

As everyone who's seen _Evangelion_ knows, the alternate-reality segment in
the last episode (of the 1995 TV series) prominently features a scene where
Rei, mouth entoasted, runs into Shinji on her way to school.

To those of us living in the year 2016, this is an obvious cliche; countless
many anime have portrayed the same thing in the two decades since (episode 1
of _Nichibros_ has [my favorite
rendition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNsuvpiXb7M)). But would viewers in
1995 have seen this as a cliche?

It seems plausible that _Evangelion_ could have been using the toast-collision
trope as a touchstone to really drive home the prototypical-slice-of-life
nature of the alternate reality. But then again, it also seems plausible that
the toast-collision was only an incidental feature of the segment, and that
the trope's present-day status as a cliche is a _consequence_ of other shows
imitating _Evangelion_. I don't really have enough of a pre- _Evangelion_
knowledge base to discern which is true.


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question
tropes neon-genesis-evangelion
Was running into people with toast in your mouth already a cliche by Evangelion's time (1995-96)?


Yes. It has been around for a long time...long before Evangelion.

It's hard to track down any real info, but I ran across a [reddit
page](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/3nhm6t/the_secret_origins_of_girls_running_with_a_slice/)
that pointed me in the right direction.

As it stands, it looks like the earliest instances of the 'running late to
school with a slice of toast in your mouth' grew from 'running late to school
with a roll in your mouth' that I could find a first confirmed instance as far
back as 1968 in the manga "Patty's First Love." Some suspect that it was
pulled from some 1950s Soap Opera, originally.

At any rate, that page went on to talk about how the book "Even a Monkey can
Draw Manga" that was published 1990 to 1991 or so (4 to 5 years prior to
Evangelion) considered the 'running late to school with a piece of toast in
your mouth and crashing into someone' such a cliche that it parodied it on
[this page](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IV7HY.jpg)

So, I'd say that's pretty darn conclusive...it is definitely significantly
older than Evangelion, and was already a running joke to the level of parody
by that time.


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answer