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Subliminal Seduction: Difference between revisions
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* An ad for Tesco Compare parodied it. The ad featured Paul Daniels encouraging viewers to think of an insurance comparison site while various blatant logos for the site showed up behind him.
* A year 2000 advertisement for the Republican party had a bunch of negative terms for the Democratic party, such as "Bureauc'''RATS'''", zoomed in at varying parts of the screen. Of course, the Bureauc- part cut off.
** It is actually in response to this that ''[[The Simpsons]]'' did there "subliminAL messaGOREs" chalkboard gag as seen later in the page.
* A promo image for ''[[Tangled]]'', if you believe this [http://yourdailyhumor.com/index.php/uncategorized/tangled/ humor site].
* Parodies on a Comedy Central TV spot. The ad showed a series of Christmas-themes children's drawings while Penn Gilette narrated about how people exploit Christmas for commercial gain, while the message "WATCH COMEDY CENTRAL ALL THE TIME" appears for a split second.
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** [[Word of God]] says {{spoiler|the monster is dead}}; apparently the reason it's backward is because it's ''not'' true.
* Parodied in the film ''[[Little Nicky]]'', where the title character reveals a Satanic backwards message on a song by the ''soft-rock band'' Chicago.
* In John Carpenter's ''[[They Live!]]'', aliens control the world through subliminal messaging (backed by [[Applied Phlebotinum]]) hidden in billboards, magazines, and pretty much everywhere.
* Used as a bit of a plot point in ''[[Spy Kids]]''. Junie's favorite show employs several characters in costume speaking gibberish, but when the tape of the show is played backwards you can clearly hear their cries for help.
* The horror movie ''Trick Or Treat'' takes the urban legend about Satanic messages hidden in music and runs with it. The movie is ''about'' a heavy metal star who was into black magic (and died in the middle of a magical ritual) who put a backmasked summoning spell on his next-to-be-released album. The hero, a put-upon headbanger (played by the guy who played Skippy in ''[[Family Ties]]''), gets the only prerelease copy of the album. Playing the album backward in short bursts gives the nerd headbanger advice for defeating the jocks and preps at his school who torment him, but the album keeps wanting to be played backwards in it's entirety -- and when he does, the dead metal star is summoned in demon form ''from Skippy's stereo speakers'' and runs amok. The plot is a little tongue in cheek rather than pure [[New Media Is Evil]]--the radio DJ is played by [[Kiss|Gene Simmons]] and [[Ozzy Osbourne]] cameos as an anti-metal evangelist.
** The hero's radio DJ friend discourages a young heavy metal fan from trying to hear backmasked lyrics on records. Why? Because he insists that it's nothing more than a scam by record company executives to make kids ruin their albums playing them backwards, so they'll have to buy more. (This would've been a subversion of the trope, had the records in question not ''really'' contained hidden incantations invoking demonic forces.)
* ''[[The Exorcist]]'' has short flashes of a demonic face during some scene changes.
* In ''[[The Ring]]'', the corpse's of Samara's victims are shown for a split second at two points in the movie.
* Then, of course, there's the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doWOdB1d0mg "Fruity Oaty Bars"] from ''[[Serenity]]''...
** Justified, though, since she is triggered by a code which she has already been programmed to respond to. She didn't just see 'kill kill kill' flash up on the screen for a second, and decide, hey, I really don't like the people in this bar . . .
* In ''[[Memento]]'', {{spoiler|after his wife's death, Sammy is shown sitting in a mental institution. Briefly, just after someone walks in front of him and before the scene cuts back to Leonard on phone, Sammy's character is actually replaced by Leonard sitting in the same chair.}}
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* Having fallen out with the Channel 4's director and never knowing how far is too far, [[Chris Morris]] inserted a single-frame image into his news-special satire ''[[Brass Eye]]'' that said "[[Biting the Hand Humour|Grade]] is a {{spoiler|[[Country Matters|cunt]]}}".
* In Season 3 of ''[[Lost]]'', some characters have to rescue a prisoner that is being forced to watch a brainwashing tape while loud music plays. The video is already eerie enough (with messages like 'God loves you as he loves Jacob'); however, fans discovered if the music in the scene is played backwards, the message "Only fools are enslaved by time and space" appears.
* ''[[Father Ted]]'' tried to use this to convince the inexplicable Chinatown on Craggy Island that he wasn't a racist. Unfortunately, he only had a slide projector, so he just clicked back and forth as quickly as he could from a slide of himself to one with "Not a racist" written on it.
* In 1986, evangelist Rev. Jim Brown of Ironton, Ohio [http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19860426&id=HrwMAAAAIBAJ&sjid=j2YDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5527,2779842 convinced his flock] that the theme song to ''[[Mr. Ed]]'' contained Satanic messages backmasked into it. [[Dr. Demento]] obligingly broadcast the theme both forward and backward for listeners to make up their own minds. He couldn't help but comment, though, "I suppose if you listen to the word 'horse' backwards enough times -- or if you happen to be a back end of a horse -- you could start hearing something sinister if you really wanted to."
* The BBC topical panel quiz ''[[Have I Got News for You]]'' briefly flashed up "VOTE CONSERVATIVE" just before an election. There were complaints.
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** The story writing for the historic Icelandic tome "Njorl's Saga" gets picked up halfway through by the North Malden [[The Icelandic Sagas|Icelandic Saga]] Society. After momentarily lapsing into a P.R. film for business investment in North Malden, an action scene unfolds with "INVEST IN MALDEN" occasionally flashing on the screen (along with knights carrying signs shilling for Malden.)
** And in another sketch, where someone is undergoing persuasion to quit the Masons, we see what he's seeing as a voice-over asks "do you want to stop being a Mason?". The image he's looking at is repeatedly replaced for brief intervals with an image of a naked woman alongside a large "YES". When the sequence is over, {{spoiler|he of course answers "no"}}.
* ''[[The X-Files]]'' episode "Wetwired" dealt with subliminal messaging on cable television driving people to murder. Mulder finds that he is immune to this subliminal messaging because he is red/green colorblind, and the messaging is heavily reliant on that. Scully, on the other hand, is temporarily brainwashed, convinced that Mulder is one of the men who abducted her and has been lying to her from the beginning. This almost ends tragically as she pulls a gun on him in her mother's home.
** This leads to a [[Crowning Moment of Heartwarming]] when Scully insists that Mulder never trusted her, and Mulder replies with "You are the ''only'' one I trust." On the other hand, the rest of the episode is disturbing, since it is about the furthest extreme that Mulder and Scully stray from [[The Power of Trust]] in the entire series. ''That's'' how powerful [[Subliminal Seduction]] is.
* [[QI|STEPHEN FRY FOR POPE]]
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** The Mindless Self Indulgence song ''Backmask'' is a blatant poke at subliminal messages. When played forwards, the lyrics tell the listener to "go kill yourself", "don't forget the guns - you're gonna need 'em to destroy", et cetera; played backwards, a large section consists of a pleasant female voice telling the listener to be a good person, e.g. "Don't stay out too late", "Get dessed for church".
** The intro to [[Electric Light Orchestra]]'s "Fire On High" contains the ominous-sounding backwards message [[Nightmare Fuel|"The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!"]]
*** They later released an entire album, ''Secret Messages'', parodying the practice and the associated hype.
*** It's said that when the band first heard allegations that their music contained "satanic" backmasking, "skcolloB" was one of the politer responses.
** On [[Pink Floyd]]'s album ''[[The Wall]]'', the song "Empty Spaces" contains the amusingly self-referential if kind of hard to make out since it's so buried in the mix backwards message
{{quote|'''Roger Waters''': "Congratulations, hunters, you've just discovered the secret message! Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont..."
'''James Guthrie'''<ref>One of the album's producers</ref>: *interrupts* "Roger, Carolyne <ref>Roger's then-wife</ref> is on the phone."
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** [[They Might Be Giants]] do this all the time, most noticeably in the song simply called "Subliminal". If you play "On Earth, My Nina" backwards, you'll actually hear "Thunderbird", another song of theirs. They Might Be Giants being They Might Be Giants, they released the "reversed" song half a decade before the forwards one. The demo version of "Which Describes How You're Feeling" has a bridge that, when played backwards, gives the message "They Might Be Giants wanted to include a verse about the suffering people in the world, but we couldn't figure out where to put it into the song". And "Hide Away Folk Family" ends with ''fake'' back-masking: It's actually just John Flansburgh singing a string of backwards-sounding nonsense.
*** They do a double reverse in the song "Dinner Bell". They take a string of spoken parts of the body (ex. shoulder, bicep, elbow, arm), reverse the line, sing what they heard of the reversed line, and then reverse the reversed lines that they sung, and put those lines into the song. It's a cool effect.
** The ending of Soul Coughing's "The Bug" features a just barely audible loop of Mike Doughty repeating "George Clooney is Satan!" Not only is it a parody of the supposed message "I buried Paul" hidden in "Strawberry Fields" by the Beatles, it's also something of a [[Take That]] [[Biting the Hand Humor|to the very film it was written for]]... ''[[Batman and Robin (film)|Batman and Robin]]'', starring George Clooney.
** "<nowiki>P5hng Me A*wy</nowiki>", a song from [[Linkin Park]]'s remix album ''Reanimation'', contains a backmasked section which is simply one of the song's verses.
*** Inverted with Linkin Park's "Announcement Service Public." YOU SHOULD BRUSH YOUR TEETH! AND! YOU SHOULD WASH YOUR FACE!
** "The Poet And The Pendulum," the first track on Nightwish's ''Dark Passion Play'', opens with backmasked verses from the end of the song.
** [[Soundgarden]] attempted to cash in on this satanic messages thing on the song ''665'', but a bout of dyslexia lead them to leave a message to Santa.
** "Please Don't Release This Song", [[Mitch Benn]]'s parody of "new" Beatles songs "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" on the album ''Too Late To Cancel'', ends with a backmasked section that turns out to actually be the chorus of "We Haven't Got A Clue", the first song on the album.
** The [[Franz Ferdinand]] song ''Michael'' has "She worries about you, call your mother" backmasked into it.
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** Even [[Christian Rock]] band [[Petra]] got in on this. After being falsely accused of planting real backmasked Satanic messages in their songs (this was the early '80s), they deliberately placed a conspicuous backwards message in the space between two songs on their 1981 album ''Never Say Die'': The message? [[Schmuck Bait|"What are you looking for the Devil for,]] [[Take That|when you oughtta be looking for the Lord?"]] Later they openly lambasted the critics with their song "Witch Hunt", which contained, in the bridge, backwards versions of spoken lines that also appeared forwards in the same song.
* The infamously "pornographic" song "Darling Nikki" by Prince has a backward-masked sequence that, when played forwards, says "Hello, how are you? I'm fine, 'cause I know the Lord is coming soon. Coming, coming soon."
** "Sucker" by Self ends in an [[Affectionate Parody]] of this: It has a backmasked sequence that sounds identical to the one in "Darling Nikki", but changes the message to "Hello, how are you? I'm fine, 'cause I know that breakfast is coming soon" (It's from an album called ''Breakfast With Girls'', and the next song on the album is the title track).
* You can find "backwards message" videos on [[YouTube]] for hundreds, possibly even thousands of songs, for everything from [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Led+Zeppelin+backwards&search_type=&aq=f Led Zeppelin] to [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Spongebob+Squarepants+theme+backwards&search_type=&aq=f the theme song to] ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]''.
** What you have to remember though, is that some of them are only ''perceived'' reversed messages (e.g., the alleged "Yes, I'm Alive" message in one of 2Pac's songs).
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* In Trip Theory's "Times Up(The Bomb Remix)", there's a timestretched and backmasked(?) vocal sample in the transition to the third break. Can't find a transcription of it.
* The end of the title track of the first [[Overkill (band)|Overkill]] album, on original pressings, has the message "There's no message here, you're going to ruin your needle, asshole!"
* Semi-similarly, the end of Vicious Rumors' album "Digital Dictator" contains a very obvious backwards message which reverses to play "Be nice to your mom and dad. Don't abuse. Don't blow your brains out on drugs. Rock your brains out. By the way, you're ruining your needle."
* [[Caparezza]] included a backmasked message in one of the tracks of his latest CD. You can read more about it [http://www.staperarrivarelafinedelmondo.com/2011/02/messaggi-subliminali-sul-nuovo-cd-di-caparezza/#comments here] (in Italian). The message means more or less: "I know how religion makes slaves out of you... but darkness will make its light". One of the album tracks (not the one where the message is) indeed talks about conspiracies and secrets.
* [[Five Iron Frenzy]]:
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== Radio ==
* Parodied in a "Smashie and Nicey" sketch by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. The two DJs are playing a record that has been accused of having backwards messages:
{{quote|'''Nicey''': "We've played this record backwards, forwards and sideways and can't find any satanic messages."
[They play the record] '''Voice''': "Kill yourself. Worship Satan. Take drugs."
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* The Nightmares in the [[Milkman Conspiracy]] level in ''[[Psychonauts]]'' sometimes shout things that sound like gibberish while you're battling them. In reality, they're actually saying things like "Death, I'll get you" backwards, possibly to play with the whole conspiracy theme of the level. (The Nightmares that appear in other minds {{spoiler|Like Milla's}} speak normally)
* ''[[Halo]]'': The music tracks "Mausoleum Suite", "Dread Intrusion", "Black Tower", and "Gravemind" all contain backmasked speech: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Reversed_Messages. Not all of the speech is decipherable, though. eg. in the third part of Mausoleum Suite, the voices are just backmasked gibberish.
** This is also how they got the Elite language in the first game (which is pretty much the only appearance of said language before the humans developed [[Translator Microbes]]). The Elites' phrases are Johnson's phrases played backwards. For example, the famous "Wort wort wort" said by the Elites is "Go go go" played backwards and a couple octaves lower in pitch.
* ''[[Half Life]] 2'': [[Nightmare Fuel|If you play the noises that the headcrab zombies make backwards, you can hear muffled voices screaming "Oh God" and "Help me".]]
* ''[[Diablo]]'' contains the satanic message (at least in the game files): ''Eat your vegetables, and brush after every meal.'' (backwards, of course)
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* In ''[[Leisure Suit Larry]] 5'', the [[Meaningful Name|Des Rever]] Records corporation places literally seductive backmasked messages in their recordings, which you can actually hear in-game if you play the golden record in their headquarters backwards.
* In the 1996 Point-and Click "[[The Neverhood]]" soundtrack, there is a song called "Sound Effects Record #33", in which the first sound effect is "Man Facing Backwards in the Shower Whilst Singing". The sound is merely backmasked gibberish.
== Western Animation ==
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* When ''[[Dave the Barbarian]]'' and his family form a rock group, Chuckles uses this to turn their listeners into a zombie army.
* ''[[Clone High]]'' has JFK fall through the roof of the school and begin gurgling on the ground. The bump before the commercial is played backwards. When the whole scene is played backwards, the gurgling Kennedy urges the audience to nominate ''Clone High'' for an Emmy.
* At the beginning of ''[[The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy]]'' episode "The Prank Call of Cthulhu", Mandy says something backwards that turns out to be "Cartoons will rot your brain".
** Also, the original ending credits sequence for the show had a backwards message near the end, which turns out to be creator Maxwell Atoms saying "No, no, this is the ''end'' of the show. You're watching it backwards!"
* In the middle of the [[Big Lipped Alligator Moment|BLAM-ish]] hallucination sequence in ''[[Beavis and Butthead]] Do America'', Beavis briefly starts talking backwards. When reversed, it turns out he's actually saying "I recommend that everyone go to college and study hard".
* Parodied (of course) on an episode of ''[[South Park]]'', where it's revealed that all Broadway musicals use this to get women to give men blowjobs. In practice, it's just the actors inserting the word "blowjob" into every other line.
* An episode of ''[[Danny Phantom]]'' revolves around an instrumental written by [[Evil Diva|Ember McLain]] that, when played backwards, contains the message "Leave your kids. Come to the cruise" and is used in a mind control plot.
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