And that’s the central paradox she was highlighting; whether a revelation makes sense within the story and whether that revelation pleases the fans are two completely different things. For writers, it can be something of a no-win situation if it doesn’t land just right.
Yeah, which means that its a type of satisfaction that comes at the expense of others. Like it’s only something to be smug about if you also happen to disprove a bunch of other headcanons, which means all those fans will be disappointed because what they thought should happen, didn’t.
"The line between comedy and horror is thinner than either genre would like it to be." As someone who writes both, I will have you know that comedy has no problem with how close it is to horror. Horror, on the other hand, has never stopped whining about it.
Horror sometimes feel the need to show how "serious" it is. Otherwise the audience doesn't doesn't take it seriously... And if You take it too seriously, the audience stops taking it seriously funny enough
Comedy loves horror, horror likes to pretend it’s too dark and gritty for comedy, truly a match made in some back room of heaven by an intern who accidentally bumped into a console.
Combining the two, however, is akin to juggling on a unicycle. It's doable, definitely a learned skill honed from two other learned skill and whether you succeed or fail it's going to be a spectacle.
The noodle incident is so especially compelling in Calvin and Hobbes because it feels like the only thing he feels real shame about; usually he’s proud of his schemes, especially when he gets away with it like it’s implied he did in this case, but his extreme defensiveness even to Hobbes really piques your curiosity.
@@gogogo123454321 You misunderstand, I’m not referring to it as a noodle incident, I’m talking directly about the noodle incident as a recurring story element in Calvin and Hobbes and part of why it’s so memorable within that story on its own. I’m not comparing it to anything.
My favorite was an indirect reference in an entirely unrelated comic. Two aliens on a spaceship talking about a planned heist. "Don't worry, we'll just blame someone else!" "Oh, like that incident with the noodles?" "Right! They still think that kid did it all!"
Solo did basically all the Noodle incidents back to back, which means that, instead of Han having a long and storied career filled with many different adventures, he’s a guy that peaked early who keeps bringing up the one cool week he had 10 full years ago
Tbf, that's the kind of attitude I'd expect from a guy so bad at smuggling half the system knows he's a smuggler, and the other half can guess by looking at him.
@@funnyvalentinedidnothingwrong thats a hilarious way of describing han and also i think this sentence is making me evaluat wheter star wars was ever well written
@@sylvy16 The original Star Wars? Maybe to some extent. The movie Solo specifically? It was an awful piece of crap that a group of great actors tried to carry and really earn their paycheck on, even though the writing was a dumpster fire.
The density also pulls the audience out of the story, ruining the immersion. We no longer see it as a new story of Han, but rather as the writers trying to tie thing after thing to the OG trilogy.
@@Axterix13 That density is what tends to bug me about a lot of movies, really. I mean, take most Star Wars movies - Since all the galaxy's important stuff seems to happen exclusively in movies that usually take place over what, a few in-story days or so? It creates a world where the action/importance density is implausible. 99.9% of the time, nothing of particular note or entertainment value is apparently happening anywhere, then BAM, it all goes off in the .01% of plot time movies focus on. An "important stuff over time" chart for the setting would be purely sparse peaks and long flatline valleys with nothing in between. And that starts feeling really fake. And yeah, that especially goes for Solo, since he apparently did everything of note in his backtstory all in one rapid series of events? That's an especially egregious and artificial feeling plot density bubble. To be fair though, this problem applies to lots of action-focused movies, where the beginning to end is basically one consecutive, likely constantly rushed, chain of events. The main character might get to take a nap or be knocked out for a few hours in the middle at best. And while there's nothing inherently wrong with it, I'm really not sure why movie writers favor that compressed in-story timeframe so much. The character did nothing fantastically interesting for months, years, or their entire life up to that point, but then learns about the secret war between good and evil, discovers their powers and becomes an integral part who personally saves the world... and all in less than 48 hours start to finish. Bleh. It's not even like it isn't clearly possible to tell very successful stories where the good, plot relevant stuff is spread out over weeks or months. For example, every Harry Potter book/movie. The Lord of the Rings series also makes it clear that a good deal of time is passing between major story beats. And those fictional worlds feel much realer for it.
@@Alloveck I think it works for Star Wars, because it's ultimately about a military campaign (well, two, but let's focus on the OT). The Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire is where all the "big stuff" is going to happen in that era in the same way the trenches of the Great War were where all the "big stuff" happened from 1914 to 1918. This is also why the Prequels didn't really 'work' until the release of The Clone Wars, because that was less a focused military campaign and more a war - it needed the multi-dozen-hour runtime to feel reasonably large and unfocused. But once they did, it made sense that the protagonists were in the centre of the all the action because "the protagonists" included multiple units stationed all over the galaxy in part of an intergalactic war. It spread the characters out so there was never too much density. The way to avoid the problem of a movie feeling too dense is to give it a reason to be that dense. Compare the above examples with movies like Solo or the Sequels, where it feels like the protagonists are Forrest Gump'ing their way through every major event without Forrest Gump (the movie)'s self awareness.
@@trianglemoebius Just to be super clear here, my issue with plot density over time isn't the density of important things relative to the real life runtime of the movie itself. I like a movie to keep the pace brisk. It's the density at which important things happen over the internal time frame that the movie's plot covers that I take issue with. And with that said, yes, I agree that some plot contexts justify a ton of important stuff happening in like, one in-story day much better than others. But even when the plot is totally internally justified for all happening in one quick burst of events, it still bugs me when a series goes on long enough with the important stuff always, exclusively happening in very quick bursts. Once the sample size gets large enough, it feels very unnatural if there isn't a mix of rapid fire important events and slow burn important events, for lack of a better term. Life doesn't work like that. And beside all that, I just prefer stories where the heroes get to catch their breath, you know? It doesn't hurt a story to let a few days pass between one battle to the death and the next big action set piece, but so many movies seem written like they are explicitly and intentionally trying to keep the in-story time as compressed as possible for some reason.
@@bjwessels is a lot easier to demonstrate a dialogue based trope with audio though, especially when such a large part of the trope is the emotional response to the incident, which is best shown with audio
"Seriously, this is just the jockstrap incident all over again! Right down to the big red ball!" "I thought we let that go..." "I'll let it go when you die! Again!"
Abother version is when the incident happens in a prequel movie so we, the audience, know it and so does the characters but because it's not in the movie itself it becomes a noodle incident for both the characters and us. E.g. Frozen 2 mentioning Hans
Milo Murphy’s Law performed an incredible noodle incident, the so called Llama Incident. It’s referenced repeatedly yet almost nonsensically in the episodes leading up to the episode dedicated to it, the actual incident is a legitimately insane sequence of events that checks every reference made to it, and the episode ends with the creation of The Woodpecker Incident, which is then never spoken of again.
I sort of wish the Woodpecker incident was spoken about around characters who weren’t there so they could get just as frustrated as Zack did about the llama incident
@@Shift_Salt ok, so this one is funny. The Cato-Neimoidia business was a noodle incident in the movie. And then, they eventually released a novel all about the Cato-Neimoidia business. Called Brotherhood.
In Legend of Korra, Bumi brings up a lot of noodle incidents in his past, but everyone, including the audience, thinks he's making them up to make himself seem as awesome and capable as his bender siblings... Until we see one of those incidents on screen and then he starts telling it but goes "Ah, whatever, you won't believe me anyway", which implies that all of his noodle incidents really happened. It was cool and hilarious in equal measure.
Oh! I'm glad you helped me remember that! I love that biy of implication and characterization too. However, I think that might be a different trope i e. "telling tall tales" or "big fish stories". But with the clever subversion of them actually being true, but lacking vital context.
YES that's my favorite aspect about him! One of the best lines in the show is when someone says something about getting kidnapped in a sack and Bumi says out of the blue "that's what got me into the United Forces."
There's also when he got into the fog of lost souls and revealed much of his light-hearted side is meant to cover up how haunted he is by much of those noodle incidents.
Oh sure when Calvin has a noodle incident it’s an iconic narrative but when I have a noodle incident it’s “depressing” and “yet another attempt at cooking dinner”
God, what happened with the "last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye" made me SO MAD. As much as I love Goose, he should NOT have been the one to take out Fury's eye.
I made a comment about this that I'll paste here: "I love the Goose twist because of how it reframes those previous references as total horse-shit he was just manipulating people with. Nick Fury understands tropes. He understands his own reputation as a shadowy authority figure and veteran badass of decades past, and it's useful to him. "A cat scratched out my eye" doesn't help him to convince Captain America to play ball, so he changes the story. That's characterization, and it's consistent with the trick he pulled after Coulson's death putting blood on the trading cards (and covering up his resurrection). He knows how to tell someone something that's emotionally convincing, fits the details that person is aware of, and compels them to do what he needs them to do. It's extremely informative on his character."
@@forrestibI really like that take. I don't feel like I can give the mcu stuff benefit of the doubt anymore to take that as intentional (as a whole anyway, I can believe that some writers maybe?), but it does totally work as a head-canon for me.
Mcu to me has an even more condensed version of the problem comics have. Different authors, directors, editors, producers etc. Having different understandings of and visions for the characters. With the mcu stuff it's not even a while run or several of comics in one style, it's just one movie before changes may happen. A cynical take I admit, so I don't relish it, but I hope it explains why I and others might think badly of the decision to do it how they did. Again though, thank you for sharing your version because I infinitely prefer that framing
@@forrestib This was my take immediately, tbh. Fury is a well-known liar, so taking anything he says at face value is not the best idea generally. Lying about how he lost his eye is par for the course; it's the implication of HOW he could've lost it that matters, especially knowing those characters will NEVER KNOW the actual reason. It's the perfect Noodle Incident, really.
@@appa609 Nat blew up a little girl to prove to SHIELD she had changed sides, is what Budapest is (see: Black Widow, the film, as everyone else said). How the event of Avengers remind either of them of Budapest is not at all clear to me.
...Hold up. "You/My Father fought in the Clone Wars?" was *also* a Noodle Incident. It was a historical footnote to make clear the military camaraderie of the past generation. And we got the *prequel trilogy* out of it.
To be fair, Georges Lucas knew he was gonna make the prequel trilogy. At first, he even thought he would make three trilogies, but finally cut the sequel one. Taht's why so much extended universe focused on the future of Star Wars but not the past, Lucas said to all the writers beforehand "You can explain what follows and play with the present, but I'll do the past, eventually". So the Clone Wars bit was more a prequel bait XD
I’d more say we got The Clone Wars out of it. But I believe “that business on Cato Neimoidia doesn’t count” is still a small noodle incident because it wasn’t covered in the show.
imo, the key difference between the Clone Wars and, say, how Han got the Millennium Falcon, is that one of them is history that everyone knows about, and one of them is something only a couple characters know about. finding out about the Clone Wars gives us a look at historically important events that shaped the present and left an indelible mark on the world; finding out about the Falcon tells us about a few days in a couple characters' lives.
@@thetwilightgamerThe very first thing I was thinking upon recognizing what this Trope Talk was gonna be about, was Obiwan and Anakin's references to their off-screen adventures together from Episodes II and III (and Cinemasins whinging about the films not actually showing those, 'cause ofcourse).
"God, Zarbon's dead, Dodoria's dead, the Ginyus are dead, this is just one giant mess. It's just like that Jockstrap Incident except now I don't have Ginyu around to dig the holes"
"The only reason he took those jokers out was because I loosened them up for him. Like a jar of space pickles. Ugly stupid space pickles. I've just gotta get those dragonballs. And if its anything like that Jockstrap Incident, Ginyu probably buried them somewhere around here."
I love that in her rush to clarify "the fact that Noodle Incidents only work when you don't explain them DOES NOT recuse you from needing to have answers for actual important plot questions" Red (accidentally?) said "bye" AND THEN said "So, yeah" I love her commitment to The Bit.
I now imagine red must have a huge document full of indecipherable video ideas like "The noodle incident", "Conservation of Ninjutsu", "Those dang phones"
I remember when I invoked "Conservation of Ninjutsu" in a game I ran where one player had a maxed-out Minion resource. I gave him the option of one perfect super-Alfred, or an infinite supply of inept ninjas. He chose correctly.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate..."
It also works great as the final punchline as the hero rides off into the sunset with the crew. "So, what did happen during [noodle incident]?" *sigh* "Alright, kid, I guess you deserve to know. It all started when..." and fade to black
"...what is this tattoo I've heard so much about?" "Well... it's a long story. It was right after the Murmansk brushing incident. You're familiar with that, I believe . . ." - _Down Periscope_ (closing lines) To be fair, this one actually got explained very early in the film (and by the main antagonist, no less) but is never actually shown (for multiple reasons including a big obvious one), only referenced.
A possible ancestor to this trope might be found in the original Sherlock Holmes stories. At one point Dr. Watson refers to "the story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not yet prepared." That story is never published, but the idea that Holmes has faced and defeated some (literally) unspeakable horror is planted and remains in our minds. Clearly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle understood the power and purpose of the Noodle Incident.
Funnily enough, a lot of Han Solo's noodle incidents were explored in expanded universe novels. A big reason why they worked was because they were usually a chapter or two as part of a larger adventure. Solo, meanwhile, gave the impression that Han had one really exciting weekend and the rest of his life was fairly mundane.
Yeah the Solo novels worked at giving you a sense of time. His life actually unfolded and there was a LOT that happened other than the noodle incidents referenced.
i think red mentioned this in the plot time vs downtime bit of the sequels episode. plot time has a lot of things happen in quick succession because movies kind of have to make it that way to keep pacing and tension, whereas downtime is far more sustainable in the long run of a person’s life. by making a prequel you’re expected to explain some bit of a backstory, because if you leave something out people will be like “but what about this” and then you also have to add a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t mentioned in the original movie, which also makes a “but what about this”
@@Hazel-xl8inThere's a big difference between explaining _a_ noodle incident and explaining _all_ noodle incidents. _Solo_ does the latter, as if they'll go stale if the writer doesn't package them all at once.
Yeah, I loved the A.C. Crispin Han Solo trilogy that slowly filled out Han's backstory and prejudices. Especially since a lot of those "A-hah, there it is!" explanations weren't just the average of people's expectations. *Spoilers Ahead* It wasn't just a smuggling run to and from Kessel, it was a rescue mission and his odometer was broken. He didn't just win the Falcon from Lando in a card game, he won a ship from Lando's lot, then took Lando's personal ship instead of one that was for sale. Lots of other fun little shenanigans that build on the character.
One of my favourite 'Noodle Incidents' is Mole's backstory in Atlantis, I think it does the joke perfectly and is a good way to close out a relatively emotional segment and really is the best way they could've handled said character's history. "You don't wanna know. Audrey, don't tell him. You shouldn't have told me, but you did. Now *I'm* telling you; you don't wannna know."
No one will ever know Mole’s backstory. My guess is that he was a dirt enthusiast, who is shown by humanity so badly he was forced to go live with nature where he found acceptance through moles. That’s why he’s called “the mole” because the only thing that ever accepted him were the animal. But that’s just my guess.
Somewhere deep down in the comments, I've posted that it's not that fans don't know what we want from a story. Maybe we do, maybe we don't. But the real problem is that corporate management _absolutely_ doesn't know what fans want, *but they're absolutely certain that they do.*
@@VinemapleFans only ever want more of the same. They say they want new, but every time they get that, they complain. But when you do give them the same, they complain about that too. The fans aren't the creator. Stories don't happen by commission; they get created, and then find their audience. This is also why mandated prequels or sequels seldom ever work; they're too half-baked and reactionary to be truly compelling.
This applies to games as well. You get situations where gamers will complain about some aspect of the game and propose some surface level change to fix it, but the devs will need to go deeper, to understand what makes this an actual issue, to be able to properly address the problem.
@@nicholassmith7984 I just commented about this phenomenon with the new Fallout series. So many are assuming it's gonna suck because....reasons. And the show isn't even out yet at the time of this comment. The biggest example I can think as proof that 'fans know better' is rubbish is how many 'true Star Wars fans' want a Darth Vader slasher movie despite the fact that the Vader comics are already filling the gaps about his life inbetween the Prequel and Original Trilogy. A lot of 'true fans' don't want stories with thematic relevance or characterization. They want comprehensive wiki pages.
I like the general rule that an authors job isn’t to build a world COMPLETELY. But to make a world that FEELS complete. A sort of “make the the reader think you did more than you did”
@@mcv2178 Oh, Tolkien realized it. He tried his best, actually. It was his hobbies and field of study that took over, and prevented him from being more efficient.
@@mcv2178There's still a lot about Middle-Earth that we don't know about ^^ Like, the Istari, we have Gandalf and Saruman, important characters in the story, pretty fleshed out. Radagast, a random background character with one paragraph of lore in the Silmarillon. And the Blue Mages. Two beings with the same power-level of Gandalf of which we only know that their mission was in the East.
This trope is a flawless example of the thought that sometimes, as a writer, you really have to trust your audience, and sometimes, as a writer, you SHOULD NOT trust your audience like even a little bit. A lot of becoming a good writer is just developing an instinct for which moment is which.
It can indeed be very hard, especially since different audiences can react very differently. For example, every time I see a story's theme be delivered very unsubtly and think it would've been better if the story had delivered its theme more subtly, I always inevitably then see a large subset of the audience completely miss the theme and I think, "Well, never mind."
One tip I heard is that you can always trust an audience to know what they *don't* want, but you can never, ever trust them to know what they actually want instead.
One of my favorite sub tropes of this is when someone STARTS to explain it, only to be repeatedly drowned out or interrupted by noise and associated visuals.
There is one episode of Phineas and Ferb where Vanessa asks Ferb about his name while he's busy looking for something. Offhandedly, he starts to answer "Well, actually it's short for - oh, here it is." This one works really well to me because it adds an absurd level of noodle-ness to something otherwise fairly mundane, packing an incredible amount of "wait, WHAT?" into a single throwaway gag which is literally never addressed ever again.
I just came across a D&D webcomic where a pair of characters end up in a adventure where it's just the two of them separated from the party. The GM offers to skip that adventure and revisit it later, to which one of the characters responds "Sweet! It'll be a Noodle Incident!", which raises an interesting point - Noodle Incidents are very convenient in TTRPGs, as they let you characterize your player character without having to build out tons of lore and having to make sure that lore fits with all the other worldbuilding.
@valdonchev7296 reminds me of this one incident that was part of my TTRPG character’s backstory. In our latest campaign, one of the other players and I decided to have our characters’ backstories linked and formed a brother and sister like bond. My PC was always trying to rein in the other PC’s more chaotic tendencies, but their other player improvised this one NPC that she could not stand, and I decided in the moment to roll with it and have my character agree that, yes, this NPC was the worst. Why? We never explained it. That NPC was just simply the worst, and that was all there was to it. I did eventually come up with an explanation as to why both PC hated that NPC (because I thought I would help with roleplay), but I never intended to share that with the other players and wanted to keep it as vague as possible. But the truth got out, and the mystique is now ruined. Ah well. 🤷🏻♂️
I love how "so yeah" started off as "I didn't know how to end the video" and ended up becoming the standard Trope Talk signoff, to the extent that Red felt the need to do a perfunctory "so yeah" here.
A Tragic comedic noodle incident happens in Adventure Time. The characters describe a great Mushroom War, and when you look at the character designs you think they were just lobbing mushrooms at each other, maybe the mushroom can talk, and went “ouchies” as they did. No, that’s just these kiddie looking characters understanding of what a nuclear bomb fallout looks like. A great big mushroom.
It's foreshadowed fairly early on what the great mushroom war was, considering a chunk of the earth is missing. And we even get to kind of see it in the Fin the Human episode where alt universe Fin takes the ice crown from Simons corpse and the bomb goes off.
I like the mushroom war because it is intentionally both a noodle incident and a very important part of the shows world. They show stuff from the past often and with the Finn The Human ep. It's something that gets talked about and then brought to life in a way that doesn't harm It's mystique, and then feels complete by the end of the show
“The line between comedy and horror is thinner than either genre would like it to be.” Fear is of the unknown. Comedy is of the unexpected. There’s a frightening/hilarious amount of overlap. Arguably the primary difference is just the threat level.
There was a running gag in the penguins of Madagascar tv show where skipper would refer to a mission in “denmark” while doing a cool voice. Probably my favourite noodle incident put to screen “Just like old times skipper” “Yeah, just like *Denmark*”
Bruh I was just talking to a couple of friends about the Noodle Incident trope and used this as an example, I'm so glad to see someone bring it up here
I'm fairly certain the Penguins' "Denmark" thing was a reference to the time in 2015 when a group of penguins almost escaped the Copenhagen Zoo. They got out because one "bit" a zookeeper, and in the keeper's rush to get aide he left the door to their enclosure open - although they got stuck in the tunnels so they were never really getting out. The video of the penguins waddling around the back corridors went viral for a bit, so I think the show was relying on people having seen it to get the reference.
I think Milo Murphy did a pretty good job at revealing it’s Noodle Incident joke The entire show almost every episode at some point the characters compare their current wacky situation to the Llama Incident. The joke eventually became now utterly impossible it is that so so many things happened in the llama incident. But then, near the end of the series, they had an entire episode showing it with every single reference ever weaved together into a series of hyper creative crazy gags. I loved that cause of just how impressive it is.
I also love how the episode also start unknown adventure that end up the gang stuck on the tree branch at the edge of the cliff. Talk about begin the episode with also a Noodle Accident...
I thought of the Llama Incident a lot during this video and it is a really interesting example. On the one hand, the fact that they keep referencing that one event specifically implies that it was one of the craziest adventures they’ve ever had. Actually showing it runs the risk of being a letdown; “THIS is what everyone has been so excited about?” And I’ll admit, I don’t remember much from the actual episode. Considering everything we see in the show, it is a bit odd for the characters to keep referencing events that are literally less rememberable (to me) than other adventures we know they’ve had. However, I was familiar with jokes like the Noodle Incident and ‘knew’ that we would never actually see the Llama Incident, and I feel like the creators knew that many of the audience were in a similar boat. I was never invested in the Llama Incident, so I didn’t put any effort into figuring out what it might be and I ended up being pretty surprised when they actually put all the pieces together into one adventure. It’s similar to when they made “Meepless in Seattle” in Phineas and Ferb, taking a bunch of unconnected clips and weaving them together into a complete story. I can appreciate that they turned the Llama Incident from a running gag into a challenge. (I’m going to need to do a rewatch to see how well they pulled it off)
“I used to have two, but you know, the llama incident”. The fact that he uses EVERY item he mentioned prior is what makes this show an absolute masterpiece.
Notably, the characters stop referring to the llama incident after that episode I believe. If they do, it’s used more as dramatic irony than a noodle incident. It’s been a while since I watched it.
One of the first "Noodle Incidents" I can remember is from the beginning of the first Ghostbuster-- Peter: "This reminds me of that time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Do you remember that?" Egon: "That would've worked if you hadn't stopped me."
That has multiple layers because Peter likely stopped Egon from performing trepanning, which was something ancient people did to release evil spirits..
@@HistoryVideoGamesMiscStuffand knowing about trepanning gives you enough info to make some guesses, but still leaves what he wanted to accomplish in the dark.
Favorite use of Noodle Incidents is the character Morn from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Were the whole joke is everyone in the cast goes on and on about what a crazy and fun guy Morn is, and will frequently allude to his past adventures and how he never shuts up. Yet all you ever see of Morn is him sitting silently at the bar. Literally an entire episode is built around Morn reeking havoc and you don't get to see any of it, just the characters after the fact trying to put their testimony together to work out what happened.
And characters who are never once in the same scene as Morn describe their detailed ongoing relationship with him Like Worf and his weekly sparring sessions, and Jadzia and her crush on Morn The whole episode starts off with a Morn hologram that "can't pass for Morn because it doesn't talk"
The Captain Boday joke is pretty good, but Morn's so great because so many different characters have WILDLY different dynamics with him! I also love the way Quark gets a few noodle incidents to explain his skills. Why's he that good with a phaser? He doesn't want a repeat of The Incident with the picky eaters from when he was a cook. Why's Riker calling in a favour? Because he hangs out with Quark and that crazy night left a favour open (also yeah hi Quark's in the middle of being questioned by a security guard while he's on his video call don't worry about it). Quark has a BUNCH of noodle incidents, and it really makes it feel like he's a clever dude with a lot of weird skills and like 50 side hussles of varying legality going on, in a way that just showing him doing that in episodes about him only wouldn't do.
A fun, but less common, inversion of this trope is when the audience *has* seen the incident(s) in earlier installments, but the minor characters whom the main cast meet have not and react accordingly.
It's a great way to contextualize the adventures of the main cast in relation to the rest of the world. Depending on the reaction, they could be impressive, insane, clever, lucky, or cursed according to the rest of the world. Sometimes if even leads to the main cast getting a chance to break from what they've had to be to go on their adventures. I actually think this happened a few times with various companion characters in Doctor Who. The go on a crazy adventure, come back home, tell their family and friends, and those characters react accordingly. Usually, they get worried and fuss over the lead or turn it on its head with a " 'bout time you went and did something." And then the lead reacts to their reaction. It can vary a lot. Defiance, self-assurance, persuasion, coaxing, anger, or something else entirely. Then, with Doctor Who at least, the Doctor, who has seen these sorts of things happen every time they pick up a new companion, gets to weigh in. This usually reveals something about that particular Doctor and almost always tells something of their relationship with that companion. I've seen it happen with many other stories too, but I genuinely can't conjure any further examples. But it's a very useful writing tool to give context to the characters, I think.
This is always a really fun thing to play with in TTRPGs. Partly because the level of sheer brutality that most TTRPG parties end up normalising to themselves should fill literally any onlooker with overwhelming terror. Your party usually aren't the only one in that world, so other people KNOW what the multi-racial troupe of heavily-armed magically-gifted types can do, and why they should be alternately genuflecting or passing bricks hoping they're not on the wrong side of them today. The other thing to do is have someone thank the party. They'll get real jaded if they feel like they're not having an impact. Just have a kid give them a flower or something, something innocent and heartfelt. They expect festivals in their honour and chests of gold, but they never expect the human touch. It keeps the murderhobo instincts suppressed.
The best Noodle Incidents come from dnd. If you've ever added a new player mid campaign, or a player that can only make it a few sessions, suddenly you have a treasure trove of noodle incidents.
Hilariously, this has happened so much at our table that last night a player brought up a tragedy from his past, and the guy who first invited me into the group said, “Oh, I don’t think I was here for that. Was it before I joined?” The response: “Kinda. I mean. It’s backstory.” (Cue all of us opening his backstory document to confirm, yep, there it is at the bottom of the page.)
my one group when we talk in depth abt the paladin maiming the fighter after she was corrupted and then an hr later vaguely reference that one time she convinced an enemy she was god .
Fun thing I noticed reading through Calvin and Hobbes strips: the noodle incident ONLY starts coming up after a strip where Calvin is walking around with Hobbes after school, and mentions he had a bad day and doesn't want to talk about it. Hobbes asks if it had to do with some sirens he heard about noon that day, to which Calvin replies "I SAID I didn't want to talk about it" so there's a chance the noodle incident involved police and/or EMTs Of course if it did it's weird that Calvin's parents were never informed about it
@@JohnZ117 no they canonically don't know, there's a series of strips where Calvin's mom goes to a scheduled parent-teacher conference (it goes about as well as expected), and when she comes back Calvin immediately goes into Plea Bargain Mode and among other things is freaking out because he's certain Miss Wormwood told his mom about the noodle incident (he insists he was framed), at which point his mom replies with "what noodles?" and Calvin quickly tries to pivot. His parents actually have no idea the incident ever happened (or at least, they had no idea before that point)
Depending on who the EMTs were for, maybe nobody actually connected Calvin to the incident (or not to the degree that they could call his parents in), so they remained oblivious?
Honestly the noodle incident could involve macaroni art which is something I remember doing in school. My guess is Calvin decorated an entire wall in macaroni and shenanigans ensued.
@@katiebirdie7868 I always thought that they were never able to connect Calvin with what happened of that he had a good enough alibi that he got away with it after initially coming under suspicion
The whole irony about trying to find an explanation about how the Millenium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" is the fact that according to the original script, Han was trying to sell Ben and Luke a load of bullshit, and Ben wasn't buying it.
Yeah that was the impression, he was trying to sound awesome and amazing and the best, but as Greedo points out, first sight of an Imperial patrol he dumped cargo and ran like hell
Alec Guinness knew the assignment, too. You can look at his face on the delivery of that line and he is doing the "really? you expect me to believe that?" face so hard.
Also, he was making a point about the speed of the ship in that line, so twisting it in Solo to restore the original meaning of parsecs makes it even more incoherent. I mean, I've seen someone say "hey guys, you know what ? What if in Star Wars, they measured time with a unit called "Paar' seks" ?". Much simpler solution, sticks it in a nice way to the people who complained about it, and it's not even like deforming real words to make Star Wars names is unprecedented. The ice planet is called Hoth.
But this explanation doesn't actually demonstrate anything. Yes the script called for Han making a boast and Obi-Wan rolling his eyes at it. But that would play out if Han was speaking nonsense and Obi-Wan knew it was nonsense, or if Han was just making a sensible, but bold claim. "I can jump 10kg into the air" vs "I can jump 10 feet into the air." I don't know what explanation Solo went with, but a passible explanation has existed for decades in one of the books focused on Han, involving how close you can get to black holes. Which is a silly proxy measurment, but its not like those don't exist in real life. Computer Mouse chips express their accuracy in "DPI" or "dots per inch". Ie "this chip does 16k dpi" or "this new chip does 25k dpi" but that's literally just a sensitivity multiplier on the mouse output. And nobody runs a mouse above 7k or so anyway. It's just vaguely linked to accuracy in that - supposedly - the max dpi is the highest multiplier you can stick on the mouse without your cursor jittering around on the screen. Which implies some vague underlying accuracy, but it's a really stupid way to measure it.
@@Xylos144 You only reinforced the point a bit. It was BS; and all the attempts to reconcile it have to bend over backwards and twist rules, only to raise more questions than they answer. The effort was put in, but it wasn't worth the pay off. If I was gonna to try and make good on this joke/boast about the Parsecs; I would played it straight, including a whole action sequence, and made the twist the fact Han has been describing it wrong all these years. This succeeds in both proving his boast was well earned, but also subverting things in that the incoherence of the boast are his own fault. So not only are people justified in assuming hes BSing, you also get the fun twist that Han is robbing himself of credit by using terminology wrong. It also fits into his character being successful more by being resourceful than competent/trained.
My favorite Noodle Incident is actually from L4D2 where Ellis tells you the hundredth story about his super cool friend Keith where they escaped a burning hospital only to realize that he was actually doing that adventure with you. Not only does this mean he was telling the truth about all the other incidents, but he actually sees you as one of his closest friends now. ❤
This reminded me a lot of a teacher of mine experiment explaining the importance of abstraction. He said "A 100% accurate map of a city would be 100% useless, because it would be the size of the whole city " . I think telling a good story is the same thing, you need to choose what details are explained and what will remain in the shadows
I like that in Red vs Blue the characters bring up noodle incidents in the exact same way they bring up onscreen incidents which I think helps the jokes flow nicely and provides enough explanation to understand on a surface level why some characters interact in certain ways with each other
That's exactly what I was thinking of too! Like why does Grif telling the story of how he helped fight the Meta sound like complete bs when we literally saw it happen?😂
I think that a bid part of the problem with Solo is that they tried to answer All the Noodle Incidents in One. The EU had many stories explaining Han's noodle incidents, but they were generally focused on One Incident per Story - handily implying that such incidents stretched out across his entire backstory, which in turn implies that there are Other Noodle Incidents we know even Less about. The fact that some of the incidents got multiple explanations in different stories also helped.
Also the fan theory that Han was lying or misrepresenting his history when talking to Luke Possibly in order to gauge how much he could extort from them
@@JeiJozefu That's not even a fan theory, it's based on the official creator commentary from the laserdisc and DVD versions of Episode IV. It was canon that Han was just bullshitting when he mentioned the Kessel run, but got retconned.
What made Solo so cumbersome was the fact that they tried cram the explanation to all his noodle incidents into one movie. You could have told a great story around how Chewie and Han met. You could have told a great story about the Kessel Run. You could have told a great story about Han getting the Falcon. But they weren't concerned with telling any of those stories well...they were concerned with fitting them all in so the story of the movie had all the narrative satisfaction of grocery shopping.
Yeah, there are cases where a noodle incident can finally be shown well and be satisfying, but it needs to serve the storytelling. Solo was just filling in the blanks like noodle madlib. And there wasn't enough connective tissue to string the story together very strongly.
Well put. The purpose of a Noodle incident is to make the story feel bigger than just what you're seeing. A good story is like a giant web, with everyone and everything interconnected. Noodle incidents are the far ends of the web, connected to elements that we can't see. Solo basically took all the loose ends of Han's story and showed exactly where they end, and then didn't create any new loose ends. So instead of making Han's story web bigger, it made it smaller.
Oh, thank goodness, someone in the top dozen comments made my point about Solo. Contrast this to Rogue One, where they made an entire heroic tragedy around a _single line_ from ANH: "Many Bothans died to give us this information."
@@VinemapleThe "Many Bothans died" line was in The Last Jedi and was about the second Death Star. Rogue One was getting the plans Leia sent to Tatooine with R2D2 in A New Hope regarding the first Death Star.
saw the word "noodle" and zipped over here at the speed of light. no clue what this entails, but i'm excited update: i had NO idea that thing had a name, and now that's my favorite trope name ever. it's just so ridiculous, i love it
I love the Jock-strap incident that is mentioned in DBZA. It's not just mentioned once, several characters talk or think about it and everyone adds a new detail.
When you first started explaining this trope my immediate first thought was "oh this is why Solo flopped" and then hearing you use it as one of the the prime examples gave me so much satisfaction. The original series never needed an explanation for any of Han Solo's previous antics because his actions on screen tell you literally everything you need to know. He's arrogant, quick to adapt, and flies a ship that looks like a misshapen frisbee that is also one of the fastest ships in the galaxy, and yet somehow is still alive to give a ride to Luke and co. That's it.
Han seemed like the guy stupid enough to get himself into constantly dangerous stuff, but smart enough to always get out alive on and off for however long before he met Luke Instead all that stuff happened in one wacky adventure he once had
@@degeneratemale5386 that's another problem I had. The time scale was all sorts of wacky. Aside from that couple year skip with him joining the imperial army, everything else feels like it happens in the span of a week. Every crazy adventure that Han and Lando choose to reference all comes from the same 1 week span of time. And that's.. kinda underwhelming. The original trilogy makes it at least appear that Han and Lando had years of history before Han won the Falcon "fair and square", putting a wrench in the friendship.
@@degeneratemale5386 In the original movie Han is a dangerous scoundrel who sells the idea that he'd leave the Rebellion in order to save his own skin; his sudden return is eucatastrophic and something we'd wanted without expecting it. Making Han a sympathetic character from the start completely misses the point.
3:49 "They shat on a farm, Sypha. And their shit was on fire. Burning devil goat turds from the sky.” Will never stop obsessing over how Trevor Belmont, who remains stern in the face of horrifying monstrosities, sees THAT as the most disturbing thing he's ever seen.
My favorite example of this: Agent Georgia from Red Vs. Blue. Washington is inexperienced with his jet pack, and the rest of the team consistently warns him to “not end up like Georgia.” They never tell him what happened to Georgia.
really feeling the bit at the end abt mysteries that are SUPPOSED to be explained, i was kind of expecting Red to directly mention Sherlock as an example - they kind of did a reverse noodle incident where they implied that it WOULD be explained, and then realised that nothing they could come up with would be as clever as the theories that fans came up with in the interim, so they were like surprise!! we're not gonna tell you!! it's a noodle incident now!! which was. not popular lmao.
Even worse is that Moffat was like, "I've seen a lot of the fan theories on this, and one of them got it right." Which sent the fandom even further into a tizzy.
I still enjoyed it, because the banter and dialogue was exactly what made Han fun, and I extremely enjoyed that it shows Han doing EXACTLY what he was introduced doing in ANH - in trouble with someone who can make him suffer a LOT, and just trying to argue, bargain, or scam his way out of it. No, seriously - go back and watch: He NEVER delivers on ANYTHING that he promises ANYONE in that movie. He just keeps getting into deeper and deeper trouble and running further away and getting into trouble with someone bigger and meaner than the FIRST guy he got in trouble with. Also - y’know, it doesn’t NEED to be outstanding or new or groundbreaking. Sometimes, it’s okay to just be fun.
Yeah, my biggest problem is that they felt the need to explain absolutely everything about him away in one movie. All the way down to a little charm no one even noticed in the Millennium Falcon
@@cameronwilsey9334eh. I did enjoy that it added a little bit of new perspective on some aspects - like, yeah that iconic blaster was obviously just for fan service, but from a different point of view, the fact that Han KEPT it, even though there’s definitely better blasters and it was given to him by someone who ultimately double crossed him… Han’s sentimental. Little things.
I'm such a Calvin and Hobbes fan! It's lovely to see the noodle incident granted such iconic archetype status by possibly my favorite RUclipsr of all time. It's such a positive note in my life
@@BradyPostma to be fair Red isn't the first to name the trope this, it's been established as the trope name for a long time. But Calvin & Hobbes does absolutely deserve to be the trope namer
@@macaronsncheese9835 - Apparently I don't spend enough time on TV Tropes or wherever to have heard the trope referred to as "noodle incidents" before. Until this video, I'd only heard "the noodle incident" used to refer to its specific use in Calvin and Hobbes.
At this point, _Solo_ is practically the Star Wars fandom's own noodle incident. Remember that movie which gave Han Solo's last name a tragic backstory?
As a man once said "We all know about the phrase 'Show don't tell', but people tend to forget about it's less known cousin 'Don't show, don't tell, quit while you're ahead'"
Okay but Ducktales had the perfect good *and* bad example of the noodle incident being revealed. The Spear of Selene was a very plot-integral noodle incident that, once resolved, opened a lot of character development for everyone involved, as well as introducing Della to the story. Scrooge's unexplained feud with Santa, only ever referenced with "he knows what he did," however... No explanation for that would ever have been better than the implication, especially given Scrooge's origin as a character native to a Christmas story. That noodle incident just makes sense, and the explanation we eventually got just drained the comedy from every time it was mentioned before.
Amen to this, on both points! I the jokes about Santa. They were an incredible running gag, and the explanation just kinda... kicked the legs out from underneath the joke.
A variant of this trope I’m a sucker for is the worldbuilding noodle incident, when a character mentions an important historical event, or a famous figure without going into why they’re famous because in universe, everyone knows them. It just gives such depth to stories when used correctly, it tickles my writing brain.
_Star Trek_ pretty famously has a habit of naming three figures from the past. Two are people everyone has heard of, and one they made up, whether from our future/their past or an alien. The third one's accomplishments are only explained from context.
And these kind of scenes don't even loose their magic if they are eventually explained, as you can experience the story again, now being on the same level of knowledge as the characters.
@@boobah5643oh, I love whenever Star Trek does that, lol. It's especially fun if you've got a corner or two of the worldbuilding you like to dive into (personally, I'm such a sucker for Romulans, Vulcans, and pre-Surakian Vulcans in particular), so you can dive into beta canon and extended universe stuff, and when they pull the worldbuilding noodle incident (like "...great fools of history; you know, like how Hegelochus flubbed his line, Muhammad II killed Genghis Khan's envoy, and Nirak saw the approaching army and thought it was a sandstorm") you get to point at the screen and go "OH WAIT I KNOW ABOUT THAT" while (because it's a whole world!) still feeling like there's plenty of cool stuff and you're barely scratching the surface.
I think of Harry potter because there is one throw away line where Harry laments how his teacher is so dull that even talking about a war between wizards and giants he couldn't pay attention. Its a solid enough joke for anyone who has had a terribly dry teacher but I kept thinking "man a story about wizards fighting giants sounds way more interesting then the story i'm actually reading".
A good example of a noodle incident are SCP’s. A lot of SCP’s have information expunged or redacted for various reasons. Whenever something is expunged, it makes the reader wonder what it may be. For instance, in the SCP-096 file, it says that it hunts down its target, kills it, and then [DATA EXPUNGED]’s it. We don’t know what it does but it leads to no remains of the target being left. It’s an interesting way of noodling an incident by having information ‘classified’
I never thought of it in that way. Just another "Leave it to the reader's imagination" Type, but that's basically what noodle incidents are (Except if it's explained, in some tale based on the SCP).
The old original ones are really good about this, and it makes it interesting to read and imagine. Every time I see some of the more recent ones, though, they just use it as a way to be lazy and not actually have to write anything, which is kind of sad.
@@sammym6239earlier ones were good with it, then it became pretty outrageous with how much was being expunged, redacted or corrupted (the red lake one is a great example where it feels like the author gave up halfway through) and more recently in reaction to this redacted meme have become massively overwritten for better or worse
The best part of Doctor Who is that the Noodle Incident could be a regular NI or actually a cheeky reference to an actual episode from the 70's or 80's or some kind of comic or audio drama. That or a juicy bit for a later writer to pick up on.
Indeed, even the (I think?) 4th Doctor had an episode where his past regenerations were shown alongside faces we'd never seen before. It adds intrigue and mystery... as opposed to the revelation that the Doctor has had lots of previous regens, all of whom seem to hold men in contempt. :(
One of the most textbook examples of “establishing a noodle incident, choosing to reveal the context, and it being underwhelming” imo is the Tenth Doctor’s thing with Queen Elizabeth I.
Some people have trouble grasping the future, even if it is laid out. "But what if THIS time, something bad happens???" Even though nothing has changed. Not all fears are rational.
Burn notice actually did this in a fascinating way- the characters will often reference things they did in the past and adapt those situations to the present. It lets you see the general outline of each noodle incident while giving you a decent amount to go off of My favorite one is where main character says they need to do "the same thing they did to that colonel with the drinking problem", to which another character complains that that took months to set up and they have barely an hour. It ends up with them gaslighting a gangster and his brother until they think the gangster is having a complete psychological breakdown. Burn notice is a hell of a show.
My favorite version of this is from the Penguins of Madagascar tv show where they reference Manfredi and Johnson, 2 other penguins we’ve never met and presumably had some horrible demise
What makes it even funnier is Manfredi and Johnson do show up briefly in the show, and they try to get Skipper's attention but fail. Gives us small breadcrumbs as to where they are but doesn't reveal how they got there. Pretty much having your cake and eating it too.
We actually see them briefly in an episode of the TV show; they're currently stuck at either the San Diego Zoo or some Seaworld analogue, I forget which. That the Penguins go there to rescue Kowalski and leave without ever seeing them even though they get to watch their former comrades speed off into the sunset triumphantly is played for a bit of dark humor.
On the horror aspect of "nothing is scarier than what you're imagining," one of my favorite things about the original The Thing (1982) is that the monster looks different every time it shows up so you never have a chance to get used to it for the fear to stop taking effect.
Thank you for bringing up the whole, "fans don't know what they want" angle of story telling. To many times I will see fans say the most idiotic ideas for a story and I just scream into my desk. Semi related, I am a drafter (a step bellow engineer) and we have a phrase of, "the customer actually has no idea what they want and we have to predict what they want." There is a reason why fans are not writers for the same reason customers are not engineers. Except when you have a customer that IS an engineer and then they either are the most entitled jerk because they think they could do it better, but just don't feel like it OR they are the nicest customer because they understand the reason you are making the choices you did.
I've often seen when doing software engineering that the customer _does_ know what they want, but they _don't_ know that they do actually know what they want, so they make up what they _think_ they want and it's usually not quite what they _actually_ want.
14:19 I think the way my mind responded to this image highlights the strength of this trope. Seeing “it involved a lawnmower and my mom was *not* happy” caused my brain to instantly conjure the image of a nice suburban house with a lawnmower comedically sticking out of one of a shattered upstairs windows with no logical explanation as to how it got there, which is exponentially funnier than other plausible explanations that can be as mundane as “I mowed my mom’s flower garden by mistake.”
The "Llama Incident" being an inconsequential-yet-oh-so-iconic adventure alluded to but never explained for a good twenty-one 11-minute episodes of MILO MURPHEY'S LAW still cracks me up. Simply paying off the bit was so real of them.
And then it becomes a relevant plot point in Missing Milo, where they time travel back to the Llama Incident to coax the stampede into running over the bad guys.
My favorite personal experience with the Noodle Incident was when, while plotting out a story, I had a character reference a noodle incident called the ‘Irish Job’. The entire story was just notes at this point, I just wanted to toss that like in as a way of showing the main character has done this type of thing before. I showed my friend the summary for the story I had, and they saw the joke. Asked about it. 3 years later. I never wrote the original story. But The Irish Job is about 70k words in.
Yeah, definitely! I realized it was honestly the story the character was more emotionally invested in. Funny enough, it made the original plot look more like a Noodle Incident (just obvi in the future) since it was a much lower stakes, less emotionally charged scenerio. Funny how writing does that sometimes @@Blockzord
I NEED you to know I'm dyslexic, and I fully read this comment as being about "Irish Jacob". Which made me chuckle because of the implication of there being a non-Irish Jacob in the story, and you not writing that Jacob's story but Irish Jacob's instead.
Okay but the funniest part is@@agustinamagpie that you're actually not totally wrong. It went from the main duel lead being a non-Irish mobster to the head of Irish Intelligence, who is in fact named Jack, which is somewhat close to Jacob. so in fact, the story is now about Irish Jacob. More specifically Irish Jacob realizing his spouse of 3 years was actually a Russian Spy the whole time whoops.
One really good example of a noodle incident that actually got revealed in a really nice way is, ironically, a show who's whole plot just _is_ explaining how that noodle incident occurred. The entire incident is explained and elaborated on across multiple seasons of writing. "And that's How I Met Your Mother."
I imagine related to the comic where they're all telling scary stories around the campfire, and while we don't get to see Kirby's story, we do get to see the absolutely horrified reaction from his audience that none of the other characters' stories came close to evoking.
Unironically, The Bite of '87 from FNAF applies here since its one of the only events in the history we never see. Closest we see is a seperate bite that happened in '83 (or '84). Its just a bit of lore mentioned at the start of the series that puts players on edge immediately imagining what went wrong.
Ironically, the bite is kind of an example of what can go wrong with continuity writing. At first, it was actually good. It provided reasoning for how Fnaf 1 happens the way it does, then was the basis of a prequel that does not quite explain it but gives enough context for the fanbase to very much get what happened, while also using it as a basis to expands with more vague events(basically eating the cake and somehow having more cake than starting out with). However, then...the series does a lot of weird overexplainly shenanagans after Fnaf 3 that makes the bite seem utterly insignificant in the chronology. Many people forgot that the bite is even meant to be canon anymore, because the noodle was basically covered with new details so hard that you cannot even see it anymore.
FNAF is honestly the perfect example of maybe why you shouldn’t just add in Noodle Incidents. As fnaf’s entire story comprises of almost nothing BUT noodle incidents. Making getting invested extremely infuriating as nothing makes a lick of sense and nothing is answered, sometimes things just get retconned or faded to obscurity you can’t tell if it even happened anymore (like the bite of 87. Nobody even knows if that event actually happened anymore cause of all of the timeline changes)
lowkey i disregard the bite of 83 as a whole and choose to believe what happened in fnaf 4 is the 87 bite, all my homies hate source code retcons that make no sense
That "internalizing the fact that you don't need to explain EVERYTHING" is so effing true. Even if i, the writer, make an explanation.... sometimes i should just leave it as implied instead. That's probably more powerful
It's like the Avatar animated vs live action: the original animation didn't need to explain everything, it had had It's moments of silence where the viewers could fill the blanks themselves, interpret it or simply read the character's emotions. The live action fells the need to explain EVERYTHING, as if there wasn't already a decrease in media literacy, but it was also insulting, as the original creators trusted the viewers, they knew they were smart enough to understand and fill the blanks. And I know the live action was an abridged version so there were things they had to explain because showing it would take too long, but really, what was the point of making it then?
@@mega20able JRR Tolkein wrote his legendarium... to hold all the backstory he couldn't cram into the main story. He'd allude to things... and use as major plot points... in ways he couldn't explain in-story. In this regard it's a way to streamline story telling, it keeps narrative flow, but also lets the reader learn more. I actually LIKE it when writers compile stuff like that, trying to understand a fictional world is hard enough, and having a synopsis helps a lot.
Sometimes a story element can start off as a noodle incident in order to build audience curiosity, but then be explained later to satisfy that curiosity while simultaneously seting up some foreshadowing. An example of this would be the references to "going Turbo" in Wreck-It Ralph.
Another example is the noodle incident(as called in canon) from The Daily Maintenance of Shinozaki! They explain what the incident was, but it added onto the existing mystery of Human Repositories!
Thank you for bringing up turbo, that's a great one. His backstories only ever given later down the line but "going turbo" is mentioned even early into the movie. It's very good foreshadowing.
I love having a name for "The Noodle Incident" this is probably my favorite concept in storytelling. It feels like a fun combo between "show don't tell" flipped on it's head, and "audience imagination" that works both for humor and drama
Milo Murphy's Law had this as a running gag - the llama incident. It eventually does get fully explained and does lose its luster, because it doesnt really manage to be any wackier than the normal shenanigans in the show. However, the characters do revisit it later from a different angle, as they use the chaos (and their knowledge of how it will play out) to lose their pursuers in a time traveling car chase. So it manages to go from a noodle incident into a long term chekov's gun.
“I want to tell you the story of the creature from the vegetable soup, but I won't because I don't want to bother you with a story that has nothing to do with your adventure.”
I liked it in Milo Murphy's Law the first season they keep mentioning the llama incident and eventually they do explain it and it's absolutely hilarious
Ah, the Kessel run. I heard this headcannon that was very likely, yet very unpopular among nerds: Han deliberately lied about the parsecs, he chose a length unit instead of a time unit in order to gauge how naive Ben was. And then the movie came out, and discussions about it ended not with a bang, but with a thunderous sound of blowing raspberries.
There are a lot of noodle incidents in Phineas and Ferb about Doofenschmirtz’s life. How does a child disinherited by his parents in an Eastern European country get adopted and raised by ocelots, a species of wild cats from Central America? How does neither parents show up at his birth? So many questions.
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb That one is easy, in the case that his inventions are ever turned against him, he knows exactly how to stop them. Like a true engineer or coder, it is an exit strategy on whatever he is building. Granted, he could probably make them less obvious, but it is a trade between certainty of success and security in invention, and that certainty does NOT reach 100%.
I _hate_ watching horror movies. I don't like gore or jump scares, I don't like how horror makes me feel. **I love horror movie parodies!!** The added catharsis of laughing throughout a horror movie is _fantastic!!_ And even for poorly made horror spoofs this still works! Give me all of them, from the "Scary Movie" 1-4 and "Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th" to "Bride of Chuckie" , "Shaun of the Dead" , and "Young Frankenstein". I'm gonna have a good time 😁
I think one of my favorite cases of that is the penguins of madagascar "why Skipper is a fugitive in Denmark" gag. Even when we do get some bits and details we still dont know what actually happend there and I kinda like it.
We got an episode where he manages to break back in and destroy Denmark's official records of his 'misdeeds', and when Private got a chance to read the folder before Skipper destroyed it, the documents were redacted into illegibility and Private himself couldn't read them anyway because there were no pictures.
As much as I loved Captain Marvel, the Goose scratch was a total cop-out. They could have cut it out and lost nothing. One instance of on-page vagueness that's stuck with me for ages is in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator when someone asks how the Vermicious Knids can bite people if they have no mouths. "They have other things to bite with," Is Willy Wonka's answer. That's all the answer we'll ever need. Or want. When done well, this trope can be brutal.
The cat scratch still makes me mad. The MCU wasn’t satisfied ruining serious moments in the movie they were making, they felt like they had to go back and ruin serious moments in movies that were already made. You can argue that Nick Furry would definitely lie about how he lost his eye to help make a point (like the bloody cards in The Avengers), but just because it’s not necessarily a continuity error doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It doesn’t just remove the possibility of seeing an epic adventure where he loses his eye, it removes a chunk of characterization and backstory we thought he had.
I think the most frustrating part of the scratch incident is that they could have had their cake and eaten it too. Have the cat scratch Fury, have him with an eyepatch at the end of the movie, then he removes it and show his eye recovering. Still kinda pointless, but it lets you have the joke without impacting his character long term.
So in Star Wars Legends, there was a book trilogy that explained most of Han’s backstory. That worked however, because the events of the books covered like twenty years with time jumps. So how Chewie and Han met, why Han knows Shyriiwook, the Kessel Run, how Han win the Falcon, why Lando hates him…they’re all given time, interspersed with other adventures, MORE noodle incidents, and made so his backstory isn’t largely like ONE WEEK. Things are explained, but the cool, experienced nature of Han is preserved.
I have that trilogy of books an one fun detail is it ends with “the beginning” kinda making the rest of star wars a meta noodle incident for those books
And the funny part is that many of the explanations are similar (like Han enrolling in the empire, but deserting and saving Chewie from Imperial slavery), they just work better when they’re not rushed
I can't believe I lived a Noodle Incident for my entire childhood. Video is fantastic, and my brain just sparked from a real life incident, and I just had an idea of how to write the reveal of a noodle incident, that preserves the hilarity of it. Abridged version is, when I was a kid, my mom told me a phrase that would make my dad laugh everytime I said it, but it was never explained to me why it was funny. "You Seniors." I asked for YEARS what this phrase meant, and nobody would tell me. Finally whenever I was old enough to realize what a senior was, my dad told me he would tell me the joke when I became a senior in highschool myself, but he warned me that I would be dissapointed in the joke because I had hyped it up since I was LITERALLY 5, but I had to know what it meant. Then without prompting on the summer between junior and senior year high school, my dad started telling me a joke, and it was only when he he got to the punchline at the end, that I realized he had finally told me the "You Seniors" joke... and it was SO BAD. It was such a dumb joke! It's not even really funny! When I tell this story to people about the joke, I don't even mention what the joke IS, because, like the Noodle Incident, finding out the joke just changes the story to waiting TWELVE YEARS FOR A JOKE THAT WAS NOT WORTH IT. (Side note from my parents: I was so young when they told me the punchline for the first time, they kept thinking that I would forget about it, and when I didn't, they actively dreaded the day they were going to have to tell me. When I called my mom to complain to her after dad finally told me the joke, she was cry-laughing at my pain, it was great.) However! I feel like you could use that in writing for a great comedic effect! If you had a character to represent the audience to go through the indignation of discovering the Noodle Incident BUT the AUDIENCE doesn't see them reveal the Noodle Incident, you just see the Audience Stand-In Character be cheesed about the Noodle Incident not being as cool as it was hyped up to be, while still preserving the audience's knowledge.
It's not quite a noodle incident, but that suggestion at the end reminded me of an episode in the Penguins of Madagascar show, in which Private gets really curious about a joke the rest of the team is laughing about, but they don't let him see because he's "not qualified" In order to get qualified, he goes on a solo mission (the main plot of the episode), succeeds, and at the end, gets to read the joke, and what does he have to say about it? "I don't get it." The audience never gets to learn what the joke is, obviously
Honestly O.K. K.O.‘s “Sandwich Incident” is my favorite version of this trope because they use the same three second flashback of the sandwich every time someone brings it up and it becomes like a running joke before we get a genuine, and pretty sad, view of what happened.
Too bad the Sandwich Incident only last for one season but at lest that one season have a lot of episode then the rest of other season. The only mystery after that is the shadowy figure mystery and who is K.O. father
Yeah I was slightly disappointed they let us see what the sandwich incident was. And that it was only tangentially related to a sandwich. I was hoping he just made a truly awful sandwich and thats why she hated him.
It's so funny to see the top comments being about the Jockstrap Incident from DBZ Abridged, when the series also has one of the best inversions of the trope: Dr. Gero and Namek. From his perspective, Namek and Super Saiyans are Noodle Incidents that the main cast keep talking about, but that he's completely in the dark on. So we the audience actually get to laugh at being the ones in on the in-joke, while a villain has to react to it straight.
Thanks for this video. I just realized that this is not just a story trope, it's a life lesson. Instead of spewing TMI, we can portray ourselves through our own Noodle Incidents. Or do people already do this? Maybe that's what jewelry and tattoos are for, and why people get mad and call them posers when there's no deeper meaning and story behind an iconic piece of personal branding.
A lot of fans think they want the Noodle Incident explained when what they really want is to feel smug that their headcanon is correct.
This
U right.
And that’s the central paradox she was highlighting; whether a revelation makes sense within the story and whether that revelation pleases the fans are two completely different things. For writers, it can be something of a no-win situation if it doesn’t land just right.
Yeah, which means that its a type of satisfaction that comes at the expense of others. Like it’s only something to be smug about if you also happen to disprove a bunch of other headcanons, which means all those fans will be disappointed because what they thought should happen, didn’t.
_Solo_ in a nutshell
“The line between comedy and horror is thinner than either genre would like it to be.”
My eyes have been opened.
In a funny way or in a horrific way?
They are literally the exact same genre with the one exception being down to the framing.
This is part of why jokes can fail so horribly.
This is why horror comedy is so much fun, Shawn of The Dead and The Cabin In The Woods being two of my favorites.
@@osirisatot19i really dislike those movies
"The line between comedy and horror is thinner than either genre would like it to be."
As someone who writes both, I will have you know that comedy has no problem with how close it is to horror. Horror, on the other hand, has never stopped whining about it.
Horror sometimes feel the need to show how "serious" it is.
Otherwise the audience doesn't doesn't take it seriously... And if You take it too seriously, the audience stops taking it seriously funny enough
Comedy loves horror, horror likes to pretend it’s too dark and gritty for comedy, truly a match made in some back room of heaven by an intern who accidentally bumped into a console.
Combining the two, however, is akin to juggling on a unicycle. It's doable, definitely a learned skill honed from two other learned skill and whether you succeed or fail it's going to be a spectacle.
Comedy thrives on annoying people (usually people in the story), so this tracks perfectly
and now I have a sitcom playing in my head with the main characters "Comedy" and "Horror", thanks
The noodle incident is so especially compelling in Calvin and Hobbes because it feels like the only thing he feels real shame about; usually he’s proud of his schemes, especially when he gets away with it like it’s implied he did in this case, but his extreme defensiveness even to Hobbes really piques your curiosity.
He did say he was framed…
@@isaactrockman4417 He's also claimed that noone can prove he was responsible.
It’s also where the name of the trope comes from, so yeah.
@@gogogo123454321 You misunderstand, I’m not referring to it as a noodle incident, I’m talking directly about the noodle incident as a recurring story element in Calvin and Hobbes and part of why it’s so memorable within that story on its own. I’m not comparing it to anything.
*fear of punishment. It's not guilt, it's a lawyer-like self defense mechanism
"Trust me, you don't wanna know. Audrey, don't tell him. You shouldn't have told me, but you did, and now I'm telling you you don't wanna know."
I was scouring for the Atlantis' reference from Dr. Dulce
ATLANTIS!!!
HELL YEAH ATLANTIS
I can *hear* that sentence.
My favourite Disney movie
My favorite was an indirect reference in an entirely unrelated comic. Two aliens on a spaceship talking about a planned heist.
"Don't worry, we'll just blame someone else!"
"Oh, like that incident with the noodles?"
"Right! They still think that kid did it all!"
The Comic was Freefall
lmao
So he was framed
Iconic
@@Jonnyg325 I had thought so, but wasn't sure enough to day
Solo did basically all the Noodle incidents back to back, which means that, instead of Han having a long and storied career filled with many different adventures, he’s a guy that peaked early who keeps bringing up the one cool week he had 10 full years ago
Tbf, that's the kind of attitude I'd expect from a guy so bad at smuggling half the system knows he's a smuggler, and the other half can guess by looking at him.
@@funnyvalentinedidnothingwrong thats a hilarious way of describing han and also i think this sentence is making me evaluat wheter star wars was ever well written
@@sylvy16 The original Star Wars? Maybe to some extent. The movie Solo specifically? It was an awful piece of crap that a group of great actors tried to carry and really earn their paycheck on, even though the writing was a dumpster fire.
@@sylvy16I think Star Wars can be well written and Han can still be a guy who peaked when he was 20 and never stopped bringing it up 😂
Han once ran for 4 touchdowns in a single game
Making ALL of Han's noodles a part of a single story basically takes away the "ive done a lot" vibe and replaces it with "i did one thing"
The density also pulls the audience out of the story, ruining the immersion. We no longer see it as a new story of Han, but rather as the writers trying to tie thing after thing to the OG trilogy.
@@Axterix13 That density is what tends to bug me about a lot of movies, really. I mean, take most Star Wars movies - Since all the galaxy's important stuff seems to happen exclusively in movies that usually take place over what, a few in-story days or so? It creates a world where the action/importance density is implausible. 99.9% of the time, nothing of particular note or entertainment value is apparently happening anywhere, then BAM, it all goes off in the .01% of plot time movies focus on. An "important stuff over time" chart for the setting would be purely sparse peaks and long flatline valleys with nothing in between. And that starts feeling really fake. And yeah, that especially goes for Solo, since he apparently did everything of note in his backtstory all in one rapid series of events? That's an especially egregious and artificial feeling plot density bubble.
To be fair though, this problem applies to lots of action-focused movies, where the beginning to end is basically one consecutive, likely constantly rushed, chain of events. The main character might get to take a nap or be knocked out for a few hours in the middle at best. And while there's nothing inherently wrong with it, I'm really not sure why movie writers favor that compressed in-story timeframe so much. The character did nothing fantastically interesting for months, years, or their entire life up to that point, but then learns about the secret war between good and evil, discovers their powers and becomes an integral part who personally saves the world... and all in less than 48 hours start to finish. Bleh. It's not even like it isn't clearly possible to tell very successful stories where the good, plot relevant stuff is spread out over weeks or months. For example, every Harry Potter book/movie. The Lord of the Rings series also makes it clear that a good deal of time is passing between major story beats. And those fictional worlds feel much realer for it.
@@Alloveck I think it works for Star Wars, because it's ultimately about a military campaign (well, two, but let's focus on the OT). The Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire is where all the "big stuff" is going to happen in that era in the same way the trenches of the Great War were where all the "big stuff" happened from 1914 to 1918.
This is also why the Prequels didn't really 'work' until the release of The Clone Wars, because that was less a focused military campaign and more a war - it needed the multi-dozen-hour runtime to feel reasonably large and unfocused. But once they did, it made sense that the protagonists were in the centre of the all the action because "the protagonists" included multiple units stationed all over the galaxy in part of an intergalactic war. It spread the characters out so there was never too much density.
The way to avoid the problem of a movie feeling too dense is to give it a reason to be that dense. Compare the above examples with movies like Solo or the Sequels, where it feels like the protagonists are Forrest Gump'ing their way through every major event without Forrest Gump (the movie)'s self awareness.
@@trianglemoebius Just to be super clear here, my issue with plot density over time isn't the density of important things relative to the real life runtime of the movie itself. I like a movie to keep the pace brisk. It's the density at which important things happen over the internal time frame that the movie's plot covers that I take issue with.
And with that said, yes, I agree that some plot contexts justify a ton of important stuff happening in like, one in-story day much better than others. But even when the plot is totally internally justified for all happening in one quick burst of events, it still bugs me when a series goes on long enough with the important stuff always, exclusively happening in very quick bursts. Once the sample size gets large enough, it feels very unnatural if there isn't a mix of rapid fire important events and slow burn important events, for lack of a better term. Life doesn't work like that.
And beside all that, I just prefer stories where the heroes get to catch their breath, you know? It doesn't hurt a story to let a few days pass between one battle to the death and the next big action set piece, but so many movies seem written like they are explicitly and intentionally trying to keep the in-story time as compressed as possible for some reason.
Props to Red for managing to discuss a trope that's entirely dialogue in a format where she can't play audio clips.
Copyright?
@@BrunoMaricFromZagrebi think so, yes
Calvin and Hobbs is a comic, so there is no audio.
@@bjwessels is a lot easier to demonstrate a dialogue based trope with audio though, especially when such a large part of the trope is the emotional response to the incident, which is best shown with audio
subtitles baby, saving the day once again
Well if it’s anything like that Jockstrap Incident, the bodies are probably buried somewhere around here.
Funny thing is,just rewatched that episode
God dammit you beat me to it
Now son, if this is anything like that jockstrap incident we don’t want to get boxed in
God this is just like that Jockstrap Incident, only this time I don't have Ginyu around to dig the holes
"Seriously, this is just the jockstrap incident all over again! Right down to the big red ball!"
"I thought we let that go..."
"I'll let it go when you die! Again!"
My favorite subversion of this trope is when an on screen event becomes a noodle incident for other characters that weren’t there.
“What about Jong-Jong?”
“Oh, like we’ll ever run into him again”
“Who’s Jong-Jong? Nevermind, if it’s important I’ll find out”
@@Enray11and they did run into him again
“One day you’re going to tell me why you stop being Batman.”
“Seriously! What the ****** IS NAMEK?”
Abother version is when the incident happens in a prequel movie so we, the audience, know it and so does the characters but because it's not in the movie itself it becomes a noodle incident for both the characters and us.
E.g. Frozen 2 mentioning Hans
Milo Murphy’s Law performed an incredible noodle incident, the so called Llama Incident.
It’s referenced repeatedly yet almost nonsensically in the episodes leading up to the episode dedicated to it, the actual incident is a legitimately insane sequence of events that checks every reference made to it, and the episode ends with the creation of The Woodpecker Incident, which is then never spoken of again.
I sort of wish the Woodpecker incident was spoken about around characters who weren’t there so they could get just as frustrated as Zack did about the llama incident
Yeah leave it to that animation and writing team to actually pull off explaining a noodle incident 😂
I wish that it was mentioned here
And then they actually use time traveling to the llama incident to help them win a fight
It’s so well done, it gave me a new perspective on llamas
Star Wars also had a much more prominent Noodle Incident that later got very, very explained:
“You fought in the Clone Wars?”
Was looking for this comment
That's true, but I'd say obi-wan talking at Anakin about all their adventures together at the start of episode 3 is even more fitting.
Basically the prequels is the explanation of the noodle incident of the original trilogy
How about “That business on Cato Neimoidia doesn’t, doesn’t count.”
@@Shift_Salt ok, so this one is funny.
The Cato-Neimoidia business was a noodle incident in the movie. And then, they eventually released a novel all about the Cato-Neimoidia business. Called Brotherhood.
In Legend of Korra, Bumi brings up a lot of noodle incidents in his past, but everyone, including the audience, thinks he's making them up to make himself seem as awesome and capable as his bender siblings... Until we see one of those incidents on screen and then he starts telling it but goes "Ah, whatever, you won't believe me anyway", which implies that all of his noodle incidents really happened. It was cool and hilarious in equal measure.
Oh! I'm glad you helped me remember that! I love that biy of implication and characterization too. However, I think that might be a different trope i e. "telling tall tales" or "big fish stories". But with the clever subversion of them actually being true, but lacking vital context.
YES that's my favorite aspect about him! One of the best lines in the show is when someone says something about getting kidnapped in a sack and Bumi says out of the blue "that's what got me into the United Forces."
He is truly sokka nephew, sokka would be proud uncle
There's also when he got into the fog of lost souls and revealed much of his light-hearted side is meant to cover up how haunted he is by much of those noodle incidents.
And we get the opposite in Toph, where the audience knows the stories in question, but Toph dismisses them as minor boring incidents.
Oh sure when Calvin has a noodle incident it’s an iconic narrative but when I have a noodle incident it’s “depressing” and “yet another attempt at cooking dinner”
You shouldnt of done that to those noodles
Six sheriff deputies! Six!
Five people had to be hospitalized
Four broken windows
I can still hear the screams of the last one.
God, what happened with the "last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye" made me SO MAD. As much as I love Goose, he should NOT have been the one to take out Fury's eye.
I made a comment about this that I'll paste here:
"I love the Goose twist because of how it reframes those previous references as total horse-shit he was just manipulating people with. Nick Fury understands tropes. He understands his own reputation as a shadowy authority figure and veteran badass of decades past, and it's useful to him. "A cat scratched out my eye" doesn't help him to convince Captain America to play ball, so he changes the story. That's characterization, and it's consistent with the trick he pulled after Coulson's death putting blood on the trading cards (and covering up his resurrection). He knows how to tell someone something that's emotionally convincing, fits the details that person is aware of, and compels them to do what he needs them to do. It's extremely informative on his character."
@@forrestibI really like that take.
I don't feel like I can give the mcu stuff benefit of the doubt anymore to take that as intentional (as a whole anyway, I can believe that some writers maybe?), but it does totally work as a head-canon for me.
Mcu to me has an even more condensed version of the problem comics have. Different authors, directors, editors, producers etc. Having different understandings of and visions for the characters. With the mcu stuff it's not even a while run or several of comics in one style, it's just one movie before changes may happen.
A cynical take I admit, so I don't relish it, but I hope it explains why I and others might think badly of the decision to do it how they did. Again though, thank you for sharing your version because I infinitely prefer that framing
@@forrestibokay you made me like it, props to you
@@forrestib This was my take immediately, tbh. Fury is a well-known liar, so taking anything he says at face value is not the best idea generally. Lying about how he lost his eye is par for the course; it's the implication of HOW he could've lost it that matters, especially knowing those characters will NEVER KNOW the actual reason. It's the perfect Noodle Incident, really.
‘Just like Budapest all over again’
‘You and I remember Budapest very differently’ Is one of my favorite examples of this troupe.
I have no doubt they will eventually do a Disney + mini series "Budapest" showing the events.
@@appa609wasn’t that the Black Widow movie? I thought that was meant to be that backstory? Never actually watched it.
@@appa609The Black Widow movie shows what happened in Budapest
@@estebanalvarado1650I have no idea what you're talking about, there was never a blank widow movie.
@@appa609 Nat blew up a little girl to prove to SHIELD she had changed sides, is what Budapest is (see: Black Widow, the film, as everyone else said). How the event of Avengers remind either of them of Budapest is not at all clear to me.
...Hold up.
"You/My Father fought in the Clone Wars?" was *also* a Noodle Incident. It was a historical footnote to make clear the military camaraderie of the past generation. And we got the *prequel trilogy* out of it.
To be fair, Georges Lucas knew he was gonna make the prequel trilogy. At first, he even thought he would make three trilogies, but finally cut the sequel one.
Taht's why so much extended universe focused on the future of Star Wars but not the past, Lucas said to all the writers beforehand "You can explain what follows and play with the present, but I'll do the past, eventually". So the Clone Wars bit was more a prequel bait XD
I’d more say we got The Clone Wars out of it. But I believe “that business on Cato Neimoidia doesn’t count” is still a small noodle incident because it wasn’t covered in the show.
imo, the key difference between the Clone Wars and, say, how Han got the Millennium Falcon, is that one of them is history that everyone knows about, and one of them is something only a couple characters know about. finding out about the Clone Wars gives us a look at historically important events that shaped the present and left an indelible mark on the world; finding out about the Falcon tells us about a few days in a couple characters' lives.
@@thetwilightgamerThe very first thing I was thinking upon recognizing what this Trope Talk was gonna be about, was Obiwan and Anakin's references to their off-screen adventures together from Episodes II and III (and Cinemasins whinging about the films not actually showing those, 'cause ofcourse).
Probably the best noodle incident explanation
"God, Zarbon's dead, Dodoria's dead, the Ginyus are dead, this is just one giant mess. It's just like that Jockstrap Incident except now I don't have Ginyu around to dig the holes"
"Now, son; if this is anything like the Jockstrap Incident, we don't want to get boxed in!"
I'M SORRY?
@@rubberduckydjTFS DBZAbridged
@@rubberduckydj the jockstrap incident, you'd have to be there to believe it
"The only reason he took those jokers out was because I loosened them up for him. Like a jar of space pickles. Ugly stupid space pickles. I've just gotta get those dragonballs. And if its anything like that Jockstrap Incident, Ginyu probably buried them somewhere around here."
I love that in her rush to clarify "the fact that Noodle Incidents only work when you don't explain them DOES NOT recuse you from needing to have answers for actual important plot questions" Red (accidentally?) said "bye" AND THEN said "So, yeah"
I love her commitment to The Bit.
Me, six years from now: We all remember that time Red said "bye" before "so yeah."
You: *nods sagely*
Audience: [spellbound and intrigued]
I now imagine red must have a huge document full of indecipherable video ideas like
"The noodle incident", "Conservation of Ninjutsu", "Those dang phones"
Are you sure it isn't a giant wall covered in scrawled notes, character pics and string?
@@4namolly I'm sure "String Theory" is somewhere on her Conspiracy Wall in the Room Full of Crazy!
Yes, but most of them make sense if you just google the phrase.
I remember when I invoked "Conservation of Ninjutsu" in a game I ran where one player had a maxed-out Minion resource.
I gave him the option of one perfect super-Alfred, or an infinite supply of inept ninjas.
He chose correctly.
I think there's a website called TVTropes or something that have a lot of these things compiled
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate..."
I've seen my only real friend die, I've seen a giant penny roll over a guy dressed like a rainbow…
Please remind me what that is from? It’s killing me (was it Dr. Who? Watchmen? Actually, it was Bladerunner, wasn’t it?).
@@thrawncaedusl717Yup, it's bladerunner.
@@thrawncaedusl717Blade Runner, yeah.
"All those.. memories.. will be lost in time like.. tears in rain
Time to die.."
It also works great as the final punchline as the hero rides off into the sunset with the crew.
"So, what did happen during [noodle incident]?"
*sigh* "Alright, kid, I guess you deserve to know. It all started when..." and fade to black
This is practically a trope in its own right
and i eat that up tbh
Like the secret recipe of the krabby Patty. The main ingredient of the Krabby patty is...
"...what is this tattoo I've heard so much about?"
"Well... it's a long story. It was right after the Murmansk brushing incident. You're familiar with that, I believe . . ."
- _Down Periscope_ (closing lines)
To be fair, this one actually got explained very early in the film (and by the main antagonist, no less) but is never actually shown (for multiple reasons including a big obvious one), only referenced.
Zuko to Ozai…
A possible ancestor to this trope might be found in the original Sherlock Holmes stories. At one point Dr. Watson refers to "the story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not yet prepared." That story is never published, but the idea that Holmes has faced and defeated some (literally) unspeakable horror is planted and remains in our minds. Clearly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle understood the power and purpose of the Noodle Incident.
Funnily enough, a lot of Han Solo's noodle incidents were explored in expanded universe novels. A big reason why they worked was because they were usually a chapter or two as part of a larger adventure. Solo, meanwhile, gave the impression that Han had one really exciting weekend and the rest of his life was fairly mundane.
Yeah the Solo novels worked at giving you a sense of time. His life actually unfolded and there was a LOT that happened other than the noodle incidents referenced.
i think red mentioned this in the plot time vs downtime bit of the sequels episode. plot time has a lot of things happen in quick succession because movies kind of have to make it that way to keep pacing and tension, whereas downtime is far more sustainable in the long run of a person’s life. by making a prequel you’re expected to explain some bit of a backstory, because if you leave something out people will be like “but what about this” and then you also have to add a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t mentioned in the original movie, which also makes a “but what about this”
@@Hazel-xl8inThere's a big difference between explaining _a_ noodle incident and explaining _all_ noodle incidents. _Solo_ does the latter, as if they'll go stale if the writer doesn't package them all at once.
Yeah, I loved the A.C. Crispin Han Solo trilogy that slowly filled out Han's backstory and prejudices. Especially since a lot of those "A-hah, there it is!" explanations weren't just the average of people's expectations.
*Spoilers Ahead*
It wasn't just a smuggling run to and from Kessel, it was a rescue mission and his odometer was broken. He didn't just win the Falcon from Lando in a card game, he won a ship from Lando's lot, then took Lando's personal ship instead of one that was for sale. Lots of other fun little shenanigans that build on the character.
Han scored four touchdowns in a single game and coasted for the rest of his life?
One of my favourite 'Noodle Incidents' is Mole's backstory in Atlantis, I think it does the joke perfectly and is a good way to close out a relatively emotional segment and really is the best way they could've handled said character's history.
"You don't wanna know. Audrey, don't tell him. You shouldn't have told me, but you did. Now *I'm* telling you; you don't wannna know."
To tell Milo would have...disturbed the dirt!
No one will ever know Mole’s backstory. My guess is that he was a dirt enthusiast, who is shown by humanity so badly he was forced to go live with nature where he found acceptance through moles. That’s why he’s called “the mole” because the only thing that ever accepted him were the animal.
But that’s just my guess.
That noodle incident was actually so well done that I don't even know everyone else's backstory
@@awesomemantroll1088”well, as far me goes, I just like to blow things up”
@@GurrenPrime "Come on Vinnie...tell the kid the truth..."🤣🤣
"... Which I like to call 'Fans don't actually know what they want from their stories.'"
PREACH, RED!
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainity!" -- The Audience (channeling Douglas Adams)
Somewhere deep down in the comments, I've posted that it's not that fans don't know what we want from a story. Maybe we do, maybe we don't. But the real problem is that corporate management _absolutely_ doesn't know what fans want, *but they're absolutely certain that they do.*
@@VinemapleFans only ever want more of the same. They say they want new, but every time they get that, they complain. But when you do give them the same, they complain about that too.
The fans aren't the creator. Stories don't happen by commission; they get created, and then find their audience. This is also why mandated prequels or sequels seldom ever work; they're too half-baked and reactionary to be truly compelling.
This applies to games as well. You get situations where gamers will complain about some aspect of the game and propose some surface level change to fix it, but the devs will need to go deeper, to understand what makes this an actual issue, to be able to properly address the problem.
@@nicholassmith7984 I just commented about this phenomenon with the new Fallout series. So many are assuming it's gonna suck because....reasons. And the show isn't even out yet at the time of this comment.
The biggest example I can think as proof that 'fans know better' is rubbish is how many 'true Star Wars fans' want a Darth Vader slasher movie despite the fact that the Vader comics are already filling the gaps about his life inbetween the Prequel and Original Trilogy.
A lot of 'true fans' don't want stories with thematic relevance or characterization. They want comprehensive wiki pages.
"...and we can't use the Enterprise-E." _(everyone looks at Worf)_
"That was _not_ my fault."
I like the general rule that an authors job isn’t to build a world COMPLETELY. But to make a world that FEELS complete.
A sort of “make the the reader think you did more than you did”
....but I am still glad JRR Tolkien did not realise that! : )
Red's primary worldbuilding philosophy.
@@mcv2178 Oh, Tolkien realized it. He tried his best, actually. It was his hobbies and field of study that took over, and prevented him from being more efficient.
@@mcv2178There's still a lot about Middle-Earth that we don't know about ^^
Like, the Istari, we have Gandalf and Saruman, important characters in the story, pretty fleshed out. Radagast, a random background character with one paragraph of lore in the Silmarillon. And the Blue Mages. Two beings with the same power-level of Gandalf of which we only know that their mission was in the East.
Like in videogames where only the area your supposed to be in is rendered.
This trope is a flawless example of the thought that sometimes, as a writer, you really have to trust your audience, and sometimes, as a writer, you SHOULD NOT trust your audience like even a little bit. A lot of becoming a good writer is just developing an instinct for which moment is which.
It can indeed be very hard, especially since different audiences can react very differently. For example, every time I see a story's theme be delivered very unsubtly and think it would've been better if the story had delivered its theme more subtly, I always inevitably then see a large subset of the audience completely miss the theme and I think, "Well, never mind."
One tip I heard is that you can always trust an audience to know what they *don't* want, but you can never, ever trust them to know what they actually want instead.
One of my favorite sub tropes of this is when someone STARTS to explain it, only to be repeatedly drowned out or interrupted by noise and associated visuals.
There is one episode of Phineas and Ferb where Vanessa asks Ferb about his name while he's busy looking for something. Offhandedly, he starts to answer "Well, actually it's short for - oh, here it is."
This one works really well to me because it adds an absurd level of noodle-ness to something otherwise fairly mundane, packing an incredible amount of "wait, WHAT?" into a single throwaway gag which is literally never addressed ever again.
The villain in monsters vs aliens. Every other line is interrupted by the machine. Is like a mad lib floor villain backstories.
The names of Timmy Turner's parents
@ikebirchum6591 Favorite part of this is that Timmy's dad's name was "Mom Turner" until he legally changed it to something no one ever hears.
Especially when they finally get round to explaining it, it cuts to black and the credits roll.
I just came across a D&D webcomic where a pair of characters end up in a adventure where it's just the two of them separated from the party. The GM offers to skip that adventure and revisit it later, to which one of the characters responds "Sweet! It'll be a Noodle Incident!", which raises an interesting point - Noodle Incidents are very convenient in TTRPGs, as they let you characterize your player character without having to build out tons of lore and having to make sure that lore fits with all the other worldbuilding.
@valdonchev7296 reminds me of this one incident that was part of my TTRPG character’s backstory. In our latest campaign, one of the other players and I decided to have our characters’ backstories linked and formed a brother and sister like bond. My PC was always trying to rein in the other PC’s more chaotic tendencies, but their other player improvised this one NPC that she could not stand, and I decided in the moment to roll with it and have my character agree that, yes, this NPC was the worst. Why? We never explained it. That NPC was just simply the worst, and that was all there was to it.
I did eventually come up with an explanation as to why both PC hated that NPC (because I thought I would help with roleplay), but I never intended to share that with the other players and wanted to keep it as vague as possible. But the truth got out, and the mystique is now ruined. Ah well. 🤷🏻♂️
I love how "so yeah" started off as "I didn't know how to end the video" and ended up becoming the standard Trope Talk signoff, to the extent that Red felt the need to do a perfunctory "so yeah" here.
We don't talk about the "so yeah" incident
A Tragic comedic noodle incident happens in Adventure Time.
The characters describe a great Mushroom War, and when you look at the character designs you think they were just lobbing mushrooms at each other, maybe the mushroom can talk, and went “ouchies” as they did.
No, that’s just these kiddie looking characters understanding of what a nuclear bomb fallout looks like. A great big mushroom.
It's foreshadowed fairly early on what the great mushroom war was, considering a chunk of the earth is missing. And we even get to kind of see it in the Fin the Human episode where alt universe Fin takes the ice crown from Simons corpse and the bomb goes off.
I like the mushroom war because it is intentionally both a noodle incident and a very important part of the shows world. They show stuff from the past often and with the Finn The Human ep. It's something that gets talked about and then brought to life in a way that doesn't harm It's mystique, and then feels complete by the end of the show
Giant mushy friend!!
To me Advetnure time + mushroom war would add up to walking mushrooms swinging swords and spears at each other...
adventure time has nukes?? (i never got past season one it starts too slow for me but i know its amazing)
“The line between comedy and horror is thinner than either genre would like it to be.”
Fear is of the unknown. Comedy is of the unexpected. There’s a frightening/hilarious amount of overlap. Arguably the primary difference is just the threat level.
Someone once wrote that comedy is "The noise coming from the brush not being a lion".
Which illustrates the similarity quite well.
Fear is the unknown, comedy is the unexpected, sorrow is the unwanted.
Jordan Peele said it best, it's literally just what music is in the background.
also the proximity, hence "comedy is tragedy plus time."
and framing. theres a lot of comedic fighting(arguably a dangerous situation) in slapstick comedies.
There was a running gag in the penguins of Madagascar tv show where skipper would refer to a mission in “denmark” while doing a cool voice. Probably my favourite noodle incident put to screen
“Just like old times skipper”
“Yeah, just like *Denmark*”
Bruh I was just talking to a couple of friends about the Noodle Incident trope and used this as an example, I'm so glad to see someone bring it up here
I'm fairly certain the Penguins' "Denmark" thing was a reference to the time in 2015 when a group of penguins almost escaped the Copenhagen Zoo. They got out because one "bit" a zookeeper, and in the keeper's rush to get aide he left the door to their enclosure open - although they got stuck in the tunnels so they were never really getting out. The video of the penguins waddling around the back corridors went viral for a bit, so I think the show was relying on people having seen it to get the reference.
@@trianglemoebius Is the video on YT?
I think Milo Murphy did a pretty good job at revealing it’s Noodle Incident joke
The entire show almost every episode at some point the characters compare their current wacky situation to the Llama Incident. The joke eventually became now utterly impossible it is that so so many things happened in the llama incident. But then, near the end of the series, they had an entire episode showing it with every single reference ever weaved together into a series of hyper creative crazy gags. I loved that cause of just how impressive it is.
I also love how the episode also start unknown adventure that end up the gang stuck on the tree branch at the edge of the cliff. Talk about begin the episode with also a Noodle Accident...
I thought of the Llama Incident a lot during this video and it is a really interesting example. On the one hand, the fact that they keep referencing that one event specifically implies that it was one of the craziest adventures they’ve ever had. Actually showing it runs the risk of being a letdown; “THIS is what everyone has been so excited about?” And I’ll admit, I don’t remember much from the actual episode. Considering everything we see in the show, it is a bit odd for the characters to keep referencing events that are literally less rememberable (to me) than other adventures we know they’ve had.
However, I was familiar with jokes like the Noodle Incident and ‘knew’ that we would never actually see the Llama Incident, and I feel like the creators knew that many of the audience were in a similar boat. I was never invested in the Llama Incident, so I didn’t put any effort into figuring out what it might be and I ended up being pretty surprised when they actually put all the pieces together into one adventure. It’s similar to when they made “Meepless in Seattle” in Phineas and Ferb, taking a bunch of unconnected clips and weaving them together into a complete story. I can appreciate that they turned the Llama Incident from a running gag into a challenge. (I’m going to need to do a rewatch to see how well they pulled it off)
“I used to have two, but you know, the llama incident”. The fact that he uses EVERY item he mentioned prior is what makes this show an absolute masterpiece.
My only complaint is that I agree with red, knowing what the llama incident was, takes away all the mystery.
Notably, the characters stop referring to the llama incident after that episode I believe. If they do, it’s used more as dramatic irony than a noodle incident. It’s been a while since I watched it.
One of the first "Noodle Incidents" I can remember is from the beginning of the first Ghostbuster--
Peter: "This reminds me of that time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Do you remember that?"
Egon: "That would've worked if you hadn't stopped me."
That has multiple layers because Peter likely stopped Egon from performing trepanning, which was something ancient people did to release evil spirits..
@@HistoryVideoGamesMiscStuffand knowing about trepanning gives you enough info to make some guesses, but still leaves what he wanted to accomplish in the dark.
Not to mention, in the same scene: "Raaaayyy... the sponges migrated about a foot n' a half!"
I feel like that was improvised.
Favorite use of Noodle Incidents is the character Morn from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Were the whole joke is everyone in the cast goes on and on about what a crazy and fun guy Morn is, and will frequently allude to his past adventures and how he never shuts up. Yet all you ever see of Morn is him sitting silently at the bar. Literally an entire episode is built around Morn reeking havoc and you don't get to see any of it, just the characters after the fact trying to put their testimony together to work out what happened.
And characters who are never once in the same scene as Morn describe their detailed ongoing relationship with him
Like Worf and his weekly sparring sessions,
and Jadzia and her crush on Morn
The whole episode starts off with a Morn hologram that "can't pass for Morn because it doesn't talk"
Idk i like the Captian Boday joke more myself
The Captain Boday joke is pretty good, but Morn's so great because so many different characters have WILDLY different dynamics with him! I also love the way Quark gets a few noodle incidents to explain his skills. Why's he that good with a phaser? He doesn't want a repeat of The Incident with the picky eaters from when he was a cook. Why's Riker calling in a favour? Because he hangs out with Quark and that crazy night left a favour open (also yeah hi Quark's in the middle of being questioned by a security guard while he's on his video call don't worry about it). Quark has a BUNCH of noodle incidents, and it really makes it feel like he's a clever dude with a lot of weird skills and like 50 side hussles of varying legality going on, in a way that just showing him doing that in episodes about him only wouldn't do.
The DS9 example I thought of was, "We do not discuss it with outsiders."
I never want to learn why bunnies frighten Anya.
A fun, but less common, inversion of this trope is when the audience *has* seen the incident(s) in earlier installments, but the minor characters whom the main cast meet have not and react accordingly.
It's a great way to contextualize the adventures of the main cast in relation to the rest of the world. Depending on the reaction, they could be impressive, insane, clever, lucky, or cursed according to the rest of the world. Sometimes if even leads to the main cast getting a chance to break from what they've had to be to go on their adventures.
I actually think this happened a few times with various companion characters in Doctor Who. The go on a crazy adventure, come back home, tell their family and friends, and those characters react accordingly. Usually, they get worried and fuss over the lead or turn it on its head with a " 'bout time you went and did something." And then the lead reacts to their reaction. It can vary a lot. Defiance, self-assurance, persuasion, coaxing, anger, or something else entirely. Then, with Doctor Who at least, the Doctor, who has seen these sorts of things happen every time they pick up a new companion, gets to weigh in. This usually reveals something about that particular Doctor and almost always tells something of their relationship with that companion.
I've seen it happen with many other stories too, but I genuinely can't conjure any further examples. But it's a very useful writing tool to give context to the characters, I think.
"Like water leaking through a dam", she suggested.
"Yeah." Percy smiled. "We've got a dam hole."
"What?" Piper asked.
"Nothing."
This is always a really fun thing to play with in TTRPGs.
Partly because the level of sheer brutality that most TTRPG parties end up normalising to themselves should fill literally any onlooker with overwhelming terror. Your party usually aren't the only one in that world, so other people KNOW what the multi-racial troupe of heavily-armed magically-gifted types can do, and why they should be alternately genuflecting or passing bricks hoping they're not on the wrong side of them today.
The other thing to do is have someone thank the party. They'll get real jaded if they feel like they're not having an impact. Just have a kid give them a flower or something, something innocent and heartfelt. They expect festivals in their honour and chests of gold, but they never expect the human touch. It keeps the murderhobo instincts suppressed.
the Mistborn era 2 Bands of Mourning hotel scene
The best Noodle Incidents come from dnd. If you've ever added a new player mid campaign, or a player that can only make it a few sessions, suddenly you have a treasure trove of noodle incidents.
truer words have never been spoken fellow ttrpg enjoyer
Hilariously, this has happened so much at our table that last night a player brought up a tragedy from his past, and the guy who first invited me into the group said, “Oh, I don’t think I was here for that. Was it before I joined?”
The response: “Kinda. I mean. It’s backstory.”
(Cue all of us opening his backstory document to confirm, yep, there it is at the bottom of the page.)
Just a mention of how not Steve died at our table...
my one group when we talk in depth abt the paladin maiming the fighter after she was corrupted and then an hr later vaguely reference that one time she convinced an enemy she was god .
Especially good if it transcends years and groups.
Fun thing I noticed reading through Calvin and Hobbes strips: the noodle incident ONLY starts coming up after a strip where Calvin is walking around with Hobbes after school, and mentions he had a bad day and doesn't want to talk about it. Hobbes asks if it had to do with some sirens he heard about noon that day, to which Calvin replies "I SAID I didn't want to talk about it" so there's a chance the noodle incident involved police and/or EMTs
Of course if it did it's weird that Calvin's parents were never informed about it
Calvin's parents don't want to talk about it, either.
@@JohnZ117 no they canonically don't know, there's a series of strips where Calvin's mom goes to a scheduled parent-teacher conference (it goes about as well as expected), and when she comes back Calvin immediately goes into Plea Bargain Mode and among other things is freaking out because he's certain Miss Wormwood told his mom about the noodle incident (he insists he was framed), at which point his mom replies with "what noodles?" and Calvin quickly tries to pivot. His parents actually have no idea the incident ever happened (or at least, they had no idea before that point)
Depending on who the EMTs were for, maybe nobody actually connected Calvin to the incident (or not to the degree that they could call his parents in), so they remained oblivious?
Honestly the noodle incident could involve macaroni art which is something I remember doing in school.
My guess is Calvin decorated an entire wall in macaroni and shenanigans ensued.
@@katiebirdie7868 I always thought that they were never able to connect Calvin with what happened of that he had a good enough alibi that he got away with it after initially coming under suspicion
The whole irony about trying to find an explanation about how the Millenium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" is the fact that according to the original script, Han was trying to sell Ben and Luke a load of bullshit, and Ben wasn't buying it.
Yeah that was the impression, he was trying to sound awesome and amazing and the best, but as Greedo points out, first sight of an Imperial patrol he dumped cargo and ran like hell
Alec Guinness knew the assignment, too. You can look at his face on the delivery of that line and he is doing the "really? you expect me to believe that?" face so hard.
Also, he was making a point about the speed of the ship in that line, so twisting it in Solo to restore the original meaning of parsecs makes it even more incoherent. I mean, I've seen someone say "hey guys, you know what ? What if in Star Wars, they measured time with a unit called "Paar' seks" ?". Much simpler solution, sticks it in a nice way to the people who complained about it, and it's not even like deforming real words to make Star Wars names is unprecedented. The ice planet is called Hoth.
But this explanation doesn't actually demonstrate anything.
Yes the script called for Han making a boast and Obi-Wan rolling his eyes at it.
But that would play out if Han was speaking nonsense and Obi-Wan knew it was nonsense, or if Han was just making a sensible, but bold claim. "I can jump 10kg into the air" vs "I can jump 10 feet into the air."
I don't know what explanation Solo went with, but a passible explanation has existed for decades in one of the books focused on Han, involving how close you can get to black holes.
Which is a silly proxy measurment, but its not like those don't exist in real life.
Computer Mouse chips express their accuracy in "DPI" or "dots per inch". Ie "this chip does 16k dpi" or "this new chip does 25k dpi" but that's literally just a sensitivity multiplier on the mouse output. And nobody runs a mouse above 7k or so anyway. It's just vaguely linked to accuracy in that - supposedly - the max dpi is the highest multiplier you can stick on the mouse without your cursor jittering around on the screen. Which implies some vague underlying accuracy, but it's a really stupid way to measure it.
@@Xylos144 You only reinforced the point a bit. It was BS; and all the attempts to reconcile it have to bend over backwards and twist rules, only to raise more questions than they answer. The effort was put in, but it wasn't worth the pay off.
If I was gonna to try and make good on this joke/boast about the Parsecs; I would played it straight, including a whole action sequence, and made the twist the fact Han has been describing it wrong all these years. This succeeds in both proving his boast was well earned, but also subverting things in that the incoherence of the boast are his own fault. So not only are people justified in assuming hes BSing, you also get the fun twist that Han is robbing himself of credit by using terminology wrong. It also fits into his character being successful more by being resourceful than competent/trained.
My favorite Noodle Incident is actually from L4D2 where Ellis tells you the hundredth story about his super cool friend Keith where they escaped a burning hospital only to realize that he was actually doing that adventure with you.
Not only does this mean he was telling the truth about all the other incidents, but he actually sees you as one of his closest friends now. ❤
This reminded me a lot of a teacher of mine experiment explaining the importance of abstraction. He said "A 100% accurate map of a city would be 100% useless, because it would be the size of the whole city " . I think telling a good story is the same thing, you need to choose what details are explained and what will remain in the shadows
Well, it'd be useless as a map. It'd be a great playground for a training simulation, though.
@@Duiker36 that would take A LOT of paper 🤣
Digital maps kicked your former teacher's butt, lol.
@@lpfan4491 not at all, a 100% accurate digital map would as useless as a printed one. No one needs all the details of the real street.
- "Oh, last year we had an Indian kid."
- "Oh yeah?"
- "Yeah, but they got him."
That joke was so good, the whole show ended up being a lot funnier and more emotional than I was expecting.
This trope is basically all the Family Guy cutaway gags except we don't get to see the gag.
What does that mean?
@@wisperton Scooby Doo
@@wisperton It's a joke from the new Ted show.
17 minutes about the trope where you never see what happened? I love this channel so much.
I like that in Red vs Blue the characters bring up noodle incidents in the exact same way they bring up onscreen incidents which I think helps the jokes flow nicely and provides enough explanation to understand on a surface level why some characters interact in certain ways with each other
That's exactly what I was thinking of too! Like why does Grif telling the story of how he helped fight the Meta sound like complete bs when we literally saw it happen?😂
I think that a bid part of the problem with Solo is that they tried to answer All the Noodle Incidents in One. The EU had many stories explaining Han's noodle incidents, but they were generally focused on One Incident per Story - handily implying that such incidents stretched out across his entire backstory, which in turn implies that there are Other Noodle Incidents we know even Less about.
The fact that some of the incidents got multiple explanations in different stories also helped.
Also the fan theory that Han was lying or misrepresenting his history when talking to Luke
Possibly in order to gauge how much he could extort from them
Ditto Star Trek and explaining how Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru test...
@@JeiJozefu That's not even a fan theory, it's based on the official creator commentary from the laserdisc and DVD versions of Episode IV. It was canon that Han was just bullshitting when he mentioned the Kessel run, but got retconned.
@@nathangamble125
The entire Star Wars franchise functions as a cautionary tale on intellectual property
What made Solo so cumbersome was the fact that they tried cram the explanation to all his noodle incidents into one movie. You could have told a great story around how Chewie and Han met. You could have told a great story about the Kessel Run. You could have told a great story about Han getting the Falcon. But they weren't concerned with telling any of those stories well...they were concerned with fitting them all in so the story of the movie had all the narrative satisfaction of grocery shopping.
Yeah, there are cases where a noodle incident can finally be shown well and be satisfying, but it needs to serve the storytelling. Solo was just filling in the blanks like noodle madlib. And there wasn't enough connective tissue to string the story together very strongly.
I always thought the same. They wanted to have an iconic Han Solo movie and his origin story. But those two doesn't work that well together.
Well put. The purpose of a Noodle incident is to make the story feel bigger than just what you're seeing. A good story is like a giant web, with everyone and everything interconnected. Noodle incidents are the far ends of the web, connected to elements that we can't see. Solo basically took all the loose ends of Han's story and showed exactly where they end, and then didn't create any new loose ends. So instead of making Han's story web bigger, it made it smaller.
Oh, thank goodness, someone in the top dozen comments made my point about Solo. Contrast this to Rogue One, where they made an entire heroic tragedy around a _single line_ from ANH: "Many Bothans died to give us this information."
@@VinemapleThe "Many Bothans died" line was in The Last Jedi and was about the second Death Star. Rogue One was getting the plans Leia sent to Tatooine with R2D2 in A New Hope regarding the first Death Star.
saw the word "noodle" and zipped over here at the speed of light. no clue what this entails, but i'm excited
update: i had NO idea that thing had a name, and now that's my favorite trope name ever. it's just so ridiculous, i love it
Samez
"No clue what this entails"
Well, then, the trope seems to be working.
Same
@@tdimensional6733 the real noodle incident was the noodle incident we found along the way
If we're talking favourite trope names, I'm partial to 'tomato surprise'
I love the Jock-strap incident that is mentioned in DBZA. It's not just mentioned once, several characters talk or think about it and everyone adds a new detail.
When you first started explaining this trope my immediate first thought was "oh this is why Solo flopped" and then hearing you use it as one of the the prime examples gave me so much satisfaction. The original series never needed an explanation for any of Han Solo's previous antics because his actions on screen tell you literally everything you need to know. He's arrogant, quick to adapt, and flies a ship that looks like a misshapen frisbee that is also one of the fastest ships in the galaxy, and yet somehow is still alive to give a ride to Luke and co. That's it.
And Lucas had to screw it up by nixing his character development arc of "dangerous scoundrel to hero" by having him not fire first.
Han seemed like the guy stupid enough to get himself into constantly dangerous stuff, but smart enough to always get out alive on and off for however long before he met Luke
Instead all that stuff happened in one wacky adventure he once had
@@degeneratemale5386 that's another problem I had. The time scale was all sorts of wacky. Aside from that couple year skip with him joining the imperial army, everything else feels like it happens in the span of a week.
Every crazy adventure that Han and Lando choose to reference all comes from the same 1 week span of time. And that's.. kinda underwhelming.
The original trilogy makes it at least appear that Han and Lando had years of history before Han won the Falcon "fair and square", putting a wrench in the friendship.
@@degeneratemale5386 In the original movie Han is a dangerous scoundrel who sells the idea that he'd leave the Rebellion in order to save his own skin; his sudden return is eucatastrophic and something we'd wanted without expecting it. Making Han a sympathetic character from the start completely misses the point.
3:49 "They shat on a farm, Sypha. And their shit was on fire. Burning devil goat turds from the sky.” Will never stop obsessing over how Trevor Belmont, who remains stern in the face of horrifying monstrosities, sees THAT as the most disturbing thing he's ever seen.
My favorite example of this: Agent Georgia from Red Vs. Blue. Washington is inexperienced with his jet pack, and the rest of the team consistently warns him to “not end up like Georgia.” They never tell him what happened to Georgia.
"You do not want to know."
Poor poor Georgia.
They probably imply that he died while using a jetpack
That was the second example that came into my head, behind TFS’ Jockstrap Incident running joke.
There were even a couple answered noodle incidents, like Washington's hatred for cars
really feeling the bit at the end abt mysteries that are SUPPOSED to be explained, i was kind of expecting Red to directly mention Sherlock as an example - they kind of did a reverse noodle incident where they implied that it WOULD be explained, and then realised that nothing they could come up with would be as clever as the theories that fans came up with in the interim, so they were like surprise!! we're not gonna tell you!! it's a noodle incident now!! which was. not popular lmao.
Even worse is that Moffat was like, "I've seen a lot of the fan theories on this, and one of them got it right." Which sent the fandom even further into a tizzy.
I think for Solo it would have been better if they instead gave us *more* noodle incidents, more adventures, show us things we never knew he did.
I still enjoyed it, because the banter and dialogue was exactly what made Han fun, and I extremely enjoyed that it shows Han doing EXACTLY what he was introduced doing in ANH - in trouble with someone who can make him suffer a LOT, and just trying to argue, bargain, or scam his way out of it.
No, seriously - go back and watch: He NEVER delivers on ANYTHING that he promises ANYONE in that movie. He just keeps getting into deeper and deeper trouble and running further away and getting into trouble with someone bigger and meaner than the FIRST guy he got in trouble with.
Also - y’know, it doesn’t NEED to be outstanding or new or groundbreaking. Sometimes, it’s okay to just be fun.
Yeah, my biggest problem is that they felt the need to explain absolutely everything about him away in one movie. All the way down to a little charm no one even noticed in the Millennium Falcon
@@cameronwilsey9334eh.
I did enjoy that it added a little bit of new perspective on some aspects - like, yeah that iconic blaster was obviously just for fan service, but from a different point of view, the fact that Han KEPT it, even though there’s definitely better blasters and it was given to him by someone who ultimately double crossed him… Han’s sentimental.
Little things.
I love Calvin and Hobbes references in other media.
I'm such a Calvin and Hobbes fan! It's lovely to see the noodle incident granted such iconic archetype status by possibly my favorite RUclipsr of all time. It's such a positive note in my life
@@BradyPostmaThe noodle incident has had iconic archetype status long before Red has had a channel.
@JohnZ117 , I like that she's explaining it for all the younglings that were too little to here about Calvin and Hobbes
@@BradyPostma to be fair Red isn't the first to name the trope this, it's been established as the trope name for a long time. But Calvin & Hobbes does absolutely deserve to be the trope namer
@@macaronsncheese9835 - Apparently I don't spend enough time on TV Tropes or wherever to have heard the trope referred to as "noodle incidents" before. Until this video, I'd only heard "the noodle incident" used to refer to its specific use in Calvin and Hobbes.
At this point, _Solo_ is practically the Star Wars fandom's own noodle incident. Remember that movie which gave Han Solo's last name a tragic backstory?
I watched that movie and forgot that was even a thing.
Thus making the name an example of "too on the nose" instead of an actual name that merely seems to have symbolic meaning to us.
As a man once said "We all know about the phrase 'Show don't tell', but people tend to forget about it's less known cousin 'Don't show, don't tell, quit while you're ahead'"
Okay but Ducktales had the perfect good *and* bad example of the noodle incident being revealed. The Spear of Selene was a very plot-integral noodle incident that, once resolved, opened a lot of character development for everyone involved, as well as introducing Della to the story.
Scrooge's unexplained feud with Santa, only ever referenced with "he knows what he did," however... No explanation for that would ever have been better than the implication, especially given Scrooge's origin as a character native to a Christmas story. That noodle incident just makes sense, and the explanation we eventually got just drained the comedy from every time it was mentioned before.
Amen to this, on both points! I the jokes about Santa. They were an incredible running gag, and the explanation just kinda... kicked the legs out from underneath the joke.
As soon as you started explaining, I was like "Oh, like Budapest!", and then you immediately used it as the example lol
Same!
That is the one that came to my head first, and Star Wars "Ninth time; that business on Cato Neimoidia doesn't count."
@osirisatot19 That one is actually explained in a novel called Labyrinth of Evil thst came out right around the same time as the movie.
That was my immediate thought too.
@@Clyde-S-Wilcox Still doesn't count for the movie and Star Wars media that isn't the movies gets retconned out of canon all the time.
A variant of this trope I’m a sucker for is the worldbuilding noodle incident, when a character mentions an important historical event, or a famous figure without going into why they’re famous because in universe, everyone knows them.
It just gives such depth to stories when used correctly, it tickles my writing brain.
_Star Trek_ pretty famously has a habit of naming three figures from the past. Two are people everyone has heard of, and one they made up, whether from our future/their past or an alien. The third one's accomplishments are only explained from context.
And these kind of scenes don't even loose their magic if they are eventually explained, as you can experience the story again, now being on the same level of knowledge as the characters.
@@boobah5643oh, I love whenever Star Trek does that, lol. It's especially fun if you've got a corner or two of the worldbuilding you like to dive into (personally, I'm such a sucker for Romulans, Vulcans, and pre-Surakian Vulcans in particular), so you can dive into beta canon and extended universe stuff, and when they pull the worldbuilding noodle incident (like "...great fools of history; you know, like how Hegelochus flubbed his line, Muhammad II killed Genghis Khan's envoy, and Nirak saw the approaching army and thought it was a sandstorm") you get to point at the screen and go "OH WAIT I KNOW ABOUT THAT" while (because it's a whole world!) still feeling like there's plenty of cool stuff and you're barely scratching the surface.
I think of Harry potter because there is one throw away line where Harry laments how his teacher is so dull that even talking about a war between wizards and giants he couldn't pay attention. Its a solid enough joke for anyone who has had a terribly dry teacher but I kept thinking "man a story about wizards fighting giants sounds way more interesting then the story i'm actually reading".
Ah the Neo Armstrong Cyclone Jet Armstrong Cannon. It's really perfect.
"I owe you from the thing with the guy in the place, and I'll never forget it" - Ocean's Eleven
"That was our pleasure."
"I'd never been to Belize."
That "Wouldn't you like to know weather boy" smacked me in the face like a fish, thank you.
Ah, a fellow Monty Python afishionado! *ba dum tss*
A good example of a noodle incident are SCP’s. A lot of SCP’s have information expunged or redacted for various reasons. Whenever something is expunged, it makes the reader wonder what it may be.
For instance, in the SCP-096 file, it says that it hunts down its target, kills it, and then [DATA EXPUNGED]’s it. We don’t know what it does but it leads to no remains of the target being left. It’s an interesting way of noodling an incident by having information ‘classified’
I never thought of it in that way. Just another "Leave it to the reader's imagination" Type, but that's basically what noodle incidents are (Except if it's explained, in some tale based on the SCP).
The old original ones are really good about this, and it makes it interesting to read and imagine. Every time I see some of the more recent ones, though, they just use it as a way to be lazy and not actually have to write anything, which is kind of sad.
@@sammym6239earlier ones were good with it, then it became pretty outrageous with how much was being expunged, redacted or corrupted (the red lake one is a great example where it feels like the author gave up halfway through) and more recently in reaction to this redacted meme have become massively overwritten for better or worse
@@polkka7797 "Wait, SCPs are just lazy hack writing?"
*"Always have been."*
The best part of Doctor Who is that the Noodle Incident could be a regular NI or actually a cheeky reference to an actual episode from the 70's or 80's or some kind of comic or audio drama. That or a juicy bit for a later writer to pick up on.
The problem is when they mix them up (looking at you, time war).
Indeed, even the (I think?) 4th Doctor had an episode where his past regenerations were shown alongside faces we'd never seen before. It adds intrigue and mystery... as opposed to the revelation that the Doctor has had lots of previous regens, all of whom seem to hold men in contempt. :(
One of the most textbook examples of “establishing a noodle incident, choosing to reveal the context, and it being underwhelming” imo is the Tenth Doctor’s thing with Queen Elizabeth I.
"The Terrible Zodin..."
People will be like "all fear is rooted in the unknown" and then get panic attacks on the way to a dentist appointment for their third root canal.
Touché dread is definitely a close second
Some people have trouble grasping the future, even if it is laid out. "But what if THIS time, something bad happens???" Even though nothing has changed. Not all fears are rational.
Burn notice actually did this in a fascinating way- the characters will often reference things they did in the past and adapt those situations to the present. It lets you see the general outline of each noodle incident while giving you a decent amount to go off of
My favorite one is where main character says they need to do "the same thing they did to that colonel with the drinking problem", to which another character complains that that took months to set up and they have barely an hour.
It ends up with them gaslighting a gangster and his brother until they think the gangster is having a complete psychological breakdown. Burn notice is a hell of a show.
It deserves more love, I agree. I watched it in its entirety when it came to streaming based purely on the curiosity its TvTropes entries created.
Yes! Thought of this, too. I love Burn Notice (yes, even the last season, alone at my Unpopular Opinion table 🫥), one of my most rewatched shows.
My favorite version of this is from the Penguins of Madagascar tv show where they reference Manfredi and Johnson, 2 other penguins we’ve never met and presumably had some horrible demise
My favorite was Skipper's apparent business in Denmark, between him and the 'dames.'
Except we do eventually see them, and they are very much alive, though very injured, in Seaville
What makes it even funnier is Manfredi and Johnson do show up briefly in the show, and they try to get Skipper's attention but fail. Gives us small breadcrumbs as to where they are but doesn't reveal how they got there. Pretty much having your cake and eating it too.
We actually see them briefly in an episode of the TV show; they're currently stuck at either the San Diego Zoo or some Seaworld analogue, I forget which. That the Penguins go there to rescue Kowalski and leave without ever seeing them even though they get to watch their former comrades speed off into the sunset triumphantly is played for a bit of dark humor.
@@mr.cobalt1668 Same braincell. XD
On the horror aspect of "nothing is scarier than what you're imagining," one of my favorite things about the original The Thing (1982) is that the monster looks different every time it shows up so you never have a chance to get used to it for the fear to stop taking effect.
Oh heck yeah, you’re right!!
Human Head with Spider Legs will always live in my nightmares. *shudders*
Thank you for bringing up the whole, "fans don't know what they want" angle of story telling. To many times I will see fans say the most idiotic ideas for a story and I just scream into my desk. Semi related, I am a drafter (a step bellow engineer) and we have a phrase of, "the customer actually has no idea what they want and we have to predict what they want." There is a reason why fans are not writers for the same reason customers are not engineers. Except when you have a customer that IS an engineer and then they either are the most entitled jerk because they think they could do it better, but just don't feel like it OR they are the nicest customer because they understand the reason you are making the choices you did.
I've often seen when doing software engineering that the customer _does_ know what they want, but they _don't_ know that they do actually know what they want, so they make up what they _think_ they want and it's usually not quite what they _actually_ want.
14:19 I think the way my mind responded to this image highlights the strength of this trope. Seeing “it involved a lawnmower and my mom was *not* happy” caused my brain to instantly conjure the image of a nice suburban house with a lawnmower comedically sticking out of one of a shattered upstairs windows with no logical explanation as to how it got there, which is exponentially funnier than other plausible explanations that can be as mundane as “I mowed my mom’s flower garden by mistake.”
How did the mower get way up there if you were mowing a flower garden?
Oh, my mom kept her flowers in windowboxes!
(my best attempt)
The "Llama Incident" being an inconsequential-yet-oh-so-iconic adventure alluded to but never explained for a good twenty-one 11-minute episodes of MILO MURPHEY'S LAW still cracks me up. Simply paying off the bit was so real of them.
Then we get woodpecker incident
And then it becomes a relevant plot point in Missing Milo, where they time travel back to the Llama Incident to coax the stampede into running over the bad guys.
And the explanatory episode was wacky enough for the bit!
This is the only time explanation was still funny to me.
The Llama incident was the first thing I thought of when she started explaining the trope
My favorite personal experience with the Noodle Incident was when, while plotting out a story, I had a character reference a noodle incident called the ‘Irish Job’. The entire story was just notes at this point, I just wanted to toss that like in as a way of showing the main character has done this type of thing before.
I showed my friend the summary for the story I had, and they saw the joke. Asked about it.
3 years later. I never wrote the original story. But The Irish Job is about 70k words in.
Good luck!
Seems like you found something that was important to your characters and decided to make that the story instead.
Yeah, definitely! I realized it was honestly the story the character was more emotionally invested in. Funny enough, it made the original plot look more like a Noodle Incident (just obvi in the future) since it was a much lower stakes, less emotionally charged scenerio.
Funny how writing does that sometimes @@Blockzord
I NEED you to know I'm dyslexic, and I fully read this comment as being about "Irish Jacob". Which made me chuckle because of the implication of there being a non-Irish Jacob in the story, and you not writing that Jacob's story but Irish Jacob's instead.
Okay but the funniest part is@@agustinamagpie that you're actually not totally wrong. It went from the main duel lead being a non-Irish mobster to the head of Irish Intelligence, who is in fact named Jack, which is somewhat close to Jacob.
so in fact, the story is now about Irish Jacob. More specifically Irish Jacob realizing his spouse of 3 years was actually a Russian Spy the whole time whoops.
One really good example of a noodle incident that actually got revealed in a really nice way is, ironically, a show who's whole plot just _is_ explaining how that noodle incident occurred. The entire incident is explained and elaborated on across multiple seasons of writing.
"And that's How I Met Your Mother."
"I always enjoy unspeakable horrors that are left up to the viewer's imagination."
- Matthew Taranto, author of Brawl in the Family
Couldn't have said it better.
Good old Taranto. Love that guy's work.
Exactly how I feel.
Was he talking about something in a Kirby game?
I imagine related to the comic where they're all telling scary stories around the campfire, and while we don't get to see Kirby's story, we do get to see the absolutely horrified reaction from his audience that none of the other characters' stories came close to evoking.
Unironically, The Bite of '87 from FNAF applies here since its one of the only events in the history we never see. Closest we see is a seperate bite that happened in '83 (or '84). Its just a bit of lore mentioned at the start of the series that puts players on edge immediately imagining what went wrong.
Ironically, the bite is kind of an example of what can go wrong with continuity writing. At first, it was actually good. It provided reasoning for how Fnaf 1 happens the way it does, then was the basis of a prequel that does not quite explain it but gives enough context for the fanbase to very much get what happened, while also using it as a basis to expands with more vague events(basically eating the cake and somehow having more cake than starting out with).
However, then...the series does a lot of weird overexplainly shenanagans after Fnaf 3 that makes the bite seem utterly insignificant in the chronology. Many people forgot that the bite is even meant to be canon anymore, because the noodle was basically covered with new details so hard that you cannot even see it anymore.
*markiplier meme*
FNAF is honestly the perfect example of maybe why you shouldn’t just add in Noodle Incidents. As fnaf’s entire story comprises of almost nothing BUT noodle incidents. Making getting invested extremely infuriating as nothing makes a lick of sense and nothing is answered, sometimes things just get retconned or faded to obscurity you can’t tell if it even happened anymore (like the bite of 87. Nobody even knows if that event actually happened anymore cause of all of the timeline changes)
lowkey i disregard the bite of 83 as a whole and choose to believe what happened in fnaf 4 is the 87 bite, all my homies hate source code retcons that make no sense
That "internalizing the fact that you don't need to explain EVERYTHING" is so effing true. Even if i, the writer, make an explanation.... sometimes i should just leave it as implied instead. That's probably more powerful
It's like the Avatar animated vs live action: the original animation didn't need to explain everything, it had had It's moments of silence where the viewers could fill the blanks themselves, interpret it or simply read the character's emotions. The live action fells the need to explain EVERYTHING, as if there wasn't already a decrease in media literacy, but it was also insulting, as the original creators trusted the viewers, they knew they were smart enough to understand and fill the blanks. And I know the live action was an abridged version so there were things they had to explain because showing it would take too long, but really, what was the point of making it then?
@@mega20able JRR Tolkein wrote his legendarium... to hold all the backstory he couldn't cram into the main story. He'd allude to things... and use as major plot points... in ways he couldn't explain in-story. In this regard it's a way to streamline story telling, it keeps narrative flow, but also lets the reader learn more. I actually LIKE it when writers compile stuff like that, trying to understand a fictional world is hard enough, and having a synopsis helps a lot.
Sometimes a story element can start off as a noodle incident in order to build audience curiosity, but then be explained later to satisfy that curiosity while simultaneously seting up some foreshadowing. An example of this would be the references to "going Turbo" in Wreck-It Ralph.
Another example is the noodle incident(as called in canon) from The Daily Maintenance of Shinozaki! They explain what the incident was, but it added onto the existing mystery of Human Repositories!
Shinozaki is an absolute joy to read
Thank you for bringing up turbo, that's a great one. His backstories only ever given later down the line but "going turbo" is mentioned even early into the movie. It's very good foreshadowing.
I love having a name for "The Noodle Incident" this is probably my favorite concept in storytelling.
It feels like a fun combo between "show don't tell" flipped on it's head, and "audience imagination" that works both for humor and drama
Milo Murphy's Law had this as a running gag - the llama incident. It eventually does get fully explained and does lose its luster, because it doesnt really manage to be any wackier than the normal shenanigans in the show. However, the characters do revisit it later from a different angle, as they use the chaos (and their knowledge of how it will play out) to lose their pursuers in a time traveling car chase. So it manages to go from a noodle incident into a long term chekov's gun.
Chekov's noodle.
@@lpfan4491we don’t talk about Chekhov’s noodle. It will ruin the mystique for when it almost certainly shows up later.
“I want to tell you the story of the creature from the vegetable soup, but I won't because I don't want to bother you with a story that has nothing to do with your adventure.”
Uh....what?
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb Earthbound
@@SuperBatSpider This explains everything and nothing at the same time, Brilliant.
I liked it in Milo Murphy's Law the first season they keep mentioning the llama incident and eventually they do explain it and it's absolutely hilarious
Ah, the Kessel run.
I heard this headcannon that was very likely, yet very unpopular among nerds: Han deliberately lied about the parsecs, he chose a length unit instead of a time unit in order to gauge how naive Ben was.
And then the movie came out, and discussions about it ended not with a bang, but with a thunderous sound of blowing raspberries.
"So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous raspberries."
@@Obi-Wan_KenobiGeneral Kenobi!
I figured it was a challenge to do it while traversing the shortest distance, zooming past obstacles and space warps.
I love that this trope is named for something from Calvin & Hobbes!
Yeah ik right?
As well it should be.
"And then there was the Bite of 87', it's amazing how long a person can survive without their frontal lobe,"
My sister and I say the Noodle Incident is a bigger mystery than the Bite of 87.
"Fans don't actually know what they want" is one of the most true statements ever.
Sometimes fans don't want the answer, they want to want it. And if you give it to them, they can't want in anymore, because they already have it.
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainity!" -- The Audience (channeling Douglas Adams)
I'm glad that the guy who multiple times requested a Noodle Incident Trope Talk finally got their wish.
There are a lot of noodle incidents in Phineas and Ferb about Doofenschmirtz’s life. How does a child disinherited by his parents in an Eastern European country get adopted and raised by ocelots, a species of wild cats from Central America? How does neither parents show up at his birth? So many questions.
Why does he keep putting self-destruct buttons on everything?
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb That one is easy, in the case that his inventions are ever turned against him, he knows exactly how to stop them. Like a true engineer or coder, it is an exit strategy on whatever he is building.
Granted, he could probably make them less obvious, but it is a trade between certainty of success and security in invention, and that certainty does NOT reach 100%.
“The line between horror and comedy is finer that we’d like to admit” also explains why horror movie spoofs work so well
I _hate_ watching horror movies. I don't like gore or jump scares, I don't like how horror makes me feel. **I love horror movie parodies!!** The added catharsis of laughing throughout a horror movie is _fantastic!!_ And even for poorly made horror spoofs this still works!
Give me all of them, from the "Scary Movie" 1-4 and "Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th" to "Bride of Chuckie" , "Shaun of the Dead" , and "Young Frankenstein". I'm gonna have a good time 😁
I think one of my favorite cases of that is the penguins of madagascar "why Skipper is a fugitive in Denmark" gag. Even when we do get some bits and details we still dont know what actually happend there and I kinda like it.
We got an episode where he manages to break back in and destroy Denmark's official records of his 'misdeeds', and when Private got a chance to read the folder before Skipper destroyed it, the documents were redacted into illegibility and Private himself couldn't read them anyway because there were no pictures.
As much as I loved Captain Marvel, the Goose scratch was a total cop-out. They could have cut it out and lost nothing.
One instance of on-page vagueness that's stuck with me for ages is in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator when someone asks how the Vermicious Knids can bite people if they have no mouths. "They have other things to bite with," Is Willy Wonka's answer. That's all the answer we'll ever need. Or want. When done well, this trope can be brutal.
The cat scratch still makes me mad. The MCU wasn’t satisfied ruining serious moments in the movie they were making, they felt like they had to go back and ruin serious moments in movies that were already made.
You can argue that Nick Furry would definitely lie about how he lost his eye to help make a point (like the bloody cards in The Avengers), but just because it’s not necessarily a continuity error doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It doesn’t just remove the possibility of seeing an epic adventure where he loses his eye, it removes a chunk of characterization and backstory we thought he had.
THE VERMICIOUS KNIDS!
Omg I'd forgotten all about them even though I was obsessed with Roald Dahl's books as a kid
@@Enray11 "Nick Furry." Heh.
I think the most frustrating part of the scratch incident is that they could have had their cake and eaten it too. Have the cat scratch Fury, have him with an eyepatch at the end of the movie, then he removes it and show his eye recovering.
Still kinda pointless, but it lets you have the joke without impacting his character long term.
I always personally assumed that the Vermicious Knids brought new meaning to the term "Butt-biter".
So in Star Wars Legends, there was a book trilogy that explained most of Han’s backstory. That worked however, because the events of the books covered like twenty years with time jumps. So how Chewie and Han met, why Han knows Shyriiwook, the Kessel Run, how Han win the Falcon, why Lando hates him…they’re all given time, interspersed with other adventures, MORE noodle incidents, and made so his backstory isn’t largely like ONE WEEK.
Things are explained, but the cool, experienced nature of Han is preserved.
I have that trilogy of books an one fun detail is it ends with “the beginning” kinda making the rest of star wars a meta noodle incident for those books
And the funny part is that many of the explanations are similar (like Han enrolling in the empire, but deserting and saving Chewie from Imperial slavery), they just work better when they’re not rushed
@@coldnova1037 yeah, it ends in the Cantina just before Luke and Ben arrive. It’s pretty good.
@@ErrantIndy yeah I wish they keep the ties between han and bria in cannon to link rogue one and solo but that might not have worked on the big screen
I can't believe I lived a Noodle Incident for my entire childhood.
Video is fantastic, and my brain just sparked from a real life incident, and I just had an idea of how to write the reveal of a noodle incident, that preserves the hilarity of it.
Abridged version is, when I was a kid, my mom told me a phrase that would make my dad laugh everytime I said it, but it was never explained to me why it was funny. "You Seniors." I asked for YEARS what this phrase meant, and nobody would tell me. Finally whenever I was old enough to realize what a senior was, my dad told me he would tell me the joke when I became a senior in highschool myself, but he warned me that I would be dissapointed in the joke because I had hyped it up since I was LITERALLY 5, but I had to know what it meant. Then without prompting on the summer between junior and senior year high school, my dad started telling me a joke, and it was only when he he got to the punchline at the end, that I realized he had finally told me the "You Seniors" joke... and it was SO BAD. It was such a dumb joke! It's not even really funny! When I tell this story to people about the joke, I don't even mention what the joke IS, because, like the Noodle Incident, finding out the joke just changes the story to waiting TWELVE YEARS FOR A JOKE THAT WAS NOT WORTH IT. (Side note from my parents: I was so young when they told me the punchline for the first time, they kept thinking that I would forget about it, and when I didn't, they actively dreaded the day they were going to have to tell me. When I called my mom to complain to her after dad finally told me the joke, she was cry-laughing at my pain, it was great.)
However! I feel like you could use that in writing for a great comedic effect! If you had a character to represent the audience to go through the indignation of discovering the Noodle Incident BUT the AUDIENCE doesn't see them reveal the Noodle Incident, you just see the Audience Stand-In Character be cheesed about the Noodle Incident not being as cool as it was hyped up to be, while still preserving the audience's knowledge.
This is fantastic, I love all of this 😂
It's not quite a noodle incident, but that suggestion at the end reminded me of an episode in the Penguins of Madagascar show, in which Private gets really curious about a joke the rest of the team is laughing about, but they don't let him see because he's "not qualified"
In order to get qualified, he goes on a solo mission (the main plot of the episode), succeeds, and at the end, gets to read the joke, and what does he have to say about it?
"I don't get it."
The audience never gets to learn what the joke is, obviously
Honestly O.K. K.O.‘s “Sandwich Incident” is my favorite version of this trope because they use the same three second flashback of the sandwich every time someone brings it up and it becomes like a running joke before we get a genuine, and pretty sad, view of what happened.
Too bad the Sandwich Incident only last for one season but at lest that one season have a lot of episode then the rest of other season. The only mystery after that is the shadowy figure mystery and who is K.O. father
Yeah I was slightly disappointed they let us see what the sandwich incident was. And that it was only tangentially related to a sandwich. I was hoping he just made a truly awful sandwich and thats why she hated him.
It's so funny to see the top comments being about the Jockstrap Incident from DBZ Abridged, when the series also has one of the best inversions of the trope: Dr. Gero and Namek. From his perspective, Namek and Super Saiyans are Noodle Incidents that the main cast keep talking about, but that he's completely in the dark on. So we the audience actually get to laugh at being the ones in on the in-joke, while a villain has to react to it straight.
“Now lie back and think of… Namek”
It is interesting how dramatic irony can blend with noodle incidents.
"I thought you'd be goopier." - if there is a more skewering reaction to a horror creature, I can't think of it at the moment.
Thanks for this video. I just realized that this is not just a story trope, it's a life lesson. Instead of spewing TMI, we can portray ourselves through our own Noodle Incidents. Or do people already do this? Maybe that's what jewelry and tattoos are for, and why people get mad and call them posers when there's no deeper meaning and story behind an iconic piece of personal branding.