Carmen Miranda was an actress from The Golden Age of Hollywood known for her large hats adorned with many pieces of fruit. These hats were famously used in the film The Gang's All Here, particularly the number "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat", and Miranda wore them throughout her career. The concept of the fruit hat has become so recognized by society that many other works have paid homage to this kind of headwear.
Miranda has stated that the hat was inspired by fruit vendors she saw in Brazil, and fittingly, many characters wearing this type of hat do so in order to evoke tropical locations and weather. Characters who are fictional versions of Miranda may also wear fruit hats to solidify the reference to the actress.
A common Stock Shout-Out. A Sub-Trope of The Hilarity of Hats and Edible Theme Clothing.
Examples:
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Advertising
- In a "No Talking or Phones" Warning featuring the Lunchables mascots, the bunny is seen wearing a Carmen Miranda-style fruit hat.
- The Chiquita Banana mascot Miss Chiquita wears a fruit bowl hat.
Anime and Manga
- One Piece: Charlotte Compote, Big Mom's second-born child and eldest daughter, wears a huge bowl of fruit parfait for a hat, stacked with fruit of all kinds. She's also "Minister of Fruits", who's in charge of Fruits Island in the Totto Land archipelago.
Comic Books
- Monica's Gang: Maggy dresses as Carmen Miranda in a comic book cover. However, as a reference to the character's gluttony, most of the fruit have bite marks on them.
- The cover of The Simpsons Issue 65 has Marge dressed as Carmen Miranda, along with Homer eating an orange he pulled off the back of her fruit hat.
Comic Strips
- The Far Side:
- Parodied in a strip captioned "Carmen Miranda's Family Reunion", which depicts a room full of people with different kinds of food (cheese, meats, etc.) on their heads, including a kid in a baseball cap with a slice of pie stuck to it.
- Another cartoon sticks the standard fruit hat on a cow, who was, of course, named Cowmen Miranda.
Films — Animated
- The Brave Little Toaster: During "The Cutting Edge", when the characters are depicted as being in Rio de Janeiro, the Toaster is wearing a fruit hat.
- Despicable Me 2: One of the Minions makes a fruit hat out of Gru's fruit stash he uses for jelly. Later at the movie's end, when four Minions imitate Village People, one of them wears a fruit hat.
- Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa: When Alex is banished from his pride after failing his rite of passage, Makunga forces him to wear a garish fruit hat, called "The Hat of Shame," to add insult to injury.
- Meet the Robinsons: Since Lewis's hair is a dead giveaway that he's from the past, as it reveals he's Wilbur's father, Wilbur puts a large fruit hat on Lewis's head to cover it up. Later in the scene, though, Wilbur realizes he can't take Lewis seriously with the hat on and switches it out for a more modest baseball cap.
- Rio: Luiz sports a fruit-covered hat throughout the first film. Justified, as the films take place in, well, Rio.
- Tarzan: during the first part of the song "Son of man", a young Tarzan decides to test his new spear by striking a few fruits hanging from the trees. He manages to get at least a dozen of them in a single throw, but the spear barely avoids Kerchak, who was about to pick a single fruit on a branch below. In the next shot, Kerchak throws his usual Death Glare to his stepson, but the contrast between his glare and his new fruit headdress is clearly Played for Laughs.
Films — Live-Action
- The Cat in the Hat: At one point during the "Fun, Fun, Fun" song, the Cat wears a fruit hat.
- Everyone Says I Love You: In the Halloween scene, one of the trick-or-treaters is dressed as Carmen Miranda and even does an impression of her for D.J. and their guests.
- Hail, Caesar!: Discussed when Western actor Hobie Doyle goes on a publicity date with musical starlet Carlotta Valdez (a Carmen Miranda Expy):
Hobie: Is it hard to dance with all them bananers on your head?
Carlotta: Oh, anyone can do it. (demonstrating with her purse balanced on her head) It's all in the hips, the lips, and the eyes and the thighs. - At the end of Red 2 the team are on a mission in Caracas and Marvin is crossdressing again, complete with a fruit bowl hat that catches a stray bullet in the banana.
- Played for Laughs in the animated opening credits of The Return of the Pink Panther. The Pink Panther appears wearing a huge hat covered with fruit while he's dancing along. He's also wearing lipstick and fluttering his eyelashes to make it clear he's playing a female role.
- Scared Stiff: Myron (Jerry Lewis) fills in for Carmerita (Miranda) when she misses a gig by dressing up as her and lip-syncing "Mamãe Eu Quero."
- In Son in Law, it's part of Crawl's costume at the dormitory's Halloween party.
Live-Action TV
- Benson: Governor Gatling's daughter Katie once dressed as Carmen Miranda at a Halloween party. She commented that some of the guests thought she was a snack tray.
- Friends: Chandler claims that after his father came out of the closet he would show up at Chandler's swim team meets wearing hats like this, and then hand the fruit out to the team as snacks.
- I Love Lucy In one episode in order to make her Cuban husband feel "more at home" Lucy redecorates the house with a jumble of Spexico items and comes out herself in a Carmen Miranda outfit — who as has been mentioned, came from Brazil, not even a Spanish-speaking country — lip-syncing to a recording of "Mamãe Eu Quero."
- Oobi: In the episode "Shopping!", Kako, then Grampu, are both shown wearing this.
Literature
- In Early Riser, the Technically-Living Zombie of Carmen Miranda (who in the book's continuity did not die in the 1950's, instead living into old age before suffering a neural collapse due to the use of hibernation-inducing drugs that turned her into a mindless, cannibalistic "Nightwalker") is spotted wearing a ballgown and her signature fruit hat. She keeps the fruit hat even after being rescued by a Zombie Advocate group who aim to rehabilitate her.
- In Witches Abroad, Granny Weatherwax loses her pointy hat to some of Genua's local alligator population, and Ms. Gogol gives her a new as a replacement. At the end of the story, Granny reveals that it was one of these kinds; "About the only fruit not on it somewhere was a melon."
- The medium* Mrs. Cake is described as owning a fruit hat that Carmen Miranda would have worn to the funeral of a continent. It's so large it actually has more volume than Mrs. Cake herself, and more than once characters find themselves addressing the hat instead of the person wearing it.
- Dave Barry once made a joke by combining the Carmen Miranda Hat with Miranda Rights...
We are very fortunate to live in a country where every accused person...is considered innocent until such time as his name appears in the newspaper. Also you have the constitutional right (the so-called "Carmen Miranda" right) to be provided — at the taxpayers' expense, if you cannot afford one — with an enormous fruit-covered hat.
Music
- The Filk Song Carmen Miranda's Ghost
about a space station haunted by a fruit-wearing apparition.
And if you think we've had too much of Cookie's homemade rum,
Just tell me where these basket hats of fruit keep coming from.
Puppet Shows
- In one episode of Fraggle Rock, the Trash Heap sings "Stuff Samba" while wearing a Carmen Miranda-style hat topped with garbage, including banana peels, chili peppers, and a load of radish tops.
- Bonita Flamingo from The Noddy Shop normally wears a Carmen Miranda-style fruit hat.
- In the Sesame Street video "Elmo Goes To The Doctor", a Muppet wearing a Carmen Miranda-style fruit hat appears during a musical number about waiting for the doctor.
- Fozzie wears a hat of fruit and flowers in the "Cabin Fever" number from Muppet Treasure Island.
Theatre
- Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: In "Benjamin Calypso," the set is suddenly covered in palm trees and the ensemble dancers often wear fruit hats to evoke the number's tropical sound.
- One of the costumes Honey dons in Too Many Cooks to avoid the gangsters is a bowl of fruit whereupon she claims to be an entertainer for the bar.
Video Games
- In Them's Fightin' Herds, one of the Pixel Lobby cosmetics is a hat made of various fruits called the "Miranda's Harvest".
Web Animation
- Dr. Tran: In “Fruit Hat”, Dr. Tran has to endure sitting with an old lady at the bus station who is wearing a fruit hat, that Tran calls a “birthday wig”. The hat in question is hiding a chicken that keeps harassing Tran for gum, unbeknownst to the old lady.
- The first Homestar Runner Halloween special, "Homestarloween Party", has Strong Bad dressed as "Carmen freakin' Miranda", complete with fruit-loaded hat.
Western Animation
- American Dad!: One of Roger's personas is a parody of Carmen Miranda, being an exotic samba dancer and churrasco enthusiast. She wears the iconic fruit hat, though it causes her to lose her balance and tumble to the floor.
- Bob's Burgers: The garbage man wears a Carmen Miranda outfit for the Halloween Episode of season 4 'Fort Night'.
- CatDog: In "Dog Come Home!", Dog runs away from home and Cat spends his precious alone time playing some Latin music and shaking the maracas while wearing a fruit hat. Winslow laughs at his appearance and steals a banana off his hat when he leaves.
- Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: While Fat Cat is singing "The Best of Everything" in Part One of "To the Rescue", Dale gets caught up in the rhythm, grabs some fruit off a nearby table, and puts the fruit on his head, making it look like he's wearing a Carmen Miranda hat. He then joins Fat Cat on stage.
- Courage the Cowardly Dog: Courage starts throwing fruits at the Bigfoot in a desperate attempt to kick the monster out of the house, though the two start having fun as the food fight escalates. At the end, the two playfully dance together while wearing a bunch of bananas as a skirt and a bundle of fruit as a hat.
- The Fairly OddParents!: In "Hassle in the Castle", a Scooby-Dooby Doors sequence inexplicably ends with Timmy and Cosmo coming out of a door while wearing outfits inspired on Carmen Miranda's iconic fruit hat outfit. Though they acknowledge they still have to chase the episode villain, they decide they can't miss the opportunity to imitate the star and dance for a while.
- Family Guy: In the episode "No Country Club For Old Men", in order to steal attention away from Peter at a fancy country club, Carter Pewterschmidt lifts a plate of fruit onto his head and improvises a short song about Carmen Miranda. He drops the plate afterwards, to the derision of the people of the country club.
Carter: Carmen Miranda, Carmen Miranda, was she a singer? Was she a dancer? Nobody knows, they just remember the fruit!
- In another episode, Stewie declares he is no longer a fan of Jolly Farm, he now loves funky fruit hats. He puts one on and does a little dance.
- In Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, Mel and Grandma's lawyer both don Carmen Miranda-style fruit hats in the musical number "Grandma's Gonna Sue The Pants Off Of Santa".
- Lilo & Stitch: Experiment 123 is an experiment of Dr. Jumba's introduced in Leroy & Stitch who has a design inspired by (and is named after) Carmen Miranda including the fruit on her head, which are inexplicably Earth fruits despite her being an alien. And it seems that based on her appearance in the Stitch! anime, in the second part of an episode where Stitch, Pleakley, and Yuna end up time-traveling to the day Stitch was "born", she didn't swap out alien fruits before ending up on Earth; she was made with the Earth fruits on her head.
- Looney Tunes
- In "What's Cookin, Doc?", Bugs Bunny is pelted with produce after lobbying for an Oscar, burying him. When he emerges, he has fruit gathered over his head and poses like Carmen Miranda.
- In "Slick Hare", Bugs hides from Elmer Fudd inside Miranda's hat when she's performing onstage. He's given away when he picks off a banana and then gives Carmen a Wolf Whistle.
- In Rabbit of Seville, Bugs, acting as the barber in the opera, makes a fruit salad on top of Elmer's head, which enrages Elmer when he sees what happened to him.
- Magical Maestro: In this classic Tex Avery short, a heckler throws various objects at an opera singer. When he flings a bunch of a fruit, it lands on the singer's head, and Mysto the Magician, acting as maestro, rolls with it by turning the opera singer into a Carmen Miranda expy.
- My Gym Partner's a Monkey: In "Shark Attack", during a cafeteria scene, Jake dresses up like Carmen Miranda and wears a fruit hat.
- Phineas and Ferb: Candace wears a banana-filled version of this, while filming a movie directed by her brothers in the episode "Lights, Candace, Action!". She asks if it's for a "some cool tropical dance number", but Phineas explains that it's to lure a starving monkey with a camera strapped to their head, as a way to work out camera angles for a big chase scene. The idea doesn't work, as the monkey is so hungry they just attack her instead.
- Two animated inserts produced in 1979 for Sesame Street feature Fruta Manzana, a blonde who wears this type of hat.
- In the The Simpsons episode "Blame It on Lisa", when the Simpson family arrives at their hotel room in Brazil, Bart finds a fruit hat and Homer finds a chocolate bar hat in the room's mini-fridge. They then dance while wearing the respective hats they found, eating one of the bars in the chocolate bar hat as well.
- Baloo wears one of these, along with a floral skirt, and performs a hula-like dance in one episode of TaleSpin. The act can be seen briefly during the show's opening montage.
- Time Squad: Larry wears what appears to be a quickly made fruit hat from a buffet table while “drunkenly” singing the tune to the French national anthem in the episode “Pasteur’s Packs O Punch”
- Tom and Jerry: In "Baby Puss", the alley cats tease Tom, who is dressed as a baby, by singing the Carmen Miranda song "Mamãe Eu Quero"; at one point, the smallest cat puts on a potted plant as a hat and imitates Miranda.
