Magic Countdown: Difference between revisions

* On ''[[Dragonball Z]]'', during the final fight between Goku and Frieza during the Namek saga, the planet Namek was minutes away from collapse for ''[[Inaction Sequence|10 episodes]]''. Ridiculously, one episode actually says "two minutes" at the beginning and "one minute" at the end.

** Lampshaded later by the fact that Freiza flat-out admits he screwed up the whole "destroying Namek" thing, and it was supposed to explode '''instantly'''... [[I Meant to Do That|he just made up the "five minutes left" thing to not look like an idiot]].

** A lot of this sort of thing on the show is implicitly explained as the fight being slowed down so that the audience can actually follow it. As early as the battles with the Saibamen, the already superhuman Gohan expresses trouble following the action, implying that every major fight that happens afterwards would be too fast for the human eye.

** In a later episode, they even comment on this when Goku needs time to regather his energy and asks Vegeta to stall Kid-Buu for one minute. Vegeta comments that this is a really long time for a fight against Buu and the minute does last at least an episode.

* In ''[[Star Trek III: The Search For Spock]]'', Kirk et al. activate the Enterprise's 60-second auto-destruct sequence and then go down to the transporter room where they beam off the ship. The Klingons then beam onto the ship and cautiously make their way to the bridge, where they find the countdown nearly complete and promptly get blowed up real good. But of course, roughly 100 seconds of film have elapsed between the beginning and the end of the 60-second countdown, and even at that, the trips to and from the transporter room have obviously been compressed.

* In ''[[The Manhattan Project]]'', a nuclear bomb's timer is damaged by radiation, causing it to start the timer... With 999 hours until detonation. It seems the army have more than a month to deal with it, until they discover that {{spoiler|the timer counts down exponentially, to the point that it eventually counts down several hours per second}}. Might be a [[Justified Trope|justification]] or outright parody.

* ''[[Future War]]'' is probably the only example where the countdown goes faster than reality ''on screen''.

* ''[[Superman II]]''. The H-bomb is supposed to have a 1 minute timer. It takes at least 1 minute 24 seconds to detonate after the timer starts.

** And furthermore, the timer beeped with every passing second, even when it was offscreen, but the beeps didn't correspond to how much time had passed. At the 20-seconds mark, it plainly beeped more times than there were seconds remaining.

* In the episode of ''[[Batman: The Brave And The Bold|Batman the Brave And The Bold]]'', "Invasion of the Secret Santas!", where, after noticing a doll is a bomb with a 10 second timer, Batman exclaims, "It's a Bomb!" for 5 seconds, before cutting to a commercial break.

** Happens again in another episode while Mark contemplates whether or not to destroy the Earth with a Time Bomb. He's clearly taking more than a few seconds to do this, while the timer counts down about 5 seconds. Of course, being [[Fairly Oddparents]] and all, the timer in question might have actually been magic.

* This happens all the time in ''[[Code Lyoko]]'' Season 2 and 3 with the countdown before hitting the key to avoid the reconfiguration of Sector 5. It is supposed to be 3 minutes, but it jumps forward, and sometimes backward, quite haphazardly.

[[Category:Just in Time Tropes]]

[[Category:Bomb Disposal]]