Houston, we've forgotten the crackers.
"They say the moon is made of green cheese!
No! It's made of cake, candy, and ice cream!"
No! It's made of cake, candy, and ice cream!"
One of the common Moon myths in Western culture is the saying that it is made of "green"note cheese. There was never a time when this was a popular belief, though people sometimes talk as if there really was once a mythic culture credulous enough to believe it.
This can manifest in many ways in fiction, often for laughs. For example, the moon may be depicted as made of Cartoon Cheese (possibly even a shade of green), and it may even be inhabited by moon mice (since mice love cheese and all that). Often, the cheese closely resembles the varieties most commonly used for Cartoon Cheese, particularly Cheddar for its pale yellow-white colour, and Emmental, as the holes translate well into representing craters on the lunar surface.
In Video Games, this can overlap with Level Ate as applied to lunar settings.
See also The Man in the Moon, the other common Western folklore about the moon. The closest Eastern equivalent would be the Moon Rabbit, which traditionally pounds mochi. Any cheese taken from such a moon would qualify as Fantastic Fromage.
Examples:
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Advertising
- An old McDonald's ad featured Ronald McDonald attempting to reach the moon
to collect cheese for the restaurant's burgers.
- "The Power of Cheese" mused that for thousands of years, people believed the moon was made of cheese. We landed on the moon in 1969 and checked if this was true. It was not. (pause) We haven't been back since.
- A Ritz Bits commercial from The '90s featured a box of Ritz crackers rocketing to the moon, in order to use the cheese to become Ritz Bits sandwiches...with cheese!
Comic Books
- Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: Little Cheese is a mouse who gets shrinking powers from a chunk of lunar cheese that was being studied by his scientist father. Green cheese as Green Rocks.
- Justice Society of America: In an unpublished 1940s story, a villain sends Johnny Thunder to get a piece of green cheese from the moon as one of several Impossible Tasks. Thanks to Johnny's Literal Genie, he manages to do it anyway.
- Raggedy Ann: In one comic, Raggedy Ann and Andy (and a visiting astronaut doll) visit the moon and discover a crater full of green cheese while having to dodge real astronauts.
- UglyDolls: The comic "Once in a Blueberry Moon" plays the idea of the trope with a different food. Tray, all out of food, constructs a plan to travel to the moon, which is a blue one since she assumes it'll taste like blueberry pie. Eventually, she makes it to the moon, chomps out a bite, and reacts with disgust. It's not blueberry pie, it's raspberry!
- Wonder Woman (1987): Discussed in the 200th issue in the story "Amazon Women on the Moon!", where Steve Trevor is on the moon and reports that the surface looks nothing like green cheese.
Comic Strips
- Felix the Cat: Present for a gag in a 1920s Sunday strip. Felix decides to help out a struggling cheese vendor by climbing a tower and pulling the moon directly out of the sky like it's a wheel of cheese, which the shopowner gratefully chops up and begins selling. Unfortunately, he is arrested shortly afterward — the crime being that he's selling Moonshine!
- Rugrats: The belief that the moon is made of cheese comes up in several strips.
- Angelica is revealed to believe the moon is made of cheese in the July 18, 1998 strip.
- The idea of the moon being made of cheese also comes up when Tommy and Chuckie imagine they're on the moon in the November 11, 1999 strip.
I told you the moon was made of green cheese!
- In the October 2, 2000 strip, Angelica asks her father if they'll ever be able to go to the moon. Drew claims that they already went to the moon before several times and that Angelica is just too young to remember. While remarking to Phil and Lil that she's certain she'd remember if they actually had been to the moon, Phil asks Angelica if she checked her refrigerator for cheese.
- In the October 17, 2000 strip, Chuckie informs Angelica that Phil told him a secret.
Chuckie: The moon is made of green cheese!
Angelica: That's not a secret! Everyone knows that!
Chuckie: Phil's got a big mouth.- Alluded to once more in the September 24, 2001 strip when Lil asks Phil if the moon will hit the sun.
Phil: (licking lips) That'd be kinda neat! Toasted cheese!- Brought up once more in the November 16, 2001 strip.
Angelica: Smart people know the moon is made of cheese.
Kimi: I knew that! So does that make me as smart as you?
Angelica: No, because I knew that you knew, so that makes me smarter.
Kimi: I didn't know that.- Brought up yet again in the March 15, 2003 strip when Phil and Lil are looking at the moon out the window.
Lil: Angelica says the moon is made of gooey green cheese.
Phil: That sounds so gross.
Lil: When we grow up, let's be astronuts.
Phil: You read my mind, sis. - Superman: In a 1963 Sunday strip, Mr. Mxyzptlk turns the Moon into green cheese (and then back) as part of one of his pranks to annoy Superman.
Fan Works
- The Dragon and the Butterfly: Whiteout: When Mirabel asks why he's been such an Extreme Doormat, Pedro deflects by asking a nonsensical non-sequitur about how all that cheese got to the moon:
Pedro: ...How'd they get all that cheese on the moon?
Films — Animated
- Wallace & Gromit:
- Their debut short film "A Grand Day Out" revolved around the characters travelling to the moon to get cheese.
- The second short film, "The Wrong Trousers", made a reference to it in a newspaper article mentioning how sales of "moon cheese" are soaring.
- In Vengeance Most Fowl, Wallace's computer has a ReCAPTCHA screen asking for the user to select all the images that have cheese in them. One of them is a picture of the moon, and, after a moment's thought, Feathers McGraw selects the moon picture, which is the correct answer.
Films — Live-Action
- Abbott and Costello Go to Mars: Referenced when, after he and Lester have blasted off, Orville says he doesn't want to go to the moon — "If I wanted green cheese I'd go to the delicatessen."
- Amazon Women on the Moon: A crewman tells his pet monkey that the first thing he's gonna do upon landing is carve off a hunk of that green cheese, only to get scolded by The Captain because they are on a serious scientific expedition to disprove such tales.
Folklore and Mythology
- The likely Ur-Example of this trope is a diverse collection of stories, which the Aarne-Thompson Index terms "34: The Wolf Dives into the Water for Reflected Cheese." The exact events vary, but the most relevant version goes something like this: a crafty fox gets in trouble with a Savage Wolf, the fox tells the wolf that he knows where to find food, he leads the wolf to a well, the wolf sees the reflection of the moon in the water at the bottom of the well and mistakes it for a wheel of cheese, and the wolf dives into the well and is trapped. This is the source of "thinks the moon is made of cheese" being used to mean "gullible or stupid."
Jokes
- What do you get when you divide green cheese's circumference by its diameter? Moon pi.
Literature
- The 78-Storey Treehouse Averted. Jill rescues some mice who crash-landed on the moon looking for cheese and reminds them that no, the moon is not made of cheese.
- A Brief History of New York by Washington Irving: Diedrich Knickerbocker assesses the morality of the conquest of America by suggesting what might happen if the men on the moon colonised the world. According to Knickerbocker, they would be irked by, above all other human precepts and practices, the belief that the moon is made of green cheese.
- The Church Mice and the Moon, by Graham Oakley: Played with. A small camera-carrying rocket to the moon goes astray and ends up in the church instead. At one stage the scientists see a camera image of the mice (who were supposed to go up in the rocket) eating cheese and are overjoyed at this scientific discovery that the Moon is edible.
- Cosmicomics: In the first short story, "The Distance of the Moon", the Moon is depicted as having once been close enough to Earth for people to regularly get cheese and milk from it. In this case, rather than the whole thing being made of dairy, the "milk" is a product of organic detritus from Earth being drawn to the Moon and fermenting there.
- Hank the Cowdog: The 5th Audio Only book discusses this trope from the perspective of two (unintelligent) dogs. Drover believes the moon can't really be made out of cheese because cheese sinks. Instead, the moon must be a giant oatmeal cookie because oatmeal floats.
- Mouse Math: Subverted in the picture book Lost in the Mouseum, in which Albert and his friend Leo observe a mouseum display of a large-size newspaper front page which carries the headline "MICE WALK ON MOON: One Small Step for Mouse: Astromice say moon is not made of Green Cheese!"
- The Phantom Tollbooth: "THE MOON IS MADE OF GREEN CHEESE" is one of the half-baked ideas cooked up by the half bakery. The Spelling Bee eats the "CHEESE" part first.
- "A 'Rounders' Story about the 'Green Cheese' Moon", by Kenneth Lans, revolves around the green cheese made by giant spiders which is transported to the moon by leaf-cutting ants. It is a clever story of how the earth was formed. By using a simple narrative, giant spiders, a greedy rat, an old wise turtle, jealous mountains, and the main character "green cheese", the readers are introduced to the mountains, and volcanic eruptions, rivers and tides, the desert and the moon and stars which form the Earth.
- Space Mice, written by Lori Haskins Houran and illustrated by Priscilla Alpaugh, is about two very hungry mice who run out of cheese. They see the moon in the sky and determinedly build a rocket, then fly to the moon and eat their fill. They head back home to a boy's yard on Earth and the boy is stunned that the moon is now a crescent.
- Summer in Orcus: One of the exotic cheeses available for sale at the Wheystation is a green cheese labeled "Fresh from the slopes of Mare Imbrium".
- Tom and Jerry: The Astro-Nots sees Jerry decide to join a space training camp alongside other animals to go to the moon since he's a mouse and he's interested in visiting a place made entirely of cheese. He starts to have second thoughts near the end when he sees pictures of the moon that depict it exactly how it is in real life.
- When the Moon Hits Your Eye is about the moon literally turning into cheese, with the book being a series of vignettes following different people reacting to this event.
- Xanth: The moon is described as being cheese on the near side, honey on the far side.
- Yuck, A Love Story: The moon is made of (yucky-tasting) cheese.
Live-Action TV
- The Beverly Hillbillies: In "Jethro's Military Career", Jethro wants to blast off to the moon (by tying himself to a rocket!) so he could meet moon maidens and eat its green cheese.
- Double Dare (1986) has an obstacle called "Moonwalk": a green tube with three entry/exit ports and colored gak representing the cheese. The cheese color depended on the taping day.
- The Electric Company (1971): There is a sketch where Fargo North is an astronaut in space who receives orders to proceed to the moon. He protests that is impossible since the Moon is made of green cheese and his exasperated partner reminds him that he was told otherwise in training.
- Even Stevens: Mentioned in the episode Influenza The Musical in the lyrics of Ren's song, saying that the Apollo astronauts were "surprised to find" that the moon was solid and not cheesy. She got an F for her science project, if you couldn't tell. Of course that episode was a dream.
- Hey You! What If...: "The Moon Was Made Of Cheese?" shows what would happen if the moon really was made of cheese. It wouldn't stay cheese for long. The cheese would separate with water and gases boiling up to the surface to create oceans and an atmosphere.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: When he and Kinga are pitching ideas to venture captitalist Freak Masterstroke, Max brings up how they're working on a theme park on the moon, only for Freak to insist they make a dairy farm instead, citing this trope.
Freak: We know it's rocks. They think it's cheese.
Puppet Shows
- Bear in the Big Blue House: Discussed in "Eat, Drink Juice and Be Merry". Luna tells Bear she doesn't know how that one got started, other than it proving folks always have food on their minds, even when they look up at her.
Roleplay
- We Are Our Avatars: At some point, some of the group explored a moon made of cheese during their trip to 3E. They encountered Chaos Marines and Serpentera, who survived the encounter.
Tabletop Games
- Toon: Most of Spaced Out Saps happens on the moon. The Martians have found deposits of cheese there, which have a variety of bizarre effects if eaten.
Theatre
- Merrily We Roll Along: In the opening song of the second act, a long list of maybes includes "Maybe the moon is cheese".
Video Games
- Given a nod in Dead Space 3. One of the shops near Isaac's appartment in Luna City is a restaurant called "Made-of-Cheese Burgers.''
- DuckTales: One level is the Moon, and one of its collectibles is a piece of cheese. Also, the boss there is a giant rat.
- James Pond 3: The Big Bad hires rats to mine cheese from the moon, which also possesses abundant quantities of other dairy products.
- King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride: During one chapter, the moon falls out of the sky into Falderal (a place based on wordplay and literal figures of speech) and it's revealed to be just a wheel of Cartoon Cheese. The player is tasked with finding some way of getting it back in the sky before they can leave the area.
- Brought up in one ending of Look Outside. "XIN-AMON" is the ending in which Cinnamon the guinea pig engulfs and assimilates all life on Earth and is left as a planet dotted with canyon maws and great staring eyes. She tries gnawing on the moon, having a vague echo of the memories of the humans she's rendered extinct including "the moon is made of cheese", and is disappointed to find that it's just rock.
- Luck be a Landlord: Destroying a Moon symbol makes it break down into 3 Cheese symbols, which is mostly to reference to this trope as it's usually impractical to do this for gameplay gains.
- Mad Rat Dead: Mad Rat sees a full moon made of yellow cheese at all times of the day. It's known as the Phantom Moon, it was created by Rat God, and it is her strongest minion.
- Mario Kart: Super Circuit: The Cheese Land racetrack is set on the Moon, made of Cartoon Cheese, and inhabited by Mousers. Gravity is the same as everywhere else though. Averted when Cheese Land was brought back for Mario Kart 8, as the setting had been Ret Conned to resemble a desert with a clear blue sky above.
- Minecraft: The 2023 April Fools' Day snapshot let players fly to the Moon, made almost entirely of edible cheese blocks. The ever-popular Galacticraft mod, which adds space travel to Minecraft, places Cheese Ore in the stone of its Moon dimension.
- Mystery Case Files: In Millionheir, the secret of astronomer Lee O. Ryan is that he is addicted to the green cheese from which the moon is made and that he sold Phil's private book collection to be able to get the cheese back to Earth.
- Within a Deep Forest and #modarchive story, by Nifflas, reference the trope (the former has an entire level set on the Lunar Cheese Extraction Factory), and one of his songs is also called "The Cheese in the Sky".
- The Nitrome flash game Cheese Dreams has the player taking on the role of a sentient moon made of cheese, who has to escape a spaceship of alien mice.
- Noita: Successfully navigating the cloudscape and the work above it will allow you to reach the moon. The cheese can be eaten like many other substances in the game, and hollowing out the moon's center will reveal hidden runes.
- Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat from Your Head to Your Feet: At one point, you have to find out what type of cheese the moon is made of. Depending on the game it can be either brie, cheddar, mozzarella, or Monterey Jack.
- Power Bomberman: One of the stages is set on the moon, with the soft blocks being wedges of cheese.
- Putt-Putt: Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon has a brief scene that shows a few mice astronaut kids gnawing on the observatory — much to their mom's dismay. "But it's made of green cheese, Mom!"
- Revenge of the Titans: Many of the Moon Campaign's mission locations are named for different kinds of cheese, disguised with the nomenclature of actual locations on the moon—for example, Mare Crisium (Real Life) and Mare Caseum (in-universe).
- Scribblenauts Unlimited: In the "Kana Craters" stage, which is set on the moon, Maxwell encounters a mouse who is convinced the moon contains cheese and asks for a tool to mine for it. If Maxwell gives the mouse a useful tool, like a pickaxe, the mouse will indeed strike cheese, earning Maxwell the Moon Gold shard.
- Spyro 2: Season of Flame: The "Moon Fondue" level is comprised of green, cheese-like terrain and includes a race of mouse astronauts.
- Worms: Many 2D games have a terrain setting that makes the ground out of cheese, with the implications of a cheesy moon.
Webcomics
- Girl Genius: While it's unclear what the actual moon is made up of in the 'verse, there is an exhibit in London's observatory labeled Moon Cheese.
Websites
- Google Earth's sister site, Google Moon (which provides photos of the moon's surface) at one time displayed a yellow cheese texture at its highest zoom setting (as an Easter Egg), although it has since been fixed.
- Wikipedia article: The moon is made of green cheese discusses the origin of the saying in greater depth. It's actually meant to indicate that someone who believes this is extremely gullible (an analogous modern phrase would be, "And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.").
Web Videos
- bill wurtz's song "The Moon is made of Cheese (but i can't taste it)" is about... well, yeah. However, note that not being able to taste it isn't due to not being on the moon, but rather because the singer is physically incapable of tasting cheese.
- Rats SMP:
- El's art gallery displays many rat-ified pastiches of classic art pieces created with the Chisel and Bits mod, including a version of "Starry Night" where the Moon is a piece of Cartoon Cheese.
- Later in the series, this questionably applies to the Rats universe as a whole: in-game, the Moon is made from End stone, but it has a distinct yellow tint to it and the rats refer to it as "cheese" when they visit it in the Jingle Jam Christmas event. However, no one ever gets around to confirming if this claim is true.
- In the sequel, Shep wonders if the Moon is actually made of cheese and is aiming to go to space, presumably to find this out for himself.
- Discussed, but averted in Real-Time Fandub of the Hero Story of Sonic Adventure 2; Dr. Eggman destroys the moon simply because it was never made of cheese.
- In the universe of Stampy's Lovely World, this is very much the case, as Stampy discovers. Apples made from lunar cheesenote become a plot point in a couple of episodes as well, as they have special healing properties.
Western Animation
- Arthur:
- In one episode, Arthur is trying to buy Moon Boots. He imagines himself hopping straight to the moon wearing these. He then grabs a bit of the moon and tastes it, saying that it's green cheese all right!
- Arthur's Perfect Christmas: In the "Baxter Day" song, Buster Baxter and his Mom "stop by the moon just to make sure it's really made of cheese."
- Beany and Cecil: "Beanyland" has the gang building a theme park on the moon — Dishonest John, already mining and selling the cheese there, tries to sabotage the place.
- Bugs Bunny Builders: At the beginning of "K-9: Space Puppy", Daffy asks Petunia if either the sun or the moon is made out of cheese. Petunia tells him that neither one is, to which Daffy tells her that he'd like to know for sure by going out into space.
- Codename: Kids Next Door: When Numbuh 2 faces the villainous Cheese Shogun, the latter mentions this myth at the start of his villainous rant.
- The Crumpets: In "My Family's Full of Losers", while the titular family play a game show where losers get ejected to the moon, their antagonistic Cranky Neighbor Ms. McBrisk hopes that the losers will like The Man in the Moon's green cheese. However, the moon (which is littered with trash) is not made of cheese.
- The Flumps: Played with in "Moon Shot". Pootle Flump dreams that he travels to the Moon, where he meets a pair of aliens who have come to the Moon for a picnic. They're having green cheese sandwiches, they explain, which they had to bring with them because there's no green cheese on the Moon.
- Gary the Rat starts one episode with Gary on a space expedition to the moon, where he's absolutely thrilled to discover that it is, in fact, made out of cheese. And then he dies on the surface just barely having gotten to taste some. Good thing it was All Just a Dream.
- Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs: In one episode, Harry and Charlie are arguing over what the moon is made of. Harry thinks it's made out of cheese, while Charlie thinks it's made out of peanut butter. Among the dinosaurs, Sid tried to argue that it's made of rocks, while Trike said the moon is made of chocolate chip cookies. Both kids and the dinosaurs then head to Dinoworld and use a rocket to fly to the moon to see who's right. When they land, they discover that the moon is indeed made out of chocolate chip cookies and Trike boasts that he was right.
- Let's Go Luna!: In " The Case of the Missing Cheese", Mia references this trope by calling Luna her favorite cheese in the sky.
- Making Fiends: In "Shorts 2", one of the activities Charlotte mentions she'd do on the moon in "If I Lived Upon the Moon" is that she might find moon cheese.
- MGM One Shot Cartoon: Little Buck Cheeser is about a group of young mice who build a rocket to go to the moon because it's made of cheese. It turns out in the end that the main character was only dreaming when the rocket comes crashing down after they fail to get cheese and attempt to fly home.
- Mighty Mouse: An early Super Mouse cartoon has the hero cutting the moon slice by slice like a wheel of baby Swiss, letting them fall to Earth so his mice brethren can collect them.
- The Milky Way: As "three little kittens who lost their mittens" explore a dreamland, space is made up entirely of dairy products (e.g., the Milky Way is made of milk, and the moon is made of cheese).
- Popeye: In one cartoon Popeye, Olive, and Wimpy visit the moon, which is actually made of cheese, and populated by cheese-men. Unfortunately, the Big Cheese who rules the place is a cruel tyrant. (A dose of spinach later, and Popeye manages to turn him into crumbs.)
- Ready Jet Go!: In "Mindy Turns Five", it is implied that Mindy told her teddy bear that the moon was made out of green cheese.
- Rugrats: In "Destination Moon", the babies get into an old trailer and think that they're astronauts on the moon. Phil and Lil find some old cheese in the garbage, and eat it (with no ill effects), thinking it's moon cheese.
- Seven Little Monsters: "Bang! Zoom! To the Moon" has Seven ask if the moon is made of cheese. Three answers that it is actually made of dust and rocks.
- Sheriff Callie's Wild West: The moon is made of blue cheese.
- Sid the Science Kid: In "The Big Cheese", Sid and his mother find a website that says that the moon is made of glowing green cheese. From this, Sid eventually learns a lesson that you can't believe everything you read on the Internet.
- The Smurfs (1981): "The Man in the Moon": There is cheese on the moon that Greedy helps himself to.
- Space Goofs: In "Zero Gravity", the astronaut explains to the aliens that he's on a secret mission to prevent anyone from finding out that the moon has been replaced with a fake, the real moon's destruction apparently the result of a cheese-related experiment.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- Mentioned by Patrick in "Feral Friends" as Neptune’s Moon rises (a green moon that transforms all the anthropomorphic sea creatures into far more realistically-depicted ones). He deduces it’s green because the cheese it’s made of has gotten moldy.
- In "Mooned!", SpongeBob and Kevin have to trap the rare Moon Jellyfish. They use SpongeBob shaped like cheese as bait.
- Tom and Jerry: "O Solar Meow" ends with Jerry on the moon, which has large quantities of cheese. Another short featured Tom and Jerry operating a lunar mining operation, where the caverns were made entirely of cheese.
- T.U.F.F. Puppy: In "Toast of T.U.F.F.", Snaptrap's evil plan is to blow up the moon, since he thinks it's made of cheese, which he can't eat due to having a severe cheese allergy that causes him to swell up massively, which is ironic since he is a rat. When Ollie tries to talk him out of it by saying that scientists have proven that the moon is not made of cheese, Snaptrap denies it by saying that the real reason he's blowing up the moon is to get rid of the werewolves.
- Van Beuren Studios: Subverted in the Van Beuren Aesop's Fables cartoon "Silvery Moon", 1933, where the lead character suggests the old myth that the moon is made of green cheese, but his girlfriend insists that the moon is actually made of cake, candy, and ice cream. Once they set foot on the moon, the latter is proven to be right.
- The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: The ending portion of the live-action Framing Device for "Visitors from Outer Space" has Ronald suggest going to the moon and looking for cheese as a possible future space adventure.
- Yogi's Ark Lark: While the Hanna-Barbera cast are in space, Pixie and Dixie run by with a slice of cheese. Huckleberry Hound sees them and asks where they found it. He then makes a realisation and glances at the moon. Sure enough...