Nice Hat/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


A Nice Hat for a Fair Lady.
  • Amongst the reasons for one to watch My Fair Lady: Gay Subtext, Audrey Hepburn, fantastic songs, Awesome Sets and Fabulous Hats - such as the current page image.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Captain Jack Sparrow really likes his leather tricorn. To the point that, when Jack tells the crew to leave his fallen-overboard hat behind (near the beginning of Dead Man's Chest) they know something is seriously amiss. Jack just learned that Davy Jones has sent his pet kraken on a seek-out-and-destroy mission, and Jack's the target.
    • In Curse Of The Black Pearl, Jack suggests an alliance with Barbossa. Offering to buy him a really big hat seals the deal.
    • Barbossa himself has a really nice hat. It never once leaves his head in the first three movies, and in the fourth, it symbolizes his return to piracy from privateering.
      • Geoffrey Rush, who plays Barbossa, does not take it well when his hat keeps getting blown off in the Hilarious Outtakes of the third movie. YE BLEW OFF MY HAT, YE BLEEP!
    • At the end of CotBP, Will acquires a hat with a big swashbuckling feather, lampshaded by Jack in a possible Trope Namer as he bids adieu to his captors. "And Will... Nice Hat."
  • Every western, ever. Cowboy hats are just naturally nice hats.
  • Even the cowboys in non-western films like Toy Story. Woody spends an entire scene of the second movie searching for his hat and in the third, Lotso shows it to the other toys to convince them that Woody had died trying to escape Sunnyside.
  • Indiana Jones' spiffy fedora, which he never leaves behind even when he's about to be crushed by slowly descending doors. Many fans know it simply as "The Hat".
    • In one scene in The Last Crusade, he thinks he's lost it and he has a moment of silence for it.
    • In The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, picking up and putting on his hat is the first and last things he's shown doing on screen, both times with his theme playing, symbolizing his status as "Indy" or "hero".
    • There is a debunked urban legend that the hat was stapled to Harrison Ford's head. (Started, presumably, by an outtake in which Ford jokingly put the hat on his head and then applied a staplegun (empty). He did have to use adhesive tape, though.
    • The reason the hat never comes off is that the director simply didn't want to have to deal with the nearly-inevitable continuity errors which would have come along with losing the hat. Thus, the Improbably Sticking Hat.
  • Oddjob's razor-sharp bowler hat in the James Bond novel/film Goldfinger.
    • We haven't mentioned that Bond has some nice hats too. Some early films show him throwing it into Moneypenny's office and it landing on the hat-stand. One can only imagine how many takes they must have done to get that shot.
  • The fedoras Jake and Elwood wore in The Blues Brothers. Notable in that Jake never removed his during the course of the film, and Elwood doffed his only twice.
  • In The Apartment, the protagonist starts wearing a neat little bowler when he gets a promotion.
  • Miller's Crossing is all about guys in Nice Hats. Near the beginning of the film, the fedora'd protagonist Tom Reagan has a prophetic dream about losing his hat.
    • "Givin' me the high hat!" said repeatedly by one of the few characters not to wear a hat.
  • The Spirit is deeply attached to his fedora (and the rest of his outfit) and is caught multiple times ensuring it doesn't get away and recapturing it after fights. The Octopus doesn't have a consistent hat but in his first appearance he dons a very nice hat.
  • The Neimoidians of Star Wars are, quite literally, a Planet of Hats - Nice Hats, that is.
  • Arthur: "Nice...hat."
  • Literal "Nice Hat" in Jurassic Park; Dennis Nedry to Lewis Dodgson. "What are you trying to look like, a secret agent?" The hat itself is not particularly notable apart from being a fedora.
    • There was also Dr. Grant's hat that he losses about half way through the first movie, but he has it throughout the third.
  • David Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, as well as the Storms.
  • Major Kong from Dr. Strangelove replaces his flight helmet with a cowboy hat when he thinks that thermonuclear war is in progress.
  • The Mask: The title character wears a massive bright yellow zoot hat, complete with feather.
    • The Cuban Pete hat also counts.
  • Ryan Evans from High School Musical is known for his collection of fabulous hats- mainly fedoras, but other types of hats have been seen. Due to his parents' immense wealth, he has enough hats to never repeat throughout the entire series. They are seen as his trademark- in the entire series, there are only two scenes in which he is seen without a hat.
  • Jef Costello, the hitman from Jean-Pierre Melville's crime film Le Samourai, never leaves his apartment unless his fedora is perfectly positioned atop his head. This is less OCD than extreme care about his appearance due to his code of honor.
  • Dick Tracy's trademark yellow fedora, which matched his trench coat. The novelization of the film said he actually had dozens of them, as they tended to be ruined often in field work, and whenever he had to replace one, he saved the ruined one for a friend who collected them.
  • The Shoveller in Mystery Men sports a miner's helmet. When he gets his costume upgrade, the light on the miner's helmet goes from ordinary-blah white to ooh-and-aah blue.
  • Ramirez' musketeer-style hat with the peacock feather sweep in Highlander. The Kurgan had a very impressive hat as well, made of a skull and fur.
  • John Shooter's wide-rimmed black bowler in Secret Window. Doesn't have any special powers, but it is important to the plot.
  • In Cannibal! The Musical, one of the bullying trappers wears a hat made out of a skunk. Whenever he tries to put down the main characters, Matt Stone's character always retorts, "Nice hat!", causing the trapper to look up at it self-consciously.
  • Van Helsing in Van Helsing - your average 17th-Century vampire hunting hat. See also Real Life examples.
  • Mrs. Calloway in Home on the Range. It's her Berserk Button, and she gains a love interest (albeit a weird one) when he compliments it.
  • The Japanese Academy hat worn by Coraline of Coraline is apparently very popular within the fandom. The hat was based on a hat that director Henry Selick bought for his son while on a trip to Japan.
  • Witch King and Sauron wore awesome and unbelievably awesome hats respectively in The Lord of the Rings.
  • In The Rocketeer, the eponymous character's finned helmet helps him steer.
  • A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Kubrick had Alex and his droogs dressed in the heighth of nadsat fashion. And even if their platties were not what was described in the book, they still looked real horrorshow.
  • Doris the bowler hat in Meet the Robinsons might qualify, if by "nice" you mean, "stylish and impressive," and don't mind that whole Evil Overlord issue.
  • Detective Keith Frazier of Inside Man, played by Denzel Washington, has a very nice white hat. The last shot of the film shows it being hula-hooped on the foot of his on-screen girlfriend.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger's fedora.
  • Charlie Chan invariably wears a broad-brimmed Panama hat with a rounded crown.
  • Nine has several Nice Hats: 1's bishop hat, 7's skull-helmet, and 2's combination candle holder and eyeshield.
  • Zombieland: Tallahassee rocks a wonderfully Badass cowboy hat.
  • The Mad Hatter in the 2009 Alice in Wonderland naturally has a very nice hat that seems to exist solely to cause cosplayers agony when it's not being used as a form of transportation.
    • Suffice to say that if he takes off the hat, the odds are good that he's about to do something incredibly risky or more crazy than usual (sacrificing himself to the Red Knights so that Alice can escape, letting Chessur take his place at the execution while he sneaks around behind the Red Queen, and dueling the Knave, to name a few).
  • Cougar in The Losers has a nice hat he's particularly attached to. It's commented on late in the movie and when a mook tries to take it he dodges out of the way. It appears that even with a gun to his head he's not about to give in.

Mook: You know, I like that hat. That's a great hat. [beat] I really don't care if there's a hole in it. What are you smiling at?

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