Cake Toppers

"If you haven't met the perfect couple, let me introduce you. They stand atop a layer of butter-cream frosting. The secret of their success? Well, for starters, they don't have to look at each other."

— Mary Alice Young, Desperate Housewives

There is a tradition of putting little bride and groom figurines on top of the wedding cake. At some point, there became a film tradition of using a shot of the figurines to tell us about the wedding. This occurs particularly if there is something unusual about the bride and groom that they can show in the figurines; e.g., a gay or lesbian wedding, an interracial marriage, or that the groom is a huge Packers fan. Just as often, it can be a commentary or joke on the wedding or the marriage or sometimes just to establish the scene at the reception, with the amount of damage to the cake indicating time passed.

If left at the altar, expect a character to take out their frustration on the half of the cake topper that left them. Or talk to it while weeping.

Then there's that one guy who tries to eat it.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• An EC Comics story was based around a conman using bride and groom voodoo dolls to bewitch a wealthy old woman to marry him so he could have her money. He is eventually killed by the bride doll, which had maintained its power after the woman's death, and was being kept as a cake topper on a leftover piece of their wedding cake.
• Wonder Woman (1942): The Keating Mansion's eerie atmosphere is aided by a dusty cobweb strewn cake with a young bride and groom topper, of Abigail and John in their youth before John became a career criminal and Abigail a recluse.

Fan Works

• In Loved and Lost, an extended retelling of "A Canterlot Wedding", the canonical cake toppers of Shining Armor and Princess Cadance get a more important role. When Spike is exiled from Equestria by Jewelius, the latter gives the toppers to the baby dragon just to taunt him with the painful memory of turning his back on Twilight. And sure enough, Spike begins hating them for this reason. During the Final Battle, Spike uses the toppers to jam one wheel of Jewelius' chariot, preventing the tyrant from escaping as the tides turn against him.

Films — Animation

• In Shrek, Princess Fiona is being forced to marry Lord Farquaad, a man who is absolutely not Compensating for Something. When she looks at their wedding cake toppers, she smushes his down into the cake to more accurately show his height. At the end of the movie, after Farquaad has been disposed of, the Gingerbread Man is seen smushing the figurine even further into the cake until it's completely hidden. He then dances with the Fiona cake topper.

Films — Live-Action

• The Big Cube: At Johnny and Lisa's wedding, the groom statue is a bearded hippie wearing a medallion and striped pants, while the bride statue wears a bikini and a veil.
• At the double wedding in Calamity Jane, you'll notice that the two couples managed to get cake toppers that are dressed a bit like their current wedding apparel, with the right hair colors and everything.
• In Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Reed and Sue's wedding has a transparent bride with a groom wrapped around her.
• A wedding cake topper is used for Sympathetic Magic in the Amicus Productions anthology horror From Beyond the Grave (1973).
• Wedding cake toppers of Ursula Stanhope and Lyle Van DeGroot appear in George of the Jungle on a wedding cake. However, George smashes through the cake during a swing, and the Stanhopes' dog grabs the Lyle topper. A scene later, the smashed cake is seen with the headless Lyle topper on top. The little figures Break the Fourth Wall and shriek in terror just before George smashes them into bits.
• Mel Brooks parodied this in Silent Movie, where he and Bernadette Peters see a wedding cake in a shop window. They then fantasy-segue into a gown-and-tails dance number on a wedding cake, struggling as they go as the icing gets deeper and deeper. At the end, the scene fades back to Mel and Bernadette, gazing soulfully at each other, not noticing the bride and groom figures are now splattered with icing.
• At the end of Sweet Home Alabama, the happy couple has an impromptu wedding reception at the local bar/hangout. Since the original cake toppers no longer fit, one of their friends grabs a pair of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots as a substitute.
• In The Wedding Singer, after the botched wedding at the beginning of the film, best man Sammy observes that the bride cake topper is missing and only the little groom is left standing there alone. The real groom, Robbie, has taken the bride figure and is sitting on the porch staring at it in his hand.

Literature

• In one of the The Baby-Sitters Club books, Mary Anne's classmate mentions bride and groom cake toppers during a social studies class, "or maybe you could have a giant plastic wedding bell, right ..."
• It All Started With Columbus:
  Some think [Harry Truman's] opponent, Thomas E. Dewey, was defeated because he was compared to the little man on a wedding cake. This cost him the votes of hundreds of thousands of men who were unhappily married.
• The Larry Niven short story What Can You Say About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers is set in part at a divorce party, where a couple is splitting up, but friendly. A black frosted divorce cake has the toppers facing away from each other.

Live-Action TV

• Oh, "Something Blue" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
  Spike: I don't like him. He's insipid. Clearly human.
  Buffy: Ah ha! We can smear a little red paint on the lips. The blood of the innocent...
  Spike: That's my girl!
• Charmed (1998): In "Cat House" Phoebe, Paige and the Villain of the Week get magically sucked into Piper and Leo's memories where the Villain accidentally destroys the cake toppers at their wedding. Once the spell is broken and everything appears to have been set right, the camera cuts to a now empty shelf where the figures used to be displayed. At the end of the season Piper and Leo are forced apart when he's promoted to an Elder.
• CSI: NY: In the B-plot of "Murder Sings the Blues," the head of the bride from a wedding cake topper is found lodged in the victim's throat. He was choked to death with it.
• When Daphne left Donny on Frasier, he took the male half of the cake topper back to his office and talked to it about how they'd both been abandoned. He even names it "Mr. Chump" and insists Frasier treat it as if it were alive.
  Title Card: Guess who's short, wears a tuxedo, and has frosting all over his feet?
• On one episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will is pretending to be the voice of a Barbie doll-sized bride cake topper who says she'll marry Carlton... who he then places on the table and is the actual size of a normal male sized groom cake topper, all to mock his height.
• The '90s anthology series The Hitchhiker had an episode, "Shattered Vows", where a ceramic figurine of a couple ends up having voodoo-doll properties: we first find out when it's used as a cake topper and the heat of the candles makes the real couple break out in fevers.
• In Modern Family, Cam's dad made a topper for his wedding with Mitchell. Mitchell is not fond of it because of the way he is portrayed (he's Foot Popping, for one thing) and tries to get rid of it.
• My Name Is Earl:
  • Joy and Darnell had an interracial couple on top of their cake (because they are). Oh, and the "cake" was made out of alternating layers of Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes.
  • When Joy was married to Earl, they didn't have a real wedding cake (due to their wedding being a drunken Elopement in Las Vegas), but Earl did put on a hairnet and infiltrate a bakery when they got back to Camden, and brought home the top layer of somebody's wedding cake for Joy, complete with generic wedding-cake topper. The cake gets eaten by Randy when he's drunk and placed on a mound of cat turds, much to the amusement of Earl and the ire of Joy.
• One Day at a Time (2017): Penelope recalls how her mother Lydia put a figurine of HERSELF on her daughter’s wedding cake. In the same episode, Lydia reveals that she planned to do the same to her grandson’s wedding cake, too.
• One of the intros to Penn & Teller: Bullshit! includes a scene where a Bride and Groom are placed on the top tier of a cake... then two Grooms on the next tier, two Brides on another, and finally Three Brides and Two Grooms.
• In the "December Bride" episode of Roseanne, Roseanne explains to Leon, who is getting married to his longtime boyfriend Scott and whose wedding she organized, that since she couldn't find two grooms, that she broke off the bride from a usual man and woman topper and replaced her with a male action figure from the movie Pocahontas.
• In Rumpole of the Bailey, Claude and Phyllida Erskine-Brown's topper at the end of "Rumpole and the Course of True Love" features the groom in a barrister's gown and clerical bands and the bride in a wedding dress—and both in barristers' wigs. Later, when Sam Ballard got married to "Matey" (the Matron of the Old Bailey nurses), the topper had a man in a barrister's wig and a woman with a nurse's hat.
• There was a joke on Scrubs where Turk made a huge deal about the cake place not having Black/Latina cake-topper couples. The offer to touch them up with chocolate icing... didn't go over well. He's annoyed with her, so he's actually looking to make a scene.

Music

• In the Concrete Blonde song "Carry Me Away":
  And any promise we make is as easy to break
  As the plastic people on the wedding cake

Puppet Shows

• In an episode of Fraggle Rock, Junior bakes a wedding cake for his parents' 513th anniversary. The toppers are actually PVC toys made in Germany by Schleich.
• One Swedish Chef sketch on The Muppet Show has him making an onion cake which has Miss Piggy and Kermit as the bride and groom. The cake sinks the moment he puts on the Miss Piggy figure.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons module I6 Ravenloft: On the day Sergei was to marry Tatyana, Strahd murdered Sergei so he could have Tatyana for himself. The wedding cake is in a room in Strahd's castle: Tatyana's figurine is still on top of the cake, but Sergei's has been cast to the floor (presumably by Strahd).

Video Games

• Octodad: In the sequel's level "Wedding Bells", the second section of the level has a cake with Octodad and Scarlet figurines on it.
• Super Mario Odyssey: Bowser's cake doesn't just have him and Peach, but a few Piranha Plant bouquets as well.

Visual Novels

• The Perfect Ending in Melody shows custom cake toppers in the wedding between the protagonist and the title character.

Webcomics

• Something*Positive: Vanessa has the odd habit of dressing up as a Kaiju for everyday activities. When she and Davan get married, he wears his own version and they have little Gozilla cake toppers, seen here.

Western Animation

• Big City Greens: In “Flimflammed”, after scamming Gloria out of $200, Cricket spends the money on a wedding cake, claiming that it’s only because it was the biggest cake he could buy. When an angry Gloria points out the toppers (with Cricket as both groom and bride), he replies “Can’t I feel special on my big day?”
• In Disenchantment's first episode, Zog (father of the unwilling bride), doesn't seem to understand the point of these:
  "And neither of these looks like me. Make them both look like me, then get rid of one!"
• In one episode of Family Guy, Peter sets up Meg for a Shotgun Wedding, after she believes that she's pregnant. While planning the wedding, Peter says that the store was all out of little cake figurines, so instead he got a toy version of The Iron Giant and one of those courtroom rag dolls where they ask the children just where the suspect touched them.
• In Futurama, Leela was engaged to a fellow Cyclops shapeshifting grasshopper and the top of the wedding cake shows the bride on her knees polishing the groom's shoes. It more or less defines the way he treated her.
• When Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law decides to marry his Really Gets Around girlfriend Gina (AKA Comet Girl from the original show), the cake has one bride and about 6 grooms because Gina is also marrying her other boyfriends, including Phil Ken Sebben, Peanut, and the Zen Bear.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: During "A Canterlot Wedding", we see that Equestrian weddings use the little cake toppers as well. Spike can't stop playing with Shining Armor and Cadence's.
• An episode of The Simpsons had Marge and Homer find their old wedding cake top with the figures still on it. Homer speculates that they have "wee little parties" at night, and then attempts to quickly open the freezer and catch them in the act. Another episode has Homer eat the couple on top of Apu and Manjula's cake, believing them to be made of icing.
  • In the episode "A Fish Called Selma", Homer tells Marge that he stole the (plastic) cake topper from Troy and Selma's cake after their wedding and then proceeds to attempt to eat it, which he can't, so he ends up swallowing it whole.
    Homer: Mmm, pointy.
  • In "The Simpsons Tall Tales," a Shotgun Wedding has a cake with a bride figure, a groom figure, and a father figure holding the groom at gunpoint.
• On Steven Universe's Thanksgiving Episode, the Gems, who don't really understand human customs, try to combine a bunch of different Earth celebrations together, including a wedding. Pearl declares that the whole group will "marry each other," taking out a cake with solitary brides and grooms stuck haphazardly all over.
• Wacky Races: In "Dash to Delaware", Dick Dastardly lured Peter Perfect and Penelope Pitstop into a bakery, where he somehow managed to put them into the top of a wedding cake and dressed like bride and groom.

Other

• The DVD cover of Gay Weddings here◊.
• Gahan Wilson drew a cartoon where two chefs are looking at a wedding cake with two guys on it. One chef doesn't look too happy, but the second tells him, "Times change."
• LEGO Artist Eric Harshbarger has created many wedding items out of LEGO bricks, including cake toppers. Read about them here, see the cake here◊, and see a closeup of the LEGO cake topper here◊.
• Along with same-sex and interracial cake toppers, there are now ones where one-half of the couple is being forcibly dragged by the other. Or shackled to them.
• When Steve Purcell was married, he had the cake-toppers made in the likeness of his creations dressed as newlyweds.

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