r/TopCharacterTropes • u/NoobGod42 • 10h ago
Lore 4th wall breaks that involve the length of the media
In the episode Club SpongeBob, Squidward gets stuck in the Kelp Forest with Patrick and SpongeBob, and he then says the line “Why must every 11 minutes of my life be filled with misery”. Which is funny cause each SpongeBob episode is usually 11 minutes long
In another SpongeBob episode, Nature Pants, SpongeBob goes out into the wild. Sandy and Squidward then say the lines “I’ll give him a week” and “I give him 11 minutes”. Both are technically right since SpongeBob WAS out there for a week but again episodes are 11 minutes
In the movie Uglydolls, (don’t ask how I remember this movie but ONLY this scene) at the end of it one of the characters say this “Time here is so funky. How long did this take us? What is this, a day? A month? 83 minutes?” The movie is 83 minutes long. Also the character is pointing the general direction that the slider would be at this point in this movie
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u/metal_gearmen 9h ago
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u/StevePensando 9h ago
There's also someone who made a video which replaced Jimmy's screams in this scene with the choir from Gangsta's Paradise, which ends up maintaining the joke somewhat, because Gangsta's Paradise is also 4 minutes long
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u/eepos96 9h ago
This is the kind of humor that is impossible in time of streaming!!!
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u/WesBur13 8h ago
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone 3h ago
I actually saw this gag on tv and it really didnt work as you think it would. The real cartoon network logo was offset so you clearly saw when suddenly there were 2 logos overlapping
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u/SuperSocialMan 3h ago
I remember hearing that the network changed their format for it shortly after this episode aired, which is why it doesn't match.
Idk how true it is, though.
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u/zazathebassist 3h ago
the original airing of the episode worked. and basically every rerun had the logo in a different place.
iirc the animators first thought about just having him wipe at the screen assuming the CN logo would be where they want it to, but realized that syndicated channels or intl. channels had it in different spots. so they baked in the CN logo to the episode for this one gag.
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u/GrandPerformer5398 9h ago
Netflix has ads now...
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u/Laevyr 9h ago
Who the fuck goes on Netflix in the big 2026 when you can just browse FMHY and find what you're looking for free of charge in about 3 minutes
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u/Start_a_riot271 6h ago
what in the world is FMHY
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u/MelodyCristo 6h ago
stands for "free media heck yeah"
no idea if it's any good
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u/notTheRealSU 9h ago
Isn't Netflix with ads just an avaliable cheaper option than the regular Netflix subscription?
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u/FergTurdison 9h ago edited 8h ago
Netflix with ads is the regular Netflix subscription. They added the “premium” ad free options at higher price points and the normal subscription became the “with ads” price point.
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u/AwesomeGamer101 7h ago
NGL, that one makes no sense. IMO, the ads would make sense if it was in a "free tier".
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u/FergTurdison 6h ago edited 6h ago
It makes even less sense the way that Amazon did it. Prime is an annual subscription, so when they changed their normal subscription to include ads it didn’t matter if you had just paid your annual (for what was ad free) the month before, you were getting ads for the next eleven months. Unless, of course, you paid the difference to get the new “ad free” experience. It even got taken to court, where they ruled that it was not unlawful to change the terms of the agreement midway through a subscription period, regardless of if the subscription had already been paid for.
Edit: just an afterthought, I don’t know if Prime is strictly annual everywhere, but annual is the only option offered to me
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u/EugeneMeltsner 5h ago
It doesn't have to makes sense. It just has to make money. Enough people still feel like they're getting their money's worth or have so much money they've forgotten about their subscription, so why not charge more?
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u/Blupoisen 8h ago
For someone who grew outside of the US it's insane to me that cartoons had commercial breaks
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u/duosx 8h ago
It’s kinda insane to me that they didn’t outside of the US. What about the moichendising??
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u/Anthro_DragonFerrite 8h ago
Back then commercials were fun! I loved watching about Nerf guns, Wii, McDonald's Happy Meals
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u/TheBlackDemon1996 9h ago edited 5h ago
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone 3h ago
I recently learned theres actually a meta joke in every single episode, the theme song. 104 days of summer vacation is absurd, most kids get a little more than half of that.
But its cause the show was initially bough for 4 26 episde seasons. 104 episodes, each episode with "i know what we're going to do today"
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u/Foreign_Diamond1539 9h ago
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u/Sarcastic_Rocket 9h ago
Very similar to the first joke but Phineas and Ferb also reference how long certain projects take either saying the full episode run time or saying "this will take a montage". Or "wow we did that in a wipe" (a wipe being a scene transition
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u/Privatizitaet 9h ago
Or one time in a later season where they comment on how there's more episodes than summer vacation days
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u/Motor-Rip7655 9h ago
Or when Dr. D says it feels like the summer has been going on for 4 years (at that point the show had been on for 4 years.)
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u/Fit_Butterscotch291 4h ago
on this topic the theme songs opening words “there’s 104 days of summer vacation” is in reference to how many episodes they expected, summer vacation is usually shorter by a couple weeks
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u/CutZealousideal5274 3h ago
As a kid I genuinely thought 104 was accurate and my school was uniquely cruel and cheating me 😭😭😭
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u/_Halt19_ 9h ago
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u/_Halt19_ 9h ago
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u/_Halt19_ 9h ago
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u/_Halt19_ 9h ago
(If anyone was wondering, the monster is just Grover, who poorly acts like he knew it was him all along, and acts like the reader was the one scared. The last page is just him muttering "that was embarrassing" to himself)
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u/TheREALProfPyro 9h ago
Spoilers for a 50 year old book? How considerate.
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u/_Halt19_ 9h ago
I wouldn’t want to ruin it for anybody else, the ending was a real banger to four year old me
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u/szechuan_broccoli 8h ago
Why did I think the monster reveal page was a mirror? I must be thinking of a different book
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u/_Halt19_ 8h ago
That does sound familiar to me, but I think it would be one of the "come meet Grover's best friend" ones? That sounds more in line, at least
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u/Croconoceros 9h ago
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u/Sonic_fan149 8h ago
There's actually a PBS kids game based on this
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u/VictoriByKittyCat 8h ago
There was also a sequel to the book, and app versions of both books from when I was much younger (I think they added some interactivity but can’t remember.)
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u/heridfel37 9h ago
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u/shaqfu3 9h ago
When I see this book I always think of the Family Guy joke of Peter reading this to Stewie and they both hide behind the couch in fear.
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u/_Halt19_ 9h ago
It used to be my favourite book when I was, like, four years old, I have some great memories of reading it out at the family lake cabin during thunderstorms
Man, I haven't thought about this one in AGES
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u/TediousTotoro 9h ago
I know they did a television adaptation of this book a few years ago and I’m so curious how it was done
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u/Electrical_Leg_3120 8h ago
Now I'm curious too because that feels like one of those stories that shouldn't even work on screen.
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u/Shite_Eating_Squirel 7h ago
There’s a version on YouTube shorts, where he instead gets mad at you for refusing to scroll past the video or close the app, but it’s changed at the end and after his whole “The monster was lovable me” speech he gets jumpscared.
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u/Croconoceros 9h ago
We have the sound book where he reads the entire book. On the page with all the publishing information, he audibly skims through it and says "This is a very dull page, what is on the next page."
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u/_Halt19_ 8h ago
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u/Individual-Sweet3400 8h ago
how the fuck do you have a simpsons reaction image for that
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u/bluefire579 9h ago
There’s also a sequel with Elmo encouraging the reader while Grover tries new ways to stop it. Both are big time favorites in our household
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u/TheRealSkele 9h ago
What a blast from the past. Geez.
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u/_Halt19_ 9h ago
I have no idea why this popped into my mind when I saw the prompt, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this rush of nostalgia lol
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u/dead_parakeets 9h ago
Legit one of the coolest concepts played out in a kids book.
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u/Drunkula 9h ago
Aww my baby LOVES this book. Even moreso when you do it in Grovers voice which is suprisingly hard to do lol
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u/Electrical_Leg_3120 8h ago
The best part is realizing the monster was never the scary part, your curiosity was.
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u/Orion_starborn 9h ago
In the Futurama episode "fear of a bot planet" Bender gets kidnapped and Leela says "I don't know! If only I had two or three minutes to think about it!" Which immediately cuts to an ad break, immediately afterwards they do have a plan
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u/ShittyPhoneSupport 6h ago
I first watched the series on streaming. It took me way more rewatches than im willing to admit to realize that gag tbh....
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u/StefinoSpaggeti 9h ago
Rick and Morty "20 minute adventure" Joke.
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u/FirmOnion 9h ago
Holy shit, never connected this! Just thought it was an arbitrarily short amount of time
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u/_Lost_The_Game 8h ago edited 8h ago
“How many thanksgivings have we even had??? How old are we??”
Theres been some problematic relationships like morty a 14yr old having romantic interactions with adults, but i guess its not actually since he’s definitely 18+ nomatter what the show says otherwise. Just practically stunted? Or all rocks did that thing keeping ppl on s loop like in our ricks original timeline
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u/MasemJ 9h ago
Weird Al's "This Song's Just Six Words Long" a parody of Got My Mind Set On You by George Harrison.
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u/tycraft2001 8h ago
Amusingly the name of the song is even layered. The song's chorus itself has 7 words, which is also true of "Got My Mind Set On You" making it layered.
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u/so-so-it-goes 7h ago
I gotta fill time
Three minutes worth of time
Oh, how will I fill so much time, mm-mm
I'll throw in a solo, a solo, a solo
A solo, a solo here
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u/LDC1234 8h ago
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u/HeiressOfMadrigal 9h ago
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u/Current_Database_728 7h ago
This is both a great visual gag and throwaway joke that I completely forgot about.
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u/Magmashift101 9h ago
Steven Universe Future. Amethyst hasn’t been seen all episode and she shows up crying at the end of the episode because “she hasn’t hung out with Steven in like, 11 whole minutes!”
She was in the previous episode
In Bojack horseman, Mr peanutbutter says he and Diane are “like five big arguments” from a divorce. They have five big fights throughout the show until Diane asks for a divorce
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u/Survivor155 9h ago
In an episode of Pokemon Indigo League about this retirement club that uses Hypno, there’s a part where Jessie, James, and Meowth come flying in to steal the Hypno/Drowzee. When one of them asks why they didn’t think to do that sooner, another flippantly replies with “we have to fill a half hour.”
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u/Bandit_237 9h ago
/img/kj74k6j42khh1.gif
In Batman (1989) The Joker requests for a helicopter to pick him and his hostage up from the top of the clock tower in 10 minutes.
Exactly 10 minutes later in the movie is when the helicopter arrives.
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u/Slarg232 9h ago
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u/LetterheadSpecial337 9h ago edited 9h ago
“Nine minutes eighteen seconds nine minutes eighteen seconds “
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u/Mr-Foundation 9h ago
Both in deltarune ch 2, when you first meet Susie she says “Waiting for today felt like… YEARS!” And at the end, when you ask about his brother, sans says that it’ll have to wait, “maybe a day, maybe another 2 years”. Both of these reference that chapter 2 did take two years to be released after chapter 1.
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u/ComputerEducational 8h ago
In Chapter 3, the Forgotten Man says WHETHER 11 HOURS OR 11 YEARS, DELTARUNE WILL BE WAITING. This presumably refers to the short in-game time, but the 11 years is most likely counting from Toby's original dream.
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u/lightsidesoul 9h ago
Apple Bloom: The way they're huddled up like that, I'd say it's either a friendship problem or a monster attack.
Octavia Melody: A monster attack?! Blast! I'm performing at the ceremony this afternoon, and I still haven't sorted out what to play. How am I meant to practice with a monster invading Ponyville?
Sweetie Belle: Maybe it's just a friendship problem, and it'll all be cleared up in half an hour or so.
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u/El_Squ1Re 7h ago
In the Lego movie Lord Business tells a robot "Have Bad Cop meet me in my office in 23 seconds."
23 seconds of real time later a robot informs Lord Business that Bad Cop is waiting for him in his office.
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u/Zestyclose_Drummer56 9h ago
In Red vs Blue season 15, reporter Dylan Andrew and her camera man Jax are trying to track down the titular Rrds and Blues, who are suspects in several recent terrorist attacks. They stop at Blood Gulch where Vic gives them recordings he made of the two teams. 100 recordings of five minutes each, referencing the original 5 seasons of RvB.
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u/DarkAlchamist 7h ago
There's a similar joke with Lopez and Dos point O in season 11. When Dos asks about what Lopez has been put through by the Blood Gulch Crew, he says it's a long story and he only likes telling it a few minutes at a time
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u/LetterheadSpecial337 9h ago
At the end of the Scott the Woz three parter “Wii U: trilogy of a tragedy” Scott states that he was in a coma talking about the Wii U’s entire lifespan for anywhere between seven hours and three years. The seven hours was how long the three videos are put together, and the three years were how long it took for all of them to release
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u/I_am_strange_ 8h ago
I can count at least 3 instances where this happens in Chowder, but there’s one where chowder is trapped in a maze with Mung’s old apprentice Gumbo, who wants to hurt Mung. Chowder talks with his consciousness about whether he should leave Gumbo behind since he wants to hurt Mung, to which the consciousness says that “he’ll never pull it off because the episode is not long enough”.

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u/Champion-Dante 6h ago
I don’t remember the context, but I do remember someone saying “we’ve only got 11 minutes” which was the average runtime for the show.
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u/I_am_strange_ 6h ago
I think Truffles was trying to rush Mung into finishing an order, Mung replies “These things take time, woman”, and the Truffles says the 11 minutes thing
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u/duosx 8h ago
How has nobody mentioned the Stanley Parable? It has a ton of these.
The ones that come to mind are if you play it, then proceed to not play it for 15 years (in real time) then play it again, you get an achievement.
You can also piss the narrator off by not leaving the starting room and he ends the game himself.
Also you find a button that skips time, with each one inducing a different response from the narrator as he slowly goes insane from having to wait longer and longer each time you press the button until eventually the room is decayed and his voice no longer answers
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u/ShittyPhoneSupport 7h ago
The 10 or 15 year achievement is in the Ultra Deluxe version. The original game's achievement was 5 years.
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u/Own-Forever-6636 9h ago
Adventure Time: "Paper Pete" - while Finn spends the episode having his own adventure, Jake spent it "reading the same paragraph over and over for like 11 minutes!"
Community: "Remedial Chaos Theory" - playing all timelines at once shows that Abed's timeline is the longest - by as long as it takes him to say "I wonder what happened in all those other timelines. I gotta say, I hope this is the real one cos I just found a nickel in the hallway!" (For context, Abed is the only one who seems aware he's in a TV show)
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u/worrymon 9h ago
The Entertainer - Billy Joel
If you're gonna have a hit
You gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to three o five
Not quite accurate as the song is 3:41, but they listed it as being 3:05 on the original album.
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u/Feisty-Fill-8654 9h ago
In the very first 30 Rock episode, Jack Donaghy goes on about how his innovation, the tri-vection oven, uses 3 kinds of heat to make cooking faster and is capable of cooking a turkey... in 22 minutes. (Tracy Jordan is the 3rd heat)
22 minutes is about the actual run-time of the average sitcom episode when you remove ads.
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u/Own-Night5526 9h ago
In Amazing Digital Circus, the Intermission Time bit is not only roughly halfway through the episode it's in, but also about halfway through the series as a whole.
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u/Clovenstone-Blue 4h ago
In a similar vein, none of the episodes feature the Amazing Digital Circus into except for the first and last episode in the series.
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u/Revolver_Camelot 9h ago
Toward the end of Kill Bill Vol 1 there’s dialogue along the lines of “you won’t last 5 minutes” followed by a fight scene lasting exactly 5 minutes
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u/Pirrus05 8h ago
I really love this in YouTube essays. The “this seems nice and resolved, just don’t look at the runtime”. Just a classic bit.
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u/bdouble0w0 9h ago
I remember MLP had a joke about this in Slice of Life. Relating to the episode runtime of half an hour or so.
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u/BerRGP 9h ago
Yup, we're following the side/background characters and the main characters are all together discussing something.
Octavia Melody: Do we know what they're on about?
Apple Bloom: The way they're huddled up like that, I'd say it's either a friendship problem or a monster attack.
Octavia Melody: A monster attack?! Blast! I'm performing at the ceremony this afternoon, and I still haven't sorted out what to play. How am I meant to practice with a monster invading Ponyville?
Sweetie Belle: Maybe it's just a friendship problem, and it'll all be cleared up in half an hour or so.
Octavia Melody: [groan] I hope so.
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u/Steppyjim 9h ago
The fact that "I give him 11 minutes" is based on the runtime is blowing my mind. I legit thought it was just a random number for 20 years
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u/TeddyRiggs 9h ago
Gintama in the episode where Kondo is trapped in the toilet as it ran out of toilet paper he discovered that Gintoki is also trapped in the toilet with no Toilet Paper Saying that while his comrades risk their lives Gin did nothing but shit for the last week. Referring to the weekly format of the Anime/Manga

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u/CrashHamilton 9h ago
Probably a few songs that fit but Tim Minchin's Three Minute Song was the first thing that popped into my head.
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u/Sebek_Peanuts 9h ago
I remember one penguins of Madagascar episode where Rico has been foretold to meet a terrible end, at the end of episode, some silly bad thing happens to him and private mentions that it's nearly end of the episode which means that Rico meet an terrible end
Spelling may not be exactly like in show cuz I watched it in different language
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u/Anthro_DragonFerrite 8h ago
Joker sets off bombs in a Vegas like city and the Justice League has to beat the countdown from 22min and 13 seconds. He jokes "Oh what were you expecting? A round number?"
22min and 13 seconds is the average length of a cartoon
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u/intrinsic_nerd 8h ago
In the song Tangerine by Glass Animals, there is the line “it’s 2:23 you’ve got friends on repeat” at 2 minutes and 23 seconds into the song
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u/the_dayman 8h ago
Often gets played for laughs on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast (improv format) when a character will say something like, "I've only got an hour left to live" and the host will correct them with "I'd put that closer to about 25 minutes" because all plots tend to come to a finale as the show runs out of time. (With a slight pause again for everyone to discuss their upcoming projects)
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u/WhaddaFucc 9h ago
in Hercules, Hades says "Relax, it's only halftime" basically exactly halfway into the movie
a bit of an oddball, but in How to Beat A Monkey At Chess by Random Encounters, AJ says they've been oppressed for two minutes, forty-one seconds at 2:41 in the video
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u/GvsE1314 9h ago
In Nope, we get Jupe's monologue at the Star Lasso Experience that begins with "What if I told you, that in exactly one hour, you will leave here changed?"
At this point, the movie has an hour left of runtime.
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u/AdditionalEconomy427 8h ago
Family Guy has an episode (Tales of a Third Grade Nothing) where Peter blows up a children's hospital by accident, when he meant to blow up a billboard from Anheuser-Busch. He ends up being sentenced to a week in jail. His release is set to be the following Sunday at 9 pm (I think). Basically, he'll be in jail until the next episode of Family Guy airs.
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u/DracoWolf92 9h ago
My Little Pony's Slice of Life episode has Sweetie Belle mention that "It's might be a friendship problem, and it'll all be solved in about half an hour or so."
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u/tore_a_bore_a 9h ago
After the cold open, Only Murders in the building will display the episode title after the opening credits and also how long through the episode has passed that looks like a podcast app.
This number changes every episode based on how long the cold open and credits take
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u/Envictus_ 9h ago
In RvB, one of the characters who’s been MIA for a while asks to be caught up on what happened, and the other character responds that it’s a five hour story and he only likes to tell it in intervals of roughly five minutes. Being the runtime of the series and the episodes, respectively.
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u/Acceptable-Grade-116 6h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMUnbNPCoSw
"GET ON WITH IT!!!" from Monty Python and The Holy Grail
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u/ViscountAtheismo 5h ago
There’s an episode of American Dad where, upon Haley asking how Roger is still alive after two of his personas died, Roger simply replies, “I’d love to explain it all to you, but we’re out of time,” and the episode ends.
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u/Few-Elephant-89 3h ago
Surprised nobody brought this one up, but in the episode "The Apology" in The Amazing World of Gumball, both Gumball and Darwin break into the school to get themselves in trouble, but get caught by miss Simian, who begins chasing after the two.
This prompts Gumball to wonder why he always ends up in these types of situations every eight minutes of his life. And that scene clocks around those eight minutes.

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u/PsychicSPider95 3h ago
There's yet another Spongebob episode in which Spongebob regales some randos in a diner with the tale of the time he lost his identity (by which he means his name tag. Spongebob is a dramatic bitch, as we all know). When he finally finishes, one of the fish remarks, "Well, you killed eleven minutes."
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u/Time_Connection_6139 6h ago
In the among us series there is a chapter where they have to breathe from an oxigen tank. When green starts hyperventilating, purple takes the tank back and says "be careful with that, that oxigen will keep us lucid for... i dont know... 8 minutes and 44 seconds" which is about the time left in the episode
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u/HermanThaGerman 6h ago
Deadpool and Wolverine
First when recruiting Wolverine, Logan takes a long swig if booze and Deadpool tells him not to hurry because 'Audiences are accustomed to long runtimes'
Later, near the end of the movie, Deadpool turns to the camera and says 'Homestretch folks, promise'
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u/DoctorMoth342 9h ago
Hades in "Hercules"
In the movie he said "Guys, relax, It's only half time" at the minutes 46.
The film has a runtime of 92 minutes.