"I heard the shouting and swearing behind me, far too close behind me; I snatched a glance with my heart in my mouth. The image that I beheld was so compelling that I nearly ran into a telephone pole before I remembered to look where I was going."
A Mad Scientist getting distracted will probably just end up in The Madness Place for a while. But for most other characters, the results can be more immediate. Whether it's a Backseat Driver causing you to veer off the road, someone jaw-dropping walking past as you were about to step over a hole, or a startling remark while you have a sharp object in your hand, not paying attention at just the right time can be a serious problem. (And, of course, it will always happen at the right time to make the sufferer run into an upcoming tree, telephone pole, Low Clearance, or Priceless Ming Vase...)
Typically Played for Laughs, especially in slapstick films, but Played for Drama examples are possible — especially if We Need a Distraction from something bigger, if I Shall Taunt You during combat, or if it's a Safe Driving Aesop. Overlaps with Watch Out for That Tree!, which may or may not involve a specific distraction; Magic Misfire, which can easily result from disrupting Concentration-Bound Magic; Distracted by the Sexy, which will often become dangerous if the one affected is able to do more than just stand and stare; and Failed a Spot Check, which can overlap if someone overlooks a danger to themselves (but failing to notice something unrelated happening to someone else is not usually this trope). A Dramatic Drop can also become dangerous in the quite likely event that the dropped item was fragile, although comedies will often ignore the implied glass shards on the floor. Driver Faces Passenger, Look Both Ways, and Spit Take tend to be Sub Tropes (although technically it is possible for those to happen in ways other than distraction), and examples of them should usually go on those pages. Characters suffering from Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! are particularly prone to this (and tend to do it to themselves without outside help).
Not to be confused with Distracted from Death, which is a reaction to death, rather than being the cause. Also note that this trope is specifically about the distraction itself being dangerous; things like someone taking the opportunity to Back Stab you while you're looking away will not normally be in scope, since the danger was separate from the distraction. (It might still count if you were already in the middle of a fight with someone, and unwisely look away from them; in that case, you really did it to yourself.)
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: After Hol Horse's attempt to kill the team fails due to his own watch ruining the plan, he angrily grabs Boingo's Thoth to find a new strategy, having forgotten that he had shot multiple trick bullets with his Emperor, distracting him enough to not properly control them, resulting in all of them landing on his face.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt: The start of the series has a group of GMs flying through the Thunderbolt Sector. One pilot gets rattled by a lightning bolt caused by the magnetic interference, a split second before he slams his GM into the remains of a Salamis-class.
- Space Runaway Ideon: One of the most infamous moments of the Characters Dropping Like Flies nature of the series happens to be when a little girl in a space suit ducks behind cover, but gets distracted and stands back up when a body goes flying past her in the middle of a battle. The moment she turns to look at it, she gets her entire head blown off by a laser weapon.
- The Summer Hikaru Died: A Flashback reveals that Hikaru's death on Red Sand Mountain wasn't caused by any of the ghosts or spirits haunting the place, but by slipping and falling when he noticed a tree shaped like a naked lady. He lampshaded the absurdity in his last moments.
Comic Books
- OnlyFriends with Penn: A flashback in the first issue shows Penn mooning a guy on a bicycle. The guy is distracted long enough to plow his bike into a group of people.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) — "Champions": In the fighting tournament, Amy is matched against Knuckles. She is confident she'll defeat him and will be the one to fight Sonic in the final round, but then she stops to question if fighting Sonic would impress him or make him upset, and worries about hurting him. In the midst of her thought, Knuckles dives right at her, and quakes the ground, rocketing Amy into the crowd and defeating her. Sonic and Tails glare at Knuckles for going overboard on Amy.
Knuckles: I... I thought we were fighting...?
- Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) — Issue #21: Doctor Eggman has infected Mobius with a virus mutating everyone into zombified robots. Tails tries to find a cure to stop the virus, and heads to his house to do some research. After getting enough speed data from Sonic (who is infected with the virus) he is able to create a formula to cure the disease and sends the data to Restoration HQ. But suddenly, zombie Chaos messes with Tails' electric system, destroying his signal. He attempts to just send the server blades from his computer to the HQ on foot, but then a zombot breaks into his house, startling him into dropping the server blades, which shatter to pieces. Tails is so frustrated that he runs straight to his garage and jumps in his mecha to evacuate.
Tails: I had it. I was so close. And I can't blame you...
Fan Works
- Accidental Apotheosis: A passing jogger is quite taken aback by the sight of Ash cantering along, and turns his head to watch, while continuing to jog straight ahead.
Which made it a bit of a pity the road curved there, really.
- Another Way: An abrupt knocking on Blasto's door startles him into pressing the wrong buttons on his machinery, destroying two biological samples that represented hours of work.
- A Darker Path: When Oliver sees on the news that Atropos killed the Simurgh, his shout of surprise is so loud and sudden that Marissa jolts upright hard enough to throw herself off the seat, and Ballistic, who's driving the motorhome, "nearly performed an unprompted lane change." Then Oliver tells them what he read, and Ballistic hits the brakes so hard that they fishtail off the road in a cloud of smoking rubber, stalling the engine and throwing loose items everywhere.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami - "What a Mess": Melissa is in charge of maintaining an anti-mana ward, which requires single-minded focus — but then she's suddenly attacked and injured by an assassin who was searching for Mercury, causing her to lose control.
Reacting violently to the disruption of Melissa's concentration, the magical diagram on the roof discharged a blast of verdant magic into the sky with a loud hiss. The shockwave tossed both opponents standing at its centre into the air like rag dolls.
- Chapter 5
of Enter The Wyrm: Taylor cheerfully and loudly comments on how her new generously proportioned chest is so perky she doesn't even need bras, and another student promptly crashes into a wall so hard he falls over.
- Harry Potter and the Ritual of Love's Memory: Harry sees Hagrid teaching a class about unicorns — then sees one red-haired student in particular brushing a unicorn's mane, making him smile and trip over a tree root.
- Here Comes the New Boss:
- Taylor is out of sorts after her spar with Glory Girl almost ends badly, and her school friends notice. She's just started occupying herself by using Stoneknapper's matter-shaping power to idly examine the bench she's sitting on, when Frankie asks if it's her period that's bothering her — which shocks her into twisting the bench leg into a corkscrew, having to quickly fix it before anyone notices.
- Elpis was joking when she suggested that if Amy hung around, then the people she healed might name a child after her, but Amy dryly comments that that has really happened. When she elaborates that a woman gave birth to triplets and named them all after her, however, Elpis almost trips down the stairs, narrowly grabbing the railing in time, as the Butchers exclaim in her head that You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!
- It Gets Worse: Taylor's power loves to break people's concentration at the right moment to set off a chain of Disaster Dominoes, and there are so many options! Whether it's Aegis hitting a sudden flock of seagulls mid-flight and plowing into the PRT building to knock Sophia out and interrupt her attempt to slander Taylor, Crawler and Hatchet Face yelling too loudly while Burnscar is driving and making her drive into a drainage ditch, wrecking their vehicle and making them switch to one that's been tampered with, or a cockroach running up the sleeve of Saint, causing him to turn String Theory's gun to higher power instead of switching it off, the possibilities are endless. Even Taylor herself almost runs into a telephone pole upon glancing back and seeing what her power did to her pursuers.
- Mauling Snarks: Taylor finds a video clip of Glory Girl becoming too engrossed in her phone, and consequently flying straight into a brick wall. (Though the wall likely fared worse.)
- The Peace Not Promised: Severus Snape has strictly enforced lab safety rules for decades, including forbidding public displays of affection. But he's never before had temptation of his own in that regard. He and Lily Almost Kiss — but while lost in her eyes, he has also lost track of the extremely time-sensitive potion he was brewing and realizes just quickly enough to throw them both to the ground as it explodes. (They're both unhurt in the end, merely Covered in Gunge, but it takes days for him to start the potion over.)
Lily: What happened?
Severus: ... I wasn't watching the time. - Spellbound (Lilafly): Adrien has his head in the fridge, excited about Marinette's chocolate pudding — and then Trixx unexpectedly and loudly greets him from behind.
The fridge's glass board let out a perilous clang when the top of his head collided with it.
- The Taste of Peaches:
- Taylor is just getting her first good look at Tinkertech, and grumbling about how physics doesn't work that way when Armsmaster unexpectedly speaks up from behind her to point out that the evidence says otherwise. Taylor is startled enough that the lens she was holding promptly flicks out and bounces off his helmet — and she's strong enough that it knocks him back a step and leaves a bruise.
- Lisa sees two girls walk into her cafe with prominent fox tails and freezes up halfway through pouring a cup of coffee, staring at them — until moments later she's jolted out of it by scalding hot coffee running down her hand.
- Triptych Continuum: The Bounce Test: Zebras can make a super-special potion that requires three years of constant care, with less than a minute available for any breaks in the stirring otherwise it goes bad. It's suspected that someone got distracted at some point because a danger-sensing magic triggered it.
"I asked her what would happen if it went without stirring too long, and she said she thought it went inert after twenty-one seconds. But if you didn't get back to it within a minute, it's supposed to turn into poison. And maybe that's an exaggeration, [...] But she was sure about the only way you could tell how it came out: you drink it.
- Trump Card: Danny deliberately tries to keep an open mind about how Taylor is working with supervillains and breaking the law to get money after she pointed out how every other option was worse. Even as she starts asking whether he would accept money from her if it was stolen from other villains, which he's not keen on, he doesn't just shut the conversation down, trying to be supportive. And then she tells him just how much money she might be taking in.
His head whipped around so fast to stare at me that the steering wheel jerked as well. There was the blare of a horn, and he got the car straightened up before slowing down and pulling off the road.
- Chapter 50 of WALK: Alucard mentions that he would accept payment from Dragon (for putting a stop to the Dragonslayers) in the form of nude photos, causing Armsmaster to solder straight through the circuit board he was working on.
Films — Animated
- Played for Drama in the climax of Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation. After the Greens crash through the kill switch station and shut off all the killer Farm Bots, the crash causes a chain reaction of stations exploding all over the asteroid, which could send the asteroid hurtling towards Big City. So the family must find the central wire that can shut down the procedure. Cricket and Bill get into another argument, with Cricket calling Bill out for his over-protectiveness and not accepting the idea of trying something new now, while everyone else tells the two to focus on the task at hand. Then Bill calls Cricket out for putting the family in danger with his schemes and begins to tell him that his ideas are bad, leading Cricket to denounce Bill hatefully. Tilly immediately alerts them of the central wire behind them, but before they can pull it, the core explodes, separating the Greens.
- Dot and the Kangaroo and its sequels:
- In the original film, while trying to find grass for her pet rabbits, Dot gets distracted by a marsupial mouse and chases after it, trying to befriend it, only to tumble down the embankment, hit her head on a tree and become lost in the bush as a result.
- In Dot and the Bunny, Dot, who is perpetually barefoot, is warned to look out for numbats and echidnas, but becomes lost in her own thoughts, wondering aloud why she should be on the lookout for the aforementioned animals. A numbat warns her Just in Time to prevent her from stepping on an echidna she was unknowingly walking towards.
- Home (2015): Tip shouts at Oh not to distract her while she's driving. Much later, there's an Ironic Echo as she answers her mother's question of "What are you doing?" with "Distracting the driver!" She's shining light in the eyes of the pilot of a giant spaceship, making him come to a rumbling, screeching halt that kicks up a cloud of dust as far as the eye can see.
Oh: I almost did a number three!
- Ice Age: Continental Drift: Sid's task in the plan to steal Captain Gutt's new ship is to unwind the vines and not let go while the pirates are distracted. Just as Sid is about to grab the last vine holding the ship, he spots a berry bush, and forgetting everything else, he drops his handful of vines to eat one (which ends up temporarily paralysing him). The ship floats off, but the good guys still manage to take the ship before it leaves.
Films — Live Action
- Doctor Strange: The Inciting Incident of the film consists of Strange driving to a party on a twisty mountainside road, and foolishly looking at images of the injuries of a prospective patient on his cell phone. His divided attention leads to a serious car accident that ruins Strange's hands, costing him his surgery career.
- In the climax of Get Out (2017), Chris escapes from the Armitages’ house (from getting his brain stolen) and drives off with Jeremy's Porsche. Just as he starts driving, Georgina runs at the car and gets knocked out. Unwilling to deal with the guilt, Chris decides to take her with him to civilization in hopes of saving her. Unfortunately, when Georgina gains consciousness, she reveals herself to be possessed by an Armitage and attacks him, causing him to veer off the road in shock and crash into a tree, injuring himself and killing Georgina.
- Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey: At one point, Chance and Shadow are trying to deal with a mountain lion — Shadow is luring it onto a rock, with the plan being for Chance to leap onto one end and send the mountain lion flying away. Unfortunately, he gets momentarily distracted by an inconveniently timed butterfly showing up and zipping around his face right as he needs to jump. Fortunately, Shadow gets his attention back in time for their plan to work.
- Moonstruck: Ronny's bad blood with his brother Johnny started because Johnny distracted him while he was cutting bread with the industrial bread slicer in the family bakery, causing Ronny to accidentally cut off his own hand. Ronny further blames his being maimed as the reason his fiancée left him for another man, and thus hasn't spoken to Johnny in five years. While he doesn't deny his bitterness is misplaced, he warns Loretta that Johnny's foolishness is a danger to others.
Ronny: He made me look the wrong way and I cut off my hand. He could make you look the wrong way and you could cut off your whole head!
- Premonition: Over the course of the movie's story, Linda lives a week out of order, and discovers that her husband Jim will die during the sixth day. When that day comes, Linda drives to the interstate road where Jim's death is predicted to happen. She calls him via cellphone and urges him to turn back. He narrowly avoids clashing with a car, making him and Linda believe that the tragedy was avoided. Then a fuel transport truck approaches. Linda, still talking to him via cellphone, tries to tell him to get out, which affects Jim's attention to his surroundings. By the time he hears the truck coming, he tries to get out but it's too late and dies a gruesome death when the two vehicles collide.
- In Rush Hour (1998), Johnson is in the middle of defusing a bomb in a tested simulation. Just when she's about to cut a wire, James enters the room with Lee, and loudly greets her, startling her into cutting the wrong wire, blowing up the bomb, and failing the simulation.
- Say Anything...: Diane has a Love Epiphany and rushes to tell Lloyd that she loves him. Unfortunately when she finds him he is in a kickboxing match, and her entry causes him to be immediately kicked in the chin by his opponent while he is distracted.
Literature
- American Gods: Played for Drama when it comes out that Laura's death in a car crash was caused by her attempting Auto Erotica with the driver while they were going at highway speed.
- Beware of Chicken:
- When Meiling reveals to Jin that she is pregnant, it happens to be near a bend in the road back to their home. Jin is so surprised by the news that he runs off the side of the road and several feet into the adjoining hill before stopping.
- Beware of Chicken AU: Soaring Heaven's Isle: The Soaring Heaven's Isle sect has been restricted to female-only for many centuries, ever since all the men were lost in a demonic attack. Jin's presence thus draws a lot of attention from the women flying around, to the point where one is so busy staring that she flies into a wall and thuds to the ground.
- Bog Standard Isekai: Brin probably shouldn't have allowed himself to become quite so engrossed in long-distance spying while also pouring mana into a Fire Jelly core to see how much it can hold. It turns out that the answer is "less than that" and the failure state is an explosion so powerful that only his System-granted sense of impending death gives him enough warning to pull his attention back in time to partially escape it. He's still blinded for several days until his Healing Factor regrows his eyes.
- Falling Up (Silverstein): In "Headphone Harold," Harold is so busy listening to music on his headphones that he doesn't hear an oncoming train as he's walking on railroad tracks.
- The protagonist of Help I Am Being Held Prisoner is addicted to playing practical jokes. Shortly before the start of the novel he places a naked female mannequin on the hood of a car in easy view of a major highway. This distraction results in a seventeen-car accident causing twenty injuries and subsequently results in the protagonist being sent to prison.
- I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew: The narrator is too busy looking at daisies to see where he's going, and ends up stubbing his toe on a rock.
- In the film adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha, Mameha explains to Sayuri that a true geisha can stop people in their tracks with a single look. Sayuri gives "the look" to a man riding a bicycle, causing him to crash into a cart.
- Rise of the Living Forge: Lillia tries to put Arwin out of her mind while chopping vegetables, but then remembers how his hands playfully covered her eyes — and her knife splits the cutting board in two.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Lord Luthor Tyrell is rumoured to have lost his life in a hawking accident — namely, he was too busy watching his bird, and rode his horse off a cliff.
- Super Supportive: The first time Alden is notified of an incoming video call from Evul-art’h (who is basically alien royalty, ranked 2763 amongst all their trillions of citizens), he almost falls off the exercise bike he was using.
- Two Too Many: The kittens Two and Too Many hide in the bristles of the witch's broom when she flies in the Grand Race. Their eyes emit a blinding light that distracts or dazzles many of the other racers, causing them to veer off course or crash. She ends up winning the race.
- In the Warrior Cats book The Elders' Quest, during a fight with badgers, Leafstar almost attacks one of her Clanmates due to her failing vision causing her to mistake him for a badger. One of her warriors (Kitescratch) pauses, turns to her, and shouts at her to stop — and promptly takes a fatal throat wound.
Live-Action TV
- Big and Small: In one episode, Big is using a machine to carry a tomato, but Small talks to him, distracting him into letting go of the machine and thus breaking the tomato.
- Doctor Who: In the Red Nose Day short Space and Time Rory Williams is helping the Doctor to perform some maintenance on the TARDIS, only to accidentally drop the component he was holding, causing the events of the short, when his wife walks onto the glass platform above him, wearing a skirt.
- EastEnders once had a character get distracted talking to someone while chopping vegetables, not paying attention to what they were doing, and ending up slicing their finger open. Harry Hill's TV Burp parodied this by having Harry chopping vegetables while talking to the camera and flailing the knife around wildly until he chops his entire hand off.
- In several Mayday episodes, accidents turn out to be the result of both pilots being so focused on solving an issue that comes up that neither of them is keeping an eye on the other systems, causing a minor problem to (nearly) crash the plane.
- Worzel Gummidge: Mr. Peters is trying to put a windowpane into Mrs. Bloomsbury-Barton's house, but is distracted by his son John yelling, "Crikey!" and drops the pane.
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: If a mage's concentration is broken while they're trying to cast a spell, they're forced to check for a Magic Misfire with an extra botch die added to the pool. Some spells are even less forgiving — it's an automatic botch if a magic circle's construction is interrupted. A botch can have all sorts of nasty effects, from mutating the caster, to driving them insane, making the spell rebound on them, or even sending them into the Final Twilight, eliminating them from the game on the spot.
Video Games
- This chains into Watch Out for That Tree! in the fifth Henry Stickmin game, Fleeing the Complex, where Henry hijacks a truck from the Wall prison complex, although he gets accosted by his captors' guards. Choosing to shoot back causes him to open fire on them, only for him to crash into a tree, which defeats the player.
Fail Screen: "Eyes on the road, man!"
- New Arc Line: You meet Mick Mortinsen for the first time while he was participating in a fight against Grotwyr the Crusher; while he had come to the pier to receive you on behalf of Mr. Simon, he was participating in the fight to pass the time. As you approach the fighting arena, Mick sees you and waves toward you; unfortunately, this allows Grotwyr to land a decisive blow, knocking him out. This leads to Mick losing and thus going into debt to Ernie the bookmaker, requiring you to raise the money to pay them off.
- Steve Burnside of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica ends up accidentally breaking a pipe ferrying toxic gas while craning over an escape vehicle for he and Claire Redfield to use, because he was too busy staring at her ass to notice he was swinging it past where it needed to be. He's only 17 and a ball of hormones so it's hard to blame him for getting Distracted by the Sexy, but it also means Claire has to set out on yet another Fetch Quest to shut off the gas main.
Web Animation
- asdfmovie: One sketch in "asdfmovie2" features a guy telling the other that it says "gullible" on the ceiling. When the guy looks up, he actually sees the word gullible written on it... and then he notices that the guy just stole his lungs.
- Battle for Dream Island Elsewhere: In "The Bare Minimum", while Money was running with some balls, she talks to Needy about the importance of the challenge and in her inattention, she runs into Sidewalky as he crushes her and steals her balls.
- Happy Tree Friends: Zigzagged at the end of "Home Is Where The Hurt Is", Handy escapes from Giggles' crazy house. Just as he leaves, he nearly steps on a loose nail on the front porch, but spots it and jumps over it. However, he then looks up to see the house is designed as a giant origami crane, and in his inattention he steps on a loose floorboard with another nail poking out, that impales him straight in the eye, killing him.
Webcomics
- xkcd presented the art of nerd-sniping, invented of course by the Black Hat guy, where the player deliberately causes a physicist or mathematician to pause and contemplate a complex problem — in the middle of traffic.
Black hat guy: There's a certain type of brain that's easily disabled. If you show it an interesting problem, it involuntarily drops everything else to work on it.
Western Animation
- Alphablocks: In "Tightrope", IGH is stuck on a tight rope and wants to get down. When they spell the word "light", a ray of light blinds the letters' faces, causing them to slip off the rope. Luckily, they magically float back up.
L: We’re lovely and light~
- The Amazing World of Gumball:
- "The Remote":
- During the fight at the parking lot, Richard runs with the remote and notices the boys running after him, so he runs after and look back to see if they're still following him, only to slam his head into a hanging sign, knocking him out and the boys steal the remote.
- Gumball and Darwin run off with the remote, then shriek as they see Nicole gaining on them — and collide with Richard, bouncing off his belly as he nabs the remote.
- When Nicole nearly exits the mall, she notices a toll up ahead and has to pay for it or else she'll set a bad example for her children. She quickly digs in her purse for the right change but runs out of time and collides into the bar and drops her things, and the boys reclaim the remote again.
- "The Internet" — Gumball posts an embarrassing video of himself by accident, and it goes viral, prompting him to get the internet itself to remove it. But the Internet does everything in his power to impede Gumball's journey. One of his obstacles is hijacking the traffic system, causing a lot of cars to crash into each other, and nearly running the boys over. When crossing the street, Gumball insists on running, but Darwin stops him, lecturing about the importance of traffic safety, while a couple of cars crash in front of him. Once the light turns red again, Darwin stops in the middle of the road and Gumball quickly runs off the street before he can get run over. Darwin scolds him for not being careful, as he could've risked getting hurt, and as he says this a giant truck swerves over him, and Darwin crosses the street when the light turns green again, without getting hurt.
- "The Remote":
- Angry Birds Toons: In "Chuck Time", Chuck speeds himself up so he will have time to save Red from a high drop. While going down to find a way to cushion his fall, he suddenly goes back to watch a butterfly; luckily, the slowly falling Red is able to remind him not to get distracted at a time like this, allowing Chuck to get back on track before the distraction can result in consequences.
- BoJack Horseman: Discussed by Bojack in "Free Churro". His dad, Butterscotch Horseman chose a crucial moment to turn and ask his dueling opponent if he had read the novel and what he thought of it. He missed a tree root he tripped over and then cracked his skull.
- Clarence (2014) — "Honk": Clarence tries to improve his communication skills through a squeeze horn. At first his honking gets some laughs from his students, but it starts to become annoying to them over time. One incident involves Breehn in a science lab as he's cautiously dropping a solution to a test tube, when Clarence loudly honks his horn, startling Breehn, and he pours too much of the test tube, causing the concoction to explode and fizz all over the place, activating the fire alarm, and causing everyone to flee in terror.
Breehn: IT WAS THE HORN! THE HOOOOOORRRN!!!
- Family Guy — "Customer Of The Week": Lois buys a coffee from her favorite barista. She's then offered the opportunity to donate a cup of coffee to a soldier oversees, and she gladly accepts it. It then cuts to said soldier in the middle of a Wire Dilemma, when someone gives him his free cup of coffee by chucking it in his face, causing the soldier to cut the wrong wire, and the bomb explodes, killing the soldier.
- Looney Tunes Laff Riot:
- When Porky and the Looney Tunes gets chased by Yosemite and Toro on a cliff side road, Porky steps on the gas and blinds him with smoke. Everyone laughs at him, including Porky who’s still driving. When he looks back at the road he and others shriek as he ends up driving the car off a cliff and crashes the vehicle into a jungle.
- When Wile rides his Cool Bike to catch the Roadrunner, he becomes inches away from capturing him and gets off his bike to catch him. But in his inattention, he would step on the bike's speed adjuster, activating it to full power and blasts over the Roadrunner and rocketing into a canyon.
- Miraculous Ladybug:
- Played for Laughs in "Zombizou", where a flashback shows Marinette almost causing an accident in science class because she was distracted by the sight of Adrien.
- In the Miraculous World: Tokyo TV-special, the reunion between Kagami and her First Love Kazuno during battle distracts both long enough for a monster to throw them far away. This, in turn, distracts Kazuno's teammate Miki, resulting in her getting knocked out and kidnapped.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Too Many Pinkie Pies", Twilight devises a test to tell apart the real Pinkie Pie (who is a complete person) from a bunch of clones (who only care about having fun): make all the Pinkies stare at paint drying on a wall, and whoever looks away gets zapped into oblivion. They variously get distracted by things like a bird, a frog crossed with an orange, and other Pinkies trying to amuse themselves and get zapped. When only two Pinkies are left, neither one shows any signs of cracking, until...
Rainbow Dash: I can't take it anymore! Somepony's making balloon animals!
Pinkie Pie clone: What? Where? [gets zapped] - The Simpsons:
- In "Homer Defined", the reactor at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant overheats, and Homer struggles to figure out what to do about it. A flashback shows him in training with the instructor pointing out the safety mechanism which would fix the problem, and Homer fails to notice because he's playing with a Rubik's cube instead of paying attention.
- In "Brake My Wife, Please", Homer fills his car with gadgets which have absolutely no business being used while driving, including a DVD player, snow cone machine, Lite-Brite, and fog machine (which even he admits is crazy). He ends up driving off a pier as he watches a cooking show and attempts to actually cook behind the wheel, and the episode's main plot begins with him losing his driver's license for that.
- Total Drama: In "Who Can You Trust?", Gwen and DJ are doing a cliff-climbing challenge, with Heather and Duncan holding their ropes. Heather pulls an extra rope she attached to Gwen's skirt, tearing it off. DJ momentarily stares at her underwear, accidentally letting go of his own rope, and falls.
- Transformers: Prime: In the episode "Convoy", Optimus Prime and the Autobots are in the middle of fighting Vehicons when Fowler calls Optimus. He answers the call and is distracted just long enough for a Vehicon to get the drop on him and knock him out.