Yodel Land

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    The Hollywood Atlas version of Switzerland, as well as Bavaria, Austria, Northern Italy, and other regions in or near the Alps—in fact, any place in Germany is also frequently part of Yodel Land in the Hollywood Atlas.

    A quick guide:

    Scenery:

    • The Alps:
      • The Matterhorn
      • High and unreachable sharp mountain peaks with dangerously narrow and unstable pathways
      • Expensive ski resorts
      • Edelweiss (makes up some 80-90% of all non-generic flowers in Yodel Land)
      • Avalanches
      • Weather: either sunny and freezing cold or severe blizzard
    • The valleys:
      • Peaceful evergreen pastures with goats and/or cows
      • Large, half-timbered houses
      • Avalanches
      • Weather: either sunny and warm or romantic snowfall
    • The Black Forest (which isn't part of any of the aforementioned regions)

    Appearance:

    • Men:
      • Lederhosen (often inaccurately depicted in places where they have never been traditional, e.g. most of Germany and all of Switzerland)
      • Tyrolean hats (little green felt hats with a feather in the band)
      • Huge, twirly or funny-looking moustaches
      • Monocles or glasses
      • Gray beards (if they're past 55)
      • Brushy handlebar mustaches
    • Women:
      • Long blond hair (usually in braids)
      • Dirndl dresses (cf. Lederhosen for inaccurate geographical/cultural application)
      • Aprons
      • Often overweight and with Gag Boobs
    • General:
      • Tall and slender (if they're young) or short and stocky (if they're old)

    Professions:

    • Bankers (Male)
      • GOLD
      • They're sometimes gnomes
    • Cheesemakers (Male)
    • Chocolatiers (Male)
    • Clock/watchmakers (Male)
    • Woodcarvers (Male)
    • Cow/goat/shepherds (Usually children; more often male than female, but females do appear occasionally.)
    • Alpinists (or guides) (Male)
    • Ski resort owners (Male)
    • Innkeepers (Male)
    • Beautiful blonde-braided girls in cleavaged Bavarian tavern wench dresses (like in Oktoberfest) (Female)
    • Waitresses (See above)
    • Spies (Badass if male, beautiful and seductive if female.

    Cuisine:

    • Cheese
    • Chocolate
    • Fondue (may be either chocolate or cheese)
    • Brandy
    • Beer (especially around Oktoberfest)
    • Schnitzel, usually wienerschnitzel
    • Sausages
    • Dark rye bread
    • Strudel

    Wildlife:

    • Goats
    • Cows with big clanking bells
    • Sheep
    • Saint Bernard dogs (usually with brandy casks around their necks)
    • Gulls
    • Ibexes (always aggressive against whomever)
    • Groundhogs
    • Mountain wildflowers, especially edelweiss.

    Misc. culture:

    • Yodelling
    • Swiss army knives with 293,487,569,234,756 blades, including absurd/funny ones
    • Extremely precise Swiss watches
    • Cuckoo clocks, though they weren't in fact invented in Switzerland or anywhere else in the Alps.
      • Invented in the Black Forest, which is usually lumped together with Yodel Land, so it's not that a bad mistake.
    • Alphorns and the Ranz des Vaches
    • Rustic carved wooden bears
    • William Tell
    • Dancing the laendler

    Cultural values:

    • Neutrality
    • Hospitality
    • Prosperity
    • Pedantism

    Never shown :

    • Geneva
      • Headquarters of the WHO, the WTO and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
      • The CERN research institute and its Large Hadron Collider
      • Speaks French.
    • Switzerland's eventful military history
    • Switzerland's major role in the Reformation
      • Huldlrych Zwingli and John Calvin
    • Any place in Lower Austria
    • The rivers and the traffic on them
      • Rhein - here long before it reach Loreley, it was former still able to overswim a thirdpart of Liechtenstein.
      • Aare - surrounding the old part of Bern on three sides.
      • Donau - that from An der schönen blauen Donau. (Flows through Austria, but neither through Switzerland nor through the Alps.)
      • And several others providing good possibility for heavy ship traffic, both tourism and freight. In fact, if you think, that just because Switzerland and Austria have no coast line, speaking about their fleets must be jokes, you You Fail Geography Forever.

    May overlap with Oktoberfest, given the German influence in the region, or with Norse by Norsewest due to confusing Switzerland with Sweden. The Spanish-speaking people make the latter confusion because in the language both countries names ("Suiza" and "Suecia" respectively) are way more similar.

    See Switzerland for a more nuanced depiction. Also see William Telling.

    Examples of Yodel Land include:

    Advertising

    • Often depicted in Ricola commercials.
    • Invoked in this Heidi Klum photoshoot.
    • Any Milka commercial is situated there. Milka is Swiss, so that's reasonable.
      • Interestingly it was invented by a swiss chocolatier in Austria and is produced all over the world but not in Switzerland. We actually prefer Lindt and Suchard. It's the Germans that love Milka.
    • St. Ives health-and-beauty products

    Anime and Manga

    Comic Books

    Film

    • The Third Man references this trope.
    • The Shirley Temple movie Heidi, and the distant sequel Courage Mountain with Noely Thornton and a very young Charlie Sheen.
    • The So Bad It's Good British sci-fi movie from 1969 Moon Zero Two (later seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000) had a scene where the villain's Bikini Girls were too busy playing with the whole-wall TV set to pay attention to the game of Monopoly they were supposed to be playing with their boss. One of them was setting the screens to show typical Swiss scenery, an alpine meadow filled with typically Swiss cows. The boss ordered them to turn the wall off...

    Girl: But I've never been to Switzerland!
    Boss: The only thing worth seeing there are the banks.

    • Many James Bond movies end up in Yodel Land:
      • Most of the action in On Her Majesty's Secret Service takes place in Switzerland, much of it at ski resorts.
      • A small part of Goldfinger also takes place in Switzerland (to which country he follows Goldfinger by car.) Much of the movie actually avoids this trope, however, taking place in Goldfinger's metallurgical plant, hardly part of the typical image.
      • Parts of For Your Eyes Only take place in Switzerland
      • In The Living Daylights, we see a very stereotypical Vienna.
      • In Quantum of Solace a performance of Tosca takes place in Austria.
      • The Gamecube videogame Agent Under Fire has an alpine base.
    • Laurel and Hardy in Swiss Miss.
    • Most of the action in the original The Pink Panther takes place at a Swiss ski resort.
    • The Tim Burton version of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory practically declares all of Germany Yodel Land by placing the city of Düsseldorf there.
    • Most of Feuer Eis Und Dosenbier (a German movie, mind you) takes place somewhere that's not quite clear whether it shall be Switzerland or Austria, although it's two hours of walking distance uphill from an infamous Austrian ski resort.
    • Third Man on the Mountain
    • Partially subverted in the 1978 film Silver Bears. It's set in Lugano, in the Italian speaking part Switzerland (a fact noted by a character). But the plot revolves around banking and money laundering.
    • Many German or Austrian heimatfilme take place here, and is no less stereotypical and clichéd than non-German productions.
    • Invoked In-Universe by Ophelia's costume in Trading Places:

    Coleman: Let me see, you would be from Austria. Am I right?
    Ophelia: No, I am Inga from Sweden.
    Coleman: Sweden? ...but you're wearing Lederhosen.

    Literature

    • In David Drake and S.M. Stirling's The General, the Halvardi are Swiss barbarian analogues.
      • "The Ambassadors of the Free Canton of the Halvardi!"
      • "the eastern mountain tribe"
      • "[their] hair was mostly blond, and both sexes wore it in long braids that fell to their waists on either side"
      • "A shaman capered before them, waving a ... ceremonial wooden house with a small jeweled bird within..."
      • Note: Halvardi = "Helvetia", which is very Swiss.
      • it's also a type of cheese.
    • Johanna Spyri's Heidi series, also because (or although) it is Swiss-made itself. This one's already Older Than Radio.
    • Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, harboured a genuine love for the Germanic parts of the Alps (and for winter sports, in a time when they were an elitist pastime reserved for the moneyed travelers.) Not only did the literary Bond visit the region on several occasions, he was a Yodel Lander himself, being half-Swiss! You Only Live Twice reveals that Bond's mother, Monique Delacroix, was Swiss, and that both parents died while mountain climbing in France.

    Live Action TV

    • The "Cliff Hangers" game on The Price Is Right invokes this trope, with a little man in lederhosen and a hat with a feather climbing a mountain to very yodel-y music.

    Theatre

    • The Sound of Music ventures into this area with the song "Edelweiss" and the yodeling-heavy marionette song about the lonely goatherd (which is also danced as a Ländler).
    • The city of Merano, South Tyrol (currently Italian, "used to be German") sometimes is a setting in the musical Chess by Tim Rice, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (Very reasonable, since the World Chess Championship match between Karpov and Korchnoi, that was part of the inspiration for the musical, was held in Merano in 1981). Sometimes Merano isn't included, because the musical seems to be so completely rewritten for each production that there's very little that's canon.

    "It's living your life in a show by Rodgers and Hammerstein!"

    • Music in the Air incorporates some elements of this, though there's hardly any mountain climbing and the middle of the show is set in the big city of Munich. (The failed 1951 revival relocated the show from Bavaria to Switzerland.)

    Video Games

    Western Animation

    • In the Making Fiends episode "Toupee", Mr. Milk has a fantasy song sequence where he imagines being a Swiss Banker that mostly consists of this trope.

    I could...
    Count Swiss francs while I yodel
    Eat fondue with the locals
    Work with clients overseas
    Keep a safe filled up with cheese!

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