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Convenient coverage in just the right spots...
Suzu Kanade, Ayakashi Triangle

A completely nude or otherwise exposed character's "naughty bits" are blocked from the camera by a convenient prop or oddity of architecture, yet every other character in the scene gets an eyeful, usually resulting in either ogling and nosebleeds, or Squicks and grabs for the Brain Bleach.

Usually this is used just out of cultural necessity, and/or to hide the fact that the cast members involved weren't really nude in the filming of the scene. However, it can be Played for Laughs due to the increasing absurdity of the covering elements (as seen in the Austin Powers films), and overuse of this trope tends to break the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief and effectively become a gag, even when played technically straight. In this case, it's common for conveniently-placed props to double as visual innuendo too.

As seen in some examples below, this trope can also be used to cover gruesome detail (blood, dead bodies, etc) or covering up a brand name or famous figure whose image wasn't cleared with the legal department to be seen.

Bowdlerized is when the original footage is censored to allow normal viewing for a different audience, which contains some overlap with this.

For hidden faces, see The Faceless. For bedtime Scenery Censor techniques, see Modesty Bedsheet. Related to Godiva Hair (where nudity is covered up by long hair) and Hand-or-Object Underwear (where a naked character deliberately covers themselves by holding an object or placing their hands over their private parts). TV shows and movies (be they animated or live action) that use bathing scenes usually rely on Censor Steam or Censor Suds. Careful lighting can be used to create a Censor Shadow. In comics, speech bubbles are very serviceable too, as seen in Speech-Bubble Censoring. For cases in which an actress is pregnant but her character isn't, see Hide Your Pregnancy.


Examples

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    Advertising 
  • A 3Sussies commercial has a woman dancing in a dress that slips down without her noticing. Once the dress falls low enough to expose her, she has two conveniently-placed cupcakes in front of her breasts.
  • An ad for Ace Hardware makes an Austin Powers-styled gag out of this as it depicts a woman fixing her shower. The way the shower breaks just-so happens to send a wet bar of soap flying to the glass door, spilling foam on it, with the suds and doorknob covering her as she puts on a Modesty Towel. But her towel is only around her waist, so her toplessness is covered by household objects knocking in to each other like a Rube Goldberg Machine (also caused by the shower break) while she walks across the house. When she loses her towel, the censorship becomes full-body. Finally, she approaches her tool cabinet, with reflective glass doors. And there happens to be two bars that line up with her breasts and crotch. Most of it appears to be a recreation of a similar scene from Mastizaade, down to using several similar gags.
  • Carex had a body wash commercial showing someone using the product nude. She takes off her towel right as she walks in front of a plant to cover her butt, and when applying the wash, two gel figures watching her are also hiding her breasts from the viewer.
  • An ad for Fruice played this for laughs as we are introduced to two girls hiding behind a bush, apparently naked talking about a "natural thing". Cue two shirtless guys walking in, then we see that the thing they're hiding is a bottle of Fruice and the girls are just wearing tube tops.
  • An ad for Perfect Skin hair removal shows a goer at a nude beach standing up with her towel caught in her pubic hair. The towel stuck to her crotch barely preserves her modesty when she's shown in a frontal shot from the stomach down, and her arm and hair placement covers her chest when she's getting up prior.
  • The "Less is More" T-Mobile commercial depicts several nudists at a resort, with all breasts and genitals obscured by limb-placement or objects. A lamp is used to cover a man near the beginning, and most of the women's chests are covered by objects they are holding. Butts are not covered at all and the full version of the ad even begins with the lead woman's ass visible for several seconds.
  • In this New Zealand internet safety PSA, a pair of naked porn stars show up on the doorstep of an ordinary suburban home. While they are are completely unfazed by their nakedness, their modesty is preserved by strategic camera angles, conveniently placed furniture, and—at one point—a carefully held tea mug.

    Anime & Manga 
  • The anime version of Akikan! is rather fond of this trope, particularly in the first few episodes.
  • During the Hot Springs Episode of Ayakashi Triangle, Matsuri tries not to look at the girls in the bath, but he and Suzu end up staring at Lu and Yayo, who are both stark-naked in the open. Unknown to Yayo and Lu, the amorphous, inky-black spirit that Suzu and Matsuri came to exorcise is barely covering their nipples and genitals—which Suzu seems to find more embarrassing than just looking at them naked.
    Suzu: Convenient coverage in just the right spots...
    Matsuri: Oh no! It's growing.
  • B Gata H Kei had this occur when Kanejou attempted to spy on Yamada and Kosuda after they sneaked away to her bedroom during a Christmas party. Kosuda's "erogami" was blocked from view by a well-placed bit of bed railing.
  • Creed from Black Cat has one of these. One is when he's in a rose bath daydreaming about Train, and his privates are covered by strategically placed rose petals.
  • Bleach:
    • When Yoruichi transforms into a human for the first time there's liberal use of Censor Steam. But when she sits down, Ichigo's freaked out reaction ensures his flailing limbs hide parts of her anatomy that would have very clearly been on display.
    • When Wonderweis is first born, there's a convenient shadow covering where it counts.
    • In a filler episode, when Mizuho walks into the bathroom, Ikkaku's so shocked he drops his towel. No matter what panicked position he moves into, there's always a conveniently located item blocking the audience from seeing too much.
  • Buso Renkin:
    • Mahiro, Tokiko and Ouka are in a hot spring, and Mahiro mentions Tokiko and Ouka's breast sizes. An enraged and embarrassed Tokiko stands up in the bath, and at that moment, Mahiro extends her arm to block Tokiko's breasts.
    • Also happens in a male perspective when Papillion and Kazuki are in the same bathhouse. Papillon gets up and walks around completely naked, actually wearing something over his crotch.
  • When Ran plays the Accidental Pervert part in Case Closed by barging into a Big Fancy House's rooms when the guys inside are changing clothes, the view of a handsome guy's privates is blocked from the reader's view by Ran's head.
  • Done in one of the Code Geass picture books. Collectively taking a bath, it is quite apparent that Milly, Shirley, Kallen, and Nina can see each other's privates, but the artist angles it so limbs block the viewer's view.
  • Cutey Honey:
    • Despite this being fairly common in the anime (just watch the intro), fanservice wasn't the focus of the original series. That's what New Cutey Honey was for.
    • The intros to later iterations often played with this. The intro for New did, in fact, have similar censoring (usually using visual effects) until the very end, while one part in Re: parodies the original by having one of the checkered hands peeking (though Honey catches it and covers herself).
  • Part of the plot in Don't Cry, Girl. In chapter 1 Masuda quickly arranges his apartment so that his penis is always blocked from the camera's view by some object. Or while talking he suddenly has the remote control in his hand resting in just the right place.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • The American broadcast dub of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z would sometimes censor the random nudity that wouldn't fly on cable TV. Sometimes it worked okay, such as putting in an additional tree in a forest scene or fluffing up an area of the flying nimbus. Other times it was just too painfully obvious, digital underwear usually sticking out the most (especially if the character moves around a lot in them).
    • One of the Cartoon Network showings of DBZ had Gohan naked just after transforming back from a giant space monkey, being followed around by a cropped photo of a bonsai tree.
    • Dragon Ball Z Kai had Gohan's tail in place, including the Japanese version (which also justified censoring baby Goku's genitals to make it more modest than the original DBZ).
    • To be fair, that was a group effort between Funimation and Saban. Though FUNimation did continue a little bit with editing, it wasn't nearly as noticeable or ridiculous-looking (other than the one instance of airbrushed-in pants on Vegeta, but that was one time).
  • Fairy Tail has a very good example when Gray gets naked on the boat to Tenrou Island. His naughty bits are cleverly censored by a glass on a table in front of him, by Happy's deliberately getting in the way while smiling to the readers, by Loke's face and lastly by Cana's hand before finally being told to wear some clothes.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood:
    • A scene immediately after Ed takes a shower in where he's talking to Al without bothering to cover up (until Shao May crawls out of Al's armor and sees him, complete with Luminescent Blush through panda fur) has one of the spikes on Al's armor in the frame to cover the exact point where Ed's genitals would be.
    • A far more blatant example occurred right after this when Envy walks in on them, asking if they were done yet. Ed had forgotten his Modesty Towel at the moment, but Envy's head makes up for it.
  • Full Metal Panic!:
    • Parodied with singular joy in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu's Hot Springs Episode. It starts out subtly enough, with a peeping hole in the women's changing room being just out of focus of the girls' bits, or the logs in a fence being the right height to cover their breasts and crotch... but then you get increasingly absurd methods, like a ladybug flying from a nearby leaf, hands moving in synch with characters in the background, and ending up with Tessa slipping and falling spread-eagled on her rump, a rubber ducky covering her crotch from the camera (and her knees covering her breasts).
    • The Second Raid did this only once: in the second episode with Yui Lan and Yui Fan; the only occasion when at least one crotch wasn't covered by the other girl, it was covered by a table (breasts got zero censoring; no cover, no missing nipples).
  • Futari wa Pretty Cure only has glowing metal statue-like figures during the transformation sequence. However, the second season Max Heart has a gold heart conveniently blocking Nagisa and Honoka's nude (though still glowing) figures when they dive through the rainbow tunnel.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig: The Major shows more than her usual skin when she's staying overnight in a Taiwanese hotel with a kid from the refugee gangs. She enters the room naked, covering her breasts with a towel draped over her shoulders, then when she slips into bed a ceiling cam view is obscured by the overhead lighting fixture.
  • Subverted in GunBuster. The girls are having a bath, and while you'd think for something would cover their naughty bits... it doesn't.
  • Hanaukyō Maid Team:
    • In episode 6 a female school teacher strips naked in front of her class of children. One of the children's heads blocks the view of her groin and moves as needed to prevent any viewing of it.
    • In episode 12's opening title; a nude Mariel is on the screen. As the camera pans down, Taro's head pops up to cover her genitals.
  • The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, episode 9: Each time Haruhi undresses Mikuru, Yuki's books block the nudity. Also, Yuki only changes her book when Haruhi undresses Mikuru.
  • Used extensively in High School D×D to censor the characters' genitals. Candelabras, furniture, scraps of clothing and even a girl's own panties mid-removal are used to hide their crotches. Only their crotches, though, the series doesn't shy away from their fully-detailed upper halves. There was actually one exception in the original run, where Issei's penis was visible for a couple of frames, but this was airbrushed out in the DVD release. (Censored distributions use gag censorship added in post-production to hide breasts if you were wondering.)
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • Golden Wind: One of the manga covers features Giorno nude and posed in a manner reminiscent of Renaissance era art. A strategically placed piece of billowing fabric artfully preserves his modesty.
    • JoJolion: Yasuho's first meeting with Josuke and seeing he has four testicles is covered by her head.
  • Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple does this sometimes, usually involving Shigure.
  • In Kill la Kill, whenever Mikisugi (frequently) removes his clothing, conveniently placed Bishie Sparkle prevents the viewer (but not the characters) from seeing his genitals, butt, or nipples. This trope sees frequent use whenever characters are nude in any way (which is often considering the plot and theme of the series), until the last couple episodes where the animators just gave up and Barbie Doll Anatomy came into play.
  • Maken-ki!:
    • Used at the beginning of chapter 31, when Takeru accidentally pulls down Haruko's shorts while trying to climb out of the lagoon. The back of his head and a lock of his hair perfectly covers the spot where her vagina would be, preventing the reader from seeing what he's seeing.
    • Also used liberally in the anime adaptation; particularly during bath scenes, where carefully placed shampoo bottles, spigots, and other foreground objects are used to obscure the girls' naughty bits. All of which are removed in the DVD/Blu-ray boxset, which is completely uncensored.
  • Oddly subverted in the somewhat obscure OVA My Dear Marie. There are times when this would happen to characters, such as one point where a character is sitting, and his head would block the view of another character's nipples. In the third episode, however, the eponymous Marie, a Robot Girl, was given the ability to dream and had this same scene. The camera was inexplicably moved a few inches to the left, giving full view of one of her nipples. Apparently, nudity is okay as long as it's on robots.
  • Naruto:
    • The "Sexy Jutsu" covers Naruto's female form up with clouds or some sort of mist. Results in Iruka-sensei getting a nosebleed.
    • When Suigetsu recovers from injuries in a tank of water, what appear to be bubbles in the tank cover his lower half.
    • In the episode "Road to Sakura", Hinata dresses in a more revealing outfit so Sakura will remember her. While kneeling in front of Shino who reacts in embarrassment, a vertically split Venus fly trap is covering her crotch, which implies either the anime isn't allowed to show panties or she isn't wearing any.
  • Happens on occasion in Negima! Magister Negi Magi, where characters will be covered by random objects like leaves, plants, hair and, in some cases, the shredded remains of their clothes. Like every single time, Negi uses his powers against anything female. And for some reason, it is almost always nothing but a tiny scrap over the crotch, presumably held up by hidden antigravity devices.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion plays with this trope in a few episodes.
    • Shinji, panicked and shocked by discovering a penguin in the bathtub, confronts his new roommate Misato while he is still undressed. As he rants, his "naughty bits" are hidden by a beer can on the table in the foreground. During the conversation that ensues, Misato picks up the can, revealing that Shinji's modesty is still defended — by a much smaller container clearly labeled "toothpicks". Click here for image.
    • In Rebuild 2.0., the above scene is repeated with Asuka instead of Shinji, and when Misato picks up the can this time, a smaller cup with a straw sits, just blocking her. That still doesn't stop Shinji from seeing Asuka naked, whose reaction was... well, not good.
    • Episode 5 has Shinji walk in on Rei just after she got out of the shower. After Shinji accidentally knocks her down and she drops her towel, a desk lamp in the foreground keeps her breasts obscured until she gets dressed. In the Rebuild version of this scene, Rei's nipples are clearly visible just before she gets up off the floor. Then there are all of the times when Rei gets in her cloning tube. Naked.
  • One Piece:
    • Parodied when some of the crew steal Franky's speedo in order to force him to join. You see stuff like Franky running in side-view, and a ball bounces along his side, perfectly obscuring the view just when his audience-side leg would reveal his bits.
    • They do it again when the women of Amazon Lily are checking out Luffy's "family jewels". First, he's covered by someone's head. When she moves, there's a book held by someone. When even that is out of the way, someone's bow comes out of nowhere between two frames and gets in the way. Nobody's telling them to move that though.
    • When Dr. Hiluluk is getting naked in a snowstorm to make Chopper trust him, his whole body is shown... except for his groin which is conveniently covered by a strategically placed snowflake in the foreground.
  • One-Punch Man:
    • Saitama ends up naked after Genos accidentally incinerates his clothes. Thankfully a little smoke and, after, a street sign cover his genitals.
    • In the first episode, Saitama fights against Beefcake, a man who became enormous after drinking a steroid that would try to make him the strongest man in the world (and Saitama proves him wrong). His clothes did not grow with him, but when he's first seen from the front, a cloud is positioned right over his groin. Some later shots make it look like he has nothing to hide anyway, however.
  • The 30th and final episode of the PaRappa the Rapper anime features an example that doesn't involve nudity when PaRappa loses his hat because of the birds that he hatched flying away with it. When the top of his head isn't out of frame, it is obscured by PJ's hand and a tree branch before the birds' mother eventually returns the hat to PaRappa.
  • In episode 8 of Penguindrum after Ringo gets naked and attempts to rape Tabuki, Shouma stops this and her naughty bits are blocked by the fan and then by Shouma's foot.
  • In addition to Censor Steam, episode 20 of Persona 4: The Animation uses this to hide the girls' lady bits from the audience. There are many, many conveniently positioned arms. At one point, a washtub held at a funny angle is used to hide Naoto's entire upper half.
  • Puni Puni☆Poemi has a scene with at least half a dozen naked women in a (tiny) Japanese communal tub, but no matter what camera angle is used, the one rubber duck in the tub with them is always blocking the naughty bits that would otherwise be visible.
  • Rurouni Kenshin:
    • While Kenshin and co. are at hot springs, Kenshin has an epiphany. He races out to tell the two girls, still naked. A convenient bush stands in the way, and there are only above the waist shots of Kenshin once he breaks free of it...
    • Also, in the anime version of Raijuuta's Arc, Yutarou decides to give Yahiko an aggressive speech about how he will train with Kaoru and become better than Yahiko and such... when Yahiko is about to get into the bathtub. A small part of the scenery covers the space between his legs.
  • Sailor Moon: In the final episode when Sailor Moons defeated Sailor Galaxia, the star seeds begins to hover around. Fully nude she begins to talk to Galaxia, who is now freed from the chaos. Just a little star seed hovers directly before her genitals.
  • Shaman King: Tao Ren only seems to bother getting dressed as a matter of decency, rather than modesty. As a result, this happens to him in almost every bath scene. One particularly egregious example used Bason's head to hide his "naughty bits".
  • Shimoneta: The end credits of each episode concludes with a brief montage sequence of Ayame and Tanukichi nude, followed by whichever support character was introduced in the episode. A bubble filter conceals their genitals, except for the final episode which finally shows Ayame fully nude from the waist up.
  • Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle has a non-Fanservice example in chapter 229 when the princess and several other characters are trying to get a glimpse of Poisonous Flame Dragon's face sans Cool Mask. When he finally takes the mask off, his face keeps getting obscured by a series of increasingly unlikely objects (stream of water, toothpaste bubbles, random flash of lightening, falling leaves, etc.), much to their frustration.
  • So, I Can't Play H!:
    • Bedsheets are used in episode 7, to conceal when Hild begins to have sex with Ryosuke. The glow beneath the covers only allows you to see her silhouetted on top of him, along with the accompanying hip motion.
    • Also seen in episode 12, during the scene when he's trying to convince Lisara to let him join her in the furo for sex. Ryosuke's dog stands in front of him to cover his privates, while she's in a bath towel.
    • During the ED credits animation, Lisara is seen lying on her back, nude, with a large red ♂ symbol on top of her. The arrow is positioned directly between her legs, to cover her vagina.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
    • Done during its Hot Springs Episode. Kamina is covered by Boota hovering in between his legs, while Simon's drill covers him. In fact, it looks less like "covering" and more like temporarily "becoming" said part. What's really funny is that the Sci-Fi channel broadcast still blurred the first shot of naked Kamina, presumably because you could still see his ass. This has the effect of making Boota's presence less obvious and it seems that that one shot originally showed his penis.
    • Also in the prison fight episode. Towels that stood magically in place while in midair.
    • In the second movie, Lordgenome walks naked in front of a Big Bang powered Wave-Motion Gun. No need to worry about censors, as his crotch is ON FIRE, and we don't see anything.
    • Nia in Episode 24. A giant holographic picture of her is displayed where she's nude. However, for some reason, parts of her are missing, bordered by square textures signature to the Anti-Spiral. Guess where two of those "missing" parts happen to be.
  • To Love Ru Darkness is a master of this, with a girl's naughty bits being covered from view at one point by droplets of water streaming down from a showerhead. Male characters are sometimes shown naked too, just using this to cover the bare minimum.
  • In Toradora!, when Kitamura drops his Modesty Towel, the only thing remaining between his naughty bits and the audience is the cell phone Minori is using to take pictures of him. It... Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
  • In Usavich Comaneci, a fluttering transgender chicken gets in the camera's way when characters lose their clothes.
  • Variable Geo:
    • Invoked during the scene where Jun strips, after being defeated by Yuka. While the crowd gets to see everything and enjoy the show, the ropes of the ring cover the appropriate areas, preventing what would otherwise be a full-frontal nude scene.
    • Also done when Kaori's unnamed opponent is forced to carry out the penalty for losing a rank-1 match. Kaori turns around so her face blocks the audience's view of what's going on behind her, though you can faintly hear the other girl moaning. She steps out of the way just as the scene changes.
  • In ViVid Strike!, when Fuuka's suddenly too-small magical training clothes dissolve on her during her first use of Adult Mode, a small cluster of residual magical particles remain over her no-no parts and helpfully trail after her as she runs away in embarrassment.
  • Used in Wandaba Style's second episode. Innocent Fanservice Robot Girl Kiku#8 is recharging her battery, but since she runs on solar power, and her "skin" is actual solar cells, she spends the scene naked, with Hanagata making efforts to keep the camera from seeing her naughty bits, mostly with his afro.
  • Wave!! Let's Go Surfing!! has a recurring gag in which lead character Masaki will jump up excitedly while in the onsen, forgetting that he is naked. His bits will usually be obscured by the head or shoulder of whomever is sitting in the onsen with him.
  • In Wild Act, volume 3, Yuniko's... lower half... is covered by a shovel. Ryu Eba doesn't see what we see, and we see quite a bit.

    Arts 
  • Older Than Steam: The art that hangs in museums is no stranger to Scenery Censor. Take this 15th-century painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. By an improbable coincidence, all four men's genitals are obscured by leaves or other obstacles (the women and children don't mind showing theirs though).
  • The Birth of Venus (Botticelli): Although it's technically a nude rendition of Venus, her hands cover her breasts and her long hair is blowing in the wind to conveniently cover her genitals.
  • Circe Invidiosa: Circe's bare breast is covered by the glass bowl she's holding.
  • The Problem We All Live With: Inverted. One of the federal marshals' arms in the foreground partially obscures the racist graffiti that's scrawled on the wall in the background. Not enough that there's any doubt about what it says, but at least the slur is a bit less visible.

    Asian Animation 
  • In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons episode 58, Brother Tai's fur "clothes" are stolen by Wolffy to use for his and Wolnie's Chinese New Year's lion. When Brother Tai finally catches up with Wolffy to take his clothes back, his... uh, you know... is conveniently blocked from view by Wolffy himself.

    Comic Books 
  • Alix: In a televised interview, author Jacques Martin notes that for an album, he always had to "cheat" for a barechested female character. Except for one dramatic scene where he couldn't do it without ruining the effect, so he snuck it to print before the editor noticed (it was probably for a weekly magazine like Le journal de Tintin at the time). In a later book, highly suspicious wall mosaics get the same treatment (supplemented by speech bubbles).
  • Archie Comics: "Clothes Encounter", a story originally published in the 81st issue of the 1987 Betty and Veronica series, has Betty and Veronica remove their clothes to have them dry in the sun after falling out of their boat on the fishing trip. Everything below the shoulders is covered up by bushes.
  • Batman:
    • Batman Confidential #18 may set some kind of record for this trope as it features an issue long fight between Batgirl and Catwoman in a nudist club with masks being the only item of clothing either of them is wearing. The artist, Kevin Maguire, continually manages to cover up everyone's naughty bits, with a raised hand here, a well-positioned turn, and my favorite, a bowl of fruit — in particular, a pear — to cover Barbara's butt.
    • "Perpetual Mourning", in the Batman: Black and White anthology series, follows Batman as he does an autopsy on a female corpse, which is necessarily naked. One panel shows an overhead view of the room, with the lighting rig over the autopsy table hiding the corpse from shoulders down to knees.
  • Bikini Cowboy: The graphic novel has Whisky Jill bathe topless while waiting for Rod McCloud to regain consciousness. Her breasts are covered up by her surfboard.
  • The Creeper: In one old issue, Ryder had to remove his "fake" Creeper suit to see if his real Creeper suit still worked, and gets fully naked, having a shoe on the corner of a desk cover his bits.
  • Crimson: When Alex Elder and Joe confront Vampire Hunter Scarlet in her apartment she is wearing only a Modesty Towel. During the struggle, she loses the towel and gets completely nude before the two. The reader doesn't get to see anything too risky as Alex's body is obscuring Scarlet's, but he appreciates the good view of it.
  • The Defenders: Cloud, a sentient cloud that could assume either male or female human form, used little cloud puffs to cover the genital and (in female form) breast areas, although it wasn't clear as to whether those parts of his/her anatomy were actually formed or just left nebulous.
  • Happens all the time in Italian comics Dylan Dog, Nathan Never and the like, which often feature staggeringly beautiful women. Breasts (with *gasp* nipples!) and butts (female and male) are shown but the genitals still need to be covered with strategically placed items, pieces of furniture, or (during showers, baths and similar) implausibly high splashes of water... especially irritating since the rest of the water is often not splashing at all.
  • Empowered: Between the sex scenes, bondage, and title heroine's catastrophically delicate super-suit, Empowered gives this trope a massive workout. We twice see Ninjette take off her top to reveal shuriken pasties on her (admittedly almost indistinguishable from a boy's) chest.
  • Firefly: The Sting: A couple of panels in the spa have a character's nudity hidden with conveniently placed foreground objects. When Kaylee is getting into the pool, she's covered up by a plant, and when Inara sits up after meeting Saffron, her chest is covered with two candles.
  • Futurama:
    • In issue 54, Leela is found naked up a tree and has branches obscuring her genitals and her ass.
    • Issue 68 begins with the Planet Express crew naked and unable to remember why. When they aren't using their hands to cover up, their nudity is obscured by various conveniently located objects, with Bender's arm obscuring Farnsworth's groin, Farnsworth's head covering up Amy as well as Hermes and Farnsworth's memory-erasing machine covering Amy's front in one panel and Leela's butt in another.
  • Green Lantern:
    • The sixth annual of volume three has Kyle Rayner enter an Edgar Rice Burroughs-influenced fantasy world through a painting he bought. In there, he befriends a woman named Saria Amenthis, who at one point undresses in front of Kyle. She is viewed from the back and has a tree branch obscuring her buttocks while a flower covers up her breast.
    • In volume three, issue 138, Kyle and Jade visit an alien planet and at one point spend time on a beach. Jade chooses to go topless, much to Kyle's dismay. During this scene, Jade's breasts are obscured by Kyle creating a construct of a censor bar as well as the wing of one of the bird constructs Jade creates to take the censor bar away.
  • Harley & Ivy: The miniseries features some instances of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy being naked with their private parts obscured by conveniently located objects, such as the limbs of guards who rush over to break them up in the showers when Ivy tries to beat Harley in retribution for unwittingly foiling her latest scheme and landing the two back at Arkham.
  • I Hate Fairyland: The Fuck Fairyland variant cover for issue ten is an homage to the scene in Spider-Man No More where Peter Parker walks away after throwing his Spider-Man costume into a trash can, except Gertrude has walked away naked while giving the finger after disposing of the very clothes off her back, with Larry's cigar smoke obscuring her bare behind.
  • The Incredible Hulk: In The Incredible Hulk (1968) #168, Betty Ross is transformed into the Harpy sans culottes, with shadows hiding her breasts and genitals; when she changes back into human form—in midair, high above the ground—the subsequent splash page shows her wearing a brown bath towel. (This ignited a discussion on the letters page as to whether The Comics Code ban on nudity was necessary or appropriate).
  • Knight and Squire: Birthday Girl is an Innocent Fanservice Girl superheroine who is always naked, but also always surrounded by balloons. Except when she reports to the Knight when her videophone image has a black bar across it labelled "Inappropriate".
  • Mercy Thompson: When Mercy Thompson shifts from coyote back to human, she ends up naked. The Mercy Thompson: Homecoming comic uses anything — even shadows — to cover up Mercy's breasts and genitals.
  • The Powerpuff Girls: "Mojo's Day Off", an unpublished story, has mysterious calamities befall Townsville, one of which is a ray that renders everyone naked (it's not Mojo—he's tired and is trying to relax). One man his hiding behind a fire hydrant while a woman covers herself with a newspaper.
  • L.E.G.I.O.N.: The 13th issue of R.E.B.E.L.S. volume 2 has a decapitated but still living Despero regrow a new body, with his weiner obscured by the head of a Psion.
  • The Outsiders: In Batman And The Outsiders 2007 #3, Batgirl casually walks into the kitchen nude in front of two lesbians. The orange juice she takes out of the refrigerator prevents the reader from seeing anything except her butt, which is kept partially in shadow but still quite visible.
  • Red Robin: When Red Robin breaks into Promise's hideout to confront her only to discover she's showering and then she spots him and starts a fight before he has a chance to decide how to deal with a surprisingly naked criminal the architecture and speech bubbles manage to maintain her decency for the reader.
  • Rulah, Jungle Goddess: In her Origin Story, Jane Dodge has her clothing destroyed in a plane crash. She is left butt-naked with her modesty preserved only by Censor Shadows and trategically-placed vegetation until she fashions a Fur Bikini from the hide of the giraffe killed by her crashing plane.
  • Sally Forth (Wood): Occurs frequently in Wally Wood's Sally Forth, as the comic was not X-rated and never went beyond nudity, so critical parts were hidden behind just about every conceivable prop (including other characters, possibly also nude).
  • She-Hulk: The infamous cover of The Sensational She-Hulk #40 when John Byrne was in charge. The cover in question shows She-Hulk naked, covering herself with the Comics Code Warning, and being handed a skip rope by the hand of John Byrne telling her to do it. That's actually shown to be a subversion within the book itself, as the first couple of pages shows her naked but everything is obscured by the motion of a skipping rope, and when she eventually stops, she is revealed to be wearing revealing swimwear.
  • The Simpsons Futurama Crossover Crisis: When Zoidberg mutates into a human, he appears completely naked. The only thing covering his family jewels in one panel is Marge's blue hair.
  • The Superman Adventures: Issue #28 has a bit where Jimmy Olsen in Superman's body admits that he's avoiding looking at Lois Lane and Professor Hamilton because he can't control his X-ray vision, with a panel showing Lois and Hamilton wearing transparent clothing. Lois uses her arm to cover up her breasts, while her pelvic region is obscured by Hamilton's clipboard and Hamilton's rear is hidden from view by the panel border.
  • Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose: The comic has full-frontal nudity for almost all of its female characters, but Jon (the one male comic character who gets molested more often than Kon-El) gets increasingly strange and improbable means of hiding his penis, topping off with having a lilypad laid over it, and a frog sitting on top of it. The Double Standard is not lost on the readers.
  • Teen Titans Go!: The eighth issue has Mad Mod trick Beast Boy, Starfire and nearly everyone in Jump City into wearing hypnotic clothing, which Cyborg eventually frees everyone from with his sonic weaponry. When Beast Boy and Starfire realize they're naked, Robin's head obscures Beast Boy and Starfire's pubic areas from view while Raven's arm obscures Starfire's breasts.
  • TeenAgents: The third issue has a scene where Aurik, Seera, Jesse and Jami go Skinny Dipping. While most of the nudity is obscured using shadows, by not having nipples and genitals visible or by having everything below the waist or shoulders submerged in the water, two panels cover up Jesse's crotch with a conveniently placed tree.
  • Terra: The comic has several panels of this as a nude Atlee rummages through Dr. Mid-Nite's office looking for her clothes after realizing she is nude when she regains consciousness.
  • The Twelve: The series uses the fact that obscuring the genitalia is expected to hide an important reveal about Dynamic Man until the appropriate point.Specifically, it hides that there actually isn't anything to see anyway — Dynamic Man is thought to be an empowered human but is actually an android.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man: This trope is used quite often in the comics, much in thanks to the more realistic depictions of certain supervillains. It is almost always very well done and almost never distracting — it can take two read-throughs to realize that the Hobgoblin is naked during his entire first appearance.
    • For example, read through volume 4 (Legacy). Norman Osborn reveals himself — in many ways — to Peter Parker. A desk obscures his naughty bits. Peter Parker's backside is also obscured, in volume 6 (Venom) by the remnants of the Venom symbiote.
    • Another example is the Clone Saga arc, where both Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy appear totally nude, with smoke covering Gwen's breasts and nether regions, and a Peter Parker clone's hand covering Mary Jane's.
    • In the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends arc, Liz Allen turns into Firestar and burns all of her clothes leaving her naked for most of the arc. with her flames covering her naughty bits, and when she's back to normal she's either covered in ice by Iceman or in shadows.
    • An interesting aversion is Electro, who, every time he appears naked, nothing obscures... anything. Yet when Electro appeared in Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions, Spidey still blocks the view of his crotch with his hand.
    Spider-Man: Oh dude, pants! No-one wants to see your junk!
  • X-Men: In Uncanny X-Men #236, Rogue somehow winds up naked when fighting the Genoshan soldiers with Wolverine, various items cover her breasts and crotch including a soldier’s body, a jail cell, and shadows, and at one point a flying piece of glass covers her butt.
  • V for Vendetta: Eric Finch takes LSD, leading to him running a long way naked. In one panel where his whole body is shown, a shadow obscures his genitals. (Since it's a pen-and-ink drawing, shadows are often opaque areas of black.) In another panel, he is a black silhouette, hiding all his features, including the genitals.
  • Watchmen: Mostly averted, as there are several full frontal shots of a naked Dr. Manhattan. Lampshaded by his groin region being covered on occasion by transparent objects that don't actually hide anything.
  • What The--?!: The 24th issue of What The—?! had a section called "Misprints in the Comics", which depicted a few Marvel Comics characters in humorous situations resulting from one word in their title being altered. New Warriors became the Nude Warriors and had the team naked except for their masks. Namorita and Firestar had Godiva Hair covering their breasts, with their genitals covered up by a street sign for the former and a car door for the latter, while Nova's groin was censored by a speech bubble and the other members being covered up by standing behind Nova, Namorita, and Firestar.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): When the newly formed Amazons rise from the sea they are entirely nude, but the plants on the coast and the speech bubbles are carefully placed to ensure they remain tastefully covered.

    Comic Strips 
  • Used as a gag in a Beetle Bailey strip in August 2009 (no longer on the Houston Chronicle site).
  • Bloom County:
    • Parodied: After Opus the Penguin got a nose-job, the results were concealed from the reader for about a week by a series of increasingly improbably placed household objects.
      • It eventually ends with Opus standing on a hillside humming to himself, with his new nose covered by... a box of cereal hanging from something off-panel on a string. The next panel is an apology from the author for the silly censorship, and the final panel shows Opus' new, disturbingly human nose.
    • Bloom County once did an entire week with all the characters naked (purportedly as a ratings grab) and covered in this fashion. The last strip has Milo standing behind a potted flower, ordering Opus to remove his bow-tie; when he does so, the flower stretches across the panel to cover up his neck.
  • Pooch Café. In a series of strips starting July 17th, 2014, Poncho goes to a beach where the dogs run around without their collars, which they call a "nude beach". In the following two strips (July 18th and July 19th], after Poncho takes off his collar he is shown with an object covering up his neck as if the area covered by the collar needed to be censored. Oddly enough, in the strip for July 21st he is shown with his neck uncovered - did the artist forget the gag?
  • Happens in Zits when Jeremy is home alone and decides to march around the living room naked.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • Zig-zagged with Arlo the Alligator Boy. Arlo undergoes a deep Heroic BSoD after Ansel disowns him and strips himself of the hand-me-down loose-fitting suit he gave him; the crotch area of his alligator body is always unobscured, given that alligators don't have anything serious. But when Bertie is reassuring him on the beach later, his lower body is obscured for the majority of the scene.
  • The title character of 2007's CG-animated Beowulf fights the monster Grendel in the altogether, with his goods blocked from view by (among other things) a conveniently placed sword embedded in the table he is striding across to make his entrance. Grendel's mother (voice, face and rendered body of Angelina Jolie) is "clothed" in weird gold water... ''stuff''.
  • In The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, right after Wallace has had the Were-Rabbit curse lifted, and woken up (so he is now stark naked), Gromit gives Wallace a box to wear. Naturally, the box reads "May Contain Nuts."
  • In Hilda and the Mountain King, Hilda is transformed back to a human completely stark naked. Hilda stands behind a large rock to address her mother, with the rock covering everything except her head and hands.
  • In The Little Mermaid, when Ariel is transformed into a human, she's shown in the shadows where barely anything is visible. When she's on the shore, she's wearing nothing but her Seashell Bra, and the audience never sees anything but her legs and upper body until she finally gets dressed. However, her three (male) best friends — a crab, a seagull, and a fish — are with her all the time and presumably see everything. (When her father Triton transforms her into a human at the end of the movie, he also gives her a sparkling dress to wear).
  • Mulan has Ling's backstroke accompanied by a strategically-placed water lily, and once Mulan leaves the lake, she whistles for Khan so the horse can block the Sexy Surfacing Shot.
  • The Simpsons Movie, Bart, skateboarding in the nude, passes by several dozen conveniently placed objects... and then they invert it when he passes a fence with a hole in the middle, resulting in a lengthy, uncensored shot of his animated genitalia (in a PG-13 movie!), while the rest of him is covered up — at least in the uncut version that was shown in the movies and is on DVD and Blu-Ray. The TV version plasters a censor box that reads, "European Version Only" over the hedge with the long hole in it.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Actress Angelina Jolie is known for her prolific collection of tattoos, especially on her back. With the rare exception (most notably Wanted in which they were actually augmented cosmetically), make-up or strategically placed clothing is used to hide the tattoos in her films.
  • The Jackie Chan movie The Accidental Spy has one of that actor's usual combat sequences running, then fighting, then running some more, then fighting some more, all the while stark naked in the middle of a Turkish street bazaar. The entire scene is lengthy and is an unending combination of this and Hand-or-Object Underwear with extra credit to the film editors for keeping it clean with near-impossible difficulty.
  • In Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Alice loses her clothing when she grows into a giant girl. Until the Red Queen gives her appropriately huge clothes, most of her below the shoulders is hidden behind various buildings and trees.
  • Amazon Women on the Moon: In the "Son of the Invisible Man" segment, Griffin (who thinks that he is invisible) plays Invisible Streaker while the pub patrons pretend not to notice him. Strategically placed furniture protects his modesty (from the audience, at least). Noticeably, the same does not happen when Monique Gabrielle is walking around naked in the "Pethouse Plaything" segment.
  • The Austin Powers series has a Running Gag where Austin or a female character will have their privates covered from view by random objects in the environment. The things used to cover usually get more and more phallic in Austin's case, and more voluptuous in the case of any woman. At one point, Vanessa Kensington conceals her breasts behind a drawing of a pair of breasts.
  • The film adaptation of Stephen King's Autopsy Room Four avoids showing the protagonist's groin, despite the fact that it's an important plot point (A paralysed man is mistaken for dead and is about to be cut open for his autopsy, when the startled female doctor realises he has an erection). The dialogue used to imply what's happening is quite funny though.
  • In Avatar, when Norm's Avatar is first shown, its pubic region is obscured by heads and pieces of equipment. In addition, all the female Na'vi could be considered as using this with their necklaces which (barely) cover their nipples.
  • In The Avengers, Bruce crashes to earth as the Hulk and de-transforms, leaving him, in the words of an observing security guard "buck-ass nude". His naughty bits are (barely) covered by some rubble sticking up beside him.
  • In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the government and then Lex Luthor experiment on General Zod's corpse. The body is nude the entire time, but the privates are hidden from view by Luthor's body or equipment.
  • In Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), when Mike (played by Edward Norton) poses nude in front of a dressing room mirror, his best part is covered by a chairback.
  • Cassanova Was A Woman: Cassanova starts hallucinating a Latina naked woman near the end, who's covered by a newspaper she's reading.
  • Subverted in A Clockwork Orange. When Alex is being checked in to the prison, he is stark naked with a box in front of the camera at groin level... then they remove the box.
  • A subtle example in Dark City: when John awakens naked in a bathtub at the beginning of the film, the water is just cloudy enough to conceal his submerged body. Yet seconds later, when he knocks over the goldfish bowl and releases the fish into the tub so it won't die, the water is perfectly clear. (Also soap-free enough that the fish is fine when the police arrive.)
  • Dawn of the Dead (2004): A bizarre example is present on the US Director's Cut DVD, where a scene is censored by the addition of gore to cover up nudity. CGI blood smears on the windshield of a car were added so that they obscure the view on the breasts of a nude woman walking past the car. This is especially bizarre since the DVD in question is unrated and features at least one other topless scene, which remained uncensored.
  • In Deadpool, Angel Dust has a Wardrobe Malfunction, and an ashamed Colossus blocks his (and the audience's) view of her exposed breast with his hand.
  • In Eyes Wide Shut, many obscuring props, and even some digitally generated characters, were deliberately added into the movie's nude scenes in post-production so as to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating (which, in practice, would have made the movie borderline pornography) and bump the film back into an R rating.
  • The Fifth Element: Naked Leeloo in a tube, before her "bandages" get applied. Her fully nude body is actually visible in the background in several brief shots, which is rare for a PG-13 film.
  • Used in A Fine Mess as a subtrope to I Have Boobs, You Must Obey! The back wall of the sauna is the exact height needed to cover Claudia's butt when she drops her nightgown and even after she walks forward out of the sauna to distract Tony.
  • The Freakmaker: When Heidi is unconscious and naked on Nolter's operating table, her breasts are visible but her crotch is obscured by a tray of surgical instrument above the table.
  • Goldfinger. James Bond finds Jill Masterson while she's lying dead on the bed while covered in gold paint. When he first looks at her, there's a conveniently placed pillow that blocks the audience from seeing her buttocks.
  • The Great Houdinis: During Harry's naked prison escape, his crotch is hidden by the bars of his cell.
  • An in-universe example becomes a minor plot point in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Psychic girl Jamie has a vision of Michael's next kill site and tells Loomis she sees a "big cookie woman" there: a risque advertising poster of a buxom woman with a pair of chocolate-chip cookies covering her breasts.
  • While pressing his pants, in the film Hands Across the Table, Ted walks around in his underwear for a while, but when he bends down, there’s a strategically placed plant to stop any peeping eyes from seeing something more. It's surprising how much films still got away with after the Hays Code crackdown.
  • Hot Bot: When Bardot malfunctions and passes out on the bed still naked, Nard's chainsaw conceals her body from the audience.
  • According to the DVD commentary on Hulk, Eric Bana was going to be covered by strategically placed objects during his fight with the Hulk Dogs, but upon realising the result was like Austin Powers they went for his Amazing Stretching Pants instead.
  • Played straight in Daniel Craig's nude scene in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, in which he paces back and forth behind a table that just covers up his modesty.
  • The 2016 Bollywood movie Mastizaade has a scene clearly inspired by the Austin Powers series where the female lead struts naked around her room, while several objects in the environment are used to conceal her nudity. When she approaches the large mirror on her dresser, the mirror is strategically cut to conceal the view from her chest and groin.
  • The Naked Witch: When the naked witch walks from the graveyard to the town, a full view of her nudity is blocked by strategically placed trees, a barred gate, etc. This is a little odd, as later on the movie has no issue with showing her fully naked.
  • In the original National Lampoon's Vacation, Christie Brinkley's breasts are obscured by the water when she's in the pool.
  • In the 2013 short film Not Another Happy Ending, a character is seen naked sitting at a computer. When she gets up, various objects cover most of her naughty bits.
  • Not Another Teen Movie: While Areola always walks around naked, her vulva is either out of frame or covered by various objects in front of her. Her butt and breasts are never obscured and there is even a gag where her subtitles are spaced weirdly so that they do not cover her.
  • How the 1980 Get Smart movie The Nude Bomb had a PG rating (PG-13 not being around then). Whenever The Nudifier exploded, victims were carrying briefcases or rifles, sitting behind desks or just had their back(side)s to the camera.
  • Odd Obsession: On two different occasions in which Kenji is staring at his nude, prone, unconscious wife, his body is carefully blocked so as to obscure Machiko Kyo's naughty bits.
  • Passengers: When Aurora sheds off her dress to put on a spacesuit, her chest area is blocked by Jim's body, who is looking the other way.
  • The People vs. Larry Flynt uses this to stay within its R rating. When one of Flynt's models is posing naked on a bed, and he tells her to spread her legs for the camera, the audience sees one railing of the footboard blocking the view to her goodies.
  • Prehistoric Women: During David's Naked First Impression of Queen Kari, strategically placed vegetation prevents the audience from seeing anything more than Toplessness from the Back.
  • Scary Movie 4 has the president (Leslie Nielsen) naked in front of the UN. (Long story.) He is censored by several heads and a man's arm. However, it turns disturbing when he stands in front of a flagpole, bends over (still in front of the flagpole) to look at a machine, and very suggestively starts to go lower (with his ass still right in front of the flagpole) all while talking about "loose flabby pink things."
  • Lampshaded in the pre-Shaolin Soccer Stephen Chow film, Look Out, Officer! (released post-Soccer on American DVD as The Shaolin Idiot). Ordered by a doctor to disrobe for a physical examination, Chow's character, Hsing, runs around the room rearranging items on shelves and tables seemingly at random, finally citing "decency" as his reason. When the doctor points out that he can still see Hsing, Hsing points out at the audience and replies, "But they can't." And sure enough, throughout the following scene, Hsing's lower extremities are hidden at every angle by one of the items he'd placed.
  • Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has Mycroft using this. To cringeworthy and comedic results.
  • In a nudist camp scene in A Shot in the Dark.
  • Starship Troopers: There is a mixed-sex shower. As the camera pans around we see naked young men and women showering, chatting and walking about. But somehow a bit of plumbing always manages to be between the camera and any genitals. The boobs do show up, though. There is also Dizzy and Johnny's sex scene which cuts away before they get farther than removing their shirts. This was Lampshaded and exaggerated in the RiffTrax Live version when the "Famous Shower Scene" is discussed frequently by the riffers, but when it actually arrives, a Gorilla Gram is delivered, causing the in-theatre camera to follow the gorilla instead of the film.
  • The T-X uses a combination of this and Godiva Hair at the beginning of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines when she arrives naked in the past from its Time Travel trip.
  • Most people don't seem to remember this trope in Titanic, because Kate Winslet's breasts are unobstructed. Her vulva, on the other hand, is placed very conveniently behind Jack's sketch pad.
  • In The Whole Nine Yards there is a scene when the Quirky Miniboss Squad is entering Tudeski's house, where Jill comes out of the bedroom on to the landing, totally nude, as a diversion with the railing covering her genitals but leaving her breasts completely exposed.

    Literature 
  • This is common in depictions of Adam and Eve in children's Bible storybooks, along with Godiva Hair for Eve.
  • The Australian children's book Barebum Billy, which is about a boy named Billy Bottom who enjoys running around naked, makes use of conveniently located objects to obscure Billy's crotch whenever he's viewed from the front. A part where he's running around sprinklers has jets of water obscure his privates, his antics at the grocery store have his sentient toy robot cover Billy's groin with his own hand on security cam footage and a card that has "Censored" with a backwards R scribbled on it when the store manager catches him scarfing down a bunch of candy that hasn't been paid for and the robot's head covers up Billy's pubic area when he strips at church. At the end of the book, the grown-up Billy and his wife Millie's pelvic areas are covered up by microphones from interviewing news reporters as well as the text on a Time Magazine cover, with Millie's breasts obscured both by a book she's holding and her long hair.
  • The endpapers of the special edition hardbacks of the Tiffany Aching Discworld novels show a sweeping landscape of the Chalk by Paul Kidby, with all the significant locations from the books. The lower half of the Disc's version of the Cerne Abbas Giant (aka the Rude Man of Cerne) is hidden by a small hill with a tree growing out of it.
  • The Franny K. Stein book Attack of the 50-Ft. Cupid depicted the titular Cupid as naked, with his genitals obscured by the quiver for his arrows and a tree.
  • The children's book Nuddy Ned and its sequel Nuddy Ned's Christmas both have objects conveniently placed to cover up Ned's private parts and rear end, part of the novelty being that there are flaps that can be lifted to reveal something else covering up Ned's nudity. The first book even ends with Ned's parents being convinced to join him in running around naked, with their backsides covered up by their discarded clothing (Dad's bum being obscured by his shirt and Mom's behind covered up by her pants).
  • On the covers of the Xanth books, when they depict nude characters (such as female centaurs, who don't wear clothes) they're strategically posed so some part of the scenery or a body part covers the naughty bits.

    Live-Action TV 
  • A naked Courtney Thorne-Smith's boobs are obscured by a lamp in the "These Are the Days" episode of Ally McBeal.
  • Armstrong & Miller, the forerunner to The Armstrong and Miller Show, had a sketch called "Nude Practice" which was a straight-faced parody of a country vet soap opera in which the only unusual element was that Armstrong and Miller went about their work entirely nude, with their bits concealed by the scenery. Nobody in the sketch seemed to notice. Then they hired earnest young assistant vet Roberta, played by Sarah Alexander, and she too went around entirely nude (except for glasses and Wellington boots), holding her vet bag in front of her in any scene in which she was facing the camera. Roberta's character arc was that she was treating an animal and the farmer didn't believe she could cure it, but in the final installment the vets were sitting around having breakfast with teapot and newspaper doing their work as scenery censor and Miller's character took a phone call from the farmer, who said that the animal was fine and that Miss Roberta did a great job. When Miller hung up the phone, all the vets stood up, put down bags and dropped their newspapers so that Roberta could be congratulated, going into some of the most shameless full frontal nudity ever seen in a TV sketch show.
  • In the "Hot Water" episode of Baywatch, an old man and two young women are illegally sunbathing naked. The old man is partially covered by a small tree in front of him, one woman is partially covered by the other woman.
  • In the "The Hunt" episode of Baywatch: Hawaii, Jessie, Dawn, Allie, and Kekoa attend a traditional Hawaiian ceremony in which they have to be topless. Before they take their bikini tops off, they cover themselves with leis and perform a hula dance.
  • The Big Bang Theory:
    • Raj takes experimental medication in hopes of getting over his difficulty talking to women, which has the side-effect of making him want to strip in public. When he gets naked the first time, his crotch is behind some wine glasses. When he's later seen still naked in The Stinger of that episode, he's behind a table.
    • When Howard and Sheldon have an escalating fight over a parking spot, Howard at one point sits on Sheldon's beloved couch spot nude, with only a laptop covering him. It turns out he placed the laptop that way on purpose — not out of modesty, but because it was Sheldon's. Sheldon is seen in the Stinger trying to sell it, offhandedly mentioning how it has not been on an astronaut's penis for that long.
  • The Bill has a nude model's genitalia covered by a bit of wood from an artist's easel.
  • In the Bones episode “The Finder”, Walter talks to Brennan while on the toilet with his boxers down. The only reason we don’t see his naughty bits is a strategically placed sink between him and the camera.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Spike manages to be naked for about half his appearances in season 6 while walking around. Or in one case, sitting on his coffin, legs drawn up, spread way apart, possibly a response to Buffy's previous boyfriend standing in the room holding a phallic weapon. He ended up concealing himself with his own thighs quite a bit... since his character was making no efforts to cover up.
      • It's played for Female Gaze given that his groin is usually framed just barely out of camera range, or covered by a sheet held just barely above his crotch.
      • A specific example is in "Wrecked", when he and Buffy wake up in a now-destroyed house from a night of rapturous Destructo-Nookie. Buffy is already using their largest available article of clothing—his Badass Longcoat—as a Modesty Bedsheet, so a conveniently-placed pole was used to hide his groin from the camera.
    • Oz's nudity after transforming from werewolf to human is covered by a rock in "Phases" and by a scientist in "New Moon Rising".
    • The Monster of the Week in "The Dark Age" is naked when he comes out of his body bag in the morgue, with a conveniently placed autopsy table to cover his lower half.
    • Buffy also has this after being transformed into a rat in Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered. When the spell is broken, she is in the basement and totally nude, hidden behind some boxes.
  • In the Chips episode, This Year's Riot, there was a LOT of this when Ponch and Bobby showed up to a house whose female occupant condoned nudity at her beach property. No need for Censor Boxes when there were plenty of beach umbrellas on the scene... and a few partial shots of some moored boats, too!
  • Chuck:
    • In the episode "Chuck Versus the Beefcake", there's Morgan, in Ellie and Awesome's kitchen. He's holding a large bowl of fruit to hide his groin. Somewhat a subversion, as if one closely examines the bowl of fruit, one sees a banana and two fuzzy kiwi fruits are humorously positioned.
    • Chuck himself becomes this in "Chuck Versus the Suitcase" when a naked enemy agent takes him as a Human Shield.
    • And then it's averted entirely in "Chuck Versus the Hack-off", with Chuck and Sarah actually completely nude in one scene, with all the naughty bits covered by scrambled Censor Boxes.
  • Lampshaded on Cougar Town when Jules and Grayson decide to spend all day home naked.
    Jules: Have you noticed almost everything in this house is boob high?
  • The CSI episode "4x4" involves Sara and Greg forced into a shower due to potential exposure to hazardous materials/disease. The camera spends a lot of time on closeups of their faces and feet.
  • CSI: NY:
    • "Time's Up" opens with a naked man running through the streets of New York. While there a lot of close-ups showing him from the waist up, there are several long shots where strategic areas are blocked by traffic, bystanders, etc.
    • Another episode, "Heart of Glass", features a naked woman being found dead in the bathtub. Later in the episode, there's an Imagine Spot showing her reflection in a nearby mirror when she's standing up to touch the thing that ended up electrocuting her, but the camera is angled so that the tub's spout blocks the viewer from seeing anything below her collarbone area.
  • The Daily Show: Jon Stewart speaks of the Beach of Strategically Placed Objects.
  • Doctor Who:
  • In one episode of Emmerdale, Debbie Dingle gets some light-hearted revenge on Ross Barton by trapping his mechanic's overalls in the bonnet of a car he's fixing. He wriggles free and enters the pub wearing only what he had on underneath his overalls which, as Debbie well knew, is nothing at all. Only a conveniently-placed bar and even more conveniently-placed handbag prevent us from seeing what the villagers are clearly enjoying.
  • Eureka:
    • In the first-season episode "Purple Haze", Taggart is running around the woods au naturel (his phrase) possibly under the influence of an intoxicant. Somehow there's always a conveniently placed branch between his hips and the camera, full of leaves larger than those of any tree native to the Pacific Northwest.
    • Happens to Fargo in a later episode when he was showering at GD and a man-eating blob crawled out the drain; Fargo panics, and runs straight into the crowded main hall. He calmly makes a one-liner, borrows two briefcases from confused bystanders, covers his naughty bits with them, and runs out.
  • A somewhat-rare written form occurs in a Peacekeeper Wars episode of Farscape, where we see Harvey once again asking John about his wormhole knowledge, this time in an old-style classroom. John, fed up, scrawls something across two blackboards and tells Harvey to "make sure [Scorpius] gets that message." When the camera cuts to the blackboards, Harvey's head obscures most of the first word. (However, the message is still very clearly "Fuck Off".)
  • Firefly uses this quite a bit:
    • For example, River's out-of-the-box scene in the pilot episode, Saffron showing up naked in Mal's bunk in "Our Mrs. Reynolds", and Mal himself strutting about in the cargo bay stark naked at the end of "Trash".
    • An interesting variation of this pops up in the pilot when River climbs out of the box. Though you don't see anything from the first few shots, the camera then switches to a far-off, wide-angle shot of the entire bay that shows River very clearly, in which nothing is covering her up, but the camera is so far off that you can't see anything distinct about her.
    • The Serenity: Better Days comic miniseries also plays with this. When River kicks an enemy soldier in the teeth without looking at him, the angle of the panel would have shown a clear shot up her dress... if it weren't for the kicked soldier's hand flying up to block the view.
  • Forever Knight. In a point-of-view shot, vampire detective Nick Knight raises his badge just in time to block our view of a stripper's below-the-neck-area as she turns to face him. This scene was used in the opening title sequence for the series, for obvious reasons.
  • The Glades: In "Gallerinas", Jim is questioning a suspect, who is an artist painting nude. Several objects, including Jim's hand, are used to block certain parts of the woman's body.
  • Gossip Girl: After they all have sex together, Aki, Audrey and Max have their genitals/breasts covered by the roof beams overhead, since it's shot from above.
  • Grand Hotel: In the series pilot, Gigi Mendoza is seen lounging on her top-floor balcony in her birthday suit from behind with a house lamp covering her backside.
  • Hannibal: Showrunner Bryan Fuller tells of a run-in with Standards and Practices over the season one episode "Coquilles" in which he was required to obscure the exposed buttocks of a corpse by pouring more blood over the crack. By the time season three rolled around, Richard Armitage (as the Tooth Fairy/Red Dragon) appeared completely nude from the rear in very dim light to show off the character's extensive Red Dragon tattoo.
  • Hawaii Five-0 — Kono and Steve chasing a naked suspect in "Ha'awe Make Loa", a sequence made memorable by its creative use of foreground objects.
  • This happened in an episode of Hell's Kitchen. Contestant Ed, who was hammered drunk after a reward session at a winery, was encouraged to get naked in the hot tub by other contestants. He did, and this trope happened instead of the usual censor blur.
  • A Running Gag in Home Improvement is that Wilson's face is always half-obscured. This started out with only the top half of his face being seen over the fence to add a mysterious feel to the character, then it turned into a Running Gag as the show started putting other objects to obscure the bottom half of Wilson's face in increasingly silly manners. On one occasion this was inverted, and the top half of his face was covered while showing the bottom half.
  • Horrible Histories: One "Historical Fashion Fix" had a Celt being transformed into a Celtic warrior, who fought in the nude. Decency is preserved by some strategically placed shelves, clothes racks, etc.
  • There was a House episode in the sixth season that started out with House wandering around naked and his naughty bits were covered up by a drawer and some of the opening credits.
  • In How I Met Your Mother, we've seen all the main characters (except Robin) partially naked. Especially in the aptly-named episode "Naked Man".
  • JAG:
    • In the two-part episode "Boomerang", Mac is supposedly sunbathing topless with Mic on Manly Beach in Australia. When Harm and Bud come, she had a magazine covering her chest.
    • In "A Tangled Webb (Part 2)", Mac has a Bathtub Scene, but the audience (as opposed to Harm) don't get to see anything because of strategically placed bubbles and camera angle.
  • While wearing a latex bodysuit in an episode of Jonas, Joe had to place his hands awkwardly in front of his crotch because, according to one producer, "there was a lot of Joe showing." It is worth noting that neither of his brothers, who were both wearing similar outfits, had this problem.
  • In Lucifer, there was a Season 4 visit to a nudist camp by Lucifer and Ella Lopez, following the show's move to HBO. All the nudity was covered by Austin Powers-style scenery puns, such as a pair of large jugs.
  • The L Word: Unlike most of the characters, Joyce is covered by nearby objects when she's naked in her office.
  • 2x30 of Magnificent Century, when Prenses İsabella decides enough is enough and she is now ready to seduce her way out. Used together with Dress Hits Floor and Toplessness from the Back.
  • M*A*S*H:
    • Similarly, Gary Burghoff's withered left hand was concealed throughout M*A*S*H.
    • A more obvious example is when, in one episode, Hawkeye bets Trapper that he could walk around the camp naked and no one would notice. The scene runs like a blueprint for the Austin Powers examples.
  • Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: When Nixie, Lyla, and Sirena end up naked when turn themselves into humans. When the camera goes for a full body shot, a piece of driftwood covers their hips and torsos.
  • Million Yen Women: This is employed whenever Minami hangs around the house naked, which she does quite a bit.
  • The Monty Python's Flying Circus "Full Frontal Nudity" animation has a succession on increasingly absurd objects blocking the crotches of naked women, leading up to a passing train and then a multi-car pileup.
  • Once on Mork & Mindy, the alien Mork walked out of the shower naked to talk to a shocked Mindy, who had to explain human customs regarding nudity. The low cabinet that acted as a scenery censor kept the audience from seeing that Mork actor Robin Williams actually was naked.
  • On My Name Is Earl, one episode involved Frank, a fellow inmate (and former roommate of Earl's) being dumped by his long-term girlfriend for showing Earl her naked picture. Frank becomes depressed, to the point of attempting suicide. To cheer him up, Earl signs Frank up for an online dating service. That doesn't go well, so Earl decides that the only way to pull Frank out of his funk is to get his ex back. They take a nude picture of Frank, which is posted on a billboard in the middle of Camden for all to see. The audience gets to see it from his ex-girlfriend's perspective, with her head covering his naughty bits.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000:
    • In the episode "City Limits", Joel unexpectedly opens an umbrella in the theater to obscure some nudity in the movie.
    • The bots do something similar in "Avalanche", flying drones into the theater to strategically cover a naked woman emerging from a hot tub.
    • In "The Time Travelers", the bots lampshade an in-film example — when the female lead is in a futuristic spa, they comment on how convenient it is that she's just the right height that the painted lines on her glass tanning booth block view of her private parts.
  • NCIS has bodies on an examination table fully undressed, but with a lamp casting overly bright highlights on the body's no-no region. If they're female, their chest cavity is open.
  • An episode of New Tricks has this with a nudist chopping logs.
  • Power Rangers:
    • The show regularly engages in the "non-naughty" variant: Jason David Frank was not allowed to wear short-sleeved shirts in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, though he regularly wore tank tops in earlier seasons. The reason? He'd gotten several tattoos on his arms in the intervening years.
    • Likewise, one of the actors on Power Rangers S.P.D. always wears gloves to cover a tattoo on his hand. Superheroes aren't allowed to have tattoos. In this case, this also had a small effect on how they adapted the series from the original Japanese version; in the original, the Yellow Ranger had psychic powers connected to touch, so she wore gloves to help her deal with her Power Incontinence. While giving that ability to the Green Ranger in the American version was a quick fix for his actor's tattoo, they also had to alter the plot somewhat anytime it hinged on those same powers.
    • SPD's original version, Dekaranger, used this one a lot too, especially since the Pink Ranger loved taking baths, requiring very, very lucky groupings of bubbles. (In one episode, this was played with a bit by having the new, male addition to the team cheat her out of her bathtime, whereupon the same bubbles covered his same areas).
  • In an episode of Relic Hunter Sydney and Nigel have to enter a nudist spa to look for an artifact. The place is filled with naked people, whose naughty bits are all covered by more or less unlikely objects - parts of the scenery, garden plants, the instruments played by the live band. The effect is quite entertaining and hangs an implicit lampshade on the trope. Nigel, who is very uncomfortable being nude with strangers (and with Sydney) picks up a large beach ball and carries it along as Hand-or-Object Underwear.
  • In Sanctuary, the first time after Henry goes full HAP and back, he is covered by the tail of a snake creature crawling away from him.
  • The Sandman: In "Sleep of the Just", Morpheus is stripped of all his clothes when he is imprisoned, and is still naked during his breakout. In one shot that can't avoid showing him full-length from the front, when he's scooping up a handful of sand to use against his captors, his other hand just happens to be positioned in a way that blocks the audience's view of his genital area.
  • On Saturday Night Live, with host Matthew Broderick, in a sketch at a nudist camp, featuring "The Penis Song".
  • In one episode of Scrubs, J.D. is given a physical by Dr.Cox and his genitalia is concealed by a table. Later, in the same episode, when he is unconscious in his neighbor's bathroom after trying to use their toilet as the result of Vasovagal syncope, a light fixture preserves his modesty.
  • Sherlock: Done in "A Scandal in Belgravia" when Irene Adler decides to receive Holmes and Watson totally naked.
  • In the Spanish sitcom Siete vidas, one of the characters is an actress in a teen comedy, under Dawson Casting naturally. And in one episode her character had a naked scene. After the actress refused, none of the script was changed... but the scene had instead a fairly ridiculous amount of Scenery Censor. To wit, she had to walk around the locker room, and there was something blocking her every time, including an inflatable ball thrown in the air to cover her breasts in the short space where there was nothing else that would do.
  • Stargate:
    • In the Pilot Movie of Stargate SG-1, a kidnapped USAF sergeant is stripped naked and evaluated as a Goa'uld host; she gets this treatment rather unsubtly as she's hauled all over the room. After she's rejected, Daniel Jackson's wife is similarly appraised... and then this trope gets utterly averted. Full frontal nudity is already extremely unusual in a scene filmed for American television, but the contrast with the first scene made it downright shocking in this case.
      • The production team has made it clear that they regret this scene (it was forced on them by Executive Meddling) — it has been altered when they did a do-over of this episode, starting from scratch with the original footage. Stargate SG-1 was originally aired on Showtime which allowed for the full-frontal nudity, which also appears in the DVD, but all airings of "Children of the Gods" on regular TV (mostly Sci-Fi channel) have that bit (or those bits, if you prefer) edited out. Some broadcast in other countries don't, however. The scene also remains intact on Netflix.
    • A non-naughty version occurs in the first couple of episodes of the fourth season of Stargate Atlantis. Between season three and four, Jason Momoa got a tattoo on his left forearm and since the first episode of season four carried on directly from the end of the last episode of season three, he spent the episode first wearing a bandage on the arm (the character had been injured) and then a long sleeve coat. A few episodes later, we finally see him "acquire" the tattoo, eliminating the need for this trope.
  • Star Trek:
    • James Doohan lost a finger when he took part in D-Day as a Canadian infantryman. During most of his career he and his directors took pains to not show the missing finger, despite the fact that as an engineer on Star Trek, at least, it wouldn't be a stretch for a man who spends most of his time around machines to have lost a digit at some point. But then, they'd have to explain why they hadn't just fixed it with 23rd-century medical technology. You can see it in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics", in which he appears, especially in the holodeck scene. The missing finger is also noticeable in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" when Scotty comes on the Bridge with the double-armful of tribbles.
    • Many other episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation also feature nudity, with several methods of censorship:
      • In "Déjà Q", Q has his junk blocked by an actor standing in the camera's line of sight. According to the producers, he was meant to be wearing a small, er, "pouch" to cover himself during that scene. After several takes where it appeared in shot, he just filmed the scene while naked.
      • Lwaxana Troi would have discretion shots of the neck up. This was used on Seven of Nine (below) several times.
      • When Captain Picard is captured and tortured by Cardassians in "Chain of Command", his naked form is hidden from the audience by the room just being really, really dark. For the record, Patrick Stewart really did film that scene in the buff, although he requested a closed set.
    • Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Still Standing: From "Still Hangin' Out" (Season 2, Episode 20): The lamp when Judy is naked and rubbing lotion on herself while Matthew Halverson (son of neighbors Ted and Kathy) is watching by jumping on the trampoline that she and Bill had mistakenly positioned under the window.note 
  • Discussed in an episode of Polish sitcom Swiat wedlug Kiepskich where the main protagonist and his manchild neighbour are watching an episode of Latin American soap opera, and the said neighbour gets quite turned on by the erotic scene, even though everything goes under the blanket. When the protagonist tells him how pathetic he is, he tries to defend himself by assuring than in the next scene the girl will go to the bathroom and will probably be stark naked, to which the protagonist points out that "they will just put a flower in front of the camera to cover her ass".
  • During the pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, while Cameron is beating the crap out of a group of drunken guys while naked, at one point she turns toward the camera at an angle that would have flashed her entire upper body, but any naughty bits are blocked by the arm of one of the men she's beating up on.
  • Used in That '70s Show when Hyde forces Fez to serve customers naked in the Photo Hut.
  • Ea, the main character of the Japanese made-for-TV drama Toumei Shoujo Ea, is found nude by the main male character, and she stays that way pretty much the entire series. Partially justified as clothing (or anything touching her skin) causes her invisibility superpower to malfunction. Regardless, no effort is made to conceal her nudity, outside some clever camera work and the occasional lens flare blocking things that are too much even for late-night Japanese TV — which, apparently, isn't much.

    Music Videos 
  • This is almost ridiculous in the music video for AKB48's song "Ponytail and Scrunchy": the girls head into the locker room after some sports session, and they are constantly obscured by random towels, locker doors opening, shampoo bottles, etc. Only, there's some random chihuahua that just happened to wander in without them noticing, panting heavily while he watches. Lucky dog...
  • The video for Robbie Williams' "Rock DJ" sees him stripping off his clothes to try and get the attention of the DJ and dancers. Once the underwear comes off he's conveniently blocked by said female dancers who are skating around him.
  • The UK video for "They" by Jem (which is revealed to be All Just a Dream by a teenage boy) has her as an astronaut on a space station, reenacting the opening scene from Barbarella. However, when she's fully naked, a holographic real-time display of the Solar System prevents the viewer from seeing too much.

    Pinballs 

    Video Games 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: Whenever Ann uses the shower at her apartment, the full view is covered by a decorative jar standing in front of the center.
  • Bayonetta: When Bayonetta removes her hair-clothing to summon full demons, there will always be a "spiral" of it that's positioned to cover her breasts and genitals. This even shows up if she is wearing costumes, since the costumes are not removed when she summons demons, so the game is still censored her even when clothed. This overlaps with Godiva Hair, but still counts as this trope by itself since Godiva Hair is normally not spun around a person and used to weave a portal to hell.
  • In Bikini Karate Babes, the character Venus finds herself tied to a tree after removing another fighter's top. Aphrodite (that character) finds her and rips off her top to reveal a bra. She then rips that off and Venus's dignity is preserved only by Aphrodite holding her bra like a trophy. This is in live action.
  • The eponymous Catherine spends several scenes in Vincent's room being completely naked. The camera only shows her from behind, frontal shots never go past her shoulders and, the times she is shown from the side, Vincent's laptop is conveniently hiding anything naughty.
    • Promotional material and the cover art of the OST depict a sitting Catherine in a dress giving a frontal upskirt view with her legs spread, with Vincent's head conveniently placed between her crotch and the camera. The art is even used as the background of the official Japanese website, with an interface button covering her crotch instead. Curiously, the same page features an alternate version of the art without the censorship object as the background, but it's not normally visible when viewing the page, and her crotch has no detail.
  • Chrono Cross gives you a good shot of Serge's naked body, including his butt, but with his arm covering his penis.
  • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Makoto gets photographs of his classmates all together without him in it. However, he notices that Junko's face is covered in all the photos to hide the fact that the Junko Makoto met previously was an impersonator.
  • Darkstalkers Resurrection has alternate art of Felicia used in more commercial locations (such as Felicia's overview on YouTube) that censors her near-bare butt with her cat form.
  • Devil May Cry:
    • Subverted in the first Devil May Cry game; Dante has a sword which appears to cover a poster of an apparently topless woman; he takes it off, and strategically blocks the view of it, but right before the "camera" changes angles, it is revealed that the woman's breasts were covered (by stars, but still). Later games in the series mysteriously include a bra on the same poster.
    • Played straight in Dm C Devil May Cry; Dante flies through his trailer in slow motion while naked, pulling on bits of clothing as he goes. Heck, even pizza is used as a censor!
  • Dragon Ball Origins has much of the original comics' dirty humor intact, including the part where Bulma flips her skirt at Master Roshi to make him hand over his dragonball, from his POV to boot and both without the knowledge that she's not wearing any underwear at the moment. Conveniently enough, this being a DS game, the offending part is blocked by the gap between the screens. On the other hand, the game also subverts it by being true to the original comic and making no effort to block any view of kid Goku's penis.
  • Dragon Quest VIII also uses this in a not-naughty fashion to prevent you from seeing King Trode and Princess Medea's faces in flashbacks from before they were cursed. This gets very contrived when the only thing blocking Trode's face is Medea's hand gestures.
  • For some reason, the North American release of Fire Emblem: Awakening's Summer Scramble DLC edited the picture of Tharja so that a curtain is hiding her adjusting the bottom part of her bikini. Some people argue that it makes the scene look more risque (by suggesting Tharja's getting ready to start Going Commando).
  • Geist was given an "M" rating in the US for (among other things) a brief scene containing nudity — but anything objectionable was covered by strategically-placed soap bubbles.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV (specifically The Lost and the Damned addon) plays this trope straight and then subverts it, when Johnny meets with Thomas Stubbs III, he (Thomas) is naked after a massage and walks around the room conversing normally with Johnny — his genitals covered up by various props — but then suddenly the camera switches to give us a hefty shot of his dangling genitals.
  • In Heavy Rain, the camera angle changes to cover your character's bits whenever they shower or urinate. Madison's breasts are never concealed, though.
  • HuniePop: Venus' third picture is her in the shower. Since the game reserves complete frontal nudity to a character's fourth and final image, her vulva is obscured by the high-pressure water coming out of the shower head. Because of this the image is also unchanged in the censored Steam version.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The Mermaid normally sits on a rock, but when she loses her top, she hides in the water to cover her bare chest. Doesn't apply in versions where her missing item is a necklace, but she still hides in the water.
  • Mostly played straight in Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail! as far as Fanservice is concerned, but averted for Fan Disservice (e.g. watching a very hairy fat guy swim in the nude). Most blatantly done at the nudist pool, where Drew Baringmore is sunbathing without a suit with only her laptop and a strategically-placed branch blocking the view. A few times, we see her from Larry's POV and his eyes slowly creep down to her chest. She then pulls a My Eyes Are Up Here, and the POV snaps back to her face. When Larry and Drew are walking away, Larry is walking in the foreground, blocking everything, as noted by the frustrated narrator. Averted if one activates an Easter Egg (by breaking the branch), revealing Drew's boobs. After this, when walking away, the boobs are still visible.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • Played with, possibly as a homage to the Neon Genesis Evangelion toothpick scene. Raiden is stripped of his clothes towards the end, and has to run around preserving his modesty — he can, however, press himself to the torture rack he was originally strapped to. He reverts to an arms-stretched out pose, and the camera changes view — to behind a drinks can, the close-up protruding straw completely preserving Raiden's dignity. There's also a hilarious moment when, if he's seen by an enemy soldier, Raiden can retreat to the rack and press himself against it to fool the soldier, who looks on in envy and says, "I wish I had that..." before leaving.
    • If you pay attention, at some point during this whole sequence, there's a frame or two where Raiden's dangly bits aren't covered... but his character model doesn't have dangly bits... (as evidenced when he does side-flips). In The Document of MGS2, you can pause and move the camera around freely in any cutscene, including the one in the torture chamber. This allows you to get a full view of Raiden's (lack of) privates.
    • In the cutscenes before the section of running around naked, the camera stays clear of Raiden's lower half while he's strapped to the torture bed. One shot has the camera zoom out, with Olga stepping into the frame maintaining Raiden's cover.
  • A Mortal Kombat: Deception promotional image shows Mileena in her second costume (where she is basically nude) or presumably naked holding her sai weapons. The thin blades manage to cover just enough to make it not explicit.
  • Ouendan 2:
    • During the final song showing the various nations contributing their energy to help reheat the sun (its a weird game, just go with it) there a quick scene where we there a very nude statue in background, one of the contributors pump his fist blocking the view as we see an energy beam firing from the... lower regions.
    • In the same game, "Go My Way"'s highest difficulty features the cheergirls bathing. During the zoom in before the countdown, you get to see Sayaka (the leader) topless... except her breasts are covered by the gap between the DS screens.
  • Subverted and Played for Laughs in Persona 5, where in order to overcome a locked door in the second target's Palace, Ann has to accept Yusuke's nude modelling job in order to access the target's house. When Yusuke is gathering his supplies to begin painting, we see the top of Ann's head in the lower-right corner, heavily suggesting she's in the nude as Yusuke wanted. He then turns around and asks her is she "gained some weight". Turns out he's commenting on the absurd amount of clothing Ann has on due to her modesty being at stake and that she needs to buy time for Morgana to do his thing until the target comes home.
    • Played straight later on in a Public Bathhouse Scene however. Yusuke, Ren (Joker) and Ryuji are trying to have a coversation... but Ryuji can't stand the temperature of the water since an eldery man keeps adding more hot water and eventually exits the bath, with a wall covering everything but past his upper torso thanks to the positioning of the camera.
  • In the not "Naughty" category, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has this in case 1-5. The Blue Badger, a mechanically dancing police mascot (shaped like a badge, not an animal), was moved into storage for a few hours to keep it from being damaged in the bustle of cleaning out evidence lockers. A man broke into this storage room and was supposedly killed there. There is video footage of the attack happening, however, when his identity becomes important, it's easy to note that at all times in the video, his face is constantly either out of shot, or covered by the Badger's batons, which move in time to his movements, though not quite perfectly, as, if you watch closely, you can see towards the end that the Blue Badger is doing a twitch and doesn't start moving, to keep the person's identity still a secret. It starts moving again a second later.
  • In Streets of Rage, Blaze's fist goes (seemingly unintentionally) between the camera and her Minidress of Power when she does a back kick.
  • At the beginning of the SNES version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a demo of the main character is walking around naked on his way to a house, with his private area being censored by fences, trucks, and even motorcycles (however, once the Start button is pressed, it bypasses the whole scene). The Angry Video Game Nerd even lampshades this.
  • Terrible Triplets: When changing the triplets' diapers, farts cloud cover their crotches, which turn into flowers when you clean them.
  • Whacked!: Lucy normally goes around naked and covered in Censor Boxes, but one cutscene has her trying to remove them. She then sees that there's more forms of censorshipnote  under the bars but takes those off too. Right as she takes off the last "layer" of censorship, Toof gets up to the screen and his head covers her body.
  • At the start of the ending cinematic to Xenogears, Fei and Elly are trapped naked in a sort of empty parallel dimension and must run towards the point of contact with their own world. The characters glow with a faint aura when standing around (as the camera strategically bounces around) but during their run, while the camera pans with them from the side, Fei in the lead somehow always manages to conceal himself with the leg nearest the camera whereas Elly a few steps behind has her entire torso glow with obscuring light. Then subverted in the next scene when their former friend appears to help them with a full frontal shot to display his lack of attributes (stylistic censorship, or maybe because said character is not exactly human anymore).

    Web Animation 
  • Hello Kitty and Friends Supercute Adventures: In "Hello Kitty's Bow Chase" a bird steals Hello Kitty's trademark bow, and for a good chunk of the episode, the ear said bow usually occupies is obscured by all manner of things, from the glare in Hello Kitty's bedroom mirror to some stirred leaves to a frisbee thrown by Pompompurin. This goes on for almost a whole minute until Hello Kitty uses some flowers as a temporary replacement.
  • In one live-action segment of Homestar Runner, all four members of Limozeen appear on a Thanksgiving e-card. There is a conveniently placed turkey in order to hide the fact that one of the members is played by the creator's wife.
  • Let's Go! Tamagotchi: At the beginning of episode 3, when Memetchi wakes up, a table in her room briefly blocks her hair curl from view before it's revealed that it's standing straight up.
  • The Napster Bad short "Napster Dead?" has Lars Ulrich, among other people, bathing in a beer-filled bathtub. His naughty bits are perpetually covered with foam.

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • In regards to the Adam and Eve example mentioned in Literature above, various animated adaptations of the story (specially those aimed at children) use this trope and Godiva Hair for obvious reasons. Some of those adaptations include the ones from The Beginner's Bible, both series of Superbook, The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible and Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible.
  • The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "Jimmy Goes to College" as Jimmy goes streaking, the lower part of his body is always obscured.
  • Animaniacs:
    • In the short "A Quake, A Quake", Ralph is outside wearing only his socks and has his shame covered by a fire hydrant.
    • In "Guardin' the Garden", and similar to the straight-forward adaptations of the Biblical story mentioned above, Adam and Eve are both completely naked, but their naughty bits are always conveniently covered by foliage.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • Katara is shown bathing onscreen in "The Runaway", using the water and Godiva Hair to obscure anything not appropriate to show in a TV-Y7 rating.
    • "The Winter Solstice, Part 1" has a scene where Zuko tells Iroh to get out of a hot spring, but when he comes out, a visibly disgusted Zuko cringes while our view is blocked by the same hand he's using and he tells Iroh to go back in.
    • Alluded to in the quite-well-done Abridged Series by GanXingba:
      Iroh: Zuko, you shmuck, it's 5 o'clock. What happens at 5 o'clock?
      Zuko: Naked Iroh Time...
      Iroh: And what is the one rule about Naked Iroh Time?
      Zuko: "Don't interrupt Naked Iroh Time!"
      Iroh: You're damn right. Now get your tuchus out of here before I kick it!
      Zuko: (moans) Now I'm scarred physically and mentally.
  • BoJack Horseman:
    • In "A Quick One, While He's Away", a brief scene of Sarah Lynn's music video for "Prickly Muffin" is seen, set in a planetarium, in which a nude Sarah Lynn has her breasts censored by two planet models, while a third planet model censors her...ahem, her prickly muffin.
    • Later in the series the titular character also has a nude scene in season 5 episode 1 “The Light Bulb Scene” (in the video examples below). The censors include male crew members (2 humans, an ostrich, and an anteater), film equipment (a camera, a boom mic, and an audio equipment chest), and a table topped with a buffet (including styrofoam cups, a coffee maker, a milk cartoon, and a box of doughnuts). While sadly the audience does not get to see any Male Frontal Nudity, besides the Fan Disservice of Baby Seahorse, an interesting note is the boom mic and anteater head censors which suggests that Bojack (and possibly all male horses) are very well endowed like real life horses and is possibly one of the many reasons that he has had over 100 sexual partners.
  • The Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: B.U.T.T." involved Numbuh One losing his swimming trunks after his teammates force him to take some time off at the beach. At one point, he hides behind a beach umbrella to cover up his nudity.
  • In the Dan Vs. episode "Art", Dan's revenge scheme requires Chris to pose as a life model, and this trope is used on both him and the finished portrait.
  • One Danny Phantom episode had Vlad hiding his nudity behind an armchair and another has him using a towel to cover up in the shower after Danny turned his bathroom wall invisible and the whole world saw the poor Vlad.
  • Happens in Dexter's Laboratory when Dee-Dee begins her morning routine in "Game For A Game". She begins singing a song and proceeds to undress behind a screen, stopping behind a conveniently-placed potted plant as she realizes she forgot to put fresh clothes on:
    Dee Dee: Off with my PJs I will take it
    Oops, I almost walked out naked!
  • The Downtown episode "Train Pain" has a scene where Chaka and Mecca moon a man in retaliation to him deliberately not letting them get onboard a train in time. When we see the mooning from the man's perspective, his body covers up Chaka and Mecca's butts.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Rent-A-Ed", Rolf lets his towel loose during his visit to the sauna, and Double D's hat obscures Rolf.
  • Family Guy:
    • The Campbell family goes around naked all the time, so this often comes in to play to cover their frontal nudity. To name just one example, Dottie first appears with the stairs' handrail level with her crotch, and after stepping off the stairs her hands block the view (and not in the deliberate way). She also has permanent Godiva Hair.
    • The Christmas Episode "The Return of the King (Of Queens)" has Peter tell his children Chris and Meg to stop walking around naked in their home because they have company. During the scene, their fronts are obscured by Christmas stockings and the railing of the stairs.
  • Good Vibes: In scenes where Mondo is naked, his fat belly is enough to cover him.
  • Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids: "Nobby's Nightmare" uses various objects to conveniently obscure the genitalia of Nobby's naturist parents, including a potted plant, a pineapple and pots and pans.
  • Home Movies: Mc Guirk is given a kilt, which brings out his suppressed passion for Highland dancing — then a leg cramp sprawls him out on the ground, to the horror of everyone getting a full view.
  • In the HouseBroken episode "Who's The Boss?" Diablo gets a pair of fake testicles. Throughout the episode they are censored by objects and other characters.
  • Justice League:
    • At the beginning of "Secret Origins", when Diana (a.k.a. Wonder Woman) steals the Amazonian armor that becomes her costume, she takes off a cloak and judging from what is seen, appears to be wearing nothing as she proceeds to put the armor on. Which is a reference to the scene in Heavy Metal where the female warrior armors up in pretty much the same fashion.
    • The climax of the second season finale of Justice League Unlimited ends with Luthor left lying on the ground naked, with his naughty bits just barely blocked off by Flash's legs. (This soon makes for an odd scheme where Supes almost strangles a naked Luthor.)
  • King of the Hill:
    • In the episode "Naked Ambition", Bobby accidentally catches Luanne nude while she is changing out of her swimsuit. His head pretty much obscures any view of Luanne's frontal nudity.
    • In "Sug Night", Hank and Peggy go to a nude resort and (unwillingly) meet two nudists. Most of the nudity is censored by shrubbery. At one point, Hank and Peggy are seen from behind, with Peggy's rear covered by a flower, and Hank's exposed for a second before a hummingbird flies over his.
    • Non-nudity example: In "Lupe's Revenge", Peggy takes her students to a butcher in Mexico thinking that it's a magic show. When the butcher cuts the chicken's head off, the head of one of the students covers the headless body. Oddly, it can be seen for a split-second when Peggy throws it away later.
  • The Legend of Vox Machina: When Scanlan sneaks into Vedmire's house to create a distraction the window be picks turns out to be the privvy.... and Vedmire is there taking a poop. Vedmire's penis is censored by Scanlan himself being in between the camera and it, the camera then cuts to behind Vedmire after he stands up and one of his falling poops is not fully blocked from view, but is obscured by a Censor Shadow.
  • Looney Tunes:
    • A fig leaf conveniently turns up in two shorts to cover up a character's privates. All This and Rabbit Stew has Sambo the hunter stark naked after losing all his clothes to Bugs Bunny at craps (as it irises out, Bugs reaches out from the dark area and plucks the fig leaf), then to Red Hot Ryder in Buckaroo Bugs after Bugs uses a magnet to cause Ryder to drop trou.
    • Daffy the Commando assumedly subverts this as a calendar with what appears to be a topless lady is seen on the wall of the Nazi bunker.
  • Sally Lou's breasts are covered by Snafu's letter in the Private Snafu cartoon Censored.
  • Rocko's Modern Life: In "Bedfellows", Heffer becomes a nudist after living at Rocko's house for several days. He throws a party in Rocko's backyard, where he invites other nudists. At one point in the party, a naked woman is shown from the back. She is standing next to a bullseye, and when she turns around, a pair of arrows that get fired at the bullseye cover her breasts and crotch.
  • Rolling with the Ronks!: "Fashion Victims" has Walter stop a saber-toothed tiger by tying it up with a rope tied together from clothes he stripped off the other Ronks. After the saber-toothed tiger is defeated, two naked Ronk men and one nude Ronk woman pop up to cheer Walter for his act of bravery, with the men's bodies obscured by a bush and a rock while some huge leaves cover up the woman's body. The three then look down and sheepishly duck out of view while covering themselves with their arms once they realize they're bare.
  • In the 1991 Rugrats episode, "Naked Tommy", Tommy takes off his clothes to be like Spike and entices Phil and Lil to do the same. In the scene where Stu is aghast to find that Phil and Lil have undressed, Tommy's front private is censored by the playpen.
  • In Samurai Jack episode "XCIX", Ashi's nudity is blocked by her weapons and Jack's (conveniently placed) sword.
  • Lampshaded in the Sheep in the Big City episode "Agony of De-bleat", in which General Specific changes his uniform while walking past a box, which is labeled "RANDOM BOX" in flashing neon lights.
  • Lampshaded in Tex Avery's The Shooting of Dan McGoo: the bartender, strategically positioned in front of a nude painting, announces, "I don't move from here all through the picture." When a fight breaks out, though, he ducks behind the bar — revealing that the woman in the picture is missing everything from chest to mid-thigh. (In its place she holds a sign reading "I ain't got no body.")
  • The Simpsons:
    • In "The Call of the Simpsons", Homer and Bart wind up naked after falling from a waterfall. After finding each other, Homer finds out his clothes are missing as he walks out into the open and a conveniently placed bird's nest covers his crotch.
    • In "Brush With Greatness", it's used to censor a painting Marge had made of Mr. Burns. On the commentary, everyone talks about how much fun they had making those objects as small as possible. Lampshaded at the end of the episode, when Marge and Mr. Burns discuss her portrayal of his genitalia and it sounds like neither of them actually saw that bit of the painting (due to the obstructions).
    • In "Natural Born Kissers", Homer and Marge's nudity is concealed by wind-powered lawn ornaments. When Homer notes that the ornament in front of him is two men sawing a log in half.
    Homer: Marge, can we trade? I don't trust these guys.
    • In "The Girl Who Slept Too Little", Chief Wiggum somehow ends up naked in the graveyard next to the Simpsons' house and staggers away listening to music on a Walkman while a strategically placed patch of fog covers his butt (the series used to allow bare butts to be shown, but the FOX censors have since cracked down on this, which is kinda stupid considering one of the other episodes they did centered on Marge posing naked for a charity calendar, though that was toned down considerably too).
    • In a non-nudity example, in "Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield", every time the Chanel logo is shown half of it is covered by something. According to the DVD commentary, it's a case of Writing Around Trademarks; while Marge could say that she has a Chanel dress or bought one as a replacement, actually showing the label (or the storefront) was a no-no, which is why Marge's fingers covered the label and why there was a tree covering the storefront when she went to get the replacement dress.
  • The Spectacular Spider-Man:
    • Flint Marko is depicted as nude when he serves as an experimental subject in "Competiton". He is mostly shown from the waist up, but anything lower is obscured by someone standing in front of him, the glare of a pane of glass, or the process of his transformation. After he becomes the Sandman, his lower half initially remains a shapeless mass, until we cut to him maintaining human form, complete with manifested clothes.
    • During Flash Thompson's birthday party in "Growing Pains", the photo of him running with no pants on at age four has a flower covering up his butt.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
    • An unusual case of this occurs in "Nature Pants", when SpongeBob decides to shirk clothing and return to nature. Various objects cover the lower part of his body, as usual (when he is taking off his pants for instance, he is standing behind a bush), but proceed to cover less and less over the course of the episode, until it becomes clear that there's really nothing there to cover.
    • In "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy II", SpongeBob uses the Conch Signal to summon Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy to his house to open a jar of mayonnaise for him, right when the two are in the middle of taking a bath. When Mermaid Man shows up naked at SpongeBob's house, Gary's shell is covering his crotch. Gary leaves once Barnacle Boy puts a Modesty Towel on Mermaid Man.
    • In "Squid's Day Off", Squidward goes crazy while he's taking a bath and runs to the Krusty Krab with bubbles covering him. Eventually, he looks down and we see a close-up shot of the area directly above his legs, and all the bubbles pop except one. SpongeBob gives him his pants to save him from being completely nude. However, the Fridge Logic comes in when you realize that Squidward never wears pants anyway...
    • In "Bossy Boots", Squidward rips off his Kuddly Krabs uniform and a policefish instantly appears and puts a ticket right where you'd expect only, once again, Squidward never wears pants anyway...
    • Again pulled off inconsistently in "Someone's in the Kitchen With Sandy", this time with Sandy. Sandy sheds her pelt in order to take a shower and Plankton takes it in order to disguise himself. Sandy is very clearly wearing her regular bikini throughout, but the framing and object placement (and various characters) occasionally seem to think that she isn't.
    • Also seen in the Employee of the Month PC game. Mr. Krabs can be found in Barg'N-Mart selling some old junk, completely naked because he sold his clothes to a fish. It's unlikely his 3D model has anything to hide, but his crotch is nonetheless covered by a pile of cans in the foreground. You can also examine the cans, which the game refers to as "strategically-placed"
  • Steven Universe: "Frybo" ends with Steven animating all his clothes, including his underwear, to attack the similarly animated Frybo costume, and remaining naked for the remainder of the episode. Any frontal shot of him standing up straight has one of his still animated clothes covering him up from the camera's view.
  • Superman: The Animated Series:
    • After Supergirl is seriously injured both by a brainwashed Superman and soldiers armed with Kryptonite guns. When she's brought to Star Labs for medical treatment... hello conveniently positioned medical equipment.
    • Same thing later happens to Galatea. And considering Galatea is basically the DCAU version of Power Girl...
  • A Played for Laughs and fully-clothed example in Teen Titans. In "Episode 257-494" (a.k.a. "Don't Touch That Dial"), the Titans end up confronting a group of robots demanding their identification. Beast Boy tries a Jedi Mind Trick schtick on them, going so far as to steal Raven's cloak to make himself look mysterious. Despite the girl always wearing a leotard, she crosses her arms over her chest in disbelief with Robin's right fist over her hips.
  • Happens in episode 14 of the second season of Wakfu. The gang visits an inn with a bathhouse, and a rubber duck in the girl's bath with the smuggest fucking smirk ever blocks the girls just in time in every shot.
  • There is an episode of The Weekenders where they went to see the Venus de Milo. Of course, they only showed its head at the beginning. When the camera finally zoomed out, guess what was obscured by a conveniently placed plant.

    Real Life 
  • Many companies object to visible tattoos, although their popularity is steadily rising. In many cases where clothing is insufficient to conceal a tattoo, bandages are liberally applied.
  • Many wedding websites sell tattoo cover-up kits for those who want to permanently mark their bodies and express themselves... except for one day, when they are generally expected to look like princesses.
  • Thanks to the rather suspicious implications of having a tattoo in Japan, many public hot springs and bathhouses take this to an amusing extreme. Once you're in the right bathing area, you can strut around as naked as a jaybird, without even worrying about a Modesty Towel... but there had better be a bandaid over that tattoo, or you'll be asked to leave.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Peek A Boo, Scenery Censors

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Maki's Insecurity

Despite being an Amazonian Beauty Maki is insecure about being too muscular, even when the camera itself ogles her. To the point, she gets very mad when people insult her and mishear them as trash-talking her appearance. She gets especially anxious when compared to girly girls like Iris and Hibana, but gets some confidence when Hibana compliments her muscular body.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (7 votes)

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