reports back to Halloween Bitters that Dib didn't care about Zim possibly dying we're treated to a pan-over of the skool. There is a swarm of bats flying out of it, however just a second later there are dancing skeletons in tophats.
    • Also played for laughs in "Mysterious Mysteries", when Zim, Dib, Gaz and GIR are on the titular Show Within a Show and each are giving their own version of the story behind some footage Dib gave to the show, complete with reenactments. When it's GIR's turn, he quickly goes into a tangent about a giant squirrel that flies to another planet and "fights all the bad guys" (again, with reenactment).
      Presenter: What does that have to do with ANYTHING?!
      GIR: Me and the squirrel are friends!
  • The episode "Day of the Larrys" of Time Squad. After Larry builds heaps of clones of himself to minimize his amount of housework to do, the episode promptly moves on from a plot-related scene to a completely irrelevant montage in a place that can be only described as, well, a gay nightclub for robots. Not only are we unnecessarily exposed to dancing Larry clones (which is still pretty damn funny), one of them explicitly flirting with Tuddrussel, but it isn't at all explained how in the world Otto and Tuddrussel got into that club if there's a bouncer at the door who kicks out anyone that isn't on the list. The amusing factor of the scene kind of justifies the BLAM, but it still has nothing to do with the plot.
  • Mickey Mouse Works had a sequence in the Donald Duck episode "computer.don" where Donald gets sucked into his computer while trying to fill out his personal information, and is left at the mercy of a cursor that mostly pokes his ass until eventually being printed back out. This has no bearing on the rest of the episode apart from an excuse to throw in an Art Shift to CGI. Watch the BLAM here.
  • It's a Mystery, Charlie Brown: Linus makes a brief appearance in which he utters four rhyming lines. He never has dialogue like this again in any Peanuts special.
  • On the episode "Humiliation 101" of My Life as a Teenage Robot, once Jenny figures out that she in fact will not be embarrassed by her mother in front of the entire school, she breaks into random song with Brad and then they proceed to school after singing this little ditty with a small dance included as if nothing ever happened.
  • Hanna-Barbera's feature Heidi's Song had not one, but two. First, Grandfather tells Heidi stories about evil spirits haunting the mountains right before she goes to sleep, leading to a Disney Acid Sequence nightmare; second, when Heidi is locked in the rat-infested basement by Fräulein Rottenmeier, the rats break into a Villain Song, with Sammy Davis Jr. as the head rat. (And for this BLAM, Davis gets second billing on the movie, right after Lorne Greene as Grandfather and before Margery Gray as Heidi.)
  • In the Chucklewood Critters TV special "Which Witch is Which", Ranger Jones leaves his Halloween party to investigate something, but when he does, the scene cuts to a pointless music video showing these witches that perform all these magic spells. This segment/song holds nothing to the plot at all.
  • The Dexter's Laboratory episode "Aye Aye Eyes", in which Dexter is stalked by a little girl with enormous, soul-penetrating eyes, suddenly segues into a colorful, poppy, saccharinely upbeat musical number in the middle of it which illustrates Dexter's frustration. It comes completely out of left field, and doesn't match the show's general tendency to not use background music in favor of a more quiet vibe. Still, it remains one of the more popular scenes in the show's history.
    • A straighter example appears at the beginning of the episode "Continuum of Cartoon Fools", in which Dexter is seen sitting at a desk, scribbling something on a piece of paper and looking at a stopwatch while periodically making a bizarre noise that sounds like "BWAAAAT". It's never brought up again, and we never do find out just what he was doing it for. Apparently, this behavior is a common technique in the animation industry for timing a storyboard, making the scene something of an inside joke, but it's complete gibberish if you aren't aware of that, which would apply to just about anyone who doesn't work in the animation industry.
      • In that same episode, at the end of a sequence where Dexter blocks off every possible entrance to his lab to keep Dee Dee out only to have her pop up again, his frustration reaches a breaking point, and he decides to... smash a watermelon with a mallet.
  • In an episode of 2 Stupid Dogs, the dogs get stuck in a science museum, and the little dog fools around with a plasma ball at an exhibit about how "Electricity is Your Friend". His fooling around leads to him getting a nasty electric shock, causing him to hallucinate a creepy pink tiki mask face who sneers "FOOLISH CANINE! I AM NOT YOUR FRIEND! MUA HA HA HA HA HA HA!"
  • Animaniacs did this quite often, typically with quick, random cameos by other various Animaniacs characters in each other's segments. For instance, it happens twice in the Slappy Squirrel cartoon "Bumbie's Mom", and Slappy lampshades it both times.
    • It was pretty common to see Ralph the security guard chasing Yakko, Wakko and Dot through one random scene in at least one cartoon per episode that the Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister Dot) weren't supposed to be appearing in. It was quite literally a Running Gag, and would usually culminate at the very end of the episode with the siblings scampering back into the water tower and Ralph shaking his fist at them.
    • This trope's appearance in animated films was spoofed in the Pochahantas parody they did, via "The Ice Cream Song".
  • In Phineas and Ferb, the popularity of the "Gitchie Gitchie Goo" song in one early episode led the higher ups to decide to make the musical segues occur at least Once per Episode. That includes when it really doesn't make any sense to have a musical number whatsoever; the writers do their best, but sometimes there's just no way to work a song into the plot of an episode... and yet there's one there anyway.
    • "Robot Rodeo" ends with a particularly weird one "Izzy's Got the Frizzies", with an extended sequence of Isabella go-go dancing to a song about her frizzy hair. Made even odder by the fact there was a much more sensible musical number earlier in the episode.
    • "Summer Belongs to You" has probably the weirdest one to date: "J-Pop (Welcome to Tokyo)", where everyone turns into big-eyed anime characters and starts dancing like they're in a Caramelldansen video in front of wildly flashing backgrounds, all while a perky pop song with Intentional Engrish for Funny lyrics playing. It's even lampshaded!
    • There is no Candy in Me from "Picture This!", a spur-of-the-moment rap at the very end of the episode brought about by Candace's stunned stutter.
      Buford: Nerd ain't no piñata!
    • "Dance, Baby" from "Candace Disconnected", where Dr. Doofenshmirtz randomly invites Perry to join in his "evil exercise show", and they start doing aerobics to a goofy disco song with nonsensical lyrics.
      Dance, baby, dance, baby
      Hands in the air
      Go down to the store
      And buy a wicker chair!
    • "Shot in the Butt with a Dart" from "Bad Hair Day" has Doofenshmirtz, after getting mistaken for a rare "tangerine orangutan" and being shot with a tranquilizer dart, singing a random show-tune about it, only to lose consciousness in the middle of his song.
      I'm blurry and drowsy, but balladry beckons
      Though I'll probably lose consciousness in seventeen seconds. note 
    • For a non-song example, there is the Giant Floating Baby Head. It first shows up in "One Good Scare Oughta Do It!", where the boys try to cure Isabella's hiccups by building a haunted house. At the end of the episode, they admit that they don't even know what it was, where it came from, or why. Every few episodes it can be seen randomly appearing, though no one will ever mention it. It was brought up in the series finale song that recapped the entire series, where they said they still have no idea where it came from.
      • Then there is one mid-song in The Ballad of Badbeard, where it cuts from the titular pirate song to Candace, high out of her mind on moss, singing "Why do my nostrils whisper to meeee?" to psychedelic music and accompanying background, then cuts right back to the song.
    • The whole 'Ferb TV' episode is somewhat one of these, considering it's a collection of random moments from spoof TV shows featuring the characters, and has no plot, no relevance to the overall plot, and none of the conventions of the average Phineas and Ferb episode. It's essentially twelve minutes of pure Big-Lipped Alligator moments.
  • Milo Murphy's Law
    • "The Note" features a Similar Squad who was also looking for a doctor's note. Once they cross paths with the main gang, they just say hi and leave. This is never mentioned again in any other episode.
    • "Fungus Among Us" gives us a brief cutaway when Dakota hears the group is travelling to the 1960s. We see him grinning while dancing in only a pair of green underwear and faux-hippy tattoos—Cavendish wonders aloud what on earth just happened, Dakota says not to worry about it, and the plot continues unchanged by the event.
  • The Simpsons:
    • "Burns, Baby Burns". Homer and Larry have just been caught staging a kidnapping, when suddenly the whole scene turns into a party. Lampshaded when Marge asks where the music and liquor is coming from, and Homer replies, "It's a party, Marge. It doesn't have to make sense." Although this can be seen as a jab at how many of Rodney Dangerfield's (who was voicing Larry Burns) movies seem to end with a spontaneous party. Specifically, it's referencing his spontaneous party in Caddyshack, which even had the same Journey song "Any Way You Want It." It was something of a BLAM in that movie, too.
    • The ending of "The Great Money Caper": right as Lisa is about to explain the entire ruse, Otto bursts into the courthouse and yells "Surf's up!" followed by a montage of everyone surfing.
    • In "The Ned-Liest Catch" Homer is chasing Ned Flanders to convince him not to break up with Edna. At one point he starts swimming in a canal trying to keep up with him but he gives up and drifts away, moments later he is randomly attacked by a giant octopus.
    • In "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk", Homer meets with the German investors who bought the power plant. One of them says they're from the Land of Chocolate and Homer has an Imagine Spot where he pictures himself in said place, eating as much as he can as fantasy music plays. When he snaps into reality, he asks the investors if they were talking about chocolate only to be told they only mentioned it ten minutes ago.
    • In "Fear of Flying", a man going by the suspicious name "Guy Incognito" enters Moe's Tavern for a drink. He looks and sounds just like Homer, only with a fancy suit, top hat, and mustache. Having been previously banned from the establishment, the patrons beat him up and throw him out... just in time for Homer to walk by and catch his double lying unconscious on the pavement. Homer is shocked to find his exact double unconscious but is suddenly distracted by a dog with a puffy tail. The whole thing is never mentioned again.
    • There are brief scenes where imaginary creatures such as fairies or demons appear randomly as one-off gags. In fact, this is a rule among writers; Matt Groening called it "rubberband reality", which allowed for wacky and improbable things to happen so long as they had no real effect on the plot and simply existed for Rule of Funny, meaning any unrealistic things that occurred on the series were required to be BLAMs.
  • One of the Henry and June wraparounds in an episode of KaBlam! had June going to sing a pretty song, and saying how she wanted to make the show "intimate". She also said that without Henry on the show (this is the episode where he quits temporarily), she wanted to "spread her wings", but what did that do with the plot? The song was nice, the scene was funny, but what did it have to do with the episode? The scene never got mentioned again, but only one small remain- after the following short and the commercials, June was wearing a neckbrace (she crashed into the fourth wall), but it suddenly disappeared by the final wraparound. Plus, it was very out of character for her.
  • South Park:
    • Cartman's head exploding in the episode "Medicinal Fried Chicken". It didn't happen in a Dream Sequence or an Imagine Spot, his head really did blow up. But he's not killed out of the blue — the next time he's seen, he is relatively fine, and the head explosion is never mentioned throughout the rest of the episode. What makes this especially strange is this happened in season fourteen, after the surreal elements of the show had mostly died off.
    • In the episode "Eek, A Penis!", during Mrs. Garrison's chase to find his "penis" (a white experimental mouse with a human penis surgically grafted onto it), the "penis" stops fleeing at one point after glimpsing at the moon, and begins to have a duet with itself (the mouse and the penis, which can talk now) in the vein of "Somewhere Out There" from An American Tail. They are stopped mid-song by Mrs. Garrison, and the "penis" never sings, or talks, again.
    • Clyde's angry defense of Cartman, in a voice and tone completely alien to him, at the beginning of "Marjorine":
      "You sir mocked Cartman before, yet you too sit here demanding answers! Now damn you let him speak!!"
    • At one point in "Tweek x Craig" a faux-Japanese song starts in the background, and then it's revealed as being sung by a stereotypical salaryman at the karaoke. All the sequences seen during the song (including a live-action one with two people cosplaying as Tweek and Craig) are revealed as the video clip for the song. Actually, the whole episode, centered around Yaoi fanarts made by the never-before-seen Asian students at SP Elementary, can count as a BLAM for people not familiar with the subject.
    • Alex Glick from "Red Man's Greed" is a walking BLAM. He appears in multiple scenes, each time giving a generic line any other character could have said, and even gives the Once per Episode aesop at the end, only for Kyle to shoo him away.
    • Martha Stewart's appearance in "Eat, Pray, Queef", where she shows how to decorate a woman's queef by shoving decorations up her vagina. It has no impact on either of the plots featured in the episode and is never mentioned again.
  • Earthworm Jim has an amusing intermission in the middle which in pretty much every case had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. The blammiest (in "Opposites Attack!") is probably "six seconds of dancing turtles".
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog had Eustace being attacked by a squirrel that came out of nowhere in the episode "Family Business".
    • One episode had the family's house being placed in the middle of a biodome. At one point, the biodome produces a thunderstorm, and when Eustace grabs the front door handle to look outside, the handle gets zapped — and in the middle of Eustace's electrocution, a duck's head gets overlaid across his butt and quacks.
    • One episode opens with an archaeologist dusting off a gem stone inside some sort of temple, which suddenly shoots out a beam of light, which is reflected off a few things before causing a disco ball to come out of the ceiling and some music to play for a brief moment. Afterwards, the archaeologist just shrugs and continues where he left off.
    • In "Courage in the Big Stinkin City", Courage goes into a red hotel to get a letter. Each floor has something random behind the door; sharks, King Ghidorah from Godzilla, and a freaky Jump Scare of a violin-playing girl with a Nightmare Face.
    • In the episode "Perfect", Courage goes through five Nightmare Sequences, the first one being the most memorable and most disturbing. It is 10 seconds of a morbid blue fetus thing that whispers, "You're not perfect" before cutting right back at Courage screaming in fear as he wakes up.
  • An early Bugs Bunny cartoon, Fresh Hare, ends with one of these: Bugs has been caught by the RCMP, tried for many serious crimes, and sentenced to death. An early Elmer Fudd (the fat one) asks him for his last wishes, and Bugs replies "I wish...", then suddenly bursts out singing "I Wish Was in Dixie." Then the mounties suddenly turn into blackface minstrel show performers singing "Camptown Races", though that part of the scene frequently gets censored out of the cartoon.
    • The Porky Pig cartoon Porky at the Crocadero has a scene where the walrus manager goes off to get Porky to conduct the band at the restaurant, saying "I must get him back, schnell!". As he starts to run, the picture suddenly freezes and an off-screen voice explains, apropos of nothing, "Ladies and gentlemen, 'schnell' means 'quick'!". The picture then starts again like nothing happened.
    • Another Porky cartoon, Porky's Duck Hunt, a duck lands on a cask of booze, but just as Porky shoots at it, the duck flies away and he shoots the cask instead. Five fish swim into the sunken cask, then stumble out drunk, walk on land and get in a rowboat and start singing "Moonlight Bay". Even Porky seems confused by the events.
  • The Jimmy Two-Shoes episode "Ghostsmackers" goes into a commercial for a ghost-related Misery Inc. product. It gives nothing to the plot, and the product is never seen again.
  • "Nightmares and Daydreams", an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender features a come-out-of-nowhere samurai showdown between Momo and Appa. For people who don't watch the show, that would be the flying lemur and the sky bison, both pets of Aang. As the episode title suggests, though, this is All Just a Dream.
    • It's pretty clear that this fight is a hallucination even before it begins, but even amidst all the other weirdness, Guru Pathik's brief cameo during the fight comes out of nowhere and, unlike the fight, is never even discussed.
  • In Home Movies, in Brendon's production of "Starboy and the Captain of Outer Space", the conversation turns to hot dogs and how they're made - there's an abrupt cut to a still-picture montage of the two visiting a hot dog factory with a guy in a hot dog costume, with a bossa-nova soundtrack, and right back to the action...in the space of maybe three seconds. One might wonder if one even really saw it.
  • American Dad!:
    • The episode "The One That Got Away" has Klaus throw a smoke bomb on the floor and vanish from sight. A moment or two later, there's another blast of smoke, and when it clears we see Klaus, now with a sword and crown, cutting his way out of the belly of a Lovecraftian monster. This event gets precisely three lines of discussion before being forgotten about entirely:
      Klaus: I was gone sixty years; how long was it here?
      Roger: What? Where'd you go?
      Klaus: I don't know, but wherever it was, I am their king now.
    • The "Crack" medicine commercial parody on "A Jones for a Smith". Yeah, it works as a satire on how prescription meds can be just as bad as illegal drugs, but, like most gags in Seth MacFarlane's cartoons, it doesn't really have a relevant place in the plot. Of course, unlike a lot of gags in Seth MacFarlane's cartoons, the BLAM is justified as Stan was hallucinating from the crack and saw his life as a prescription drug commercial (which ends with him cuddling up to the homeless crack dealer's mother [whom Stan saw as a dog during his hallucination] on a dirty mattress in an alley).
    • The Smiths singing "We Go Together" in "Home Wrecker".
    • In "National Treasure 4: Baby Franny: She's Doing Well: The Hole Story", Francine trying to prove her worth by finishing a mysterious math problem may be entertaining, but it doesn't have much to do with the rest of the episode.
  • The BBC Christmas animation The First Snow of Winter is the story of an Irish duckling who gets seperated from his family while flying south, and is befriended by a water vole. About ten minutes in, for no real reason, Voley and Sean start line-dancing. And then an entire flock of sheep joins in. At the end of the scene they spin around to look at the sheep grazing as if even they're wondering whether that really just happened.
  • Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol: After Old Joe meets with the undertaker, laundress and charwoman (the last two of whom inexplicably look like witches), the four burst into a loud song for absolutely no reason, proclaiming how bad they are.
    • In-Universe this special is a musical Christmas play Mr. Magoo happens to be starring in, so the sequence fits if only because there hasn't been a song for awhile. But television airings of the cartoon tend to cut out the entire "it's a play" framework for time, leaving viewers wondering what the hell the point was.
  • My Little Pony
    • The Sea Pony scene in My Little Pony: Rescue at Midnight Castle. Everything's been semi-serious up to that point, and then Megan and a Pony fall in the river and get eaten by a giant clam. Cue Disney Acid Sequence in which the Sea Ponies rescue them while singing a catchy doo-wop song (and judging by their expressions, Megan and Applejack are just as confused as the audience). The whole song is never mentioned again, although the Sea Ponies themselves later help Megan and the Ponies sneak into Midnight Castle.
    • Friendship Is Magic: Most of Pinkie Pie's song sequences are BLAMs (or come pretty darned close), but her over-the-top flash dance routine at the beginning of "A Friend In Deed" really takes the cake. It's especially noteworthy since it's one of the few times you see a character from the show wear pants.
    • Likewise, Discord's "Glass of Water" song from "Three's a Crowd".
    • Made very literal with Gummy's Inner Monologue in "Slice of Life". Probably intentional, as the whole episode contained similar trope-inspired scenes (including a literal jump over a shark).
    • Within "Honest Apple" Pinkie suggests to Rarity, who is fuming about AJ's stubbornness over her fashion judging, to relax by strumming on a guitar. Rarity proceeds to let out an epic metal guitar solo (with her superimposed on a flaming background) for a few seconds, before returning the guitar and thanking Pinkie, who is utterly speechless while her hair looks like it went through one heck of a windstorm.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants has a few examples of random moments.
    • A notable example would be the Davy Jones' locker scene.
    • "Fools in April" has a scene where SpongeBob is laughing so much from pulling pranks that his tongue appears to fall out...which in and of itself is another prank, as not only is it a fake tongue, it's alive, laughing alongside SpongeBob. This odd entity appears for a few seconds and is never explained or mentioned again.
    • In "Karate Choppers", Sandy threatens to pour hot sauce on SpongeBob's tongue, and the drop of hot sauce hanging out of the bottle develops a face via Synchro-Vox while the background is full of Dramatic Thunder. It is never mentioned again.
      Volcano Sauce Drop: Mwahahahaha! By the powers of naughtiness, I command this particular drop of hot sauce to be really, REALLY hot!
    • "New Student Starfish" has Mrs. Puff's classroom watching over an egg which they name Roger. At the end of the episode, the egg hatches to reveal Roger is a live-action chick who then says, "Hey! What'd I miss?"
    • Invoked and lampshaded in "I Had an Accident". After being torn in half by a live-action gorilla (played by a guy in a suit), SpongeBob wonders "What's a gorilla doing underwater in the first place?". The gorilla tries to explain himself, then shouts "George, they're on to us!" and rides away on a pantomime horse. It then shows a live-action scene of family watching the episode, and they're just as confused as the audience is, so they turn off the TV in disgust.
    • During the Doing the Sponge scene in "The Chaperone", among all the havoc that the dance move has caused is a group of prom-goers being chased by a giant apple.
    • In "The Great Patty Caper", when trying to find who stole the key to the safe deposit box containing the Krabby Patty formula, Patrick accuses the third suspect of being a werewolf. Out of nowhere, a guy walks on screen, turns into a werewolf under a full moon (despite it being daytime at that moment), and runs off. He, along with the fact that werewolves exist in the SpongeBob SquarePants universe, is never mentioned again.
    • At the end of "Squilliam Returns", amid the end of the episode's chaos, Patrick and Mr. Krabs run out of the kitchen bound in rope and Mr. Krabs alerts the customers of the Appetizer, a creature made of food who comes out afterwards, causing the customers to panic and run out. It pays off a gag that was set up earlier (Squidward finding out the hard way that Mr. Krabs is a Lethal Chef after getting a look at the appetizer he prepared), but the Appetizer itself is never brought up again.
    • In "Shanghaied", when the Flying Dutchman tells SpongeBob and Patrick that he's going to eat them instead of keeping them on his crew any longer, they decide to make a break for it, but the only way out of the crew's quarters is through the perfume department of a live-action mall where they're repeatedly sprayed with samples until they make it to the end.
    • Near the end of "Boating Buddies", SpongeBob, Squidward, and Mrs. Puff are in a runaway boat and after plowing through a costume store, they drive into a laboratory and are shrunken by a shrink ray that was intended to be used on a mailman, who then breaks out of his restraints to eat a potato chip that they ran under.
    • Plankton's cameo being amongst objects being thrown at SpongeBob and Squidward in "The Play's The Thing". Nobody ever speaks of his presence and it's never mentioned even once.
    • "CopyBob DittoPants" features a random cameo by Patrick being played with by a group of SpongeBob clones. When they all disappear, Patrick says "Life is but a walking shadow." He then starts rolling around in the sand repeating "Looby looby looby looby" before a lawnmower from the previous scene comes in and slices him into 9 tiny Patricks who then run around in circles, also repeating "looby looby looby looby" in high-pitched voices. This is Patrick's only appearance in the episode and it sure is an odd one.
    • "Your Shoe's Untied" opens with SpongeBob watching a dancing anemone on TV, then Gary enters the room and SpongeBob quickly changes to the sports channel, suggesting that SpongeBob may have been watching something inappropriate. Then Patrick knocks on SpongeBob's door to show him his new shoes, and the episode's plot kicks off with the whole sequence never mentioned again.
    • In "SpongeGuard on Duty", SpongeBob thinks he's as cool as Larry the Lobster and teases fate by saying that he will be struck by "a flying ice cream truck" if he's not. He only survives by screaming "and live" at the last second, letting him get out from under the truck without a scratch, save for the vanilla ice cream on his nose. While Larry mistaking the ice cream on SpongeBob's nose for sun-screen does lead into the main plot of the episode (SpongeBob becoming a lifeguard), the flying ice cream truck's presence is only acknowledged by Larry saying "Please do not land flying ice cream trucks on the bathers!", and said flying ice cream truck is never mentioned nor seen again.
    • In "Something Smells", Spongebob sees a huge pink blob on a bench, and assumes it to be a giant pile of bubble gum. Then the blob reveals itself to be Patrick, having had his head and limbs compressed into his body. What exactly he was doing and why is never explained, and neither of them ever mention it again.
      • Later in the same episode, Patrick sees Spongebob playing an organ in his dark, fireplace-lit study while wearing a vampire-like cloak and Groucho glasses as a storm rages outside. The only real connection it has to the story is that it’s ostensibly an homage to The Phantom of the Opera, whose title character’s face is deformed; not only will most people, especially kids, probably not get the reference, but in-context, why exactly Spongebob is doing this of all things goes completely unexplained. His cloak and glasses disappear in the next shot, and the whole thing is...altogether now...never mentioned again.
      • The random didgeridoo player who suddenly appears in the middle of the marching band Spongebob is saying hi to and then disappears shortly after.
  • Metalocalypse:
    • In "Fatherklok", Toki, Murderface, and Pickles all express their disdain for their respective fathers... when seemingly out of the blue, Nathan disagrees with them, and the show cuts to a montage of Nathan and his father doing fun, stereotypical father-son activities together, accompanied with cheesy, overly happy music.
    • One big example is when Toki sings Underwater Friends.
  • ThunderCats (1985) had quite a number of weird moments in most of chapters written by William Overgard, but the most bizarre one happens near the end of "Jackalman's Rebellion". Right after the mentioned rebellion fails, Jackalman goes back to Castle Plun-Darr, asking for forgiveness and to be accepted as part of the Mutants once again, while being mocked and rebuked by them. All of this while being watched in video by Wilykit and Wilykat, without any explanation of how they can spy on them, when exactly did they sneak a camera in there nor why didn't they use it to avoid future Mutants' attacks.
  • An episode of Justice League Unlimited titled "Kid's Stuff" had a baby Etrigan randomly appearing. We never find out how or why he got there.
  • In the Futurama episode "The Sting", a moment involving Bender has a scene cutting to him, on fire, screaming and flailing about, whilst sitting in a chair. Several of the crew then run on-screen and put him out with fire extinguishers, and then Bender proceeds to calmly resume smoking a cigar. Also in that scene The Professor's voice comes out of Amy's mouth and the group break into song for no reason. In general, there are a lot of these in the episode, which are justified, given that most of the episode was a coma fantasy.
  • In the short-lived Clerks: The Animated Series, during the episode where Dante Hicks is being sued, they suddenly declare that the original ending got lost on its way overseas and the Korean animators were forced to come up with their own ending, which leads to a bizarre animesque Dance Party Ending.
    "We, the jury, find in favor of... Big American Party!"
  • The early Betty Boop cartoons were racy, surreal, and featured a lot of hot jazz music and vocals by the original king of cool, Cab Calloway. These musical numbers were often BLAMs, though, as in "Minnie the Moocher", in which Betty is very suddenly and for no apparent reason accosted by a singing, dancing ghost walrus (a rotoscoped Calloway). Yes, a ghost walrus, who then proceeds to sing the eponymous song for no reason at all. This is pretty strange even by the standards of early Betty Boop.
  • King of the Hill:
    • In the episode involving Peggy, Nancy, and Minh in a race for school board, there's a scene where Dale goes to a trailer park to pick up voters who are likely to be Nancy supporters. No-one is at the trailer-park except a man fixing a satellite dish (the others having been abducted by Peggy to stop them from voting for Nancy). The man explains that the people are gone, and then decides to assault Dale for Dale's hat, quickly scaring Dale out of the park, the last part specifically being the BLAM moment.
    • In "Peggy's Pageant Fever", after Peggy's makeover, the scene switches to Bill washing his car while singing (badly) to BTO's "Takin' Care of Business", when Peggy passes by in Buck Strickland's car while Bill just stares.
  • The "Walk on the Wild Side" Episode of X-Men: Evolution is considered this. It begins with Scott making an uncharacteristic chauvinist joke after saving Jean and Amara, leading Jean to turn into a knee-jerk feminist who's 'sick of always being treated like the weaker sex' despite having been treated with nothing but respect and admiration by nearly every other character up to that point. After she, Tamara and Tabitha stop some carjackers, they get the idea of forming an all-girl vigilante group, roping in Kitty and Rogue to the mix, complete with leather outfits, enough spy riffs to do Kim Possible justice and enough Les Yay to make the characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer sit up and take notice. Even Mystique gets in on the act.
  • Yashimoto trying to fight a Fixed Idea in Cybersix. He starts throwing out some goofy martial arts moves and yells, which is completely in character for him. Then right the hell out of nowhere Jose, the goofy little kid who can't fight to save his life, muscles in and starts throwing moves and yells of his own. He ultimately tries a jump-kick and falls flat on his back, and one of the Fixed Ideas has enough and and attacks Yashimoto. Watch it here at the 7:35 mark.
  • Trina Riffin's Diary Moments are apparently an in-universe example of these to anyone not into Grojband. Mina lampshades this in "A Knight to Remember" after having one due to having her personality swapped with Trina's.
  • The Looney Tunes short "A Gruesome Twosome", a cartoon about two cats fighting to catch Tweety Bird and win the affections of a female cat, has a bow tie-wearing dog randomly show up just to steal a kiss from the girl cat.
    Red Cat: Every-body wants to get in the act!
  • Littlest Pet Shop (2012) has this in the form of the Lost and Found Box musical number from the episode "Blythe's Pet Project". It comes out of flipping nowhere, makes absolutely no sense, and is more absurd than pretty much any Imagine Spot in the entire series.
  • In A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, the "Little Birdie" musical segment shows Snoopy preparing the lawn for the Thanksgiving dinner. Halfway through, Snoopy struggles to open a folding chair and subsequently hurts his paw attempting to open it a second time. The chair inexplicably gains sentience and Snoopy gets into a fight with it...and loses. None of the human characters are around when this happens and it has no bearing on the remainder of the special whatsoever.
  • The Lion Guard: The song "Tonight We Strike." In it, the hyena Janja outlines his plan to attack the Pride Lands at night and kill all the animals while they're sleeping. What actually happens is that the hyenas sneak into the Pride Lands during the day and cause a gazelle stampede. Most likely what happened is the song was not revised after the plot for the episode was rewritten, probably due to time or budget constraints, causing the song to not mesh well with the rest of the episode.
  • The song from the The Adventures of Portland Bill episode Baking Day. It has no bearing on the plot, there were never any songs in the episodes before this one, and there were never any songs in the episodes after it.
  • Soupe Opéra: The entire show. Two minutes of fruit and vegetables moving around and forming animals, not to mention the music: electronic drums and inhuman noises. Then you go back to your standard kids' shows like nothing happened.
  • In Iron Man: The Animated Series, the Scarlet Witch had a very bizarre portrayal that bore no similarity to the comic book character. In one episode, Iron Man and his team are fighting a giant killer robot; Wanda accompanies Tony to an underground bunker that has a computer with the secret to destroy the robot. When they get there, Wanda suggests using magic to find the robot's weakness and starts randomly singing in tongues and...purring? Meanwhile, Tony completely ignores her and uses the computer to find the robot's secrets as he had intended. He says nothing about Wanda's weirdness and they go right back to fighting the robot in the next scene.
  • As catchy as all the songs in Bertha are, whenever they appear in an episode they serve no purpose other than to pad out the story a little more.
  • Batman Beyond: The scene in which Terry meets Melanie/Ten has a BLAM. As they're walking down the street and conversing, we see them get to a pole. Out of the blue, Melanie grabs onto the pole and start pole dancing. Terry doesn't react to this, and they both keep talking like nothing unusual is going on.
    • An even more notable example occurs in the episode "Mind Games". While looking for Tamara at the Brain Trust organization hideout, Terry encounters a fat man with milk-white skin and round blacked out glasses. The man is heavily implied to be blind. No words are exchanged, but a huge wind picks up around him and he begins to float. The two fight. but exactly how that was accomplished is a mystery. It's hard to tell whether it was the ever increasing wind or whatever agonizing thing he was doing to Terry's mind that did the damage. Eventually Terry knocks him out and moves on. He never said a word during the fight or anything about it afterwards. What it had to do with the overall plot of the episode is anyone's guess.
      • Actually, a line later in the episode indicates that said man was in league with the other villains, other members of the Brain Trust. Given that said villains are psychics, it's safe to say he was another psychic in Brain Trust acting as security.
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In the episode "Billy & Mandy vs. The Martians", Grim and Mandy return to Earth to find that somehow everyone in Endsville have turned into zombies, who then begin dancing due to being influenced by Billy's thoughts being transmitted through the Braincaster (the machine Morg was using to control his zombie minions). When Billy's extreme stupidity causes the Braincaster to suffer a Phlebotinum Overload, they all suddenly turn back to normal. It adds nothing to the plot other than to show Morg's plan falling apart, which wasn't even entirely necessary, the people being turned into zombies comes completely out of nowhere, and them turning back to normal due to the Braincaster overloading implies that it turned them into zombies in the first place, when it was never indicated that it had this ability before.
  • Rick and Morty has far too many to count. Of note is the moment in the pilot episode when Morty coughs up a blob which takes a humanoid form, ages, and dies in a few seconds. Rick lampshades it with a "Don't think about it, Morty!" This is by no means the only one - there are dozens.
  • In The New Scooby-Doo Movies episode "The Exterminator", after the gang accompany Don Adams to the attic of Lorne Chumley's mansion, Shaggy and Scooby are frightened by an invisible man dressed as an elevator operator. After exiting the elevator, Shaggy and Scooby encounter an invisible couple in Victorian costume. The former could have been Chumley in disguise, but the latter is never explained.
  • Early on in Muzzy in Gondoland, there's a silly little scene in which Cat goofs off by playing a slot machine game on Corvax's computer. She gets excited when she spins three plums, only for a hatch on the console to open up and start shooting out plums. A rather exasperated Cat shouts "Plums, plums, plums!" as she's buried in them. This is never referenced again.
  • Halfway through The Backyardigans episode "Ranch Hands from Outer Space", Uniqua and Pablo shrink Tasha's horses and play with them, singing a song about it. This is thoroughly irrelevant to the plot.
  • The Rugrats episode "Toy Palace" features a huge Thorg toy in a toy store falling and being transported by a functioning time machine in the store. The fact that Time Travel is real in Rugrats is never mentioned again. Talk about Reed Richards Is Useless.
  • Kim Possible:
    • The episode "Clean Slate" has a scene where Kim bumps into a girl named Katlyn, who tells her she's Kim's biggest fan and asks for her autograph. This comes out of nowhere and is never brought up again. Justified in that Katlyn was a kid whose wish from the Make-A-Wish Foundation was to appear in a episode of the show.
    • "Car Alarm" had a brief scene where, after the Sloth accidentally flies into outer space, Ron takes advantage of it to test his theories on zero-g naco eating. It's not explained where he got the naco, and it's never mentioned again.
  • Too many to list in Drawn Together. The show has characters die and come back to life in the same episode, so their deaths qualify as this. Word of God says that nothing in this show happens for any reason other than to be funny, so this is inevitable.
  • Steven Universe: At one point in "Future Vision", it suddenly cuts to Steven and Garnet doing aerobics to a Korean work-out tape. After about thirty seconds of this, Garnet suddenly smashes the tape player with one of her gauntlets and says "Okay, we're done."
  • In Tangled: The Series episode "Rapunzel and the Great Tree", an otherwise serious two-parter delving into the Myth Arc about the Sundrop/Moonstone and Rapunzel's approaching destiny, features a Disney Acid Sequence where Eugene and Lance get separated from the group and exposed to some sort of hallucinogen by a plant that wants to eat them, and sing a song about how they're the best of friends. It features visuals like Eugene's eyes becoming butterflies and flying away and Lance growing rabbit ears that he plucks off (to 'lend an ear' to Eugene's troubles). While the show is no stranger to musical numbers, they tend to be more rooted in reality (at least, they're consistent with the tone of the show) and don't rely on cartoonish gags. Even the subject matter of the song (Eugene and Lance's friendship) doesn't go on to feature into the episode or arc, since the relationships that get focus are Rapunzel/Cassandra, Rapunzel/Eugene, and even Eugene/Eugene's Disappeared Dad. It sort of feels like they threw it in to remind us that Lance is Eugene's friend, since there hadn't been any real focus on that dynamic since the season premiere. And even when the titular Great Tree becomes hostile, nothing about its attack draws from the abilities it demonstrates here.
  • In the Estonian short film Breakfast on the Grass, Georg is attempting to get a loaf of bread from a bakery to trade it for something else. A bakery worker takes several loaves of bread from in front of him, throws them in a device that crushes them into a bottle of beer, chugs the beer, rips his shirt and is transported to a planet with a starry sky, where he kicks a random cat into orbit before falling over and passing out. This is not commented on by anyone else present, and the scene proceeds as if all of that didn't just happen.
  • The Patrick Star Show: In "Patrick's Alley", Patrick's pet sea urchin Ouchie randomly speaks a full sentence to him. Ouchie has never been able to speak outside of dog barks, which Patrick can understand anyways. There's no reason given for him suddenly being able to speak English, he never does it again in the show, and Patrick doesn't question it.
  • In the Molly of Denali episode "It Came From Beyond," Trini has some pretty surreal dreams involving a talking bird vetch who starts invading Qyah and chanting "YOUR HOME IS OUR HOME." These weird scenes don't quite fit in with the usual tone of the show, and it's the one of the only times the show has dipped into trippy territory.
  • Detention: The opening of "The Blame Game" features Miss Kisskillya imagining herself in a parody of the opening of Scream where she ominously threatens to give Lemonjella and Orangejella detention over the phone. While it's implied to be a result of Kisskillya's toothache causing her to imagine things, it's got no bearing on the plot and never gets mentioned in the rest of the episode.


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