It's that time of the year again. The whole town is assembled at the central park, ready for that one traditional competition the town is well-known for. The host (usually the mayor) will be there to explain the rules, introduce the winning prize and start the event.
Everyone in town will either participate or join the audience, depending on how athletic they are. The contest will always start with a fireworks shot, followed by a crowd shot and depending on how much time there is still left for this episode, a couple of shots of minor contestants before moving on to the main characters wishing each other good luck.
Expect the Competition Freaks to be wearing sports uniforms during the entire episode. The prankster, the bad guy and the bungling inventor will not miss this opportunity to somehow rig the game.
Either the main character wins, or a muggle/nobody will win the game when the amount of cheating reaches ridiculous heights.
Examples:
- Candy Candy has a rodeo contest.
- Cardcaptor Sakura did a town scavenger hunt.
- Kirby: Right Back at Ya! does this quite a lot, sometimes with absurd fads sweeping the town. One episode included the residents of Cappy Town collecting figurines of themselves, which Meta Knight thought was absurd... until he saw one of himself and changed his mind.
- Many episodes of Pokémon features the cast coming across some town in the middle of a themed Pokemon competition like flying, skateboarding, cooking, dancing, etc. Taken to ridiculous levels during the Sun & Moon saga where, due to the story being grounded for the most part on Melemele Island, the only city there had multiple contests.
- Wowser has a town contest every three episodes.
- Komori-san Can't Decline! has a contest to design the town mascot. Ultimately, the winner is Tsurezure, making a cameo from Ojojojo.
- Boldores And Boomsticks: Team RWBY enters a traditional local Fighting-Type tournament to earn some local currency.
- Eureka does this often with scientific contests, such as the "build your own dog" contest.
- The Play-by-Post Game Journey Through the Multiverse has this as its third world, with a town in Tibet holding a contest to see who can catch the most ghosts, with a winner receiving a chest. However, things don't end well, and the contest was just to see who'd be a good meal for the monster inside the chest.
- Alfred J. Kwak featured a town-wide triathlon.
- Angelina Ballerina did this in the 2002 series episode "Treasure Tandems". Angelina and the other mouselings embark on a treasure hunt/scavenger hunt in teams of two on bicycles.
- The Grand Finale of Codename: Kids Next Door did a mammoth worldwide scavenger hunt with almost every operative and villain of the show and the winner receiving the Delightfuls' Birthday cake. Near the end Nigel (Numbuh 1) wins and is selected by Numbuh 74.239 to join the Galactic KND, just to be informed that he might never return to Earth, which in turn means that he'll probably never see his friends and family again.
- The Loud House episode "Racing Hearts" focuses on Luna and Sam competing in a town scavenger hunt.
- Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart has three of these episodes: "Head Chef", "Baost in Show" and "Thumb War."
