Merit Badges for Everything

You know you've Seen It a Million Times, primarily in comedy: With groups that are based on the Boy Scouts and what have you, you can name virtually anything, and odds are, there'll be a merit badge for it.

Hopping On One Foot While Singing Led Zeppelin Tunes And Drinking Chocolate Milk Badge? Yep. Bruce Campbell Lookalike Badge? Check. Catching Arrows Blindfolded Badge? You know it! And many, many more.

Sometimes this concept is used as a throw away line to explain some (suddenly essential) esoteric knowledge held by one of the heroes (particularly if they have not been set up as having those skills as part of their character):

"Bob, when did you learn to make a Ham Radio out of toothpicks and tinfoil?"
"Oh you know, I got my Amateur Radio Building Merit Badge when I was a Boy Scout -- never had any use for it until now."

Might even be an Aesop of some kind about how Boy Scouts might be geeky or nerded, but they do have some skills that come in handy at times, and maybe they are masculine after all.

Probably inspired by the Real Life Merit badges of:

  • Basketry—Weaving baskets, presumably not underwater.
  • Leatherwork
  • Wood Carving
  • Mammal Study
  • Fingerprinting—Usually finished off in about half an hour at the craft hut during scout camp.
  • Metalwork—A great excuse to produce one's very own ninja stars. Alternately, remember: It's not a sword, it's a really long, really sharp letter opener.

Those six merit badges were the favorites of Boy Scouts at Scout Camp who needed an extra merit badge but didn't want to work too hard.

Then there were also the weird ones like Masonry which involved building your very own outdoors fireplace/brick barbecue.

Sadly most of the really odd ball ones were eliminated in the 90's.

Related to MacGyvering. (Boy Scouts is an organization dedicated to producing those guy guys with skills!) See also I Minored in Tropology.

Examples of Merit Badges for Everything include:

Comic Books

  • Disney's Junior Wood Chucks are like this.

Film

  • Troop Beverly Hills beats this into the ground when Phyllis starts using creative requirements to give out Wilderness Girl merit badges. Everything from grading high-end diamonds to her making out with a CPR instructor. The evil council leader revokes the badges when she finds out.

Rosa: Patches! We don't need no stinking patches!

Literature

  • The Red Green Book: Wit and Wisdom of Possum Lodge has a set of badges which parody the Boy Scouts one. The more advanced ones, starting with Bowling and Fishing, require developing an obsession about the content, including dreaming about it. After a few other examples, it terminates with "Anything men enjoy", which can be used for practically anything.

Live Action TV

  • The "Scoutrageous!" episode of The Goodies features the World Domination badge (up to that point only ever awarded to Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and David Frost. But Frost stole his.).
  • When Debbie Harry, of the musical group "Blondie," appeared on The Muppet Show, she was helping a Frog Scout troop get their "Punk Badges."

Theatre

  • A Scout Camp sketch references this, as the campfire is interrupted by an old former Scout who complained about how easy things are now.

Why in my day, we only had one badge: Coal Mining.

Video Games

  • In Psychonauts, you get new abilities by earning their merit badge, so you end up with a whole bunch of merit badges in things like Invisibility, Clairvoyance, and Levitation.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • The Fireside Girls of Phineas and Ferb, whose exploits can be as insanely overambitious as the title characters' schemes and so earned them all kinds of bizarre badges, often related to the boys' latest scheme. Once, Isabella casually mentions that they just earned their Mountain Moving badge, and we see the hole where it used to be, and the mountain in its new setting. Other times, they're trying to get badges in aeronautics or alligator wrestling.
    • How about the "Reckless Disregard for Life and Limb" patch?
  • One episode of The Fairly OddParents had Cosmo getting various weird merit badges.
  • The Urban Rangers of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy have, among many others, a Lard Bringing Badge and a Microwave Burrito Badge, as well as a Bringing Me My Badge Badge.
  • The Mighty B!
  • There's that old Looney Tunes cartoon where Porky Pig has licenses to do ridiculous things culminating in "permit to use Daffy Duck as motor". Then he doesn't have a marriage license, not being married. This isn't a merit badge, but it's gotta be related.
  • In Jew Scouts there are apparently two ways to get a Chutzpah Badge: babysit the "Squirts" (Cub Scouts equivalent) or capture a bear.
  • In The Emperors New School, the Junior Chipmunks seemed to have a patch for almost everything. Naturally, Kuzco failed to achieve even one, meaning he had to obtain the highly-dangerous Condor Patch to avoid flunking out of school (It Makes Sense in Context).
    • He fails to get even that one, but guess what? He gets to get the "I Failed To Get Every Single Patch Patch"...
  • An early episode of The Simpsons had Bart join a Boy Scouts facsimile of some sort and earn various patches to sew onto his uniform. There's a bit with him attaching various patches for dubiously fantastic feats, the final punchline being a shot of his "patch forgery" patch.
  • While the only badge actually mentioned in Pixar's Up, "Assisting the Elderly," is pretty normal, the credits include several strange-looking one, featuring such things as a radiation hazard symbol and a mushroom cloud.
    • Those possibly reference David Hahn, "The Radioactive Boy Scout". Having received a Eagle Scout merit badge in Atomic Energy (presumably a "displaying understanding" project) he went on try building himself a breeder reactor. This never achieved critical mass, but did produce a dangerous amount of radiation.
    • The movie did also mention "Extreme Mountaineering Lore" and "Wild Animal Defensive Arts".
  • The Little Amazons from The Oblongs had a hygiene badge (which Helga could not, in good conscience, accept).

Head Den Mother: "You are not certified to drink your own urine!"

  • In Taz-Mania, the Bandicoot scouts seemed to have badges for everything. For example, Taz's brother had a merit badge in swinging from vines to save people from falling off waterfalls.
  • In The Problem Solverz episode "K-999 and Da Little Explorerz", the trio encounters a young scout who needs to earn a badge for semaphore, which the characters define as "a system of flag communication famous for people not knowing what it is." Alfe then dresses as a scout and obtains every Little Explorer badge in order to get the badge for her.
  • In one episode of Camp Lazlo, Scoutmaster Lumpus bemoans the failure of any of the Bean Scouts to achieve a single merit badge. Edward thens reveals that he has full set (having dishonestly bought them). We never find out a full list but it does include 'Motorcycle Maintenance'.

Web Animation

  • There's a Gotham Girls webisode that has Harley Quinn and Batgirl use this gag for extreme humor value. Somehow a knot-tying merit badge in their world allows you to restrain an opponent head to toe in seconds.
    • Well, if the younger scouts would PAY ATTENTION during Pioneering merit badge, (The real life equivalent) this might be closer to Truth in Television.

Real Life

Back in my day, we had to walk nine miles to get to school every morning, and nine miles to get back home -- uphill both ways. And we didn't have these fancy Videogame Belt Loops or Pins in the Cub Scouts. If we were lucky, we'd get sent into bear country alone for a week with no food or water. And if we made it out in one piece, the troop leader would ask us why we weren't man enough to earn the Eaten Alive badge.

  • The Boy Scouts now have a Geocaching Merit Badge.
    • Honorable mentions go to Truck Transportation, Farm Mechanics, Pulp and Paper, and the politically questionable Indian Lore.
  • UK Girl Guides have the option to work towards their chocolate badge.

Do I get my Merit Badge in Troping now?

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