Cock-a-Doodle Dawn

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Which came first, the rooster or the sun?

A common staple in fiction, Roosters are often shown to crow at daybreak. In fact, almost all works set on a farm have this happening. In many depictions, a rooster's crowing itself is what brings the sun up.

In certain works, the rooster is replaced with a creature more suited to the setting.

Related to Howling to the Night, which is when wolves howl at dusk.

Not Truth in Television, as in Real Life they never shut up regardless of what time it is. They are just the only animals awake at that ungodly time.

Examples of Cock-a-Doodle Dawn include:

Advertising

• This trope is why a rooster is used as a symbol for insomnia for Ambien (prescription sleep aid) commercials.

Anime and Manga

• In Pani Poni Dash!, Serizawa would often dress as a rooster, climb on top of a pole, and announce the time of day.
• In Pokémon, a Dodrio can be seen atop Oak's laboratory at daybreak.
• In Doctor Slump, this is done by a pig. It's that kind of manga.

Comic Books

• Featured in a lot of Asterix adventures. Averted in Asterix and the Cauldron, where Asterix discovers the emptying of the cauldron just before daybreak and rouses all the villagers, so the rooster considers crowing unnecessary.

Film

• Rover Dangerfield
• Home on the Range
• Rock-a-Doodle involves the sun not rising at all unless the rooster crows.
• In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a ratbird crows, heralding the beginning of an ice cream snow day.
• A rooster is heard to crow right before daybreak in The Yellow Submarine, which is odd, since the meanies seem to have turned every other living creature to stone.
• Played for laughs in the claymation movie, Chicken Run. Fowler the rooster is seen at sun rise at the beginning of a scene, where he loudly shouts in very obvious English, "COCKADOODLEDOO!"
• Parodied in Babe, where a duck crows to avoid being eaten.
  • And really annoys the actual rooster, who sees it as his job but can never wake up early enough to beat the duck.
• Part of the Establishing Character Moment for heroine Nastenka in Morozko (The Russo-Finnish Jack Frost, as seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000); her Wicked Stepmother's making her knit a load of socks by dawn; despite knitting at ludicrous speed, she resorts to using her Friend to All Living Things credentials to beg the neighborhood rooster to give her more time. The rooster explains that he has to follow this trope, and suggests that she asks the sun instead. She does. It works.

Literature

• In The Lord of the Rings, a rooster crowing interrupts Gandalf's confrontation with the Lord of the Nazgûl at the gates of Minas Tirith, even though there's enough smoke from Mordor that it's impossible to tell that the sun is rising.
• The book The Enormous Egg starts with a mini-plot about the family's chicken, Ezekiel, who crows every morning, annoying the neighbors. The solution is to put him in the cellar at night and not let him out until well after sunup, so he doesn't know when its dawn and therefore doesn't crow.
• Discworld:
  • In Reaper Man, there is Cyril the Rooster, who never remembers to crow at the right time till he is given the words "Cock-a-Doodle Doo" to read by Death. Unfortunately, Cyril is dyslexic. Dock-a-loodle-fod!
  • In Wyrd Sisters there's a spell that must by completed before the first rooster crows. Nanny Ogg has her vast army of children and grandchildren gag all of the area's roosters so the spell will work even if takes until after dawn to finish it.
    • Given that this is such a witchy response to this kind of limitation, one must wonder why Granny Weatherwax is so concerned with doing the spell the "right" way and disapproves of Nanny's loophole.
• Geoffrey Chaucer's Chanticleer thinks that the sun rises because he crows. Pertelote persuades him not to crow one morning, and he is shocked when it still rises.
• In one Encyclopedia Brown story, high school dropout/con artist Wilford Wiggins tries to get kids to invest in a device that can control birds. He demonstrates its abilities by making a rooster crow at sunset. Encyclopedia ruins the scam by pointing out that since the rooster had been kept under a blanket beforehand, it probably thought the sun was rising instead of setting.

Live-Action TV

• In The Office, Dwight hints that a rooster wakes him up every morning. Not surprising since he lives on a farm.
• Mentioned in Friends, Chandler and Joey's pet chick, now a full grown rooster, apparently has a habit of waking up the whole apartment building at dawn, though only Monica and Rachel knows that they own it.

Music

• The Beatles' "Good Morning" starts with a rooster.
• Camille Saint-Saëns' "Danse Macabre", which begins When the Clock Strikes Twelve, has its climax interrupted by the crow of an oboe, after which the diminuendo is quick.

Video Games

• Warcraft 3 has a rooster crowing to indicate daybreak.
• Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg the sun doesn't rise until a rooster crows
• Multiple Zelda games, to indicate that it's officially daytime.
  • The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time
  • The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask
  • The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess

Web Comics

• Two Order of the Stick strips open with a rooster crowing, heralding a new dawn in the Azure Empire. There's also a younger rooster who is unimpressed with this, commenting in the first strip "You're such a sell-out" and in the second "You're not my real dad".
• Occurs as a Chekhov's Gun in Tales of the Questor: the hunt of the protagonist is stated to end when "the cock crows the dawn". Unfortunately, there's a way around that, or is there?
  • There is. someone didn't take the possibility of a nickname or code name into account.

Western Animation

• Any cartoon or film that takes place on a farm, really.
• On SpongeBob SquarePants, the crowing is done by scallops.
• One episode of The Angry Beavers spoofed this by having a bear crow. At the end of the episode, Dagget asks, "Norbert, what is wrong with that bear?"
• There's a rooster who crows at dawn in Fairly Oddparents, which, on one occasion, explodes.
• A rooster crows in the Title Sequence of Shaun the Sheep.
• In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "The Cutie Mark Chronicles", Applejack remembers when she left the farm for the big city, and is surprised to find that city folk have no concept of a rooster. Homesick, she watches the sun rise the next morning and sadly cock-a-doodle-doos to herself.
• A sight gag in the Super Secret Secret Squirrel cartoon "Dr. O" has the sun repeatedly coming out and disappearing as Secret Squirrel struggles with the controls of Dr. O's sun-blocking satellite. A rooster farmer is seen crowing when the sun comes out, and stopping when it disappears again. Eventually, the light starts changing so fast he keeps getting cut off, and he eventually gives up.
• At the very beginning of Der Fuehrer's Face, a rooster can be heard crowing "Heil Hitler!" while performing a Hitler pose outside Donald Duck's chalet (which for some reason, resembles Adolf Hitler's face).
• In the classic Tex Avery cartoon "Cock a Doodle Dog", Spike the Bulldog has his sleep interrupted by a rooster with an especially obnoxious crow. After various backfiring attempts to shut the bird up, Spike winds up crowing loudly by the rooster's house after the rooster goes to bed.