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Stating the Simple Solution - TV Tropes
Lister:
Why don't we scrape away this mortar here, slide one of these bricks out, then using a rope weaved from strands of this hessian, rig up a kind of a pulley system so that when a guard comes in, using it as a trip wire, gets laid out, and we put Rimmer in the guard's uniform, he leads us out, we steal some swords, and fight our way back to the 'bug!
Kryten:
Or we could use the teleporter.
Lister:
Or, in a pinch, we could use the teleporter.
There is a problem. A dramatic, elaborate, and dangerous (and sometimes, pretty darn cool) solution is proposed to solve it. It's the Only Way! Then some other jerk points out that a much simpler Mundane Solution exists that would probably be more effective. Usually followed by sighs, face palming, or even screams of frustration from the others who didn't think of that, or, more rarely, berating the one who made the simpler suggestion as if they're the imbecile.
Most often, it's a villain (usually of the Diabolical Mastermind or Evil Overlord variety) proposing the complicated scheme, and it is a savvy minion (or occasionally even The Hero himself) questioning their boss's grade-A Bond Villain Stupidity. However, it's not unheard of for clever villains to brag about the fact that they're eschewing elaborate Death Traps and intend to just shoot the hero, making them a No-Nonsense Nemesis. Sometimes, it's a Hyper-Competent Sidekick wondering why the hero is adhering to Honor Before Reason.
There are fanfictions written for this sole purpose.
If nobody states the simple solution until after they've spent the whole story on the Zany Scheme, it's a "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot.
See also Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?, Sherlock Can Read, Actually a Good Idea, Lampshade Hanging, and Impossibly Mundane Explanation. Just Eat Gilligan is built around not having anyone do this. If someone actually does the simple solution, Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs. If the simple solution is well acknowledged as an oversight, expect Didn't Think This Through to be a response. If someone gives an actual reason not to take the simple solution, it's Simple Solution Won't Work.
Examples:
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Advertising
- As part of an ad campaign for the introduction of Netflix to Canada, one commercial features a boy watching a Bar Brawl scene in a Western on TV. At the end of the commercial, when two of the cowboys are duelling hand-to-hand on the second floor, the boy remarks, "They know that they have guns, right?"
- One Credit Karma ad begins with a group of kids looking over a treasure map, planning a The Goonies styled adventure to save their house, when the lead kids' mother turns on the light and says they've refinanced with the advertised service, and they'll be fine. One child responds "Your mom's mean."
- This Fruit of the Loom ad has the company inventing a type of breathable underwear which was tested in a wind tunnel and decide that the cool tests it went through warrants giving a cool name. They toss out a variety along the lines of "Pant-arctica", "Shiver Me Trousers", and "Brrriefs"; the janitor incredulously suggests just calling it "breathable underwear" but is ignored. They're about to decide on "Breezy Fo Sheezy" when a narrator pops in and overrules them—it really is just called "breathable underwear".
Comic Strips
Game Shows
- On Taskmaster:
- This often pops up during the on-stage segments where Greg or Alex will point out much simpler way the contestant could have done the challenge. Sometimes they enforce it as well by giving a task to a contestant which is apparently just a Luck-Based Mission, have them come up with ludicrously complicated means of finding the answer (or just guess and hope for the best), and then tell them that the answer was in plain sight and they didn't have to "solve" it at all. The Pendulum Draws The Eye had a task which involved finding which sock, out of fifty, contained a satsuma orange with very limited means of searching them. During the show they were told that the giant number 8 on the side of the caravan, which normally isn't there, referred to which sock contained the orange.
Greg: I'm a bit irritated. Someone seems to have graffitied on the side of my caravan!
Alex: That was awkward. So I obviously put the satsuma in the 8th one along and the big eight was there to remind me but I left it up. If any one of them had looked back at any moment, that would have been so annoying!
James Acaster: I just remembered that I hate this show!
- And sometimes the contestants just do something silly on their own, often while trying to be smart, only for Greg or Alex to point out there was a much simpler way. The Series 4 finale prize task was to bring in the most money. Mel brought in nearly a million pounds... but most of it was Monopoly money with only 240 pounds on top. Alex points out that she genuinely did bring in 970,000 pounds worth of Monopoly money, that is 48 board games worth, then points out that had she just brought in the 815 pounds she spent buying all the Monopoly boards it would have been much more than anyone else had brought in so farnote Hugh brought in 2 million in Vietnamese Dong, worth about 72 pounds, Joe brought in 250 pounds worth of pennies, Noel brought in a currency he invented, and Lolly hadn't gone yet. You practically see the color drain out of her when the realization hits her. While Lolly still would have won (she brought in a blank cheque to go one pence above whoever had the most, and also 2000 pounds as a backup), Mel would have gotten 2nd instead of 4th had she not put in the extra effort.
Myths & Religion
- Alexander the Great is said to have encountered the legendary Gordian Knot, along with a prophecy that whoever managed to loosen and untie it would become the ruler of all of Asia. After studying the knot for a bit, he drew his sword and cut the knot in half, and went on to fulfill the prophecy (by the standards of the day, of course — by modern standards he got nowhere close, only making it as far east as the Indus River).
- In the binding of Fenrir of Norse Mythology, Loki asks the other Gods why they don't just kill him while he's bound, especially since it's foretold Fenrir kills Odin come Ragnarok. The other Gods don't kill him because Fenrir was bound in a holy place, which would have become tainted with both the violence and the blood.
Podcasts
- Hello Internet: In one episode, Grey laments that try as he might, he can't find a collared shirt with the exact attributes he wants. He's gotten so frustrated about this that he has occasionally, but very seriously, considered starting a small factory just to create the shirts he wants. In the next episode's follow-up, Myke mentions that many fans asked why Grey didn't just go to a tailor. Grey admits that this had never occurred to him, partly because he unconsciously thought of tailors as something from a bygone era.
- In one episode of Mission to Zyxx the crew is burdened with an overly complicated orders during a mission to disrupt Ted Ronka's political campaign.
C-53: The plan is this. Seesu sent this along and it's spent pretty much our whole trip here printing out. It's very comprehensive.
AJ: That's a pretty thick binder
C-53: Yes it's very, very thick. In fact I'm still sort of getting through the-
AJ: Beat him in the head with the binder. Ok, let's do this.
Radio
- John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme:
- Skewered in a sketch about two kings suffering from really bad communication problems. A third party, stuck between the two bickering kings and fed up of the whole mess, suggests rather than sending messengers back and forth (thereby messing up the fields where they live) the king just Shoot the Messenger. The messenger tries pointing out the reason this is frowned upon, and then that if it's such a problem the king could just give him the day off, but by the time he says this, the king's already shot him.
- When King Herod learns about Jesus, he tries ordering the death of every infant under the age of two. His aide tries pointing out the sheer monstrousness and impracticality of such a response, and that if Jesus has just been born he's obviously not going to look like a two year old, and if by some freak of coincidence their target slips the net Judea will be suffering a public relations nightmare. The aide then says if he's that fussed he could send two guards to check the stables for a new born baby, but Herod insists on the infanticide regardless.
Roleplay
- In Darwin's Soldiers: Scrodinger's Prisoners, Dr. Shelton and a soldier have to get through a room with an angry doctor. The soldier suggests this as an option. Turns out that's pretty much what they do.
- In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, a group of students try to leave the school and discover that the front doors and windows are locked. They start to panic, with one of them picking up a guitar to smash one of the windows. Cue one of the students asking why they don't just try the emergency exit, or ask one of the teachers what's up.
Theatre
- In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Guildenstern, taking Hamlet's claim that " I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" literally, and then gets more and more convoluted in his attempt to work out where southerly actually is, until Rosencrantz suggests going and having a look. Guildenstern retorts "Pragmatism?! Is that all you have to offer? You seem to have no conception of where we stand! You're not going to find the answer waiting for you in the bowl of a compass, I can tell you that!" (This is indicative of their dealing with the more philosophical aspects of the play; Guildenstern trying to work things out from first principles, but unable to do so because he has no starting position, and Rosencrantz suggesting things that are more straightforward, but are equally stimmied by the void they find themselves in.)
Urban Legends
The problem with urban legends along these lines is that sometimes, the "simple" solution isn't always that simple. But it still makes for some interesting thinking along these lines:
- One anecdote describes a group of monks arguing over how many teeth are in a horse's mouth. One naive young man suggests finding an actual horse and counting the teeth. The monks shout him down, saying that scientific questions are properly answered not by empirical methods, but by consulting old authorities. The anecdote serves to ridicule the medieval "scholasticist" approach to science. Only problem is that it's unattested before the 20th century, so that may never have been the case at all.
- When the Americans and Soviets first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens wouldn't work in zero gravity. The urban legend goes that NASA, in solving the problem, spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside-down, underwater, on almost any surface, and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 degrees Celsius. The Russians, in solving the problem, used a pencil. It kinda went that way, but there was an extra wrinkle — pencils might have worked, but they weren't exactly safe, because there was concern about the effect of graphite dust and debris in zero gravity — so the Americans weren't ignorant of the pencil solution so much as thought it was too risky (Apollo 1 bursting into flame on the launch pad unsurprisingly made them Properly Paranoid about fire safety), and the Soviets weren't so much clever as willing to take the risk. The Americans switched to felt pens, and the Russians switched to grease pencils on plastic tablets. Eventually, a private entrepreneur independently developed the space pen with $1 million of his own funds, and sold them to NASA and Russia for $3 each.
- A crew transporting a house had difficulties with an overpass that their payload was 3 and a half inches too tall to fit under. They were standing there, scratching their heads, debating how to find an alternate route, when a kid on a bicycle who was doing his morning newspaper route asked what was up, he said, "Why not just let some air out of the tires and then re-inflate them after you've passed under the bridge?" A few minutes later, the crew were on their way again. It's a cool story about how a simple solution can come from an unlikely place — except this particular solution only buys you a little bit of clearance, so it only works if you were really close to making it with inflated tires to begin with. If you spend too long on deflated tires, you can wreck them and be unable to continue even after you cross. It's a solution oversize load routing uses all the time, but in a very intricately planned way.
- A joke is told about a driver who gets a flat tire just outside the fence of a mental asylum. Nervous about being stopped in such a place, he quickly starts to change the tire, putting the nuts in the hubcap while he wrestles the spare on. He then accidentally kicks the hubcap and the nuts fly out, disappearing into the tall grass beside the road. Suddenly, he hears a voice: an inmate watching him from just inside the fence tells him to take one nut from each of the other three wheels and use those, and that should serve to hold the spare in place long enough for him to get to a garage and replace them. He says, "That's a great idea! What's somebody like you doing in a mental asylum?" The inmate's reply is "I'm in here because I'm crazy, not because I'm stupid."
- A story about John von Neumann has him given the puzzle:: "Two bicycles twenty miles apart start approaching each other each moving at ten miles an hour. At the same time, a fly that moves fifteen miles an hour starts flying back and forth between them until it is crushed when they meet. How far did the fly travel?" He immediately answers "Fifteen miles". The person posing the puzzle notes that most people try to sum the infinite series instead of spotting the simple answer (the bicycles meet in one hour, so the fly traveled fifteen miles in that hour). In response, von Neumann said that he did sum the infinite series in his head.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Genocide Jack is a Serial Killer, said to be the Ultimate Murderous Fiend. Jack has a modus operandi of only killing certain targets with scissors, while leaving the word "BLOODLUST" as a Calling Card nearby written in blood. The second case has the students apparently come across another one of Jack's victims. However, Jack points out that several aspects of the victim's death are inconsistent with Jack's usual methods (such as the victim's head bleeding from blunt force trauma instead of being stabbed with scissors). As the students twist themselves in knots trying to figure why Jack has deviated from the usual method so much, Makoto says that the obvious solution is that Jack didn't do it. And indeed, Jack isn't the culprit for this murder. In fact, Jack is accused of three different killings throughout the story, and is responsible for none of them. When questioned why the Ultimate Murderous Fiend isn't killing anybody, Jack responds that it's simple pragmatism — Jack doesn't want to deviate from the calling cards, and the goal of the Deadly Game is to literally get away with murder. So Jack decided it would be a lot easier to just not kill anyone.
- Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: While most of the students are breaking their brains puzzling over how the killer of chapter 1 managed to move around during a blackout and throwing out ever more outlandish solutions, Akane puts forward that the killer had their own light source. This is true — it was the flame from a portable stove.
- Fate Series:
- In Fate/stay night's Heaven's Feel scenario, True Assassin points out to his master that the easy and pragmatic thing would probably be to have him kill Shirou and Rin, who are running around like headless chickens desperately trying to find a way to defeat the Shadow that's eating half the town. Said master, who is an utter sadist, replies that it's more fun to do nothing, watch them fail, and have the Shadow kill them. This comes back to bite Zouken in the ass when the Shadow, which is Sakura, kills him and True Assassin.
- In Week 3 of Fate/EXTRA, you and your Servant figure out that the way to escape Caster's identity-erasing Reality Marble is to remember your name after it's erased. When you ask Rin how to do this, she suggests writing it down.
- Fate/strange Fake: At one point, Gilgamesh suggests to his Master Tine Chelc that rather than waste time searching for and fighting the other Servants, they could win the Holy Grail War if he blows up the entire city with Ea since all the other Servants and Masters should be somewhere within. Tine balks at the suggestion, not wanting to sacrifice the townspeople. Gilgamesh shrugs and says he just wanted to see how she would react.
- Oddly enough, Arcueid in Tsukihime asks Nero this — technically, she points out he's been messing around too much by making Shiki suffer, which just triggered his Nanaya side — after Nero decides he's going to have fun and slowly eat Shiki instead of killing him outright. After Shiki starts kicking his ass, he realizes maybe it would have been a better idea not to play with his food.
- Umineko: When They Cry: This is used to solve the Closed Circle mystery of episode 2's First Twilight - how was the killer able to get 6 people inside the chapel when only Maria had the key and Rosa is absolutely sure that the door to the chapel was locked? Simple - Rosa is lying about the chapel being locked. Similar principles solve many of the other Twilights, in fact. Just figure out who is lying.
Web Animation
Web Original
Web Videos
- When the The 8-Bit Guy is talking about getting 80 columns on the Commodore 64 he gives four possible methods. The first one involves doing it in software which is slow and eats up a good chunk of the machine's already limited memory, and the second two involve two third-party add-on cartridges that are rare, costly, and support next to no software. The fourth solution, though? Just buy a Commodore 128 which has full Commodore 64 compatibility as well as native 80 columns support.
8-Bit Guy: The Commodore 128 basically is a Commodore 64 inside. And these are actually more common and cheaper to buy than one of these! (Holds up one of the add-on cartridges)
- In the Achievement Hunter Let's Play GTA V episode "Lindsay's Heist", the gang attempts to push a port-a-potty into a truck from a high building, a port-a-potty that would be used to carry their "loot" and be picked up by the Cargobob. Ryan Haywood points out the obvious solution - just get the Cargobob and take the port-a-potty with them. There's a brief silence before they tell him to shut up.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd:
- When reviewing the Game.com he talks about its Internet capabilities and explains how it required a wired connection to a modem since this was the days before wifi. So, you could buy the Game.com, plug it into your modem, and navigate through it's tiny text-only touch screen, but since you don't own a modem with Internet for no reason and can't leave the house with it anyways...
Nerd: WHY NOT JUST USE A COMPUTER?!
- When reviewing the various Hydlide games, to compare the game to literal shit he quotes Harry G. Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit which gives an elaborate theory on why people find feces repulsive to which he gives a much more simple solution to the question:
On Bullshit: Just as hot air as speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment. What remains when the vital elements and food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death. Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive.
Nerd: Or is it perhaps because it stinks?!
- During his Making Of episode when talking about how he does all the special effects for the Nerd episodes, he states he uses Photoshop to create them and then inserts them with Final Cut Pro on the advice of Dave Willis. Having met Willis in a bar, he asked him for advice on how to do special effects and, rather than getting a grandiose explanation, was simply told "Just do it in Photoshop!"
- James Rolfe made a video for "Cinemassacre's Top 10 Worst Movie Clichés". Number 1 is labeled "Stupid Villains" and boils down to him demanding "Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?!" It ends with a The Good, the Bad and the Ugly movie clip that subverts and lampshades the trope.
- When AstralSpiff is harshly critiquing and debunking an obviously fake Speed Run of Poppy Playtime, he takes note of how the player is honestly decent at the game and actually manages to keep up with competitive times until the cheating begins. Spiff points out how, if the guy just made a legitimate speedrun, he'd could easily get top 50 on the leaderboards and would get a lot more views and subscribers than he could ever get with his convoluted scheme to cheat.
- In Campaign 3 of Critical Role, the group needs to get the name of a dwarf that they're looking for, managing to track his last known location to an inn. While everyone is discussing how to get the name from the tavern's owner — mostly coming up with ideas that are either risky or illegal — Ashton suggests just bribing the tavern owner to tell them the name of the dwarf. Twenty gold and some sly wording later, Ashton has a name.
- Fire Department Chronicles has several videos doing this for 9-1-1 with everything from giving a saline IV to a woman suffer hyponutremianote In the show, she was given a catheter in the middle of a crowded bar to using airbags to lift a firetruck off Buck rather than trying to lift a sixty thousand pound truck by hand. His most common solutions are using water to cool something off or giving someone a tourniquet to stop bleeding.
- The Funniest Minecraft Videos Ever: In the "Prison Escape" video, Jack Manifold is in prison in order to stay away from his wife. He's there because she's not there; when she dies, he gets to leave. Tommy points out that he could just go to, say, Argentina, because she's not there either.
- Dan Avidan of Game Grumps describing how the Endoraptor of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom worked and why he thinks it's utterly ridiculous: Dan:
I didn't hate it, but it was definitely doofy. So there's a new dinosaur they've created called the Endoraptor, and they've genetically engineered it so it can be used as a weapon. What you do is you take a gun with a laser scope on it and you point the laser at something that you want attacked and you click the trigger and the Endoraptor goes and destroys whatever the laser was pointing at.
(
Beat
)
Dan:
You may be thinking to yourself: why not just have a gun that shoots
bullets
?
Arin: (Bursts out laughing)
Dan:
Which is definitely the main Internet problem with that movie. That would be more effective, really. You've already laser-targeted your thing. That was a big issue people had with it.
Arin:
Yeah, that problem was already solved!
- Lampshaded in Gun Man Rises starring Gun Man.
- Karl Jobst:
- During "The Worst Fake Speedrun on Youtube" he gives a thorough analysis of Badabun's faked speedrun of Super Mario Bros. and highlights all the various people they stole footage from to cobble it together, then questions why they went to this much effort. He points out how there are well over a thousand speedruns of that game, and how they could have made a much more believable video by just using one of those rather than this big edited together Frankenstein's monster of footage from Tool-Assisted Speedruns (which is obviously not human) and world record holders like Kosmic and Darbian (who are so well-known their footage will instantly be recognized).
- In that same video, Karl also points out how Badabun could have simply made a video explaining speed running tactics, and easily gotten just as many views (maybe even more) with a lot less effort than slicing up and stapling together a bunch of footage. Karl then points out that Bismuth, a YouTuber with far fewer subscribers than Badabun, did just that. Bismuth's video got more than double the views of Badabun's video, and Bismuth started a successful series of speedrunning explanations starting from there. And it was all totally fine with the speedrunning community, because Bismuth outright says that the footage he uses isn't his own and gives credit where it's due. Had Badabun done the same thing, Karl speculates that Badabun would have coasted by without any trouble.
- During "These DOOM Cheaters Were Caught Red-Handed" video, Karl goes in-depth into how difficult it is to make a fake Speed Run that won't immediately be recognized as such. Karl says that professional Speed Runners are better than Sherlock Holmes at spotting the absolute smallest details — even so much as a single frame out of place, one errant move, or one tiny hiccup in the physics will be enough. This is a clue that the player is using artificial slowdown, save-state abuse, footage splicing, or cheat engines in order to get a better time. Karl then quips that it would take such a good understanding and so much mastery of a game to make a seamless faked Speed Run that it would probably be easier to just actually do the Speed Run.
- When Youtuber Kolanii set out to make as rich as possible in only 100 days of Minecraft, right out the gate he sets out to use the various tried-and-true money-generating tactics like selling tons of sticks to tons of fletchers, which requires chopping down tons of trees and burning through tons of axes. While doing this he points out he could just make an automated farm to make tons of emeralds, but vetoes it because he'd "just go AFK while it ran and it would be too boring".
- When Jarvis Johnson is being subjected to Troom Troom's surreal DIY videos in his Troom Troom is Actually The Worst Channel on Youtube video, after seeing numerous nonsensical life hacks to deal with body fatigue when using computers he points out how they could just avoid these weird maladies by sitting properly.
Troom Troom: Do your legs tend to fall asleep from sitting at a computer for a long time?
Jarvis: ...No, actually. These people need to learn about ergonomics!
- Internet Historian
- When he is talking about the third time the internet came together to pester Shia LaBeouf by stealing his He Will Not Divide Us flag, this time hoisted in Liverpool on the roof of a museum, he dubs their first plan to steal it "Operation Occam's Razor": where they just walk in the front door, take the lift to the roof, and grab it. It doesn't work as Shia was Genre Savvy by this point and had hired a security team who had disabled the lift and had the flag under guard. The internet still managed to get on the roof and only failed to get the flag due to the sheer dumb luck of lacking a knife or scissors needed to cut the zip ties.
- When he and JonTron did Future, their biggest criticism with Walmart's virtual reality online store evokes this. They bluntly ask who, in their right mind, would want to do shopping in a virtual store with an actual shopping cart and having to find their products that way, all the while being haunted by a virtual reality assistant, when you could just have a simple interface where you find products on a website either by browsing or searching and then select what you'd like to buy. And then point out this system already exists and has for quite some time. Jontron:
You know what I love about this thing, is it's like, isn't this just Amazon.com but with extra steps?
Internet Historian:
Yeah, and with this annoying lady who's preventing you from like listening to music or whatever in the background!
Virtual Assistant: And now... ON TO ELECTRONICS!!!
Internet Historian: Ugh
... Instead of just opening a web page, alright here's the thing with the stuff, instead you have to go through this rigmarole of being into the shop, you have to get back to the electronic store, and as you do that every time she does this stupid fucking line "and now onto the fun stuff!" Yeah, yeah, yeah; skip, skip, skip!
- Most Khaby Lame videos are presented this way, with a random person on TikTok using an overly complicated, pointless method or contraption to perform simple tasks, followed by Khaby sarcastically doing it the simple way. An example would be a person taping the end of a fork to use it as a makeshift spoon for soup... followed by Khaby simply taking out a spoon to perform the same action.
- Kitboga is a scambaiter popular on Twitch and YouTube. Episode 2 of Baited - "The Professional," features a standard refund scam in which supposedly too much money is transferred into Kitboga's fake bank, and he needs to return it via gift cards. Kitboga spends over a half-hour running the scammer in circles, suggesting other, simpler methods by which they could get it sorted out, such as simply transferring the money back to Kitboga, or calling Kitboga's bank. When the scammers attempt to blackmail Kitboga by threatening to take all his money and/or send people to hurt him for not complying with the scam, Kitboga calls their bluff by asking the scammer why they're dicking him around with gift cards. In short, if the scammer had the capability to steal all of Kitboga's money or physically threaten him, then why didn't the scammer just do that instead of trying this gift card angle? This is usually enough to get the threats to stop, as the scammer realizes that Kitboga is too Genre Savvy to be fooled.
- LegalEagle, during his analysis of Liar Liar, points out a number of times where Fletcher could have gotten around things by being completely honest — that is not by using a half-truth or just refusing to speak. Like when Fletcher wants a continuance because he can't lie, it's explained he could have pointed out that the previous lawyer withdrew just yesterday and he's a brand-new lawyer on the case: this would be a more than valid reason for a continuance, as a lawyer needs ample time to familiarize himself with a case.
- Linus Tech Tips: In "My monitor just got an UPGRADE," Linus goes through the arduous task of VESA mounting two very heavy 32:9 monitors on top of each other. At the end:
Linus: Could I have just put a TV on my desk? Yes. But DAMMIT! This is Linus Tech Tips, that's not how we do things around here.
- When The Nostalgia Critic is watching Jurassic Park (1993), he harshly criticizes the opening scene where the park worker is killed by the velociraptor, noting the glaring Idiot Ball-ness of the scene and how there were dozens of much easier and safer ways to get that thing into the pennote which he then follows up with a "what if?" sketch in which the Jurassic Park personnel discover the hard way that velociraptors have reflexes fast enough to catch the tranquilizer darts and toss them back. Critic:
They try to transport one of the highly intelligent raptors via Portal Cube, when, of course, something goes wrong. You know, was there really no other way to get these things into their cages? Brute force doesn't do much compared to common sense. I mean, look at the forklift. They could lift it just a little bit higher, then boom. drop it in. Or tranquilizers. Why not tranquilizers? Couldn't they just knock these things out and then slip them in that way?
Or were the raptors too smart for that plan?
- Screen Rant Pitch Meetings: Comes up often. Usually, the Screenwriter will describe characters doing something elaborate and dramatic but totally nonsensical when there is a much more straightforward solution to the problem that the Producer will point out.
- A variation of this happens in the Venom Pitch Meeting, only directed at the Screenwriter himself as opposed to the characters in the film. At the beginning of the film, the two Simbiotes land in Malaysia, and Venom is taken back to the lab, and Riot escapes. The Screenwriter then talks about all the legwork he had to do in order to get Eddie Brock into the lab so that he could bond with Venom as well as get Riot into the lab so that it could bond with Drake.note So a scientist working for Drake goes and talks to Eddie Brock to report about Drake performing experiments on Homeless people, and helps him break into the lab so that he could take pictures of it, as opposed to simply taking the pictures herself. Then Eddie finds the Venom Symbiote and bonds with it. Meanwhile, Riot latches onto an elderly woman in Malaysia and spends six months aimlessly wandering around before latching onto a young girl who is about to fly to America. The young girl then somehow gets into the secure lab so that Riot can bond with Drake. The screenwriter even says that it will probably be the "least fun" part of the movie but he needed to somehow get everyone into their positions so that the plot could get going in earnest. The Producer points out that he could eliminate the need to do all that legwork by simply having Venom be the one who escapes at the beginning. After admitting that the chance could "Save about 45 minutes of crap and make the whole thing a lot more fun to watch..." the Screenwriter refuses to make the change because he "doesn't want to."
- "Shark Pool" is a trailer for a fictional movie about a shark in a swimming pool. A guy offers the suggestion of "just don't go in the pool". Unfortunately, he's the Only Sane Man and the rest of the guests are Too Dumb to Live.
- S&D Tier: Morgan has an affinity for planning high-stakes, overly-complex heists that take months to prepare. Their best friend Alex is the most powerful supervillain in the world and completely unkillable, and would do anything for Morgan. Alex repeatedly emphasizes that they'd be glad to just walk in, kill or otherwise incapacitate anyone who got in the way, take the prize, and bring it to them, and they could easily accomplish this in five minutes or less. Morgan refuses to take them up on it, as that would take all the fun out of it.
- In the video "Sherlock Holmes Sucks at Deduction", parodying the franchise's common use of Conviction by Counterfactual Clue, Sherlock deduces via his Sherlock Scan that Watson had a smoked tofu sandwich on rye bread with mustard for lunch, because he has small yellow stains on his sleeves, well-made clothes, and a few telltale physical signs of a vitamin B-12 deficiency, associated with vegetarians. This turns out to be completely wrong; he's not a vegetarian, and he had soup for lunch. Another guy in the room points out that he could tell Watson had soup because he smells like soup.
- The Spoony Experiment:
- StacheBros:
- In "Bowser Junior's Time Out", Bowser Jr.'s plan to get his Barbie Future Dictator of the World set from his father's bedroom was to learn how to dig a hole to China and come back at the other side of the door. Koopa tells him he could've just opened the door since it probably wasn't locked, which is something Junior didn't realize until 3 hours of digging.
- In "Home Alone", when Wario and Waluigi try to get past a door in Bowser's Castle with a heated doorknob, Waluigi tries sneaking underneath the door since he's so skinny, but Bowser Jr. electrocutes him with an Amp. Afterwards, Wario gets in by simply pushing the door open.
- Steam Train:
- When playing Besiege, after attempting to create hilariously and stupidly overly complex contraptions like "The Fuck-O-Matic", only for things to keep going awry and realizing the only times he's beaten levels are when he's gotten lucky and accidentally stumbled into victory, he ultimately has an epiphany and decides to make things much more simple. Ross:
So, I made a truck with bombs on it and a cannon, but
the cannon does jack shit
so I thought "why don't I just drive some bombs into the building?" like this HELLO!
(BOOM!)
Zone conquered
- When playing King's Quest VI, Dan gets so wrapped up in trying to solve the very strange Alice in Wonderland style puzzles on the Isle Of Wonder that he completely forgets to try just walking through the gate to Chessboard Land. Ross has to point this one out to him:
Dan: Alright, this is a clusterfuck of shit I can't do anything about.
Ross: Are you serious?
Dan: Well, yeah. I can't get there without the wallflowers, and I can't get near the wallflowers without the snapdragons–
Ross: You can't get through the door?
Dan: ...Oh.
(Alexander goes through the door)
Ross: C'mon, man! You didn't think to check the door?!
Dan: Sorry...
Real Life
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