Being a Better Writer: Big-Lipped Alligator Character Traits · 10:39pm Oct 18th, 2021
Hello readers, and welcome to another installment of Being a Better Writer! We’ve got a really interesting topic for you today and we’re looking forward to diving right in! But really quick, before we do jump into today’s topic, there is a bit of news to cover.
First up, and most importantly, next week’s Being a Better Writer will once again be a Live Question and Answer session! That’s right, once again I will be taking questions from a live audience and answering them over on the Unusual Things Official Discord channel, The Makalay Camp. It will run for about an hour, starting at 5 PM MST, which would be 7 PM EST, and 4 PM for those on the west coast. Hopefully this time works best for those who’d like to listen in, at least in the US (in advance, I apologize to those living in places like India, but we really are put in a difficult spot there by the Earth being round).
But yes, next week’s Being a Better Writer will be live, at 5 PM MST. The day of, an invite will go up on the day’s BaBW post with a link to the official discord server, so that those of you who have not joined yet can get in and familiarize yourself with the server (which is small, and like the site, has grown as needs have demanded) before the Q&A session goes live.
So mark your calendars! Next week, October 25th, 2021, at 5 PM MST. Live Being a Better Writer Q&A session!
Got it? Good! Now, let’s get talking about today’s topic: The Big-Lipped Alligator Character Trait. I’ll admit with a name like that the initial response to seeing the title of the post likely fell into one of two camps. On the one side, you had the people who are familiar with the term “big-lipped alligator moment” and immediately wondered what that had to do with character traits attached on the end (as a true big-lipped alligator moment” is a scene, which we’ll discuss in a moment. The rest of you? “Big-lipped alligator what?”
So hit the jump, and let’s start answering those questions.
I've said this on the full post, but I'll say it here again because I actually want more people to see this tangentially related question. Does NOBODY remember that the alligator, apparently named "King Gator", actually shows up again? Of course he doesn't really do much when he shows up again, so it may not be that surprising nobody remembers that scene. All he does is kill off the main villain at the end. Yeah... I kinda gotta say that as good as he is, the Nostalgia Critic dropped the ball missing that detail when he coined that phrase.
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Right, but the song and everything else about that scene didn't have anything to do with that. Had the character just shown up and then come back later to kill off the villain, that'd be one thing, but instead there's a song and dance number that contributes absolutely nothing, plotwise, characterwise, or elsewise, that is then NEVER acknowledged again and is bizarrely out of place. Years and years later, as an adult, I saw the scene and was shocked because I'd actually written it off as in another movie it was so bizarre.
Now, I won't say Nostalgia Critic gets it right all the time, but that whole song and dance is really strange.
I loved that movie, it was one of my childhood favorites.
...
I completely forgot about that alligator.
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It has been years since I've seen the movie so my memory may be hazy, but there was some build up to that scene if I'm remembering how it went down right. I'm not going to argue that it wasn't weird, that scene was a fever dream and a half, but I feel that it ironically has just enough build up and plot relevance to not qualify as a "big lipped alligator" moment. The build up is when the villain is about to drop the hero into the sewers, and says he's not going to escape what lives down there. When the alligator shows up, he tries to eat the hero. This causes the hero to howl out in pain, and the alligator releases him because he thinks the hero is singing to him. The alligator reveals that he loves music, and that the hero has a voice to beautiful for the alligator to want to kill him. The alligator gets so worked up about his love of singing and the hero's voice, that he breaks out into a musical number about how he's now the hero's friend for life now. There's also some tension in that scene, since I also remember that the alligator's dancing was inadvertently keeping the hero away from the magic clock keeping him alive. It was well established that if it ever wound down he would die again, and the hero could feel that it was very close to winding down and killing him. So the alligator almost kills off the hero by accident with his song routine. That little addition actually makes the scene a lot more clever in my opinion, because you have such an intentionally clashing tone. You have the oblivious cheerfulness of the alligator happy to finally have someone that he can sing with, and the hero's desperate attempts to retrieve the only thing keeping him alive without interrupting the alligator and making him angry.