Real mirages do not require groundskeepers.
"What a spot to pick for a mirage-ee!"
The characters are stumbling through a desert, for whatever reason. They're unprepared, dehydrated and starving, desperate, depressed, generally in a sorry way.
But hark! One of the characters sees an oasis. Glittering blue water, cool palm trees, a small carpet of grass growing around it, and in some cases, beckoning Bedlah Babes. They sprint to it and fill their mouths with handfuls of refreshing water... and then the scene fades, leaving the characters to spit out their mouthfuls of gritty sand. Some examples forgo the oasis altogether, resulting in a phenomenon similar to Meat-O-Vision where characters hallucinate bars, ice cream stands and water fountains that vanish into thin air when the desperate travelers sprint towards them.
A Real Life mirage is simply an optical illusion wherein it appears that the sky becomes refracted on a hot, flat surface, creating a blue area that looks like water a distance ahead of you; this can happen in several climates (including temperate ones where one sometimes sees puddles of water on a warm blacktop road), but seeing water in the desert has a greater appeal. Only a water-like blue patch appears in a real mirage, however. The palm trees, grass and refreshments that disappear with the water are largely a result of comedic exaggeration. However, the term "mirage" is also used for when someone has a hallucination, leading to this confusion.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Pepsiman: One commercial features a man stranded in the desert, whom Pepsiman appears to. Only it's a cactus that the man believed was Pepsiman. The Pepsi can at the end of the commercial also disappears.
Anime and Manga
- Jewelpet: Magical Change: Episode 33's "Jewelpet: Currently on the Run" segment has a thirsty Ruby in a desert running into mirages of not just an oasis, but of things like a store and a water park too. Then she sees Labra offering her water, at the price of being turned into one of her minions. When Ruby decides to drink the water despite Labra's mind-control attached to it, she discovers Labra is a mirage... and then Ruby herself realizes she's a mirage as well.
- In One Piece, the mirages Nami creates are...interesting to say the least. They properly use the idea of mirages being created by the differences in air density caused by sharp temperature differential, but they have Nami create mirages by standing behind the anomaly, which logically would reflect her image back at herself, not distort it for the enemy to see. It was used correctly the first time, though. Not even going into how she can supposedly control what is seen... A lot of what Nami does in a fight, post Alabasta arc, pretty much can boil down to using her Clima-tact.
- In the Speed Racer episode "The Desperate Desert Race," Spritle and Chim-chim become lost in the desert and encounter one of these, jumping into the water and swimming, before they come to their senses and realize they're just rolling in sand.
Asian Animation
- Pleasant Goat Fun Class: In The Earth Carnival episode 15, the goats and Wolffy see an oasis, but it disappears after Wolffy is picked up from quicksand by Miss Earth. This leads Miss Earth to explain the concept of mirages.
Comic Books
- The Carl Barks Disney Ducks Comic Universe comic "McDuck of Arabia" has Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck wandering in the Saudi desert. They see a mirage of a water cooler offering water at 10 cents a cup. Scrooge refuses to buy it — "we can get all the water we want for free back at our hotel!"
- Tintin:
- In "Cigars of the Pharaoh", Tintin and Snowy think they see an oasis far off, only to find a skeleton and a sign saying "Mirage Ahead" (an untranslatable French pun on the word virage, which means a road turn).
- In "The Crab with the Golden Claws", Captain Haddock sees Tintin as a champagne bottle when the two are stranded in the desert.
- Zigzagged in "Land of Black Gold" when the Thom(p)sons meet stock mirages and non-mirages in quick succession.
- Lucky Luke: In "The Wagon Train", the titular caravan has to cross the desert on their way to California with barely any water (due to sabotage by Big Bad Frank Malone who's hiding among them), and at one point Mr. Pierre, a French barber, rushes off into the desert because he hallucinates a saloon, and yells out for a "blackberry vermouth". Luke is left to console the man after the mirage vanishes, though it's never actually shown to the reader.
Films — Animation
- The Adventures of Tintin (2011): Downplayed. Haddock sees the ocean in the desert, but this is partly due to being drunk, and Tintin describes it accurately (as a hallucination, not as a mirage).
- A variant occurs in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, where Fievel saw his family while stumbling in the desert, but they turned out to be (apparently very small) cactuses. Tiger is going through the same desert and confuses an owl with his old girlfriend. The two then pass and ignore each other, because each thinks the other is another mirage.
- In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Tiger Prowess, Lord Japper throws Weslie and Wolffy into the desert, where they try to find a pyramid described by Mr. Slowy as having a special totem that can make them invincible. They come across several pyramids that they think is the one they're looking for, only for them to turn out to be mirages.
Films — Live-Action
- Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion: Lou sees several, including a talking skeleton. Another is even a milkshake bar in the middle of the desert! When the boys ultimately stumble across an oasis ( Lou having previously seen a similar one earlier), Lou take several minutes to accept that it's real.
- Happens multiple times during the trek across the desert in Carry On in the Legion.
- In The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), one character hallucinates a memory of a stunningly beautiful exotic Arabian belly dancer performing a Mating Dance for him, although he snaps out of it.
- In Kangaroo Jack, out in the desert, Charlie sees a mirage of a Jeep and sees a rock as a frozen drink.
- Subverted in Looney Tunes: Back in Action — Bugs, Daffy, and their human companions see a mirage in the desert. Which turns out to be a conveniently placed Wal-Mart.
Bugs: Is it a mirage, or just product placement?
- Inverted in The Mummy (1999), Hamunaptra is hidden by a mirage (which makes it look like an empty desert all the way to horizon) until the rising sun reveals it.
- Road to Morocco has a mirage of a drive-in, followed by a singing mirage of Dorothy Lamour, who disappears when touched.
- In The Three Stooges short "We Want Our Mummy", Curly is convinced he sees the ocean (complete with steamship) in the middle of the desert and even goes "swimming" in it (in reality just flopping around like a beached fish); when he convinces Moe and Larry that the water is real, they dive into it and open a trap door into an underground tunnel.
- In A Kid in Aladdin's Palace, Calvin hallucinates a Burger King establishment in the middle of the dessert...many, many years before one would even exist.
Literature
- Escape from Hell (2009): While crossing the burning desert of the Seventh Circle, Allen spots a wavering mirage-like vision of a cartoon ice cream stand just visible in the heat haze. Played with, later, in that it's something of a conditional mirage. The ice cream stand is quite real — it's the only oasis of rest from the fire and heat in the desert — and staffed by a priest formerly from the bolgia of the hypocrites. However, for most of the damned it's nothing more than a fleeting mirage; only people on genuine journeys of redemptions can find and enter it.
I snorted. That was really cruel. I turned back to the forest and ran with fire in my hair.
- "The Slithering Shadow", by Robert E. Howard: Conan the Barbarian is at first worried that what he sees, while dying in the desert, is just a mirage.
Newspaper Comics
- The Far Side: One strip has the caption "Wasted Mirage", and depicts a guy trudging through the desert past a mirage of a giant glass of ice water.. and he's blind.
Puppet Shows
- Sesame Street: Marshal Grover and Fred the Wonder Horse are riding through a desert when Grover thinks a boulder is a waterfall and that a cactus is a drinking fountain. Fred sees what they really are and tries to tell Grover, but he doesn't listen and winds up crashing into the rock and pricking himself on the cactus. Finally, when Fred can get a word in, he reminds Grover that he has a canteen of water with him.
Tabletop Games
- Pathfinder: Players can run across mirages that pose much more danger than simple false hope. Living Mirages are a type of gaseous ooze that can create mirages while remaining invisible, as well as drain all the moisture from the bodies of its victims.
Video Games
- Mario Party 3: Happens in Spiny Desert, somehow. There's a 'mirage' form of the Millennium Star, which only vanishes when someone tries to buy a star from it (and beforehand, makes it appear like there's two of the character on the map). It's probably more accurate to call it a hallucination.
- In Quest for the Shaven Yak: Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy, The Stinking Dry Desert has what appear to be glasses of lemonade. However, when Ren or Stimpy get close to them, said lemonade glasses turn into scorpions.
- In a Licensed Game for The Tweenies, the whole group is in a desert and has a shared hallucination of an oasis, which they all mistake as a real, disappearing oasis since they don't know how hallucinations work.
- In Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, when Nathan Drake is stranded in the desert after a plane crash, he sees an actual oasis complete with lush palm trees and other foliage that fades away into nothing when he approaches it. He also hallucinates proper about his longtime mentor and friend Sully.
Web Comics
- Subverted at Loading Artist. This
happens when being Wrong Genre Savvy.
Western Animation
- Count Duckula: When the main characters join the French Foreign Legion and have to travel 30 leagues through the desert on foot, Duckula thinks he sees an oasis.
- When Donald Duck and Goofy get lost in the desert in Crazy with the Heat, Donald sees icebergs everywhere, while Goofy sees a soda fountain, complete with an Arab sheikh behind the counter. Unaware that it's a mirage, Goofy orders drink after drink, only to have them disappear in his hand. And yet the sheikh becomes very real when he demands payment... or else.
- In the Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop episode "Dances the Hula", Zitbag and his skeletal canine companion Horrifido get lost in the desert. At one point, Zitbag hallucinates that the Exorsisters are around and dancing while wearing leis.
- In the Family Guy episode "And Bango Was His Name-O", the second part of the movie Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, Stewie and Brian think they see a Dr. Pepper machine in the desert, but...nope, it's RC Cola.
- In an episode of Garfield and Friends, Jon's car breaks down on a desert road, leaving him, Garfield and Odie stranded. As Jon goes to get the car fixed, Garfield explains and demonstrates the cartoon definition of mirages several times to Odie, including at least one Red Herring. The ending takes a turn for the Mind Screw when it's revealed that the guy who towed and repaired the car was himself a mirage.
- An implied example happened in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy in the episode "Fear and Loathing in Endsville". We do not see anything from Dracula's point of view in the scene, but when he claims to find a limo, said limo turns out to be a cactus.
Dracula: This limo hurts Dracula's butt!
- In an episode of Inspector Gadget the titular character travels into a desert and sees a lemonade stand. After realizing that it isn't real he then proceeds to assume EVERYTHING HE SEES from that point forward is "just a mirage." This includes the M.A.D. agents out to kill him, the sacred golden scimitar he is supposed to be protecting, a tree he bodily crashes into, Chief Quimby, a pit full of cobras...
- In the Little Princess episode "I Don't Want Help", the pets are thirsty and Scruff the dog imagines them both in a Sea of Sand and hallucinating a pond with a palm tree.
- Looney Tunes
- One short shows Daffy Duck in the desert, seeing things including an oasis and an old car.
- In "Sahara Hare", Bugs thinks he spots an old car he can use to get away from Riffraff Sam, but it fades out as he climbs in and tries to start it up. Bugs' line afterwards is the page-top quote.
- Master Raindrop: Zigzagged. In one episode, Raindrop, Shao-Yen, Gin-Ho, and Niwa are stranded in a desert. When Gin-Ho sees an ice tea stand, Shao-Yen tells him, "It's just another mirage! Just like the monkey wash and the luxury hotel!" However, the ice tea stand is real.
- During his long march in the desert along with Olive and Popeye, Wimpy in Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves suddenly spots a table covered with fruits and other delicacies. As he's about to reach it, the mirage suddenly fades out and Wimpy finds himself on the sand beneath.
- The Scrappy-Doo and Yabba-Doo segment of The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show had this happen in the episode "Law & Disorder", where Scrappy, Yabba, and Dusty came across a mirage of an attractive woman offering them watermelon.
- In The Smurfs (1981) episode "Mummy Dearest", Greedy sees what he thinks is a big muffin in the Egyptian desert, only to find himself biting into a rock.
- In the Sonic Underground episode "Dunes Day", a thirsty Manic sees a lemonade stand in the desert and when he sits in the stool, it disappears and he fell down.
- Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa used this trope in "Dances with Bulls" when Marshal Moo Montana and Sheriff Terrorbull wandered through the desert while tied together, the latter hallucinating a cactus as a water fountain and a street sign as a giant popsicle.
