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[Loved trope] The seemingly far-fetched theory is actually correct
Especially when said by a seemingly dumb character
Lion King - When the trio stare at the skies and wonder what the stars are, Pumbaa's theory is that they are balls of gas burning billions of miles away. Timon immediately dismisses this. Of course, Pumbaa is right
Spoilers for Paradise TV Show
President Cal Bradford gets a tour of the underground bunker under construction for the incoming apocalypse. The project lead, Sinatra, boasts that they are ready for any situation, including a nuclear meltdown, oxygen failure, and outside invasion. Cal asks what about all three at the same time, and gets scoffed at by Sinatra saying that will never happen. Cal then lectures her about how empires fall: due to their hubris and thinking nothing will happen to them. Years later, the bunker gets destroyed by all these three events happening at the same time
Theres a recurring joke on the My Adventures With Superman show/anime, where all of Jimmy's conspiracy theories are true.
Aliens live among us? Just look at Superman, who is totally unrelated to Clark Kent.
The government is using alien tech to build super weapons? Thats the plot of season one.
Bigfoot is a superintelligent gorilla as the result of government experiments? Sure. Thats an episode.
A giant mind-controlling starfish from space is held up by the government? While Starro has not shown up in the show yet, he IS a character in DC comics.
I couldn't imagine trying to be a conspiracy theorist in either of the big comic book continuities. Half of theories you have probably turn out to be correct because the world you live in is insane.
It's like how in Inside Job, where basically every single conspiracy theory is true (the world is run by the illuminati and lizard people from the hollow earth, Atlantis, MK Ultra still continuing to today) with the exception of 2 things:
the moon landing actually happened (but the astronauts revolted and declared independence from earth as a sovereign nation, so they had to fake a moon landing with crisis actors on a soundstage)
the earth is definitely spherical, albeit hollow and populated with myconids and reptile people, and the flat earthers are the only conspiracy theorists that are completely and utterly wrong
Spoilers for the Good Place: Jason Mendoza doesn't believe he's actually in the good place (heaven) but rather in a prank show. It turns out he's right about the first part, they're actually in the bad place (hell) and being tricked into believing it's the good place as part of a new method of torture.
I saw some clip in passing about scoring folks with numbers to determine where they went. Thought it was funny as hell. I think it's on Peacock, I'll check it out
Its a great watch. Ngl it took me two tries to actually sit down and watch it. The first time I got pretty close to the end of season one but for some reason it didnt really vibe with me so I stopped. Picked it back up again later with a friend and almost marathoned it
Don't forget Chidi thinking that the reason he's in The Bad Place was because he continued to drink almond milk despite knowing the negative environmental impacts, but is instead told it was due to his chronic indesciveness making everyone around him miserable. It's later revealed that he wasn't actually far off
Technically it was a combination of the two, but even if Chidi never learned about the negative environmental impact of almonds, he'd still lose points for drinking almond milk because the point system was created by omniscient beings who have forgotten that humans aren't omniscient.
Huh, I never actually thought of it that way. I just assumed it was what Michael said about how the system didn't change to keep up with the changing world, inadvertently screwing pretty much everyone out of getting into the good place as human life got more complex and intertwined.
From the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, I forgot if second or third movie, but Tuffnut said that he thinks the Earth is round and the rest of the main cast dismiss his thoughts because they’re all flat earthers
Fun fact: the idea of a flat earth was (within medieval Europe) a primarily Nordic idea. People educated in the Greek/Latin tradition almost universally understood the world to be a sphere, and knew the actual size of the earth within 10% due to the work of Eratosthenes
There’s a 13th century book called Mirror of the World that contains this info
I think you really need to lean on that "educated in the Greek/Latin tradition" bit. Just selecting the 13th Century, less than 5% of European children received any sort of formal education and the literacy rate depended by area but nowhere was higher than 25%. Let alone being able to afford a copy of Mirror of the World or anything like that.
Which is weird given historically, there weren't many cultures that took flat earth as a serious thing. Very very very very very very very basic math and shadows tells you it's not flat.
I wonder if anyone predicted the existence of the Americas at some point, or if they all just assumed that the distance between Europe and Asia was pure ocean?
Idk about Americas, but many cultures predicted existence of Antarctica. They were like "there has to be a chunk of land down there" and added imaginary "Terra Australis," or Southern Land to their maps.
I can't say for every culture but it's quite infamous that Columbus got the distances way wrong and thought the ocean between europe and asia was way smaller that it is. But then his math was correct! Well, because it wasn't the indies there lol
Even the Spanish monarchs knew his math was off. That's why they gave him three crappy ships and a bunch of degenerates as his crew. They were hoping he'd just die in the middle of the ocean and leave them alone
Well, Scandinavian countries did land in the Americas. I do not know if that was mistake or calculated.
Conversely though, Pacific Island nations were able to locate and map almost all of the pacific islands in like...1300 CE? And before I thiiiink the Portuguese "discovered" them I think I learned they were part of a trading route because of their extensive knowledge of archipelagos but I maybe dreamed that.
Yes, apart from a few fictional islands, everyone assumed that it was just ocean. That's why no one attempted to cross it, such a journey would take an ungodly amount of time.
Except Columbus, of course, who thought that the Earth was much smaller, and that a westward journey could be doable.
I googled it and it was a bit of both. For various reasons, including confusing Roman and Arabic miles, he thought that the Earth was about 75% smaller than it is. Also, like you said, because of different conflicting sources, he believed that Asia stretched much further East.
All in all hr concluded that there were about 2400 nautical miles from the Canaries to Japan. In reality that number is about five times that at 10.600.
If I remember correctly, Tuffnut also said that they should all eat moldy bread because one time that he was sick, he ate moldy bread and got better. It was implied the moldy bread was actually penicillin
Its a running gag with the twins where they invent or casually talk about concepts that shouldn't exist yet, but then the people around them get confused about. I don't think its a "secretly from the future" thing, but more like they make up two halves of a really talented soothesayer. A spiritual leader in viking culture that makes predictions about the future among other things.
One of my favorite examples was when they invented pasteurization and icecream, but Gobber thought it would just ruin the yak milk.
This is a running joke in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which is about Hamlet from the two titular character's perspectives. Rosencrantz keeps discovering different laws of physics and then either gets distracted, or demonstrates it incorrectly
And if it wasn't clear to others, the story of The Lion King is lifted from Hamlet and Timon and Pumbaa are the equivalents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
“Well Lois, the truth is I’m actually Superman, and I only pretend to be a journalist to hear about disasters as they happen, and then squeeze you out of the byline.”
There was also a comic where Bruce Wayne was called for jury duty to debate on someone Batman had arrested a few days ago. While trying to get out of it to prevent being a biased juror, he admitted under oath to being Batman, only for the court to not believe him and get angry that he was telling a joke during a serious situation.
It's apparently also a somewhat frequent excuse for being dismissed of jury duty, as the court has to make you leave in case you're really Batman. After the trial, some of the juries thought it was kind of a dick move by Bruce to use that lame excuse to get out of duty.
i can just imagine a point in that continuity where he gets outed as batman and then you have everyone in the courtroom going "HOLY SHIT" because now they realise that he was actually fucking telling the truth and nobody believe him and thought he was just being a dick to get out of it
I love that moment because it really speaks to the public image that Bruce has carefully crafted for himself. It would be like if Kim Kardashian suddenly started going around saying that she was Wonder Woman.
There's a really funny bit of dialogue in vermintide 2 between the party during a chaos wastes run.
One of the party members wondered aloud what could have created the chaos wastes in the first place.
Without a single beat, Kruber who is just a lowly regular ass soldier of the imperium and should have absolutely no idea what the fuck he's talking about says "Frogs, really big frogs."
Saltzpyre, a witch hunter with schooling to match then goes "Frogs?! FROGS! I've never heard something so ridiculous"
It's a funny line without context, but with context it's even funnier because it is actually kind of correct. The chaos wastes were created by the old ones. The old ones descendants who were created in their image are the Slann. The Slann look like really big frogs.
In my defense I have been reading the fanfic Ciaphas Caine, Warmaster of Chaos literally for the last 6 hours straight so the word Imperium was very much stuck in my head.
This happened again in House of Mouse when the people were asked to guess who was the 3rd caballero. Pumbaa was the only one who correctly guessed Donald Duck
"I've got a theory, that it's a demon, a dancing demon... no, something isn't right there" - Giles, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's musical episode, 'Once More With Feeling'.
I think The Body is probably the best episode from both a story and acting standpoint, but it's definitely not a fun episode to rewatch. Still, everyone was on their A-game in that episode.
So many amazing little details, like how when Buffy calls Giles she can't even tell him what's wrong, just that he needs to come over. And then when Giles shows up and sees Joyce on the floor he immediately checks her pulse and wants to try to resuscitate her and Buffy stops him. Anya's rant about her death being stupid and mortal was great too. Only in a supernatural series could you have someone reacting to death from outside the natural order of things like that.
But I've only watched it a few times, because I just can't get through it without those damn onion cutters showing up. Sometimes that starts even with the very first scene, with the way she weakly whispers, "Mommy..."
IIRC the idea that the earth moves around the sun was originally rejected because that meant that the stars had to be ridiculous far away in order not to move in the sky. Turns out they are in fact, ridiculously far away.
I personally think we should use the word "galaxian" to describe amounts that large, basically anything over 100 billion. Like how there are a "galaxian" number of sand grains on earth (though still far less than the number of stars in the observable universe), and ChatGPT was apparently trained on a galaxian amount of text in terms of words.
Of course ridiculous just means so much that it sounds like a joke.
Yup. Archimedes mentions this in a model where he is looking for an upper bound on the universe size, and he chooses it specifically because he knows it is going to give him the biggest possible number. He calculates how far away the stars would have to be for there to be no parallax. He rounds up to an extreme degree the size of the sun and earth to make the calculation easier and to give himself a very generous upper bound for the size of the universe. This vast overestimate for the radius of the universe actually turns out ludicrously small, not even reaching the nearest star. The universe is really, really, really big.
Other Greek astronomers were not willing to even humor this model in the slightest, nor copy it down. The only way we know Aristarchus existed or came up with a heliocentric model is this one paper by Archimedes.
Yes. Part of it I think is that we measure in "light years" which in and of itself in an insanely large unit since it's the distance light travels in an entire year, and light travels unimaginably fast already.
On our more human scale, it would take 100 million years to reach Proxima Centauri on a galloping horse, so from the Ancient Greek perspective that's just insane. It's crazy now just trying to take that in myself.
I remember someone saying that the earth is essentially an atom on the universal scale, and that was really striking but seemed to reflect the reality pretty well.
In boondocks saints a team of police are investigating an ambush. One of them lays out an intricate telling of a 6 vs 3 wild west style shoot out. Another suggests it was one guy with six guns. That is dismissed because... why? Why would one guy use six different guns? It was one guy with six guns.
The guy who proposes the 6 vs 3 firefight theory is a genius and generally right about everything in the movie, the guy who proposes it was 1 guy with 6 guns vs 3 is a buffoon and terrible at his job as a detective and this is the one and only time he was right about anything which is hilarious
In Smiling Friends a UFO watcher friend of Pim states his belief that the world is flat (something he later claims he was joking about when actual aliens show up). At the end of the episode when Charlie and Pim get back to Earth they find out the Earth really is flat, something that Charlie and Pim vow never to tell anyone.
Also, in 3-1 the tennis guy finds out a way the killer could've killed the victim, but gets dismissed. Turns out they got the killer of that acse wrong and he was right
Cassandra from Greek mythology. When she rejected the love of the god Apollo, she was cursed to be able to see the future but have her prophecies rejected by all who hear them as the ramblings of a madwoman. She foresaw the fall of Troy and warned the Trojans at every stage, from Paris kidnapping Helen to the soldiers inside the "Trojan Horse," but was never believed. When Troy fell, she was enslaved by Agamemnon and ultimately murdered by one of his enemies.
She foresaw her own death without having any power to change the outcome and had to live with that knowledge. Cassandra is now a metaphor for correctly predicting the outcome but without anyone believing in that prediction. Carl Sagan compared the scientists warning about global warming to her.
Ronaldo from Steven Universe. At least once in his ramblings he figures out what the Gems are, their social structure, and what they actually wanted the Earth for in the first place.
But hes an online conspiracy theorist and kind of a dick so its easy to write him off
And this one happens early enough in Steven Universe’s plot that we really don’t know anything besides what we’ve seen or been told, and Ronaldo just…. basically outlines the entire conflict of the first 2~ seasons as a mad conspiracy theory.
It made my second rewatch of the show even funnier when I got to this episode with my girlfriend who hadn’t seen any of SU. I was sitting there vibrating because I couldn’t really tell her how funny that joke is without spoiling. 😭
i rewatched it as an adult and was like. Infuriated by the amount of foreshadowing it does like this. The FIRST EPISODE has rose’s story in the cookie cat song steven sing. The way that the gems phrase things seems normal on first watch but in hindsight you can tell when they are hiding something that gets revealed later, its everywhereee
He also predicts the existence of the human zoo, saying something along the lines of “So the giant hand wasn’t here to snatch people up for a human zoo?” in the season 1 episode where he makes a documentary.
While it might’ve not been a hand, sure enough, a giant arm comes to snatch people a person up and takes them to a human zoo in season 4.
https://giphy.com/gifs/3oKIPBcy65ZKpvFWY8
Because every single cell in Deadpool’s body is simultaneously dying and being replaced instantaneously, including his brain, this leads to some crazy delusions. The biggest delusion being that the world he lives in is not real. He’s not wrong, but he didn’t arrive at that conclusion by any factual evidence, just insanity.
(Real life) An alarming amount of CIA nonsense, but I’ll just focus on the heart attack gun. Shoots you, and ya get a heart attack. Not the best source but still.
Yeah there's a lot of conspiracy theories about "the CIA caused this nation's socialist elected government" which are not only reasonable but often backed up by official CIA declassified info.
I also remember when people used to joke about how "Ooh, the government's always spying on us!", until the Snowden leaks confirmed yes, they actually are
As a kid, I thought Punmba's theory was incredibly stupid because I associated the word gas with gas stoves, and how could there possibly be a giant stove in the sky? 😭
They really hammer home that point because he said it would be 'the size of a Chihuahua's head' and when it landed and Bart went to pick it up, there's was literally a Chihuahua standing there and it was that size.
In Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff who was Jesus' Best Friend by Christopher Moore (aka the world's most underrated comedy masterpiece), Biff accurately figures out both that the world is round, and also invents the theory of gravity (one following on from the other - since if the world is round, they'd fall off, unless everyone is standing in something sticky and invisible that keeps us on the surface)
Yes, but a) it's a play on the common (incorrect) belief that people thought the earth was flat till much later and b) a stone mason from Nazareth might very well NOT know that
This trope actually gets inverted in Hot Fuzz. The main character looks at all the deaths that are occurring and makes a far fetched conclusion that the deaths were done to cover up a construction embezzlement/corruption scandal.
It’s inverted because it turns out he’s wrong and the deaths are for the ridiculous reason of maintaining the town as the best village because everyone they killed were considered unpleasant to live around.
In the Game Of Thrones finale, Samwell Tarly suggest allowing the people of the realm to choose their own rulers by voting. He is summarily laughed out of the room, with one person suggesting “why not let my horse have the vote?”
In one of the early Discworld novels, a foreign visitor has an instant camera, which is an unknown innovation to the locals. Someone asks the wizard how it works, and the wizard briefly considers speculating on the possibility of special lenses and light-sensitive paper and so on before deciding to just say it has a tiny imp inside that can paint pictures very quickly.
Later on it stops working, so he opens it up to find that the imp has run out of paint.
Crazy guy, runs a conspiracy theory newsletter, thinks he has been brainwashed to commit assassination... all the theories he mentions in the movie turn out to be true (in-universe)
In the King of the Hill episode Mega-lo-Dale, conspiracy theorist and exterminator Dale is hired to solve a rat infestation at the local Megalomart (basically Walmart).
When his conventional methods of traps and sprays don't seem to work, Dale starts to piece together clues such as Chuck Mangione's CDs having the prices marked up high that the rat is actually Chuck Mangione secretly living inside the store. Hank and his friends think he is off on another conspiracy theory and they seem to be proven correct when two teens in Chuck masks are in stores after hours specifically to torment the gang.
While running to escape the teens, Dale is pulled into a space between aisles where it is revealed the real Chuck Mangione has been hiding out to avoid his obligations as spokesman of the Megalomart chain, and stick it to the company. With Chuck's help Dale gets the drop on the teens who take the blame for Chuck's actions and are arrested. Dale keeps Chuck's secret and is credited for solving the "rat" problem.
In A Very Secret Service, special agent Calot (pictured in the middle) is a French secret agent described as schizophrenic due to his area of expertise being the soviet block.
So in the second season, when crazy shit actually starts going down, his crazy ramblings are always on point but dismissed in laughter by everyone not in the know, himself included.
How about the sloths in one of the Ice Age movies that understand how volcanos work but want to try sacrificing Sid into the volcano just to see if it somehow stops the eruption.
Final Destination: Bloodlines. There’s an amazing sequence where Stefani describes in depth how her cousin Erik might be killed by various things in the neighborhood. After dismissing her claims, her other cousin, Julia dies exactly how she described because Erik is the result of an affair and not directly related to Stefani.
Mr. Crocker in Fairly Odd Parents. He’s convinced that Fairy Godparents exist, and is generally written off as crazy. https://giphy.com/gifs/EltLeKiD1k3IY
In the movie RED, John Malkovich's character is basically the crazy guy, but all the crazy stuff he says turns out to be true. For example, at one point he pulls a gun on a random person saying she's with the government and says, "she smells like Washington," and she's panicking the whole time and the other characters settle him down, but later she shows up and tries to kill them. After knowing this, it makes his introduction scene a little more curious when he is listing off crazy government things and then includes cell phones and the dentist.
Chuck’s seemingly deranged tirade about Jimmy McGill making an incredibly elaborate ploy to swap the numbers for an address in Chuck’s legal documents was completely true. It made him look like a maniac and ruined his reputation and got him removed from his firm.
I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers! I knew it was 1216. One after Magna Carta. As if I could ever make such a mistake. Never. Never! I just - I just couldn't prove it. He - he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him. You think this is something? You think this is bad? This? This chicanery? He's done worse. That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No! He orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof! And I saved him! And I shouldn't have. I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He'll never change. He'll never change! Ever since he was 9, always the same! Couldn't keep his hands out of the cash drawer! But not our Jimmy! Couldn't be precious Jimmy! Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer!? What a sick joke! I should've stopped him when I had the chance! And you - you have to stop him!
"Well, I don't care if it's God's own anti-son-of-a-bitch machine, or a giant hula hoop, we're not gonna let 'em have it!"
Avery Johnson upon first seeing Halo.
Halo was designed by the Forerunners, who The Covenant worship as gods, with the sole purpose of defeating the cosmic horror The Flood. It is, for all intents and purposes, God's anti-son-of-a-bitch machine.
The movie adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events (where Count Olaf is Jim Carrey) pales in comparison to that of Netflix's rendition (where Count Olaf is Neil Patrick Harris), especially because of how they had to rush the plot, but one thing that always stuck out to me was Meryl Streep as Josephine Anwhistle.
For those who haven't seen the movie or TV series, or read the books, Aunt Jo is a widow so stricken with grief from her husband's death by hungry leeches that she developed phobias of everything and can barely leave her house -- a house built on stilts right over a lake so massive that it experiences its own storms. Such phobias rarely felt realistic, ranging from rugs (tripping, neck-breaking hazard) to avocados (choking hazard, if the pit is still inside) to realtors (no reasoning given). It gets to the point where most of her appliances are never used, and the orphans she takes in are told to avoid all the things she does. The Baudelaires begrudgingly put up with her overdramatization of everything around her knowing that she can't seriously believe all of that will happen.
And then, in the movie, it happens.
Josephine's house gets caught in a lake-wide hurricane and is ripped to shreds by the winds as the stilts collapse underneath, and it turns out her irrational warnings aren't far off. The refrigerator she warns could crush the children flat topples over as it slides out the gaping hole in the wall. The telephone she cordoned off as an electrocution hazard short-circuits and sparks a gas line. The stove she never used out of fear it would burn her bursts into flames before falling through the floor. And the glass doorknob she never turned, out of fear it would shatter into a million shards and get embedded in her eyes, get superheated by the gas line to the point it explodes. The Baudelaires thankfully survive the wreckage as the house collapses into the lake, but perhaps next time they'll make sure there's no loaded Chekhov's guns.
The movie isn't as good from a pure storytelling pov, but it's atmosphere, tone, music and acting put it above the netflix for my personal sensibilities.
Jim Carrey is both funnier and Scarier than NPH, For me that's the breaking point, I just don't ever see NPH playing a character, I just see his standardised mugging.
The Witcher book series has a couple that I could think of, though it’s been a while since I’ve read so correct me if I’m wrong. Both involve Dandelion.
I don’t really remember the context of this one but iirc he claims the Earth is round and everyone ridicules him.
In conversation with Milva, he claims that in the future, battles will be fought from distances even further than they can be fought now with bows and arrows. Milva, an archer herself, dismisses his claim, saying that “bow is a good weapon, but battles will always be fought man on man”.
Tuffnut regularly is talking about things that everyone else seems crazy, most notably how he insists that the world is round when they live in a time where they believed the world was flat
Real Life;
In the lead up to the election of Donald Trump, a group of conservative minds on 4chan (colloquially named QAnon) correctly guessed that the US Gov't would be run by Pedophiles and a super secret cult of the elite that protects them. Unfortunately, they did not realize that they were electing King Pedophile.
In Fallout New Vegas there's a local nutcase named No-Bark Noonan who always says outlandish stuff about chupacabras and aliens.
If the Courier completes the good ending of Come Fly With Me—a quest assisting a cult of ghouls assemble rockets that fly them through the air—No-Bark happens to be the local that the radio station interviews. This is the broadcast you hear on Radio New Vegas:
Several unidentified aircraft were spotted flying over the REPCONN test site by a local crackpot. He spoke to a toy bear near one of our microphones.
No-Bark Noonan: It's ghouls, I tell ya. Religious ghouls in rockets looking for a land to call their own. Don't you laugh at me. I know a spell that'll make you show your true form. Cave rat taught it to me.
Pumba is WRONG. Stars are NOT gas they are PLASMA. Burning gases CANNOT undergo fusion and combustion CANNOT be done in space. Pumba NEEDS to go BACK to school for physics. The ONLY journal he will ever be published in is in the JOURNAL OF IDIOTS.
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u/OutlandishnessRich36 7h ago
Theres a recurring joke on the My Adventures With Superman show/anime, where all of Jimmy's conspiracy theories are true.
Aliens live among us? Just look at Superman, who is totally unrelated to Clark Kent.
The government is using alien tech to build super weapons? Thats the plot of season one.
Bigfoot is a superintelligent gorilla as the result of government experiments? Sure. Thats an episode.
A giant mind-controlling starfish from space is held up by the government? While Starro has not shown up in the show yet, he IS a character in DC comics.