Unconventional Smoothie

"How do you like your drillshake, Randy? Oily, or non-oily?"

"Will it blend? That is the question."

— Tom Dickson, Will It Blend?

At some point in your favorite movie or TV show, one of the characters decides to make a smoothie, using all the usual ingredients. Into the blender goes blueberries, fruit juice, a banana, sausage? A chocolate bar with the wrapper on? A pen?

This trope occurs when unusual ingredients, often including some non-food items, are added to a blender. May occur after a character promises a "special shake", or some similar description. Often, the more typical items are added first, while the more "unconventional" items are saved for later.

May sometimes be an example of a Lethal Chef or Cordon Bleugh Chef. A Hideous Hangover Cure may be this. Despite the name, the trope applies to any sort of mixture that gets blended in a blender.

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Examples

Advertising

• An American company (JML Power Blitzers) manufacturing kitchen blenders does this to demonstrate exactly how tough its products are. Unlikely items up to and including a whole laptop computer have been ground to powder in the promotional videos. Blendtec has been running a similar campaign on their Will it Blend? web series for years. It helps that the blenders are made of a material similar to bulletproof glass.

Anime & Manga

• The Demon Girl Next Door: During Chapter 15.5, Momo makes a protein shake for Yuko with "broccoli, protein powder, various unspecified pills, and chicken tenderloins heated until they turned into a mysterious color.
• The Cake Incident in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, when perfectionist Chiri blends a cake in order to divide it evenly among an odd (and growing) number of people.
• Happens in the Touhou Project spinoff manga Inaba of the Moon & Inaba of the Earth. Kaguya is trying to lose weight, so Eirin mentions several different diets - the Banana Diet, the Yogurt Diet and the Natto Diet. Cue Tewi fixing up a Banana Yogurt Natto Smoothie.

Comic Books

• In one Archie Comics story, a baby food company discontinues its Pizza flavored brand, which is too bad because little Jellybean Jones loves the stuff. Jughead tries to make his own kind by sticking whole pizza slices into the blender and setting it to 'puree'. After several false starts he calls the company and ask for their recipe. It turns out that the secret ingredient is anchovies, which is why it was discontinued- aside from Jellybean, nobody else liked it.
• One of the UglyDolls comics has Ninja Batty Shogun's smoothie to show off the ability of the Black Belt Juice Ninjanator. It is a week's worth of nutrition in a single three-gallon glass of juice (something that both he and Ice-Bat agree is pretty dangerous). Inside it contains various fruits and vegetables, whole grains, quasi-legal nutrient power blends, and a pineapple cube for extra sweetness. The ensuing result is so vile that Ninja Batty Shogun's forced to scrape his tongue with donuts to get the taste out, and then passes out into a fetal position.

Fan Works

• Howl-oween, the first in the Halloween Horrors collaborative series between Ellen Brand and Jeremy Ray Logsdon, mentions that Billy Cranston enjoys spinach smoothies.

Film — Live-Action

• An American Werewolf in Paris, using human hearts.
• Benny & Joon offers a recipe including Cap'n Crunch, milk, peanut butter...
• In the movie Bewitched, Uncle Arthur throws random ingredients into a blender while lecturing Jack. When Jack takes a sip and remarks on the awful taste, Arthur admits that it's not for drinking - he just loves to blend.
• Jericho Kane (Ahnuld) in End of Days makes a smoothie that includes old takeaway food and beer.
• Heaven Can Wait (1978). Joe Pendleton likes these.
  Max: What's in this brown stuff?
  Joe: That's mainly whipped liver...I put a little whey in it, then mix it with a little alfalfa sprouts, and some bean curd and spinach...It's a liver and whey shake.
• The 1987 teen comedy My Best Friend is a Vampire (starring Robert Sean Leonard in one of his earliest film roles), the hero is undergoing a slow transformation into a vampire. At one point, hungry but not knowing for what, he makes a smoothie out of a slab of raw liver (including the blood that had leaked into the bottom of the package).
• In The Naked Gun 2½, Jane makes such a shake while talking to Frank. Some ingredients include a string of sausages and a candy bar (with the wrapper still on).
• Subverted in Stone Cold, where the protagonist makes a smoothie out of all sorts of odd ingredients (vegetables, raw meat, leftover pizza, candy bars, etc.), but it turns out to just be food for his pet iguana. The lizard doesn't seem to want it, either.
• In Vampire Diary, Holly and Vicki start robbing blood banks to feed Vicki's Blood Lust. Holly puts the blood into a blender along with ice cubes,, lemon juice and Tabasco sauce and blends it into a smoothie for Vicki to drink.

Literature

• Great Lies To Tell Small Kids: "Everyone loves a meat smoothie!" And it shows the kid chucking in steak, lamb chops, and sausages.
• The Vampire Chronicles: One of Armand's fascinations while acquainting himself with the twentieth century is putting strange combinations of things in blenders, mostly sorted by color.

Live-Action TV

• Sheldon Cooper's experiments with unorthodox smoothies in The Big Bang Theory have included mango-and moth and caterpillars. His intention is to see if Leonard notices. Sheldon has no intention of drinking the smoothies himself....
• CSI has an episode where someone makes a shake using human organs.
• The Freaks and Geeks episode "Tricks & Treats" begins with Bill accepting a challenge to drink one of these. Sam and Neil mix cayenne pepper, mustard, pickle juice, pickles, a generous handful of salt, sardines, vinegar, soy sauce, chili, a spoonful of grape jelly, powdered dairy creamer, and after-dinner mints. Bill actually likes it.
• Q from Impractical Jokers made a hot dog smoothie, buns and toppings included. It was surprisingly decent!
• On a Kenan & Kel episode, the title duo managed to stumble upon a cure for the Common Cold by just throwing stuff like chicken, eggs, sardines, and, of course, orange soda. Unfortunately, neither one of them can remember the exact ingredients when Chris and Roger ask for some for their own colds, and they end up make a completely different smoothie that immediately puts people to sleep.
• In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Is On The Run, Part 1", Monk is on the lam, and seeks refuge in Natalie's house. Natalie needs a cordless drill to remove the shackles on Monk's jumpsuit. But Randy happens to be there, also looking for Monk. To distract Randy, Natalie claims that her blender broke. She then puts a bunch of random, and very questionable ingredients into a pitcher, then uses the drill to grind them all together. This results in a very disgusting looking material in the pitcher, from which Natalie takes a sip:
  Lt. Randy Disher: Is that oil?
  Natalie Teeger: That is oil. It's uh, it's from the ground so it's organic, and it just... lubricates your organs. [puts down the glass and picks up the drill] Um, I'll just be washing up. I'll be right back. You can have it.
  • Made better by the fact that Randy tries a sip and seems to find it acceptable. The whole time, though, his face is like "Natalie, what the hell is wrong with you?"
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Killer Shrews episode involves a drink called the Killer Shrew, which includes a candy bar with the wrapper on, among other very sugary foods. When Joel takes a sip, it launches him into the air and knocks him out from sugar overload. Frank, on the other hand, takes a sip, bursts into singing "Lady's Night", and tries to dance with Dr. Forrester.
• Our Miss Brooks: Some of the drinks Mrs. Davis, a Cordon Bleugh Chef, prepares for Miss Brooks at breakfast fall into this category.
• The Bass-O-Matic in Saturday Night Live. Followed in a later episode by the Bat-O-Matic.
• Top Gear: The "Man's V8" made with the V8 blender. (Starting with raw beef, and finishing with a brick). James actually drinks some of it and aptly nicknames it "the Bloody Awful".

Music

• Bill Harley's song "Pizza Shake", which is about...well, Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Newspaper Comics

• Get Fuzzy: Bucky has a fondness for tuna smoothies.

Radio

• The BBC radio panel game The 99p Challenge had a round based on coming up with these- suggestions included Bill Bailey's concoction of Praline and Seagull's Tears.
• Our Miss Brooks: Some of the drinks Mrs. Davis, a Cordon Bleugh Chef, prepares for Miss Brooks at breakfast fall into this category.

Video Games

• Dead Rising allows players to combine any two foodstuffs (including all juices, meats, vegetables, fruits, breads, frozen foods, rotten foods, etc.) in blenders around the shopping mall and turn them into smoothies that grant the player with limited power-ups, abilities, etc. That said, rotten food usually produces the Poison Mushroom "Randomizer", which doesn't grant any useful benefit at all but just makes Frank clutch his stomach in pain every few seconds until it wears off. So there's at least that concession to reality.^note Yet it still recovers 6 blocks of HP, the same as the actually good smoothies.
• The Sims 2's Seasons expansion includes a smoothie maker that sims can use to turn the produce of their gardens into various juice blends or smoothies, which, depending on the quality of the produce involved can provide nifty beneficial effects (tomato soup warms the drinker, strawberry lemonade puts them into Platinum Aspiration, etc.). One can also make "pureed boot" from the boots caught while fishing, which causes sims to spaz out in various animations for a few seconds.
• In Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures: Fright of the Bumblebees, Wallace makes plant growth formula by mixing a battery, a military ration bar, and a teabag in his blender. He doesn't even unwrap the ration bar first.

Visual Novels

• Discussed in Double Homework. The protagonist mentions that he drinks smoothies with vegetables and raw eggs as part of his dieting regimen.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss: The pilot features Blitzo dropping his cellphone into a blender on purpose, blending it, and feeding it to his daighter Loona.

Web Comics

• Awful Hospital: Exaggerated with the Bacterial Meatshake, a concoction of meat slurry and the virulent Vibrio vulnificus. Given the infinite diversity of life in the Perception Range, it's probably lunch for something, but Fern mixes it up as emetic bait for an Animalistic Abomination dolphin.
  "This smells like you imagine a septic tank would if the whole family only ate expired dog food."
• Francis' twitch-gamer "power drink" from PvP: "a blend of espresso, Jolt cola, some Pixie Stix, pure cane sugar, Choco Puffs and a splash of Mountain Dew because I'm that @!&$% crazy, man." Oohhh, the colors.
• The Coffee of Doom café in Questionable Content serves a banana smoothie. Which is a banana. Still in the peel. Smashed with a hammer and stuck into a glass. This turns out to just be a rumor; Coffee of Doom serves regular banana smoothies after all. Unless Emily asks for one, as she genuinely likes the smashed-banana version better.
• In Wapsi Square, Alan made Jin a spaghetti smoothie when she was too injured to chew.

Web Original

• The hosts of Fat, French and Fabulous suggest a smoothie made of raspberries, spinach, and snake venom, based on the fact that it's safe to drink snake venom so long as it has no way of entering the blood stream, such as a stomach ulcer.
• Homestar Runner: The Strong Bad Email alternate universe has a variation: Strong Bad uses a Game Boy in a blender to create an alternate universe portal, which he uses to visit all his different dimension doppelgangers. Then Homestar Runner gets his hands on the blender and tries to make a "real fruit smoothie" with it, which causes Strong Bad (and his alternate universe equivalents) to transport randomly between dimensions.
• Two of LoadingReadyRun's Iron Stomach Challenge episodes featured these:
  • Fast Food Smoothie, in which each contestant chooses a fast food value meal (sandwich, fries, ketchup, apple pie, soda) to throw in the blender.
  • Mayoshake, in which they make a classic yogurt, juice, and frozen fruit smoothie... substituting mayonnaise for the yogurt.
• The Godawful Smoothie from Ruby Quest.
• Shopkins has Cheeky Chocolate's energy smoothie, the "Cheeky Charge Up", which contains milk, spinach, kale, and the tears of all the competitors that she has beaten over the years.

Western Animation

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
  • In "Super Squatter", Meatwad evidently makes smoothies out of spoiled hot dogs, but he couldn't make them at the moment because of Shake refusing to pay the bills and rendering the blender inoperable. He tries to get around this by blending them with the underside of a lawnmower, and succeeds.
  • In "Robositter", Shake and Frylock are forced to get jobs at a food stand that specializing in meat, including smoothies made entirely of meat.
  • In "Creature From Plaque Lagoon", after the trio have all their teeth ripped out, Shake fills a blender with buffalo wings alongside the celery and ranch container, it ends up causing pain to his gums due to the spiciness of the buffalo sauce.
• Wildcat in Batman: The Brave and the Bold has the "Tiger Tonic", which comprises bananas, raw eggs, tuna and hot sauce.
• Ben 10:
  • An episode of Ben 10: Alien Force had Ben almost obsessively drinking smoothies. When Gwen asks him how many he's had, he tells her "Enough to know that chocolate and carrot are two great tastes that don't go great together.
  • In an episode of Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, Ben drinks a lamb and sardine smoothie.
• In one episode of Family Guy, after he's forbidden to bring Red Bull in the house, Peter resorts to making his homemade version in a blender, adding various food cans, beer, and kerosene into the mix. The result damages his kidneys and leaves him having to undergo dialysis treatments until he can get a new kidney.
• Gravity Falls has Mabel's culinary specialty, Mabel Juice. Two variants are made; a pink liquid full of glitter, sugar cubes, and plastic dinosaurs, and a green liquid full of dice and a single troll doll. Of course, the second mixture is only seen in an ordinary glass, not a blender, but since it's referred to as the same substance, it was probably blended first.
  Stan: It's like if coffee and nightmares had a baby.
• When Beezy gets a butler in Jimmy Two-Shoes he becomes too lazy to chew, making his butler mix his sandwiches in a blender (with the plate it was on).
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Snips and Snails bring The Great and Powerful Trixie an oat smoothie with extra hay. Being ponies, of course, that would be par for the course in Equestria.
• The gang in Rex the Runt create a smoothie out of whatever scraps they find lying around when there's no other food in the house, including spaghetti, stale custard powder and hair. The resulting smoothie turns out to be a sentient spaghetti creature, which Vince promptly eats.
• The Simpsons has an episode where after Homer gets his stomach stapled, he can only eat the smallest amounts of solid food after the surgery, and he has to puree it in a blender and drink it down. We see him do this with the tip of a slice of pizza, cut with a knife and fork.
• At the end of one episode of Total Drama Action, Owen, while high on pain medication after having his teeth smashed during a challenge, mixes potato chips with cola in a blender and drinks the resulting mixture.

Real Life

• Monkey House Rocket Fuel is a smoothie for college students who need to cram for all-nighters: Use caffeinated water to brew coffee, then brew another pot of coffee with the coffee. Then add to caffeinated ice cream such as Ben & Jerry's "Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz", Penguin Mints, chocolate syrup, and add 1 cup of sugar, then blend. Washing down a fistful of caffeine tablets with a glass of chocolate milkshake or something might be equally effective and a lot less laborious, but nowhere near as tasty.
• Athletes, gym bunnies and other exercise enthusiasts may drink smoothies regularly for various reasons and some of the 'home brews' may seem downright horrific to the uninitiated, particularly those made by amateur bodybuilders. Raw eggs and oatmeal often go into the blender if the drinker can't afford an expensive protein powder.
  • Tuna shakes are notably popular in weightlifting forums.
• British milkshake chain Shakeaway offers a "Wicked Wendy" milkshake, consisting of licorice allsorts, beetroot, and custard. They advertise it as "The world's worst milkshake".
• They've got competition - or they used to. A couple of years ago, Japanese fast food chain Lotteria was unwise enough to run an online promotion where people could send in and vote on ideas for their next milkshake flavour. Thanks to the lovable trolls of 2ch, the winning flavour was kimchi.
• While no one actually drinks them (we hope), standard procedure for testing of foodstuffs, including those suspected of being contaminated with heavy metals or other toxic substances, often includes as one of the early steps "blend well".

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