Message in a Bottle

"Damn it, I forgot to ask for cheese-filled crust on the pizza!"

"I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle..."

— The Police, "Message in a Bottle"

So things are looking pretty grim. A character is trapped somewhere terrible, usually an island in the middle of an ocean, a slave ship, or somewhere that it just plain sucks to be and there's no way to get a message to anyone. In this desperate situation, the only hope possible is a futile grasp at straw. Take a bottle, put in a hastily written cry for help and hope that somewhere, someone, somehow manages to find the bottle and lend a hand.

Lucky thing the odds of this happening are a Million to One Chance, or else this wouldn't be much of a storytelling device.

Despite the obvious problems with this trope, it still retains a fair amount of popularity, due to some advantages that it confers. First, the Message in a Bottle is such a desperate ploy for help that a character really has to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to even try it. It reeks of desperation. Second, usually the people who receive the message are completely unknown to whoever sent it, so their decision to help the sender of this random note from the middle of nowhere helps establish that they are, without a doubt, the good guys. Third, it's a workable Framing Device, both in the sense that the message spurs all the action of the story but also that the message can relate all of the action of the story, if the note turns out to be detailed.

It also shows up fairly often for completely different reasons, as the Message in a Bottle itself is a well-known staple of fiction. It's nearly a Discredited Trope, for that matter, but not quite yet. This appears to be somewhat related to Apocalyptic Log.

Sister Trope to Island Help Message. Related to Deserted Island.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Kuro once communicated with a girl with this, but the bottle somehow disappears and appears on its own, and it happens on land, not sea. It got delivered by a motorbike guy.
• An episode of Case Closed had the Detective Boys find a message in a plastic bottle reading "SOS" washed toward the shore. The message was written recently by a woman who was near unconscious in a tide cave.
• In Panda! Go Panda!: The Rainy-Day Circus, Tiny uses one of these to let the main characters know that the circus animals are in trouble.
• Used in OVA 2, episode 3 Squid Girl. Squid Girl and Takeru send out these messages, but hers keeps returning for some reason. Eventually Cindy and her three stooges help out by building a rocket, but the rockets either hilariously fail, or in one case, works a little too well and sends the message into space. In the end, Eiko asks her why she doesn't just use her tentacles, and Squid Girl does that. At the end, a giant shrimp is drawn on the beach by an alien, who received the message that was sent into space.
• In an episode of Pokémon: The Original Series, a girl sends a message in a bottle asking if someone can help her brother find the Crystal Onix. Ash and his friends find the bottle. Though they have never heard of a Crystal Onix, they help find it.
• One episode of Tamagotchi is about Mametchi and the gang finding a message in a bottle that washes up on shore. The message contained in the bottle catches a lot of people's attention for being a very, very well-written love letter, to such an extent that it gets made into a novel called Time Love which later gets a movie adaptation.

Asian Animation

• Guardian Fairy Michel has a very lonely person sending messages in bottles.
• Happy Heroes: This is how the inhabitants of Planet Guling communicate from long distances since the planet is themed around the prehistoric era and thus does not have any advanced pieces of technology to use to communicate.

Comic Books

• In one The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck comic book, Huey, Dewey and Louie find a message in a bottle from someone stranded on an island — who turns out to be a Beagle Boy.
• A "Fred's Bed" strip in The Beano involved Fred going back in time to answer a message he found in a bottle.
• Wonder Woman (1942): The evening before his execution the cruel pirate Capt. Storm tossed a bottle containing a map to the location of his Buried Treasure into the sea, which is found decades later by the Barnacle Gang.

Comic Strips

• No bottles are involved, but Peter in B.C. regularly corresponds with an unseen Deadpan Snarker overseas via carved stone tablets he releases at the shore. The art suggests that he usually gets a reply within a day.
• One Caldwell strip depicts a man on a "Far Side" Island with a mailbox that consists of a post topped by a bottle with a red flag sticking out of a hole on its side.
• Conchy finds a bottle washed up with a message in it reading "IF FOUND WASHED ASHORE, PLEASE RETURN TO BOB!". Conchy returns it to the bottle, tosses it back in the ocean, and it floats with the Unsound Effect of "Bob, Bob".
• The Far Side: A castaway is writing up a note to put in his bottle, only for a coconut to fall from the resident tree and smash the latter.
• Modesty Blaise: In "The Big Mole", one of the nurses being held hostage writes a note for help, places it in a plastic bottle and tosses it out of the bathroom window into the river.
• The German caricature Vater und Sohn once has the father and son get stranded on a Deserted Island. One of the first things the dad does is to write a bottled message to his son's headmaster to excuse him from school due to their incapacitation. The funny thing: The headmaster gets the message and sends one back, citing insufficient evidence to excuse his son.

Fan Works

• Bottled Letters: Given the title, it's implied that this is how Apo and Red are sending their letters between each other while living on opposing sides of the island in canon.

Films — Animated

• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day", Piglet writes a help message during the flood and throws the bottle into the rising water. The note is later found by Christopher Robin, who sends out Owl to rescue him.
• My Little Pony: A New Generation: Not in a bottle, but attached to a lantern in this case. At the start of the movie, Sunny Starscout and her father send a message of welcome to the other pony races from their home in Maretime Bay, hoping it would reach them. It turns out that it reached a filly Izzy Moonbow (a unicorn), giving her the motivation to go to the town, kickstarting the events of the movie.
• The Rescuers: This is the impetus for all of the action. Penny sends such a message to beg for rescue from her abusive captors, which is found by the Rescue Aid Society.
• The War to End All Wars – The Movie: A sailor on HMS Black Prince, mortally wounded by the German High Seas Fleet in the "Dreadnought" segment, stuffs King Albert's letter into an empty rum bottle and corks it before the ship goes down. The current carries it back to France, where it's recovered by a British soldier headed for the Battle of the Somme and "The Unkillable Soldier".

Films — Live-Action

• In the 1954 Disney film version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Ned Land uses multiple messages in bottles to notify the authorities of the location of Captain Nemo's island so they can attack it.
• Played with in Aquaman (2018). The long dead King Atlan leaves a map inside a bottle showing the way to where he's hidden his trident. After going to where the map indicates, Arthur looks into the bottle and realises there are etchings on the inside of the bottle that provide further clues if pointed in the right direction.
• The Thing (1982): MacReady is shown dictating an Apocalyptic Log into a tape recorder, which he states he intends to hide in the faint hope that it would be found by a search party if they're all killed. Or worse.
• The plot of the cheesy romantic-action film, Gorgeous is kicked off by the female lead finding a message in a bottle that says "I will wait for you". At which point she leaves her fishing village to the big city to find the person who wrote the message, her alleged true love. In a hilarious twist of fate, it turns out the writer of the message is gay, and the message is meant for his future boyfriend.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Will leaves messages in bottles for Cutler Beckett, with directions to Shipwreck Cove. Unlike most examples, he doesn't trust chance to deliver them, but attaches them to barrel-lashed corpses so that scavenging seabirds will gather in conspicuous flocks, easily visible from the Endeavour.
• A variation in Castaway on the Moon. Seong-Geun is marooned on an island—under a bridge, in the middle of Seoul (It Makes Sense in Context). He writes "HELP" on the sand, which is observed by Jung-yeon when she spots him from her apartment on the far side of the river. But she's agoraphobic and far too shy to actually come to his island and talk to him, so she drops him notes from the bridge, inside bottles.
• The Louis de Funès comedy Sur Un Arbre Perche uses an unusual variation. The three main characters are trapped on a tree growing from a seaside cliff, and put a message in a bottle with a small parachute. The bottle lands safely on a café table, but the rescuers aren't sent just yet because the café owner is adamant that the table pay for the two clearly empty bottles even though they only ordered one.

Literature

• The premise of the Planet of the Apes novel is that a couple on an intergalactic cruise ship finds the whole story written and put inside a bottle that's out IN SPACE!, combining this trope with Direct Line to the Author and Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale.
• The Nicholas Sparks novel as well as The Film of the Book of the same title.
• A message in a bottle is discovered at the end of And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. The author of the message claims to have gotten the idea from adventure stories.
• The short story "A Saucer of Loneliness" by Theodore Sturgeon, which was adapted into an episode of the The Twilight Zone (1985). The Reveal is that the tiny Flying Saucer the female protagonist encountered in her youth was also this trope.
• A chapter in Classic Singapore Horror Stories involves a message in a bottle recovered after the second World War, detailing an Apocalyptic Log of a Japanese submarine who mysteriously disappeared during the war. Turns out the submarine had an unfortunate run in with a vengeful sea-hag, and the submarine's Admiral, the final survivor, is the writer of the message. The story literally ends with him saying he needs to get the message in a bottle before it gets wet, moments before the submarine gets filled with water and drowning him.
• In The Land That Time Forgot, the protagonist writes up an account of his adventures and sets it afloat in an empty thermos flask, whence it eventually comes into the hands of Edgar Rice Burroughs and gets published.
• Edgar Allan Poe's "Manuscript Found In A Bottle" (1833).
• James Bond leaves a message taped inside an aeroplane toilet in the novel Goldfinger.
• The framing device of Yosl Rakover talks to God is that the novella is a crossover prayer/diary written by holocaust victim Yosl Rakover, hidden in a basement in the ghetto of Warsaw, and found after the war. In reality, it was written in Argentina in the late forties by Zvi Kolitz, and Yosl Rakover is a fictional character. This important fact was dropped in some inofficial reprints, leading people to believe that the framing story was true, something the author never intended. When faced with the existence of an author, many chose to denounce the story as a fraud, rather than laud it as a marvelously insightful piece of fiction. A meta case of Misaimed Fandom?
• In Winnie the Pooh a flood threatens Piglet's home so he sends out a message in a bottle hoping for help. Pooh spots the bottle but can't understand the message, so he sets off to find Christopher Robin and they both go to Piglet's rescue.
• In Truman Capote's short story, "Hello, Stranger", a respectable family man happens upon a message in bottle while swimming in the ocean. He replies to the sender, a 12-year-old girl named Linda Reilly, which starts a chain of tragedy.
• H. P. Lovecraft's story The Temple is a message in a bottle sent by a German World War I submarine captain.
  • This trope serves the basis of the very first story Lovecraft wrote, at the tender age of seven. It's ultimately subverted, with the whole thing being an elaborate practical joke. The prankster was at least kind enough to leave $25 to pay off the expenses of the rather unhappy treasure hunters' trip.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo plans to use one to assure his research is not lost:
  "Here, Professor Aronnax, is a manuscript written in several languages. It contains a summary of my research under the sea, and God willing, it won't perish with me. Signed with my name, complete with my life story, this manuscript will be enclosed in a small, unsinkable contrivance. The last surviving man on the Nautilus will throw this contrivance into the sea, and it will go wherever the waves carry it."
• The Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Ship of the Line used a version of this, except the "bottle" in question was a message probe with a delay. As the USS Bozeman is being chased by a Klingon cruiser, The Captain wishes to notify the Enterprise (as Bateson calls it "a true ship-of-the-line") of the presence of the cruiser, but the Klingons are jamming all frequencies. The probe is launched with a recorded message set to broadcast as soon as it leaves the range of the jamming field. Unfortunately, by the time Kirk arrives to chase off the cruiser, the Bozeman has already entered the temporal anomaly that would send it on a collision course with the Enterprise-D. It did, however, save thousands of lives on the defenseless outpost in the sector, which the Klingons planned to destroy.
• The Twenty-Eighth Voyage of The Star Diaries is Ijon Tichy's diary of his last and longest voyage, which he put in "an empty barrel of oxygen" and let drift into space.
• The plot of In Search of the Castaways begins when the protagonists find a bottle in a shark's stomach, which contain a call for help in several languages. Unfortunately, the message is incomplete enough that they only have the latitude to go on, and need to sail around the entire globe to find the sender.
• In The Great Balloon Race, the British entry gets stranded on top of a mountain. The captain sends out a message in bottle, with the bottle dangling from a small balloon.
• In The Mermaid Summer, Anna wants to write to Granda Eric, who is away at sea, this way, in the hopes that the bottle will be found by someone who knows where he is at the moment. But Jimsie Jamieson explains to her that the tide would bring it back to shore before it got very far. Instead, he tells her and Jon to write to the Seamen's Mission at the home port of Eric's ship so he can collect the letters every time the ship returns to Scotland.
• A cartoon in Will Eisner's Star Jaws depicts a space patrolman finding a message in a bottle which says "Help! I'm a prisoner in a fortune cookie factory."

Live-Action TV

• In Lost, four survivors set sail on a raft, attempting to secure rescue. They take along a bottle containing messages from the rest of the survivors to their families. When the raft blows up, the bottle returns to the island with the tide, alerting those still on the island that something has Gone Horribly Wrong on the raft. This is a rare instance of the bottle returning with the tide, which is possibly a more likely outcome than the bottle actually reaching other people.
  • As revealed later, the island can only be entered and exited on certain bearings, so the bottle (and the raft) was going to return to the island anyway.
• One episode of the Swedish Pippi Longstocking television show had the eponymous character asserting that her father had been captured by pirates because he sent her messages with bottles — something which most of the townspeople understandably regard as being utterly preposterous. But this being a children's show, this is naturally exactly what has happened.
• On Gilligan's Island Mary Ann had a fake boyfriend on the mainland she pretended to communicate with in this way.
• In See, once the blind Alkenny tribe start living at their second settlement, traitor Gether Bax, still eager to get rid of the "witches" (sighted people) in the tribe, drops rope messages in plastic bottles in the nearby river to give their position away to the Witchfinders. Twenty years later, one of these is found in the capital city and the Witchfinders is sent to the settlement, prompting Baba Voss' family and allies to go on the run.
• Survivorman is a Canadian reality show in which the star, Les Stroud, is dropped into various environments to survive for 7 days with no equipment. One episode was based around him being in a life raft in the middle of the ocean, followed by being beached on an island. Les then invokes the trope and actually throws a message in a bottle into the sea, with him even highlighting the last ditch, utter desperation of such an act. Possibly subverted though, because at the end of the episode, a message states that while he put his cell phone number on the message, nobody has ever phoned in.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In "Eye of the Needle", Voyager makes contact with a Romulan scientist in the Alpha Quadrant, only to find they're communicating twenty years back in time. In order to avoid changing the timeline, he agrees to take their messages and pass them on to Starfleet twenty years later. But the crew knows from their records that the scientist will die four years before this happens, so they've no way of knowing if he made arrangements in case of his death, or even if the Romulan government would have allowed him to pass the information on.
  • In the appropriately titled "Message in a Bottle", the holographic Doctor is the message and the bottle is an alien Subspace Ansible network that's widespread enough to reach a Starfleet vessel on the very edge of Federation space.
  • "Course: Oblivion" has the crew of the biomimetic copy of Voyager try to send one in the form of a probe to the real Voyager in the case that they don't survive their journey home to the Demon-class planet, but unfortunately it was destroyed upon launch.
• The Haven episode "The Trial of Audrey Parker" included a clever adaptation of this trope; Audrey Parker was trapped on a boat heading out to sea and had already gone out of range of the cell towers. Instead she sent a text message, and her phone naturally began repeatedly trying to send it. She then dropped it into a bottle and shoved it out the porthole where it drifted with the tide back to shore until getting back into coverage range, when the message was sent.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "A Saucer of Loneliness", the small eponymous saucer arrives on Earth and passes on its message to an extremely lonely woman named Margaret, who refuses to divulge its contents to anyone. However, she does make several copies of the message and puts them in bottles that she throws into the ocean. A man finds one of them and stops her from killing herself. He then reveals that he knows what the message said:
  "There is, in certain living souls, a loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine. And know by this that an immensity is one lonelier than you."

Music

• The page quote comes from the song "Message In a Bottle" by The Police. It's used as a metaphor for reaching out for help in times of loneliness, and contains the moral that everyone feels this way at some point in time.
• One interpretation of The Cruxshadows' "A Stranger Moment" is of a doomed sailor on a sinking ship sending out one of these for his loved ones.

Radio

• In the original The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) radio series, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are stranded on prehistoric Earth, and attempt to attract the attention of a passing spaceship by waving a towel at it. A volcano then erupts, covering the towel with lava. When the Earth is blown up six million years later, the now-fossilized towel gets launched into space and found by Zaphod Beeblebrox in the spaceship Heart Of Gold, who travels back in time and rescues them. (Things like this tend to happen whenever you use the Heart Of Gold's "Infinite Improbability" drive.)

Video Games

• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario Super Sluggers: An optional challenge is unlocked by following the instructions found inside a bottle at the beachside.
  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder: At Petal Isles, an Angler Poplin discovers a message in a bottle detailing that the Dolphin Kick Badge will allow a burst of speed underwater.
• In the adventure game King's Quest IV, Rosella gets swallowed by a whale and inside its throat finds a bottle with a message in it containing advertisements for some of Sierra's earlier games.
• Kingdom Hearts II: During the prologue, Kairi puts a message in a bottle for Sora and lets it drift out to sea. Sora and Riku find it on the shore of the Realm of Darkness at the end of the game, because A Wizard Did It.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link gains access to Jabu Jabu by presenting a Message in a Bottle written by Princess Ruto to the King, asking for rescue as she is trapped inside Jabu Jabu's belly. Interestingly, the message turns out to be several months old and Ruto has long since figured out how to leave Jabu Jabu — it turns out that her recent absence was for a completely different reason.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: In the HD edition of the game, there is a new item that replaces the Tingle Tuner called the Tingle Bottle. You can send short messages and pictures through it into the Miiverse and you can receive other player's bottles on beaches or out at sea.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: It is a tradition among the Zora to drop a message in a barrel from the Bank of Wishes in hopes that their wishes will come true. Link can help one Zora girl by following the barrel downstream and talking to the Hylian guy she has been sending love letters to in it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: A guy gets trapped in a cave on the southeastern coast of Hyrule and sets a message in a bottle telling of his predicament to drift out of a tiny gap along the sea currents, where Link can find it near Lurelin Village. To make it easier to find him, he also dumped lots of Brightbloom Seeds to float along the same path as the bottle.
• Appears in a Kingdom of Loathing adventure. Bottles found on the beach may contain messages reading "Help me, I'm trapped inside a Cloaca-Cola bottling plant!", magical scrolls, or for some reason blank paper.
• Animal Crossing:
  • You can send and receive messages in a bottle in Wild World. You do this by writing a message, then putting the DS in a low-power state that leaves the wireless on and carrying it around with you. Should you happen to pass by another DS in the same state, you'll trade messages, an interesting approximation of the low odds of success inherent in actual bottle throwing (subject, of course, to the concentration of fellow gamers in your environment).
  • In New Horizons, once or twice a day you'll find a bottle washed up on the shore with a note from a random villager and a random DIY recipe.
• A Girl Adrift: A mysterious message in a bottle is what first clues the player in to the fact that there are other survivors out there.
  "A bottle with a letter came out from the stomach of the fish. It says Busan in a messy handwriting and there's some kind of coordinates inscribed on it."
• Borderlands 2: The eponymous quest of Captain Scarlett's DLC requires The Vault Hunter to find a bottle with a map that contains the location of a hidden chest.
• In Illusion of Gaia, Will and Kara find one of these, ironically while shipwrecked at sea, so their discovery of the message doesn't do a heck of a lot of good to whoever tossed it out there.
• Jenny LeClue comes across a series of these while crossing the lake, each containing a cryptic message that she believes is connected to the Dean's murder. Turns out, they're all from CJ.
• In Lighthouse: The Dark Being, the Priests of the parallel world sent this out when their ship collided with an uncharted reef and sank. When you find the bottle on a remote beach, coordinates on the note inside allow you to find the ship's location.
• In Phantom Brave, Marona receives some of her missions from messages in a bottle. Justified in that these bottles are living constructs, and actively swim to their destinations. You can even recruit them to fight by your side.
• In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers, at the beach, bottles with jobs inside of them can be found.
• In Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island, Finding messages in floating bottles while exploring in her kayak allows Nancy to find a hidden location.
• The first thing Commander Shepard does in Mass Effect 2 is to launch a distress beacon as the SSV Normandy is being blown to pieces.
• In Salt and Sanctuary, messages in bottles act as the Hint System of the game. Players can use the Jurney Bottle to write hints or messages and place them for other players to find and read.
• Delicious: Emily's Message in a Bottle has these. When young Emily is three years old, she drops the message in a bottle at the sea port, until her Grandpa Vito (in the present time) saw this in Chapter 8. This message in a bottle will lead present Emily and her family searching for her dad Edward and her Uncle Antonio's brothers and their father and plan their Family Reunion in Italy. Also a Titular Name.
• Freddi Fish and The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds has a Message in a Bottle that gives the clues to the Stolen Kelp Treasure. The Sequel, The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse has a Message in a Bottle at the Hall of Fame Museum, and Freddi mentioned that she thinks of a familiar object from its prequel.
• Spectacle: You find a letter which has an elaborate illustration in a bottle floating near the waterfall. The piranhas won't let you simply take the bottle, though.
• At one point before the start of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, Thanatos Beldine sent a message in a bottle off the Island of Seiren, asking someone to send him plans for a ship so he could escape, and some snacks. The bottle was found by Hummel, who, upon finding that the bottle also contained payment, interpreted that as a valid contract, so he acquired the requested goods and deliberately got himself shipwrecked on Seiren so he could deliver the order to Thanatos.
• A side quest in Octopath Traveler II involves the party finding a message in a bottle addressed to "Ruby" and getting it to its destination. Ruby turns out to be the mother of Emerald, Osvald's accomplice in their prison break, with the message itself being written by him just before his Heroic Sacrifice.
• The epilogue to Psycholonials is formatted as a letter in a bottle from Z to the player, fitting as the story ends with Z living on a tropical island.
• The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary: After the prologue at the carnival ends with you trapped in the body of a kewpie doll and stranded on a deserted island, you find "the proverbial message in a bottle", which turns out to be a letter from Dr. Quandary mocking you for falling into his trap.
• In Uncle Albert's Fabulous Voyage, during a voyage to Egypt, Uncle Albert had to throw a bottle containing a papyrus in the sea before some bandits could steal it. The player must find the papyrus to put it back in its place.
• Several of these wash up after the events of the first and the second arc of Umineko: When They Cry, supposedly written by Maria. However, they tend to be contradictory and generally confuse the hell out of everyone trying to investigate what happened. In reality, they were written by Yasu before the massacre.

Web Animation

• AstroLOLogy: In "The Line", Scorpio finds a bottle and plans to use it to send an SOS so he and Libra can be rescued. Libra, however, throws the bottle into the sea before Scorpio can put the cork in, causing the bottle to sink.
• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email island, Homestar and Strong Bad are stuck on a "Far Side" Island when a bottle washes ashore. It's advertising Super Bowl XIX, which aired in 1985, 17 years prior.
  Strong Bad: Miami Dolphins vs. San Francisco 49ers... Great.
  Homestar: We're saved!
  Strong Bad: This is the worst deserted island ever.

Web Comics

• There are two in Gifts of Wandering Ice:
  • One appears in the background on page 28 as Rikter contemplates his tribe's ice gift stories.
  • A very important one appears in the Ice Gift Hunt minigame — it turns out to be a message from the legendary black iceberg, revealing the fate of the cryonically frozen children and the famous chief Rita.
• Parodied in Freefall — Florence needs to relay a message, but no one will help her and email is unavailable. When she unsuccessfully tries putting a message in a bottle down the drain of a sink, she muses, "either I need a bigger sink, or a smaller bottle."
• Port Sherry:
  • In "A reply, maybe?" a stranded man gets a reply to his message in a bottle.
  • In "And found they were", a stranded man throws his last message-containing bottle into the ocean. It turns out that they end up as musical instruments for Sebastian and company.

Web Games

• In the 2001 Mata Nui Online Game, it is said that the Book of Chronicles could become this if the island gets destroyed, making this video device that plays back the game's cutscenes the last reminder of its inhabitants, sent floating in the ocean. Fortunately, this doesn't come to pass in the game, although it has happened from a real-life perspective — after the game was taken down from LEGO's website, the Book's cutscenes remained its only accessible parts for several years before an updated version of the game was reuploaded in 2006.

Web Original

• Pirates SMP: Parodied. On Day 3, Scott finds one near the shore of an uninhabited island, with the message, "Help! I'm trapped in a Message in a Bottle making factory!" The later messages which other players find all have equally nonsensical messages.

Western Animation

• Arthur: In "Buster Baxter & the Letter from the Sea", Buster finds one of these washed up on the beach while he is on vacation with Arthur and his family, thinking it's from someone in the lost city of Atlantis, but later on it's revealed to have belonged to local souvenir shop owner and retired sailor, Captain Jack (aka E.J. Churney), who sent it when he was marooned in Antarctica back in 1960, but was eventually rescued.
• The Babaloos: One episode in Season 2 involves the Babaloos spotting one of these floating in the sea- given the show, the bottle is sentient.
• In one episode of Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, Brandy records a SOS video and sends it out at sea waiting for a rescue. Until someone else stranded on another island uses it as a hairpiece for his Companion Cube.
• Subverted in Clerks: The Animated Series. Randall makes one of these while trapped in the Pyramid, desperately hoping that Dante will somehow get his message. Through a series of Contrived Coincidence after Contrived Coincidence, the message actually does get to Dante in the form of a pop bottle that a member of his Little League team grabs to celebrate a victory, but...
  Player: Coach Dante, this bottle has a note in it.
  Dante: (cheerful) Then THROW IT OUT!!
• Craig of the Creek: In "Secret in a Bottle", Secret Kid writes down the secrets of others and keeps them in soda bottles so they'll be secure. A storm washes away all the bottles, forcing Craig and friends to collect them all before the secrets are read.
• Donkey Kong Country: In the episode "Message in a Bottle Show", DK reels in a bottle holding a message while fishing with Diddy, with it stating that he's supposedly been selected to lead a federation.
• Gravity Falls: In "The Deep End", Mermando keeps in touch with Mabel this way after being freed. Parodied slightly as his first message ends with "More bottles to follow", at which point half-a-dozen bottles come spilling out of the drain at once.
• In a circa 1964 story, Hanna-Barbera's Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har are beachcombing when they happen upon a message in bottle. It is a call for help from someone being held against his/her will. The pair trace it to a millionaire's little boy who just likes to stir up trouble. The millionaire hires Lippy and Hardy to retrieve the bottles as they propagate along the shore. (It's quite lucrative for them as well—they collect the deposit on them.)
• Scooby-Doo:
  • In one episode, the gang finds a note in a bottle while searching for a ghost ship:
    Daphne: What does it say?
    Shaggy: No deposit — no return.
    Velma: Big help.
  • In the Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo episode "The Ransom of Scooby Chief", Scooby and Shaggy are being held hostage in a warehouse and write a message in a bottle for help. However, when they throw it out the window, they realize there's no water around.
• The Mike, Lu & Og episode "The King of Curtains" has the islanders finding a message saying that the King of England is coming for a visit, despite Mike's objections that the message over 500 years old. The situation is made all the more difficult when the titular curtain salesman arrives and the islanders mistake him for the king, though they grow wise to it after they find a second bottle with a message saying that the visit mentioned in the first one has been cancelled.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Christmas Who?", SpongeBob and friends send their letters to Santa Claus by putting them in bottles and having a machine shoot them up to the surface.
• In the DuckTales (2017) episode "The Beagle Birthday Massacre" Lena uses them both humorously and seriously.
• While fishing, Rocky and Bullwinkle discover a message in a bottle taking the bumper they're in to a commercial.
  Bullwinkle: Fan mail from some flounder?
• Mighty Mouse discovers a message in a bottle in "Swiss Cheese Family Robinson," thrown by the titular family at the start of the cartoon, while vacationing in Miami Beach.
• In the opening of his segment on The Alvin Show, Clyde Crashcup and Leonardo are on a sailboat. Clyde writes "the two most beautiful words in the English language" on a sheet of paper, inserts it into a bottle and hurls it starboard. It hits a shark on the head; the shark opens the bottle and observes the message. It is perplexed that written on the paper is Clyde Crashcup's name. A proper episode has Clyde and Leonardo responding to a message in a bottle sent by a lady who has been stranded on a deserted island.
• The Patrick Star Show: In "The Commode Episode", Patrick uses a bottle he's been juggling to get help when he's trapped in the bathroom. He has Daddy Dartfish act as the messenger and flushes him in the bottle down the toilet. He comes back with Tinkle, who gives him the doorknob to escape.

Real Life

• The Pioneer and Voyager plaques and records: no one really expects that anything will discover them, but wouldn't it be cool to think someone could?
• Dean Bumpus used this technique to map ocean currents from the 1950s to about the 1970s.
• Supposedly there was once a job in the British Royal Navy called "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles" as captains sometimes use sea bottles to carry secret messages back to shore or stuff their log books into a empty cask to serve as a "black box" of sorts. Anyone found uncorking a bottle with a message in it in Elizabethan England is guilty of a capital offence.
• A German boy tossed a bottle into the Baltic Sea, and a Russian boy found it on a beach 24 years later.
• Older Than Radio: The first verified user of this trope is Chunosuke Matsuyama, whose ship crashed on a Pacific island in 1784 while they were searching for buried treasure. Before they all starved to death, Matsuyama carved their story in wood and floated it in a bottle. His message took 151 years to wash ashore — ironically in Hiraturemura, the Japanese town where Matsuyama was born.
• Researchers who release things into the air or water - free-floating weather balloons, rehabilitated or tagged wild animals, colored floats to trace currents or underground streams - will often label them with an ID code and toll-free phone number or e-mail address, with the expectation that people who find them later may report where the object of their study turned up.
• Defectors who've escaped North Korea have sometimes resorted to attaching messages to balloons and releasing them when the wind is blowing back across the border, for lack of any other way to inform their relatives that they made it out alive.
• In 1777, Henry Whiteside found himself trapped in his own lighthouse on the Smalls Rock by gales during what was supposed to be a brief visit. Supplies were low, and he deperately put a distress message in a bottle and cast it into the sea. It had a note for the finder about who to send it to, and, incredibly, the intended recipient got the message just two days later. Whiteside and his companions were rescued soon after.

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