Pop-Up Trivia

This trope also covers Pop Up YMMV.

You're watching a rerun of your favorite movie on TV.

You can remember the lines to the catchy tune in the background. You know exactly when the character starts talking to his green candy apple accounting calculator. Then suddenly there is a little noise you have never heard before and a little message on screen about how this calculator doesn't actually exist and the production company had to spend big money to make a fake one.

You, my friend, have been introduced to the wonderful world of Pop-Up Trivia. Wherein the little tricks that the production people put into making your show are showed off, or interesting but irrelevant but interesting pieces of information are given, such as how many calories a person would burn in 500 miles and how long it would take, but not quite as vocal as a DVD Commentary.

This trope originated with the VH1 show Pop Up Video, which aired music videos and little factoids about the video, the artist, or random related tidbits would pop up on the screen. You can tell when the use of this trope is a direct parody of the show when a popping noise is used with a cartoony icon next to the trivia fact, since that was the show's signature style. Amazon's Prime Video is currently the only streaming service to uses this in the form of a feature called "X-Ray", which is this trope applied to most media in their streaming library.

Contrast Television Tie-In Magazines, a work's official magazine contains Trivia about it.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• ADV Films had some wonderful "ADVidNotes" tracks on several of their comedy anime DVDs.

Films — Animation

• Included on the 101 Dalmatians DVD. Two sets, actually: One for the "fans" (which are more complex details on how the movie was made), and one for the "family" (side notes, plot points relating to the original book, points being brought up in the live-action films and TV series, etc.)
• The Blu-Ray Discs of Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, and Pinocchio'' have pop up tracks including trivia for both demographics.

Films — Live-Action

• This trope apparently makes for popular Bonus Material for DVDs:
  • Edgar Wright seems to be a fan. It's an option on Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
  • High School Musical did this.
  • This was an option on Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD.
  • The Star Trek 2-disc DVD sets have a subtitle option where Michael and Denise Okuda can give text commentary on this kind of stuff.
  • Source Code has one of these, strangely enough.
  • The Extreme Edition DVD of Terminator 2: Judgment Day includes a text commentary track with trivia and other notes at the bottom of the screen to annotate special moments, such as scenes not featured in the theatrical release as well as short behind-the-scenes footage that can be accessed by pressing a button on your DVD player remote.
  • Legend Films' edition of Plan 9 from Outer Space includes a trivia text feature.
  • The Back to the Future trilogy came to DVD with "Animated Anecdotes" for each movie. The later Blu-Ray set contains updated anectodes, as well as an option to point out "setups and payoffs".
  • Each DVD in the Spider-Man Trilogy has a "Spidey-Sense" trivia track.
  • The Alien Anthology Blu-Ray set has a "Weyland-Yutani Datastream" deliver factoids about each movie.
  • The Sound of Music has a "Your Favorite Things" Blu-Ray extra that allows viewers to watch the movie with pop-up windows containing trivia, behind-the-scenes pictures, and an interactive quiz (and sing-along subtitles for the songs).
  • Some TV airings of Braveheart have this, giving historical notes and production notes. Sometimes they swerved into Captain Obvious territory, such as explaining that a character was grieving for their dead father while it was happening on screen.
  • For a while in the mid 2000s, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema movies offered via video-on-demand through cable systems came with "Movies that Pop"- the trivia track would be baked into the movie (given how VOD works, it's understandable that you couldn't turn it off).
  • TheWolverine on Blu-Ray syncs to an application on a phone or tablet, and displays the trivia on that.
  • The Fly (1986) has a trivia track exclusive to Blu-Ray releases. Most of the trivia is basic and seems to be intended for casual viewers who aren't interested in the in-depth DVD Commentary by writer-director David Cronenberg or the feature-length making-of documentary Fear of the Flesh, but there are some interesting tidbits that don't appear in those (i.e., executive producer Mel Brooks originally wanted Pierce Brosnan for the male lead).
• Played for laughs in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, when a Chase Scene between the killer and his intended victims is staged like a clip from Pop Up Video, complete with a catchy cover of "Pretty In Pink" for a soundtrack. One of the pop-ups insult the actor playing the killer, so he stabs the pop-up, causing another to appear that reads "Ouch".
• The ending for Music and Lyrics has one for the "Pop Goes My Heart!" music video in the form of a VH1 Pop-Up Video, which details what happened to the characters in the movie.

Live-Action TV

• Disney Channel seems to be a fan of this. It aired a version of Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie that had these and if memory serves they did the same with Starstruck.
  • They also did it with Jump In.
• The American cable network AMC sometimes shows DVD_TV: a movie with subtitles that have information taken from the movie's DVD.
• Lost eventually started doing this with its reruns.
• Animal Planet loves this trope, and applies it to renamed reruns of their popular series:
  • River Monsters: Unhooked
  • My Cat From Hell: Scratch Tracks
  • Tanked Unfiltered
  • Call of the Wildman: More Live Action
  • Gator Boys: Gator Bites
• MythBusters has "Buster's Cut".
• When The Drew Carey Show had "spot the mistake" contest episodes, the reruns would point out each mistake via pop-ups.
• Every Doctor Who classic series DVD and Blu-ray features production information subtitles.
  • The first rebroadcast of the revival Series 9 on BBC America, "Doctor's Notes", featured a mix of trivia, fan comments, and even fanart.
• GSN had a special week of Let's Make a Deal episodes that would have pop up bubbles with information, such as the current price of Turtle Wax and Monty Hall's real name.
• The NickMom channel debuted by airing The Brady Bunch with pop-up style "comments" from Carol Brady.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch aired an episode featuring these. Originally billed as produced by the same team as Pop Up Video, which was later shown to be a marketing ploy between ABC and VH1 without the team's consent.
• Certain Star Trek shows have done this on certain DVD releases.
• Parking Wars has bits of trivia popup periodically.
• CSI: Miami did this on at least one rerun, with the 'Bullet Points' accompanied by a gunshot sound.
• Deadliest Catch from Season 8 onward, combining trivia with Tweets from fans and crew.
• The Grand Tour uses Amazon's "X-Ray Vision" feature in this fashion, with vehicle specs, song track info, translations for more obscure Britishisms, behind-the-scenes facts, and general trivia.
• Seasons 2 and 3 of the game show Peer Pressure^*Which were actually just season 1 episodes repackaged with new graphics used it to explain how certain stunts were pulled off, behind-the-scenes tidbits, and random trivia.
• Tru-TV seems to be fond of this, doing it to three of their shows:
  • Impractical Jokers: Inside Jokes
  • Hack My Life: Inside Hacks
  • The Carbonaro Effect: Inside Carbonaro
• Nat Geo Wild does this for its vet shows. The Incredible Doctor Pol has Deja MOO! and Dr Kay’s Exotic Animal ER has Gloves Off.
• RuPaul's Drag Race sometimes re-airs old seasons with pop-up facts, including both printed captions and spoken bits from hosts RuPaul and Michelle Visage.
• Jessica Jones (2015): When the second season came out, which focused heavily on Jessica's BFF Trish, clips of Trish's music video "I Want Your Cray-Cray" were featured in the episode of that name. Marvel later released the full video on Youtube with parody pop-up facts. Fair warning: the song is intentionally terrible.
• The 1994 adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms had home video releases come with baked-in Chinese subtitles that highlighted famous quotes from the source novel.
• Some later or recut episodes of Dr. Pimple Popper feature these, more as a Visual Pun on the word "pop" than anything else.

Music

• VH1's Pop Up Video, the Trope Maker. Wikipedia has a list of derivatives and parodies of Pop Up Video.

Pro Wrestling

• NWA On Fire, which shows classic NWA matches, has little infoboxes giving possibly informative bits of trivia about the wrestlers & matches being shown.

Puppet Shows

• When the now-defunct TechTV network aired the original Thunderbirds series, one of these pop-up trivia tracks would appear frequently near the bottom of the screen. A full episode done in this style was released as bonus material on a "best of" DVD of the series in the early 2000s.
• The first-season DVD of The Muppet Show has a special "Muppet Morsels" subtitle track.

Web Comics

• Fur Will Fly did an amusing spoof of the trope in general and VH1's Pup-Up Video in particular with "Pop-Up Webcomic" Sunday special features, eye-watering colour scheme and all.
• As seen in Sluggy Freelance, Dr. Viennason's Guide to Timeless Space comes with "Pop-Up Cudbitz". Unlike real-life implementations, these bonus facts are printed on actual signs that dangle next to Dr. Viennason as he presents his wisdom for the video recording, and he doesn't quite conceal his disgust when they are insulting to him (which happens surprisingly frequently).

Web Original

• DEATH BATTLE!: Starting from Naruto Vs Ichigo onwards, there would be some pop-up trivia which adds additional information about the combatants without extending the already long video length.
• YouTube used to allow you to add annotations to your uploaded videos, which could invoke this. Sadly, annotations were removed from YouTube on January 2019.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Avatar Extras
• Ben 10 and Star Wars: Clone Wars both do this in Australia.
• The Wacky Races DVD set has a "Trivia Track" on the first two episodes, "See-Saw to Arkansas" and "Creepy Trip to Lemon Twist".
• Parodied in The Simpsons episode "Weekend at Burnsie's." Marge gets out a box of old clothes, and pop-ups identify the episodes they supposedly featured in, such as a fedora with a hole in it from "Who Shot Grampa's Hat?"
• The 20th Anniversary Edition of Transformers: The Movie has the "Matrix of Knowledge" as this type of option on the first disc.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes has a series of DVD bonus features, The Avengers Unmasked, which provide a variation of this.
• The season 3 DVD set of SpongeBob SquarePants had these for three episodes.
• Titan Maximum's DVD had this as a feature for one episode. The caption bubble acted as if it were a character in itself, and mentioned knowing the Pop-Up Video caption bubble.
• Chowder had a special pop-up trivia marathon on Cartoon Network in the United States in 2010 before the series finale aired. However, these materials were reused from a previous marathon in the UK - meaning they were slightly sped up and censored PAL masters.

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