Impossible Task: Difference between revisions
Content deleted Content added
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) standardized section headers, added example, updated outdated info in example |
|||
| (7 intermediate revisions by 3 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
{{quote|''Ask him to find me an acre of land''
''Between the salt water and the sea-strand,''
''Plough it with a lamb's horn,''
''Sow it all over with one peppercorn,''
''Reap it with a sickle of leather,''
''And gather it up with a rope made of heather,''
''Then he'll be the true love of mine.''
|'''Scarborough Fair''', [[Child Ballad|Child # 2]]}}
Line 49:
== [[Child Ballad|Ballads]] ==
* The classic song "Scarborough Fair" ([[Child Ballad|Child # 2]] and [[Refrain From Assuming|also known as "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme"]]), which provides the page quote, is a lovely, melodious
== [[Comic Books]] ==
Line 57:
:* Answer: show up stripped to the waist, on a mule, that's halfway off the shoulder of the road.
* In ''[[The Smurfs]]'' story "The Astrosmurf", the title character's first attempt at finding a way to travel to the stars is to ask Papa Smurf for advice. Papa Smurf has something in his spellbook called, "How to Travel Through the Macrocosm", a multi-part, complicated (to say the least) ritual:
{{quote|'''Papa Smurf:''' Firstly, each morning, drink a pint of dew collected from a web woven by a male tarantula.<ref>This alone is impossible, as tarantulas do not spin webs.</ref> Secondly, find a moonstone at the precise moment the sun is in eclipse. Thirdly, crush the moonstone delicately with your little finger while uttering cries of joy. Fourthly, wait for the powdered moonstone to turn to salt (this may take a hundred years). Fifthly, drop a pinch of this salt on a comet's tail. Sixthly, at the same time, get a tomcat to holler three times, 'SECAKEJUKEUACEHEPAOZREUPAUR". Seventhly, [[Lampshade Hanging|do not be discouraged]], Eightly... ''(There's more to it, but the protagonist leaves before he can finish.)''}}
== [[Fairy Tale]]s ==
Line 85:
* The third classic example is from a Swedish saga, in which the full list of conditions is that the heroine cannot visit the king by foot, by horse, in a wagon, nor in a boat. She could not visit him either dressed or undressed. It could not be day or night, a month or a year, and the moon couldn't be waxing or waning. As described above, she wore a fishing-net, balanced one foot on a sledge and the other on a goat, and went at dusk. She also went on the third day of Yule, which was considered to lie outside the normal count of the year.
* [[Celtic Mythology|Prince Conn-Eda]] loses a chess game with his evil stepmother, and her geas (her binding condition on Conn-Eda that is her right after she's won) is that he go to the land of the [[The Fair Folk|fairies]] and take the [[Cool Horse|black steed]] and [[Hell Hound|supernatural dog]] of the king of the fairies, and return to her with them within a year and a day.
* In some versions of [[The Brothers Grimm (creator)| "The Golden Goose"]], a King offers Simpleton - the protagonist - his daughter's hand in marriage if he can complete three Impossible Tasks: find someone who can eat a mountain of bread, find someone who can drink all the wine in the kingdom, and build a boat that can sail on land ''and'' water. Fortunately Simpleton has befriended a [[The Fair Folk| "little grey man"]] who is able to complete all three tasks with ease.
== [[Film]] ==
Line 183 ⟶ 184:
* The terms of Zuko's banishment in ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]].'' [[Snipe Hunt|"Find a nigh-all powerful person, catch him, and bring him back, and ''then'' you can come home. Oh, and he's been missing for a hundred years."]]
* In a US Acres segment of ''[[Garfield and Friends]]'', Orson and Wade set up a restaurant that's guaranteed to serve any food you order - if they can't make it, you get free food for a month. Roy attempts to take advantage of this with several attempts at Impossible Orders... and then gets served exactly what he orders, to his own shock. He eventually wins with "an elephant foot sandwich with mustard". Even though Orson and Wade had found an elephant, it wasn't theirs to kill and put in a sandwich, so to screw with Roy, they just showed him the elephant and pretended that they were out of mustard.
* Played for laughs in the ''[[Rick and Morty]]'' episode "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy", where Rick says (under the influence of sedative drugs) that the two things he desires most are cookies and a 90-minute cut of ''[[Avatar]]''. Sadly, while cookies are easy to obtain, it seems unlikely [[James Cameron]] would ever fulfill the later.
== [[Other Media]] ==
Line 189 ⟶ 191:
== [[Real Life]] ==
* The University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt traditionally has an impossible task or two among the list of things to find, make, or do. One year it was "build a working nuclear reactor in a shed on the Quad", which, in best Impossible Task fashion, turned out to be not ''quite'' as impossible as the organizers had expected (or hoped).
* "[
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Narrative Devices]]
[[Category:Fairy Tale Tropes]]
[[Category:Older Than Feudalism]]
[[Category:
| |||