Unreadably Fast Text

A quirk of movies and TV shows where text is shown on screen, but doesn't stay on screen long enough for the audience to read it. It's not a subliminal message, and it's sometimes not even relevant to the plot, but you'll have to pause it to see what it says. Credits are often like this.

Usually a form of Freeze-Frame Bonus. Often the text will mention something about how the people who took the time to freeze-frame the text and read it clearly have too much time on their hands. A common joke is for an advert to have contract small print or medical side-effects shown like this.

Note that it's not just that you couldn't read it because you read slowly. It's that the director intentionally made it so you can't possibly read it in the time it's shown onscreen. Compare If You Can Read This.

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Examples

Advertising

• It's Thinking: In the NBA 2K ad, after the "Game and system sold separately" text, it also reads, "and they don't learn from each other, hello."

Anime and Manga

• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • Evangelion shows a paper with a very detailed description of the 2nd impact for only a second or so.
  • There's a lot of this in episode 22 (the infamous Mind Rape episode), and even more in the Director's Cut version.
  • Near the end of The End of Evangelion, we also see a bunch of letters to Gainax, some graffiti on their studio walls, and even a death threat to director Hideaki Anno.
  • The monitor of the Jet Alone's computer shows text highly reminiscent of the listing of TSR programs produced by the MEM command from MS-DOS, including one with a name similar to HIMEM.SYS.
  • There's another 2I description, but it's only a description of Second Impact for the first sentence or so, after which it pulls a Prince of Bel-Air and the rest is a history of Studio Gainax with Gainax strategically replaced with GEHIRN and the words 'Second Impact' liberally sprinkled throughout.
• Studio Shaft does this all the time:
  • Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei flashed screenshots from internet Flame Wars for several frames during the opening credits, and had numerous things written on the blackboard that would only be visible for a few seconds.
    • And the second opening... good god. Good luck even being able to pause at the right time.
  • Hidamari Sketch has tons of these. The first episode of the second season flashes plot-relevant proverbs on the screen throughout the episode, but only keeps them on-screen for about half a second. If you consider that the proverbs are in English and the audience is Japanese, it's pretty much impossible for them to read it before it goes away. There's also a crossword puzzle flashed on screen in one episode for only a second or two. If you solve it, the answers end up being a bunch of other popular anime series.
  • There's a slip of paper reading "Nice Boat" that flits by in the first episode of ef: A Tale of Memories.
  • Bakemonogatari has series of these images in the start of each episode, that contain basically a quick exposition of Araragi's thoughts on the current matter.
  • Madoka makes frequent use of this, typically either in German or in the runes made up for the series. The messages are far too long, or move to fast, to read without freeze-framing (and then translating it, for those who don't speak German). The text ranges from spoilery warnings about the dangers ahead to quotes from Faust, the story from which Madoka draws heavily. During the battle with Walpurgisnacht, one of the missile launchers coming out of the water says SHAFT. Self advertisement, anyone?
• In Haruhi Suzumiya Yuki's programming is shown faster than the eye can follow. The code is somewhat realistic (consisting of valid snippets of the C programming language) if you look at it frame by frame. She also has a habit of speaking much too fast to understand, in SQL computer code... backwards.
• In Bubblegum Crisis, the list of Griffon owners which is shown briefly on the screen includes real-life musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. Also, the HUD of an ADP officer briefly flashes "Budweiser King of Beers" and "St. Louis, Mo" in episode 1.
• Episode 10 of Super Dimension Fortress Macross has some text briefly on the screen which is a screenshot of a text-based computer game from 1971 based on Star Trek.
• In one episode of Maison Ikkoku, there's a scene where Yusaku Godai is at a pay phone, and a bus goes past in the street. On the side of the bus is the handwritten logo text from the film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall.
• Mobile Suit Gundam Wing:
  • When Heero is looking over the giant glob of text in the first episode, it's really a Photoshop readme.
  • In another episode, Quatre is looking over the blueprints for his Gundam; it includes random technical text, including a couple of Shout Outs to the Universal Century timeline (namely, Gundarium and the ALICE AI from Gundam Sentinel).
• Serial Experiments Lain has several paragraphs worth of tiny text explaining the drug Accela.
• Fullmetal Alchemist's anime adaptations occasionally has pages of English text on screen that are legible but flash by too quickly to read much of. If you pause to get a better look, the first few lines are on-topic English and the rest are meaningless gibberish. Incidentally, the legible lines are taken verbatim from Dungeons & Dragons players manuals on alchemy. Fullmetal Alchemist evidently runs on a D20 system.
• Dirty Pair
  • In episode 1, a computer monitor briefly displays names of cast members of Star Trek: The Original Series.
  • In episode 7, there is a brief shot of a control panel. The text on the buttons consists of musical references, especially to the band Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
  • In episode 5, a computer screen shows what's supposed to be a list of people associated with the Criados space station, but it's actually a list of famous musicians (including Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, etc.)
• Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu plays with this. In the art episode, Sōsuke asks advice from the eccentric art teacher. The art teacher's response is a whole, mindless lecture. At first, it simply records the parts Sōsuke understands (i.e. military terms). Then the teacher gets sped up and the subtitles get recorded in whole. He's unintelligible without the subs too.
• Sumiyoshi, one of Those Two Guys in Excel♡Saga, speaks in text (which simply appears onscreen) rather than talking normally. In one episode, he gives a long and detailed explanation of the Puchuu's recent plot, but it's such a long block of text, and disappears so quickly, that one needs to pause the video to read it. The other guy complains about this.
• The opening to Cowboy Bebop has background text all over the place. Even if it's not always scrolling too fast to read, there's too much of it to catch in the time it's on the screen.
• The Tatami Galaxy sometimes is hit by this, as the narration of the characters, particularly the protagonist, can get very fast very quickly.
• Sonic X featured this during the Sonic Adventure 2 adaptation, in understandable English. It managed to get replaced by blocks in place of text in the International Release, possibly due to usage of the words "Christ" and "Damn".
• Code Geass has a scene in an early episode where Suzaku is studying for a history textbook. It's only shown on screen for a few seconds, but it sheds some light on the series' alternate history.

Fan Works

• Kirby Guardian Has a character profile/lore drops regarding each of The Company at the end of every video.
• The Marionette tries to listen to his musicbox: The end credits scroll by so fast, pausing the video is required to read them. Pausing reveals, among other things, that animator IllusionR1 is credited for multiple roles, several silly special thanks are provided, and an admission by the animator about deliberately filling space in the credits is present.
• My Little Pony: Totally Legit Recap will flash entire walls of text on screen for only a split second, usually ideas DWK had that he didn't get to say in the initial recording. Or lewd sex jokes.

Films — Live Action

• Street Fighter II: The Movie has detailed Power Level information displayed for a short time.
• One of the copyright warnings for the DVD of Fight Club flashes by in a moment. If you freeze it or take a screencap of it, it says "If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second of your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all who claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think everything you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told you should want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.......Tyler." Take a look.
• At one point during the credits of the Leslie Nielsen film Wrongfully Accused, the words "People Nobody Cares About" appear, followed by a list of names scrolling far too quickly to read.
• Towards the end of Election, a paragraph of a quick-moving newspaper reads "If you've paused the film to read this entire article, your time would be better spent renting 'Citizen Ruth' from your local video store."
• The 1988 feature-length version of The Wizard of Speed and Time is full of these from beginning to end, but no more so than at the end of the "speed" sequence of the film-within-a-film of the same name, which contains what amounts to Mike Jittlov's personal manifesto about the power of the creative spirit, elucidated one frame and sentence at a time.
• Done by accident in Ax 'Em. There are three opening prologue text screens... and they're each barely on screen for three seconds. Not that they're accurate anyway.
• Yatsu's slideshow in Tetsuo: The Bullet Man.
• The opening credits of Godzilla (2014) feature the names of the cast and crew surrounded by narrative text that gets quickly redacted about a half-second after appearing. The text deals mainly with the efforts of MONARCH and the military to kill Godzilla and cover up his existence, along with text about a Conspiracy Theorist who thinks the Illuminati are behind all this.
• Played for Laughs at the end of the "Con Talk" sketch in Cheech & Chong's Still Smokin. The credits start out moving slowly, but then speed up to an insane velocity. Plus which, there are way too many names listed for a five-minute program of just two old cons talking on a couch.
• Deadpool: No Good Deed ends with a long report on The Old Man and the Sea scrolling by.

Live-Action TV

• In Smallville, happens a lot to articles and documents that are usually clear enough to be read but are only shown for a few seconds. However, if you pause the moments, most of them are serious text.
• Lost. At one point, in the beginning of Season Two, when Sawyer is in the water and there are sharks, you can barely get a glimpse of a shark with a DHARMA logo on it. If you look very carefully and squint a little.
• Speaking of DHARMA: Chuck Lorre's vanity plates.
• After a Cliffhanger season finale, Red Dwarf started its third series with a Star Wars style prologue explaining why the main character's children were gone, one of the supporting cast had turned female, and a one-off character from the previous series was now a regular, with a different actor. None of this was actually remarked upon in the show. The failed US pilot also did the same thing, followed in readable text with "Which you really need to know to understand the show".
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) TV show has faux computer graphics that were deliberately too detailed to read in full unless one paused one's VCR (if you were one of the 10% of the UK population that even had one).
• Regular feature on The Adam and Joe Show, to the point where they would warn you at the beginning of each episode to start your VCR as this was a "high density program".
• One episode of Brass Eye had the single-frame screen text "Grade Is A Cunt" as a Writer Revolt about Executive Meddling.
• Charlie Brooker's Newswipe did this in a recent episode; in the middle of a very fast-moving list of the countries attending the G20 summit, "Bottom Land" is listed, followed by "No, not really. We made that one up and you bothered to pause this to read the phrase "Bottom Land"; what a dismal little prick you are"
• During the sixth episode of Nathan Barley (a collaboration between Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris), there is a brief shot of a police sign appealing for witnesses to a crime to step forward. The small text at the bottom of the sign◊ both contains a Freeze-Frame Bonus joke (on a subject that anticipates Morris' later project Four Lions), and insults the viewer for being sad enough to pause the DVD to check if the shot contains a Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  "What are you reading this for your obsessional deviant DVD bandit sodsplit."
• The Replicator code from Stargate The Ark Of Truth was actually javascript taken from the Royal Bank of Canada website.
• Fist of Fun, a mid-90s BBC comedy show, did this with jokes designed to be only viewable if you recorded the show and paused the video. One of these was an advertisement for the Lee and Herring Video Repair Shop, suggesting you visit if you broke your video player by pausing it too many times.
• Lewis Black ranted about networks that do this with credits at the 2007 Emmys (saying that the people who worked on a show deserve to see their names at the end, instead of having them squashed into half the screen and sped up to make room for more advertising).
• There was a limited vogue in The '90s for ITV factual kids' shows, notably How 2 and Bad Influence to have a 'datablast' over the credits, which would be reams of text re-capping the show's content, displayed really quickly over the credits, to be viewed by taping it and freeze-framing your way through it.
• Jon Stewart of The Daily Show often highlights this for some of his informational graphics, suggesting people will go use their TiVo to go back and read all of it later.
• On The Colbert Report, after several months of listing "Super Pac" donators in a news-ticker form at the bottom of the screen, the Super Pac ended and there was no sense dragging the tail end out. Colbert told viewers to "get [their] TiVo remotes ready" and then listed all the remaining names in a matter of seconds, in a screen-filling stack of text rows scrolling by at breakneck speed.
• An episode of Trailer Park Boys has Julian reading a note aloud. The camera shows the contents of the note as he reads it, but then pans down to show additional text for a split second. The text says "If you're freeze-framing this on DVD, you're fucked!"
• The opening credits for Tokumei Sentai Go Busters has some text that flies by during a Montage, freeze-framing reveals it to be a portion of text from That Other Wiki's article on Super Sentai (specifically, the part discussing each of the series in brief).
• One MADtv (1995) sketch parodying badly-translated Korean soap operas had a character utter a single syllable, while a paragraph of subtitles flashed on the screen for a split-second.
• Saturday Night Live uses a hyper-fast scroll for corrections on its parody of Fox and Friends.
• Les Inconnus made a gag named "Théréza" (actually a fake movie extract taken from a sketch mocking cinema critics), in which the eponymous character speaks in a roughly Spanish-sounding language while French subtitles are displayed with an increasing speed until they cover all the screen and goes too fast to be readable. At this point, there is actually a quite visible phrase in the middle of the text which could be translated by something like "... about the most vicious among you who would be patient enough to read everything...".

Magazines

• In the early '90s, there was a plan to deliver magazines and other publications in this form via television. The pages of the magazine were to be taped at high speed, then broadcast in the early hours of the morning (in the days before TV stations stayed on the air 24/7). The viewer/reader was to tape the transmission on a VCR with a timer, then play it back/read it at slow speed at her convenience. Round-the-clock broadcasting and the DVD killed the proposal.

Theater

• The Blue Man Group lampshades this in the performance of their show Tubes. Three performers simultaneously flash cue cards to the audience filled with lots of text, waiting just a few seconds before moving to the next one. One of the cards says you can't read all of them and should just pick one Blue Man and stick with him. Later versions of the show have used LED signs and touch screens with the same purpose.

Video Games

• In Xenogears, Chrono Trigger's Lucca Ashtear makes a cameo to dispense a tutorial to the player. When asked, she delivers several pages' worth of info in about half a second, then asks the player if they got that.
• In Chrono Trigger, should you get the Developer's Room ending, the developers will "adjust the credits to suit your style", meaning the credits scroll so fast that they finish in about 5 seconds.
• Super Mario Bros.: This is a running gag in the Mario RPGs.
  • Super Mario RPG: The gardener in Rose Town spews several almost unreadably fast messages after you bring him the seed and the fertilizer, accompanied by the music going double-speed (and Mario becoming dizzy and falling down afterward). The same happens when finally his dreams come true and see their grown beanstalk, the one that give you access to the Lazy Shell equipment. In total, he does this three times.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: A woman in Twilight Town grows increasingly frantic when talking about her missing husband, and begins talking in this manner when listing his flaws. Rather than become dizzy, Mario falls asleep during this!
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: When Bowser is arguing with some Goomba staff while trying to get a seat his size at a theatre, one of them breaks out in a long, angry tirade that mostly flashes past too quickly to be read. This is made all the more funny because it comes completely out of the blue, since the character previously only spoke a single word at a time.
    So this big galoot here, right? He’s all like, I have no seeeat! No seeat! And he won’t shut up! But he won’t stop, and we’re all, we just can’t do it, buddy, OK? So we have no idea what to do. And this lug’s getting surlier. He’s not going away. And he has no seat! Nothing! Not a chance! So we do some solid thinking and totally fail. No big seats! I mean, we got small seats! We can do a small seat, sure, but this guy’s huge, so he’s not gonna fit in a small one! Please! And it's kinda bugging me, 'cause I'm on my feet all day! I mean, I'd LOVE to sit in ANY seat! It’s like, hey, pal, how about you try our job just once, y’know? It’d break him in two seconds! I work hard, Boss! Really hard! And this dude sits through life?! So spoiled! It makes me ill! All the suffering in the world, and this guy’s seating problem is urgent? Nooooooo! (beat) Ooooo!
• Myst: In the original release, the credits scroll past in mere seconds. This was changed for updated releases.
• Wangan Midnight: Maximum Tune has a bunch of scrolling text in its Attract Mode video. Upon closer inspection, it's a bunch of random characters, most of which are on the home row of a QWERTY keyboard.
• Mario Party 4: In the minigame Fruits of Doom, Bowser gives a list of fruits (with repeats), and players take turns bringing fruits to him. Choose a fruit he didn't list, or bring him a fruit more times than he listed, and you lose the game (and your coins). At first, the list scrolls by slowly, but quickly becomes unreadably fast, turning the game into a game of luck.
• The World Ends with You had this on Another Day, where one of the crew members, er, could "go on for days."
• Persona 3: The opening flashes an entire paragraph of French philosophical text onscreen for a few seconds. Then came the PSP remake's opening, which takes the trope to a ridiculous extent, especially since some of it is upside down to reflect the new Female Protagonist option.
• The beginning of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption features a reading from some sort of life-support machine log. It starts of with a simple status update, but as the eponymous corruption starts spreading, the text glitches, pauses, then suddenly start scrolling at an unreadable rate before everything goes black. If viewed in slow motion, most of it is gibberish, but there is the occasional readable phrase, like "Wii Format" and some German.
• cat planet: The credits go comically fast set to equally fast music. You can press alt in windowed mode to stop them.
• Devil Survivor has a flash of text just before you summon your first demons. If you freeze it for a moment you'll notice that it's actually Paul's Letter to the Romans which talks about salvation through Jesus. It also serves as a very fast piece of foreshadowing for Amane's ending.
• Mars Matrix's arcade opening movie is full of scenes that flash a paragraph of backstory for less than a second. The stage result screens also give you your next mission in a very fast marquee.
• Inverted in Braid, the credits screen of which has unbearably slow text. In order to read it, one must either have the patience of a saint or realize that the time control mechanics (in particular, Fast Forward) work even here.
• Puyo Puyo Sun: Beat Draco's course (only 3 stages long and very easy) in single player mode, and the game will mock you for not playing the harder courses by scrolling the credits and music at warp speed. Compile loooooved making fun of their players.
• The Bad Ending of Super Bomberman 5 zig-zags with this, as the credits continually speed up, slow down or grind to a halt. When you consider that the Big Bad Emperor Terrorin is a master of time and space, it's fitting.
• When the Orange Box logo and copyright info comes up at the end of the Team Fortress 2 short Meet the Demoman, there is a tiny disclaimer at the very bottom of the copyright info which reads:
  All information regarding Demoman grenade behavior was obtained from Australians believed to be reliable at the time. It is submitted to the possibility of errors, omissions, or nerfing without notice.
• The Something Else C3 Trailer uses this to warn potential players of its content.
• Ikaruga has sorts of proverbs at the start of each level that stay on screen for only a very short time, and it's unlikely the player will be able to read all of it. Pausing the game (at least in the PC version) doesn't help much because the pause menu obscures some of the text.
• Played with in Undertale. During the second phase of the fight against Sans, he'll start to attack you in the menu. Since you have to move your soul incredibly fast to prevent yourself from getting hit, reading the Flavor Text becomes impossible. The game seems to realize this too.
  Reading this doesn't seem like the best use of your time.
  • During Mettaton's quiz, one question is an enormous block of text describing a complex math problem. You get just a few seconds to answer the question, which isn't going to be long enough for most players to read the text, much less work out the math and answer it. Fortunately, Alphys always indicates the correct answer. That she got the correct answer so quickly is actually a bit of Foreshadowing. Even if you don't notice Alphys's hand signals, the quiz is designed in such a way that Mettaton won't kill you, though he will reduce your HP.
• The main villain of Kirby Star Allies, Hyness, goes into a Motive Rant that lasts a mere 13 seconds, but occupies several full boxes worth of text. In case you were wondering, it goes exactly like this:
  Hyness: We are the masters of a power driven to the far reaches of the universe, and we have but one desire! Can one such as you possibly fathom how dearly we have clung to this dream across the aeons? How could you! You couldn't! Never ever ever! We who once faced those who were in such fear of our power that they sealed us away and banished us to the edge of the galaxy! US! As if THAT loveliness wasn't enough, they tried to erase our very existence from history! RUDE! Only through our magic were we able to overcome their science and achieve great prosperity! We alone were responsible for stopping that repulsive nightmare of a galactic crisis, yet this is how you repay us! This won't stand! It won't be forgiven! It won't be forgotten! Never ever EVER! Those who called us mad, are you listening? You left us at the edge of the galaxy to be forgotten, then went along your merry way, probably living somewhere pretty and peaceful! But know this! Your future is a farce! You have none! We, masters of a matter most dark, vow to be restored, as foretold in the book of legend, which everyone thought was just a fairy tale! It WASN'T! We have already obtained the vessel that contains our Dark Lord, and he will soon awaken and shower us in compassion! Look! The vessel of our Dark Lord is filling up even as we speak! Now the time for his greatness to enter our world has come! Welcome to a new history! A new age! The age of awesome! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DARK LORD! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
• NieR: Automata:
  • One random NPC in the Resistance Camp is so chatty and talks so quickly that several boxes of text scroll past in a few seconds. 2B is left internally aghast at how anyone can talk so much.
  • Some of the communications between Pods 042 and 153 in the C/D/E route. Then again, some of that sped-up text is basically gibberish borne from message encryption, so it doesn't matter much anyway.
  • Endings F through Z have the entire credit roll fly by in the space of about two seconds.
• In Stars And Time: At the beginning of Act 5, the narration text starts going berserk and goes on a quick, Motor Mouth long rant in shaky all lowercase letters and No Punctuation Period that lasts for about three text boxes, about three or four seconds per box, until it stops. And that's if your text speed is 10% fast. If you set it to all-fast... well... good luck with that.
  (IF ONLY MIRABELLE DIDN'T DEAL THE FINAL HIT EVERY TIME... IF ONLY SHE...!!!!!! If only)
  [incredibly fast Wall of Text begins]
  (If only you knew if only the wish wasn't broken if only you could get to the king deal the final hit end it all and finally you'll be with your family forever and you'll be okay and you can just end it all you just need to get to the king deal the final hit make the wish come true make sure it all loops around you kill the king rip him to pieces for making you remember for making you see for not understanding for killing bonnie for getting in your blinding way every time you just need to kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him you just)
  [Wall of Text over]
  (need to get to the end
  and win
  and make sure everyone's wish comes true
  you just
  you just need to)

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney does this with Wendy Oldbag whenever she appears. In Justice For All, there's Richard Wellington in Case 1 and Moe the Clown in Case 3.
    • The special game over in 1-5 has the text start scrolling very slowly, then it gets faster and faster as Phoenix gets more frantic, eventually culminating in a very Big "NO!".
  • Apollo Justice uses it with Wesley Stickler, who tends to throw in a whole bunch of big words and scientific rambling to try and sound profound.
• This is used in Higurashi: When They Cry during Keiichi's (and later Irie's) bullshit speeches: the text scrolls automatically at super-speed without the "waiting" icon appearing, so that the reader can only catch glimpses of it. After it does stop however, you can rewind it and the nonsensical Wall of Text usually has a few uncanny Shout Outs in it.

Web Animation

• Battle for Dream Island has this a lot, especially in season 1. Only try to read if you have time to waste slowing down and pausing the video.
• The credits in the final episode of Inferno Cop do this when they get to the cast list, before returning to the glacially slow pace they were moving at before.
• Kirby Guardian After every episode, each of the Kirbies has a description written by Adeline. They get a second, darker version in Episode Six, showing the emotions that created them. ^note The Adeline description will be visible normally, but the Episode 6 one will be spoilered due to most being Wham Lines
  • The General:
  Always in the front, acting as leader to the team. Since he seems to like leading and tries his best, I’ve decided to call him “The General” and the group shall be referred to as “The Company”.
  Alcohol is pretty good. Have you ever had a cold beer with pizza before? Hell yeah! I remember King used to drink a lot when I was younger and told me never touch “that stuff” and look at me now, I’m doing just fine. It’s about time I’m being taken seriously!
  • GlumOne:
  This one is always looking sad and is pretty pessimistic. He’s always thinking of worst case scenarios. I only see him smile when I’m either holding or petting him.
  Man… Life was magical when I was a kid. Nowadays, it’s just boring… Look at everyone with their “hope”, “dreams” and “high expectations”… You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment
  • BleakOne:
  “BleakOne” is the name of this guy. There’s a dark aura surrounding him. That being said, he’s just as gluttonous as the others but unlike them, he prefers to be petted on the stomach rather than the head.
  I hate having to go through the town to reach my favorite painting spot. I feel like everyone is there to judge me. They must be thinking “Oh, it’s the creepy girl again. She never speaks to anyone and only shows up on cloudy days.” Leave me alone damn it! I’m just doing my own thing!
  • OddOne:
  A rather strange fellow. His reactions are over the top and he’s always playing tricks on the others and jumping around. I’m always worried he’s going to hurt himself in the weirdest way possible. His favorite activity is headbutting any part of my body that is available.
  I don’t have to “behave” or “act classy”. What’s the point in acting anyways? Want me to fit in? Nobody wants that! Everybody just wants to be themselves. Let me act a little crazy every once in a while. It doesn’t hurt anyone
  • ProudOne:
  As confident and independent as this one looks, he absolutely loves when I play with him. The more we play, the more his childish side shows. When he realizes this, he quickly shifts his attitude and acts all mysterious again. It’s so cute!
  I’m a loner, most of the time but I spent a good chunk of my childhood with King. He was always looking after me, beck when I used to live in Dream Land. He was the perfect big brother but I’m totally fine by myself now. I still visit him to this day so he can see how good I’m doing by myself
  • CautiousOne:
  Leave it to CautiousOne to tell you when things will go wrong, most of the time he’ll be right! It took the longest time for me to gain his trust. If I was near him and only moving my finger, he would be ready to run.
  Everytime I visit King or go anywhere, I have to make sure that I’m not overwhelmed by people. I’m not agoraphobic! “better safe than sorry” are just words to live by and I don’t have the energy to fix problems caused by other people
  • CutesyOne
  Now, he is the polar opposite of CautiousOne. He always wants to be with me and starts freaking out when I’m not nearby. I would be minding my own business and notice him climbing on me. Sucking my finger helps him relax when he’s stressed
  I like to please people. I can also get attached. I always make sure it’s not too much, however. I don’t want them to be freaked out. Maybe it makes me appear distant. If it wasn’t for my prudence, I would shower them with affection
  • OldOne
  There is a charming “old-timey” feel to this one, I don’t know why. He likes the spring breeze a lot for some reason. He also loves to sing but my ears don’t like it too much. One thing I’ve noticed with OldOne is that he trips and falls on his face a lot.
  I would love to have someone under my protection. Just like King did for me, I would be there for them, play with them, teach them new things about life. There’s nothing wrong with that idea! I may be clumsy and it could be said that this s my main flaw but come on! That would be adorable!
  • BitterOne
  An aggressive bully. When we’re playing outside he often starts fights with animals and insects, not realizing he may be at a disadvantage because of his size. Even during his sleep, he’s frowning! Despite this he requires about as much love as the others, He just won’t say it and cross his arms!
  It may not look like it but I became a lot stronger over the years. My punching bag allows me to exercise quite often. I also became “grumpier” and “aggressive” according to King… ^Below I mean, I don’t know, it sounds like a kiloton of bullshit that he pulled out of his ass or something. The fuck does he even know about me?! I’ll show you “grumpy” and “aggressive” Mr.IRobMyKingdomOfTheirFoodEverynight! That’s right we all know it! NyahNyah-BlahBlahBlaaah!
  • LostOne
  I Don’t think he knows who I am. I don’t think he even knows where he is. He never talks, rarely emotes. When I think he’s finally looking at me, he’s in fact lost in his thoughts. I’m just happy the others are not neglecting him. Sometimes I would notice he’s absent from the group only to find him sleeping in my shoe.
  *Sigh* It’s ok. I don’t care. I’ll just keep on doing what I do best: Enjoy my life without a care in the world. I’ll cook, dance, shine… Anything. Sleep and observe. Observe the world, people everything! I’ll analyze and replicate anything in my paintings. I am whoever I want to be. Just don’t get on my bad side or things will get rather explosive

Web Original

• The credits of the Cartoon Hooligans episode "What if Hulk Ripped His Pants #4".
• Joerg Piringer, an Austrian artist responsible for creating experimental sound/visual poets with human voices, is best known for two videos: one is "passwords", containing a display and a sped up reading of a list of passwords, and the other is the 33-minutes-long "unicode", which features most of the 65,000+ Unicode characters at the time of its uploading (one per frame).

• The Demented Cartoon Movie has a moment with a guy who's about to get blown up with a horrendously long speech bubble that lasts only a second. To make matters worse, the movie's initial release on Albino Blacksheep didn't have a Pause button, but later releases did.
  "Oh fudge bars! Someone seems to have thrown a bomb at me for no particularly good reason. This only goes to prove that my appearance in this movie was a huge mistake. I mean, come on. I'm about go get blown up by this stupid bomb that was just thrown from no where. You know what that means. It's noogle stiggy clacksitle hig toyup jokolam retttppop qrrbrbirlbel time! Wahahahaha! Why the hell are you reading this? It's pathetic enough that you have seen this much of the movie! This bit of text will disappear really soon now! It's barely legible now! Stop reading it! Seriously! This messages is about to end! There's no point in continuing! I'm about to end the message I really am! Really! So then I says to the guy. I says, that's not a watermelon. Wheee! Hahahahaha! Splat. It was fun. Really it was! Yeah."
• YouTube Poops frequently include text or screenshots that are shown for only an instant, facilitating a well-timed pause to actually read them. Or you can read the comments to see if it's been transcribed by a previous viewer who already did the work.
• In Linkara's review of The New Guardians #2, he mocks the "genetically superior beings" concept of the comic using a clip of Adolf Hitler ranting. The second time he uses the clip, a piece of text pops up the split second before resuming the review. The text reads: "Yeah, I can see why Germany would want to follow this shouting, drug-crazed lunatic. ZOMG Easter Eggs! Hi TV Tropes!"
• In The Nostalgia Critic's tribute to Siskel & Ebert, the Critic assures us that not all critics dislike certain religions.
  Nostalgia Critic: I for example only dislike these.
  (list of religions scrolls across the screen too quick to read)
  Nostalgia Critic: Especially the middle one.
• Red vs. Blue has a scene in the season 13 finale where text is rapidly scrolling on F.I.L.S.S' screen. One of the lines reads: Church dies at the end.
• JonTron has this to say when reviewing Star Wars Chess:
  **Opening text flashes by unreadably fast**
  Jon Tron: Oh...oh don't worry; I wasn't gonna read it anyways....
• The B Squad's recurring sketch 2 Black-Sounding White Gay Dudes has this for the end titles, which, if you slow them down, are the end titles from Gladiator.
• "What Is My Dog?", a relatively famous AMV, has a variation: sixty seconds in, "the obligatory 'screen full of text that's not on the screen long enough to read'" appears. It's not scrolling across the screen quickly like many versions of this, but the effect is the same. It falls into the "you have too much time on your hands" version of the trope.

Western Animation

• Invader Zim does this in "FBI Warning of Doom." The movie GIR is watching opens with an FBI warning that starts off as the usual piracy notice but takes a turn for the bizarre halfway through.
  "Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures in any medium (Title 17; United States Code, Section 501 and 506). The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates allegations of criminal copyright infringements. They will hunt you down like the dirty monkey you are and force you to wear a moose skin and ride a greased pig while singing folk tunes. They are forcing me to ride the piggy as I write this. The piggy is smelly!!"
• Pinky and the Brain has one episode where Brain flicks through a slide-show very fast. If you play it in slow motion, the slides read, "I am now controlling your mind. See, I have made you use the freeze-frame on your VCR." The opening theme sequence to the same show had two of these. The first reads "Don't tell Brain that I hid this secret message. Ha ha. Narf." The second, naturally, reads "I know about your silly secret message, Pinky."
• Family Guy has a newspaper that read "DVDs Paused to Read Newspaper Gag".
• The Simpsons:
  • One of the most notable examples was in the episode "Homer Badman", where Homer is accused of sexual harassment. A tabloid news program covers this and makes Homer look bad, but eventually corrects their story, listing it alongside a long, unreadably-fast list of other corrections including lines such as "The people who are writing this have no life.", "If you are reading this, you have no life.", and "Licking an electrical outlet will not turn you into a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger." (More under "Freeze Frame Fun".)
  • And in the episode "Bart's Comet" where the eponymous comet is headed straight for Springfield:
    Kent Brockman: Now, over the years, a newsman learns a number of things that for one reason or another, he just cannot report. It doesn't seem to matter now, so... the following people are gay:
    Matt Groening
    Ken Tsumura
    George Meyer
    Joel Kuwahara
    Bill Oakley
    Elizabeth Jacobs
    Josh Weinstein
    Jane O'Brien
    Annette Andersen
    Jennifer Crittenden
    Mike Scully
    Dominique Braud-Stiger
    Greg Daniels
    Joseph Boucher
    Al Jean
    Ping Warner
    Mike Reiss
    Craig Feeney
    Richard Raynis
    Don Gilbert
    David Mirken
    Jacqueline Atkins
    Chris Ledesma
    Mark McJimsey
    Alf Clausen
    Allison Elliott
    David Silverman
    David Cohen
    N. Vyolet Diaz
  • Yes, all of this scrolls really fast. And yes, they are the names of people who worked on the show.
  • And in "Two Bad Neighbors" when Bart shreds Bush Senior's memoirs: a scrap of paper flits past the screen with the words "VP Dan Quayle" and "embarrassment."
  • Used in "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular":
    Troy McClure: Matt Groening insisted that we make time to acknowledge the hard work of everyone who makes The Simpsons possible.
  • The credits for The Itchy & Scratchy Show as seen in "The Front" is done in this manner.
  • Another Itchy & Scratchy-related example in "The Ten-Per-Cent Solution" as the offscreen epilogue of one short:
    Scratchy sued over being turned into a canoe and won 65 million dollars. He was given a sack with a dollar sign on it, but when he opened the sack, he saw a bomb with a lit fuse. He threw the bomb out the window and got a relieved look on his face. However, the bomb landed on a trampoline held up by mice firemen, bounced back into the room, and killed him.
• Futurama has a lot of background jokes on signs that can only be read this way. Many of them written in made-up alien languages that have to be decoded to make any sense. The DVDs have one of these parodying the FOX Copyright warning that tells you how much of a nerd you are if you are decoding this.
• In the "Channel Chasers" episode of The Fairly OddParents!, the credits of Adolescent Genetically-Altered Karate Cows move quickly, and Cosmo remarks that this is because they're animation credits, and as such, no one cares about them.
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast:
  • During the "shoot a ray, and you get a word!" sequence in "Batmantis", Zorak tells Space Ghost to shoot the theory of evolution, and Space Ghost fires a shot that is accompanied by three paragraphs of text humorously explaining Darwin's theory of evolution... which only remains on the screen for about a second.
  • "The Justice Hole" ends with "Stand By For Super Credits", and the entire credits scroll by in less than a second.
• A quarter way through the run of Count Duckula, a bogus credit would go by fleetingly, and usually a bad pun in regards to something in the episode. In an episode that dealt with a flight on a plane, the bogus credit was "Runway - Del Shannon."
• In the Hey Arnold! episode "Gerald Moves Out" when Mr. Hyunh points out the list of laundry room rules. The first few are standard laundry room rules, but the rest are jokes, such as "Riding in clothes dryer is forbidden without adult."
• A Robot Chicken sketch has a trailer for a new Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson movie and ends with a Long List of other films viewers can see Stiller in this summer:
  The Great Ape Race
  CHiPs: The Movie
  Something About Mary's Splooge-crusted Hair
  A Jerry Stahl Christmas
  Scorch: The Movie
  What the {bleep} Happened to Mickey Rourke!?
  Mystery Men 2: Greenlit Against All Odds
  Meet the Parents 33 1/3rd
  Untitled Janeane Garofalo Flop
  Prolific: The Ben Stiller Story
  Stiller and Meara in: One Wacky Evening
  Puckbusters
  Avenue of Bitter Tears
  Ben Stiller Takes off his Shirt
  Who Shot Mike Fasolo?
  Tom Clancy's Right-Wing Techno-Porn
  The Dark Crystal 2: Skeks Vs. Sever
  Alphabet Soup
  Shannon Gold Saves Easter
  Yahoo Serious: Unserious and Unfunny
  Solo 2: More Solo-ier
  Burgertime vs. Pengo
  License to Mow
  Andrew Racho is Not a Ninja
  A Shot for Shot Remake of Mac and Me
  Rockland County Blues
  The Dark Brothers Present: The Meyer Sisters
  Chanus!
  Title Rejected By Network
  The Comic-Con Massacre
  Meet my Friend...Ben Dover
  The People vs. Charles Horn
  Bob, Eric, & Mike in Title Rejected
  The Ben Stiller Show: The Movie
  Garrison Keilor's Robot Chicken
  Title Rejected by Network
  The Frat Pack in the Poconos
  Kid Sonic and the New Chameleons
  Is That Freedom Rock?
  The Only Actor Not Cast in a Woody Allen Movie
  Title Rejected by Network
• In the Regular Show episode "Men in Uniform", the park staff design incredibly ugly and nonsensical uniforms in order to help boost performance. When they arrive, one box's caution label is visible for a few seconds and reads "Contents of this package exceed ugly index and should not be combined with other items of similar rating. Avert eyes!"
• Used in the Rick and Morty episode "Morty's Mind Blowers" with the instructions for if the duo accidentally erase their own memories:
  Scenario 4 Instructions
  1. Retrieve TRANQ GUN and BLAST Rick & Morty
  2. Retrieve 2 VIALS (Blue & Yellow) + AMMONIA SALTS
  3. Place BLUE VIAL into HELMET and place on Rick
  4. Wait 60 seconds and then remove HELMET
  5. Re-load with YELLOW VIAL and place on Morty
  6. Wait 60 seconds then remove HELMET
  7. Drag Rick & Morty to the TV COUCH
  8. Turn on INTERDIMENSIONAL CABLE
  9. Break the AMMONIA SALTS and wave under noses
  10. When Rick & Morty awake leave the room
• On the Merrie Melodies short "She Was an Acrobats Daughter", a Film Within a Film has a very long list of "Cast Off Characters" that scrolls by at top speed. Shown frame by frame, it reveals an endlessly repeating list of Punny Names.

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