B-Roll Rebus

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That thing where national news runs a story, and over every noun they show footage of what that noun is, even if it's a metaphor.

It's usually when they're rambling about something with opinions, and they're telling both sides while narrating and not showing an anchor:

Tom Voiceguy: "Some people say things are bad. [footage of people walking] But others, like thing expert Jane McExpert [footage of Jane at a computer], say things are good. [Jane: "Things are good."] At any rate [footage of people again], time [pause over shot of watch] and tide [pause over shot of ocean] wait for no man [shot of man]. Tom Voiceguy, ABZ News, Philadelphia." Co-anchor: "Thank you, Tom."

News on the radio, especially on NPR, does something similar with sounds. Voiceover Guy will say "The Vermont maple syrup harvest is starting up this cold February day." This cues the sound editor to play crunching snow noises as the Vermont farmer is walking through the field of snow. There may or may not be a farmer remarking, "You can't get the-yah from he-yah."

Also known as the 'Lord Privy Seal' effect, after a sketch in which the Lord Privy Seal (a sinecure post in the British government) was illustrated with pictures of a nobleman, a lavatory and a pinniped. Since then phrases like "it's a bit Lord Privy Seal" have been heard across the halls of British television news production.

Related to compulsive hyperlinking syndrome - the inclination to turn every word in text into a hyperlink, even if there's no need for explanations and the link is not used to make any point or minimal research is necessary anyway. Usually observed on fans of The Other Wiki, probably just because the wiki engine makes cross-linking so easy. We have it Just for Fun on This Very Wiki... if interested, jump over to All Blue Entry.

Examples of B-Roll Rebus include:

Played Straight

Real Life

• Inverted by Jonathan Coulton himself, though, in his song 'flickr' which does the opposite- describing a series of images in the video clip.
• Richard Dawkins shredded the faux-documentary Expelled for a number of reasons (starting with the fact that the producers had gotten him to be in it under false pretenses), but took special aim at its excessive use of Lord Privy Seals.
• The phenomenon of "literal dancing" is related, in that the dancer mimes the words to the song regardless of how metaphorical or otherwise they are. It was the subject of a hilarious routine by Peter Kay, featuring "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley, a song especially amenable to this.
  • "Johann Lippowitz" (David Armand) got famous for doing this (in a routine called 'Karaoke for the Deaf') to Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn". His increasingly angry reactions to the line "You're a little late" are a Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • A similar technique is often noted (and deplored) in Fan Vids made by the inexperienced. Every noun is matched to the closest equivalent image from the series, even if the original context of the image is irrelevant or contrary to the video as a whole.
  • The Legs & Co. dancers on Top of the Pops were famous for this to the point that people would joke that you could figure out what song was playing with the TV muted.

Prime Time News

• Fox News
  • In 2008, Fox News did a story about Hillary Clinton challenging Barack Obama to what she styled as a Lincoln/Douglas type of debate, after the famous debate between future President Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, a white racist who believed that blacks didn't count as "men" under the Constitution. During the broadcast, Fox showed B-Roll footage of a picture of Lincoln, side-by-side with a picture of Frederick Douglass, black former slave, abolitionist, and one-time vice-presidential candidate.
  • During the infamous, narmtastic "Hackers On Steroids" piece, the LA Fox 11 team likened Anonymous to terrorists and cut to a van exploding for no reason that has anything to do with the story. Unfortunately they cut back to the studio before Michael Caine can appear and tell them they were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.

Web Original

• On The Escapist is Extra Credits, set to appropriate photos and Allison Theus's cartoons. When the helium-voiced vocal says "things we can't even imagine", there's a cartoon of Theus at her drawing board saying "Things we can't even imagine? How the f**k am I supposed to draw that?!"
• Moviebob also likes to do this, especially in his videos for his blog "Game Overthinker".
  • In one of his more recent Game Overthinker videos, he even admitted that most of the delay between videos is him tracking down good pictures to use.
• It has become exceedingly common to find YouTube "music videos" in which it's nothing more than an MP3 of the song played to a slideshow of clips related to individual lyrics. A particular example comes up in a video to Jonathan Coulton's Mandelbrot Set song.
• Related to this is the visuals in Zero Punctuation, which often feature obscure references and Visual Puns (such as the logo for the University of California accompanying the phrase "You see...") and in one case a confession that he couldn't think of a good image to illustrate/accompany the topic at hand.

[A word I can't fucking illustrate]

• This is a major source of humor in the AMV Hell compilations.

Parodies/subversions/aversions

Prime Time News

• Parodied at least once in Brass Eye: Chris Morris declares "let's shatter some myths" and destroys a statue of a centaur to make the point.
  • Also in another Chris Morris series The Day Today, with the pictures gradually illustrating smaller and smaller bits of speech, with the sketch being colloquially known as "Click Ting Stamps".
• Also parodied by Russ Abbot, where a newsreader realises this is happening, and becomes increasingly nervous about what the screen will show when he sees phrases such as "Cockfosters" and "leg over" in his script.
• Parodied by Nathan Fielder in an episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Whenever he says a certain noun, he pulls it out of his coat.
  • Harpo Marx liked to pull things out from his coat to match what people are saying. Which makes this Older Than They Think.
• Mocked in this "How To Report The News" segment of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, a series devoted to describing and deconstructing News Tropes.

Western Animation

• Parodied in the chorus of the song Would you love me if from Bill Plympton's animated movie I married a strange person!.