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Fake-Out Opening: Difference between revisions
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* The first 10 seconds of the first episode of ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' are basically a recreation of the opening of ''[[Pokémon Red and Blue]]''. It then transfers to an actual battle, which Ash is watching on TV.
* If you don't count the part where a teenage boy is frantically beating up two girls with a [[Batter Up|baseball bat]], ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni]]'' starts this way, with Keiichi in his happy-go-lucky rural village hanging out with his friends.
* ''[[The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya]]'' opens with an entire episode of a [[Bad Bad Acting|horribly made]] student film of a [[Magical Girl]] adventure with a number of bizarre details, such as a talking cat that is quickly silenced. Only at the very end the viewers see the titular character and realize that it was made by the protagonists at her insistence.
* The familiar television cast do not appear until the opening credits in ''[[Sailor Moon]] Super S: The Movie''.
* The first episode of the anime adaptation of ''[[Bakuman｡]]'' begins with the opening to the main character's uncle's anime.
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== [[Comic Books]] ==
* The very first issue of ''[[The Batman Adventures]]'' (based on the 1992 animated ''Batman'' TV series) opens with Batman swooping down on a crook and punching his lights out. It's then revealed that what we actually saw was an episode of a TV show that one of The Penguin's goons was watching. (Batman as a character on a TV show being broadcast in Gotham City! [[Celebrity Paradox]], anyone?)
* In ''[[All Fall Down]]'', the story begins with a hero having his powers drained by a Mad Scientist. It's revealed to be a comic book, read by a small boy.
** Used again in chapter three. What appears to be a flashback to the end of chapter two is actually a holodeck recreation for IQ Squared to work out some frustration with his father.
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* ''Lemony Snicket's [[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' (2004) opens with a [[Tastes Like Diabetes|stomach-turningly twee]] musical CGI animation about a happy little elf, which is fortunately stopped cold by Jude Law's first voice-over.
* In the first scene of ''[[The Princess Bride (film)|The Princess Bride]]'', a film about swordsmen and such, a boy is playing a baseball video game.
* The 2001 DVD-release of ''[[Monty Python and
* ''[[Mrs. Doubtfire]]'' opens with a [[Tom and Jerry]]-style animation about a cat and a canary, then does a [[Reveal Shot]] to show the main character in a recording studio doing the voices.
* The first scene of ''[[The Scorpion King]]'' takes place in a snowy, mountain region, which is in complete contrast to the sandy desert region of the rest of the film.
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* ''[[X-Men (film)|XMen]]'' begins at a Nazi Concentration camp in the 1940s, showing the main villain Magneto's childhood.
* ''[[Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom]]'' begins with a musical piece in a Shanghai nightclub.
** ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade]]'' begins with what seems to be a regular intro with boy scouts. Then two of them become witness to a team of [[Adventurer Archaeologist|grave robbers]] with what looks to be [[Indiana Jones]] in lead. A shot of his face then reveals he isn't and one of the boy scouts is the actual hero in his youth.
* ''[[Harry Enfield|Kevin & Perry Go Large]]'' begins with the execution of Anne Boleyn, which is later revealed to be one of Kevin's daydreams.
* The all-marionette film ''[[Team America: World Police]]'' opens with a poorly-controlled marionette against a crudely painted flat backdrop. After a few moments, the camera pulls back, revealing that this puppet show is just a [[Show Within a Show]] for the real setting, which is much more elaborate. Trey Parker and Matt Stone did this as [[Biting the Hand Humor|a joke to freak out investors]] who had sunk a lot of money into the film.
* ''[[Hudson Hawk]]'', the Bruce Willis caper movie, opens with [[Leonardo da Vinci]] overseeing various projects in his laboratory/workshop.
* Subverted in the western ''[[Young Guns]] II''. Over the credits an old prospector-type guy leads his mule across the desert. Which is fine for a western -- until he's passed by a stake-bed truck. It's actually 1950, and the old guy is on his way to tell an attorney about his life in the old West (by narrating the rest of the film).
* ''The Beautician and the Beast'' opens with an animated ''[[Sleeping Beauty]]'' scene. It quickly turns into a [[Fractured Fairy Tale]] when Sleeping Beauty (voiced by Fran Drescher) turns Prince Charming down, protesting that she wants to be [[Real Women Never Wear Dresses|a modern, professional woman]], and tries to run for it. Then it turns out to be [[All Just a Dream]] being had by Drescher's character.
* ''[[Under Siege]] 2'' begins with a space shuttle launch. This relates to the plot-significant [[Kill Sat]], but has no other relevance to a train-based action movie.
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* ''Safety Last'''s opening shot makes it look as if [[Harold Lloyd]] is about to be hanged, until the reverse shot of the same scene shows he's just leaving on a train trip.
* ''[[G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra|G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra]]'' began in France, in the 14th century.
* At the behest of Alfred Hitchcock himself, audiences were not allowed to enter ''[[Psycho]]'' after the film began, as to not spoil the twists. One of which being the fact that the character we spend the entire first part of the film with is replaced with an entirely new one, despite the fact Janet Leigh was promoted as the star on all the advertising.
* The first half hour of ''[[Cloverfield]]'' [[Developing Doomed Characters|plays like a romantic comedy]]. This is done deliberitely, to show how random the monster's attack is from the character's perspectives.
* The trailer for ''[http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/disney/greenwithenvy/ Green with Envy]'' {{spoiler|aka ''[[The Muppets (film)|The Muppets]]''}} is played like this.
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* ''[[Kiss Kiss Bang Bang]]'' begins in a church picnic with a kid doing magic tricks.
* While [[James Bond (film)|James Bond]] is referred in the lead, ''[[Casino Royale]]'' counts. The intro is [[Deliberately Monochrome]] (the previous movies never used black and white), following some agent, and you only know it's the right film when he meets Bond inside his apartment.
* Trailer example: The 1939 coming-attractions spot for [[John Ford]]'s ''[[Stagecoach]]'' (a Western set just after the [[Civil War]]) opens with....documentary footage of trains (a stretch for the Old West, but still believable) and airplanes! It makes no sense at all without the narrator's commentary: he's comparing the present (1930s) with the past, and actual footage from the movie doesn't show up in the trailer until the narrator says something along the lines of "What were things like back then?" (Weird, to be sure, but justified and even effective for a moviegoing audience who up to this point had probably never seen a Western movie, or at least one that was done so well.)
* Another trailer example: ''Bean'' opens with a montage of ''National Geographic''-style footage of exotic locales, including one showing some tribal islanders worshipping a statue. The narrator explains that the statue is of Mr. Bean, although [[Rule of Funny|it's never explained to us why the islanders would believe Mr. Bean was a god]].
* The trailer for ''Mr. Bean's Holiday'' starts with a montage of brave explorers throughout history, going on to equate those with Mr. Bean's journey... [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|to the beach]].
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* ''When You Are Engulfed In Flames,'' by [[David Sedaris]], features a fake-out book jacket, which initially describes it as a detective thriller. After a paragraph, it tries to claim that it is an instruction manual for when you are set on fire, before finally admitting that it's yet another collection of [[Seinfeldian Conversation|essays about nothing.]]
* ''[[Frankenstein]]'' begins with a [[Scrapbook Story|series of letters]] from an Arctic explorer to his sister.
** This probably wasn't a surprise to the novel's first readers, since far-off settings and adventurous characters were pretty common in Romantic-era fiction. It's only surprising to ''us'' [[Unbuilt Trope|because of what we've been conditioned to expect from the]] ''[[Unbuilt Trope|Frankenstein]]'' [[Unbuilt Trope|mythos]]. (Some paperback editions of the novel actually pander to modern prejudices by omitting the Arctic framing tale and jumping straight to the creation of the monster, including cover art that depicts the monster as Boris Karloff played him, and even including the tagline "It's alive, it's alive! Oh, God - it's ''alive''!" - [[Beam Me Up, Scotty|which is]] ''[[Beam Me Up, Scotty|not]]'' [[Beam Me Up, Scotty|in the book]].)
* ''Cat-A-Lyst'' by [[Alan Dean Foster]] opens with two soldiers on a battlefield in the American Civil War. It turns out to be a scene from a movie, starring the main character.
* ''If On A Winter's Night A Traveller,'' by [[Italo Calvino]]. The whole book is a sequence of these, held together by a reader trying to continue the story he had begun but getting continually drawn off into new stories.
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* Episode 3 from Series 1 of ''[[Black Books]]'' ("The Grapes of Wrath") starts with a scene about a monk at a monastery in France, who has found grapes growing off a rose bush. {{spoiler|the miracle grapes are what the incredibly expensive wine that Bernard and Manny accidentally drink is made of}}
* Alluded to for laughs on German late night show ''[[TV Total]]'' when an audiobook narrated by band ''[[Scooter]]'''s [[Face of the Band|H.P. Baxxter]], in which machines were mentioned, was suggested by host Stefan Raab to be a ''[[Fake-Out Opening]]'' into a regular techno piece.
* On ''[[Quantum Leap]]'', the teaser for "Moments to Live" has Sam as a surgeon whose patient is dying. The patient's husband shoves Sam to the wall and says, "You killed her." When we return from the titles, we learn that Sam has leaped into {{spoiler|an actor who plays a surgeon on a soap opera}}. He also leaped into {{spoiler|Al's dream}} at the beginning of "A Leap for Lisa".
* The cold openings of ''[[Bones]]'': usually have two unsuspecting individuals doing something totally unrelated to murder--a girl interviewing for a job at a summer camp, two teens about to have a lesbian experience, a man explaining to a teenager the importance of leftover fast-food oil--before they inadvertently discover the body. Cue screaming.
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* [[Blue Öyster Cult|Blue Oyster Cult]]'s "Flaming Telepaths" opens with a tinkling music box that plays for about four seconds before the band's usual Gothic hard rock style kicks in.
* [[Queen]], in particularly [[Freddie Mercury]], thrived on writing in this style - most notably through abuse of the a-capella operatic choir. To name but a few songs: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "I Want It All", "Breakthru", "You Take My Breath Away", "Somebody to Love", "Don't Stop Me Now", "Fat Bottomed Girls"... you get the idea.
* [[Primus]]'s ''Frizzle Fry'' starts the same way as their live debut ''Suck On This'', with a quote of the drum intro of [[Rush]]'s "YYZ"... Except this time, it's followed by a swift [[Letting the Air Out of the Band]] effect, and then the studio version of "To Defy The Laws Of Tradition" starts instead. Since it's a clip taken straight from ''Suck On This'', it seems like an attempt to momentarily trick listeners into thinking that there's been a pressing mistake and they just bought a mislabeled album they most likely already had.
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* [[World Wrestling Entertainment]] pay-per-view events occasionally open with very strange segments that are apparently supposed to be "gimmicky" and sometimes [[Big Lipped Alligator Moment|aren't even thematically tied to the program as a whole]]. WWE's former October event, ''No Mercy'', opened this way in 2007. It featured a Fake Out Opening that was indeed tied to the program's theme, albeit very loosely: with no sound, we are shown the Old Testament passage "And the waters prevailed, so mighty...." against a black screen, like an intertitle in a silent movie. Only then does a montage begin of [[John Cena]] (who had recently had to vacate his year-long championship due to injury) defeating various opponents between September 2006 and September 2007. It becomes clear that Cena is supposed to be the "mighty waters." Then Cena is shown being ambushed and put out of action by [[Randy Orton]], and the narrator intones: "Alas, the rain...." [[Metaphorgotten|(So, does this paradoxically suggest that as Cena was the waters, Orton was the rain that caused the waters in the first place?!)]] Then Orton is shown releasing a white dove and is compared to Noah, in an obvious and very awkward [[Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory]].
* Oh yes, and who could forget the flamboyantly tasteless one introducing ''WWF Invasion'' (the landmark show in which WWE wrestlers fought WCW and ECW wrestlers), which opened with newsreel footage of [[Franklin Roosevelt]] announcing in 1939 (1941?) that "I have failed to prevent the invasion" - followed immediately by Stephanie McMahon maniacally screaming "Nothing can stop the Invasion!" and a wacked-out montage of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and so forth juxtaposed with [[Kurt Angle]], Diamond Dallas Page, and all the other WWE, WCW, and ECW wrestlers? Especially gauche in that the pay-per-view was held in 2001 - the year that marked the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.
* The 2005 edition of ''The Great American Bash'' opens with what seems at first to be a melodramatic political ad for television, complete with a soaring bald eagle, a double exposure of a fluttering American flag, and majestic Aaron Copland-style music. You get the sense that [[Ronald Reagan]] would have loved it.
* The cold opening for WWE's 2010 pay-per-view ''Over The Limit'' at first appears to be a grainy old educational film urging schoolchildren to follow the rules....which then yields to major [[Mood Whiplash]] as it becomes apparent that the WWE Superstars are ''not'' going to be doing that.
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* The intro to ''[[Syndicate]] Wars'' opens with a man strolling down the street in a pleasant village, until the [[Lotus Eater Machine]] chip in his head is crashed by the villains, revealing that he's really in a ''[[Blade Runner]]''-style megalopolis and gets caught in the crossfire of the Syndicate agents' miniguns.
* Several of the ''Fallout'' games, particularly the first and Bethesda's third installment, begin with kitschy, fifty-styles advertisements about what a great world it is. The camera slowly pulls back, showing the advertisements playing on a television in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. Enter Ron Perlman's iconic narration...
* ''King's Quest III'' seems to start out with a protagonist and a setting completely unrelated to the first two games, but {{spoiler|it's eventually revealed that the hero is the long-lost son of King Graham, protagonist of ''King's Quest I'' and ''II''.}} In this case, the [[Fake Out]] lasts about 3/4 of the game.
* One level of ''Sexy [[Parodius]]'' looks a bit like a parody of the ''[[Castlevania]]'' series. The music for that level begins with the first few notes of the easily recognizable "Vampire Killer" (a very popular Castlevania theme) before turning into, of all things, a ''polka''. The boss fight against Medusa does the same thing with the classic boss theme "Poison Mind".
** At the end of the ''[[Tokimeki Memorial]]''-themed stage in ''Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius'', the bosses are giant schoolgirl forms of previously-playable characters Hikaru and Akane. Their theme from the previous installment plays for a few bars before turning into Necke's "Csikos Post".
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== Web Original ==
* In [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc3plOLumRc&feature=related this] ''Random Crap With [[Homestar Runner]]'' video, the first 55 seconds are of animated versions of Masterofhomestar and his friends playing [[Team Fortress 2]]. Then, a character named "Whammy" pops and says 'Woah woah, woah, woah, woah. [[Lampshade Hanging|What the crap does any of this have to do with Homestar Runner?]]" Garth (the animator and voice of whammy) then apologizes and says he got carried away with making the opening. The ''real'' opening then falls out of nowhere and crushes Whammy.
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* ''The [[Aqua Teen Hunger Force]] Colon Movie Film For Theatres'' opens with a "Let's all go to the lobby"-type song that appears to be a promo for the theater -- until it goes completely off the rails and turns into a death metal anthem about movie-going etiquette, complete with a box of Sno-Caps threatening to "Cut you with a linoleum knife" if you talk on your cell phone.
* The ''[[South Park]]'' episode "Cartoon Wars, Part II" opened with a screen saying that the conclusion to Part I "will not be seen tonight" and would instead be replaced by a Terrance and Phillip cartoon. This made reference to the premiere of season 2, which aired on April Fool's Day and was in fact an entire episode devoted to the show-within-a-show, rather than the promised conclusion to season 1's cliffhanger ending. (To add insult to injury, at one point Terrance and Phillip started watching the "real" ''South Park'' season premiere on TV, but changed the channel before the cliffhanger resolution could happen.) This time, however, the Terrance and Phillip episode only lasted for about a minute before the prophet Muhammed showed up, though the visual of the actual character is censored out by the HBC network (the censorship of Muhammed is the point of conflict in the Cartoon Wars episode). Terrance and Phillip then get into an argument with the network president, who tells them, "Your show has become [[Very Special Episode|so preachy and full of messages]] that you've forgotten how to be funny!" The duo then argue that ''[[Family Guy]]'' is going to show an episode with Mohammed uncensored, but the president says that someone might be on their way to FOX Network to get that episode pulled. At that point the actual episode began.
* ''[[Rugrats]]'' had a variation of this. The first 3-5 seconds of almost every episode would begin with some bizarre, abstract combination of colors and lines. It would turn out to be a close-up of a random item, which may or [[MacGuffin|may not be relevant to the plot.]]
** ''[[The Rugrats Movie]]'' opened with an action sequence where the babies (in full [[Indiana Jones|"Okie-Dokie Jones"]] regalia) try to retrieve some kind of monkey idol. It turns out to just be another one of their daydreams.
** A somewhat stranger example opened the sequel, ''[[Rugrats in Paris]]'', this time with a [[Parental Bonus|parody of]] ''[[The Godfather]]''. Again, the kids are just playing pretend.
** ''[[Rugrats Go Wild]]'' continued the tradition by showing the babies having a jungle adventure. Yet another daydream, which the babies imagined after watching some of [[The Wild Thornberrys|Nigel Thronberry]]'s documentaries.
* The [[Mega Man (animation)|Ruby-Spears Mega Man show]] had one in the episode "Electric Nightmare". Megaman is battling Wily's robots and winning...until electrical cables get wrapped around him and fry him. Megaman dead. Or not; in an interesting variation of the trope, it was Wily doing a run-through of his latest scheme with action figures.
* Inverted with the ''[[Tom and Jerry: The Movie]]'' which actually starts out as a traditional ''[[Tom and Jerry]]'' cartoon, without any dialogue whatsoever, but after the opening scene it seems to turn into a completely different movie.
* The opening credits of ''[[Rock-a-Doodle]]'' are all shown in front of an outer space background, and the first few minutes of the film for some reason focus entirely on outer space. But then the camera flies down toward Earth and toward Chanticleer's farm...
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* The [[Animated Adaptation]] of ''[[Watership Down]]'' begins with a ''massive'' [[Art Shift]] in a sequence relating the tale of [[Just-So Story|how Frith made the rabbits the way they are.]] The whimsical, stylized animation makes the [[What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?]] trap even easier to fall into.
** The fact that even this intro sequence features the bloodied corpses of bunnies on screen, and that while the art is more stylized it is no softer, mean viewers are fairly unlikely to be lulled into any false sense of security about the film as a whole.
* The [[Wartime Cartoon]] [[Looney Tunes]] ''Brother Brat'' opens with a stirring, graphically dynamic montage saluting women in the workforce exceptionally handling defense factory work - and it all leads to the big question of where to leave their kid while they're at the job. It's a setup for slapstick mayhem as Porky Pig babysits a terrifying infant.
* [[Tex Avery]] in his early years at MGM set up cartoons like [[Screwball Squirrel]] and [[Red Hot Riding Hood]] by opening them in the overly saccharine storybook style that had been the studio's stock in trade - before going utterly crazy.
** Tex doesn't waste time in ''Batty Baseball." It opens with the title card then a good 20 seconds of cartoon mayhem on the baseball diamond before one of the characters stops everything and demands to know what happened to the MGM lion opening. The narrator apologizes and the MGM lion titles are shown.
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