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Don't you just hate when your friends make plans and leave you hanging?
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Hang on a minute, girls. You have a busy day ahead of you. You need to keep track of your time and your things.
—Mrs. Mouseling, Angelina Ballerina: The Next Steps
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So the adventure's over, the team beat the enemy or found the treasure and got out alive, and it's finally time to relax, say their goodbyes, and head home. And someone says, "I've got this nagging feeling that there's Something We Forgot."
Cut to a major MacGuffin that got left in the dungeon. Or an ally who got trapped is still waiting for them to get back. Etc.
Related to Brick Joke. Often deployed as The Stinger. Contrast What Happened to the Mouse?, in which a dropped plot element does not get another mention.
Examples of Something We Forgot include:
Anime and Manga[]
- Cromartie High School - after a hijacked plane trip, the students of Cromartie wonder what they could have forgotten. They deduce that their money from the trip hasn't come back yet, but completely forget about Takenouchi; an impostor fills his place in the school while he is gone. When the impostor is asked if he has any idea of what's missing, he claims that everything's fine.
- The Dragonball Z movie Fusion Reborn ends with an annoyed Shenlong asking if anyone was going to make a wish. He was summoned near the beginning of the film, but when it wasn't within his power to fix things, he was forgotten about.
- In one episode of Pokémon, Ash and Dawn send Gliscor out to fetch Brock who was in town due to Pachirisu coming down with an illness. Of course, with Gliscor being unable to fly without the aid of wind pushing it in the right direction, Brock leaves Gliscor there in order to get back on time and everyone forgets about it until the end of the episode where Ash freaks out.
- In One Piece, Kizaru teams up with a Pacifista to fight Urouge, X Drake and Hawkins. After the Pacifista hurts Urouge, X Drake attacks it. It is a gripping fight between these two, a T-Rex vs a Robot! After they both let out their brutal attacks, neither side seems to be winning. Oh yeah, did you forget that KIZARU is still here? Urouge lets out an 'Oh Crap' face before getting sent flying into three buildings.
- In the Tenchi Universe episode, "No Need for Runaways!", after the gang got back Kiyone's stolen spaceship and successfully escaped from the Galaxy Police, Tenchi realized that they forgot to pick up Ayeka and Sasami, who were left at the diner, washing dishes to pay for their dinner.
Comic Books[]
- In Sonic Universe, after a heactic (and hilarious) arc, Amy, Cream, and Vanilla are talking over tea...when Amy suddenly remembers she dropped Nicole two episodes ago.
- An issue of Groo the Wanderer focuses on a very large spider that he and Chakaal have to defeat. At some point, he sees something that's unrevealed to the audience that he means to tell Chakkal about later. At the very end, he remembers that there was something he had to tell her but can't recall what. "Oh well," he thinks, "I'm sure it was nothing important." In the same panel, an underground lair filled with giant baby spiders is shown.
- In the Cherry Comics story "Cherry Meets Rambone", Rambone and Captain Guts wander off and leave Cherry staked out naked on the ground. She even calls after them to no avail.
Film[]
- Minor example in Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie. Max turns a woman into a dog to discourage Jerry from hitting on her. They chat for a while and then walk away with Max feeling like he forgot something. He forgot to turn the dog back into a human.
- The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising ends with one of these. After the new party finds their first party's treasure carrying minion. He is left to wait for them again, only to be forgotten about. The Stinger shows him still waiting in the dungeon he was left in.
- Home Alone. The rest of the family forgot Kevin, thus setting him up to be the most famous security system ever unintended.
- Done for laughs during the credits to the Hellboy movie.
- The Cherry Orchard ends with all the family leaving the estate and locking up their house; forgetting that their extremely elderly manservant Firs is still inside.
- Although none of the characters actually realize they've missed something, this gets played for horror in the conclusion of Roger Corman's loose adaptation of The Pit And The Pendulum: Towards the end of the film, Francis hears Catherine screaming and runs down to the dungeon to save her from Nicholas. Before he can find her, a now-insane Nicholas knocks him out and straps him to the titular device. Nicholas is disposed of, Francis is rescued at the last second, and he and his rescuers leave the dungeon and promise to have it sealed off and never speak of it again... Cut to Catherine locked in an iron maiden, presumably about to be sealed in the dungeon forever.
- Airplane!: After the end credits... remember who Ted left behind? "Well, I'm gonna give him a few more minutes... but that's it!"
Jokes[]
- After the Russian space station "Mir" was scuttled, the following joke immediately arose, with the head of mission control center commenting on the event: "At this moment the station is entering the dense atmosphere. The remains will sink into the Pacific Ocean. Tomorrow our brave austronauts are going to...oh, fuck, the austronauts!"
Literature[]
- Happens in the Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters, to a trio of actors in witch costumes who were mistaken for Granny, Nanny, and Magrat and thrown in the dungeons.
- At the end of the Thursday Next novel The Well of Lost Plots, after Thursday was finally cleared of everything, the question is suddenly raised as to something that is mostly unconnected to the main plot: Who killed Godot, who it was earlier revealed had been murdered?
- Subverted in the Dale Brown novel Act of War. When making their escape from Brazil, the team notices that Manuel Pereira has disappeared, but ultimately his fate is not resolved.
- At the beginning of the Robert A. Heinlein novel The Number of the Beast, the main characters discover that their abstract mathematical research actually holds the key to traveling between different universes - and there are some strange creatures masquerading as humans (which the characters decide to call Beasts) that are out to kill them because of it. So, to protect themselves, they use that research and start traveling to parallel universes, at which point the Beasts that seemed to have been driving the plot are never mentioned again. Until the epilogue, in which all the main characters from lots of different Heinlein novels have all met up for a party and a Beast appears for no apparent reason, and someone remarks, "Quick - get his Number!"
- A subplot example in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, where the Power Trio, having finally smuggled Hagrid's pet dragon Norbert out of Hogwarts, triumphantly race back to the Gryffindor common room only to realize they'd forgotten Harry's Invisibility Cloak at the top of the Astronomy Tower. And they lose 150 points for Gryffindor when they're caught.
- Again in Philosopher's Stone: Harry and Ron triumphantly lock the mountain troll in the girls' bathroom. After about thirty seconds of self-congratulations, they remember Hermione is in said girls' bathroom.
- Near the end of Prince Caspian, Edmund says "I've left my new torch in Narnia!" It doesn't become a plot element in a later book, though it could have.
Live Action TV[]
- Used in the first season finale of Babylon 5. Since this is Babylon 5's first Wham! Episode, it's not a signal that the good ending isn't as good as it seems, it's a signal that the bad ending is about to get worse.
- A Saturday Night Live sketch where a white, ghetto-speaking pizzeria waiter named Mark Payne (played by feature player Bobby Moynihan) has a part where just as a couple leave their table, Mark realizes that he left his kid on a bus and runs out (but not before yelling at the couple who just left about not leaving a tip). It doesn't help that the next time Mark appears, the kid was never mentioned.
- One contestant on Legends of the Hidden Temple reached the episode's Artifact forgot he didn't have to complete each room's challenge to move on. While he was smashing pots to open a door that was already open, he dropped the artifact and made it all the way to the temple gates, empty-handed.
- In an episode of the new Doctor Who, the Doctor is celebrating how everybody lived that episode, until Rose reminds him that Jack was still trapped on a spaceship that was about to explode. They saved him, though.
- Two and A Half Men: In "People Who Love Peepholes", Alan moves out of the house and leaves Jake behind.
- In an episode of ICarly, Sam is left inside a luggage bag and ends up in Malaysia.
Video Games[]
- "Have you forgotten something" was a phrase used in the ending of Wizardry IV, to indicate that the ending you got really wasn't the best ending. If you got the real ending it said it followed by "You laugh, for you know that you have not."
- In Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo, Kazooie, Mumbo and Bottles are enjoying a BBQ having escaped from Gruntilda's lair and rescued Tooty. Then Tooty turns up and points out that they didn't actually defeat Gruntilda, who is still at large, and Banjo has to sprint back to the top of the lair for the Final Boss fight.
- Guybrush's crew gets left behind on Monkey Island in one of the endings to The Secret of Monkey Island. This is the ending they went with in the fourth game, where they show up again and complain to Guybrush that it was really difficult to Escape from Monkey Island™.
- In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indy will say that his victory rings hollow if you let his female sidekick die. It should be noted that freeing her is very difficult, since she's located in an easy-to-miss part of the map, stuck in a cell that requires a very obtuse puzzle to get her out of, and will be Mind Controlled by an evil artifact that you must destroy to free her.
- In Fallout 2, there is an optional quest where you go treasure hunting in Broken Hills. When you finally find where it is, and enlist the aid of a midget to get it out of there, you learn that it's really a bag of bottle caps - which would have been a fortune in the first game, but in the second, it's worthless. When the character goes on a monologue about how frustrated they feel, they totally forget about the midget who's still stuck down where the treasure was and eventually wander off without getting him out.
- Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic has a bomb that you can arm by pressing the "Press to Disarm Bomb" button. It won't go off while you're on board, so you can forget to disarm it while you finish the game. Of course by the time you are reminded of it later, it's too late and if you haven't disarmed it, the ship explodes.
- In Special Operations 2, an Expansion Pack for Wing Commander II, at the very end of the closing cinematics, after Blair has defeated Jazz and returns for praise from everyone, there's a scene of Maniac's fighter, stranded by a broken jump drive that kept him from assisting in the final fight, drifting in the void while calling for help.
- In the VGA remake of Space Quest I, if you forget to set the Self-Destruct Mechanism on the superweapon before escaping ("You can't ignore, however, a nagging feeling that you've forgotten something important. Now what could that be?"), the bad guys use it to blow up your home planet. And then terrorize the rest of the universe. Oops.
- Likewise, in the same game you can leave the Star Generator data cartridge in a reader on planet Kerona. The ending victory ceremony will then tell you that while it's good that the bad guys didn't get it, it sucks that the planet is now spinning around a rapidly cooling star... Oh well, you're just a Janitor.
- Pikmin 2: Olimar collects enough money, starts his ship, heads for Hocotate... and realizes that he left behind Loui on the Pikmin Planet. Cue second part of the game having the secondary goal to find and rescue him.
- Cave Story gives the optional task of bringing "Mr. Little" (a miniscule man) from the Mimiga graveyard back to his home in the outer wall. Once you've picked him up, he appears as an inventory item and it's possible to forget about him. But if you do, and beat the game without bringing him home, he will appear before the credits roll to ask "aren't you forgetting something?"
- He will do this even if your actions have caused the island to fall to earth, presumably killing his family and everything else within.
- In the ending of Conkers Bad Fur Day, Conker realizes he forgot to bring Berri back to life, but he can't do it now that the programmers aren't there to give him a second Deus Ex Machina.
Web Comics[]
- In this strip of The Order of the Stick, Elan mutters this as they all leave Durkon behind paralyzed on the ground.
- The last panel of this edition of The Wotch, with the owner of a local magical bookstore who was wounded in a previous strip and left behind.
- Annie silencing Reynardine in Gunnerkrigg Court. While it had some disastrous consequences, it was played for laughs a few pages later.
- This strip in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha R'r Fan Web Comic by Entropy Max, which lampshades the tendency of Zafira getting ignored by both the writers and the fandom.
- From DM of the Rings: "Uh. Guys?"
- Catena Manor has a beach-visit storyline. It ends with one character harmlessly but solidly trapped under exercise equipment...and completely forgotten by the others.
- Narbonic has another example of someone being forgotten: Seth, a gamer who gets sucked into hell during one storyline and at the end of the arc is trying and failing to find someone who'll get him out. Much later, he shows up again in Badass fashion, having put his gaming skills to good use and fought his way out.
- There was also the part when Dave was brought back to life as a zombie. Helen and Mell left his head on a city bus, and forgot all about it. It wound up in the Lost and Found, and got claimed by Madblood (who needed a spare brain for an experiment).
- In Rhapsodies this happens to Kevin once or twice.
- One arc of Nodwick has the title character captured by an evil priest hoping to use him as a sacrifice. After thwarting the villain, the party forgets to release Nodwick, who mentions that he'll probably need to find a way to break the top off the altar he's shackled to and roll the coin-shaped top back home.
Western Animation[]
- Used in an episode of Tale Spin - they forgot Wildcat at a mansion at the end of an episode.
- Used in an episode of The Venture Brothers - they forgot to free a bunch of supporting characters from a dungeon.
- Happens in "Escape to the House of Mummies Part 2" as well. Dr. Venture is the only one small enough to escape and get help, but he gets caught up in a contest with Orpheus and completely forgets about his family.
- The Simpsons subverted it, too, in one of the Treehouse of Horror short "The Shinning".
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[screen shows "Tuesday"] |
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- This is something of a Running Gag for Milhouse- the first time was an early episode when Homer and Bart left him buried under a pile of chairs after a Spinal Tap concert.
- And again, when Bart and Lisa attend the school in Waverly Hills for a short period of time. Bart suddenly remembers at the end that he has to go back because he was playing hide and seek with Milhouse. Cut to a view of the garbage can next to the Kwik-E-Mart with Milhouse's voice saying, "Two weeks! This has gotta be a record!'
- It happened again with Grandpa in "Fear of Flying": when the family returns home after Marge's panic attack on the plane, Bart mentions "You know, I have this feeling that we forgot something...". Cut to Grandpa still on the plane screaming Home Alone style. We cut back to Homer who says "Eh, I'm sure it's nothing."
- Another Grandpa example has them in Witness Protection leaving him locked out of the house. "Hello? Hellooo? ...I'm cold, and there are wolves after me!" [wolf howls]
- Also shows up in the episode where the teachers go on strike. Everyone rushes out of the school so fast a little girl is left stranded on the rings in the gymnasium. "Hello? Mrs. Pommelhorst? I'd like to get down now..."
- As well as Whacking Day, where Principal Skinner locks Bart, Jimbo, Kearney, Dolph and Nelson in the school's basement. At the end of the episode, Skinner finally remembers that the bullies are still locked in the basement.
- In "The Springfield Connection", Homer discovers his friend Herman is running a counterfeit jeans ring in the former's garage while on "breaks" from their regular poker game with Lenny and Moe. When the episode ends with Herman arrested, we see Lenny and Moe still waiting for them:
- This is something of a Running Gag for Milhouse- the first time was an early episode when Homer and Bart left him buried under a pile of chairs after a Spinal Tap concert.
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Lenny: [in the kitchen] I don't think they're coming back. |
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- In the episode "E-I-E-I-D'oh", Homer is inspired by a Zorro movie to go around getting whatever he wants from people by slapping people with a glove and challenging them to duels. Much to his surprise, a Southern colonel accepts and he and his wife move into to the Simpsons' doorstep with his RV. He and the rest of the family flee the city and move into Grandpa's old farm, setting the plot into motion. After the climax of the episode, they move back to their house, with Homer saying "I don't even remember why we left." Of course, the colonel is still there waiting for him. The duel takes place, the colonel shoots Homer in the arm (which doesn't cause any significant damage), and the episode ends.
- The Fairly Odd Parents:
- Leaving Tootie locked in the closet (boarded up, no less).
- The time they leave Vicky in the stocks.
- In the episode Shelf Life, Wanda forgot to return Sherlock Holmes back to his book.
- Also done in Danny Phantom, with Mr. Lancer being locked in the janitor's room for the entire weekend, with the janitor opening up to get supplies and then shutting the door.
- This is a Running Gag in The Replacements: Dick Daring will say this, and the scene cuts to the Daring family's pet mule Prince Cinnamon Boots, fruitlessly waiting somewhere for help/praise/support. Eventually, in one of the last episodes, he gets sick of it and locks the Darings out of their house till they realize how much they've neglected him.
- The Kid In The Lid episode of Animaniacs: Yakko traps a pet woodchuck in a toilet, who, at the end of the episode, can be heard saying "Hello? Hello? Anyone? Anybody? Can anyone hear me? I'm still in the potty!"
- One episode of Adventures in Care-a-Lot looks like it's going to play this trope straight, with Oopsy, tied to a bunch of pillows (to prevent him from getting hurt), left behind while the others go off to have fun. He even starts calling out for someone ("Hello?"), but Funshine comes back and sets him free.
- In an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Grim sends Billy and Irwin to a Dungeon Crawling game world, and then he and Mandy have to go in to retrieve them. After much adventuring, Billy, Mandy and Grim finally return home safe and sound, but Grim can't shake the feeling that they're forgetting something. Cue a final shot of Irwin, still hanging precariously onto a branch where Billy had left him several scenes before and complaining that he's starting to get hungry.
- In an episode of Back at the Barnyard, the dog is left in the cage of a dog catcher.
- In an episode of Ben 10 Alien Force, after the resolution of the events of the episode, Gwen forgot that Kevin was in the old factory yet previously beaten by a possessed Cash, despite that she promised to came back for him.
- Twice on Jimmy Two-Shoes in the same episode: Lucius gets Buried Alive, who then calls Molotov to arrest the ones responsible. He does so and leaves...without digging his boss up.
- A Garfield and Friends episode had Garfield trap the mailman by using a snare trap. Just when Jon and Garfield are going somewhere, Garfield lampshades it by stating that he forgot something. Cue the mailman still hanging in the snare. In the end of the episode, Garfield is then openly upset that the mail has not come yet and demands to know why it's taking forever, having completely forgotten about the mailman still in the snare trap.
- Used in Angelina Ballerina: The Next Steps episode, "Angelina's Lost Ice Skates where Angelina and her best friend, Alice, are excited of going to the ice skating show that they become absent-minded of their things. First, when they left the former's house, they almost forgot their lunches and ice skates if it wasn't for Polly and Mrs. Mouseling retrieving it at the time they left. Next, they left the park without their lunches, resulting in the birds gobbling it with their mouths full. They almost forgot their skates again if it wasn't for the two getting it. When they left Mrs. Thimble's shop for smoothies, Angelina ended up forgetting her ice skates there. Luckily, she gets it, but when she comes back in the rink, she missed her opening solo. Nevertheless, she could still perform with Alice.
- The My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode, "The Last Roundup", ends with Applejack finally coming back to Ponyville with her friends, with everyone celebrating her return. We then cut to Rarity and Pinkie Pie trying to make their way back to Ponyville via handcar, having been forgotten about by everyone else after they had fallen off the cart they were using during an earlier Chase Scene.
- At the end of The Rescuers Down Under, Cody, Jake, and Marahute fly both Bernard and Miss Bianca back to the United States, but leave Wilbur Albatross behind. The last thing we hear before the film finally ends is Wilbur realizing that he was left behind and starts wondering where everyone went.
- Abis Mal at the end of Aladdin: The Return of Jafar.
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Abis Mal: (still dangling from a tree branch) But does this mean that I can't get my third wish? |
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- In an episode of Family Guy, Stewie beats up his babysitter's boyfriend and looks him in the trunk of a car so he can make a move on her himself. After failing to win her over, we see him sitting on the couch with Meg during the credits:
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Stewie: I guess neither of us is really cut out for love, and we should OHMYGOD Jeremy's still in the trunk! Oh god, how long has it been? Let's see, two... two weeks. Yeah, he's dead. Definitely dead. |
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- In the Avatar episode "The Deserter", Aang and friends are introduced to a gang of Fire Nation deserters by a man named Chey, who doesn't seem very popular amongst the gang. At the end of the episode, after the gang abandon their hideout to escape from Zhao, Chey returns from the forest wondering where everybody's gone.
Web Original[]
- The trope is lampooned in an episode of Bonus Stage. It was along the lines of
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Joel: Oh no! We forgot Jessica! |
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Real Life[]
- Real-life example: When Julius Caesar marched on Rome on his return from the Gallic wars, Pompey's government fled into exile - leaving the entire contents of the national treasury behind them. D'oh!