Cup Holders

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
[The] very latest in intercepts and countermeasures. Titanium armour, a multi-tasking heads-up display and six beverage cup holders. All in all, rather stocked.
—Q, The World Is Not Enough

What can you install into your Cool Car to make it even more awesome? You decide to pimp it out with a loud stereo, wings, lasers and cannons, a giant robot body, and cup holders.

For some reason, when a character gets a new car, he will usually show a friend all the cool features the car has. When those features include cup holders, you can expect the friend to become more excited about those than any other feature the car has.

This could be headed for Dead Horse Trope territory: cup holders have been standard equipment on most cars since at least the late 90s. Closely related in terms of sarcasm are floor mats.

Examples of Cup Holders include:


Film

Marcus Burnett: Hey man where-where-where's your cup holder?
Mike Lowrey: I don't have one.
Marcus Burnett: [Snap] W'you mean you don't have one? Eighty thousand dollars for this car and you ain't got no damn cup holder?
Mike Lowrey: It's $105,000 and this happens to be one of the fastest production cars on the planet. Zero to sixty in four seconds, sweetie. It's a limited edition.
Marcus Burnett: You damn right it's limited. No cup holder, no back seat. Just a shiny dick with two chairs in it.

  • One of the features of getting an upgrade in Robots is getting cup holders built into your chest.

Literature

  • In Greg Costikyan's sci-fi novel First Contract, aliens come to Earth peacefully, but are so scientifically advanced, Earth can't keep up with inter-galactic trade. So what can Earth manufacture? Cheap little doohickeys: The one that's made in the story is a cup holder that works in zero gravity. It becomes ridiculously popular.
    • It should also be pointed out that due to disparities in interstellar exchange rates, the companies involved are able to charge thousands of dollars for said "cheap" doohickeys. So we end up doing OK out of the deal...

Live Action TV

  • Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Singularity": Trip considers adding a cup holder to the captain's chair.
  • The Office: After Pam's breakup, she buys a new car. In "Grief Counseling," she tells Roy (jokingly) she only bought it for the cupholders.

Jokes

  • In the early days, a lame joke had a user calling tech support to report the cup holder on a new multimedia PC is broken or doesn't work. "It's a plastic tray and it says 4x on it." Invariably, the "cup holder" turns out to be a pricey CD or DVD reader, back in the days when these drives were still a relative novelty.

Music

Who wants to end all fighting except for in hockey
Who shops for a truck based on the holder for the coffee?

Video Games

"So, my friend’s got this sweet low rider, right? It’s pretty cool an’ all, but I think if I ever bought a car, I’d go for a luxury sedan or ’, ya know? seats, drink holders, all that classy stuff! ‘ I’m a classy guy, right? Anyway, I…"

  • In the James Bond video game 007: Agent Under Fire continues on from The World Is Not Enough's use and has Q ends his summary of the gadgets he put on Bond's new car with it including "refrigerated beverage holders". This featured would eventually become a real feature on the Tesla Series S, almost a decade and a half later.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • The story of a user who's so computer-illiterate that s/he uses the disk tray of a computer's CD-ROM drive as a cup holder is a common urban legend. Occasionally, though, it can also be Truth in Television.

Western Animation

  • On King of the Hill, when discussing a new lawn mower, Bill Dauterive utters this epic line: "And what I'm about to say will ROCK. YOUR. WORLD. I like the cup holder."
  • In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Greece Lightning", there was this exchange:

Phineas: Remind me, why did we put spikes on Buford's chariot again? And a bowling ball catapult? I mean, what were we thinking? Why'd we give them all the cool stuff? What do we have?
Ferb: (Opens cup holders)
Phineas: Cup holders? Sweet!

  • In The Emperors New School, when Kuzco is about to marry Princess Lalala so he can become emperor, he points out the features of his royal throne, and what's one of them? Cup holders!
  • When Homer Simpson designed a car for his half-brother Herb's car company, Homer insisted that it have a holder for his cup - not one of those wimpy regulation-size cup holders, but one big enough for a Super-SlurpeeSquishee.
  • In Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Team Lightyear find themselves aboard an out of control alien (even by their standards) ship with no crew. When Buzz tries to stop the ship, all he can find at the control console were the Cup Holders. He was not amused. He was even less amused when said cup holders really were the primary control for the space ship, and the aliens in question had no concept of cup holders.

Real Life

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