Don't look now, but there's a giant wave of babies.
"No more a rake and no more a bachelor
I was wedded and it whetted my thirst
Until her womb started spilling out babies
Only then did I reckon my curse!
I was wedded and it whetted my thirst
Until her womb started spilling out babies
Only then did I reckon my curse!
— The Rake, "The Rake's Song" from The Decemberists' The Hazards of Love
An actual wave of literal babies. In massive amounts, unstoppable, they sweep over all. Possibly gurgling the whole time. It can be of any species, especially ones that reproduce at an alarming rate. Usually a metaphor for the anxiety of parenthood, or the world’s overpopulation problems, but sometimes it’s just thrown in for random humor. See also Too Many Babies.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Monsieur Jean once dreams that he's the lord of a castle being bombarded with babies, to the point where all his soldiers are overwhelmed with them.
Comic Strips
- In Bloom County Opus (after getting knocked out at his wedding) had a Flash Forward Dream Sequence nightmare about married life in the future, in which his wife left him with 100 of their test-tube babies, leading to his waking up screaming.
Films — Animated
- A running joke about Wayne, the Wolf Man in Hotel Transylvania, is that he's constantly being swarmed by puppies. When he turns human in the fourth film, the first thing he does is pretend that he's not their father, forcing his wife to deal with the problem.
- In Shrek the Third, Shrek has a nightmare about becoming a father, and in the middle of it a flood of baby ogres pours in through the window and chases him into the next scene.
- In WALL•E, when the ship is hijacked by Auto and tilting at a dangerous angle, a very large group of babies spill out of their hover-cribs and slide across the floor. They are saved by Mary and John.
Mary: John, get ready to have some kids!
- In Storks: Junior in anger causes the baby machine at Stork Mountain to go at max speed, leading to a very large amount of babies being created that overwhelms the conveyor belt system.
- The giant demonic entity that Mok summons up from hell in Rock and Rule briefly morphs into a mass of hideous baby-like creatures that fly towards the audience.
Films — Live-Action
- In Noroi: The Curse the wave is made of ghost fetuses.
Literature
- The Cyberiad: Trurl, a Constructor (one who can more or less build anything) is called to a planet by its king to resolve a Starcrossed Lovers situation between the prince and princess of two rival countries. After his first attempt fails, Trurl's plan B is to create a network of huge cannons that flood the empire with babies until they surrender. The two countries reconcile, the prince and princess marry, and Trurl goes home well-paid. The end.
Live-Action TV
Video Games
- Dante's Inferno has waves of unbaptized babies.
- In Drakengard, in endings D and E, a wave of babies eats the world.
- The third level of Um Jammer Lammy.
- In Dead Space 2, you'll occasionally face waves of exploding zombie babies known as the Crawler.
- FromSoftware
- Demon's Souls had a swamp filled with "Plague Babies."
- Dark Souls had a respawning skeleton babies at Gravelord Nito's hideout.
- Bloodborne had the Celestial Larve, incomprehensible alien babies who can cause people to go insane.
- In Donkey Kong Country Returns, the final level of world 5 has you chased by one of these... comprised of baby spiders. They serve as an Advancing Wall of Doom, which, unlike most examples, is fast as hell.
- Halo's Carrier Form Flood presumably incubate the Infection Forms they spew out on their destruction, making it a wave of alien exploding zombie babies.
Web Animation
- Teen Girl Squad is the Trope Namer. In one episode, after What's Her Face refuses to jump into a lion's mouth, a guy with a ukulele appears and sings "Wave o' babies!" as a wave of babies crashes into her. An Easter Egg reveals she survives, which is rather amazing considering Strong Bad's usual formula.
Webcomics
- Girly has a baby sidekick who makes babies at a disturbingly fast rate and shoots them out at the titular girls, like in this strip.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has an ocean of babies in one strip.
Web Original
- Among the monsters that populate Mortasheen is Ovulooge, which is basically the living embodiment of this trope, doing nothing but pumping out eggs that form a massive Hive Mind and cling together in a huge colony.
Western Animation
- The Invader Zim episode "Plague O' Babies" revolves around an alien platoon that looks like babies attacking Zim in an effort to take his ship. At the climax they merge their bodies into a walking, monstrous wave of babies.
- Metalocalypse: One of the members of Snakes N' Barrels thinks he is being attacked by a wave of evil, floating babies while high on Totally Awesome Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake (a drug so potent that it will cause you to get so high that your brain will blow chunks into the Milky Way).
- In one episode Bump in the Night, the main character ends up literally swimming in an ocean of babies (well, baby dolls), even going to the extent of surfing on them.
- In one episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy, the Eds have opened a pet shop in Ed's garage to try and make some money for jawbreakers, as usual. Ed places two rabbits together, not knowing that one is a male and the other female. Baby rabbits cover the garage floor in mere seconds and, by the end of the episode, rabbits have quite literally flooded the cul-de-sac.
- The Simpsons has an episode which features a riot in the form of a wave of angry babies at a Roofi concert, who converge on police officers and are beaten off with batons. This is referred to in the episode as the Tot Offensive.
- The Smurfs episode "Fuzzle Trouble", at the end of the episode, has Gargamel opening a box that he thinks contains Smurfs, only to find himself swarmed by lots of hungry little fuzzles all looking for something to eat.
- DC Super Hero Girls episode #AdventuresInBunnysitting, Zatanna's magic rabbits reproduce so quickly that they produce a massive flood of baby bunnies that they knock Supergirl out of her house and carry her down the street.
- In The Angry Beavers episode "Salmon Sez", Daggett and Norbert find out that their dam is in the way of salmon heading upstream to spawn. After the beavers come up with a way for the salmon to pass through, the episode ends with baby salmon flooding the dam.
Real Life
- Salmons. They may be the Ur-Example of semelparous Explosive Breeders. They make salmon runs on humongous schools to the river where they have themselves born, and lay their roe and milt there. Once the larvae hatch, they spend some time at the river and head to the ocean. Pacific salmons (genus Orchorynchus) die after they have bred, but Atlantic salmons (genus Salmo) will return back to the ocean. They may make 3 to 4 salmon runs during their lives.
- Happens once a year with red crabs on Christmas Island.
- Also happens with sea turtles, who need to hatch in such quantities because hundreds of them will be picked off and eaten within the first three minutes alone.
- The surge in births in the Western world immediately post-WW2, due to peace, social stability and rising prosperity, lasted from approximately 1946 to around 1963.note For this reason, the generation born during this peak of births is universally known as The Baby Boomers.
- In introductory biology course lectures on the theory of evolution, Malthusian population growth is often illustrated with examples of how one breeding pair of, e.g., sparrows, could hypothetically cover the Earth if allowed to reproduce without limit, in the absence of competition, predation, disease, or lack of resources.
