Crazy Awesome/Oral Tradition


 * Not all, but many, incarnations of Robin Hood in Film, Live Action Television and Literature can be Crazy Awesome, usually depending on how supernaturally talented he is with a bow and on just how much the odds are stacked against him.
 * Par for the course for Tall Tale heroes. If it weren't for the fact that their crazy plans always succeed somehow, they'd be considered just plain demented.
 * Paul Bunyan, when frustrated that all the hills in Kansas are making it difficult for him to use his three-miles-long saw, decides to get rid of the hills by flipping the entire state upside down, so all the hills are underground and there's only flat land on top.
 * Or when he got into the oil drilling business and found that there was no oil where he'd been digging. Rather than just give up on the giant hole he drilled, he cuts up the hole into thousands of smaller pieces and sells them as fence post holes.
 * Or how he made sure he always knew where oil was in the future: find some dinosaur footprints, then keep following their trail until the footprints stop; where they stop will be where the dinosaur died 65 million years ago, and since dinosaurs turn into oil when they die, there must be oil on that spot.
 * Pecos Bill once thought that killing a buffalo for its hide was a waste. Instead he skinned them alive and turned them loose to grow new hides. And it worked ... at least until winter, when all the skinless buffalos froze to death.
 * This is the same guy who lassoed a tornado and rode it like a bucking bronco.
 * And dug the Rio Grande with a signpost.
 * Febold Feboldson solved the grasshopper infestation in Kansas by importing a bunch of flying fish to eat them. He got rid of the flying fish plague by bringing in timber wolves to be the new apex predators. When folks started complaining that the wolves were worse than the fish or the grasshoppers, he simply goes out and bends some trees into a U shape so they start growing down into the ground. The wolves, being timber wolves, went where the timber was and burrowed down into the ground as well, adapting to the new environment by becoming smaller and smaller, until eventually they became prairie dogs.
 * Jack the Dullard, most commonly known from H.C. Andersen's version of the story, happily collects rubbish he finds on the road: A dead crow, a broken clog, and common mud. This all comes in handy when he woos the princess later on.
 * A book of riddles found in folklore tells the story of a particularly eccentric but cunning judge. A poor young boy was selling sticky buns on a street corner next to a large rock. The boy dozed off, and when he woke up, the money that he'd stashed at the bottom of his bun-basket was stolen. He went to a local judge, who deduced that, obviously, the rock must have stolen the money! He put the rock on trial, interpreted its silence as a confession of guilt, and sentenced it to public flogging when it refused to yield the money. The crowd that had gathered to watch laughed loud and long; the judge then turned on them, calling for each to pay a five-cent fine - dropping their money into a huge jar of water. He watched as each person shuffled forward and paid their fine -- until he pointed at a man walking away and cried "Arrest him! He stole the boy's money!" Astonished, the thief confessed and turned over his contraband.
 * ... Awesome!