Did the Earth Move for You, Too?

Then they were walking along the stream together and he said, "Maria, I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee."
"Oh," she said. "I die each time. Do you not die?"
"No. Almost. But did thee feel the earth move?"
"Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please."

— For Whom the Bell Tolls

Inevitable Stock Phrase used after characters kiss/make out/have sex during an explosion, earthquake, or similar event. The phrase comes from Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, when the hero and his lover are describing the intensity of the sexual pleasure they had (though, in that particular case, no literal earth-moving was involved). Naturally, the phrase lent itself to much spoofing.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A German advertisement for a health fund had a randy couple in the middle of a golden wheat field as all the various things around them that could injure them were pointed out. At the end of the ad, the women remarks, "Even the Earth moves," as the last thing is pointed out... a combine harvester approaching from offscreen!

Comic Books

• German comic Rudi used this with a couple in a background gag who have sex when a real earthquake strikes.
• X-Factor: Played straight in the Nation X oneshot. Longshot and and his ex-wife, Dazzler, have just finished having sex when he asks if she felt the ground shaking earlier. She states that was probably just her. They've just missed the entire island full of mutants taking on a giant.
• A one-panel gag in The Cartoon History of the Universe has two large dinosaurs "necking" saying this (while the main narrative discussed continental drift).
  Male sauropod: Did you feel the Earth move?
  Female sauropod: Honey-tons, that was the continental drift!
• The Dark Knight Strikes Again: After Wonder Woman snaps Superman out of his Heroic BSoD... the two most powerful beings go at it full-bore. There are literal earthquakes and tidal waves. When they're done, Diana actually says "Clark. The earth moved."
• Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) run, Peter and MJ reconcile and whilst they're holding each other Doctor Doom (who was being attacked at the airport they were in) moves from underneath the rubble, prompting MJ to ask "Did the ground just move?" and Peter to respond "It always does".
• Invoked in one strip of B.C.. B.C. notices that a volcano is about to erupt, he then walks up to the Cute Chick and kisses her just as the volcano erupts. He then points out that if you don't have timing you've got nothing.
• Red Ears: A regular question in this popular erotic comic book series.

Films — Animation

• In Aladdin and the King of Thieves when the 40 Thieves crash Aladdin and Jasmine's wedding with a stampeding elephant. When the ground begins to shake, the Genie says "I thought the earth wasn't supposed to move until the honeymoon."
• Parodied in Chicken Run, when the lead couple embrace and and are interrupted from kissing while a gravy explosion goes off behind them. After seeing the resolution of it, they then proceed to do so.

Films — Live-Action

• In True Lies, when Harry and Helen embrace and kiss while a nuclear bomb goes off behind them.
• During the underground grotto dance scene in Addams Family Values as Morticia and Gomez finish the dance, all the champagne bottles blow their corks.
• Ocean's Thirteen. In the middle of a seduction con, no less.
• Happened at the end of The Man Who Knew Too Little: Wallace kisses Lori while the bad guys' helicopter explodes in the background. "That felt like an explosion!"
• Subverted in Making the Grade when "Palmer Woodrow" has a three pumps and a giggle session with "Muffy", who has been asking lots of questions which will spoil his plans. He grunts on top of her twice, rolls off and says "I hope that was good for you. Wow, there's a Red Sox game on" He gets up, puts his pants on, and tells her "By the way, I never want to see you again" as he's walking out the door. She never even changes her bored expression.
• The Israeli movie Saint Clara: At the end, Clara (a teenage girl, a recent Russian-Jewish immigrant, with psychic abilities) is kissing a boy in a movie theater. There's an earthquake, but she tells him it's just a low number on the Richter scale (I forget the exact number).
• In the gangster spoof Johnny Dangerously, this is parodied (along with Sexy Discretion Shot): the title character and his love interest start kissing passionately, the camera pans up to some fireworks... and it cuts to another character, who looks up at the fireworks and remarks "Looks like Johnny's getting laid!"
• When the title aliens' ship crashes in Critters, teenager April is making out with her boyfriend in a nearby barn. April feels the ground shake from the impact and remarks that "The earth moved", to which her beau (who's barely gotten to second base yet) asks: "Already...?"
• In DOA: Dead or Alive, Christie and Max are in bed shortly after doing the deed. Suddenly, she says that the earth moved. Max, of course, takes credit, until Kasumi and Leon crash through the wall from Kasumi's room, as it is their turn to fight. Also, all fights are televised throughout the island.
• Hercules Returns parodies the underwhelming post-coital behavior of the actors playing Runaway Fiancé Labia and her beloved Testiculi.
  Testiculi: I didn't expect the Earth to move...but I at least expected you to.

Literature

• Maximum Ride: While Max is kissing her love interest and the world begins exploding around them, she excitedly assumes "Lights! World shifting! The magazines were right!" Unfortunately, it was really another attack by the "Dumb-bots".
• Good Omens: Anathema and Newt during the Time of Troubles directly before the Apocalypse. Sure, the seas hadn't started boiling and the moon hadn't turned red a blood at that point, but things had definitely started.
  Newt: That was wonderful.
  Anathema: Good. The earth moved for everybody.
• In the Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters, Magrat and Verence the Fool are kissing whilst Lancre is moved forwards 15 years in time, technically making it the longest kiss in history.
• As a joke, referred to in Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, when the lost nuke was being dug up. Talking about the danger of the bomb (thought to be conventional, at the time) prematurely detonating: "I guess when she comes [sic], the earth really moves."
• H. Beam Piper's Uller Uprising has Carlos von Schlichten and Paula Quinton kissing passionately while the flyer they're on is rocked by three Hiroshima-type atomic bombs going off virtually simultaneously behind it.
• The back-cover blurb for Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose ends with the statement that the female lead comes to love the male lead^note "Beauty and the Beast" in early-20th Century America, "And — the earth moves..." Of course, this is 1906 in California, so along with any pleasure the two may take in one another, the earth is moving because of the big San Francisco quake.
• Played with in Patrick McManus' short story "The Sensuous Angler" in which he tells the tale of his torrid...er, fishing partnership with a co-worker whose husband Hammer hates fish and fishing. After sneaking over to her apartment for some hot-and-heavy perch-filleting action (and no, that's not a euphemism), Pat asks the question at hand.
  "Yes yes yes yes! And do you know what made it move?"
  "What?"
  "Hammer! He always trips on that last step at the top of the stairs!"
• When O-ha and A-ho mate early in Hunter's Moon (1989), O-a feels "the grass begin to crackle beneath her".

Live-Action TV

• In episode 3 of Knight Rider, KITT gets stuck at the impound. He eventually breaks-out by pushing the car in front of him hard enough to break open the gate. It just so happens that there's a couple making out in said car. When KITT pulls away the woman gives the trope line.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
  • After Spike and Buffy have Destructo-Nookie, Buffy wakes up the next morning in the wreckage and asks, "When did the house fall down?"
  • After Their First Time turns him evil, Angelus taunts Buffy by asking if she expected "Fireworks, bells ringing, a dulcet choir of pretty little birdies?" And that's when he's pretending to be Angel - once that's over, he writes "Was it good for you too?" in the blood of his next victim.
• Similarly, in Angel, Connor and Cordelia had sex while it was raining fire and he asks "Did the world end?"
• Smallville
  • When Jimmy reflects on the day he and Chloe meet again, which just happened to be the day General Zod tried to reshape Earth's crust in Krypton's likeness. Actually, she kissed Clark on that day.
• In the Dad's Army episode "The Day the Balloon Went Up", while hanging from said balloon on the end of a rope, Captain Mainwaring flies through a haystack. A man and woman, of course, climb out of the collapsed haystack...
• Used in Married... with Children when Marcy and Jefferson are having sex, and Al is jacking up their house in an Escalating War with the D'Arcys over a Property Line.
• Referenced but not actually said in Blake's 7 episode "Ultraworld": Tarrant and Dayna (an explosives and weaponry expert) are captured by the Ultras, who want them to demonstrate the "human bonding ceremony" so they can catalogue the information on their computer. They decide to humour the Ultras, while using the "ceremony" as cover for Dayna to extract an explosive device she has hidden in her tooth (?!). She blows a hole in the wall, they escape, the nonplussed aliens are left wondering what happened (one says something along the lines of "Was that the human bonding ceremony?")
• Parodied in Two and a Half Men. Charlie is oblivious about a recent earthquake that occurred while in the middle of making love, thinking he was just that good.
• Leonard in The Big Bang Theory "We tried kissing, but the earth didn't move. I mean, any more than the 383 miles it was gonna move anyway."
  • ... that's a bit long for a non-Earth-moving kiss. About 20 and a half seconds, for anyone who cares.
• Played for laughs in The Golden Girls. Dorothy is on the phone with Stan during the period where they were sneaking around.
  Dorothy: Did the earth move for you too? *sees Rose listening in, turns to her* Big quake in California.
• This developed a visual gag in the older British satirical comedy show, That Was the Week That Was (TW 3). Sometime around 1962, comedian Willie Rushton was seen getting into bed with an impossibly glamorous actress/model type. Amid giggling and sighing, foreplay ensues. The camera then cuts to stock footage of waves crashing against rocks, tall chimneys falling, train going into tunnels, et c. We cut back to Willie Rushton and girl, who are still in bed - but soaked through from the waves, covered in brick dust and rubble from the chimney, and smothered in soot from the steam-train. She is screaming. He is wide-eyed with panic.
  Every bloody time we try something, all that bloody lot happens!
• Parodied on NCIS when Tony and Ziva are stuck inside the office elevator after an explosion has ripped through the Navy Yard. The scene is very much played for Ship Tease. They decide that Ziva should get on Tony's shoulders to see if she can open up the emergency hatch on the ceiling, when the elevator car jolts, knocking her down.
  Ziva: We slipped.
  Tony: Did we? I thought the earth moved.
• Doctor Who. Played straight in "The Power of the Doctor". The Master has come up with an Evil Plan involving Earthquake Machines, and invites the Doctor to "come and feel the Earth move." Then again, given their Foe Romance Subtext maybe he did mean it the other way...

Video Games

• The Mission Success cinematic for the Brütal Legend mission "Pilgrimage of Screams" has the Screaming Wall let off a blast as Eddie and Ophelia kiss for the first time.
• The Mahjarrat of RuneScape have a tradition of only mating during earthquakes. They did this because on their homeworld (which is a nightmarish volcanic Death World) they believed that earthquakes were caused by their god Mah and they needed to calm her.
• In No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, just before the Rank 1 fight, Travis and Sylvia have sex so good that it causes the entire Motel No More Heroes to shake and causes letters to fall off of the sign, turning it from "No More Heroes" to "More Ero".
• Parodied with the Shadow character in Path of Exile after killing Alira, one of the bandit leaders in Act 2:
  Shadow: Did the earth move for you, baby? Probably. You hit the ground quite hard.

Webcomics

• This strip from Schlock Mercenary. For those of you who don't feel like reading the next strip too, what happens in the third panel is that the Pa'nui blasts off a third of the Battleplate Tunguska, which was, at the time, holding them down with gravitics.
• This strip from Errant Story, using the I Always Wanted to Say That version.
• Used as a observation in 8-Bit Theater: "So that's where earthquakes come from."
• Three Panel Soul: Philosopher pickup lines.

Western Animation

• Futurama
  • When Kiff and Amy are kissing during a Buggalo stampede. It's revealed in another episode that members of Kif's species exchange DNA and get pregnant through skin contact, so a kiss may really be the equivalent of sex for Kif.
  • Not to mention the Titanic (1997) episode in which Bender and "Robot Rose" kiss. Bender: "When we kiss, I feel like we're standing knee-deep in cold, freezing water." Which, of course, they are, being on a sinking ship and all.
• In Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter works on experiment that causes the whole house to tremble while his parents are making out on the couch:
  Dexter's Dad: Mmm. Honey, you make the earth shake.
• Episode 4 of Sym-Bionic Titan, "Phantom Ninja" has the Monster of the Week crash land near a couple making out in a car:
  "Hmm, you just rocked my world."
• In one episode of Sealab 2021, Debbie Love takes a vacation. After demanding a Happy-Ending Massage from the masseurs, we next see all of them smoking (with the masseurs sporting some new bruises).
  Debbie: "Now I won't say the earth moved...but it definitely jiggled!"
• The Hey Arnold! episode "The Journal", Arnold's parents are getting in married in San Lorenzo, and after they finally share their wedding kiss, an earthquake hits sending everyone running in panic while the two continue kissing. Afterwards, Arnold's mom asks, "I think I just felt the earth move".
• South Park episode "Proper Condom Use" has the subplot of sexually inexperienced Mr. Mackey and Ms. Choksondik engaging in intercourse. While this is happening, the children are having a war boys vs. girls vice because they're worried the other gender will give them AIDS, which eventually leads to them setting off bombs on one another. The scene cuts to Mackey and Choksondik quickly sitting up from where the screen obscured their activities and the latter asking: "Did you feel something?"

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