Absurdly Bright Light

Old bulb broke, only had a 300 watter.

A Comedy trope in which a light is far brighter than any Real Life light of that type, or possibly anything short of the sun. Generally established by panning all the way out to space with the beam still visible. Bonus points if the light bulb used is a tiny incandescent one.^note The gag doesn't work as well with LED technology, where it's the norm for a tiny 4mm lamp to put out almost twice the light of a domestic filament bulb.

Can lead to Blinded by the Light. Compare Nuclear Candle and Photoflood Lighting. May be a component of Over The Top Christmas Decorations.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Not uncommon in battery commercials such as one Duracell commercial showing a set of kids replacing a flashlight battery with their most recent battery, and then panning out to show the beam from said flashlight cutting through space.

Anime and Manga

• The Falcon Punch in F-Zero: GP Legend.
• The light given off by the jewel meat and anyone who eats it in Toriko. Particularly in the Bonus Material at the end of the episode where the reporter eats some and the glow blows up the film crew's equipment.
• In one of the One Piece movies, Nami is very interested in helping two orphans find the treasure their father spent his life working for, until she is reminded by Usopp that she can't actually keep it, to which she says she knows. When the kids say they don't actually care that much about the treasure itself, and she can have it if she wants, her smile blinds all those in the cave with her.
• In Girls und Panzer, Turtle Team initially customizes their Pz 38(T) with a gold paint job that makes the tank glow so much in the sun it has permanent Lens Flare. This ensures that it's really easy for enemy tanks to see them and they ditch it for a more historically-accurate brown before the first match of the tournament.

Comic Books

• The Fourth Doctor once built a gadget called a "fizgig" in the Doctor Who Magazine strip "The Star Beast." Comprised of a cannibalized FM radio, an electric iron, and several other gadgets, it stunned his pursuers with "ultra-white light."

Comic Strips

• One FoxTrot strip has Jason ponder cartoonist corner-cutting techniques such as justifications for leaving a blank panel. As he ponders how it would work indoors, Peter shows off his new 50,000-watt flashlight and generates this effect.
• One Sunday Garfield strip had the titular cat notice the fridge's bulb has died, and decides to replace it with a much bigger bulb. When Jon later enters the kitchen for a midnight snack... cut to the house's exterior, where beams of light are seen streaming out of all of the house's windows and up through the chimney.
  Jon: GARFIELD!!

Fan Works

• One of these shows up in Socrates' mind in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, coating the faulty transmitter inside his head. It fades after the chip is repaired, revealing a colorful field.

Films — Animation

• The activation of the Depelter Turbo on Over the Hedge is so bright it gives the other characters a tan, pops a bag of microwave popcorn, and can not only be seen from space, it blasts a satellite as it leaves orbit and can be seen from outside the galaxy.
• The Spongebob Squarepants Movie has King Neptune and his shiny bald head. So devastating is this baldness that it emits blinding light while indoors and underwater and leads to a variation of a Running Gag from Fred, the "My leg!" guy.
  "My eyes!"

Films — Live-Action

• When Clark W. Griswold finally gets the Christmas lights (all 25,000) working in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, the resultant light causes the stuffy next-door neighbors to be momentarily blinded causing damage as they stumble about, and the local power plant to have to activate auxiliary power to accommodate the increased electrical usage.
• In Deck the Halls, Danny DeVito's character wants to decorate his house so that the lights can be seen from space. This creates the major conflict.
• The Christian film Let There Be Light (2017) attempts to play it seriously, the protagonist starts a campaign with his wife, called "Let There Be Light" in which, to promote Christianity, people would go out on the Christmas Eve night and light the sky with the flashlights of their cellphones, later the news report on the movement mentioning that it was even visible from space. In reality, even if a thousand people got together in one place and pointed their flashlights to the sky, their visibility even from Low-Earth-Orbit it would still be lost by brighter light sources in the surrounding areas.

Literature

• Jesus emits a very bright shadowless light upon His arrival from heaven in the Left Behind book Glorious Appearing.

Live-Action TV

• Home Improvement:
  • In at least one Christmas Episode, Tim tries to win the neighborhood Christmas ornament contest using lights so bright they blot out the sun.
  • Another involved a set of lights that were so bright they cut through a thick Michigan fog and let a circling plane safely land.
  • Another one has Tim grossly overpower a microwave to the point where he and Al have to wear welding goggles and lead vests to use it, and even then they're advised to "not look directly at the potato." It comes out of the microwave glowing!
  • Another non-christmas example occurs when Tim and Wilson get into an argument over Wilson wanting to build a greenhouse in his backyard.^note Wilson's late wife designed it, hence him getting so upset and stubborn when Tim insulted it. Tim wouldn't admit it, but he just didn't want to lose the ability to talk with Wilson over the fence. Tim brings all the stage lights home from the Tool Time set and trains them on Wilson's house. Wilson counters by erecting parabolic mirrors to reflect and focus the light back.
• Roseanne and family rebel against the neighborhood association's edicts for tasteful Christmas decorations with an unseen display of decorations so gaudy that they put on sunglasses before turning them on. The camera stays in the dark house; light blasts in through the windows.
• On Murphy Brown, during scenes at Phil's, anytime someone came in or left via the front door, a blinding glare would come in and everyone in the place would yell "Close the door!" This was an Early-Installment Weirdness bit that was dropped after the first few episodes.
• On Malcolm in the Middle, Francis lights up some fireworks, the last of which turns the nighttime scene as bright as day. Afterwards the others wonder when their sight would return.
• An episode of Grounded for Life had an overly helpful relative switch the family over to new energy efficient bulbs, cue a room full of 300W lamps with wisps of smoke rising from each.
• In an episode of Seinfeld, a Kenny Rogers chicken restaurant is built across the street from Jerry & Kramer's apartment building. The restaurant's neon sign shines directly into Kramer's window at all times, filling his entire apartment with bright red light and making him unable to sleep.
  Jerry: Can't you shut the shades?
  Kramer: They are shut.

Mythology & Religion

• Meant to be taken seriously in The Bible, as Paul in his first epistle to Timothy says that God dwells in "unapproachable light" which no man can see or could ever see. Which throughout the rest of Scripture could explain why God could not let man in his mortal state see Him as He really is, and why He uses a cloud to shield this brightness from His own people Israel when He entered into the Temple to dwell there.

Video Games

• In Battlefield 3 the unlock-able flashlight attachment for most guns. This flashlight is literally brighter than the in-game sun (at least on Xbox) and if glanced from a close distance, can completely cover the screen in white.
• The alternate mode of the flashlight in The Long Dark kicks the beam from 20-ish lumens to at least 3500. To compensate, it kills the battery power in seconds. It's good to scare away the glowing wolves.
• In Mortal Kombat 9, Stryker's X-Ray attack starts by putting his flashlight on the opponent's face, which is apparently bright enough to make anyone fall on their knees, stunned, including a man with sunglasses, the god of thunder, and even a Blind Weaponmaster.

Web Comics

• Gyarados's Hyper Beam in this Brawl in the Family strip.
• Jon's smile in a comic from Square Root of Minus Garfield, complete with the name "Zadie Smithfield".
• xkcd
  • A strip on modern flashlights.
  • From the same creator, What If? naturally has several catastrophic examples when things are turned all the way up.

Web Original

• Happens to the Jerk in the Full House episode of Some Jerk with a Camera due to the overwhelming whiteness of Jesse and the Rippers.
  Jerk: It's like watching Pat Boone and Michael Bolton play hockey in a vat of whipped cream and rice! It's so white it's BLINDING MEEEEEEEEEEE!
• Markiplier made video about finding the world's brightest flashlight. When he responded to demands to use it outside during the night in a TikTok, it turned the sky blue, causing him to turn it off and run back inside in an Oh, Crap! moment.

Western Animation

• On Rocko's Modern Life, Filbert, Rocko and Heffer are in high school asked to make a lamp out of a potato. Heffer eats the potato and several potato chips, and Filbert, in frustration, starts stuffing other items down Heffer's throat, ending with the lightbulb for the potato lamp. To their astonishment, the bulb lights up, and they start stuffing Heffer with potato products. The next morning, they present Heffer as the lamp. At first it doesn't light up, but then all the lights in town go dark and Heffer's bulb lights up so brightly it forms a beam that bursts through the roof and out into space.
• Gravity Falls:
  • In the short "Mabel's Guide to Color", Mabel tries to reflect light from a waterfall so Grunkle Stan can see a rainbow for the first time. The result not only blinds Stan, it starts a fire in his office.
  • Near the start of "Scary-Oke", the machine in Stan's basement causes a light brilliant enough to be seen across town.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: in "It's Not Easy Being Breezies", Rarity wears a dress that's so shiny that this is the result.
• Kim Possible: In "A Very Possible Christmas'', the lights on Kim's house are so bright that Ron is blinded by their glare when he arrives.
• On The Simpsons, Bart sleeps over at the Wiggum house. When Chief turns out the light, Ralph's night light is so bright Bart has to shield his eyes. Ralph says, "I'm scared," with the implication that he's STILL afraid of the dark.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Night Light," SpongeBob is so scared of the dark, that he buys an absurd amount of night lights, but that's somehow not enough. Patrick comes over and they even bring in a lighthouse to brighten up Spongebob's home.

Real Life

• Not quite a gag, but there are some flashlights out there that can blind you even if you're wearing sunglasses. This video from 2016 proves that. And it's only gotten brighter since then, with "coke can blasters" of 2018 frequently surpassing the 10.000 lumen mark. That power comes at a price, though: these torches are very prone to overheating at higher levels, and drain the battery in less than an hour. Others are not quite as bright, but the beam collimation is so focused they can reach a hilarious distance, and it only goes crazier when you swap the light-emitting diode for an LEP^note not "Light-Emitting Plasma," it actually means "Light-Excitation Phosphor" like the ultra-compact Acebeam W10.
• A variety of Real Life lights verge on this. Out of context, they are absurdly bright, but they are in fact only reasonably bright for the tasks they were intended for. This includes powerful spotlights mounted on aircraft and ships, weaponized high-intensity lamps mounted on ground vehicles meant to blind and disorient the enemy, and search-and-rescue spotlights. Before high-power LEDs became affordable, this field was exclusive to halogen and HID lamps.
• An extreme example: a star going supernova is so bright that it can briefly outshine an entire galaxy of billions of stars

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