Animate Body Parts

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Some works of fiction feature parts of the human body that may have their own separate desires and even their own personalities. These Animate Body Parts may may or may not be connected to a full human body - those that aren't may resort to unusual forms of movement, and in some cases can even speak without a mouth (unless, of course, they are the mouth). Expect the body parts in question to emphasize traits normally associated with them - stomachs think about food often, mouths may find it difficult to stay quiet, etc. This is a common gimmick used in advertising.

Supertrope to the following:

Occasionally accompanies a Ruptured Appendix episode, and can also occur on the Denser and Wackier side of Fantastic Voyage Plots. To render a particularly persistent foe's Animate Body Parts inert, you'll have to Attack Its Weak Point, and may specifically have to Remove the Head or Destroy the Brain.

Examples of Animate Body Parts include:

Advertising

  • Palmolive dish soap ads regularly feature a pair of animated hands; they were originally actual people's hands with animated eyes and hair. Another Palmolive ad has a family of hands (complete with dog) arguing about who would get to do the dishes.
  • A Mazda Ad had people's toes singing and tapping out the rhythm of a song because the car was so much fun to drive.
  • A series of commercials for an allergy product during the late 1990s featured a disembodied human nose at their main character.
  • One disturbing '90s ad for low-cut jeans had a belly-button sing "I'm Coming Out".
  • An infamous 90s Reebok advert went a bit further, showing a disembodied giant hairy belly chasing an athletic man through a city, mostly by hopping gelatinously - the scene culminated in a motorbike chase, with the stomach repeatedly shouting "Belly's gonna get ya!". You can view the madness here.
  • An ad for an athlete's foot product has a claymation foot, still attached to its owner, catch fire, grow a pair of evil eyes, and charge at everyone nearby while roaring. Made even creepier by the commercial's combination of claymation and live-action footage.
  • An antacid commercial featured an anthropomorphic stomach in a busted-up hotel room checking out of it to the tune of "Heartbreak Hotel".
  • Many allergy commercials feature some form of talking nose.
  • This Coke Zero commercial where the body parts themselves have decidedly non-human legs. And what kind of person has two tongues and one eye?
  • Some Ballpark Franks commercials feature an arm emerging from a person's stomach representing their hunger, forcing the person to eat a hot dog using various levels of subtlety. "HUNGER GET WHAT HUNGER WANT!"
  • A California Milk Board ad may be the creepiest example of this trope: A woman in the kitchen suddenly flops out of sight behind the counter. Her skeleton stands up, absent any other tissue. The woman's discarded, fully clothed and otherwise 'undamaged' flesh just lies there on the floor... and when the woman's skeleton reassures the husband that she's just getting herself some milk, her eyes roll towards where the skeleton is standing now.
  • A UK advert for an itch relief cream featured a talking patch of skin that sounded like a falsetto Bill Bailey, and attempted to urge the woman in the advert to give it "just one little scratch", eventually screaming "Aaah! Not Eumavate!" when the cream was applied.
  • Dr. Scholls has a wart remover commercial where the wart talks.
  • There is an advert occasionally seen in Britain featuring faces made of hands talking about, oddly enough, Adult Learning courses or something similar. It does make slightly more sense in context; the tagline is "Our future. It's in our hands."
  • There is a new phone out whose selling point is that it has a full keyboard, enabling you to "text it how you say it". The commercial consists of various people's thumbs (with their faces on them, mind you) speaking as they type.
  • An Australian Ad for Tooheys Extra Dry features a tongue that dislodges itself from its sleeping owner's mouth before wiggling itself to a party, where it dives into a bathtub of ice and bottles of beer, wraps itself around the Tooheys Extra Dry, and drags it back to its owner (who wakes up wondering why he has a bottle in his mouth).
  • A vintage Alka-Seltzer ad had a man arguing with his stomach, just as if they were a bickering couple at a marriage counselor. The stomach's voiced by Gene Wilder.

Stomach: . . . the way he stuffs himself at his mother's!
Man: You always hated my mother!

  • An ad for some sort of cough medicine features a talking hand wanting the person its attached to to take the medicine instead of coughing into them.
  • Those Lectric Shave commercials feature a man whose his beard hairs look exactly like him and look happy as they're being shaved away into oblivion.
  • In a Tabasco Sauce ad, there are pepperonis with faces on them that sing about the sauce. There are two variations of this commercial - one with a sing-along subtitle on it, and one without.
  • One of Old Spice's Odor Blocker body wash commercials.

Spokesman: ...Its blocking power is as powerful as me!
Voice: Yeah it is.
Spokesman: Who said that? (arm grows out of right bicep, pointing at the left bicep) Was that my left bicep? No. It was my...
Abs: (in previous voice) Ab-dominals.

Anime and Manga

  • The second Dragonball Z movie The World's Strongest features Dr. Wheelo, who seems to be a brain in a jar... which turns out to be attached to a massive mecha with guns and lasers.
  • The ninth DBZ movie The Return of Cooler has Cooler himself, barely surviving his annihilation at the end of Cooler's Revenge as what amounts to little more than a single eye! He manages to remain alive somehow and is absorbed into the Big Gete Star, which he takes control of to construct several new bodies.

Film

Live Action TV

  • One episode of Red Dwarf featured Rimmer the hologram 'accidentally' having another dead crewmember's arm uploaded instead of his own. Hilarious fights ensue.
  • In an episode of Scrubs, Carla sees Turk's mole talking to her.
  • On an episode of It's Garry Shandling's Show, Garry failed the written portion of his driver's license renewal test. Upset with his brain for being so stupid, he hooks a camera up to his TV and points it into his head so he can see his brain. The screen reveals a fat guy (character actor Stuart Pankin) lying in a hammock, who berates Garry for not challenging him enough, and they make a deal with each other: Garry will stimulate his brain more, and the brain will work with him. While they have this conversation, other body parts come to visit the brain, including a short, bald man referred to as "Mr. P" (pancreas) and his larynx (Dave Coulier), whom he argues with.

Larynx (Dave Coulier doing a spot-on Garry Shandling impression): Hi, Garry!
Garry: Is that my voice? I don't sound like that!
Larynx: Yes you do!

Newspaper Comics

  • At least two Peanuts strips had various parts of Snoopy's body expressing opinions of their own—usually connected with jogging, which meant the feet said a lot. One of these strips ended with his heart commenting "Just remember, boys - if I go, we all go!"; the feet remarked "That's scary!", and another part replies "Shut up and keep jogging."

Video Games

Western Animation

  • In a Robot Chicken sketch, William Shatner's toupee goes out and lives a second life as a James-Bond style secret agent while he sleeps. He still hasn't figured out where the medals keep coming from.
  • Futurama:
    • Played for laughs with the preserved heads of several various 19th-21st century personalities.
    • One episode has Leela develop a singing Susan-Boil.
    • The Brainspawn, a species of giant floating brains, are recurring characters. The Nibblonians are their sworn enemies, and Leela's pet Nibbler was responsible for traveling back in time to push Fry into the cryogenic container and kickstart the entire plot, so that Fry could save the universe from the Brainspawn.
  • In the Ruptured Appendix episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko's appendix (and all his other organs) talk... and even have personalities. It turns out it's All Just a Dream, though.
  • Evil Con Carne has this as its premise, with the protagonist being the brain of renowned villain Hector Con Carne. Hector was caught in an explosion, with only his brain and stomach surviving after being attached to the body of a none-too-bright circus bear named Boskov. While Hector's brain is naturally the schemer of the group, his stomach naturally has food on the brain often (and so does Boskov).
  • The Dexter's Laboratory Made for TV Movie Ego Trip has one of the future Mandarks left as a brain in a jar following his defeat by that future's Dexter at some prior point in time. During the climactic battle, as the four Dexters fight against them to retrieve the MacGuffin and save the Dark Future world, Dee Dee suddenly appears and interferes in her usual fashion, pressing a button that reverses its intelligence-sapping power. This causes the other Mandarks to disappear, presumably back to their previous timelines - except for the one native to the Dark Future, whose body freaks out during his Big No, followed by a surprisingly messy explosion that leaves a wriggling brain behind.
  • Krang from the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series is the [[Brain in a Jar|brain of an evil alien overlord whose body was destroyed, and he now inhabits an android body.
  • After starting out as a human, Baxter Stockman eventually becomes one of these in the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. The Shredder of all villains quips that "You should have quit while you were a head".
    • In the Fast Forward episode "The Journal", the turtles read about future events in their lives, including Donatello being reduced to a brain in a jar... with a mask on. The journal is then revealed to be a hoax.
    • Shredder himself is eventually revealed to be a rogue Krang alien in a cybernetic body, based on Krang from the 1987 series.
  • The 2012 TMNT series averts this with its portrayal of the Krang and the Utrom, with their bodies resembling brains rather than being them, although they still make use of robotic bodies to blend in with humans much like the 1987 Krang. Said Krang even makes a surprise appearance in a few Crossover episodes.
  • In The Fairly OddParents, the recurring Yugopotamian Empire is a species of squid-like aliens who have their brains clearly visable in a glass dome on their heads.
    • In the episode "Future Lost", the evil brain that aspired to take over the world had a strange weakness - Timmy put juice pills in its tank and follows it up with some ice, causing it to get a Brain Freeze.
  • The Powerpuff Girls:
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