The Fantastic Trope of Wonderous Titles

There's a tendency in media to create very long titles full of rare (or fake) multisyllabic words that paint a picture of whimsy, fun, and adventure, especially when the work is set in the past. This is almost a Dead Unicorn Trope as most of the titles are homages to works that never existed at all. It's often associated with pseudo-Victorian throwbacks and Steampunk (especially Those Magnificent Flying Machines).

Not to be confused with Character Name and the Noun Phrase, though they may overlap (either by reversing positions in the title or replacing "and the" with an apostrophe-S). A sub-trope of The X of Y, and may take the form of The Noun Who Verbed. See also The Adjectival Superhero and In Which a Trope Is Described. Compare and contrast Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle; one important distinction is that in that trope the long subtitle tends to be more descriptive of the work.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

Comedy

• Bob Newhart's album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart

Comic Books

• The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael (and the Dead Left in his Wake)
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life Of Ethan Green
• The Strange Talent of Luther Strode

Fan Works

• Harry Potter:
  • How I Spent My Winter Holidays, Starring James Who Is Brill (And Not Fancying Evans)
  • The Adventures of Icarus, The Invisible Poltergeist
  • The Late Night Visit, Or, Why Jo Decided To Kill Off Someone Else Instead
• Teen Titans: Evil Beast Boy's Fanciful Exploits in Perdition. According to the author, if it weren't for FanFiction.Net's title character limit, it would be called The Fanciful and Mildly Grotesque Exploits of Evil Beast Boy in Perdition. It should be noted that this is a companion piece to another story of his, and contains spoilers for it.
• Pokémon:
  • The Surprising Adventures of a Glaceon in Unova
• Bones fic The Role of the Peloponnesian War in Modern Dating Rituals (or how Temperance Brennan kissed a warrior)
• The Star Wars fic series Civil Wars, Whistleblower Tactics, Schematic Drafting, And The Finer Points Of Sith Adoption: The Essential How-To Guide For The Engineering Jedi, or The Guides for short. Each fic in the series following the pattern of long title with a one-word shorthand for ease of conversation.
  • How To Reinvent The Stormtrooper Armor To Make Your Surrogate Father Proud And Shut The Naysayers Up For Fun And Profit (Armor)
  • How To Give A Presentation To The Imperial Court While Accidentally Committing Light Treason By Making A Friend (Presentation)
  • How To Design Your Own Prosthesis And Turn The Project Into A Bonding Experience (Prosthesis)
  • How To Win A Bar Fight And Practice Diplomacy While Negotiating A Bounty On Your Head (Barfight)

Film — Live-Action

• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
• Another movie from those wacky late '50's - early '60's days was Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes. Possibly the origin of the trope.
  • Of course the success of Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (the eventual re-release title) led the director to revisit this trope with Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies.
    • It also lead to the comedic adaptation Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon being retitled Those Fantastic Flying Fools by the American distributor.
• Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain)
• The Wonderful Ears of Johnny McGoggin
• Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
• The Magical Time Traveling Thugtastic Jug
• The Completely Remarkable Utterly Fabulous Transformation of a Regular Joe
• The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm
• The Magnificent Magical Magnet of Santa Mesa
• Wee Sing in The Marvelous Musical Mansion
• The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• Spinal Tap's 1969 "concept album," The Incredible Flight of Icarus P. Anybody
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Magical Mystery Tour
• The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain
• Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
• The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
• Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
• This used to be a trend with German Foreign Language Titles, especially in The '70s and The '80s. It helped a lot that German words tend to be longer than English words. For example:
  • The Big Bus became Die haarsträubende Reise in einem verrückten Bus (The Hair-Raising Journey on a Crazy Bus)
  • Airplane! became Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug (The Incredible Journey on a Crazy Airplane)
  • Likewise, Airplane II: The Sequel became Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Raumschiff (The Incredible Journey on a Crazy Spaceship)
  • Not enough incredible and crazy? Ruthless People became Die unglaubliche Entführung der verrückten Mrs. Stone (The Incredible Kidnapping of Crazy Mrs. Stone)
  • Quick Change became Ein verrückt genialer Coup (A Crazy Brilliant Caper).
  • Zapped! (1982) became Der Typ mit dem irren Blick (The Dude With the Mad Gaze).
  • The Great Race wasn't long enough for German tastes, so it was expanded to Das große Rennen rund um die Welt (The Great Race Around the World) which is even more Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Les Fugitifs is the film which was remade into Three Fugitives which became Das Bankentrio (The Bank Trio) in German. The original was first literally translated into Die Flüchtigen (The Fugitives), but that was probably too short for German tastes, so it was renamed to Zwei irre Typen auf der Flucht (Two Crazy Blokes on the Run).
  • This often happened to Bud Spencer/Terence Hill films, especially with "zwei" ("two") at the beginning. For example, Più forte, ragazzi was prolonged to Zwei Himmelhunde auf dem Weg zur Hölle which doesn't really translate well into English.
• This trope seems to have been popular in Europe in general, see also the French spy film parody Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire a.k.a. The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe. The Germans just had to translate the title to Der große Blonde mit dem schwarzen Schuh. That said, the Hollywood remake was titled The Man with One Red Shoe with the German titles Der große Blonde mit dem roten Schuh (The Tall Blond Man With the Red Shoe) and Der Verrückte mit dem Geigenkasten (The Madman With the Violin Case).
• Parodied in Waiting for Guffman, with a shot of a poster for a fictional play called Cornelius McGillicutty & His Truly Amazing Flying Machine.
• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne
• Les Aventures de Jack Burton dans les griffes du Mandarin (literally "The Adventures of Jack Burton in the Mandarin's claws"), the French title of Big Trouble in Little China).

Literature

• The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles
• From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
• The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm
• Another classic kids' book: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
• Gulliver's Travels, officially known as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.
• Andre Norton's Scarface: Being the story of one Justin Blade, late of the pirate isle of Tortuga, and how fate deal justly deal with him to his great profit — which harks back to the same era as Gulliver
• The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming (Return of the Fireclown)
• The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century
• The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl
• "The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass"
• Parodied in Good Omens with the book within the book "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter; Being a Certaine and Precise History from the Present Day Unto the Endinges of this World. Containing therein Many Diuerse Wonders and precepts for the Wife; More complete than ever yet before published; Concerning the Strange Times aheade and Events of a Wonderful Nature"
• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
• I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President
• Galaxy of Fear has the interquel, Death in the Slave Pits of Lorrd, or How I Spent My Inter-Term Break.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium: Being a Wholly Accurate Account of Matters Concerning Steam, Skullduggery, and the Reckless Application of Mathematics in the Late 19th Century
• Jean Robinson's The Strange But Wonderful Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon
• Ellen Conford's The Revenge of the Incredible Dr. Rancid and His Youthful Assistant, Jeffrey; the talented and prolific Ms. Conford also gave the world The Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations, in which the experiences of the teenaged heroine are contrasted with the statutes & standards of her educational institution.
• The defictionalized Harry Potter textbook (and subsequent film adaptation) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
• Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
• "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
• The Scandalous Sisterhood Of Prickwillow Place
• The title for the French translation of A Series of Unfortunate Events : Les Désastreuses Aventures des orphelins Baudelaire (The Disastrous Adventures of the Baudelaire Orphans).
• The Fantastic Flying Journey and its sequel The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure.
• The Ruthless Ladys Guide To Wizardry

Live-Action TV

Creators:

• Stephen Colbert claimed that Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy starred in The Splendiferous Zeppelin Escapades of Filliam H. Muffman.

Series:

• The Angel episode "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco"
• The Bones episode "The Double Death of the Dearly Departed". Bonus for Alliterative Title.
• In The BBC Four Mockumentary Cricklewood Greats, the fictional British film studio of the title was finally destroyed (not just bankrupted, but literally destroyed) during the making of the Terry Gilliam epic Professor Hypochondria's Magical Odyssey.
• NBC had the anthology series Disney's Wonderful World of Color which was a retitled version of Disneyland which aired on ABC.
• Doctor Who: "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror"
• Mr. Show and the Incredible, Fantastical News Report
• Subverted in a series of Saturday Night Live skits with Michael Palin about a supposed Charles Dickens novel, The Wretched Birth, Miserable Childhood, Agonisingly Painful Adolescence, and Appallingly Vile and Degrading Death of Miles Cowperthwaite.

Music

• Music from the unrealized film script Dusk at Cubist Castle, debut LP of The Olivia Tremor Control. To a lesser extent, the band's name (and the loosely-structured "Elephant 6 Collective" of bands, of which they are a member) are also examples of the trope.
• Almost any Coheed and Cambria album title. (Example: Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness)
• The Beatles:
  • Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which features the song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"
  • Their album Magical Mystery Tour.
• David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
• Paul Shapera's Lost Hollow trilogy, starting with Miss Helen's Weird West Cabaret, followed by Uncle Raven's Super Happy Funtime Carnival and The Grand Cyberpunk Gala of Gabriella Gadfly.
• SKAM's The Amazing Memoirs of Geoffrey Goddard.
• Avantasia's A Paranormal Evening with the Moonflower Society.
• Aesop Rock's Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives.
• The debut album of American instrumental band Los Straitjackets is The Utterly Fantastic and Totally Unbelievable Sound of Los Straitjackets.
• Joe Satriani titled his twelfth studio album, Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock.

Puppet Shows

• The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss

Tabletop Games

• Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

Theatre

• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
• The cast album of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory lists the second song (a Backstory-delineating number) as "The Amazing Fantastical History of Mr. Willy Wonka" — but everywhere else it's given the simpler title "The Amazing Tale of Mr. Willy Wonka".
• Doctor Selavy's Magic Theatre
• The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin, as the title comes from a science project that involves irradiating the seeds of a specific type of marigold having a somewhat fanciful name with gamma rays.

Video Games

• The Wonderful End of the World
• Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness
• Yahtzee created an adventure game called Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura
• The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She-Vampires
• In Totally Rad, the localized manual is not only Totally Radical but way verbose with its section headings, none of which are abbreviated in the table of contents. The Excuse Plot, for instance, is headed: "The Totally Rad Story of a Most Unprecedented Regular Dude, a Very Righteous Babe, and a Gnarly Old Magician Who Used to Live in a Most Bodacious Spread Inside the San Andreas Fault."
• The Professor Layton games tend to go this route:
  • Professor Layton and the Curious Village
  • Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
  • Professor Layton and the Lost Future
  • Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call
  • Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask
  • Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy
  • Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy
  • Professor Layton's London Holiday
  • Professor Layton's London Life
  • Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror
  • Professor Layton and the Seven Phantom Thieves
• It'd probably be easier to list the Touhou Project works which don't follow this format. Among the most conspicuous examples:
  • Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream
  • Phantasmagoria of Flower View
  • Subterranean Animism
  • Antinomy of Common Flowers
  • Rainbow-Colored Septentrion
  • Cage in Lunatic Runagate
• Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet
• Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!

Webcomics

• The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer
• The Dresden Codak one-shot Traversing the Luminiferous Aether with Rupert and Hubert.
• Homestuck has a book within a comic, "Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery"
• Some week-end specials in Narbonic: "The Astonishing Excursions of Helen Narbon & Co."
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!
• The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
• The Non-Adventures of Wonderella
• The Incredible and Awe-Inspiring Serial Adventures of the Amazing Plasma-Man
• Wondermark has the Electro-plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000, with a long, elaborate, and slightly made-up name for a wondrous steampunk fiction summary-generating device.
• The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal
• The Quick and Dirty Life of Fritz Fargo

Web Original

• Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual: The Toaster With Two Brains
• The Remarkable Journey of Higgins von Higgings

Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • Troy McClure starred in a film called The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel.
  • Also “El Misterioso Viaje de nuestro Jomer” (“The Mysterious Voyage of Our Homer”)
• The Transcredible Exploits of Zapp Brannigan from Futurama.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack
• The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello
• The Amazing World of Gumball
• Cheyenne Cinnamon and the Fabulous Unicorn of Sugar Town Candy Fudge on [adult swim].
• The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley.
• Hanna-Barbera had two syndicated packages that involve this. In the mid 1970s, The Fun World Of Hanna-Barbera was a packaging of five shows previously aired on Saturday mornings (The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines, The Funky Phantom, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan and Wacky Races). In 1985, they released The Funtastic World Of Hanna-Barbera, which started out as a 90-minute umbrella show of three new cartoons (Yogi's Treasure Hunt, Galtar and the Golden Lance and Paw Paws). As the seasons passed, it expanded to two hours and began replaying shows previously seen as well as introducing new elements.
• Disney's 1949 animated version of The Wind in the Willows was re-released in 1978 under the title The Madcap Adventures of Mr. Toad.
• The Wander over Yonder episode "The Epic Quest of Unfathomable Difficulty".
• The Amazing Adventures of the Living Corpse
• The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
• While not a title, Gravity Falls has the Film Within a Film The Duchess Approves, starring "Sturly Stembleburgiss as the Duchess, and Grampton St. Rumpterfrabble as the irascible coxswain Saunterblugget Hampterfuppinshire."

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