Pop Up Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

You're watching a rerun of your favorite movie on TV.

You can remember the lines to the catchy tune in the background. You know exactly when the character starts talking to his green candy apple accounting calculator. Then suddenly there is a little noise you have never heard before and a little message on screen about how this calculator doesn't actually exist and the production company had to spend big money to make a fake one.

You, my friend, have been introduced to the wonderful world of Pop Up Trivia. Wherein the little tricks that the production people put into making your show are showed off, or interesting but irrelevant but interesting pieces of information are given, such as how many calories a person would burn in 500 miles and how long it would take, but not quite as vocal as a DVD Commentary.


Examples of Pop Up Trivia include:


Anime and Manga

  • ADV Films had some wonderful "ADVidNotes" tracks on several of their comedy anime DVDs.

Film

  • Apparently a popular Bonus Material for DVDs.
  • Edgar Wright seems to be a fan. It's an option on Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
  • High School Musical did this
  • This was an option on Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD.
  • The Star Trek 2-disc DVD sets have a subtitle option where Michael and Denise Okuda can give text commentary on this kind of stuff.
  • Source Code has one of these, strangely enough.
  • Included on the One Hundred and One Dalmatians DVD. Two sets, actually: One for the "fans" (which are more complex details on how the movie was made), and one for the "family" (side notes, plot points relating to the original book, points being brought up in the live-action films and TV series, etc.)

Live Action TV

  • Disney Channel seems to be a fan of this. It aired a version of Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie that had these and if memory serves they did the same with Starstruck.
  • The American cable network AMC sometimes shows DVD_TV: a movie with subtitles that have information taken from the movie's DVD.
  • Lost eventually started doing this with its reruns.
  • River Monsters has River Monsters: Unhooked which is reruns of previous episodes with this trope added.
  • MythBusters has "Buster's Cut" .
  • When The Drew Carey Show had "spot the mistake" contest episodes, the reruns would point out each mistake via pop-ups.
  • The first-season DVD of The Muppet Show has a special "Muppet Morsels" subtitle track.
  • Every classic Doctor Who DVD features production information subtitles.
  • GSN had a special week of Let's Make a Deal episodes that would have pop up bubbles with information, such as the current price of Turtle Wax and Monty Hall's real name.

Music

  • VH-1's Pop Up Video, the Trope Maker.
    • Wikipedia has a list of derivatives and parodies of Pop Up Video.
  • There's also one for the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up.

Web Original

  • YouTube allows you to add annotations to your uploaded videos, which can invoke this.

Western Animation