Fridge Brilliance

At first I was like...

...but then I lol'd.

"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

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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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Warning: High chance of unmarked spoilers

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Examples:

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&M's 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.

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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.

Meta

• After watching another Sunrise series on Youtube, you might notice something: When the main Sunrise logo appears, that little green ball (which I had always assumed was just that), spread its little mechanical wings to land on the "i". It's a freaking HARO!!! And what Sunrise Meta-Series gave us the Haro? It's basically transcended the Gundam multiverse to become a symbol of the entire Studio company!
• In this video, the environments are a little weird, from 28 Days Later to The Haunted Mansion to a strange forest, thematically, these don't make sense, then, near the end, they find a bed lying about, it dawns to the players:
  Oh, I get it! It was all a dream!
• The roots of rock music can be traced to blues, which got its roots from jazz, which got its roots through African-American gospel... which explains The Power of Rock, especially its potential for fighting evil: because of its roots in God's music!
• The moon was believed to be a woman by many ancient civilizations. Many would go on a conspiracy trip and point out that it was a divine revelation or something. Then again, how much does the lunar cycle last?
  • St. Valentine's Day is on February 14th. This may be just a simple coincidence, but when you think about it February has only 28 days. What happens around the middle of the menstrual cycle? Women^note and most female individuals of any hominid species ovulate and are more horny.
  • It may, however, have romantic connotation because of some European birds pairing off around the time of the festival of St. Valentine.
• The first episode of a television series is called the pilot, because it's the first to air.
  • This is actually a two-for: It is also called a pilot because it steers or pilots the direction the show is going to go in.
• Wham Line and Punchline are actually very closely related tropes, as what is a Punchline to a joke except a Wham Line Played for Laughs? Therefore, Wham Line and a Punchline are opposites. A Wham Line is the climax of dramatic situation while a Punch Line is the climax of a comedic situation.
• The Statue of Liberty was built in France. Who better to welcome immigrants to American than someone who came from another country to become a recognized American icon?
  • Liberty is a a bit of subversion of the French intent^note the french men who proposed the idea (Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi,Édouard René de Laboulaye) were republicans, i.e. they wanted France to be a Republic, not a Kingdom or an Empire. Their intent was to celebrate democratic values at a time (the beginning of France's Third Republic) when those values were threatened in France^note and to recycle Bartholdi's previous idea of building a giant statue in Egypt. Emma Lazarus' poem The New Colossus (the old one being the Colossus of Rhodes) that reads in part "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" turned the intent into one of welcoming immigrants to America.
• You know how fascism sought to rebuild society and establish complete governmental control over peoples lives, and how it often hearkened back to a mythologized past? Note carefully that, unlike reactionary movements, fascists looked back not to the recent past but the very remote past. For instance, Hitler looked back to the Teutonic tribes of the Dark Ages and Late Antiquity, and Mussolini looked back to the old Roman Empire. It turns out that all of this hangs together: the further back in time fascists go, the easier it is simply to make things up, and (once they're in power) to control what "history" is invented. Think of it, if a modern fascist movement were to advocate turning back the clock to The '50s, when everyone wore kimonos, performed human sacrifices, and married their siblings, there are plenty of people alive who would cry B.S., with records (including movies and TV shows) to back them up. Even going back a century or two, or a few more, you still have plenty of inconvenient records (the works of Dickens, Cooper, Irving, and even Shakespeare) that limit what can be invented. However, going back to the far remote past, where records are limited, and in a language less intelligible to modern people, gives a prospective fascist movement far more freedom. This way, they can rule by appealing to tradition without, you know, actually having to respect or being bound by actual traditions. After all, most people can't be go to the primary sources and discover the truth; and, if a few pesky scholars and reference books get in the way — hey, that's what anti-intellectualism and book-burning is for!
• In 1989, General Motors took the Chevrolet models that were rebadged import cars ("captive imports") and renaming them as the Geo sub-brand. The smallest of these was a rebadged Suzuki Swift called the Metro. It took a while to realize that Geo Metro sounds a lot like geometric.
• When a television series ends, the channel that hosts it then proceeds to go through all of the episodes before the Series Finale airs. You could say that the show's life is flashing before its (and our) eyes before its death.

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology:
  • Pandora's Box initially portrays the addition of Hope to the world as uplifting and positive. The myth, though, can be painting hope as another evil. Or, since hope is the only thing left in the box, there is no hope. Dark stuff, either way.
    • Hope may not be out of the chains of Pandora's Box yet. Or maybe it's just another evil. But only it may deliver us. So what must we do? Stay hopeful.
    • Another translation is that foreboding was left trapped in the box - so we won't know about all the miserable suffering that life will deliver us and can therefore stay hopeful.
    • Perhaps hope is truly evil. After all, with hope alone, action is never taken
  • Garlic repels vampires and can also repel insects if you eat enough of it for it to build up in your body. Aside from vampires, what's the other most notorious bloodsucking fiend on the planet?
  • Pandora's Box can be a euphemism for the female nether regions. So opening the box is the same as child birth. The children born are in essence the next generation. The ancient Greeks saw what mankind had been doing until then (wars, killing, etc...) and pictured themselves a bleak future. Each child born would just add to the crimes of humanity. BUT there was still hope. Maybe the child would grow up to be a better person than all those that came before it. This being said, it is a rather misogynistic view: it's the womans fault to put evil into this world.
    • One can also argue that since the box contains nothing but evil (all kinds of diseases, death, suffering,...), that maybe hope itself is also an unrecognised evil. Maybe hope is just a cruel joke of the gods, to let man struggle in life while all is lost anyway. Maybe hope is just a device from the gods to add more suffering to the suffering already innate in mankind.
    • Or maybe hope was left behind in the box because that's what the box was lined with. Hope is what keeps people going in the face of hardship, so it could be the Weaksauce Weakness of the various evils, ideal for keeping them confined.
    • Though no ancient source explains why hope was in Pandoras box (actually a jar, mistranslated as a box)it's generally accepted that either the hope kept trapped was baseless hope, that is the lazy wishing for things to be better that distracts people from working to make things better. Or that hope was kept safe in the jar so humankind would continue to have hope as comfort and motivation in the face of the released evils. And if the trapped hope was the good and motivating kind, it was in the jar with the evils because it was not needed as long as the evils were trapped.
    • Either way, it probably was not an euphemism for female genitals and childbirth, as some other myths about evils and blessing bestowed on humans mention *two* jars, and often mention a man opening one and letting evils loose, or letting blessings escape, but often mention hope remaining trapped or being left behind. And even in the classic story of Pandora, the jar holding the evils was a gift sent to her by Zeus. He sent it, planning she would open it, and release the evils, because he wanted to punish humans for accepting the gift of fire from Prometheus.

Poetry

• In antiquity and even up until the middle ages, pretty much everything was written in verse. Not just poetry, literature, or even drama: philosophy, scientific and medical texts were also written in verse, as were histories. This seems like a strange affectation at first, but remember that during these periods there wasn't such a thing as movable type. All manuscripts had to be copied BY HAND; as such most learned people never actually owned the books, but memorized them from copies they read in a library or school. What's one way to aid memorization? Put the information into the form of a poem or song, where the regularity of the meter and rhyme will help you memorize it!

Pro Wrestling

• The Royal Rumble 2010. Triple H was number 8. H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, it was 8 years since the Royal Rumble was held in Atlanta, Georgia, and 8 years ago, Triple H won the Rumble.
• The PG-era in general. Back when first enacted, they'd literally stop the match if someone was bleeding to patch them up and wrestlers would apologize immediately after shows for using words like ass. Now that they've let up on these restrictions in 2011, it's become shocking again when wrestlers say ass or douchebag (see CM Punk) and the few times when wrestlers bleed make huge impacts in storylines (see Cody Rhodes).
• Some people wonder why "Stone Cold" Steve Austin turned in the first place in 2001. However, the Shocking Swerve doesn't seem so shocking you realize (A) Austin lost a grueling final battle against Triple H, the man who had him run over by a car and took him out of action for nearly a year and (B) Vince McMahon appointing his then-wife Debra as the manager of his WrestleMania opponent The Rock against any of their wishes, which resulted in Austin being unable to protect her from an Ankle Lock from Kurt Angle. Austin's line of "I need to win this, Rock" was him crossing the Despair Event Horizon meaning, days away from WrestleMania and the most important match of his comeback from neck surgery, Austin looked weak. Austin's stare in his locker room shortly before his match taking place was him after making the deal with Vince McMahon.
  • Likewise, this can seen as the ultimate victory for Vince McMahon after being humiliated by Austin in two WrestleManias over the past three years. Vince's appointment of Debra as The Rock's manager was a way to weaken Austin and play off his insecurities over not defeating Triple H. Since Vince couldn't beat Austin, he made Austin join him.
  • Digging in deeper, Vince's past relationship with The Rock comes into play. Rock was Vince's hand-picked Corporate Champion, but ultimately failed to stop Austin at WrestleMania 15 and Backlash 1999, thus getting him kicked out of the Corporation. This puts McMahon turning on Rock at the next WrestleMania in another perspective aside from Vince being reunited with his family: Vince could not trust The Rock to get the job done. As well, The Rock did something that Austin could not do: beat McMahon's own son-in-law, Triple H; this arguably made Rocky a bigger threat to Vince than Austin was. This also explains why McMahon set Rock up with Debra knowing full well Austin would inevitably snap. With all that in mind, Vince got the ultimate victory on The Rock as well: Vince's new hand-picked Corporate Champion is the same man that The Rock has never defeated with gold on the line ^note This even dates all the way back to December 1997 when Austin retained the Intercontinental Championship against The Rock. Sure enough, The Rock would fail to beat Stone Cold again the following night.
• Why did Ted DiBiase choose the Netherlands Antilles and Palm Beach, Florida as seasonal residences? Both of them are famous tax havens.
• Ivory tried administering Soap Punishment to Tori during their hardcore WWE Women's Title match on the September 6, 1999 Raw. Her name is Ivory, after all.
• The forming of the Revolution in WCW:
  • Due to Ric Flair's increasing abuse of power, Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko left the Four Horsemen to join Shane Douglas and Perry Saturn. ECW fans who watched WCW would remember that Benoit, Douglas, and Malenko were the original Triple Threat. Ironically, the event that caused Saturn to join forces with Benoit included another former member of the Triple Threat: Bam Bam Bigelow.
  • Some of Shane Douglas's hatred of Ric Flair stems from Flair's penchant for politicking and holding others down. In essence, with Benoit and Malenko being nothing more than hired guns for Ric's son, David, the United States Champion at the time, he neutralized two major threats at one time, further proving Shane's point about Flair.

Radio

• The summer-2011 jingle for Quebec radio station Rythme FM was "Ça me fait du bien" ("It does me good")...which can also be heard as "Summer fait du bien". (The majority of francophone Quebeckers can speak enough English to get the bilingual pun.)
• In Adventures in Odyssey, Lucy fell head-over-heels for Richard Maxwell. Could it be that he sort of resembled her recently deceased father
  • Another bit of Fridge Brilliance is Eugene being at Campbell County rather than an Ivy League university. Campbell county had a program for prodigies, and Eugene was (essentially) an orphan. He stayed at CCCC as an adult out of loyalty.

Software

• Microsoft:
  • Microsoft's decision to give window borders a glass look in Windows Vista and 7 may seem like a rather random choice made only because it would look flashy, akin to Apple's infamous tendency to give its interfaces looks based on materials like chrome, leather, etc. But think about it for a second: programs are depicted as windows, and what are real life windows are made out of? Glass! Add to that the fact that the OS itself is named Windows, and it makes sense for its interface to have a glass look in general.
  • Also pertaining to Microsoft and Windows: readers of a certain age may remember the excitement around Windows 95 when it first came out. Although the software was as groundbreaking for its day as the iPhone was for its, for most users the vast majority of interaction was playing Minesweeper (and to a lesser degree, the other highly addictive built-in games). Turns out from MS's point of view it wasn't a waste of time at all: these games were designed to train users in precision scrolling and left/right/double clicking of the mouse.

Sports

• In the National Football League, one of the most bitter rivalries are between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins. It's also amazing if you think about the historical side of respective names of the two teams. Cowboys had always been one of the most iconic representation of the American pioneers and settlers who went to the Wild West. On the other hand, Redskins (or Indians or Native American, take your pick) are the native people of the Americas. Historically, the American pioneers tend to get into conflict with the indigenous people of the land. So the name Cowboys and Redskins are actually fitting names to show the bitter rivalries between the two teams.
  • Consider further that until the Dallas Cowboys came around in 1960, the Redskins were the main NFL team for the South in a league with mainly East Coast and Midwest roots (do note that the public idea of the border between Yankee and Southern culture is has shifted southwards in the past century - until recently Baltimore and Washington were considered Southern cities in culture, and there is a reason the Mason-Dixon Line is the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania). When the Dallas Cowboys came around, they suddenly had competition.
• Trevor Bayne winning the 2011 Daytona 500 has a few examples of this.
  • NASCAR had put in place a rule starting in 2011 where drivers could only compete for one championship (Hoping to limit the number of Sprint Cup drivers competing in the Nationwide Series). Over Speedweeks, Sprint Cup drivers won both the Camping World Truck Series (Michael Waltrip) and Nationwide Series (Tony Stewart) races. Bayne, competing as a full-time Nationwide Series driver, wins the Sprint Cup Series biggest race with a part-time team with partial sponsorship.
  • Also this was Bayne's second race, tying the record for fewest starts to a first win with Jamie McMurray, the defending winner of the 500 at the time.
• Speaking of NASCAR: that double yellow line that you can't make a pass under at Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway? It's the same double yellow line you can't cross to pass slower traffic on civilian roads!
• In Chess, when going over a Grand Master's game around move, say 12, a bishop will move to a square that has no reason for immediately. Then at the end, that "misplaced" bishop will be vital where it is.

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