Fridge Brilliance

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"They kept on losing me. They would bring out a new album and for a few listenings it would leave me cold and confused. Then, gradually it would begin to unravel itself in my mind. I would realise that the reason I was confused was that I was listening to Something that was simply unlike anything that anybody had done before."

— Douglas Adams on The Beatles, The Salmon of Doubt

You watch a movie and something about it just seems off, you don't like it. One night, as you get up for a midnight snack, you open the refrigerator door and the light dawns on you, "This is the real purpose behind this plot!"

Because you had that epiphany, what once was a hated moment has become one of your favorites.

May be evoked by Rewatch Bonus. Compare Hilarious in Hindsight, Heartwarming in Hindsight and It Makes Sense in Context. See also Ascended Fridge Horror for writers applying prior Fridge Horror in a way analogous to Fridge Brilliance. For the puzzle-solving equivalent, see the Egg of Columbus.

Has nothing to do with the light that comes on inside your fridge when you open the door.

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...but then I lol'd.

Warning: High chance of unmarked spoilers

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Advertising

These◊ print◊ ads◊ for the Game Boy Advance seem at first glance like yet another example of What Were They Selling Again? However, it makes far more sense when you consider the people are using their feet to do things we normally do with our hands...because they're too busy playing on the Game Boy Advance!
In the M&Ms commercials, the smart guy is the plain red M&M, and the dumb one is the peanut yellow M&M. Get it? The yellow one is a peanut-brain!
- Uhh...
There's an ad for Mac, with "Choose A Vista". PC spins the wheel, and lands on Lose A Turn. Mac retorts with "Didn't you make this?". Most people would see this as a What an Idiot! moment, but in reality, PC loses his turn, so it's now Mac's turn to Choose A Vista.
- Of course, this could still fall under What an Idiot!, since Mac has no reason to choose a Vista.
  - But he can.
  - This even adds to the Fridge Brilliance; the joke in these commercials is that PC is a bit rubbish, over-complicated and nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is. Of course he'd include an utterly redundant 'miss-a-turn' option to a game that only he was ever going to play.
  - Unless, of course, he included it because he knew the Mac would be there, and wanted to get the Mac to participate.
Heineken's "The Tiger" ad ostensibly seems to have Unfortunate Implications, what with the woman being the "prey". Unless you consider the possibility that the "prey" is the attractive woman's interest, not the woman herself. Even if he's asking the older woman for a dance just to get the younger woman interested, all three people (mum, woman and man) probably know that. And he's just demonstrated a willingness to make more than the usual effort at getting the woman's attention.
This TMNT action figure commercial. Initially, one might not understand why it opened with Donatello saying "Wowie! Recycling works!" However, that clip of animation was used in this earlier TMNT action figure commercial. Apparently, recycling really DOES work!
SBS's latest slogan is "Six Billion Stories and Counting": it's not just talking about describing the diversity of humanity, but it's also their initials.
On the "USA Prime Credit" Discover Card commercials, the name of the operator possibly isn't "Peggy", it's "Пэги" (Pegi)!
A 2016 commercial for that year's new Toyota Prius starts with a group of criminals exiting the bank they just robbed to discover their getaway car's been towed. One of the robbers quips "Told ya someone should have waited in the car." After they steal the Prius and make their getaway, this same robber repeatedly makes himself look like the least intelligent member of the crew and the one who least takes the situation seriously. (For example, they encounter a police roadblock. He instead points out the farmer's market behind the roadblock and suggests getting some flowers for the car.) Now, it makes sense why they didn't take a perfectly logical suggestion seriously.
An Oscar Meyer hot dog radio ad had a young boy who loves hotdogs, then we hear him undergo stages of puberty. At the end of the commercial he is a deep-voiced man who advertises their jumbo hot dogs now that he's grown up. So his wiener got bigger with age.

Arts

Ambiguity is, and has always been, a cornerstone of surrealism, by why is that? Surrealism is the practice of adapting the human subconscious (i.e. dreams) into artistic mediums. It's not possible to interpret dreams with absolute certainty.

Gamebooks

In the Lone Wolf series, it can seem puzzling at first when you find out that weapons forged by the Darklords, like Helshezag or the Dagger of Vashna, give not only combat bonus against Darklords, but can also kill them permanently, a feature that until then was solely associated with the Sommerswerd, the ultimate weapon for the forces of good. But then you realize: as a whole, the Darklords never feared much any hypothetical hero reaching them in their strongholds surrounded by their armies, especially since they are Nigh Invulnerable. The one enemy they are most likely to be confronted with — taking in account their very strong Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, and that the only way for an Archlord to emerge were civil wars between their different factions — are simply other Darklords. Thus, it should be no surprise that they devised weapons specifically to defend themselves against their rivals, and that could put them down definitely.