1 Days Left to Support a Troper-Created Project : Personal Space (discuss)

Crawl

Found on 24-Hour News Networks, such as CNN, this line of scrolling text provides viewers with the headlines while they are watching a report on, say, tax evasion. Also called a news ticker. Any spoof of a news report is almost guaranteed to have a silly headlines populating this bar for the entire time for bonus jokes, which often requires one to rewatch the scene twice to catch everything. Said headlines may or may not be about a Noodle Incident.

While these seem fairly ubiquitous now, the idea of a 24-hour news crawl on the screen didn't become popular with many television news networks until after September 11th, 2001. Prior to this, a few networks did run constant crawls, but mostly with stock information, sports scores, or weather updates.

Not to be confused with Dungeon Crawl the video game Crawl, or Dungeon Crawling.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Film 

    Live Action TV 
  • 30 Rock has featured a fake news crawl with headlines such as "Panda Murder-Suicide Shocks China"; "Wolf Blitzer Injured In Wolf Blitz"; "Mysterious Visitor From Future Wins Lottery Again"; "Anne Heche Leaves Husband For Pony."
  • The Australian comedy series CNNNN featured a fake news crawl during every episode. One episode even had a news crawl that summarised the original news crawl, and one had a news crawl for the vision impaired which basically filled the entire screen (in other words, you only saw three or four letters of the crawl at a time). You can view every one of these crawls here, y'know, if you're bored.
  • Used on Doctor Who and its spinoffs, whenever footage from BBC News or the fictional AMNN news channels appear.
  • The Community episode "Intro To Political Science" has one of these during Troy and Abed's coverage of the class election. Examples: "Professor Slater Still Missing", "Basketball Team Loses Ball", "Professor Duncan Quits Drinking Again".
    • Analysis of Cork-Based Networking has one briefly that reveals LeVar Burton and "non-celebrity" (Troy) were captured by pirates.

    Music 
  • Chamillionaire's video for Hip Hop Police runs the names of rappers wanted by police on a fake news program's crawl.
  • The video for A Perfect Circle's creepy cover of "Imagine" has a fake news crawl.
  • The song "Bad Day" by R.E.M. has a video that spoofs news reports, complete with a crawl filled with spoof news items such as "Doctor Who was born in 1937, could be expected to live for many more years even if he was captured".
  • The lyric video of "Another Way to Die" by Disturbed does this with the lyrics crawling across the bottom of the screen.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Ring of Honor's HD Net and Sinclair television shows would sometimes have crawling text updating fans on where ROH wrestlers not currently on the show were wrestling or where ROH would be coming next.
  • Ashley America's The All American Report had such claims as her causing the riots that shutdown three events not up to her standing and promises to do the same in Valkyrie Women's Pro Wrestling.

    Video Games 
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, while out in Delfino Plaza, a news crawl will be shown that gives updates on happenings all around the Isle Delfino. These updates are based around things you do in game that has effects on the island's status, such as the sunshine slowly returning and appearances of Shadow Mario, just to name a few.
  • In a trailer of sorts for the Lost and Damned download content for GTAIV, done in the style of a Weazel News report, talks about bikers causing violence while the crawl below reads things like 'Laid off worker gets laid', 'Stimulus package includes vibrator', and 'Bologna recall totally fucks worker's lunch plan' among others. And it's done again in a similar trailer for The Ballad of Gay Tony, with the main report focusing on illegal guns trade while the crawl has lines like 'Swine Flu scared by woman in mask' and 'Parents demand school closing - saying public education is socialism'.
  • SimCity 3000 has a news ticker which alternates between items giving genuine information about how you're doing and daft stories such as "Mayor denies kitty kibble shortage". And if you had disasters enabled, you'd better pay attention to the ticker, 'cuz if it says something about earth rumblings, crop circles, rowdy demonstrations or malfunctioning satellites, it's time to smash the doomsday siren button!
    • Ditto for SimCity 4, albeit vertically-scrolling and with less kitty kibble shortage.
  • Saints Row features a few of these in cutscenes for the in-game news channel. Most of them are pretty humourous, including an announcement for a film starring the Real Life voice actor of a character.
  • Ridge Racer 7 has one that's relatively serious. The crawl occurs between races and shows off the top times of certain series. These are interspersed with news stories related to the game and its setting.
  • The UNN crawl in Starcraft II actually provides a complete story, about a drug-addled celebrity (the one painted on Tychus' shoulder) who christens a battlecruiser, runs away from rehab and is found hiding in a zoo.
  • Exaggerated for satire in Metal Gear Solid 4, where an in-universe nature documentary about octopuses (Ocean of Gossip) has two news crawls that bounce all over the footage, all showing batshit insane weird news, mostly to do with horrific civilian militarism.
  • Viscera Cleanup Detail has the News Ticker machine on some levels which runs a series of stories. Most of them are fluff pieces about heroes they idolize along with some Shout Outs and other jokes.
  • In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the situation room has a news ticker which adds some flavor to in-game events. Every mission, every council request fulfilled or denied, results in a news item.
  • At one point in Undertale, Mettaton forces you to watch the live feed from his TV station of the action. The crawl at the bottom displays humorous news stories about enemies you've encountered, and differs depending on whether or not they lived.

    Webcomics 
  • In the Ozy and Millie series about Isolde becoming a reporter, the news story she's covering features in its crawl "A public service announcement followed me home the other day" (a reference to R.E.M.'s song "Bad Day" and possibly the music video for the same; see above) and "Help me I'm shrinking."
  • Grrl Power featured one of these as a Funny Background Event when a reporter is interviewing Sydney.
    News crawl: Please make this girl stop cursing. It feels like I'm playing Diablo with the censor button.

    Web Original 
  • Jib Jab's video "What We Call the News" uses a crawl as subtitles.
  • The Onion News Network, naturally, features joke headlines in its crawl.
  • In the same vein as The Onion, gaming parody site The Eggplant has a joke headline crawl.
  • In The Joker Blogs, there is an episode which is a news report with a crawl full of Mythology Gags.
  • The browser game/forum RP Imperium Nova features a news crawl across the top of the page displaying the three most recent galactic events. Elections, natural disasters, weddings, wars, assassinations...
  • Star Wars Uncut: The discussion between Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Admiral Tagge about the Imperial Senate is presented by Talking Heads on ENN along with a text crawl underneath: "Senate Dissolved...Moisture Farmers See Record Low Season"

    Western Animation 
  • George & A.J., a short film by Pixar related to Up, has this during the news report, and it makes humorous references to the feature film, among other things.
  • In one episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, which parodied the War on Terror, Phil Ken Sebben installed a news crawl in the cafeteria.
    • The news crawl actually appears at the beginning of the obligatory court scene as well, where Mentok tries to predict what it's going to say next before finally just shutting it off.
  • On The Simpsons, one episode showed the Krusty the Clown appearing on Fox News, with an identical news ticker that lampooned Fox News' conservative bias (featuring headlines like "Do Democrats cause cancer?" and "Rupert Murdoch: Terrific Dancer"). Fox News was not amused
    • The gag was repeated in "Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson", with such headlines as "Obama calls mulligan on first term" and "Europe puts Greece on eBay".
  • The into to Karl's "Monkey News" segment on The Ricky Gervais Show features a monkey newscaster with a crawl reading "EEEP... SCREECH... OOOH..."
  • In Ultimate Spider-Man, crawls ALWAYS appear as a Funny Background Event when the Daily Bugle's new screen is shown. "Mistress Death opens new cupcake shop" is a hilarious example.
  • The Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Fightan Titan" opens with a news report on TV with the crawl saying things like "Celebrity gives baby stupid name", "Something bad happens in country most Americans can't find on map", and "Random person reads fake news scroll at bottom of cartoon".
  • American Dad!: In "Bullocks to Stan", Hayley breaks up with Deputy Bullock over the phone during a news conference, and the "C-Spin" ticker shows headlines regarding the scenario.

    Real Life 
  • During the events of September 11, 2001, many news station tickers continued to show other headlines of the day, even as footage of the atrocity took place.
  • Once when the comedian Lewis Black was being interviewed on CNN, he demanded they take the crawl off the screen so people could pay attention to the interview.
  • G4 does this, usually with things that'll later show up on The Feed.


Alternative Title(s): News Ticker

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Crawl
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Crawl
tvtropes.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-22
96143
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:AJMKWXEN5WYIVOCCBFIVIEVAEERNJL3A
<urn:uuid:1a7d1494-c4f6-412a-bcdd-d2bbb4e87095>
2016-05-24T20:41:12Z
209.15.34.67
sha1:WFLDLTFYIVHHT566SJHR2GBFSS2MSDSY
<urn:uuid:06444b1a-47d5-4ee9-a7ed-2ca2042cd86f>
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Crawl
length
response
<urn:uuid:f22d31bb-8c21-4af6-a9fd-5467038a96b7>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-217-139.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf