Quotes / No Budget

Anime and Manga

Popuko: What's this crap? The animation isn't even completed yet.
Pipimi: It's like they put all their resources into Episode 1, then they ran out of gas.

—Pop Team Epic

Film — Live-Action

We ain't got no budget! (NO BUDGET!)
No craft service, man! (NO BUDGET!)
We don't take no "notes"! (NO BUDGET!)
No fucking call sheets, yo! (NO BUDGET!)
We ain't recouping shit! (NO BUDGET!)
Yeah, we got a starting day for real! (NO BUDGET!)
Yo, this picture's a go! (NO BUDGET!)
Yeah, we gonna turn Hollywood out! (NO BUDGET!)"

—No Budget, from the Cecil B. Demented soundtrack.

"Huh. It's a big mansion. It's funny how I only ever see the two of you. It's almost like the studio couldn't afford another X-Man."

— Deadpool, Deadpool (2016)

"This is from Bride of the Monster, in which a man with a spaghetti strainer attached to his head gets tortured by a photo-enlarger on a microphone stand."

— John Candy, It Came from Hollywood

Podcasts

That is my favorite, um, 'common elements' of Doctor Whos' eighties vision of the fascist future, is the buggies. 'Cause they're studio sets, and they can't do cars. They do them in The Happiness Patrol, as well. It's the iconic transport of 80s Doctor Who fascists!

— Shabogan Graffiti on Doctor Who, "Vengeance on Varos"

So Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get taken to the ship's brig, which is just a room where they're preventing from escape by powerful fluorescent light bulbs.

OK, now don't get me wrong, I love practical effects; but really? Are we supposed to believe that those're some kinda laser bars or somethin'? Fucking really? You couldn't do some kind of effect here? Jesus Christ, where did all the money in the budget go to, catering for James Doohan?

—Mr. Plinkett, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier rifftrack

Professional Wrestling

"Chairs were not in the budget Dalton! We've got the table, I brought the title, but chairs were simply not in the budget. I apologize."

—Bobby Fish, Road To Best In The World, 6/10/2016

Stand-Up Comedy

Anyway, I'm in New Zealand and I'm on this guy's show, a guy called Paul Henry. Just imagine Jeremy Clarkson, but not knowing about cars. And it's a TV show and a radio show at the same time, because that's how cheap New Zealand media can be. They generally go, "Why don't we give this radio guy a TV show?" Fuck that, then we'd have to get somebody to do the radio show. Let's just film the radio show, put that on TV at the same time, kill two birds with one stone. Brilliant idea. Promote that man. Do not give him a raise, we clearly can't afford it.

—Ed Byrne, Outside Looking In

Theatre

There is no shop in London Town
Except two flats that are painted brown
But think of all the cash they've saved
The physical budget's impeccably shaved

—Forbidden Broadway, "Teeny Todd"

Video Games

Production Budget: whatever change fell out of our pockets

—The Museum of Anything Goes

Web Original

The infamous wobbly walls (often mentioned in classic Who but rarely seen) make an appearance as the Doctor attempts to scale the silo... the floppy tentacled Kroll is one of the most toe-curlingly awful Doctor Who sequences ever and guess whose mother-in-law was around the last time this story had an airing? "Doctor Who is good I tell you!" I could be heard objecting to her mirth.

—Joe Ford on "The Power of Kroll"

What few actual sets they use are barely serviceable blank walls. There's barely even any furniture! Most of Sheridan's half of the episode is filmed in the middle of a completely black room occupied only with a pair of small chairs, because the Minbari are "minimalists." Uh huh.

— Noah Antwiler on Babylon 5: The Lost Tales: Voices in the Dark

True the budget is about half of what the first one was but maybe things have calmed down and they had more time to get the production they truly wanted. They have…actors in this movie so they have that going for them. What director did they get? John Putch? Never heard of him. What has he done? American Pie Presents: The Book of Love.

We’re doomed.

—Miles Antwiler on Atlas Shrugged Part II: The Strike

Taker and the Ortons partook in a game of Dueling Mannequins, with each party scaring the other with caskets — caskets occupied by wax dummies so lifelike, you’d swear they were just the real Undertaker…and the real Ortons… Okay, okay, so the dummies really were simply the Undertaker and the Ortons pretending to be dummies. I just find it depressing that the company’s special effects budget had apparently shrunken since 1996; they couldn’t even afford a Casket Cam in 2005.

—WrestleCrap, " Possession is 9/10s of the law, but only 1/10 of what made this feud so stupid"

Do yourself a favor and get into these clips from Lifetime’s Brittany Murphy biopic. This shit is so low-budget that I think it might be a prank. I was waiting for Jimmy Kimmel, no scratch that — Seth Meyers to walk out. This is Lifetime’s attempt to grab ahold of that Sharknado-type viral success, right? No one can act, that girl looks not a thing like the much-missed Murphy, and holy shite, THAT WIG ON 'ALICIA SILVERSTONE.' Did someone from The Craft cast a curse on that girl? What in hell does she have going on under there that required that on her head? I think it’s still attached to whatever animal died for it. And that animal has peed many times and it’s dried. They couldn’t afford an actual blonde?

—Michael K., "The Blohan biopic just put a quarter in this one’s raggedy coffee cup, shook its head and thought 'there but for the grace of God...' as it went about its day."

M.A.N.T.I.S. never achieved very much glamor during its single season, even after they started introducing real super-villains. In the end rather than retire from being M.A.N.T.I.S. or have Hawkins reveal his identity, they killed the character off.

Using an invisible dinosaur.

What you see there is the actual death scene of the protagonist, fighting an invisible dinosaur. Other heroes have come to far more ignoble ends, but rarely on network primetime.

—Cracked, "10 Most Implausible, Unpleasant, And Infuriating Ways Sci-fi Shows Kill Off Main Characters"

David: This is convenient, because when Superman rescues the train, they can just take a simple flying-forward-over-a-greenscreen shot and overlay it over stock traveling-through-subway-tunnel footage. Four thousand dollars saved for Globus!
Chris: Also Superman can stop a subway train just by shorting out the third rail, rather than actually physically using his strength to stop it. That’s another five grand!
David: Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve saved the cocaine mountain budget!

—Chris Sims and David Uzumeri on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

Fred Williamson can make a movie with 75 cents and a dirty look. The only drawbacks are that most of the extras are pedestrians gaping into the camera, a few of the main characters are Italian security guards asking everyone to leave, and if you ever see anything explode, that probably wasn't on purpose. Still, anyone can admire the frugality in this scene from Black Cobra 3. Both the soundtrack and the dialogue were legally too stupid to pay for, and Fred massacres a gang in a grocery store while destroying only one candle, one package of cookies and one roll of toilet paper. If Fred Williamson made John Carter, it would have been called Spaceman Brown: Chocolate Motherfucker, and it would have turned a $250 million profit.

—Seanbaby, 9 Supposed Action Stars Who Clearly Couldn't Fight

RWBY is a smash-hit Internet show about 3D anime girls smashing each other that somehow got popular despite its initial budget of seven dollars.

—JelloApocalypse, So This Is Basically... RWBY

Real Life

You know when I used to come through a door in Doctor Who very slowly and peer around, it wasn't because I wanted to come through a door like that. If I'd come through a door quickly, the door would've come off in my hand. So one had to stealthily creep around because the sets were very, very delicate.

—Tom Baker in 1984

One of my first questions "How much money do you think you'll be spending on it?" And they said, "Oh, probably ten million dollars". I think they ended up spending about three dollars and seventy five cents on it".

Richard Chamberlain on Allan Quartermain And The Lost City Of Gold

"We were also hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments. Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and Superman IV received no special consideration. For example, [Lawrence] Konner and [Mark] Rosenthal wrote a scene in which Superman lands on 42nd Street and walks down the double yellow lines to the United Nations, where he gives a speech. If that had been a scene in Superman I, we would actually have shot it on 42nd Street. Dick Donner would have choreographed hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles and cut to people gawking out of office windows at the sight of Superman walking down the street like the Pied Piper. Instead, we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere. Even if the story had been brilliant, I don't think that we could ever have lived up to the audience's expectations with this approach."

— Christopher Reeve, Still Me, on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

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