Cut and Paste Note

"You cannot trace us. You cannot find us. ...Sincerely, Calvin"

—Calvin and Hobbes

The classic, instantly recognizable ransom note made from individual clippings of letters or words glued onto a piece of paper. In modern fiction, distorted phone voices have the same meaning.

The Real Life justification is, of course, that handwriting is identifiable. A largely Discredited Trope in modern fiction given the prevalence of computers, telephones and other more convenient forms of covert communication. A modern criminal is more likely to simply type up a message and print it. The modern crook has little use for taking the time to create a note that can accumulate fingerprints, not to mention result in a suspicious pile of hacked up magazines.

Examples of Cut and Paste Note include:

Film

• The Big Lebowski
• Inspector Gadget 2: Dr. Claw sends Gadget such a letter to lead him into a trap, signed A Concerned Citizen. Gadget concludes that the citizen must have terrible handwriting.
• The Riddler writes some of his riddles this way in Batman Forever.

Literature

• The original example was from the Sherlock Holmes novel Hound of the Baskervilles, where it wasn't a ransom note, but a warning. Hence this is Older Than Radio. Holmes was clever enough to identify the newspapers that had been chopped up. By font.
  • Also a slight subversion, in that one of the words of the message was rare enough that the author had to handwrite it. No explanation is given for why they didn't just cut out the individual letters required instead.
• The villain in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers does this.
• In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the farmers and the animals each send the other a cut-and-paste note. Neither side understands why, because they already know each other's identities. Fox even signs his name.
• "The Straw Man" by Harry Kemelman involved a note where the pieces were all of glossy paper, specifically to hold fingerprints and confirm the participation of one of the kidnappers so he couldn't safely betray his partner. The story was written at a time when only people with a criminal record had been fingerprinted, so as long as no one got suspicious of the guy, they wouldn't match his prints with those on the note.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of House, Wilson is seen "clipping coupons." When House's beloved guitar is "kidnapped" and the Cut And Paste Note shows up demanding ransom, it's not exactly a mystery who dun it.
  • Not that Wilson's actually trying to hide his involvement or anything...
  • House later comes across Wilson nonchalantly reading a newspaper with big, cut holes in it.
• In Monk, Adrian solves the murder case thanks to a charred letter in the fireplace. After that he flips through the magazines belonging to the murdered butler and he notices the gaps in the pages.
• Al Bundy sent one of these to his TV hero Psycho Dad on Married... with Children. He spells "Psycho" with the words S-Y-K-O, claiming that it's impossible to find "P"s and "H"s in USA Today.
• Sarcastically suggested by Xander of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the Scoobies have captured one of the Big Bad's Mooks in a Season 7 episode: "Dear Mr. First, if you ever want to see your Bringer again. . ."
• Played straight in an episode of Psych, when Mr. Yang sends one to the SBPD as part of a Criminal Mind Game.

Newspaper Comics

• A different Calvin and Hobbes arc involves Hobbes sending Calvin anonymous coded insults using this; Calvin's mom eventually scolds Calvin for cutting up her magazines, and he figures it out. Similarly, he uses it to insult Susie, and in one storyline sends the page quote in a ransom note after kidnapping her doll.
• Parodied in a comic in the March 21, 2010 edition of Parade magazine. A man reads a Cut and Paste Note reading "I've got your magazine. Send $1 million or I'll cut out more letters."

Video Games

• The visual style of Persona 5‍'‍s interface and promotional material is inspired by this.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation has SCP-1020, an indestructible, self-replenishing kit for making Cut And Paste Notes which periodically becomes animated and makes its own ransom notes. If the person the note is addressed to opens the envelope the victims named in the note will disappear into the thin air, and will then reappear out of thin air once the ransom demands are met. The ransom demands are often strange, and don't seem to to do anything to benefit the entity making the demands.

Western Animation

• Goof Troop played with it once: Pete ripped out half the note, "I'm going to get you", and was scared straight, until Goofy pointed out the other half, "...a new hedge clipper".
• The episode of The Simpsons where "someone" is trying to kill Bart, and we see Marge with a big pair of scissors, cutting out something that says "DIE". She says, "Bart, I'm going to get you...! [insert gasping horror here] ...some ice cream at the store, since I'm saving so much money on diet soda!"
• South Park played this once when a pervert starts dropping cut and paste notes every time he... uh... does something really nasty to the hens in town. These hints are all bleeding obvious... but since Barbrady is 100% illiterate, he just sees a bunch of signs and letters all scrambled all over the sheet.
  • It's a Xanatos Gambit to get Barbrady to learn to read.
    • And then it fails spectacularly when Barbrady reads Atlas Shrugged and decides reading sucks.
• The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Blackjack" had the character the episode is named after send Spongebob notes in this style, in the form of making it sound like Blackjack was out to get Spongebob. Of course, this was all misconstrued for figurative when it was all literal, and the episode's ending just makes it all the more laughable.
• Played almost straight on an episode of the 80s version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Turtles manage to get their hands on the MacGuffin, a set of cuff links, but the villains capture April. They send the Turtles a Cut and Paste Note demanding an exchange, April for the "buff links". The last part confuses Michaelangleo before Donatello suggests that they must have run out of c's.

Real Life

• The FBI keeps databases of paper, glue, and newspapers to help identify notes like that. For more modern notes, they also keep information on photocopiers, computer printers, toner and ink. So don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
  • Even worse, most if not all printers manufactured since the early 2000s actively stamp their serial number in a hard-to-see coded form multiple times all over every page printed. This is ostensibly to prevent computer-aided counterfeiting, but the bonus aid it gives to repressive regimes cannot be understated. By late 2017, at least one whistleblower from the NSA had been identified and prosecuted based on the serial numbers on documents she sent to a news outlet. (That we know of.)
  • Even seemingly identical typefaces -Times New Roman and Nimbus Roman, for example- can be distinguished under a powerful enough magnifying glass. Back in the early days of home computing when there were multiple competing word-processor packages for several competing system architectures, this could go a long way to narrowing down the list of people who could have printed a particular document.
• Jussie Smollett supposedly received such a letter containing death threats in 2019. We say "supposedly" because Smollett was indicted (not put on trial as was reported here earlier) for faking (very badly; he claimed people followed him home on foot on the coldest day in Chicago history when there was no pedestrians) a subsequent hate crime attack against him and wasting CPD resources with a wild goose chase. All charges were dropped.