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Out-of-Genre Experience
aka: Unexpected Genre Change

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Every Space Western needs a bit of Medical Drama.

Writing drama is hard. Sticking to a popular formula is easy. That's why sometimes you can create a temporary Genre Shift in a series to fill up time in your story. For example, many television shows are general drama, but... with a character who is a doctor. You know that soon enough, there's going to be a central episode for that character, complete with a medical plot.

This trope can be glaringly obvious or just a subtle genre that doesn't fit into the rest of the series. Medical Drama is used as an example because it is difficult to hide.

A good test to see whether something fits this trope: If you turned on the television or opened the book at a particular point, would you be able to guess the main genre correctly?

This trope is often paired with Mood Whiplash, and an Art Shift may kick in to better fit the brief genre change. Episodes that have these experiences usually get a Bizarro Episode reputation and may have either Fanon Discontinuity or Canon Discontinuity.note  For a permanent genre change, see Genre Shift; when the plot starts out as something unrelated leading up to the switch it's a Halfway Plot Switch; and when a work has a chronic case of this trope it's a Genre Roulette. When a non-romance story goes out of focus (either temporarily or permanently) due to a Romance Arc, that's a Romantic Plot Tumor. See Courtroom Episode, Noir Episode, Superhero Episode, Cowboy Episode, and the rest of the Episodes page for common sub-tropes. For the same principle applied to video game genres, see Unexpected Gameplay Change.


Example subpages:

Other examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Attack on Titan:
    • The second OVA, which is based on the manga's "fake previews", takes the point of view of the supporting 104th trainees, and is meant to be much more comedic and nonsensical than the rest of the series.
    • Chapter 91 of the manga could be described as a full-on World War I-era War Drama.
  • Berserk, for the vast majority of the Golden Age arc, becomes a grim and gritty medieval story devoid of any demons, aside from the Zodd fight. After the Griffith rescue arc, shit starts hitting the fan and we return to the Crapsack World that is the world of Berserk.
  • In Black Butler, the Weston College school arc. It takes place in a school when previously the story had protagonist Ciel not go to any kind of official school, mostly being homeschooled by his multi-talented butler and overall having to do with murders, mysteries, and supernatural effects. Yet it opens up with Ciel running to the school's gate with a piece of toast in his mouth, lamenting how he's late. The manga actually lampshades this with a box stating that you are, indeed, reading Black Butler.
  • Some of the filler episodes of Bleach, which turn the show into a Gag Series.
  • "Pierrot Le Fou" in Cowboy Bebop is an out-of-place horror episode but replaces zombies with a super-powered Psychopathic Manchild killer.
  • Dragon Ball Super:
    • Merged Zamasu manages be this since while Goku Black and Future Zamasu were godly beings, they were still both trained martial artists and fought like one. Merged Zamasu, on the other hand, fights like an RPG Final Boss with him summoning a Guardian Entity that shoots lightning, raining down energy blasts, and throwing spears that explode when they hit the ground. This is not even getting into his final form that is straight out of a Cosmic Horror Story.
    • The Dr. Slump crossover turned Super into a gag anime complete with Breaking the Fourth Wall, toon physics, and a surreal plot.
  • The Excel♡Saga anime is, for the most part, the epitome of a Gag Series. So naturally one of the last episodes was played completely straight.
  • In the eighth episode of Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Edward becomes very determined to solve the mystery pertaining to a serial killer. Things get very Case Closed-y very fast. Especially funny because the villain in the episode (Barry the Chopper) is voiced by the same actor as Jimmy Kudo in the English dub.
  • In Hajime no Ippo, a (long) series about the harsh world of boxing, the main characters take part in a light-hearted baseball match for a few chapters. Just after the bloodiest, dirtiest and least funny fight of the series.
  • In an episode of the idol series Marginal #4, the titular group mentions that they will be starring in a mystery drama. The next episode presents that drama as the whole episode - without warning, but you catch on quickly enough that they're acting.
  • Halfway through Mayoi Neko Overrun!, the viewer gets an entire episode about mecha and later about a simple game that was made so dramatic it goes on par with a certain mahjong anime.
  • Justified Trope in Monster: medical drama is the format of the first two episodes of a very long series, as the protagonist is a neurosurgeon who then turns amateur detective.
  • Monster Musume:
    • Chapter 12 puts the Slice of Life comedy on hold to introduce MON dealing with a terrorist hostage crisis.
    • Chapter 38 puts the Fanservice on the back burner note  and focuses mainly on Lala's relationship with a terminally-ill child at the hospital.
    • Chapter 40 is more of an action-comedy than Slice of Life.
  • Given what it's normally like, seeing Nana & Kaoru briefly turn into a high school sports manga is unexpected. The heroine and her rival are on their separate school's track teams, though.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion is a deconstructive Darker and Edgier Humongous Mecha show. In episode 26 there is an alternate reality sequence where all the characters are in a Slice of Life school comedy. Amazingly this scene became the basis for a Spin-Off manga, Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days.
  • One Piece:
  • Plunderer starts out as a fantasy story where people who hold items can use supernatural abilities before a helicopter comes out of nowhere and everyone is shunted 300 years into the past to a military school set in a pre-war Japan.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica was a Darker and Edgier and deconstructive Magical Girl series. The beginning of Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion is a Lighter and Softer Magical Girl series where the tropes are played almost painfully straight. It's eerily reminiscent of the Neon Genesis Evangelion example.
  • REDLINE plays out mostly as a Quirky Movie about an illegal street race, presented in a bizarre Dead Leaves-esque tone. It's only during the third act that a top-secret bio-weapon known as Funky Boy is released from containment by La Résistance, and then all of a sudden, the latter third of the movie has a Kaiju movie going on in the background.
  • One episode of Samurai Champloo suddenly changes the series from an anachronistic hip hop-fueled Edo-era samurai series into a horror series. All the major hip hop and anachronistic references are removed, the soundtrack changes into a more moody, atmospheric one, the trio suddenly have to contend with zombies, and the whole thing ends on a bizarre Gainax Ending where everyone seemingly dies when a meteorite crashes into the village they're in. Since the events of the episode are never mentioned again, it's hard to tell whether the whole thing was even canon. Given that the episode started with the characters eating mushrooms they found in the woods, you could write the whole thing off as a hallucination.
  • Chapter 94 of Spy X Family has Anya watching Bondman skiing and wants the family to do that, so they head off to a mountain for some lighthearted fun. An approaching blizzard leads to the roads being shut down, meaning the Forgers have to head to a nearby hotel to spend the night, and that's where the chapter devolves into what feels like a friendly parody of Case Closed: several characters are introduced; mention of a rumored, blood-thirsty monster known as The Red Snowman occurs; a character gets stabbed with a frozen carrot; and the telephone lines are cut. But since Anya can read minds, she quickly figures out who the assailant is because of her ability, and Loid is The Ace capable of fixing telephone lines and treating wounds, so the assailant gets stopped before anything can happen and the trip ends the next morning with no further harm to anyone.
  • It's arguable whether Tenchi Muyo! is a Harem Comedy that randomly switches to a Space Opera or vice versa.
    • In a more straight example, Tenchi Muyo in Love 2: Haruka Naru Omoi (known better in the US as Tenchi Forever) trades out the previous film's (and its direct predecessor, Tenchi Universe's) time-travel action story for a downbeat romance drama that intensely examines the relationships between Ayeka, Tenchi and Ryoko and sheds some light on Katsuhito's (rather sad) past as Yosho.
  • Weathering With You:
    • It is impossible to miss when "Hodaka's Escape/Kid's Plot" plays, because with its heavy electronic elements, it is just so different from the rest of Radwimps's output on the soundtrack.
    • While the supernatural has been a clear part of the film right from the first scene, the appearances of the dragon-kamisama feel more like something out of kaiju film or Cosmic Horror Story. What, after all, do you call entities so titanic they stretch across the sky, to which buildings are small and humans too tiny to be seen?
  • Your Lie in April's episode 11 starts with a clip of what appears to be an unrelated superhero work.
  • Why the Hell Are You Here, Teacher!? is generally a Like Reality, Unless Noted Sex Comedy, but shifts to more of a Science Fiction story for the chapters focusing on Nanjou-sensei, who is a Mad Scientist able to invent a way to enter other people's dreams and pills that can temporarily and instantly change someone's sex. It shifts back to normal in volume 10, when the focus moves back to Kurisu-sensei.

    Comic Books 
  • Aquaman:
  • Aquaman #54 is a moody horror story that has Aquaman trapped inside his own mind when some gangsters capture and experiment on him, resulting in a mash-up of genres—including horror, a standard action story, a detective story as the real-world police worked out what was going on, and a Western. The incident resulted in the birth of his evil mirror-self, Thanatos.
    • Aquaman (1989) is much more like a war epic compared to typical Aquaman adventures, with Atlantis under occupation and a resistance working to save it.
  • Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men was a succession of these instead of the routine superhero stuff: high school drama, sci-fi, murder mystery...
    • Interestingly, Morrison fled from this genre-bending as far as they could after a certain point in their run, making the good guys and bad guys as unambiguously traditionally super-hero/super-villain in their morals and adventures, despite still keeping the more exotic outward trappings introduced earlier.
  • Sin City is mostly a crime-noir comic series set in a somewhat realistic world (for a comic book anyway). Despite this, we've had a few departures.
    • Shlubb and Klump had their own short story which was a wacky little story featuring the villainous duo and an ending gag straight out of a Looney Tunes episode.
    • The story Hell and Back features genetic tampering, espionage, a guild of assassins with high-tech weapons, and a villainess who could easily be mistaken as a straight-up supervillain due to her costume and gadgets. It's like a Tom Clancy novel mixed with Metal Gear.
    • The Yellow Bastard was operated on by genetic scientists and even voodoo witchdoctors who turned him into what could be mistaken for a yellow Star Trek alien.
    • The Farm is often described as affecting the characters mentally. Every time anyone goes there, they always feel something in the pit of their stomachs and think the exact same thing, "People have died here." It's also believed to be haunted, giving it a weird horror vibe even though we don't see anything.
    • And Rats is a creepy psychological horror story about a Nazi concentration camp guard getting his overdue comeuppance.
  • In the 1980s, a story arc in Batman dealt with Batman fighting a villain called Doctor Fang who was an ex-boxer who was trying to take over boxing in Gotham City. One issue (Batman #372) turned into a full-on boxing detail concerning a minor prizefighter getting a shot at the title and hardly had the Dark Knight in the issue at all.
  • Fables did this for the first few storylines (corresponding to the trades). The first one is a murder mystery. The second is a political thriller. The third is a caper (even lampshaded as such). The fourth is a spy/war story.
  • Rahan is set in paleolithic times; although full of Artistic License – Paleontology with dinosaurs showing up regularly (up to a serial-numbers-filed-off Godzilla once), it is devoid of any obvious fantasy elements — in fact, the title hero very often debunks any claim of magic in the setting. And then, an issue feature Rahan lost in a bizarre world that he thinks at first is the afterlife, with completely fantastic monsters and inexplicable forces. Turns out this is all a dream caused by hallucinogenic mushrooms.
  • Crossed has The Thin Red Line arc in Badlands, which temporarily drops the general post-apocalyptic horror genre in favor of a political thriller centering on the ultimately doomed attempts of Gordon Brown and the rest of the British government to halt the unfolding outbreak as well as their far more successful attempts to avert nuclear armageddon.
  • Robin (1993): The start of Jon Lewis's run had Tim get mixed up in a Lovecraftian plot with weird cults and an Eldritch Abomination in the woods far from Gotham, not even using the "Robin" name in order to keep a low profile and with the threat left to run its course and never fully researched or understood, in a book that normally focused on street-level crime, detective work, and high school drama.
  • The horror series Twisted Tales lived up to its name with plenty of stories about murderous lunatics, creepy monsters, and racism of the most cold-blooded and gruesome sort. There are two exceptions that eschew gory horror and instead aim for tragedy:
    • "Roomers" is a bittersweet character study of a quiet old man who forms a strange bond with a spider in his apartment as he lives out his final days in solitude.
    • The last full-length tale, "If She Dies", is a very potent tear-jerker story of a man who helps a sweet young orphan's ghost find peace after her untimely death in a fire, and is rewarded for this kindness when her spirit finds a new home in the body of his daughter, who'd been left brain-dead from an accident and was scheduled to be taken off life support.

    Comic Strips 
  • Candorville, a strip with just enough Magical Realism to avoid fitting into Slice of Life, made a temporary switch to dark Urban Fantasy in February of 2009. It seems the author liked the effect because later he made another such switch. And another one. At no point has the strip completely shifted over, and only in late 2010 were the urban fantasy strips finally mixed in with the other strips rather than segregated into a few story arcs.
  • Mother Goose and Grimm can't make up its mind whether it's going to have continuity with its title characters, or be an absurd gag-per-day strip without recurring cast members á la The Far Side.
  • Jim Davis intentionally did this around Halloween for a few Garfield strips in which Garfield seemingly wakes up alone in his home, but the house looks like it's been abandoned for years. Suddenly the strip is entirely creepy and not at all funny. The storyline ends with a bit of Mind Screw, so it's left to the reader to decide whether this was All Just a Dream, or if perhaps the rest of the comic is just the hallucination of an abandoned pet slowly starving to death in a condemned house.

    Fan Works 
  • Ultra Fast Pony:
    • Most episodes don't stray too far from the Anachronism Stew fantasy setting of the source material. However, the episode "Stay Tuned" transforms everything into a Cop Show parody, with Pinkie Pie in the role of Cowboy Cop and her former Imaginary Friends recast as Da Chief.
    • "Edgar Allen Poen" is an even more fundamental change: it turns the episode "Owl's Well That Ends Well" into a pastiche of "The Raven", while actually staying faithful to the episode's original story and message. No Alternate Character Interpretation, no funny voices, no jabs at the fandom — a marked contrast to the parodic or satirical treatment that every episode before or since received.
    • "The Pet Games" is arranged like an in-universe sports broadcast. Most of the dialogue comes from two off-screen commentators. Rainbow Dash and Twilight serve as judges for the event. Even the show's theme song is retooled as a bit of Product Placement.
    • "For Glorious Mother Equestria" is set up as a political propaganda film, with a breathless narrator wildly misinterpreting events in order to push the party line.
    • "Pinkie's Day In" briefly turns into a sitcom, complete with a Laugh Track and the Seinfeld theme as transitional music.

    Films — Animated 
  • Heavy Metal for the most part juggles action, comedy, and utterly gratuitous Fanservice, with 5 of the 6 vignettes each putting more or less emphasis on one of the three. And then there's "B-17", a brief but potent serving of triple-distilled Nightmare Fuel about a damaged WWII bomber succumbing to a small-scale Zombie Apocalypse, with zero campiness and no giant boobies anywhere to be seen.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Forrest Gump: Mostly a general drama, but part of the plot is a war story.
  • In Master and Commander, the crew rests for a few days on the Galapagos Islands. Dr. Maturin explores the island with the help of an eager midshipman and the film turns into a nature documentary for a little while. Almost seems like a Poorly Disguised Pilot for Creation, in which Paul Bettany plays Charles Darwin, though it's justified due to the film adapting a novel series where this happened all the time.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge is often described as feeling more like a Haunted House / Demonic Possession story than a Slasher Movie.
  • Some scenes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly can be mistaken for a war film. Especially when Blondie and Tuco are going through a Union camp to get to the cemetery on Sad Hill and are watching the war from the sidelines.
    Blondie: I've never seen so many men wasted so badly.
  • While all the films based on the Resident Evil games were arguably a Genre Roulette, the third one was entirely different from the other three. It was less a zombie movie and more a Desert Punk film with zombies occasionally appearing.
  • Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's surrealist art film L'Age d'Or starts as a brief Nature Documentary on scorpions before transitioning into... whatever the hell the rest of the film is about.
  • Not only are none of the Troll films connected, but they also can't seem to decide on a genre within the films themselves. The first film doesn't know whether it wants to be a horror film or a fantasy adventure. With Troll 2 and Troll 3 (aka The Creepers), it's hard to tell whether they were supposed to be straight horror films or horror comedies, and with the other Troll 3 (aka Quest for the Mighty Sword), it's hard to tell whether it's supposed to be a straight fantasy adventure or partly a comedy.
  • In Catch Me If You Can, con man Frank Abagnale Jr. works illegally as a doctor, among other things. This subplot looks almost as if it could be reused as a pilot for a television series. Which is entirely appropriate, since Frank is shown studying hospital dramas for lingo and basic protocol ("Do you concur?").
  • Star Wars:
    • Rogue One is a The Dirty Dozen-style war movie against the backdrop of the Star Wars Space Opera setting. And the final minutes of the film feel like something out of a horror movie as Vader boards the Rebel capital ship and slaughters any rebel troopers in his way while trying to recover the stolen Death Star plans.
    • The Phantom Menace: The brief Story Arc to have Qui-Gon free Anakin from slavery eschews space opera and political intrigue in favor of a half-hour diversion into a sports film, which is only tangentially connected to what came before.
    • Solo: A Star Wars Story is a heist movie set in a time of relative galactic peace, that feels more like Ocean's Eleven IN SPACE! than a normal Star Wars movie.
  • In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (The 1971 film); One of the scenes in the "Wonkamania" (everybody on Earth going crazy over getting Wonka bars to find the Golden Ticket) montage is basically a straight-up Police Procedural Show scene where detectives are trying to rescue a distraught woman's husband who was kidnapped for ransom. note 
  • Stripes: Sgt. Hulka's heart to heart with John (where he gives John an invitation to take a swing at him, then floors John with a single punch to the gut) is a bit out of place in a slapstick comedy. Ivan Reitman kept the scene in the movie because he felt it was important to establish Hulka's authority and physical strength over the men (as well as his considerably more old-school approach versus John's wild antics).
  • The third Pitch Perfect movie starts off as the usual musical comedy and turns into an action movie for the climax, though a scene from the climax is also shown at the beginning.
  • James Bond:
    • Moonraker was this to the Bond franchise. It was hardly the first Bond film to add some science fiction elements but never before had the franchise sent 007 into space and had the big climatic battle sequence fought by astronauts armed with energy weapons reminiscent of Star Wars, which was not a coincidence as A New Hope had been released relatively recently. It was a very unsubtle attempt to Follow the Leader that did the film no favours with critics.
    • Before then, Live and Let Die was the franchise's response to the popularity of Blaxploitation. Bond is sent against a Caribbean dictator/American drug kingpin who isn't out to Take Over the World, but is instead out to corner the American illegal drug market; unlike many other villains in the franchise, he's actually quite competent and comes damn close to succeeding at his plans. Not only that, but he's also got an underling who may or may not be the infamous Baron Samedi and is implied to have actual magic powers — something never seen before or since. There's also Sheriff J.W. Pepper, who seems like he came straight out of, say, a Burt Reynolds movie than a Bond film.
  • Trading Places: During the third act, Louis Winthorpe makes two back-to-back suicide attempts, and while the first is played for laughs (he tries to shoot himself, only to have the pistol jam, then throws it offscreen when it goes off), the second is played totally seriously, as he locks himself in the bathroom and overdoses on pills before being revived.

    Gamebooks 
  • In the Lone Wolf series, the book Wolf's Bane veers from the usual High Fantasy into Science Fantasy once Lone Wolf is stranded on the far-away moon of a different planet, which features strong science-fiction elements, quite apart even from the Magitek of Magnamund.

    Literature 
  • Animorphs is a children's/young adult Science Fiction series about Kid Heroes/Child Soldiers that progressively gets Darker and Edgier as the war goes on. Several books, sometimes but not always Filler, stand out.note 
  • The Big Four: This atypical Poirot story has Hercule Poirot, with the dubious assistance of Captain Hastings, in a life-or-death battle against the eponymous Big Four who are conspiring to take over the world. The Belgian sleuth, usually known for using his "little grey cells" amongst England's upper crust, engages in what's best describes as James Bond-style adventures. Poirot throws gas bombs, threatens an evil French scientist with a cigarette he claims shoots poison darts, masquerades as a non-existent twin brother, chases after a Master of Disguise. To top it all off, Poirot and Hastings infiltrate the secret underground lair, which blows up at the end!
  • To Kill a Mockingbird: The genre of the novel is probably best described as "coming of age". In the middle of it is a courtroom drama. There are some other crime elements scattered throughout, but it would be misleading to describe it as a crime or law novel.
  • Moby-Dick includes chapters devoted to explaining various aspects of whaling life, as well as a cetology (study of whales) lesson that could fit into a biology textbook or encyclopedia (notwithstanding Melville's assertion that whales are fish). There's also a chapter about chowder. It's often said that the reason why these sections exist is that Melville was told the novel needed to be longer - and he couldn't think of anything else to pad it out with.
  • Similarly, Les Misérables has extensive sections detailing the Paris sewers, the Battle of Waterloo, thieves' argot, cloistered orders of nuns...
  • Harry Potter in general is a mix of fantasy, coming-of-age, mystery, and boarding school-story with all the elements of these genres... and it works.
  • The Thursday Next books are... sort of an urban fantasy mystery series about literature and the Metafiction thereof. Once per book, there's a chapter wherein Thursday teams up with Spike Stoker to fight vampires, ghosts, demons or what have you, usually just so she can pay the rent. The narration shifts to a style that would not be out of place in Dracula or the more serious modern horror novel. And then things are back to normal next chapter.
    • There's also a scene where Thursday has to cross the void between two books in the Bookworld, and the book depicts the wordless void by briefly turning into a comic.
  • In Mists of Everness, the second book in the War of the Dreaming, there is a chapter or two which features a switch from the present-day Urban Fantasy to Beatrix-Potteresque Talking Animal interlude. It's interesting and funny, and ties into the plot later on, but the unexpected change can be jarring.
  • Goosebumps is normally a kid's horror series, but "How I Learned to Fly" stands out as the only book in the series that plays out more like a supernatural romantic comedy (Jack learns to fly so he can impress his crush, Mia) and a satire on being famous in America (when Jack and Wilson prove that they can fly, they soon become hounded by obsessed fans, are taken in by the U.S. Army for experiments, and become so popular that they have no private life).
  • The Nero Wolfe novels and stories are usually murder mysteries. One exception to this is The Black Mountain, which revolves around Wolfe's best friend and daughter being murdered by Soviet agents and forcing Wolfe to travel to his native Montenegro to locate the killer. While it still hinges on a murder, the novel is more of an adventure story with elements of a Cold War spy thriller.
  • The Garrett, P.I. novels were already a genre-bender by design, having started as a Nero Wolfe pastiche set in a Fantasy Kitchen Sink city. But even its usual Fantastic Noir blend was one-upped by Angry Lead Skies, which threw visiting space aliens into the mix.
  • The Nightmare Room is generally a horror seres, but Shadow Girl is a superhero story that serves as a Genre Deconstruction where the hero doesn't want to be a hero, and the villain doesn't want to be a villain.
  • Expeditionary Force: Homefront is very different from the rest of the series due to the fact it is less focused on humans being utterly overwhelmed by extraterrestrial forces and needing to rely on Joe Bishop being a Guile Hero or Skippy being Sufficiently Advanced. Instead, it is full of big action scenes where the protagonists slug it out with the enemy in open battle. Skippy is also sidelined for most of the story, unable to help the others and cursed with a human who can't come up with elaborate plans on the fly.
  • The Railway Series the source material for Thomas & Friends; does this with one of the last books the creator Rev. Awdry wrote (along with his brother George), The Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways. The book has extensive history on Sodor from its Medieval to present day history, hotel recommendations, history on great engineering works, guides on religious sites, archeological discoveries, mead guides, and of course a detailed breakdown of railway history in the region. Many consider the book an awesome moment of showing off research from Awdry, but considering the light-hearted goofy fare his characters are now famous for, it is certainly a bit of a genre departure.

    Music 
  • Monsters from the Blue Öyster Cult album Cultösaurus Erectus starts off as a traditional AOR track, but then by the middle it quickly switches to a Jazz-lounge sort of feel.
  • TechN9ne:
  • The first half of Laserdance's The Guardian of Forever was their usual synthdance, but the second half completely abandoned the style and switched to progressive trance. It was thought that this was going to be a permanent Genre Shift, but they returned to form for their next album, Laserdance Strikes Back.
  • Red Sails in the Sunset by Midnight Oil has the track "Bakerman", a very short cheerful oompa ditty in the middle of what is otherwise a dark and very political new-wave album.
  • Anoraak normally does minimalistic synthpop, but "Long Distance Hearts" has a more trancy sound.
  • Limp Bizkit's "Douche Bag" starts off in their usual Nu Metal style, then becomes a Jazz song out of nowhere at the end.
  • Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody abruptly breaks into Heavy Metal for about a verse before returning to its faux-operatic style.
  • Nightwish is usually a symphonic metal band, but their "The Islander" is Celtic folk-rock, and their "Slow, Love, Slow" might be described as dark cabaret/jazz. "The Crow, The Owl, And The Dove" is mostly acoustic pop.
  • A few Nine Inch Nails songs do this. "March of the Pigs" starts off as metal, turns into techno, and then switches to clean vocals over a piano. Then it does it all over again. "Ruiner" is mostly a synth-heavy industrial track, but has a bluesy breakdown and guitar solo after the second verse. "The Becoming" has sections that almost sound like "Kumbaya," but then give way to pulsing guitars and screams of "Goddamn this noise inside my head!" The song "Everything" off of the Hesitation Marks album is a pop-punk song that is sandwiched between the usual dark/industrial NIN fare.
  • Shania Twain released three versions of her album Up!: red (rock/pop), green (country), and blue (world music.) The red and green are fairly similar, but the blue version is similar to popular Eastern music, unlike any previous releases.
  • Played for Laughs with German Power Metal band Orden Ogan. They are known for their albums being centered on Dark Fantasy themes, but in Vale, one of their albums, there is a Hidden Track called "(Who's the) Green Man", a deliberately silly Ska-style rap song in which Seeb and Nils incoherently slur about the titular Green Man.
  • Pop-punk band Green Day has done this a couple times, most notably on the album Nimrod. They play faux-country on "Dominated Love Slave", instrumental surf rock on "Last Ride In" and ska-punk on "King for a Day".
  • Alestorm's "Death Throes of the Terrorsquid", the Sequel Song to "Leviathan", goes into Dimmu Borgir mode when the title beast awakens to do battle with the crew for the second and final time.
  • Issues' normal style of music is a mix of metalcore and nu metal with pop music into the mix. That is until you get to "Disappear (Remember When)", the final song on their debut album. It starts off normal, but once it gets to the end the instruments stop playing, and it suddenly becomes an A Cappella gospel song complete with female choir singers in the background.
  • George Frederic Handel, composer of such masterpieces as "Music For The Royal Fireworks" and the oratorio Messiah (of "Hallelujah Chorus" fame) is less famous but equally important as one of the driving forces in preservation of Irish folk music. He spent a lot of his career in Dublin (then England's second city and cultural capital) and spent a lot of his free time collecting and notating airs and dance tunes he heard in the city.
  • Sabaton is known for Power Metal anthems about military history. "The Ballad of Bull" on Heroes still follows that subject matter (it's about Australian Army Corporal Leslie Allen), but is a '70s rock-style Power Ballad.
  • [SiTH] Clan is a nerdcore Rap group, but "Love Jam" on their first album The Beta is a soft hip-hop Intercourse with You number coming between two raps about gaming. "Video Game Store" on Pixels to Polygons isn't even a song: it's a comedy skit about shopping for video games.
  • Battle Beast is known for Power Metal fused with '80s-style Hard Rock, but "Touch in the Night" is an Intercourse with You number that sounds like a synthpop tune from a '90s girl group.
  • Snoop Dogg, who's of course best known for his Gangsta Rap songs about sex, drugs, and criminality, raised some eyebrows when he released a Gospel Music album, Bible of Love (2018). Despite some Moral Guardians confused at the seeming disconnect between the artist's lifestyle and a religious message, it made it to #1 on the Gospel charts.
  • Hip-hop band The Roots' Phrenology has "!!!!!!!" (hardcore punk), "Thirsty" (EDM) and "The Seed (2.0)", a cover/remake of Cody Chesnutt's "The Seed".
  • Lydia Loveless' "Heaven" is a dance track and a 90 degree turn from the rest of Real, which elsewhere blends Americana, country and pop/rock.
  • Regurgitator's second album Unit mostly forsakes the band's earlier Genre Roulette for an 80s pop throwback record...mostly. There's also "Modern Life" (90s indie rock), "I Piss Alone" and "1234" (hardcore punk) and "I Will Lick Your Arsehole" and "Just Another Beautiful Story" (gangsta rap and psychedelic 60s pop respectively, but with slick production that evokes the 80s).
  • Corrosion Of Conformity, a metal band, stuck in a bluegrass number at the end of their album Blind for no apparent reason, called "Jim Beam and the Coon Ass".
  • Indie folk singer Laura Veirs' third album has "Cannon Fodder", a big rock song with a spacey synth outro.
  • Alela Diane's folk album Alela Diane & Wild Divine starts with "To Begin", a blue-eyed soul number.
  • Toy Dolls always include a cover on every album, usually something wildly incongruous with the band's general fast-paced comedy-punk repertoire. A standout is a series of variations on "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik", which would not sound out of place at a music academy recital.
  • Hard Rock band Guns N' Roses has "My World," an Industrial Hip Hop song. Its made even more weird made by the fact that it closes out the Use Your Illusion duology.
  • LCD Soundsystem is primarily an Alternative Rock/Dance-Punk project, known for making noisy, high-energy dance music. Their sophomore album, Sound of Silver, is also mostly this, but the album ends with "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down", a traditional jazz-piano ballad, toning down the drums and guitars for a bittersweet, heartfelt ode to James Murphy's hometown.
  • Lovebites plays heavy metal... but metalheads might be surprised to see Miyako play Fryderyk Chopin's "Revolutionary Etude" as the lead-in to "Swan Song" (she later released a solo EP of classical piano covers of metal songs, such as "Eagle Fly Free" and "Battery". For the members themselves, vocalist Asami came from a Soul and R&B background (as well as being a trained ballerina) and had no experience with heavy metal before she auditioned for the band.
  • Taylor Swift, who at the time was still a country pop artist, has the song "Better Than Revenge," a Pop Punk song, which sounds nothing like anything she's done before, or since, instead sounding more like something Paramore would have done earlier on in their career.
  • Stock Aitken Waterman are best known for producing dance-pop songs for other artists. Under their own name they released "Roadblock" in the "rare groove" style that was cool at the time.
  • British blues singer Jamie N Commons decided to collaborate with house duo Icarus for their track "Moment In Time".
  • deadmau5 released "Where's the Drop?", which is an album of orchestral arrangements of his biggest hits. He later commissioned remixes of these orchestral renditions by up-and-coming electronic producers, and released it as "Here's the Drop!".

    Theatre 
  • Invoked with Der Rosenkavalier. After composing Salome and Elektra, two extremely dark tragedies that pushed a lot of boundaries both in terms of story and music and were very popular with the approximately ten people who could see what he was trying to do, Richard Strauss decided that his next opera was going to be, in his words, "a Mozart opera", a light, fun crowd-pleaser that would appeal to a broad audience and bring in some much-needed money.
  • Tsukiuta and its spinoff series tend to do this more often than not, taking their Idol Singer main cast elsewhere in the multiverse. They've done Space Opera (with dragons), Youkai, Steampunk (where the characters are reincarnations of their space-opera selves, and their dragons find them again), a world ruled by a Flower King selected by dance competitions, and more, all for the sake of Costume Porn.

    Video Games 
  • Baldur's Gate III: Though mostly a Dark Fantasy, the game leans hard into classic horror tropes for the Shadow Cursed Lands in Act II, such as Slasher Movie antagonists, Ghost Fiction, Nothing Is Scarier, etc.
  • Might and Magic 7 is a full-on fantasy RPG for the majority of the story- until the final act, whereupon our heroes take on space aliens with space blasters.
  • Dungeon Siege Roughly halfway through the game, after a high fantasy romp through the lands of Aranna, the party stumbles into The Goblin Warrens to find out that the Goblins roughly have the equivalent of early 20th-century human technology, where the party can loot and use some of the weapons. After it's done, the story goes back to high fantasy to the end.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has an interesting experience with this trope. While in prison, Naked Snake can fall asleep if you save and quit. When you load it back, a hack-and-slash minigame starts. After a few minutes of slicing up giant mutant prison guard monsters, Snake wakes up from his nightmare, evoking a hilarious radio conversation from Para-Medic when called.
  • Jagged Alliance 2 is a squad-based strategy/RPG, set in a Banana Republic, where you assist an uprising against an evil queen and... WHERE THE HELL DID THE HUGE MAN-EATING BUGS COME FROM!? Apparently even the developers thought this might be a bit too jarring for some people's tastes because there's an option to turn "Sci-Fi Elements" off when you start a new game.
  • Also common in The Legend of Zelda series is shifts to Stealth Action games.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Happens early where you infiltrate the Gerudo Fortress, having to avoid guards and stunning them with your bow/hookshot and freeing prisoners covertly. And a simplified preview of this genre shift earlier in the same game, when young Link has to sneak past Hyrule Castle guards to meet up with Princess Zelda.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Happens as early as the first dungeon by removing your sword. The tone also feels completely different from the rest of the game, being dark and dank, and you'll find yourself moving slowly, crouching, sidling along walls and hiding inside barrels a la the box from Metal Gear Solid. You also have to take out the searchlight operators in order to be able to move on.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: As soon as you reach the Hidden Village for the first time, the game puts you right into a Spaghetti Western (or a light-gun FPS, depending how you play it).
    • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: While the game has elements of the stealth genre in the Silent Realm segments, the true example of this trope is the visit to the Eldin Volcano during the Song Of The Hero quest, where upon entry the volcano explodes, Link is captured and all his items are taken from him. He has to slowly sneak around the newly instated enemy camp and retrieve his items and has to use the ones he gets back to help him get the other ones as if they were gadgets like in a true stealth-action game.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: While the game lets the player use Optional Stealth in almost every combat encounter, there are two specific sections where it is required: the mission to board Divine Beast Vah Rudania, and the mission to infiltrate the Yiga Clan Hideout.
  • A DLC pack for Red Dead Redemption, "Undead Nightmare" turns the game into a Zombie Apocalypse story in a new campaign mode. Oh, and it adds mythical creatures, too.
  • The Yakuza series is a crime drama about life in the Japanese underworld. A spin-off title, Dead Souls, is set during a Zombie Apocalypse. Oh, and Ryuji Goda has a Gatling gun arm.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • The game is a straight Bioware RPG Space Opera. Commander Shepard wanders around the galaxy performing quests and beating up bad guys. Then there are two quests worth of downloadable content which turn the game temporarily into a heist movie and a detective movie respectively, with the appropriate mood, camera work, and tropes.
    • Part of Legion's loyalty mission bears a resemblance to a Tower Defense game, with Shepard remotely activating rocket turrets to help fight off waves of geth.
    • Mass Effect 3 has The Citadel DLC, which is an intentional send-up of the series with numerous homages to other video games, movies, and books, a lot of snide commentary about the game and the multiplayer community, some good-natured shots at both the fans and the game, and a lot of series in-jokes. It completely clashes with the sharp Reconstruction of Space Opera which makes up the rest of the series and especially with the generally dark and moody feel of the third game, since humanity is engaged in a brutal war for survival.
  • Kingdom Hearts coded does this in several chapters, taking an action-RPG game and twisting it into a 2D platformer, a hall-running railshooter, and even a turn-based RPG at times.
  • In Fable III, once the King/Queen first sets foot on the streets of Aurora, there is a rather abrupt (and effective) switch from dark humor/fantasy to full-blown horror and it just gets scarier from there.
  • Each of the Fallout: New Vegas add-ons are this. Dead Money is a slice of Survival Horror in an Art Deco resort (not unlike BioShock), Honest Hearts swaps the struggles of the Mojave out for a religious conflict in Utah, Old World Blues is a zany romp with the Mad Science and humor typical of the Fallout series magnified. Lonesome Road is a road through a true apocalyptic wasteland while on a journey to discover your past and a final confrontation with the man who's had some involvement with all the other add-ons as well as your own history.
  • Fallout 3 has a brief stint into the sci-fi realm in the Mothership Zeta DLC when your character is abducted by aliens, fights off the aliens, and at the end actually engages another alien ship in a space battle above post-apocalyptic Earth.
  • Sim Settlements 2 is a mod for Fallout 4 that normally plays like an RPG/city builder hybrid, that then later adds Real-Time Strategy warfare elements. However, the "Flickering Lights" quest that starts off Chapter 3 goes firmly into horror territory, complete with an unknown assailant and a puzzle that wouldn't feel out of place in Resident Evil.
  • In the NES ice hockey game Blades of Steel, the first intermission entertainment is a short, simplified game of the space-shooter Gradius on the arena scoreboard. Then the puck drops for the second period.
  • At one point Knights of the Old Republic turns into CSI: Dantooine, with the Player Character asked by a Jedi Master to investigate a homicide among the settlers through witness interviews and forensic evidence (the analysis of the latter is handled by a droid). Meanwhile, three portions of the player's activities on Manaan have Courtroom Episode components (two are part of the main quest, the third is Jolee Bindo's companion sidequest).
  • Max Payne loves delving into different genres during the course of the game.
    • Acts 1 and 2 are your standard crime-noir, with some tease of a Genre Shift into occult horror territory near the end of Act I before revealing that no, Lupino's not into dark magic, he's just tripping balls on Valkyr.
    • The nightmare sequences throughout the game inject a tone of surreal horror into the game when they occur.
    • Act 3 introduces elements of espionage/technothriller stuff early on, with Max battling heavily-armed mercenaries and infiltrating a military bunker in order to get to the bottom of Valkyr, along with a brief detour back to the usual crime-noir in Chapter 4, where Max confronts B.B., the backstabbing bastard who actually murdered his partner and set him up to take the fall for it. Then after that, we go into espionage mode again, this time with what seems like some kind of Ancient Conspiracy but which is actually, according to Max Payne 2, a very old criminal syndicate culminating in a final confrontation at the top of Aesir Plaza.
  • The entire Call of Duty franchise (since Modern Warfare at least) typically have zombie apocalypse-themed DLC packs. There are so many that they've now developed their own universe/continuity.
  • The first mission of Saints Row IV is a seriously-taken pastiche of Modern Warfare-style modern military shooters, unlike the more comedic tone of the rest of the game, down to the breaching scene and using a knife for melee attacks rather than Groin Attacks or pro-wrestling moves.
  • No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle:
    • The game flirts with this in the fight against Matt Helms, who's basically one giant slasher villain homage, and who's backstory is one of the few times the game and its predecessor deals with supernatural elements (his stage is even reached through an Akashic Point, another one of the rare supernatural elements).
    • The ranked battle against Charlie Macdonald is more akin to a 2D Fighting Game with Super Robots.
  • No More Heroes III: The fight against the Rank 3 boss (Sonic Juice) is presented as a turn-based RPG fight. Then Travis destroys the RPG menu and interface during battle and makes the fight switch back to a typical hack-and-slash combat akin to the rest of the game and the series.
  • Train Simulator 2012 has the infamous Trains vs. Zombies DLC... which is just the same game as before, except now there are zombies that the player has to try and not let on the train. And a witch. It must be seen to be believed.
  • The Nancy Drew series are mostly straightforward mysteries, as you would expect from the title character, but every third game or so, they decide to take a hard left turn and tell stories that are almost outright horror. Various haunted buildings (Message in a Haunted Mansion, The Haunting of Castle Malloy), ghosts (Shadow at the Water's Edge, Ghosts of Thornton Hall), a creepy cult-like family (Curse of Blackmoor Manor,) and just general creepiness abound. Most have Scooby-Doo-esque rational explanations, but it's still surprising that a video game series based on Nancy Drew of all characters has gained a Nightmare Fuel page, and earned it.
  • Batman: Arkham Series:
    • Batman: Arkham Asylum features a fairly standard but well-told Batman plot, but a sudden case of Mood Whiplash and Mind Screw hits whenever The Scarecrow's fear toxin causes Batman to have some rather disturbing hallucinations. For many players, these sudden horror sections were the high point of the game. The gameplay was unchanged, but the tone was completely different.
    • Batman: Arkham City:
      • There's an entire, darkly surreal section devoted to the Mad Hatter's insane fantasies, where Batman winds up in another hallucinatory world. Also like Arkham Asylum, the gameplay was unchanged.
      • Another occurs with Ra's al Ghul's section of the game, where yet another unreal battle takes place in a theme park Middle Eastern fantasy world before jumping right back into post-Dark Knight grim-and-gritty Gotham
    • Batman: Arkham Knight takes the cake with the ending sequences which involve Batman's worst nightmare played out in his head: Joker possesses Batman, who uses his body to hunt and kill scrambling victims in an apocalyptic Gotham - and turns the game into a third-person shooter! Then Scarecrow injects Batman with another round of fear gas and Joker gets his worst nightmare in FPS horror format.
  • RuneScape has a few quests in it that seem to be in a different genre, but one quest that is especially notable is the quest "Broken Home", which is very Survival Horror inspired. It actually plays like the early Resident Evil games. Almost the entire quest takes place in a mansion which the player cannot bring any items into, and none of the enemies in the quest can be attacked, only avoided or run from. "Broken Home" is also currently one of the only quests in the game that can be replayed an unlimited number of times, and has extra rewards for Speed Running it.
  • Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune soundtracks are known for being trance or at least having electronic music elements. But then there's "The Race Is On" from Maximum Tune 5DX, which is entirely a rock song.
  • Splatoon 2 has an in In-Universe example: Pearl is usually the rapper who appears on Off the Hook's songs. However, in one of the chat longs, a clip of one of her first music demos is posted. Turns out that before Pearl and Marina formed their pop group, Pearl tried her hand at Metalcore.
  • Phantasy Star Online 2 has two rather infamous examples of this. Reborn: EPISODE 4 is an Urban Fantasy with a Meta Fiction-esque story, due to it taking place in the real world and featuring the game itself as a major plot point. Heroes: EPISODE 5 meanwhile takes place in a Medieval European Fantasy world with elements of an Isekai work. The game went back to Science Fiction with Stars: EPISODE 6.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is normally an RPG about adventuring and fighting bad guys with heavy elements of platforming, but Chapter 6 has Mario helping to solve a mystery on a train. Similarly, Paper Mario: Color Splash eventually puts Mario in the Dark Bloo Inn, the site of a "Groundhog Day" Loop that Mario has to break in order to proceed.
  • Tiny Barbarian DX is a Rastan Saga-esque fantasy action platformer game, as one would naturally expect, so it's pretty shocking when Episode 4 changes up the formula in favor of having the barbarian abducted by aliens in the apparent final level, then later rescued by his laser firearms-toting damsel (who was the designated kidnapping victim up to that point). In-between those two occurrences, the game becomes a Run-and-Gun platformer for a while, although the sci-fi switch sticks until the end.
  • Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town: One of the romance options is a noble from a foreign land who moved to the Thriving Ghost Town in which the game is set to escape Decadent Court level politics in which he wanted no part. The plot of his Romance Sidequest involves encounters with an assassin who was sent after him, resulting in a plotline that is quite action-packed and has quite high stakes for a Farm Life Sim.
  • ULTRAKILL is a Science Fantasy First-Person Shooter, but its Bonus Levels all shift the game into a new genre for the duration of that level.
    • Something Wicked This Way Comes is a Survival Horror experience of navigating a pitch-black maze while pursued by an endessly-respawning One-Hit Kill monster.
    • The Witless is a puzzle game (and pastiche of The Witness).
    • All-Imperfect Love Song is a parody of dating sims.
    • Clash Of The Brandicoot is a third-person 3d platformer and pastiche of the Crash Bandicoot franchise.
    • I Only Say Morning is a Fishing Game parody with unusually obtuse mechanics and increasingly bizarre and referential "fish".
  • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: Kiryu's Limit Break, Dragon's Resurgence, allows him to temporarily throw out the turn-based aspects of the game and beat on enemies in real time, much like in the preceding Like a Dragon games. What makes this part of an Out-of-Genre Experience is that the Chapter 12 boss fight against Daigo Dojima, Goro Majima, and Taiga Saejima makes it so that the bosses can also do this once their health is low, turning the game into a full-on brawler until either Kiryu or the boss's health is depleted.

    Web Videos 
  • Chuckle Sandwich: While the podcast usually just consists of the hosts having a conversation, the Chuckle Dungeon episodes temporarily turn it into a Dungeons and Dragons podcast, with Charlie running small campaigns for Ted and Schlatt to play.
  • Dr Glaucomflecken: These are medical humor video skits, but sometimes swerve into horror territory.
  • Girlfriend Reviews: The duo is know for their comedic and meme-filled approach to game reviews, focusing on making fun of games and their experience playing them. Their video "Understanding The Last of Us Part II", is a thoughtful video essay that, while having a little comedy, is an overall serious video in which Shelby analyzes the game's controversial plot points and structure rather than their experience with the game, which they felt was necessary due to the massive controversies and discourse happening around the game. They would later make their usual review of the game.
  • Maggie Mae Fish: Maggie usually makes good humored video essays where she analyzes pieces of media through an academic and critical lens. "Change", however, is a video essay that focuses on no piece of media in particular (though she refers to Hoarders and Weekend (1967)), and is more of a personal meditation in which Maggie talks about her recent personal experience with grief after losing her grandmother, and her dislike for unchanging things.

    Western Animation 
  • Occurs often in The Amazing World of Gumball, due to the show's fondness for parodies.
    • "The Others" turns the show in a parody of Teen Drama, with plenty of references to My So-Called Life, when Gumball and Darwin try to help the saddened Claire when she suddenly has to move.
    • "The Test" turns the show in a sitcom, and a bad one at that, when Gumball decides to change his ways, the group's lives are shifted so now the show is a sitcom with Tobias as the main character.
    • "The Sweaters" turns the show in a parody of sports movies, specifically Karate Kid. Where as the town bends itself backwards for the parody to be played as straight (and over the top) as it possibly can, Darwin and Gumball realize the oddness and decide to just ride this one out.
  • American Dad!:
    • The alien Roger once pooped out a turd made of solid gold; pretty standard fare for the show. But then a couple scenes in two different episodes were devoted to people finding the golden turd and engaging in Film Noir style crime out of greed over it, without a joke to be heard. These scenes would even switch to a widescreen format back when the show was still aired in fullscreen just to make them look more cinematic.
    • "Lost in Space" is an almost serious science-fiction story focused on Jeff.
  • Archer
    • "Space Race", the two-part finale of the third season, stands out for being a full-on Science Fiction story about a mutiny on a space station and a plot to colonize Mars in a workplace comedy about spies. Justified, as it's a direct spoof of a specific James Bond film that was also an example of this trope.
    • The 8th season is an entire season of straight-up Film Noir, justified as being Archer's coma dream. It's also considerably more dramatic than the rest of the series.
    • The 9th season continues this trope with a shift to classic 1930s pulp adventure for Archer's next coma dream, although this was closer in tone to the first seven seasons of the show than the eighth season was.
    • The 10th season does this a third time for Archer's last coma dream, with a shift to much harder Science Fiction than the Season 3 "Space Race" two-parter, complete with alien pirates, space gladiators, black holes, and its version of the villain Barry being a full killer robot with no human features whatsoever aside from having the same voice as the previous human Barrys. It is darker than Season 9, but lighter than Season 8.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender has a couple of episodes like this. "Zuko Alone" is a Western, complete with a Showdown at High Noon. "The Beach" is a Teen Drama, complete with Fanservice and a Wild Teen Party. "The Puppetmaster" is horror, conveniently aired near Halloween.
    • This is even lampshaded their pre-finale summation episode; when the Gaang takes a break from training to go see a play based on their previous adventures, Sokka comments that this exactly the kind of random time-wasting activity he misses since the show shifted to more serious and plot-driven episodes.
  • Batman: The Animated Series:
    • We're all familiar with the classic Batman episode formula. Classic Bat rogue hatches zany scheme related to their particular motif, some detective work, track to abandoned factory, defeat. Several episodes in the series departed rather drastically from this pattern:note 
    • Any episode that features advanced technology, like robots or gene-splicing, comes off as sci-fi to the point of being out of place in the dark deco Film Noir setting.
    • "Heart of Steel: Part 1" and "Part 2" feature Bats fighting a computer (made by a well-meaning futurist) whose plot is to replace the entire species with Robot Mes.
    • "Tyger, Tyger", in which Catwoman is abducted by a mad scientist who turns her into a literal Cat Girl to mate her with his latest creation.
    • Most episodes with Ra's al Ghul will feature Bats actually leaving Gotham to have a globetrotting pulpy adventure.
  • Dan Vs., a show focused on wacky revenge schemes, has had two episodes involving this:
    • "The Dentist", where Dan and Chris fight a dentist supervillain.
    • "Wild West Town", where the genre jump shouldn't be even remotely difficult to guess.
  • Dexter's Laboratory, a sci-fi gag comedy, has:
    • The episode "Framed", where Dexter's glasses are cracked. It's very dialogue-heavy, Dexter's lab isn't even mentioned, and feels more like a school slice-of-life story.
    • "Filet of Soul" is a fairly straightforward horror story about Dexter and Dee-Dee being haunted by the ghost of their pet goldfish.
    • "DiM" has no dialogue and no music and is simply about a trip to the store to replace a broken light bulb. There are also no gags or jokes whatsoever and appears to simply be experimental storytelling.
    • The lion's share of "Better Off Wet" is of an elaborate synchronized swim sequence. As a result, it's less of any genre in particular and more an isolated Busby Berkeley Number with a few pool-related gags before and after it.
  • Family Guy:
  • The Gargoyles episode "Sentinel" marked a brief foray into Space Opera, when Goliath and Angela go to Easter Island and run into an alien warrior who mistakenly believes that the Gargoyles are aliens as well. Though we don't see its direct consequences, the episode makes it clear that Earth is an outpost in a massive intergalactic war.
    • Word of God says that the aliens that the sentinel was guarding against actually would have invaded Earth two centuries after the events of the show, with the descendants of the main characters (and the members of the cast still alive at that point) forming a resistance against them. Honestly, the show was already such a Fantasy Kitchen Sink that aliens weren't much of a stretch...but since the proposed spin-off about the alien invasion was never actually made, "Sentinel" still sticks out like a sore thumb.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • While a supernatural-themed show, any episode with Blendin Blandin is much straighter sci-fi.
    • The three-part series finale goes in a different direction entirely, becoming a post-apocalyptic alien-vs.-mecha show.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • In "Twilight's Kingdom Part 2", the fight between Twilight and Tirek looks like something out of a Shōnen anime, often being compared to Dragon Ball Z. This is especially noticeable with the climax of the episode, which is more in line with previous finales.
    • "The Saddle Row Review". With this episode, the show dips its hoof into Mockumentary-style comedy, with the diner interviews taking the place of talking-head confessionals. To further drive the point home, the working title of this episode was "Saddle Row & Rec".
  • Recess:
    • The episode "Schoolworld" adds sci-fi to the Slice of Life comedy.
    • The theatrical film goes into the territory of spy thrillers and 1960s counter-culture, among others, to the point of being Genre-Busting.
  • Samurai Jack, usually a more serious show, has a few comedic-driven episodes with little in the way of action, most notably "Jack is Naked" and "Jack's Sandals".
  • The Simpsons: "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" transplants characters into new genres - Chief Wiggum and Seymour Skinner are a pair of street-smart private investigators (well, at least Skinner is), the eponymous family performs a song-and-dance skit, etc.
  • South Park has the episodes "Kenny Dies," "The Return of Chef" and "Stanley's Cup," all drama-driven episodes featuring very little comedy. The former two, in particular, featured the deaths of two beloved characters (even though Kenny eventually came back, despite the fact this death was intended to be permanent, unlike his many past deaths).
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): Ultimate Draco uses the time scepter to send the turtles to different times and places. Michaelangelo was sent to an alternate universe where the turtles are more traditionally cartoonish superheroes. Raphael was sent to a motorcycle race on an alien world. Donatello was sent to a dystopian future where Shredder had conquered the world. Leonardo was sent to an alternate universe similar to a samurai movie which was populated by humanoid animals.
  • Tom and Jerry is well-known for its slapstick Gag Series nature. The short Blue Cat Blues, however, is a romantic drama where Tom tries to win back a Gold Digger's love, only to fail and end up Spurned into Suicide.
  • Voltron: Legendary Defender is mainly a sci-fi action-adventure series but it has the space horror episode "Crystal Venom" and the comedic "The Voltron Show!".
  • In the Wander over Yonder episode "The Bad Neighbors", the wacky sci-fi hijinks turn into a parody of generic suburban sitcoms when Lord Hater and Emperor Awesome both end up hiding out in a cul-de-sac on Suburbicon IV and get into an Escalating War with each other.
  • We Bare Bears is usually a light-hearted Slice of Life comedy, but the "Icy Nights" episodes are an action-packed homage to the neo-noir genre.

 
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Alternative Title(s): And Its A Medical Drama, Temporary Genre Shift, Unexpected Genre Change

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Acala's Wrath

At climactic points in the triple-threat boss fight against Daigo, Majima, and Saejima, the game's genre shifts temporarily from turn-based RPG to full-on brawler, with both Kiryu and his opponent attacking each other in realtime.

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