Chorus Girls

What do you go for,
Go see a show for?

Tell the truth, you go to see those beautiful dames.

—Dames, title song

GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!

Often, one Ms. Fanservice is not enough. So, a show may fill itself to the brim with sexy young ladies in Stripperiffic costumes. Having a chorus of showgirls dance with plenty of wiggles and high kicks helps keep the men in the audience entertained.

This was fairly common in earlier musicals, back in the days when the target audience member was the proverbial "tired businessman" (nowdays, he would go to a Bikini Bar). Thus the horror whenever someone in Jeeves and Wooster set their sights on "a chorus girl".

Compare the Jiggle Show, where the women are actually the stars of the show, rather than decoration.

Examples of Chorus Girls include:

Anime and Manga

• The all girls episode of Excel Saga.
• Everything that has The Unwanted Harem tends toward this trope.
• All the cheerleaders, with the exception of the protagonist's love interest, in Eyeshield 21.

Film

• Astoundingly, they managed to slip Chorus Girls into a Disney film, with "Let Me Be Good to You" from The Great Mouse Detective.
• The "Paris Holds The Key" number in Don Bluth's Anastasia features French Chorus Girls who Squee, bare their shoulders, and ruffle their skirts to make Toulouse Lautrec proud.
• La Cage Aux Folles has Chorus Girls who are mostly transvestites.
  • As does The Film of The Musical of The Film, The Birdcage.
• Used in The Producers, where the flamboyant stage director takes the World War II drama Springtime for Hitler and turns it into a musical, complete with goose-stepping chorus girls.
  • And before that, in the song "I Wanna Be a Producer," "beautiful girls wearing nothing but pearls" dance around Leo.
• Busby Berkeley Numbers in many old Warner Brothers movie musicals used lots (and I mean lots) of Chorus Girls, often lookalikes of star Ruby Keeler. The title number of Dames (quoted above) is not only performed by Chorus Girls but sung in praise of them.
• The Sharpettes in High School Musical 2.
• The USO showgirls during the "Star-Spangled Man" musical sequence in Captain America: The First Avenger.

Literature

• Parodied in Starfighters of Adumar, when eternal prankster Wes Janson gets a cloak composed of flexible flat-panel monitors. One of the animations it displays is a chorus line of (fully clothed) Jansons.

Live Action TV

• The Doctor Who episode "Daleks in Manhattan" features a group of them, but it's not that revealing.
  • The Colonel's flashback in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" shows him looking at Genteel Interbellum Setting erotica and going into a flashback-within-a-flashback of some cancan dancers, while claiming he was reading military memoirs and reminiscing about the Boer War. This time, it actually is pretty revealing.

The Doctor: Colonel, snap out of it!... No, no, right out of it!

• The Juggy dancers from The Man Show. "And now, girls jumping on trampolines!"
• When Have I Got News for You moved to BBC 1, they opened their first episode by promising the show wouldn't change. This was followed by a line of chorus girls kicking their way across the set to burlesque music. (On the "Very Best of HIGNFY" DVD commentary, Paul Merton calls this "a poor idea, badly executed." Ian Hislop: "I'm glad it's in, then.")
• An episode of Suite Life On Deck fetures chorus girls including the two female leads, London and Bailey dressing up and joining them.
• Appeared on Top Gear to welcome Richard Hammond back to the show. He found them more embarrassing than titillating, which was of course the entire point.

Music

• All the hard rock videos of the 80s and their female "decorations".
  • Motley Crue Lampshaded this with their song "Girls, Girls, Girls".
• Nearly all the RnB videos of the current decade and their "shorties".

Theater

• Bollywood. Period.
• Fetchez la Can-Can dancers!
• The Bird Girls from Seussical the Musical, especially in this troper's production, in which they were dressed in corsets, booty shorts, and Showgirl Skirts made out of feather boas. What do you mean, it's not for grown-ups?
• Chicago has this in various places. Cell Block Tango, much?
• The musical adaptation of Li'l Abner couldn't get away with not using them, since they were in the comic strip as well.
• Of Thee I Sing has the candidates for First Lady of the United States parading about the Atlantic City boardwalk in bathing suits. The press corps takes careful aim with their cameras at the girls' knee dimples.
• The Hot Box Dolls in Guys and Dolls.
• The Merry Widow has six named ones: Lolo, Dodo, Jou-Jou, Frou-Frou, Clo-Clo and Margot.
• Banana Shpeel, Cirque Du Soleil's George Lucas Throwback to Vaudeville, has plenty of these.
• In its time, Oklahoma!! was notable for not bringing on Chorus Girls for Fan Service, instead keeping the female ensemble modestly dressed. That is, until the Dream Ballet brought into action a few gaudy dancing girls like those featured in Jud's magazines.
• Discussed in Carousel. Sometime after the Time Skip, Carrie reports that her husband took her to an "extravaganza" while in New York, but the sight of "twelve hussies with nothin' on their legs but tights" offended his puritanical sensibilities so much that he immediately hustled her out of the theatre. She went back, though.
• "A Whole Lotta Locomotion" from the second U.S. tour of Starlight Express, to the horror of the long-term fans.
• Kiss Me Kate.
• The backing dancers during 'Fat Bottomed Girls' in We Will Rock You
• The Fandango girls in Paint Your Wagon, who are outnumbered four to one by the men.
• The first act of Modern Luv, whose dancers also include a Camp Gay male. Averted in the second act, where they wear modest Amish outfits.

Video Games

• Parodied in Sam and Max Freelance Police musical number "The War Song", as Agent Superball dances in various Busby formations. His kicks aren't that high, but what do you expect in a standard black suit?