Huddle Power

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Whose hand is that?"


"I've got just the thing! Now, huddle up boys, and make that old whispering sound!"

WE NEED A DESCRIPTION! TROPER HUDDLE!

[huddle]

Planning a Zany Scheme? Huddle! Organizing an infiltration? Huddle! Have to get your team fired up for the game-winning Hail Mary toss? Huddle! Want to discuss whether or not you should let The Mole back on the team? Huddle! Huddles solve everything!

The huddle comes in two variations, where either the audience is part of it, or the audience isn't.

If the audience is a part of it, there will be a Huddle Shot. We will hear everyone's concerns as they whisper back and forth.

If the audience is not privy to the huddle, we will instead see a far shot of everyone squished together. There will be indecipherable whispering. Occasionally, especially in cartoons, one person will look up at whoever/whatever it is they're all talking about, before being dragged down by a fellow huddler. This version of the huddle follows the Unspoken Plan Guarantee—that is, because the audience doesn't know what's about to happen, the plans will go smoothly.

May be accompanied by a Team Handstack and a "Whoa, Bundy!"

Got that? BREAK!

Examples of Huddle Power include:

Anime and Manga

  • Bleach anime episode 146. When Nel and her friends think that Ichigo and the others are bad guys, they go into a huddle to decide what to do.
  • For a manga about football, this is actually inverted in Eyeshield 21; in order to win the Christmas Bowl, the Deimon Devil Bats decide that they need to go the entire second half without a huddle so their opponents, the undefeated Teikoku Alexanders, won't have time to think.
    • Played with against their last fight against the White Knights. With only less than a second on the clock, the Devil Bats are on the receiving end of a kick. In order to make one last touchdown, Hiruma yells for a huddle during the middle of a play for Taki, Monta, and Sena. There, he passes the ball to one of them, leaving the White Knights too confused. The enemy quarterback realizes who has the ball, but a moment too late - Sena scores the winning touchdown.

Film

Live-Action TV

  • The heroes in the Mystery Science Theater 3000-featured Time of the Apes do this at one point, prompting Crow to state their plan as "We'll bang our heads together and walk around in a daze!"
  • Families conferring for an answer to steal on Family Feud.
  • In the classic Mork and Mindy episode, "Mork's Mixed Emotions," as a inversion of it. Mork, whose emotions are each presenting themselves as separate personalities, leans down as to confer with them in a one person huddle.
  • One episode of The Monkees had a battle scene where the Mooks would attack the Monkees, suffer a setback, and go into a huddle with the Big Bad, presumably to get tactical advice, then return to fighting. Again and again ... until the moment when it turned out the most recent setback had clobbered all the Mooks, and now it was the Monkees huddling with the villain, who didn't notice until they captured him.

Theatre

  • The Supreme Court goes into a football-style huddle in Of Thee I Sing when asked to decide between corn muffins and justice.

Video Games

  • Final Fantasy VIII: Rinoa and the Forest Owls have a variation where they squat down on the floor while constructing plans. Lampshaded by Squall.

Squall: How serious are you...? Really...? The three of you plop down on the floor to discuss strategy? On top of that, you can't make a decision without our input, right? How do you think we feel, working for such an organisation?

Western Animation

  • The Powerpuff Girls do this on occasion.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants subverted this in the episode where Plankton plans to take over Bikini Bottom... err, Gulch. First it looks like the citizens huddling together, only to reveal that it was just Spongebob making whispering sounds because he didn't really have a plan.
  • Also spoofed on The Simpsons, when the family huddles to think of a plan to get their counselor out of a tree. (Long story.) Homer begins whispering, while Lisa talks in her normal voice...

Homer: It's a huddle. You have to talk like this.
Lisa: Fine, I'll talk like this.
Homer: WHAAAT?!

    • And then it turns out the wolves and cougars at the bottom of the tree the counselor is in are also huddling and whispering.
  • The audience-participation version appears in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000", when the Apple family gets into a huddle to discuss whether or not to accept the Flim/Flam brothers' partnership deal. The camera whips around to each member in turn, and ends to reveal that Flim and Flam have also joined in their huddle.
    • Also occurs in "Putting Your Hoof Down", when motivation trainer Iron Will and his entourage consider whether they should fight Fluttershy's refusal to pay for his seminar (because she was not "completely satisfied" as he had guaranteed).

Real Life

  • Every football movie ever. Actually, every sports movie ever. Actually, just every sport. Actually, you know what? This happens all the time in Real Life.
    • Fun fact: the huddle was invented by a football team from a college for deaf students, allowing the players to plan the next play without telegraphing it to the other team via hand signals.