Soundtrack Dissonance/Music/You Are My Sunshine

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The song of DOOM! Whenever anyone sings this song, disaster follows. Tragic Spoilers follow.

  • The Worlds Fastest Indian -- After singing this song the Bert has a heart attack.
  • Angel -- Fred sings this just before spitting blood, falling into fever, having her soul destroyed, and her body used as a vessel for an Eldritch Abomination to claw its way back from death.
  • Beaches -- Sung in the final happy moments before the "Wind Beneath My Wings" Death Montage.
  • The Muppets -- Hugga Wugga blows off the yellow puppet's head for singing it.
    • But the puppet survives and gets his revenge...]
  • All My Children -- Dixie Martin's song. It plays in the background when she dies.
  • The Twilight Zone TOS episode "It's a Good Life". Dan Hollis sings a few bars of "You Are My Sunshine" at one of Anthony's "parties". One minute and 40 seconds later, Anthony turns him into a human jack-in-the-box and sends him to the cornfield. Watch it here: the song is at 0:45 and the punishment is at 2:25.
  • Used to be used as the jingle for French's Mustard. To those of us who hate mustard, it'd be a disaster to use it...
  • In The Return one character openly mocks the unfortunately named succubus, Sunshine, with this song. Pretty soon she is kidnapped, tortured, mindraped, transformed into a succubus herself and then eventually ends up being Sunshine's demonic daughter.
  • I seem to recall an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where The Doctor tries to help Seven of Nine improve her social skills, and one of the things he does is teach her this song. And things don't work well throughout the episode.
    • Well, he falls in unrequited love with her, but he is successful in teaching her how to interact with people better, so the tone is kind of bittersweet.
  • Used in the ending montage of the Cold Case episode "The Goodbye Room".
  • Used in O Brother, Where Art Thou?; fits mainly because it's set in the depths of the Great Depression.
  • An episode of The L Word has Alice buying a plush sunflower for her cancer-ridden girlfriend Dana that sings it when you push a button on the bottom. Alice does not reach Dana in time and as she drops the sunflower as she falls to the floor, it sings the tune over Alice's hysterical crying.
  • There's actually some dissonance between the music and lyrics of this song all by itself. It is not a happy story.
  • Brian Wilson uses it in his Smile album, in a very slow, minor-key rendition with altered lyrics (You were my sunshine...how could you take my sunshine away?)
  • An unusual example in the Tunnels book series: Rebecca actually sings this, especially at the most inappropriate times.
  • In a Season 1 episode of The A-Team, Face and Hannibal sing this in cheery harmony as they distract and then knock B. A. out in order to get him on the air-plane. This song makes it seem a bit mean-spirited.
    • Face and Hannibal just seem to like this song. They sing it a couple of other times during the series as well, usually when they're in some sort of danger.
  • B. G. James' last entrance theme in TNA actually starts with him reciting the line, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine..." in a pained voice before launching into a vaguely rap-metal beat.