Just For Fun / Pitch the Work

So you have a series.

However, one day someone asks the dreaded question: "How do I pitch it to the higher-ups?" And suddenly it hits you — trying to sum it up in as few sentences as possible might be the way to do it. Brevity Is Wit, after all, so pitch the work using its High Concept.

Important Note: This is a game, not a proper trope. Please don't use it as an entry on a work page.

Compare Better Than It Sounds and Worse Than It Sounds, for when a work is given a brief, yet exaggerated description that makes it sound better or worse than it actually is, respectively, rather than merely providing the work's High Concept.

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: A young boy meets and falls in love with 100 girls during his high school career.
• Attack on Titan: Dual-wielding steampunk spidermen child-soldiers fight man-eating giants bent on wiping out mankind.
• Assassination Classroom: School children have to assassinate their octopus-like teacher before he blows up the Earth.
• Death Note: An Ordinary High-School Student finds a notebook and discovers that he can kill whoever he wants simply by writing their name into it.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: A Former Teen Rebel becomes homeroom teacher to a class of teens who hate teachers.
• Sailor Moon: Super Sentai for girls.
  • Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!: An all-male Sailor Moon where (almost) nobody takes it seriously.
• Space Battleship Yamato: "These are the voyages..." or at least Japan's version.
• Back Street Girls Gokudolls: After a failed mission, 3 Yakuza Mooks are forced into sex change operations by their Bad Boss in order to become Japanese Idols.
• Pretty Cure: Saint Seiya for girls.
• K-On!: The Beatles as schoolgirls.
• Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: An autistic schoolboy steals a military death machine and starts a interplanetary conflict after his girly name is made fun of.

Asian Animation

• Flower Angel: What if Cardcaptor Sakura had fairies instead of Clow Cards?
• Happy Heroes: On a planet far away, years into the future, five superheroes which were formed from machines called stones defend against various monsters.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: A wolf attempts to use crazy schemes to capture goats, but fails.

Comic Books

• All Fall Down: What if all the superheroes and supervillains in the world lost their powers... and never got them back?
• Godzilla in Hell: Godzilla goes to hell.
• Hellboy: What if a literal demon was raised by humans and became one of the good guys?
• House of M: What if mutants ruled the world?
• Irredeemable: What if Superman got genocidal? As for its second part, Incorruptible, what if Zod was the only one who could stand against him?
• Nemesis: What if Batman was the Joker?
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Teenaged mutant turtles trained in the secret art of Ninjutsu.
• Superman: Red Son: What if Superman landed in the Soviet Union instead of America?
• Y: The Last Man: A man and his pet monkey are the only survivors of a Gendercide.

Film — Animated

• Chicken Run was literally pitched to Steven Spielberg by Peter Lord as "The Great Escape with chickens".
• The LEGO Movie: An ordinary construction worker in a LEGO universe gets mistaken for The Chosen One and goes on an adventure to stop the president's evil plan.
• Nearly every film from Pixar can be summed up using the question "What if [x] had feelings?," as demonstrated here.◊
  • More specifically, WALL•E was born from a question a writer asked shortly after Toy Story wrapped: "What if mankind left Earth and someone forgot to turn off the last robot?"

Film — Live-Action

• Two studio execs are credited with separately coining the term "High Concept": Don Simpson (business partner of Jerry Bruckheimer up to Simpson's death in the early 1990s) of Paramount and Jeffery Katzenberg of Disney. Just look at the movies they've overseen, and the results are obvious.
• Air Force One: Die Hard on Air Force One with Harrison Ford as the President.
• Alien was pitched as Jaws in space.
  • James Cameron simply pitched Aliens by writing the title on a chalkboard and drawing a line on the S (making it a dollar sign). The next day, the film was greenlighted and given an $18 million budget.
• Ali G Indahouse: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but in the UK and Mr. Smith is Pretty Fly for a White Guy.
• Back to the Future: Young man goes back in time and accidentally prevents his own birth, has to play cupid to his own parents.
• Big: A 13-year-old kid wishes he was big, wakes up as a 30-year-old man.
• Blood Red Sky: Snakes on a Plane, except replace the snakes with vampires and framed with a conventional airplane hijacking.
• Bugsy Malone: A murderous 1930s gang war, as reenacted by a bunch of singing kids with custard pie guns.
• Children of Men: What would the world be like after 20 years of no children being born?
• Dave: The Prisoner of Zenda in 1990s America.
• Dave Made a Maze: As the title says, but it's Bigger on the Inside.
• Die Hard: Terrorists take over a building, leaving one man to sneak around and thwart them. (It's such an encapsulated concept that it became a shorthand for other high-concept pitches.)
• Enchanted: Disney Princess from an animated movie gets stuck in cynical live action New York.
• A Fistful of Dollars: Yojimbo recycled as a western.
  • Yojimbo: Red Harvest recycled as a Jidaigeki.
• Forrest Gump: A single man obliviously influences dozens of landmark events throughout the Baby Boomer generation's lifetime.
• Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Freddy vs. Jason and AVP: Alien vs. Predator: what if two popular, pre-existing monsters fought each other?
• Groundhog Day: Man is forced to relive one day over and over.
• Hook: "What if Peter Pan grew up?"
• Inception: A heist film set inside the human subconscious.
• Iron Sky: Nazis on the Moon.
• Jaws: Giant shark starts attacking humans on New England island.
• Junior: Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant.
• Jurassic Park: Dinosaurs are remade in a nature park and run amok.
• Lockout: Escape from New York, only in a Cryo-Prison In Space. It still borrowed so much from the original that John Carpenter sued for plagiarism and won.
• Mannequin: A man falls in love with a department store mannequin who comes to life... but only he can see her true form.
• Memento: a man who can't form new memories tries to solve a murder by himself.
• Mona Lisa Smile: Dead Poets Society, Gender Flipped.
• National Treasure: Adventurers unravel clues hidden throughout well-known pieces of American history to find a long-lost, unparalleled treasure.
• Next: Man who can see two minutes into future fights terrorists.
• Nick of Time: Man's daughter is held hostage to force him to carry out a suicidal assassination.
  • Olympus Has Fallen: Under Siege in the White House.
• Phone Booth: Sniper holds man at gunpoint in a phone booth.
• The Player: Not the concept of the movie itself, but it's set in the film industry, and most of the characters rattle off high-concept pitches to each other to try and make a blockbuster. It's been credited with teaching aspiring film-makers how to pitch ever since.
  Griffin: Twenty-five words or less.
• Real Steel: Rocky with robots.
• The Rock: Die Hard on Alcatraz with chemical weapons.
  • Or, James Bond’s final mission, long after his lifestyle caught up with him.
• The Shallows: A shark traps a surfer on a small rock in the ocean.
• Sharknado: "Sharks. Tornado. Sharknado. Enough said!"
• Snakes on a Plane. There are snakes. On a plane.
• Space Jam: Michael Jordan plays basketball with the Looney Tunes.
  • Space Jam: A New Legacy: Another basketball player, LeBron James, plays alongside the Looney Tunes within the broader Warner Bros. multiverse.
• Splash: Ordinary guy falls in love with mysterious girl who turns out to be a mermaid.
• Suicide Squad (2016): Supervillains are forced to be a high-risk black-ops group for the government in exchange for reduced sentences.
• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby: Was literally pitched by simply writing on a chalkboard: "Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver."
• Ted: Mark Wahlberg and a talking teddy bear.
• The Terminator: Robot is sent back in time to kill the savior of mankind before he is born.
• The Thing from Another World and its remake: humans trapped in a cramped, isolated (ant)arctic base with a killer alien.
• Timecop: It's right there in the title.
• Titanic: James Cameron pitched the movie as "Romeo and Juliet on the RMS Titanic".
• Tower Heist: Ocean's Eleven in New York.
• Transformers: A boy and his car.
• Tremors: Jaws in a desert.
• Tucker & Dale vs. Evil: a slasher movie where the backwoods hillbillies are the heroes and the college kids on vacation are the murderers.
• Under Siege: Die Hard on a battleship with nuclear weapons starring Steven Seagal.
• Unstoppable: A runaway train carrying dangerous chemicals is en route to slam into a residential area, and there's nobody on board to stop it. Its taglines were even shorter: 1 million tons of steel. 100,000 lives at stake. 100 minutes to impact.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Humans and cartoon characters live side by side in 1947 Hollywood.
• The World's End was conceived as "Some drunk guys save the world."

Literature

• Bret Easton Ellis called the premise of American Psycho a high concept: a serial killer on Wall Street.
• Jules Verne: His concepts are usually stated in the title:
  • Five Weeks in a Balloon
  • Journey to the Center of the Earth
  • Around the World in Eighty Days
• H. G. Wells: His concepts are usually stated in the title:
  • The Time Machine: A story about travelling to The Future.
  • The Invisible Man: A story about a man who has become completely invisible.
  • War of the Worlds: A story about Mars declaring war on Earth.
• The Left Hand of Darkness - An ambassador from Earth has to try and convince the humanoid members of another planet to join the federation of all the other planets - and the planet he's on is both stuck in an Ice Age and has no gender.
• The Wish List: A recently deceased girl cannot enter Heaven or Hell due to having a neutral soul, and decides to help an Old Man whom she helped rob when she was still living in order to get enough good karma to get into heaven. This involves helping him attain things from a list of Wishes
• Harry Potter: A boy goes to a Wizarding School while trying not to get killed by the Evil Overlord who killed his parents.
• Ciaphas Cain: Flashman's space adventures in the 400th century.
• Constance Verity: A Regular Caller Hero who's Seen It All is sick to death of adventuring, but adventures keep happening.
• Honor Harrington: Distaff Counterpart Horatio Hornblower in space
• Temeraire: What if the Napoleonic Wars were fought from the backs of intelligent dragons?
• Flashman: Famous war hero who's secretly a coward trying to keep his reputation and hide intact in Victorian England.
• The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn: Two friends buy the LA Dodgers, and move them back to a rebuilt Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in the mid-1980's.
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: a young girl develops the ability to taste the emotions of people in the food that they make.
• The Dresden Files: "The only wizard in the Chicago phone directory", or "Dirty Harry Potter".
• Brandon Sanderson likes doing these for his books.
  • Elantris: What if the gods lost their magic?
  • Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: What if the evil overlord won?
  • Steelheart: What if all supers were evil?
  • The Stormlight Archive: What could justify ridiculously large anime BFSs? This one gets poked fun at the most, as Stormlight is by far his most ambitious series, clocking in at ten books ^note and multiple novellas that follow minor characters in the main series of more than a thousand pages each. So he's writing over ten thousand pages to justify really big swords.
• Most books by Stephen King fall into this.
  • IT: Seven misfits fight a monster that lives in the sewers.
  • Stand By Me: A writer looks back to the weekend when he and three friends traveled to see a dead body.
  • The Stand: After a plague kills most of the world's population, the survivors gather in a battle between good and evil.
  • The Mist: A mysterious mist full of alien monsters envelops a small town.
  • Mister Mercedes: A retired cop hunts for a serial killer.
  • The Running Man : In a dystopian Alternate History , a man participates in a deadly game show.
  • Misery : After he's injured in a car accident, a writer must write for his life against his deadliest fan.
  • 11/22/63: A man goes back in time to save John F. Kennedy, but finds it's easier said than done.
  • Cujo: A Saint Bernard catches rabies and goes on a rampage.
  • Under the Dome: A small town is suddenly trapped underneath an impenetrable dome.
• Captain Underpants: Two boys hypnotize their principal into thinking he's a superhero.
• The Hound of the Baskervilles: Sherlock Holmes investigates a demon dog haunting the heir to a sinister country estate.
• The Urban Fantasy series of Simon R. Green can be summed up as:
  • Nightside: Sleaze-era Soho as Fantasy Kitchen Sink
  • Secret Histories: James Bond in enchanted Powered Armor
  • Ghost Finders: Who You Gonna Call? to Do Something about ghosts
  • Ishmael Jones Mysteries: Undercover alien solves Ten Little Murder Victims scenarios
• Animorphs: Five teenagers (and their alien friend) fight Puppeteer Parasite aliens by transforming into animals.
• InCryptid: A family of former Monster Slayers become Monster Conservationists to protect Benevolent and Non Malicious Monsters from Van Helsing Hate Crimes.

Live-Action TV

• 21 Jump Street: Cops who look so young they can pass as teenagers, go undercover in high schools to fight youth crime. (Also re-used for the same-named 2012 movie remake, though that one played the concept much more for laughs.)
• Dexter, a serial killer whose cop father taught him to kill wrongdoers.
• Forever, immortal man wakes up unscathed everytime he dies.
• House: Sherlock Holmes as a Medical Drama.
• JAG: Top Gun meets A Few Good Men
• Keen Eddie - New York detective fighting crime in London. Or Dempsey and Makepeace meets Starsky & Hutch.
• Miami Vice: According to legend, the actual pitch was "MTV Cops."
• Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills: There's a group of teenagers with tattoos. They fight aliens. They are from Beverly Hills.
• Smallville: Superman meets The X-Files with teenagers.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: Wagon Train... to the stars. While this was the original pitch, it's not really a fair description of the series - it was used to pitch the show because The Western was the big thing in The '60s. A more accurate high concept would be "Horatio Hornblower doing William Shakespeare Morality Play episodes in space"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer was actually described verbatim by Joss Whedon as a High Concept show - What if the ditzy blonde followed by a creepy crawly in a dark alley is not only ready for it, but also kicks the monster's ass?
• Seinfeld liked to lampshade the idea that it was "a show about nothing," especially when Jerry and George pitch a Show Within a Show to NBC executives, although that is not an ideal High Concept for the show itself.
• The Colbert Report. It's said that when the show was pitched as "Stephen Colbert parodying Bill O'Reilly", it was picked up immediately without even a pilot.
• Most live-action shows on Disney Channel, particularly in the shared universe most of the shows inhabit are built around a High Concept, which usually boils down to "Normal, everyday teenagers... with a twist!" The only real exceptions being Even Stevens, Lizzie McGuire, Good Luck Charlie, Girl Meets World and Andi Mack. There's almost a quota of one low-concept show at a time.
  • That's So Raven: Teenage girl who has faulty psychic powers.
  • Cory in the House: Younger brother of psychic teenage girl goes to live in the White House.
  • Phil of the Future: Future family stuck in modern times.
  • The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: Twin boys who live in a Boston hotel.
  • The Suite Life on Deck: Same twin boys, but now teenagers and living and attending high school on a cruise ship.
  • Hannah Montana: Teenage girl with a superstar alter-ego.
  • Wizards of Waverly Place: Family of wizards who live in New York City.
  • Sonny with a Chance: Teenage girl who stars in a sketch comedy.
  • JONAS: Teenage boys in a world famous band.
  • Zeke and Luther: Teenage boys strive to be world-famous skateboarders.
  • I'm in the Band: Teenage boy is a guitarist for heavy-metal band.
  • Shake it Up: Teenage girls who star in a dance show.
  • Austin & Ally: Teenage singer-songwriter duo and their two best friends.
  • Jessie: Breakout star from Suite Life on Deck plays Small-town teenage girl who nannies for a wacky big city celeb family.
  • A.N.T. Farm: Class filled with child prodigies.
  • Dog with a Blog: the High Concept is right there in the title.
  • Liv and Maddie: Teenage star returns home to live with her twin sister and parents who work at her high school.
  • I Didn't Do It: Friends in a high school setting with (usually) Book Ends in the form of Hilarity Ensues.
  • K.C. Undercover: A family of secret agents.
  • Bunk'd: The celebrity children from Jessie go to summer camp.
  • Best Friends Whenever: Teenage girls get the ability to Mental Time Travel.
  • Pair of Kings: Two brothers discover they are kings of a Pacific island colony.
  • Crash & Bernstein: Boy who only has sisters gets a brother in the form of a Living Puppet.
  • Kickin' It: Teenage boys and girl practice martial arts.
  • Lab Rats: Boy discovers bionically enhanced teenagers.
  • Mighty Med: Teenage boys become doctors at a top-secret hospital for superheroes.
  • Lab Rats: Elite Force: Two of the bionic teenagers from Lab Rats join forces with the teenage doctors and their superheroine friend from Mighty Med.
  • Kirby Buckets: Teenage boy aspires to be a cartoonist, and later starts traveling to alternate dimensions.
  • Gamer's Guide to Pretty Much Everything: Teenage competitive gamer must work his way back to the top after a Career-Ending Injury.
  • Bizaardvark: Teenagers are hired by a content creation studio and make web videos.
• Similar to the Disney Channel example, many of the shows in the Nick Verse are built around some sort of High Concept.
  • Zoey101: Teenage girls who go to a formerly all-male high school.
  • Big Time Rush: Teenage boys in a world famous band.
  • iCarly: Teenagers who host their own web series.
  • Victorious: Teenage girl who goes to a highly competitive and exclusive arts school in Los Angeles.
  • True Jackson, VP: Teenage girl who becomes the vice president of a fashion company.
  • Marvin Marvin: Teenage alien is sent to live on Earth by his parents.
  • Sam & Cat: Two breakout characters from iCarly and Victorious become roommates.
  • Wendell & Vinnie: Adult Child becomes the legal guardian of a Child Prodigy.
  • The Haunted Hathaways: A mother and her two daughters move into a house haunted by the ghosts of a man and his two sons.
  • The Thundermans: Super-powered twins - one an aspiring super-heroine and the other an aspiring super-villain - live with their super-powered parents, super-powered younger siblings, and a former supervillain who was transformed into a rabbit.
  • Henry Danger: Teenage boy becomes the sidekick to an indestructible Manchild superhero.
  • Game Shakers: Teenagers launch a mobile game studio with the financial backing of a wealthy rapper.
  • Knight Squad: Medieval teenagers at a knight academy.
• Home Improvement: Tim Allen is a family man and host of a DIY TV show; exaggerated forays into Manliness leads to An Aesop.
• Jack of All Trades: Bruce Campbell plays an American Revolution Veteran-turned-Secret Agent/masked vigilante fighting Napoleon Bonapart like Adam West's Batman.
• Last Man Standing: Refreshed Tim Allen vehicle serving as an updated version of Home Improvement (or even All in the Family) with 21st century sensibilities.
• Mork & Mindy: Wacky space alien is sent to Earth to study and report about Earth culture; rooms with young single woman living in Boulder, Colorado where his misunderstandings of Earth culture lead to wacky hijinks.
• The Monkees: Struggling, zany Beatlesque Anglo-American pop-rock quartet in The '60s has madcap adventures.
• Person of Interest: Reclusive billionaire and ex-CIA agent fight crime with a machine that predicts people involved in violent crimes before they happen... but they don't know if the person of interest is the victim or the perpetrator.
• How I Met Your Mother: A guy tells his kids the story of how he met their mother.
• Gilmore Girls was pitched as a series about a mother and daughter who are more like friends than parent and child. It was picked up immediately, without even a hint of a script.
• Transparent: It's about a Trans Parent.
• The Good Place: Due to a mix-up, a Jerkass accidentally gets sent to Heaven and has to make sure that nobody finds out. Or not.
• Leverage: A Broken Bird former insurance broker forms a team of thieves to take down Corporate jerkasses.

Pinball

• Apollo 13: 13-ball multiball!
• Flash Dragon: It takes your picture if you get the high score.
• Monster Bash: Put the Universal monsters together for a rock concert.
• Varkon: Play pinball in a Video Game cabinet.

Tabletop Games

• Applied to sufficiently important (and of course player) characters in several recent incarnations of the Fate system, including The Dresden Files RPG. The character's high concept (in Harry Dresden's own case, for example, it's "Wizard Private Eye") constitutes one of his or her "aspects" — which means it can be invoked for mechanical bonuses or compelled to make his or her life more difficult — and even enjoys a measure of script immunity in that the rules make it the single hardest aspect to actually change once established.
• BattleTech: A Fantasy Counterpart Culture Feudal Future with Humongous Mecha.
• Ironclaw: Just another Fantasy Counterpart Culture Tabletop RPG, but this time with furries.
  • Jadeclaw: A Wuxia film roleplaying game... with furries.
  • Furry Pirates: The Golden Age Of Piracy, The Game... with furries.
• Warhammer 40,000: In the grim darkness of the distant future, there is only war.
• F Orce Of Will: Magic: The Gathering without the mana screw.

Theatre

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Hamlet from the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with absurdism
• Blithe Spirit: A remarried widower accidentally calls back the ghost of his first wife; Hilarity Ensues.
• Mrs. Hawking: What if Sherlock Holmes were more like a lady Batman?
• A Chorus Line: A look into the lives of Broadway dancers.
• Einstein on the Beach: An examination of the life and work of Albert Einstein…with no plot.

Video Games

• AkaSeka: Massive Multiplayer Crossover of all eras of Japanese history as a match-3 Romance Game.
  • An overly Japanese Yume100.
• Assassin's Creed: A Historical Fiction Conspiracy Thriller series of Wide-Open Sandbox third-person stealth games centered around a Secret War between two ancient societies that change the course of history.
• Bloodborne: Hunt your nightmares in a Gothic city plagued with monsters and kill an infant Great One.
• Chulip: Figure out how to kiss pretty much every living being in the area in order to kiss the literal girl of your dreams.
• Control: A woman with Psychic Powers fighting monsters in the House of Leaves that's used for the SCP Foundation. Plus it's in the same universe as Alan Wake.
• Def Jam Series: Rappers from the Def Jam label (and a few actors) in a fighting video game.
• 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand: 50 Cent fights mercenaries in the Middle East in search of a priceless diamond encrusted skull.
• Fighting Games: Choose your character and beat all the others.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover variants: choose characters you love from different series and beat up characters from other series.
• Gravity Rush: A superhero-sandbox about an amnesiac, scantily clad Goth-GyaruGirl with the power to fall in any direction fights blob monsters in a Japanese-anime version of France floating in the sky.
• Jetpack Joyride: There is a Jetpack, you steal it, take it for a joyride and see how far can you go.
• Katamari Damacy: Roll everything up into a ball. Everything.
• Kingdom Hearts: Final Fantasy, but with Disney characters.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The moon will crash into the land within three days and the only person who can stop this is a child in a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• Mass Effect 2, on the back of the box: "They call it a Suicide Mission. Prove them wrong."
• Monster Hunter: Hunt big scary monsters, carve their remains, and use them to make better gear to hunt more big scary monsters.
• Monument Valley: Find a path through the impossible architecture.
• Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-: Buddhas as pretty boys.
• Orcs Must Die!: An idiot must Hold the Line against a horde of Orcs and their allies.
• Pac-Man World: In this 3D platformer, Pac-Man must rescue his kidnapped family from Ghost Island and defeat the robotic imposter Toc-Man on his 20th birthday.
• Pikmin (2001): Use Pikmin to recover your missing ship pieces before time runs out.
  • Pikmin 2: Return to the planet and use Pikmin to collect treasure to save your company from debt.
  • Pikmin 3: Use Pikmin to collect fruit to save your planet from a food shortage and recover your teammates and the cosmic-drive key so you can get off the planet before your food runs out.
• Planescape: Torment has one called by this name in the vision statement.
  The player is a scarred amnesiac immortal in search of his identity. On the way, the player character will kill a lot of people... including himself.
• Pong: Two paddles hit ball back and forth.
  • "Avoid missing ball for high score".
  • Ping Pong: The Video Game
• Portal: A hybrid First-Person Shooter and Puzzle Game where the only weapon is a gun that shoots portals that you can go through with an insane killer AI acting as Mission Control.
  • The Laconic entry for the game used to be "Darkly humorous puzzle game in an empty laboratory that kicks the laws of physics in the nuts.", so called that because in order to solve the trickier puzzles, you need some excellent spatial reasoning skills. Or as the game calls it, "Thinking with portals!"
• Racing Games: Race other players or the computer and finish faster than everyone.
• Shoot Em Ups: Shoot everything that isn't you. Sometimes seen in a longer form: "Shoot 'em up, eat the dots."
  • The latter is especially true for Ikaruga, though it's more "Shoot 'em up, eat the same-colored dots as your ship."
  • Taken to its logical extreme with a Finnish freeware overhead shooter called Tapan Kaikki, "I Kill Everyone".
• Shoot Many Robots: Killer robots are rampaging and it's up to this hillbilly to shoot many robots and save the town.
• Sly Cooper: A Gentleman Thief raccoon steals from other criminals.
  • Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus: Thief raccoon fights 5 criminal bosses to steal his family's thieving instruction manuals.
  • Sly 2: Band of Thieves: Like the first game, but it's open world, you get to play as Bentley and Murray, and it's Darker and Edgier.
  • Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves: Like the second game, but you get to play as more characters, you're on a boat and you get to replay any mission you want!
  • Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time: It's like the third game but with time-travel, you get costumes that give you new abilities and you get to play as Sly's ancestors.
• Souls-like RPG: Get killed again and again as you struggle your way through a Dark Fantasy world.
• The Tale of Food: Chinese food as pretty boys.
• Tengai Makyou: What if, instead of Dragon Quest-style role-playing games being Japanese writers inaccurately romanticizing Western knights-and-dragons mythology, they were based on the work of Western writers inaccurately romanticizing Japanese mythology?
• Touken Ranbu: Japanese swords as pretty boys.
• Tyranny: The Empire already won – and you work for it.
• Yandere Simulator: You have a crush on your Senpai. Pair off, run off, or bump off everyone who gets in your way.
• You Have to Burn the Rope. That's not a Zero-Context Example, that's literally all the context you need.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Fifteen students, each of whom are the best in the world at a specific thing, are trapped in a prestigious school and forced into a Deadly Game by an evil teddy bear mascot.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: New students, new killing game, except now it's on a tropical island and there's a good mascot too.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: New students, new killing game, set in a school again, and the evil mascot now has kids.
  • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls: Two teenage girls, one with an anti-robot gun and the other with a Superpowered Evil Side that's had a Heel–Face Turn, are targets in The Most Dangerous Game run by a group of tweens who want to kill all adults and create a children-only paradise.
• Steins;Gate: A self-styled Mad Scientist accidentally invents a time machine and is hunted by a mysterious organization.

Webcomics

• Eldritch Darling: Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: the webcomic.
• Kiwi Blitz: A girl with a kiwi-shaped Mini-Mecha attempts to fight crime. (Emphasis on "attempts.")
• Lookouts (a Penny Arcade spinoff): The Boy Scouts in a Heroic Fantasy world.
• Mob Psycho 100: An Ordinary High-School Student loses control of his Psychic Powers whenever his emotions get too strong, so he tries to supress them in order to live a normal life.
• One-Punch Man: What if Anpanman beat Baikinman once and for all? And just couldn't stop winning?
• Sleepless Domain: Take Puella Magi Madoka Magica, give everyone therapy, and let the girls kiss.
• Star Impact: Boxing with superpowers.
• xkcd proposes the perfect action movie: "River Tam Beats Up Everyone".
  • A similar concept to this is Sam Hughes's "One Hour Fight scene".

Web Original

• A few of the Channel Awesome contributors feature this as the hook of their shows (or at least did initially):
  • The Nostalgia Critic: Manchild revisits movies from his childhood, and discovers that they're not as good as he remembers.
  • The Cinema Snob: A snobby art-house film critic who's been reduced to reviewing 1970s porn and exploitation films.
• Froghand: "The Longform Zero Punctuation"
• If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device: The God-Emperor of Mankind, after 10,000 years on the Golden Throne, receives a text-to-speech device to communicate with the Imperium.
• TwoSet Violin: Asian-Australian violinists prove that Classical Music Is Cool.
• Plenty of examples from AlternateHistory.com
  • Decades of Darkness: The United States becomes an expansionist slave empire after Thomas Jefferson dies of a heart attack in 1809.
  • A World of Laughter, a World of Tears: Walt Disney is elected president in 1952.
  • For All Time: FDR dies of a stroke two weeks after Pearl Harbor, leading to possibly the ultimate Crapsack World.
  • Chaos Timeline: What happens to the world if the Mongol Empire was never formed?
  • Green Antarctica: Antarctica is a habitable landmass with its own native population.
  • A Greater Britain: Oswald Mosley never becomes a fascist and is elected Prime Minister of Great Britain.
  • Twilight Of The Red Tsar: Joseph Stalin survives his stroke and remains in charge of the Soviet Union.
  • Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire: Vladimir Zhirinovsky takes control of Russia in 1991.
  • Holding Out for a Hero: Gustav Stresemann Survives: Germany doesn't fall to the Nazis in the 1930's.
  • Decisive Darkness: What if Japan didn't surrender in 1945?
• Uno: The Movie: Five men log into a game of Uno which ends up lasting way longer than it should.

Western Animation

• Transformers: Two warring factions of alien robots (one good, one evil) come to Earth and fight one another.

Dialogue examples:

Anime & Manga

• Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun: "What would you get if a pre-superpowered Izuku Midoriya went to Yokai Academy instead of U.A. High? Wacky hijinks apparently."

Films — Live-Action

• 1408: "It's an evil fucking room."
• Hot Tub Time Machine: "Must be some sort of... hot tub time machine."
• National Treasure: "You think there's a treasure map.... on the back of the Declaration Of Independence."
• The trailer for The Bounty Hunter gives us "You're telling me you want me to kidnap my ex-wife for money?"
• Lawn Dogs:
  Trent, age 21: I'll make you a deal. We can be friends, if you can keep it a secret.
  Devon, age 10: What's wrong with you and me being friends?
• Parodied in Network, where a scene demonstrates what happens when the word "unique" isn't taken seriously:
  "These are those four outlines submitted by Universal for an hour series. You needn't bother to read them. I'll tell them to you. The first one is set at a large Eastern law school, presumably Harvard. The series is irresistibly entitled "The New Lawyers." The running characters are a crusty-but-benign ex-Supreme Court justice, presumably Oliver Wendell Holmes by way of Dr. Zorba. There's a beautiful girl graduate student, and the local district attorney who is brilliant and sometimes cuts corners. The second one is called "The Amazon Squad". The running characters include a crusty-but-benign police lieutenant who's always getting heat from the commissioner, a hard-nosed, hard-drinking detective who thinks women belong in the kitchen, and the brilliant and beautiful young girl cop who's fighting the feminist battle on the force. Up next is another one of those investigative reporter shows. A crusty-but-benign managing editor who's always gett..."
• Speed: "Pop quiz, hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do?"
• The Toxic Avenger: "Okay, so what if you made a Slasher Film about a Bloodbath Villain Origin... but it's about an unironically heroic superhero with an environmental message?"
• Unstoppable: "We're not just talking about a train, we're talking about a missile the size of the Chrysler Building!"
• Transformers: "I bought a car. Turned out to be an alien robot. Who knew?"
• Gladiator: "The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor" was frequently used as a tagline for the film.
• Parodied in A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever: "Explicitly summing up the moral of the story, awkwardly working in... the Movie Title."
• The Man from Earth: "What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?"
• Star Trek (2009):
  Spock: Nero's very presence has altered the flow of history... thereby creating an entire new chain of incidents that cannot be anticipated by either party.
  Uhura: An alternate reality?
  Spock: Precisely. Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum was disrupted, our destinies have changed.

Live-Action TV

• Herrick in Being Human: "So, a werewolf, a ghost and a vampire decide to live like humans do. They get jobs, a house, and a TV license..."
• Breaking Bad: "High school teacher turned meth dealer, brother-in-law's in the DEA? That'd make one hell of a story..."
• In the words of Genre Savvy Spike:
  "You are a vampire detective now? What's next? Vampire cowboy? Vampire fireman? Oh, vampire ballerina!
• In-universe example in The Sopranos: Christopher tries to sell his gangster-slasher script Cleaver as The Godfather meets Saw.

Video Games

• Superhot: "TIME. ONLY. MOVES. WHEN. YOU. MOVE."