Polar Bears and Penguins: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* Coca-Cola mostly averts this. In one, they lampshade it. It may be justified, if the bears were travelers.

* Kid Cuisine, a brand of frozen TV dinners, has a penguin and a polar bear as their mascots. (Though they're apparently smart enough to buy clothes, so maybe one of them got a plane ticket and flew to the other one's place.)

* A promo for Netflix included sample clips from nonexistent movies in various genres, including a "documentary" that apparently plays this trope straight.

 

* ''[[Penguin Musume]] Heart'''s lead is Sakura "Penguin" Nankyoku. Her rival is "Polar Bear" Marie. Convenient.

** Note: "Nankyoku" = "[[Meaningful Name|South Pole]]".

* In one episode of ''[[Lupin III]]'', Lupin tries to bring polar bears to the South Pole and the penguins to the North. Just to find some hidden treasure.

 

* ''[[Elf]]'', which portrays the North Pole as a magical land populated by clay-animation creatures and talking snowmen, supposedly would be able to get away with this. Instead, it averts it brilliantly by having polar bears and ''puffins'' instead, which ''are'' arctic animals.

* Wonderfully averted in ''[[Happy Feet]]''. Despite being a movie about adorable dancing emperor penguins, not a single polar bear can be seen.

{{quote|[[You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry|"You wanna know how hard I can punch?"]]}}

 

* ''[[Mr Popper's Penguins]]''; of course there ''is'' a good reason for this happening

* [[Older Than Radio]]: Wyss's ''[[Swiss Family Robinson]]'' was riddled with an impossible concentration of animals and plants on an island. Penguins arrived in numbers on an island that's so close to the equator that it never snows—although penguins aren't restricted to snowy or frigid climes by any means, the Galapagos Penguin is the only surviving species that lives in outright tropical climates.

** Considering how beloved a story ''[[Swiss Family Robinson]]'' is, I think we can chalk this one up to [[Bellisario's Maxim]].

** Which is used to spoof Encyclopedia Brown in this [http://www.theonion.com/articles/idaville-detective-encyclopedia-brown-found-dead-i,753/ article] of ''[[The Onion]]''.

 

* ''[[The Far Side]]''. Gary Larson drew a few strips featuring this trope for the same reason he did strips with [[Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying|humans and dinosaurs living together]]: [[Rule of Funny]]. A typical example has a group of penguins on a small ice floe commenting on the ongoing rash of mysterious disappearances, while a polar bear sits among them, wearing a fake beak [[Paper-Thin Disguise|as a disguise.]]

* [[Garfield]] has frequently talked about going to the North Pole to eat penguins. Nermal once caught on to his mistake.

 

 

* The first ''[[Endless Ocean]]'' plays this to the hilt. Then again, [[Misplaced Wildlife|about half the wildlife is misplaced]] anyway due to the [[Rule of Fun]], so it's not quite as noticeable. ''Endless Ocean 2'' averts the trope as part of getting the marine life to more reasonable locations, and even acknowledges the difference between diving in a frozen sea and next to a frozen continent.

* The "Arctic" scenario from ''[[Repton]] Around the World''.

* One game for the iPad had you launch penguins across icy hills to escape a polar bear.

 

* Tyler Martin's ''[http://wallyandosborne.com/ Wally and Osborne]'' (originally titled ''On the Rocks'') deliberately plays with this trope by placing Wally the polar bear in Antarctica, where he forms a Laurel and Hardy style partnership with Osborne the penguin. How Wally got to Antarctica or why is never explained, although Osborne once suggested that Wally might be (literally) bipolar.

* While there aren't any polar bears in [[Pokey the Penguin]], there ARE a whole lot of penguins, and they all proudly live in the ''Arctic'' Circle.

* During ''[[The Last Days of Foxhound]]'', Liquid Snake wounds up in [http://gigaville.com/comic.php?id=154 Alaska] after using as [[Ejection Seat]] (from a ''helicopter''). He incorrectly assumes that he's in the North Pole, and wonders why there aren't any penguins around. Then again, Liquid is [[Idiot Hero|an idiot]].

 

* Parodied by ''[[Italian Spiderman]]'', which has penguins [[Deus Ex Machina|show up and save the day]] in Italy.

 

* In the [[Christmas Special]] ''[[Santa Claus is Comin' to Town]]'', the young Kris Kringle literally runs into a penguin who is lost trying to find the South Pole. Kringle makes a point of noting that pole is on the opposite end of the planet and "you're about as lost as you can get."

* [[Walter Lantz]]'s cartoon penguin [[Chilly Willy]] is often paired up with a polar bear.

* Originally, ''[[The Rescuers (Disney film)|The Rescuers]]'' was actually going to be about Bernard and Miss Bianca trying to save a polar bear from an evil penguin.

 

* [[Truth in Television]]: The word "penguin" originally designated a fish-eating, flightless, black and white dweller of the Northern Hemisphere: The [[wikipedia:Great Auk|Great Auk]]. It's been extinct since around 1850, though.

* While polar bears themselves are absent from the southern hemisphere, some other Arctic species have been introduced there. One notable case is the reindeer, which occurs now in Sub-antartic islands, and they can be [http://ibc.lynxeds.com/video/king-penguin-aptenodytes-patagonicus/colony-reindeers seen next to penguin colonies]

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Animal Tropes]]

[[Category:Hollywood Atlas]]