Long Pants

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Let's talk about your pants. Or your lack-thereof. Daisy-Dukes aside."

Homestar Runner What are you talking about, Strong Bad? I wear long pants.

Strong Bad: Um... no, from what I can tell, you wear no pants and have blue soles glued to the bottoms of your feet.

A technique in which cartoonists illustrate a character in such a way that their pants and shoes are one and the same. In the most extreme cases, their entire outfit appears to be one article of clothing, with thin black lines being the only illusion of separation. Used to make the color patterns more uniform and to eliminate the hassle of drawing dividing details.

Examples of Long Pants include:


Anime and Manga

  • Code Geass has a rare, non-budget related example. Just look at Lelouch's Zero costume. Ever notice how the boots and pants are completely seamless?
  • Yugi in Yu-Gi-Oh!! during the Duelist Kingdom anime. Yugi's shoes and pants were often shown as one single item of clothing.
  • Fai D Flourite in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, his Boots and Pants in his normal clothing
  • Roronoa Zoro's most common outfit shows his boots and pants to be one seamlessly put together.
  • Both Roger and Dorothy from The Big O are drawn like this, a result of Roger's insistence on him and everyone in his employ wearing black clothes. (even if Dorothy's outfit is more a really dark red)

Comic Books

  • Many superheroes have costumes where the boots seamlessly blend in with the pants, often with the pants blending in with the shirt too as if the entire outfit is like an infant's pajamas. Storm and Archangel from the X-Men are particularly bad offenders. Spider-Man would be too, except we've actually seen him take off his costume shoes enough times to know they're separate.

Literature

  • Dr. Seuss did this with many of his characters.

Newspaper Comics

  • Arguably, Ziggy, though the parrot once said "I'm not the one not wearing pants".[1] After repeated jokes by The Comics Curmudgeon and Pearls Before Swine, Ziggy hung a lampshade on this in late 2009, early 2010, in a brief arc where Ziggy "finds" his pants and a line is drawn seperating his feet.

Video Games

  • In The World Ends With You, Uzuki Yashiro's shirt has attached gloves. Given that trends and popularity are a major theme in the game, this is probably a fashion statement on her part more than the artists being lazy.
  • The Miis. Seriously, just take a look at them!
  • Any humanoid Pokémon that appears to be wearing "clothing."
  • One of the default female outfits in the Mass Effect series is a floor length dress that doesn't show the character's feet.

Web Comics

  • All of the characters on Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff appear to be wearing these.
  • Homestuck's infamous Pantskat (the result of identical colours for shirt and pants).
  • In the furry comic, Sabrina Online, the titular Sabrina (a skunk-girl) appears to be wearing no pants at all. Then a strip was released where her room-mate asked to borrow her pants; apparently Sabrina just likes wearing pants that make her look like she's wearing no pants.
  • All of the characters The Word Weary have narrow black stalks that protrude from their hips. And everyone seems to be wearing solid black elf shoes.

Web Original

  • The trope title comes from the Lampshade Hanging quote at the top, from the SBEmail "Long Pants".
    • Strong Sad, who doesn't seem to wear any pants (or anything for that matter), is somewhat concerned about buying his favourite underwear ("the blue ones") back from an online auction.
  • In Bonus Stage, Joel's pants/shoes are like this.

Western Animation

  • In Home Movies it seemed that just about everyone wore jumpsuits, that went as far as to cover their fingertips. They acknowledge it at one point when we're in Brendon's room seeing his dirty jumpsuits strewn on the floor, finger/foot covers and all, and all the same shade of blue.
  • The Fairly OddParents was also quite fond of using this on short characters such as children or fairies. However, tall characters like Vicky the Babysitter also expressed the design.

Timmy: Time to get out of bed, get dressed, put on my shoes... (looks down at feet) Whatever!

  • The majority of the characters of Get Ed are either depicted with no legs (robotic butler Crouch and hologram Kora) or wearing a futuristic suit that combines shoes and pants into one or has large, fat-ankled boots (with the pants tucked in, of course). In fact, the only character who had ankles was Ol' Skool. The sad thing is, the show was in 3D, which makes the animators extremely lazy indeed.
  • The Simpsons does this with hair for its blonde characters.
    • Sort of. The three main kids have this for their hair, but it's become a rule that no other characters can have that as a design quirk. All other blondes have different shades than their skin. (This is to make the main characters visually unique)
  • Flapjack wears long pants.
  • In Danger Mouse, since DM's jumpsuit is the same colour as his fur, it's not immediately obvious that he isn't just wearing a belt and a Chest Insignia. One instance of lampshading occurred when Penfold was being used to draw out aliens who attack pant cuffs. DM had to point out that his own trousers had no cuffs, which Penfold admitted he had never noticed before.
  • Dexter in Dexter's Laboratory has this, although that might be a case of having ridiculously long boots. His father however sometimes ,depending on the artist (presumably), follows this trope.
  • Everybody in Making Fiends is a single color and has no lines for socks or shoes, though they all have Long Sleeves. Girls (and the male teacher, for some reason, though he may be a real case of long pants) look like they wear dresses or muumuus on top, and boys wear baggy shorts.
  • The main trio of Camp Lazlo appear to be wearing black long pants. Most of the other campers are simply not wearing pants at all.
    • Except that one episode where EVERYONE wears pants to justify being pants'd by Edward.
  • Variant: My Little Pony (every iteration) does this with hooves. Certain male ponies in Friendship Is Magic are exceptions.
    • Most ponies don't wear clothes anyway. This has been lampshaded in the show.

Rarity: Spike, not now! We're changing!
Applejack: Beg pardon, Rarity, but we don't usually wear clothes.

  1. Despite never wearing pants, because he's a non-anthropomorphic parrot.