That's No Moon: Difference between revisions

* In the ''[[Earthsea Trilogy]]'', Ged once goes to an island to fight off dragons. The first dragons are relatively small and easy to defeat... then the ''castle'' on the island moves and it's the main dragon...

** The BBC Audio adaption even gives Ged the line "you are right, my friend, that is no tower..."

** The [[Discworld]] sits atop the back of 4 gigantic elephants, who themselves stand upon the back of an even larger turtle.

* In ''[[Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (novel)|Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix]]'', Grawp is, at first, believed to be some anomalous hillock.

* In [[China Mieville]]'s ''[[The Scar]]'', Bellis finds out what it is Armada is [[Kraken and Leviathan|looking for]] by means of a drawing in a book:

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' began one episode with a grizzled old explorer in a spacedock talking about a forest-covered planetoid he claimed to have once discovered: during an "earthquake", it turned out to really be a gigantic alien creature with its own ecosystem growing on it. Oddly enough, the story is brushed off as a tall tale and plays no part in the rest of the episode. Given the bizarre lifeforms encountered each week, that might be taken as [[Arbitrary Skepticism]] on the crew's part.

** The same crew once met a living, sentient nebula.

* Used in the ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' episode "Unnatural Selection", when the crew lands on a planet and realizes its surface is made entirely of Replicators.

* In the ''[[Farscape]]'' episode "Green Eyed Monster", the line "That's no moon!" is used word for word by Crichton. It's not a space station however, it's a "[[Space Whale|budong]]".

** And again with the Series' Fnarg finale. All the stars in the universe have been wiped out- so why does Earth still have a sun? Because that's no sun, its {{spoiler|the exploding TARDIS!}}

** And in "The Beast Below", the Doctor describes Starship UK as "that's not just a ship, that's an idea, that's a whole country". Skyscrapers have neon signs bearing the names of counties. {{spoiler|Then it turns out Starship UK's engines are dummies - because the whole structure is built on the back of a star whale!}}

* Spoofed in ''[[Celebrity Deathmatch]]'', when Bam Margera goes into orbit around the massively fat Don Vito.

 

* [[Older Than Print]]: In the ''[[Arabian Nights]]'', [[Sinbad the Sailor]] stopped on an island on his first voyage and discovered the hard way that it was a whale. Then he found a huge dome and found out the hard way it was a roc's egg. This same beast, the zaratan, appeared in other Middle Eastern tales. Strangely, it was sometimes a whale and sometimes a turtle, despite the name remaining constant.

* Krakens were supposedly so huge that sailors frequently mistook them for islands, camped on them for the night, and were then drowned as they submerged.

* Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen sometimes depicted [[wikipedia:Troll|trolls so large that trees grow on them]].

* Another huge example from Arabic Mythology is our world resting on the shoulders of Kujata, a colossal bull, who is then standing on the back of Bahamut, [[Always a Bigger Fish|an even ''more'' colossal fish!]]

 

== Radio ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Tropes in Space]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]

[[Category:Lunar Tropes]]