LORE in a Minute - TV Tropes
- ️Sat Jul 14 2012
Have fun!
[1]
was a series of animated videos on YouTube, written and narrated by the staff of Polaris (most typically TotalBiscuit, OMFGcata and Press Heart To Continue) with art by various animators starting with DJ Ross. They involve a brief explanation about the backstory of a certain video game franchise and as indicative of the title typically take anywhere around a minute.
Lore later added a second series called Fast Facts to the channel. These shorts are facts that are said in a rapid manner. There is also Checkpoint, which gives a similarly quick summary of a game's story, so naturally there will be spoilers.
It also updated thrice weekly, with a game Lore on Mondays, Fast Facts on Wednesday, and either a developer Lore or a Checkpoint on Fridays.
Beginning 2015, the show has began telling lores of other media including movies and TV shows. After a brief hiatus in 2016, the show returned with a new logo and theme song. The series abruptly ended production in 2018 following the closure of Maker Studios (Polaris’ parent company).
Includes examples of:
- Catch Phrase: Have fun!
- Creator Cameo: Special Lore episode will have the voice actor of said franchise narrating the episode. (eg. Kira Buckland in the Skull Girls episode)
- Call-Back: In the episode for Uncharted, Nathan Drake is seen stealing things from Lara Croft.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Earlier Lore episodes contains songs from games they were narrating. Recent episodes no longer do that.
- Formula-Breaking Episode:
- The Animal Crossing, SkiFree and Flappy Bird lores have nothing to do with the respective games, but speculate on the Villager, the Yeti and Flappy respectively. It paints the Villager as a Yandere being cheated out by Tom Nook, the Yeti as an exiled Microsoft employee out for revenge, and Flappy as losing sleep and delirious while trying to cope with the nightmarish world around it.
- The Stan Lee lore episode does not have the Catch Phrase "Have Fun".
- Motor Mouth: Pretty much required by all of the narrators to get the Lore under a minute, though some episodes are easier than others.
- Oh, Crap!: "Have fun."
- Once an Episode: The aforementioned "Have fun!", usually coupled with at least one character (Usually the player character) from the series being covered having an Oh, Crap! expression.
- Running Gag: A Wailmer can commonly be seen in scenes with a forest.
- Shout-Out: Lara Croft's treasures, including a diamond from Minecraft.
- And the aforementioned Wailmers.
- Look through all the Fast Fact episodes and count how many Psychonauts references there are.
- One of the hats in the Team Fortress 2 episode is Peacock's top hat from Skullgirls.
- One of the students in 47's classroom is Corvo.
- Stealth Pun: Their "Have Fun" tee shows a hunk of dead meat on the box cover. Considering how characters usually act by video's end, this comes as no surprise.
- Take That!: Most of the Gears of War video is spent recapping the events of the games rather than the lore, with an uncharacteristically sardonic tone. This was mitigated somewhat with the video for Gears of War 4, with the only sarcastic line from that video being:
A few secret experiments later, the Locust species was spawned, because, we needed something to shoot at.