Sorry, Billy, But You Just Don't Have Legs: Difference between revisions

== Comics ==

* One pre-Popeye ''[[Thimble Theater]]'' strip played this for laughs. Ham Gravy, running a shoe store, hires and fires a few assistants because they keep stealing shoes. Eventually, he hires a man with two peg legs on the grounds that since he doesn't have feet, he won't steal shoes. Castor Oyl, hearing this, decides to apply the same logic at hiring an assistant at a ''hat store''.

* [[The Flash]] villain Rainbow Raider, was a gifted painter, but was also, unfortunately, colorblind.

** [[Take a Third Option|Why didn't he just focus on black and white artwork?]]

'''Reg:''' I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?! }}

* The hunchbacked Ephialtes in ''[[300|Three Hundred]]'' gets told he can't join the Spartans because he'll weaken the phalanx, as he can't raise his shield high enough to protect the men next to him.-- Ironically, the movie then violates this premise by having the Spartans break up their phalanx and fight individually.

* [[Rudy]], you're too short to play football!

* ''[[Everest]]'': one of the kids had braces, whose tendency to contract in extreme cold would become a problem on the high altitudes of Everest. As a result, he was sent home.

* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]''

** Bran Stark suffers from this in having dreamed about being a knight prior to being crippled.

** Jaime Lannister experiences this after {{spoiler|losing his sword arm while a prisoner of Vargo Hoat}}

* In ''[[How To Be A Superhero]]'', Captain Eagle breaks into an orphanage to find a kid who's parents were killed by a mugger and might want revenge on crime. One boy seems promising, until one of the other orphans points out "But you've only got one leg, Bobby-Ray!"

* In ''[[Warrior Cats]]'' this happens twice:

** Jaypaw just wants to be a great warrior, and won't listen when other cats tell him that he can't because of his blindness. He does get the chance to train as a warrior apprentice, but when a patrol he's on gets into a fight and he's easily beaten by an enemy apprentice because he can't make sense of what's going on, he has to come to terms with the fact that he'll never be a warrior. He ends up becoming a medicine cat instead.

 

 

* Peter Cook and [[Dudley Moore]]'s famous sketch about a one-legged man auditioning for the role of [[Tarzan]].

* An episode of ''[[Baywatch]]'' had a wannabe-lifeguard rejected because he wore contacts (and thus had bad eyesight). The plot ended with them changing that rule when the candidate pointed out the hypocrisy that once you passed the test you never had to retake it and that several of the older lifeguards may have once had perfect eyesight, but now wore contacts, but were considered perfectly capable lifeguards.

** One of the first episodes reveals in a [[Flashback Twist]] that Locke, who is a total [[Badass]] on the island, was once a delusional armchair explorer, totally oblivious to the fact that people in wheelchairs have trouble exploring. Getting stranded on the island has been a gift for him.

** In a much later episode, an alternate-time line Locke gets verbally slapped upside the head with this trope by Rose, the manager of an employment agency, and finally listens to reason.

** Charles saves a man's leg from amputation, but the man's hand is beyond repair and loses some flexibility. After the surgery, Charles learns his patient is a concert pianist. Fortunately, as a classical music aficionado, he manages to find copies of one-handed concertos that the man can play with just his left hand. The young musician points out that he's not going to have a career playing a handful (no pun intended) of gimmicky pieces from one composer, and Charles agrees that that's not likely -- what makes him a musician, however, isn't what's in his hands. Charles himself knows how to play, but he can't make music like this man can: he can write, he can teach, he can conduct, he can still make music the center of his life, even without playing.

** Other episodes dealt with a college football player whose career is [[Incredibly Lame Pun|sidelined]] by an amputated leg, and an infantryman whose face is disfigured and attempts suicide rather than go home and face his fiancee.

* Used briefly in an episode of ''[[Dragnet]]'' where Sgt. Friday explains to an applicant to the Police Department that he's too short and therefore could not effectively restrain an assailant.

* In an episode of ''[[Star Trek]]'', "Is There in Truth No Beauty?", we learn that a blind person is not allowed to pilot the Enterprise, even with the aid of assistive technology. The blind woman, an assistant to the [[Brown Note|maddeningly ugly]] Medusan ambassador, proves jealous of Spock's ability to see the ambassador--even though doing so drives him insane.

 

== Video Games ==

** Overlord Zetta confines himself into The Sacred Tome to avert the total destruction of his Netherworld. Anyone with sufficient Mana can write a wish in The Tome and it will become reality. Zetta has the Mana for it, but being a book, he no longer has arms to write with. Oops!

** Subverted by Babylon, who, when about to write, warns everyone not to ask about how he can write without hands. He should really get around to telling Zetta how he does it.

** A slime that Barkeep was completely sold on until he got sucked down the drain.

** And a giant the size of the pub itself. Who ''also'' tries to play the race card.

** He did dream of joining some sort of beast-riding lancer squadron, if he wasn't culled for defects first.