The "The" Title

It may be a stylistic choice, it may just be laziness, but for whatever reason a series, or just a very large and noticeable number of works by the same author, have titles prefaced by the word "The". These names are often things like (to take examples from the popular Animorphs series): "The Experiment", "The Escape", and so on. If an author uses this trope to excess, expect the names to get a little odd (The Answer, The Happening), confusing (The Unexpected), or downright unhelpful (The Attack, The Threat). The author may also get really carried away with the "The" count and "The" the title until it makes little grammatical sense.

As such this trope comes in two main types:


 * Titles with too many "The's": In this variation The author has gotten a bit "The"-happy and has added them in to the title seemingly at the random. The.


 * Titles that mainly begin with "The": The author acts as described above and begins the name of most installments with the word "The". Expect it to get a little weird at times. Note: The writer does not need to deliberately preface every episode or book with the word 'The' for them to count as an example, only most of them.

See also: Idiosyncratic Episode Naming. Not to be confused with The "The" Title Confusion, where it's unclear whether or not something begins with a "the".

Film

 * Exaggerated with Attack of the The Eye Creatures.

Music

 * There is a rock-band simply called The The.

Literature

 * The Animorphs series is a well-known example. Every single one of the regular Animorphs books (not all of the Megamorphs books do this) was prefaced by the word The. This series provided many of the title examples above.
 * A Series of Unfortunate Events has this for all books in the series, followed by a pair of alliterative words for all but the last one.

Live-Action TV

 * The Sparticle Mystery has a plethora of The's.
 * In the Second Doctor era of Doctor Who, only Fury from the Deep did not start with "The", and its working title was The Colony of Devils.
 * Friends, nearly every episode is titled "The One with the...".
 * Seinfeld, nearly every episode has a title that begins with "The."
 * Every episode title of The Class starts with "The Class..."

Music

 * On Gileah & the Ghost Train's self-titled album, every song title begins with The. Their order on the album is also alphabetical order. At least one song apparently had its name changed to fit the theme: "The Shadow"'s demo version was originally called "All I Need".

Newspaper Comics

 * The Far Side collections with indexes feature sections for each letter of the alphabet. However, every letter but "T" is blank, as each comic is identified as "The one with the [x]".

Video Games

 * One of the best known series ever: The Legend of Zelda.
 * Double subverted in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
 * And The Legend of Zelda CDI Games, Link: The Faces Of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Averted altogether in Zelda's Adventure.

Western Animation

 * Avatar: The Last Airbender, similar to the Animorphs example but to a lesser extreme. About 80-90% of episode titles are pretty much "The 'Noun'". The noun generally refers to either the primary setting, a character of the week, or a MacGuffin.
 * The Amazing World of Gumball does this.
 * Aqua Teen Hunger Force had a season where every episode's title started with "The", and the season finale was just "The".