Box Ring Design Tool Distracted By Shiny Objects

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Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!

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...what's dis ting do 'gain?

"Hi, Tick! I'm your mind! Sorry we don't talk much, but I'm easily distracted by shiny objects."

Hello, Tropers. Welcome to the page of multiple interruptions for picking up stuff off the — Ooh, a page telling us to describe this trope here!

In media, the symptoms of attention deficit disorders tend to be exaggerated to the point of absurdity. Sufferers seem to be on a constant caffeine high. They are unable to maintain focus on anything for more than a few minutes before getting distracted by a shiny object, hence the trope title.

In reality, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) consists of a whole set of symptoms, some detrimental and some beneficial. For example, one person with ADHD might be very social and loves talking to different people, gets excited about discovering new things, and sometimes loses track of what's happening around them; and another might be reclusive and shy and unable to perform well in a controlled setting, but really opens up with a close friend or when talking about something that interests them.

There are a few simple reasons for this trope. First is a rampant misunderstanding about what ADHD actually is (in which case you should go do some research), resulting in the oversimplification and exaggeration. ^note The misdiagnosis of ADHD/ADD, especially with the rampant Ritalin craze in the '80s, have really shaped public opinion towards this disorder. Bear in mind, though, there are people who suffer from this out there. Second, it's much funnier to have a character who just fidgets and spaces out occasionally without having to worry about the realism of adding other dimensions to their personality.

If this type of character has Animal Motifs, they're often associated with dogs, squirrels, kittens, or ferrets.

See also Hollywood Psych, Hollywood Autism, The Schizophrenia Conspiracy, and "L" Is for "Dyslexia". Similar types include the Absent-Minded Professor, Forgetful Jones, and the Cloudcuckoolander (who may or may not have a disorder). This exaggeration is frequently seen in Genki Girls and Keets. Can often overlap with Easily Impressed where people are amazed easily rather than distracted. These symptoms are well within the very wide range of symptoms that you might see in any character with an Ambiguous Disorder. Attention Deficit Creator Disorder may be what you get when an artistically inclined individual has a case of this in Real Life.

Closely related is What Does This Button Do?, which you can expect to hear often from such individuals. Hilarity may or may not ensue. Liable to Forget To Eat, right up until the point that a Delicious Distrac- HEY! Are those chocolate chip cookies?! Mmmm....

Not to Be Confused with— oh, wow! Look at all the examples!

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Woo, Examples!

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    Anime & Manga

• Alice Fuji from Arachnid has a condition named "Congenital Excessive Concentration" that makes her overfocused on random things and lose track of everything else. With some unspecified training, though, it becomes a Disability Superpower that improves her learning skills and gives her Super Reflexes.
• Rightly or wrongly, Azumanga Daioh is sometimes used to illustrate the difference between ADHD (Tomo, Genki Girl Jerkass extraordinaire) and ADD (Osaka, Cloudcuckoolander extraordinaire).
• Sakura, an Ill Girl from Betterman. Her canon ADHD is only referred to once, but it's a severe case, and she receives heavy, heavy medication for it. Also, while she can be considered a Cloudcuckoolander, she's a thoroughly creepy and tragic Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant.
• The villain Princess Buburina from Catnapped! is easily distracted by shiny objects and Chu Chu distracts her at one point by dangling a toy on a string in front of her, slightly justified because she's a cat.
• Excel of the Excel Saga anime is this every second she's on screen, & can't even focus when she's talking, twisting her lightning fast sentences into twisting paths of unrelated subjects. In a meta sense, her poor English VA Jessica Calvello, herself diagnosed with ADD, ended up damaging her vocal cords by Episode 14 because she couldn't keep it up.
• The main children in Hanamaru Kindergarten see their attempts to follow Tsuchi during his day off hampered by their kindergartener attention spans. After the trio is distracted by a toy machine, a cat, and a panda-cat poster, Hiiragi decides that perhaps kindergarteners shouldn't be detectives.
• Hell Teacher Nube: "Tremble before Baki, the Supreme Oni sealed in Nube's left hand that has been loosed upon the human world! With but a wave of his hand, this Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever gigantic, blood-red demon will incinerate the city and there is no-one with the power to stop h— OH MY GOD did that man just cut a can with a Ginsu knife? How did he do that? Whee, the kiddy train at the park looks fun, I wanna ride it! One, two, one, two! Aerobics is fun! Wh-what is this... slinky? Can I eat it? Look, Minki! The man with the animal balloons made me a giraffe, yay!" Then again, if Minki is hurt in any way, Baki will become fiercely focused and absolutely nothing will distract him from annihilating the offender.
• From Hyouka, Episode 12 has Chitanda, who has been tasked with asking the Student Council President to allow the Classic Literature Club to have an additional booth for the Cultural Festival. However, she just can't seem to make it there without being drawn in by all the various activities around her.
• The iDOLM@STER. Hibiki stops in the middle of her swimming race with Makoto to catch a fish.
• Cocoa of Is the Order a Rabbit? is very easily distracted. In episode 9, she goes to the park to help look for Aoyama's lost fountain pen. She looks under a bench without any luck. Later when she spots a rabbit, she chases after it, completely forgetting about looking for the pen. In episode 10, she starts spouting off prime numbers. She gets into the thousands, then turns her head, notices a picture album, and gets distracted by that. Sharo wonders how she gets so easily distracted.
• Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: "Renka has a habit of chasing moving objects!"
• In Kill la Kill, Mrs. Mankanshoku keeps getting distracted by Mikisugi's shiny purple crotch glow, on several occasions. Her daughter Mako is much worse, getting mostly distracted by food.
• Yui Hirasawa from K-On! tends to get very easily distracted, especially by things that she considers cute (such as dogs). This is prominently displayed in episode 8 when she proves immune to nerves after finding a 100 yen coin on stage right before the Light Music Club's concert.
• Hanako from Massugu ni Ikou is scattered-brained and gets distracted easily. She is a dog, after all, and Kishu have a high prey drive.
• Miyako from Hidamari Sketch is quite hyperactive and prone to distractions around her. Despite this, she is shown to be the smartest and most artistically talented of the main characters.
• Catarina tends to zone out during conversations in My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, which tends to result in her gaining siblings, fiancees and destroying absolutely any dignity she had been showing off until that point. And then she forgets and does it again the next day.
• Naruto: Naruto is shown to be this. From the beginning of the series, he shows some clear signs of having ADHD. He even earned the nickname, "hyperactive knucklehead ninja."
• Shinobu of Ninja Nonsense has a great one of these in the first episode.

  Shinobu: I passed the exam! Your panties gave me a high mark!
  Kaede: I'm happy for you.
  Shinobu: Yes. Thank you very much. A kitty! (wanders off)

• Yu Touma from Q.E.D., which, in a rare case, is not played for laughs. To clarify, as a little girl she was unknowingly responsible for their beloved family dog getting out of the house and getting run over because she was supposed to shut the door but got distracted. Many years later, while visiting her older brother Sou, she finally realises what had happened and breaks down in tears.
• Ramen Fighter Miki:
  • Miki literally cannot focus on making deliveries without being distracted by helping stray dogs, beating Bit-Part Bad Guys or chasing insects.
  • Kayahara Sensei seems to take her responsibilities as a teacher and a Bully Hunter seriously until she gets her Trademark Favorite Food and then forgets everything else.
• Ranma ½:
  • Hinako Ninomiya is both hyperactive and easily distracted, especially in child form. This certainly doesn't help in her job as an English teacher, the students frequently taking advantage of her distractions. She's more focused as an adult, but if she stays too long this way she starts reverting to her childish behavior.
  • Happōsai is one of the series' most powerful martial artists, and the man responsible for teaching Hinako Ninomiya her draining technique. However, he's such a Dirty Old Man that he can easily be distracted with an exposed cleavage or some woman's underwear, something that Ranma has exploited on more than one occasion.
• Suzu from RIN-NE is a prime example of this. Special mention goes to when she took part in an obstacle course race filled with many cat toys alongside other black cats. All of them fell for the trap and started playing with the toys instead of advancing, except for Oboro, whose owner, Ageha, is filthy rich so he doesn't care for cheap toys (but he does get disqualified for exiting the course). Suzu, however, arrived first by a wide margin. Why? Her attention span is so short that she quickly becomes bored with the current toy and moves to the next one, eventually reaching the finish line.
• Usagi from Sailor Moon often gets easily distracted when trying to accomplish important tasks. Especially if it involves either food or boys.
• Hotaru from Samurai Deeper Kyo has a fairly realistic display of ADD, but it's played for laughs in the way that the people around him react to him. He comes off as a mix between Cloudcuckoolander and Obfuscating Stupidity.
• In Sonic X, Sonic spends a lot of the time he isn't running around lying on rooftops and snoozing, yet goes utterly insane when cooped up on a ship for ten days and nights. This may be because he's somewhat aquaphobic and can't swim.
• The Harpies of 12 Beast are highly excitable, curious, and very energetic, but never remember for more than five minutes — or less, really. Poster Girl Aero is a (partial) subversion. This is a common trait of harpies in Okayado's works. See also the other Aero from Deadline Summoner and Papi from Monster Musume.
• All of Yes! Pretty Cure 5 — the entire series, as well as its Oddly Named Sequel — happens because Nozomi gets distracted one morning before school and chases a passing butterfly. In a later episode, she displayed more realistic ADHD symptoms. ADHD was never explicitly mentioned, but much like Cosmo, the intention was clear.
• The five-year-old titular character of Yotsuba&!, from the same author of Azumanga, being the cheerful hyperactive cloudcuckoolander she is, also has her moments.

  Fuuka: (After explaining to Yotsuba about how everyone has two sets of grandparents) Understand?

  Yotsuba: (Pointing out to the side) Ah! A bus!

• Yuzuko and Yukari from Yuyushiki are prone to this, often talking about one thing, then immediately switching the subject when another topic comes up.

    Card Games

    Comedy

• Bill Burr on his podcast takes an adult ADD Test at his wife's insistence, and despite his claims he didn't have it, couldn't even make it through the first question without being distracted.

    Comic Books

• Marvel Comics' Deadpool has complete ADD, along with a very unique form of insanity.
• Green Lantern has Larfleeze, a.k.a. Agent Orange. His greed makes him distracted to almost anything, making his scenes hilarious. In fact, he says that shiny things are his weakness.
• Impulse: Bart Allen, the aptly codenamed Impulse. Until he got kneecapped, read an entire library in under 2 hours, and took up the Kid Flash mantle. So, apparently, the (temporary) cure for ADHD is kneecapping. It came back when he came Back from the Dead in Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac seems to have ADD trouble. On a positive note, it makes it hard for him to commit suicide because he tends to lose focus on it halfway through. It got downplayed as the series got Cerebus Syndrome, though. Jhonen Vasquez is apparently very close to a Real Life example of this.
• Bean the Dynamite from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), occasionally. In his first appearance, Fiona distracts him by throwing some shiny keys away. Later, Sally does almost exactly the same thing with one of his own bombs.

    Comic Strips

    Fan Works

• Momoko from Wedding Peach Abridged.

  Momoko: It must be hard on Yosuke [to clean the Olympic length pools all by himself]. (pause) Hey, this ring gets so shiny when you move it around!

• Councilmen Raynold (or is it Reynold?)'s only defining characteristic in Soulless Shell.
• Due : "OOOH! My pen!"
• Chives the Dog, a minor character in the Sonic X fanfic Don't Keep Your Distance. Incidentally, she seems to be the only Mobian child imprisoned in a diamond mine (along with the main characters) who doesn't mind this line of work.
• Yet again, with a little extra help: "Ice Cream People!!"
• Ryuk in the original Death Note Abridged by TioH and Dargonakis.
• Brutally parodied in Sonic F:

  Chris: Cream! Aren't you still mad about—
  Cream: I'm only six years old. I have the attention span of a hamster, so I've forgotten why I was angry— OOH A SHINY OBJECT!

• The pug in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series rarely holds onto one mood for long. As Hobbes puts it:

  "He's a furry little emotional rollercoaster."

• Light in Death Note: The Abridged Series (kpts4tv):

  Ryuk: ...now what you need to know about the Shinigami eye deal is...
  Light: [thinking] ...shoes... I need to get shoes...

• In The Lion King Adventures, the Uchoyo Diamond has this effect on animals. Simba uses it to take over the entire pride.
• Harry Potter:

  ...[Harry] rolled his eyes and decided not to try to say anything unless Ash got distracted by something shiny.

• Ultra Fast Pony uses this as an occasional gag, rather than a consistent trait of any one character.
  • In the opening episode, Twilight Sparkle sets off to save the world from an impending apocalypse. One run-in with Rainbow Dash later, she completely forgets about the apocalypse and makes it her goal to destroy Rainbow Dash instead.
  • In "Copywrong", Rarity devises a Zany Scheme to wreck Fluttershy's modeling career, but the scheme immediately derails and ends with punching Rainbow Dash rather than hurting Fluttershy in any way.
• In Age of Dragons, Kathan Adaar is a Qunari Inquisitor prone to going off on random tangents and forgetting what particular quest he is on at any given moment. Somehow he manages to be the smartest guy in the series anyway, proving that sometimes The Cuckoolander Was Right.
• Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness: Alice is gifted with a scarf early in the Extra Stage. Several times after, she gets distracted enough with its quality that several conversations fly right over her head.
• Joys of the Parenthood - The Țepeș Edition: Being easily distracted like all other three-year-olds, Lisa has little faith in bringing Adrian to a council meeting.

  "I'd prefer later," Lisa frowned. "When he's capable to look after himself."
  Dracula looked at his wife, furrowing his brows. "None of them would dare to harm our son, love. They know I would tear their pathetic souls to shreds if they laid a finger on Adrian intending to harm him."
  "I meant his attention span," Lisa pointed at the toddler in vampire's arms who had abandoned Dracula's collar when his attention was drawn to older vampire's pointed ear and soon tiny fingers with sharp beginnings of nails dug into the flesh, tugging.

• This fanfic of Steven Universe depicts Pink Pearl as having ADHD, as a contrast to the autistic Crystal Gem Pearl.
• In Marik's third Evil Council video, Marik sends new member DAN GREEN to steal Yugi's Millennium Puzzle. When Dan meets Yugi, however...

  Dan: Hello, I'm Dan Green. You may remember me from such animated products as Stepmother's Sin and The Little Panda Fighter.
  Yugi: Can I help you with something?
  Dan: [thinking] Oh, dear, I've completely forgotten what I was supposed to be doing. Come on, Dan, think! Hmmm...I know! I'll just activate my Sexy Man Voice! That usually works! [in deep voice] I'm going to do my laundry. Could I have some change?
  Yugi: I guess that's okay. So is that everything?
  Dan: Um, yes. I think so.
  [cut to Marik's Evil Council]
  Marik: It didn't work!
  Bakura: Personally, I'm shocked.
  Marik: Dan Green, you are a most disappointing villain!

• In Luz Belos: Princess of the Boiling Isles, Luz being diagnosed with ADHD is one of the contributing factors to her lack of skill with magic, having gone through multiple magic teachers (Lilith included) before managing to make any breakthroughs with Eda.

    Films — Animation

• Aladdin has the Genie, a character reflecting Robin Williams's stream of consciousness, which goes from Jack Nicholson to vintage cars, true love and speaking animals in less than a minute. Cloud Cuckoo Lander on crack, if you will.
• Dory from Finding Nemo fits the bill, though her "disorder" is rather attributed to a condition of "short term memory loss". As she can only remember a relatively short span of time clearly, it's easy for her to forget what she was originally doing and thus is likely to switch to a new topic. It runs in her family... she thinks. This is actually a disorder known as Anterograde Memory Dysfunction or AMD. This is the same mental condition shown in the Christopher Nolan movie Memento.
• In the Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Justice League: Cosmic Clash animated film, Supergirl exhibits this trait when a cute kitten makes her distracted while fighting an army of robots: "Focused? Oh, they don't come much more focused than me, Cyborg. Oh, look! A kitten!"
• In Monsters vs. Aliens, both Insectosaurus and B.O.B. are like this. The former because he has the personality of a dog. The latter because he has no brain (turns out you don't need one). Both of them were distracted during the fight with a giant alien robot.
• The "What's This" sequence in The Nightmare Before Christmas: Jack even ends up running into a pole. This, naturally, leads some fans to speculate that Jack has ADD. This is most likely not the case: Jack had been doing the same thing, in the same place, in the same way for an untold number of years. This was the first time he had seen anything like this; he's not distracted by "the shiny" as much as he's trying to take it all in at once while being very (musically) enthusiastic about it.
• Hammy in Over the Hedge behaves in a hyper, caffeinated manner and exhibits Hollywood's definition of ADD. A plot point relies on giving caffeine to th— SQUIRREL!!
• All of the dogs in the Pixar film Up seem to have thi—SQUIRREL!!... ... ...s problem. And a new meme is born. Note that this may not be an accurate representation of human ADHD, but it's a much more accurate representation of dog psychology. If there's even a suspicion, a dog will do exactly what it does in the movie, minus speaking — jerk its head away and stare waiting to see its target. If it spots it, it wi— SQUIRREL! ...will typically bark or growl uncontrollably.

    Films — Live-Action

• The 1972 live-action adaptation of 1776 had this little bit, when John Adams was addressing Senator Chase, who was enjoying his lunch? Dinner? On the matter of American independence:

  Adams: America awaits on your decision, Chase. The whole world waits on your decision. [beat, points towards Chase's plate] What's that, kidney? [Chase angrily slaps Adams' finger away from his food]

• Doug Remer in BASEketball seems to suffer from this. It serves as a demonstration for one of the reasons Ted Denslow is so interested in his Coop Cooper's new sport.

  Denslow: People today have attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds!
  (Coop looks over to see Remer staring at a bird)
  Coop: I hear you.

• The movie Charlie Bartlett has a scene involving the title character taking too much Ritalin. It was depicted as causing him to run around, singing in his underpants.
• Clerks: The stupid customers...

  Video store customer: Do you have that one with that guy who was in the movie that was out last year? ...Oooo! Navy SEALs!

• Used in the Dungeons & Dragons (2000) film. When Ridley and Snails are sneaking into the magic school, Snails is in a position where he's too scared to jump down a few feet, and Ridley says he'll catch him. Cue Ridley being distracted by an off-screen creature grunting and drawing his attention for just the right moment.

  Ridley: Sorry. I thought I heard something.
  Snails: You did. Me hittin' the ground.

• In the Iron Man films, Tony Stark's eccentric nature makes him prone to zoning out of what he's supposed to be doing.

  Stern: Mr. Stark? Mr. STARK!
  Tony: [turns around] Hmm, yes, dear?

• The main character's younger sister in the film Pecker is diagnosed with ADHD, when in reality she just consumes way, way, way too much sugar. After being prescribed Ritalin, she acts quite zombie-ish, culminating with her nearly choking on a pill after she refuses to wash it down with a soda. By the end of the film, she's off both the sugar and the meds.
• Venom (2018): Venom shows shades of this, owing to his nature as an alien with non-human priorities.

  Eddie: We won't.

  Venom: Who was that guy? [notices dog] Wait, this thing looks delicious!

• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) has the titular Sonic, whose Super Speed causes his attention to move as fast as him, which results in it rapidly jumping from one thing to the next as they catch his attention.

    Jokes

• The obligatory Lightbulb Joke:

  Alice: How many kids with A.D.D. does it take to change a light bulb?
  Bob: How ma—
  Alice: Hey, wanna go ride bikes?

• One comedian talked about his difficulties in school:

  "They said I had A-D-H- that's a nice necklace!"

• Referenced in a Bill Engvall sketch about parent-teacher conferences. The teacher asks if there's a history of ADD in the family, and Bill says "Yes, we add, subtract, multiply... why are you spelling it?" His wife then says, "M-O-R-O-N. She means attention deficit disorder." And by that point, Bill is looking out the window at birds.
• As seen on an A.D.D. T-shirt:

  "I don't have A.D.D., I'm just — look, a chicken!"

    Literature

• In the Amber Brown books, Amber can sometimes be easily distracted. She has to go for special classes because she has trouble concentrating to take standardized tests.
• Isaac Asimov's "The Author's Ordeal": In this case, the "shiny" is the new Science Fiction plot in the author's head. It is sufficiently distracting that a traffic accident is caused when you sideswipe another car.
• In the Clémentine books, especially in the earlier titles, Clementine has to be reminded often to pay attention in school and has trouble sitting still. As she explains...

  "Clementine, you need to pay attention!" the art teacher said one more time. And just like the other times, I was paying attention. I was paying attention to Margaret's empty seat.

• Greebo from Discworld tends to keep his cat personality even when human, which leads to a somewhat ADD-esque behaviour pattern.
• In Fire Engine By Mistake, a fire engine driving through the countryside is such a novelty that sheep stop nibbling, cows stop chewing, and horses stop dusting each other with their tails.
• Helen Burns from Jane Eyre probably had inattentive type ADD. The list of personal flaws Helen confesses to Jane all match the diagnostic criteria: "I am... slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say... I cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements." She goes on to describe how, although she does very well in classes that catch her interest, her thoughts "continually rove away" during uninteresting lessons.
• Joey Pigza, the title character from his series of books has ADHD and a central point of the series is his ongoing struggle to think before he acts and learn to calm down. By the end of the first book, he changes his medication and then a central element in the second book is his newfound ability to calm down and think.
• The Bandar-Log (monkeys) of The Jungle Book are this. We're told that nothing they ever do lasts more than five minutes because they're distracted by something else, and would likely have forgotten Mowgli in the snakepit after kidnapping him.
• Katt vs. Dogg: Both Molly and Oscar are easily distracted by small animals. It's what got them lost in the woods in the first place (Molly got lost chasing a butterfly, and Oscar got lost chasing a flying squirrel).
• In The League of Peoples Verse, the entire Cashling species suffer from this: always bored, easily distracted, and unable to focus their attention on anything for very long.
• Elin from Of Fear and Faith is easily distracted by all kinds of things, including bugs, noises and pickles, and her narration will sometimes take notice of and ramble on about random pieces of scenery that are completely unimportant to anything other than Elin's curiosity (such as the aforementioned pickles).
• In Anne Bishop's The Others Series, the Crowgard fit this behaviour to a T. Really reinforced by the revelation that the Crowgard of the Lakeside Courtyard run a shop called Sparkle and Junk.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, pretty much all half-bloods are ADHD. The explanation given is that it's their natural battle reflexes and helps to keep them alive in battle (which they go through on a regular basis).
• In Phenomena a character says that both main characters have this. It's said to be a strength. The author has it himself, and has said that he finds it really hard to focus on writing at times.
• Mr. Smith, father of P. G. Wodehouse's Psmith.
• In the somewhat farcical Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Darksaber this trope becomes a crucial "plot point", as the Hutts' titular superweapon is let down by the Tauril workers who constructed it, who as a race seem to have this trope as their Hat.
• The Spren Sylphrena or "Syl" in The Stormlight Archive is very curious, excitable, and easily distracted by something new. In Rhythym of War, she admits that she feels like she has two brains; A rational brain that can focus on important topics, and a childlike brain that constantly jumps to the nearest thing she notices. She regrets that her impulsiveness usually wins out.
• In The Time Machine, the Time Traveller's description of the demeanor of the Eloi matches the DSM's criteria for inattentive ADHD.

  A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children, they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy.

• Nathan in You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) pays very little attention to what's going on around him and tends to drift off and start thinking about cereal jingles when people try to tell him more than a few sentences at a time.

    Live-Action TV

• Tracy Jordan of 30 Rock almost refers to this trope by name; his exact words were "... I have Attention Deficit Disor— Jack, your shoes are shiny."
• In the The Big Bang Theory episode "The Luminous Fish Effect," Sheldon is in the middle of proving to Penny why she needs to slow down driving to the supermarket, citing her car's weight & speed, combined with their collective weight when...oh, putt-putt golf!
• Bluestone 42 gives us Rocket. The Colonel summarily executes his beloved pet rat Smokey for trying to eat the Colonel's prized flowers.

  Rocket: Smokey! You were *sniff* the best pet a boy could want!
  Mac: Look, Rocket! Breakfast pizza!
  Rocket: Ooh, food!

• Valeria Ferrer from Carrusel was very energetic and cheerful, but had serious difficulties staying focused and at the beginning she didn't exactly fit in the class due to how loud and fast-speaking she was. In a What an Idiot! moment, her teacher Ximena tried to tone her attitude down via putting on a facade and treating her harshly; Valeria, however, got so depressed that she actually got sick.
• The Colbert Report. On more than one occasion, Stephen has begun to speak about something serious, only to be distracted by a feathery cat toy hanging from the ceiling, which he bats and swings at like a kitten. While still very much in character, it's probably meant as an allusion to how real news programs will cut short or tangent off more serious or important stories with more fluff/opinionated pieces that don't require an unbiased view.
• The Daily Show's Jon Stewart believes the press has an attention problem.

  "Ever see six-year-olds play soccer? The ball goes somewhere and twenty-two kids go, 'The ball!' Brbrbrbrbrm, kick, 'BALL!!' Brbrbrbrbrum."

• Doctor Who. The Doctor, Two, especially Four ("Jelly baby?"), Six (the coat), Eight ("These shoes!"), Ten ("New teeth!") and Eleven ("Big flashy lighty thing! That just has me written all over it. Not actually. Give me time... and a crayon." Also, in response to a question about why he put a glass of water on the floor, "I don't know. I think a lot, it's hard to keep track."). Sure, he can focus when it's needed, like when the universe itself is threatened, but most of the time he has the attention span of a squirrel. The odd numbered Doctors (besides 11) tend to exhibit fewer ADHD traits than the even-number incarnations. The Doctor (at least the Eleventh) does seem to honestly have some sort of ASD ^* Autism Spectrum Disorder, given the fact that it manifests in other ways than simply inattention (such as difficulty engaging in social interactions, impatience, overlooking things that seem obvious to others, and becoming bored easily, but maintaining excellent focus when he knows what he's doing or he's emotionally invested in something). Given his flamboyant personality, some of the "ADD... Ooh, Shiny" reactions could be intentional exaggerations. In the prequel minisode to (New Who) Series 9 "The Doctor's Meditation", the Doctor remarks that Clara keeps telling him he has "attention deficit, uh, something-or-other."
  • The Thirteenth Doctor actually displays many true-to-life signs of ASD; she is socially awkward, can barely complete a thought without going off on tangents, expresses childlike excitement about basically everything, and often becomes overwhelmed when there is too much that needs to be done in a short space of time or too many variables in a situation. When this happens, she has to stop and verbally reassure herself that she can handle it; she just needs to slow down and think through the problem one piece at a time. This is a very accurate depiction of the way an autistic mind works. ^note People on the spectrum tend to have narrow, but occasionally varied interests, an attention deficit such as ADHD/ADD and social awkwardness. Again, 13 has a very obvious version of the latter...
• Drake from Drake & Josh. He gets distracted so easily. One time Josh was pouring his heart out to Drake who was listening, only to walk away when a beautiful girl walked by. Also when Josh was taken away to be submerged in a chemical bath, Drake looks like he's about to do something, only to see someone left mashed potatoes on the floor.
• The Fosters has Jesus, who's a subversion similar to Stiles in Teen Wolf, in that it manifests in impulsive decisions, as well as an inability to remember certain things (like taking his medication), and forgetting things right after he's been told them (such as no skateboarding inside the house). When he goes off his meds to protect his sister, who was selling them, his body language gets more anxious and fidgety, his tendency to make impulsive decisions gets worse, and the tendency to flip back and forth between several activities (fiddling with his phone and listening to music) while simultaneously hyperfocusing on one (flipping through his skating photos).
• In one episode of Friends, Joey is at Central Perk when he realizes he should have been at work two hours ago. Then he gets distracted talking to Chandler and sits back down. Chandler reminds him about work, so he leaves, only to see an attractive girl outside and get distracted talking to her. Chandler yells out the window, "Joey, for God's sake, go to work!" and he runs off.
  • Joey has proposed to Phoebe, thinking she is pregnant, then proposes to Rachel, who actually is pregnant. Phoebe is hurt, but says "I'll take you back, Joey Tribbiani... hey, look, a Salami Buddy!" (one of Monica's wedding presents nobody could figure out).
• Jason in The Good Place is so easily distracted that at one point, hoping to forestall an endless string of questions about the Jacksonville Jaguars, Eleanor has Janet conjure up "something shiny" for him. Janet obligingly provides a sparkler, and Jason immediately runs outside to play with it.
• Elsbeth Tascioni on The Good Wife is a brilliant yet scatterbrained lawyer. It's to the point where when Alicia and Dean face her in court in "Shiny Objects" they pretty much render Elsbeth useless for the day by randomly taking magazines with pictures of steamships and penguins out of their folders during her cross-examination. Later we get an Imagine Spot from Elsbeth's perspective featuring random images of a steamship and a clown.
• Growing Pains: It has often been speculated that one reason behind Mike's (Kirk Cameron) poor academic performance is ADD. Episodes have seen him buy a "magic rock" (from a school scam artist) to help him with an extemporaneous essay, stay home from school to catch up on Gilligan's Island and fail to take an IQ test seriously. His possible problems are particularly spelled out in the late 1987 episode "Nasty Habits," where Mike's bad habits, constant distraction and inability to concentrate for a few minutes have put him in danger of possibly not graduating from high school on time. Here, he struggles to start an English essay that, after putting it off, is due the next day. At one point, he envisions dancing with a pretty girl he met at the pizza parlor (with the Tiffany song "Could've Been" used to frame the scene) ... before he finally is able to clear his mind and write a coherent paper.
• Horrible Histories has hyperactive reporter Bob Hale, who goes off topic exceedingly easily. Somehow he turns a list of Roman emperors into the Macarena...
• How I Met Your Mother: When Ted calls Barney the worst student in the episode "Robin 101", he answers that his teachers said he has "AD... something. Can we have class outside?"
• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Parado is all too playful for his (supposed) age, gets bored extremely easily and tends to switch between what he is toying with at a moment's notice. The only thing he focuses on is fighting other riders, namely Emu.
• ADHD was the topic of one episode of Last Man Standing. The school psychiatrist diagnoses Boyd with ADHD after he becomes too disruptive in class and prescribes medicine. Mike goes on a tirade about the situation, feeling that the school just uses ADHD as an excuse to drug kids that are too energetic and Boyd doesn't really have the disorder. He's proven right when Boyd calms down in school after he begins playing ice hockey to burn off energy. However, it's later revealed that Mandy took some of Boyd's medication while studying for her exams and did better than usual, suggesting she actually has ADHD and explaining a lot of her seeming absent-minded personality.
• Battie in Little Lunch is notoriously distractable. Best demonstrated on "The Lost-And-Found Box":

  Battie: My dad says that I lose stuff because I get distrac... (tails off as as he starts staring at the rope in his hand he has been winding up)

• Francis is shown developing a serious case of ADD in an early episode of Malcolm in the Middle: even after his roommate has stripped the room of every possible form of entertainment, Francis still can't focus on his homework, to the point that upon seeing a cockroach on his desk, he prefers to build a racetrack for it.
• In the "Valentime's Day" episode of Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn, the quads are looking for reasons their parents don't celebrate Valentine's Day. Dicky finds a large roll of bubble wrap and the quads immediately stop their quest in order to pop all the bubbles. Two hours later...
  • It happens in "Sweet Foot Rides" when the quads go to the hotel room to get their father's prototype shoes back from the man they thought stole them. Instead, they go immediately to the bed and jump up and down on it, taking so long that the man comes back.
• Andy on Parks and Recreation has a tendency to lose focus mid-conversation. Or sometimes mid-sentence:

  Andy: (singing) "Ron and Dianne sitting in a tree / K-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I." (points) "Did you see that bird?"

• Shawn Spencer on Psych seems to have adult ADD. In order to deal with this in childhood, his father taught him how to combine his short, quick observations with his eidetic memory. Instead of being completely unfocused, Shawn can now be incredibly focused but only in short flashes. In "Shawn Takes A Shot In The Dark", he outright says he probably has ADD.
• In the '80s, Saturday Night Live had a series of "Mr. Short-Term Memory" skits starring Tom Hanks.
• Spaced:

  Tim: Tyres has got a really short attention span; I remember once we were — oh look, wrestling!

• A gag from a Taxi episode: Louie gets sued by an old lady for hitting her with his cab. Learning that she's a notorious scam artist, he welcomes taking her on in court. Just before the civil hearing, Reverend Jim discovers that this time Louie ironically did injure her for real, and tries to warn Louie:

  Louie: Ignatowski, get the hell outta here.
  Jim: Boss, I think there's something you ought to know.
  Louie: The only thing I wanna know is how fast you can get out of my sight.
  Jim: Boss, this is really, really important, and you know how short my memory is, so let me tell you before I forget.
  Louie: Okay, what is it?
  Jim: What's what?

• Subverted on Teen Wolf. Stiles does have ADHD, but it manifests more in a somewhat wacky body language, impulsive decisions and the tendency to ramble. It's stated by one of his teachers that he has trouble focusing in class, but you could make a case for him hyper-focusing on other things. Also, he doesn't ramble that much. More of a zingy one-liner dude. He hyper-focuses as well, as shown in "Wolf Moon" when he ends up spending hours researching lycanthropy on little more than a whim.
• In That's My Bush!, Princess seems to suffer from this:

  "This is the way we lock the door, lock the door, lock the door. This is the way we lock the door — Oh, what a pretty bell."

• As seen in "A Hero is Born" episode of The Thundermans, King Crab is very easily distracted, even in a battle, by bubbles.
• Sometimes invoked on Top Gear to interrupt an argument during the News segment. None of the presenters will stop talking on whatever topic is going on when Jeremy Clarkson will point at a member of the audience and declare "JESUS IS HERE!"
• Cat on Victorious is this to a T. Especially if you have candy to help distract her with.

    Music

• System of a Down has oft-changing time signatures and desperate, screaming lyrics in their songs to mimic the signs of Attention Deficit Disorder, according to Word of God. They also take stances against the pharmaceutical drugging of youth, with the title track off of the album Toxicity representing the poison of complacency that medication offers, in their opinion.

    Myths & Religion

• According to one Japanese creation myth, mankind has this trope to thank for mortality. The legend goes that, when the creator god got around to making humans, he asked the chief god in the heavens what he should make them out of. The chief god originally instructed him to make humankind out of wood; however, he later changed his mind, and sent an otter to the creator god instructing him to make humans out of stone instead. Along the way, the otter got distracted by a pool of fish, and as a result he ended up delivering the message after mankind had already been created. According to the myth, mankind would have been nearly indestructible had it been made from stone like the chief god intended.

    Pro Wrestling

• A frequent aspect of wrestling matches is the "distraction", where it often leads to cheating... or, in the broadest sense affects the outcome of the match. A typical example is someone coming to the ring to taunt his foe, the foe going over to argue with them, and the foe's opponent for the match (which may only be starting right at that moment) sneaking up from behind and rolling him up for the pin. Another example is the manager, valet or other second distracting the Easily Distracted Referee long enough for a rule-breaking wrestler to use a foreign object to hit his opponent, knock him unconscious and get a win. During tag-team matches, one of the partners of the face team will try to get the referee to notice illegal double-teaming of his partner by the heel team, but the referee is preoccupied with trying to escort him — the non-legal face wrestler — out of the ring.
• George Steele: Bobby "the Brain" Heenan once exploited Steele's crush for Miss Elizabeth by bringing out a poster of the beautiful valet of Randy Savage to "the Animal's" match against "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff and showing it to him at critical points in the match. Orndorff was able to get an easy win over the lovestruck Steele.
• Miss Elizabeth: Played the part perfectly during the Hulk Hogan-Randy Savage vs. Ted DiBiase-André the Giant match at the 1988 Summer Slam, when — just as it seemed the hellish Mega Bucks team had victory wrapped up — she took off her skirt to reveal a bikini bottom. DiBiase was stunned and couldn't concentrate, and heel-leaning referee Jesse Ventura was also distracted (Andre, portrayed by the announcers as also being distracted, was actually yelling at Ventura to pay attention to the match). All this distraction allowed Hogan and Savage to regain their bearings and rally to a victory.
• "Sick" Nick Mondo admitted he used to have this problem, linking his inability to pay attention to his discovery of the fact there are professional wrestling schools.
• Maria Kanellis once lost a match because she was too busy posing for pictures being taken by the troops in Iraq to notice her tag team partner Candice Michelle needed a break against Trish Stratus and was trying to tag out.
• Leva Bates once lost a triple threat match to Su Yung because she was too busy doing an impression for the fans of the woman she just appropriated her new bandana from to notice La Rosa Negra was being pinned by Yung.

    Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street:
  • Many viewers feel that they may have introduced Elmo to set up a commentary on ADD or ADHD. It never happened, but he sure is easily... ooh, shiny! Or, if you want a simpler explanation... He's supposed to be THREE YEARS OLD.
  • Another Muppet character, Forgetful Jones, is a living embodiment of this trope. Or he may just have Alzheimer's....

    Tabletop Games

• The Kender race in the Dragonlance setting of Dungeons & Dragons embodies this trope. They even have a racial ability to "Detect Shiny".
• The Batwinged Bimbo From Hell class in Macho Women with Guns (both being Exactly What It Says on the Tin, by the way) has access to the skill "distort reality"; by shifting their attention completely to something like their nail polish, a run in their stockings, or a shiny object, they can avert any attack by not paying any attention to it at all. If the skill roll succeeds, the attack instead targets another player.
• Goblins of Pathfinder have this, to the point where nothing can hold their attention for more than a few seconds. This ADOS even shows up in the middle of combat, when a goblin may waste a turn to do something completely stupid.
• Warhammer:
  • There is a running joke among players that creatures with the Stupidity rule (which means there is a chance the unit will do nothing other than wander forward a few inches for a turn) suffer from this, in particular Dark Elf Cold Ones (dinosaur horse thingies) thinking "kill kill kill kill, ooooh shiny".
  • This is actually accurate in the case of Sigvald the Magnificent, who at random times during the battle will actually become so distracted by how awesome and shiny his armour is that he will stop fighting and demand his henchmen to polish it and tell him how wonderful he is.
• Corax in Werewolf: The Apocalypse have this as one of their racial flaws. Their other flaw being an allergy to gold, this doesn't usually work out too well for them.

    Theatre

• In Hadestown, during "Road to Hell," Orpheus is distracted from cleaning tables by a red dishrag and uses it as musical inspiration. He misses his cue from Hermes and only notices the audience when his name's called again.
• The Marriage of Figaro (Cherubino) and The Magic Flute (Papageno), both composed by Mozart. Those who were close to the composer marveled at how familiar the characters seemed.

    Video Games

• Meta-wise, most gamers are expected to drop everything related to the fate of the world when they see a vividly-colored beam of light radiating from a piece of equipment; you can always save the world next time, but that ultimate epic legendary shiny must be picked up or it's gone.
• Wide-Open Sandbox games in general. Set out to save the world, spend 200 hours running subquests and exploring.
• Taokaka from BlazBlue has a three-second or three-step (depending on which comes first) attention span/memory combo. Of course, Hilarity Ensues.
• Borderlands 2 has one example with Tiny Tina, as you get ready to destroy a train with some missiles:

  Tiny Tina: Awwrite counting down. Ten! Nine!

  (the missiles fire prematurely and blow up the train)

  Tiny Tina: I got bored.

• In Devilish Hairdresser, the Angelic Hairdresser's Fatal Flaw is her short attention span. She will often turn away from her work to make a phone call, prepare a cup of coffee, or look at some books, giving the Devilish Hairdresser time to mess with her clients.
• The basis for a joke in Dragon Age: Origins where the game designers fall victim to this trope. It unfolds as follows in the description of a Glamour Charm:

  This minor magical charm captures the viewer's attention and distra... ooo, pretty...

• Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress, all too often. It isn't uncommon for a dwarf to Urist McTroper cancels post: Pick Up Equipment. Dwarves will cancel a task to pull a lever to activate a critical series or traps or other defensive mechanisms to go get a drink or take a nap. Military dwarves will, on some occasions, literally stop fighting an invading horde of monsters because they're sleepy or hungry.
  • An entire invading army can be distracted by one of your pet cats, chasing after it instead of laying siege to your fortress.
• In EarthBound, an otherwise indestructible Master Belch can be defeated if you use Fly Honey to distract him; he'll waste turns to guzzle that mess down, leaving himself vulnerable to attack.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Depending on your playstyle, there is a high chance your Player Character in any game in the series falls victim to this trope, due to the high amount of content in said games' open worlds. It's very easy to take on a quest, only to forget said quest because of all the optional dungeons you encounter on your way, followed by taking on other quests only for them to also be postponed because you encountered, depending on the game, a gate to Oblivion or a dragon.
  • This is a trait of the Demiprinces, a form of lesser Daedra born of the union between a Daedra and a mortal. Demiprinces tend to have short attention spans and get bored very easily. Fa-Nuit-Hen, for example, can barely stay focused on questions during his interviews and outright interrupts people so he can answer them before he loses track of what they're saying.
• Subaru of Ensemble Stars! loves to play around and have fun and hates having to do boring things. And as the trope name might suggest, he absolutely loves anything shiny to a crow-like extent, hoarding coins and anything else that sparkles such as ramune bottle marbles.
• EverQuest II gives us the collection quest items, often nicknamed "shinies" by the players for two reasons. The first is that, well, they glow — they're small, glowing points on the ground with a question mark on top. The second is that you can expect many people to instantly take a leave of their senses and drop whatever it is they were doing (such as traveling, trying to avoid dangerous mobs, healing their group or trying NOT to aggro everything in sight) in order to dig them up. Even more so in groups, where there's a competitive aspect to it — first person to activate the shiny gets it, and the rare ones sell for a mint. A shiny popping up in the middle of a difficult fight can quite easily spell "wipe".
• Guild Wars 2 gives us the Skritt, who have a unique form of Hive Mind. They all have individual intelligence, but the more Skritt are around each other at a time, the smarter they get. Form up a whole Warren (underground city) and they rather effortlessly start repurposing snatched Asura and Charr tech into their own proto-industrial revolution. When there's only one or two around, though, they have the minds of the rodents they evolved from and are basically this trope made flesh.
• Shimakaze from KanColle has this as part and parcel of her fixation on speed. Especially emphasized in episode 4 of the Animated Adaptation: when she's called in for a briefing, Shimakaze bounces around excitedly asking "When do we start?!", but when the briefing actually does start, she's playing with one of her Rensouhou-chan ^note a pet-slash-familiar resembling a mix between a naval gun and a Pokémon and not listening. When the mission is set to launch, she's nowhere to be found, presumably having gotten bored and wandered off. After some hilarious failed attempts to draw her out, her teammates sit down for A Spot Of Tea...and Shimakaze eagerly skips up, asking "What are you guys doing? Can I have one of those scones?"
• Kingdom of Loathing has an Attention Deficit Demon as a potential familiar (though as a rare one by now, since it was available for a limited time).

  [Your Demon] bounces around, helping you pick stuff up. "Did you know that chili peppers aren't actually peppers? And a coconut isn't a nut, either! Hey, remember that one monster you fought? He was crazy. Do you like music?"

• Melissa from Knights in the Nightmare is often characterized as having a mild case of ADHD. Unlike many other examples, she actually displays hyperfocus — Ancardia is all she can really be bothered to concentrate on, and she's otherwise fairly easily distracted. The more commonly attributed characteristics of the disorder get Flanderized by the fandom.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
  • Link can defeat Ganondorf by waving a fishing pole around to distract him while taking potshots at him. See it in action here. This is actually pretty common in the Zelda series — a good quarter of the final bosses will stop and stare at your fishing pole/bug net.
  • Zelda herself has a case of this in The Minish Cap. Multiple times during the festival when she's talking to Link, she'll run off mid-sentence because she got distracted by another booth or person.
• The Piglins in Minecraft are prone to this, even when they're aggressive, but they soon get back to fighting you afterwards.
  • Averted for the Piglin Broods, they don't get distracted by gold.
• A poster of a troll in Mishap 2: An Intentional Haunting includes four speech balloons containing simple utterances. "Oooh, shiny!" is one of them.
• Deviljho of Monster Hunter is perpetually hungry and crashes Unstable environments in search of more food (which, more often than not, includes everything that moves.) However, if you drop a piece of meat on the ground, it'll immediately stop what it's doing and go chow down. This can be used to your advantage, as you can apply certain items to the meat beforehand to put the Deviljho to sleep, poison it or paralyze it for a short time.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, your rival shows this at least once. He comes barging into your room, then after a few seconds notes you have a new laptop.
  • The Poké Doll is a brightly-colored toy that will distract wild Pokémon and allow the player to run away from them. In Pokémon Platinum, you can use it to escape the plot-mandatory battle with Giratina and end its universe-destroying rampage. Yes, I did just distract Cthulhu with a dolly.
• Pony Island: Satan in a nutshell — I've got to finish this current game I'm working on! It's got to have many levels, suspense, build-up, an epic final boss, and, and ooh... here's a cute mascot for a brand NEW game!
• The Curiosity Core in Portal.
• The intro sequence of A Princess Tale states that this is how the main character earned her nickname, "Princess Ooh Look, a Kitty."
• The Arakun race in the text-based Retro MUD game are famous for being like this. They also have a racial emote called "ashiny". Players tend to ham it up for all it's worth.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic has issues with staying still for extended periods of time.
  • Also Tails, to a certain extent. He's a bit more focused and patient than Sonic is, usually, but he's VERY easily distracted by things he finds interesting. Which, since he's a Child Prodigy Gadgeteer Genius, mostly includes killer robots.
• The Novakids from Starbound are an entire race of these, as they can't focus on any task for long before getting distracted by something new and interesting, have very poor long-term memories, and don't recognize the importance of writing things down for later. They're actually stunningly intelligent on an intuitive level (a Novakid can build a working FTL drive and spaceship just by seeing one pass by and inventing what they need to get it to work), but they keep having to reinvent the wheel. For this reason, Novakid communities tend to fluctuate between stone and digital age (usually lingering on the "steel and steam" age out of affectation more than anything) as one generation makes groundbreaking discoveries and the next one forgets how they work. The beta versions of the game reflected this in the character intro blurbs; while the other races had long-term reasons for their situations, the Novakid's boiled down to "You're on a malfunctioning ship and you can't remember how you got there."
• A Liberated Borg Caitian Duty Officer in Star Trek Online has Flavor Text implying that he has a certain amount of this.

  "My time in the Collective honed me. I am more focused on ... hey, that light is blinking!"

• Fairies in the Touhou Project franchise have this in general, due to being ephemeral and short-lived (but immortal) youkai. In the spin-off game Fairy Wars (which stars fan-favorite Cirno), you have a "motivation meter" in place of a life bar; when it hits 0, Cirno gets bored of the whole adventure and wanders off to find something more interesting to do.
• World of Warcraft:
  • One of the "silly" jokes a male orc can say:

    "I will CRUSH and DESTROY and... ooo... shiny..."

  • A Dryad named Mylune will actually get distracted by a butterfly halfway through her quest-ending text.
  • This trope even applies to player characters now, as anything lootable by your character sparkles in your view.
  • The gorlocs in Sholazar Basin demonstrate this literally, having an obsession with collecting shiny objects. Jaloot is an especially bad case, with the item that calls him having the added Flavor Text of "Should he be managing to pay attention at the time".

    Visual Novels

• Magical Warrior Diamond Heart:
  • Valerie has ADHD and can't focus on her studies. She usually gets distracted by cute things or cute people.
  • Zacharie has ADHD just like Valerie, and get distracted by anything shiny and cute.
• Shouichi "Capt" Kazama from Majikoi! Love Me Seriously! has all the trappings of your typical shounen hero and has both the luck and the skill to be the best at everything he tries. Despite this, his minuscule attention span mixed with his love of wandering around and trying new things prevents him from ever fully embracing this role, ensuring that he'll never steal the spotlight from any of the Action Girl love interests or the protagonist Yamato.
• Jazz, the protagonist of Songs and Flowers, displays many symptoms of ADHD, but in a more realistic manner. She loses track of what's happening and can be forgetful, but she can also get hyperfocused on certain things, loves learning new things, and can really open up around friends. It also doesn't stop her from being legitimately talented at gathering info and putting pieces together.
• The player character of Starship Promise is a brilliant engineer whose train of thought bounces around like a ball in a pinball machine: lightning-fast but very easily diverted onto irrelevant tangents ranging from beluga whales in space to how hot that person over there is, even in the midst of life-or-death situations.

    Web Animation

• Button's Adventures: Button is highly impulsive and forgetful of his belongings, but can also be held captivated by his gaming for long periods of time.
• Atlus employees suffer this, at least according to Yahtzee's review of Catherine:

  Atlus developer: ... Wait, I'm confused. What was I fixing again? Oh, look! A puppy!

• Chicken of Chicken and Moose has this, seemingly paired with hallucinations. He gets distracted by a "rainbow," which is actually an oil slick.
• Jafar winds up distracted by Frollo's fishing line during a climactic battle in The Frollo Show, much like Ganondorf from Twilight Princess above.

    Webcomics

• Fighter from 8-Bit Theater, so very much so. Invoked nearly word-for-word in this strip.
• Larxene from Ansem Retort fits this trope, big time. The fact that she's also addicted to crack, PCP, crystal meth, and nearly every other illegal drug in existence makes it worse.
• Archipelago's Blitz is practically the poster child for this trope, exclaiming "Look Credenza, I found a shiny!" in various forms throughout the entire comic. For example, a man lost in the woods asks him for help. Blitz instead focuses on a shiny bauble he is wearing and asks to show it to his friend. Given permission, he grabs the shiny and gleefully runs back home, unaware that he is dragging the man with it.
  • The man being dragged is also an example.

  Paolo: My friends and I had just arrived on the island and I was stretching my legs when I got...um...distracted. ("Oooh! Butterfly!") It happens a lot to me.

• In one Arthur, King of Time and Space strip Fasha asks Guenevere what the documentary about ADHD she was watching was like. Guenevere replies that she doesn't know, she switched channels to watch cartoons.
• The Bird Feeder has Tina, a hyperactive hummingbird. Clearly set forth in her very first appearance in #6, "Short Attention Span," when a conversation is cut short when she is distracted by something off-panel.
• Blade Bunny is either this or pretending to be.
• Elliot from Blood Stain suffers from a lack of focus, lapsing every so often into Imagine Spots whenever she is talked to. In a deconstruction of this trope, this makes her unable to hold a job for very long and causes her to not communicate at all, in fear of her superiors admonishing her for her lack of focus.
• Hilariously parodied on Broken Plot Device when introducing Sunny to Liz. The remark in the final panel is priceless.
• Pixies in the webcomic Chasing the Sunset have the attention span of a moth, probably as a counter for their omnipotence. A pixie can do anything she believes she can, but it vanishes as soon as her attention goes elsewhere. Naturally, all pixies love "shinies".
• Fluffy from Commander Kitty is a small pink female cat. She likes to push shiny red buttons, and rarely if ever knows what's happening around her. She has a 50% chance of either causing complete catastrophe or miraculously saving the day.
• In the world of Crystal Heart people can implant crystals as their hearts to gain special powers. The crystal Muna starts the adventure with, Good Fellow, has this as a side effect — it allows her to sense emotions and even read minds, but makes her easily distractable.
• In Dragon Sanctuary, Dean's fae blood makes him incredibly restless, and evidently the trait is common amongst most human-fae-hybrids — Merno comments that he's never known one to sit still. Unfortunately for Dean this manifests in him abandoning his duties and wandering into places he shouldn't.
• Rolan of Ears for Elves has this problem when Tanna's showing him around the Taurecuiva Festival. Well, surely he has a right to be distracted when it's all so new to him, what with being a different culture and such...
• Nina Delacroix of Eerie Cuties is easily distracted by butterflies and her unfortunate werewolf classmate Ace, calling out "Puppy!" whenever she spots him and chasing after him.
• Eddie from Emergency Exit.

  Bob: (pointing) LOOK! A DISTRACTION!
  Eddie: OOH, where? I collect those!

• Familiar Ground: "ooh, pretty!"
• Footloose: Jin the half-werewolf has the doggish tendency to be distracted by anything she sees.
• Freefall: Dvorak, the robot inventor. Or should that be Mad Scientist?

  Dvorak: I'll keep an eye on things here.
  Qwerty: Unless you get distracted by a new idea, or something shiny.
  Dvorak: New ideas ARE shiny. That's why they're so hard to resist!

• Galaxion has Zan Wilder. He simply is more interested in building improbable gadgets than anything else (like, say, holding a job).
• The Girl, from A Girl and Her Fed, is confirmed attention-deficit.
• Minmax the Invincible Warrior, from Goblins. "...OOO! A shiny rock!" He probably traded this for a combat bonus.
• Both Halo and Dabbler of Grrl Power have versions of ADD. Dabbler is an alien/demon/something so her version may be a little different. Halo is just different, and has an Adderall prescription that doesn't seem strong enough.
  • The bottom three panels are probably the most obvious case yet.
• Homestuck:
  • The Salamanders from the Land of Wind and Shade.

  "Look at this! Another Cherished Idol profaned! Such sacrilege has become commonplace with the recent glut of the Underlings. It would bring a tear to my eye if I were not so clearly fit to be tied with these hyperactive mannerisms and severe attention deficit oh my god look a bug."

  • Clubs Deuce from the Midnight Crew cannot possibly hope to remember more than one thing at a time and gets easily distracted by clocks.
  • "You were very foolish to believe you could be a leader of men. Look at what bearing that flag has wrought. Perhaps one day you will find something new to bear. A burden befitting of the peasant you truly are. Oh my what's that shiny thing in the water?"
  • Jade can be a bit like this while asleep.
• Daisy, on the cover of the third Housepets! book, looking at King's swinging collar instead of King himself. Although to be fair, it's about all you'd expect from a pup who's only words (so far) have been "Hi! I'm Daisy!".
• Gertrude in The KAMics suffers from this here, here and ... ooh, cool!
• The MS Paint Adventures series Problem Sleuth treats this as a useful skill for one character: Pickle Inspector dodges attacks by getting distracted by something else and randomly stepping out of harm's way.
• The Order of the Stick:
• Millie from Ozy and Millie There are many more examples.
• Precocious:
  • Chrispy states in his sketch blog that Vincent has an undiagnosed case of ADHD.
• This ◊ PvP strip. Scratch, being a cat, naturally.
• Sabrina "Ultragirl" Mancini in Rival Angels isn't usually prone to this, but it happens to her once at a very inconvenient time. Her best friend, Sun Wong, almost falls off the edge of the stage (twenty-foot drop), but Sabrina saves her by grabbing the waistband of her shorts at the last second. Sabrina then uses her other hand to grab the comic's Big Bad (who pushed Sun toward the edge in the first place) to prevent herself from being dragged over the edge along with Sun. And just when it looks like all three of them are going to fall, one of the Big Bad's two Dragons grabs her and pulls. Which is when this exchange happens:

  Sun: Don't let go, Sabrina!
  Sabrina: [looking down] OH MY GOD, SUN! When did you start wearing a thong?

• In Rusty and Co., a summary is blamed on the readers' need for it.
• Schlock Mercenary gives us Nick, the Dumb Muscle of Tagon's Toughs;

  Meet Corporal Burt "Nick" Nicholson, special forces. Metallic metaphors work best on Nick: Iron sinews...heart of gold..mind like a steel trap...
  Nick: Dere's lotsa words on these shelves. Are dey important?
  Schlock: Just books, Nick. Stay focused.
  Nick: Ooh! Pictures!
  Schlock: Focus, Nick.
  ...Attention span of lawrencium 258.

  • Schlock himself has been described as "an overstimulated child", but he does have an excuse, based on both his 'birth' and biology.

    "I find my perspective refreshing."

• Scarlet, the squirrel from the webcomic Sequential Art is an example of this ◊. Part of what affects her is that she used to be hooked up to a giant supercomputer (along with three others) where their savant-like intelligence was used to crunch numbers. Coming from a world where things really are instantaneous, the real world would come off as a big distraction to her. Also might have something to do with the accident that ended up getting her out of the corporation where she was being kept involved lots of really intense heat. Which damages computer chips.
• In Shifters Werebeasts are often subject to the drawbacks of their animal forms as well as the advantages.
• Unity of Skin Horse, which is sort of a large drawback for someone who was intended to be a Super Soldier.
• Kiki from Sluggy Freelance embodies this trope. But as she's a ferret experimented on by a Mad Scientist (nobody knows whether the mad scientist part has anything to do with it, but being a ferret sure does) who can literally go ballistic after a pixie stick, it's probably not surprising. In one of the most extreme cases ever, Bun-bun once told all his recent personal secrets he wouldn't want anyone to know to her (while wearing earplugs to avoid hear her chattering in response), because he needed someone to talk to and he knew he could instantly erase all that from her memory by showing her some shiny car keys.
• One webcomic artist did a comic on how her 5th grade teacher discovered she had "crazy bad ADD". She also frequently makes comics that highlight her attention problems even as an adult.
• Uh-Oh, It's a Dinosaur: Kyra has a bad case of this.
• Walky from Walkyverse.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic:
  • Cap'n Fang, who would give Tomo and Osaka tag-teaming together a run for their money. Ironically it's his specific mental disability which makes him the greatest kobold pirate ever. Though, everyone eventually gets at least one of these moments.
  • Also from this comic: "Satyrs have a rather short attention span."
• Mayy Storm of Zelfia isn't the task-oriented type.

    Roleplay

• Crops up very frequently in Survival of the Fittest. Some portrayals of ADHD (such as Lance Barrett) are very low-key and realistic. Others, however, like with Owen Fontaine, are of the plain old bouncing off the walls variety.

    Web Original

• Uncyclopedia has a self-demonstrating article on the subject.
• The Monday Morning Mooks can rarely finish a sentence, let alone a discussion
• WALLE Forum Roleplay: Spectrum, oh so very much.

  Spectrum: Hi! You're colorful!

• Whateley Universe example: Joanne Gunnarson, code name Murphy, but her problem is written fairly accurately. Has ADHD, and has just manifested as a mutant so her meds don't work right. Spends all her time walking around drinking coffee. When she gets distracted or upset, her power kicks in, which is bad. She's a Reality Warper, and reality usually warps so that she gets the short end of the stick.
• Brandon from Trinton Chronicles has this problem.
• My Opinions on Every Pokémon Ever: "Ooh, look! He's wearing a bowtie!"
• NigaHiga on YouTube claims to have ADHD and has vlog segments of what he's like when he's "Off the Pill".
• Noka: Found has the brilliant idea of smashing the furniture down and refashioning all of it into a fort-igloo hybrid. Albeit, he did almost none of the work and spent most of the time searching for his bacon-print underwear to fly as the fort's flag, he still managed to convince Abel and Solo to help him.

  Found: ...Convince?
  Az: Yes! Convince! How do you sell someone the angle of "Wanna destroy the furniture in this room and turn it into a fort? We can stick my underwear on top and call it the flag!" — actually that's pretty convincing in itself...

• Dan Carlin's hardcore history says that the Romans describe Germanic invaders in more or less this way. Tall, strong, unbelievably brave, skillful with weapons, a monstrous horde descending on Rome! Then they get distracted by Spain for a few years.
• #6 on Cracked's If Everything Got An Adorable Mascot is Addie the ADHD tornado. "Let us help you learn to cope with... Ohh!!! Shiny!!!"
• In Worm, Kid Win is constantly leaving his projects half-done thanks to this. It's notably portrayed as a serious frustration for him, on top of his many other stresses.
• In Constable Frozen's photo edit Go Away Anna, Anna breaks down the door of Elsa's ice palace, only to be distracted by her pizza.
• Cao Cao in Farce of the Three Kingdoms, although Guo Jia and Big Xun usually manage to keep him on track.

    Web Videos

• Newer to the Let's Play scene team Drak and Shadow Let's Plays also have a serious problem with waning conversations. Their Let's Play of Shadows of the Empire particularly This episode where they go off on just about anything BUT the game they're playing. Both are well aware of this fact.
• This completely derailed Funday Night Gaming's Let's Play of Skyblock in Minecraft for most of the series.
• The Game Grumps often put their conversations on hold when something unexpected pops up in the game they're playing.
• It's Alive! with Brad: Whenever Brad Leone gets distracted in the kitchen, which is often, the editor will throw in some bizarre cartoon (a pickle playing drums), sound effects (That Poor Cat), or Caption Humor.
• Markiplier has claimed to have been diagnosed with ADHD in at least one of his videos.
• Matthew Santoro:
  • In Do You Have a Short Attention Span?, Matt says that he doesn't have a short attention span, and immediately gets distracted by a bird.
  • In The A.D.D Test, Matt says that he doesn't get distracted easily, and immediately gets distracted by a bird.
• The Nostalgia Chick:
  • Similarly, the Chick gets constantly distracted by puppies, cute jewelry or her team's antics.
  • Speaking of her team, Dr. Tease gets distracted by gerbils when she's trying to warn the Chick that Dark Nella is closer than she thinks.
• The Nostalgia Critic during FernGully 2: "Is this what you humans call ADD? I feel like I can't focus on anythin— oooh, a housefly." (moves off after it) He also displays this in other reviews, especially when he wanders off during a boring film.
• PeanutButterGamer shows shades of this during the Hardcore series or other Let's Plays. In his Super Mario 64 LP on the DS, he mentions in his first video wanting to explain why he's playing on the DS and not the Virtual Console 64 version. He forgets it during that video and has to focus multiple times to recall he hasn't explained yet in the second video. In one livestream, he mentions that both viewers and friends have suggested he may have ADHD, but hasn't really bothered to get a professional opinion on it.
• ScrewAttack: Stuttering Craig suffered from it during his Vortex review.

  Stuttering Craig: Seeing something pretty will never be more important than gameplAY- what is that over there. [pauses] That looks really— I'll be right back. Hold on. That looks really cool. [runs off] IT'S SO SHINY!

• SuperMarioLogan:
  • In the episode "Bowser's Cookies", Chef Pee Pee tells Toad to watch the cookies in the oven, and not to get distracted. And then:

    Toad: Don't get distracted. Don't get distracted. Don't get distracted. Don't get— (GASP) KITTY!
    [switch to another scene]
    Toad: Kitty! I know where you're in! (chuckles) I'm-a get you! Come here! Come here, where are you?

  • Bowser Junior himself is also prone to this. In "Bowser Junior's Candy Bar!", he says that he would not want anything at the gas station (Chef Pee Pee went there with him to buy something), but a Gilligan Cut occurs and he gets distracted by the candy being sold there. He winds up stealing a Hershey's candy bar.
• YouTube personality Tobuscus is this trope personified in his "Lazy Vlog" series, which are often more of a Motor Mouth-fueled stream of consciousness than anything planned. Some recurring distractions approach the level of Catch Phrases, such as "Ooh, an airplane!" or "Hot hot hot!" when seeing an attractive female. He also has a Let's Play channel (called TobyGames), in which he can be counted on to constantly lose track of what he's supposed to be doing, leading to amusing (if occasionally frustrating) misadventures.
• Vsauce: Michael will often get sidetracked and start talking about something only tangentially related to the subject in the video's title. Michael justifies it in video; his goal is to discuss and teach any subjects that he can with the questions in the title only being "hooks" to get the viewer's attention.

    Western Animation

• Jake from Adventure Time. It's especially evident in "Power Animal" when Finn has gone missing and Jake, though genuinely worried about him and determined to track him down, keeps getting distracted by random fun things going on along the way.

  Jake: Take my sandwich, BMO! I'm gonna go find Fi—(gasp) A dancing bug!

• In the Angry Birds Toons episode, "Chuck Time", Chuck gets sidetracked by a butterfly when he's supposed to save Red from falling off a cliff.
• In Arthur, Buster isn't usually this way, but:

  Buster: We're patient, attentive, and — Ooh! Look at the monkey!

  • George is diagnosed with Dyslexia, but the episode in question sees George get caught up in his imagination several times. It's even entitled "The Boy with his Head in the Clouds."
• Beware the Batman villain Magpie is a kleptomaniac who steals pretty shiny things without concern for whether or not they're valuable. This is not Played for Laughs; instead, it underscores her downright terrifying insanity.
• Bob's Burgers: Gene Belcher is notorious for being easily distracted, to the point where "Best Burger" reveals that his family members refer to goofing up due to losing focus as "Gene-ing out".
• Bojack Horseman: Mr. Peanutbutter, being a dog, gets easily distracted, especially whenever he spots his friend Erica.
• Clone High:
  • Gandhi:

    Gandhi: Did you hear? Did you hear? Don't tell Paul Revere. Gandhi is contagious. Totally outrageous. A disease with initials. That's the worst kind. ADD. Has warped. His mind.

  • And Special Guest Tom Green:

    Tom Green: Hi, I'm Ottawa's Tom Green. I live in Hollywood, thank you. So some of you may have been mean to a kid with ADD. That's not cool. Coffee? Anyone for -- coffee anyone? All right, sorry. I like cotton candy. Check out my muscle. Potato chips. It's a Ferris wheel! So I guess what I'm trying to say is — [a plastic grocery bag blows by] Plastic bag! Plastic bag! Plastic bag! Plastic bag! Plastic bag! Plastic bag!

• Chowder of Chowder, although in his case, food is usually involved.
• On Clifford's Puppy Days, it is typically possible for one of the puppies to end a conversation they don't want to have by simply asking "Are we going to talk about X all day, or are we going to play?", which prompts an excited response of "Play, play, play!" At least for a little while.
• Webwolf, Darkwing Duck's ancestor from the episode "Inherit the Whimp" is a barbarian warrior who is easily distracted by round things, every time he spots one he stops what he's doing and says "Ooh a roundy, roundy, roundski!" and goes off to play with it.
• Detentionaire: The skater clique, much to Lee's frustration.

  Lee: Yeah, sort of in the middle of something here! It happened two seconds ago... you probably forgot.

• The Dragon Prince: In the very first episode, Claudia enters in her very first scene absorbed in a book and almost bumping into a tree. Technically, this was a sign of hyperfocus and is a giveaway for ADD. Next to that she has impulsive and chaotic responses, including "ooh shiny" moments for an elf's braid. She is quirky and often misses social cues, which is a symptom as the disorder causes distractions (to ones own thoughts or anything else) in the middle of conversations.
• The Fairly OddParents: Timmy. In "Genie Meanie Minie Mo", when Cosmo and Wanda couldn't grant his wish for a cheese and ham omelet because it was 10:31 AM and it was against Da Rules to grant breakfast wishes after 10:30 AM, Timmy said nothing would take his mind off it until... he noticed a garage sale. Though to be fair, he did still remember his desire for an omelet and checking out that garage sale did coincidentally lead to him getting one.

  Timmy: Well, I'm Timmy Turner. I'm ten years old and I have a short attention span. Also... (pauses for a moment, then walks off)

  • Cosmo lampshades his own attention problems in one episode:

    Cosmo: I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. I have the attention span of a rodent!

• Family Guy:
  • Cleveland Jr., before his departure to The Cleveland Show, was a very hyperactive boy who often found lost interest in something he was good at then turned to something else. In the only episode where he had a major appearance, he becomes a very talented golfer but by the end of the episode, he loses interest and starts kicking the golf ball around like a soccer ball.
  • Peter is no different either in later seasons. Chris even lampshaded one episode after Peter's stint as a pirate in which he quickly loses interest after losing his parrot and found a piano. Most of Peter's antics is due to his "It Amused Me" attitude. If something is not amusing him, he will quickly find something else that will, which makes his focus waver all over. Peter also has a nasty habit going completely off topic when he speaks to someone without missing a beat at all. Brian lampshades this when he asks Peter if he is asking for his help or if he is going to ask another pointless question again.
  • One episode has Peter display an extreme case of being easily distracted. When Peter screws up the timeline in the past by going with Cleveland to a club instead of going out with Lois, it causes him to be married to another woman in the present instead of Lois. Death gives Peter another chance to fix his screw-ups, but Peter winds up screwing up several times (pissing off Lois and then going to the club with Cleveland every time Death gives Peter another shot). Death finally gets pissed off at Peter and tells him he is on his own. Of course, Peter manages to fix everything in the last minute.
  • James Woods, whose animated likeness served as a murderous antagonist for the Griffin family, would often contemplate his revenge against the Griffin family before being distracted by a trail of Reeses Pieces ("Ooh, a piece of candy!" "Ooh, a piece of candy!" "Ooh, a piece of candy!" ... ), before falling victim to a trap box, where he would be restrained until his ultimate arrest — or as the show made it out, to await examination by scientists.
• Reed from Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes is this from the very first episode, "Doomsday".

  Reed: These creatures come from an alternate dimension... A Negative Zone, if you will. It's actually really amazing that—
  Susan: Reed! Big alien monster about to eat us?
  Reed: Oh. Sorry.

• Fish Hooks:
  • Clamantha; her band is even named "Clamantha and the Shiny Objects".
  • Milo is shown to have this in "Fail Fish".
• Freakazoid! frequently dropped whatever he was doing to go on some mundane activity with Cosgrove.

  Freakazoid: Nothing will stand in my way!

  Cosgrove: Hey, Freakazoid, wanna go out for a mint?

  Freakazoid: Okay.

• Glitch Techs: Miko tends to be very hyper and not able to focus on any one thing for more than a few minutes.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Soos veers into this at times. For example, Soos was distracted by a laser pointer in "Double Dipper".

    Soos: I am so glad I turned my head. That dot did not disappoint.

  • Also Mabel; there's this moment from "The Time Traveler's Pig":

    Mabel: Don't worry, brother. Whatever happens, I'll be right here, supporting you every step of the OH MY GOSH, A PIG!!!

• Hip-Hip and Hurra:
  • Hurra on occasion.
  • One episode features a Magpie. As you can imagine, this is her main character flaw...
  • The Coco bird acts this way whenever she sees an occasion to drop other birds her egg.
• Gir from Invader Zim. Where do we even start?

• Mikey from Kappa Mikey has a really short attention span, which even he himself has lampshaded.
• Kim Possible's boyfriend is the poster child of this trope. Lampshaded, of all places, in the episode where Ron is tested whether or not he is actually the hero.
• On King of the Hill, Bobby Hill is mistakenly diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed drugs to combat it. The effects on his behavior are fairly realistic, causing him (among other things) to count the ridges on checkers instead of playing the game and claim to pinpoint by smell the exact moment when a carton of milk in a closed refrigerator has spoiled. (In reality, Bobby had been on a sugar high caused by eating overly sweetened cereal that morning.)
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012) has Minka Mark, the excitable female monkey who fits this trope to a tee.
• The Looney Tunes Show:
  • Daffy Duck has a severe case of this. One such example is when he realizes that Bugs' new dog is a dangerous Tasmanian devil... then he gets distracted by an ad for guitar lessons. Later he tries to warn him again but stops to buy a hooded sweatshirt.
  • Also Lola's new version in the show, to the point she starts rambling in the middle of a short answer about random things and, most of the time, about Bugs.
• Metalocalypse: The members of Dethklok are constantly fiddling with items such as laser pointers and cell phones, even while Ofdensen is trying to convey important matters to them

  Ofdensen: You have a very short attention span!
  Nathan: No, we're not!

• The animals on My Gym Partner's a Monkey go into a hypnotic trance if presented with a shiny object. For that reason, they're banned from school grounds. Jake uses a faceted glass doorknob from Adam's house to put the entire school under his power. They spend the whole day talking about "monkey butt". Pretty pretty, shiny shiny...
• In episode 7 of the second season of Miraculous Ladybug, Gigantitan, the Villain of the week gets very easily distracted by anything that looks like a lollipop. Justified, since he is a baby who accidentally got akumatized after throwing a tantrum over some lollipop.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie from is sometimes prone to this. She interrupted her friends' Shut Up, Hannibal! moment against The Spirit of Chaos for one last swig of chocolate milk rain.
  • The Pinkie Pie clones created in the episode "Too Many Pinkie Pies" are this cranked Up to Eleven. So much so that the ultimate test to determine the real Pinkie is A Good, Old-Fashioned Paint Watching, which only the real Pinkie is determined enough to pass.
• In Peter Rabbit, the kitten Mittens is "always alert and always on guard."

  Mittens: Ooh, a feather! (bats feather) Mew, mew, mew, mew! (falls asleep)

• Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz of Phineas and Ferb has a bad case of this. He'll be explaining his latest evil scheme, then digress midway-through to ramble about how a particular word sounds weird to him, or pause mid-defeat to exclaim over a band.
• Pinky in Pinky and the Brain has a severely limited attention span, which is made even worse by the fact that he barely understands Brain's monologues about world domination anyway. It's lampshaded several times.
  • There's also Precious the evil cat when she announces her plans for world domination she'll get distracted by round shiny things or feel the urge to run around the house for no particular reason.
• In The Problem Solverz, it doesn't take much to distract Alfe. "Did somebody say ninjas?!"
• The kindergarteners from Recess. Justified - they are all five years old.
• Scooby-Doo
  • Downplayed with Scrappy for the most part in Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, but-Did somebody say monster?! Lemme at it!
  • Fred from Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated not only obsesses over traps, anything remotely shiny derails his train of thought.
• Entrapta from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has this, particularly in regards to anything technological.
  • Scorpia has a bit of this too. In the middle of realising Seahawk is with La Résistance, she gets distracted by the prospect of seeing a duck and looks away from him.
• The Sheep in the Big City episode "Beauty and the Bleats" has Sheep encounter a genie who gives him three wishes. After using them up and being trapped in a humanoid form, Sheep gets his chance to trick the genie into giving him three more wishes when he discovers that the genie is distracted by luminous objects and uses a giant torch to lure him into being trapped inside a lamp again before freeing him from the lamp once more so that he'll have to grant him three wishes again.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Brother's Little Helper", Bart, after pulling a few too many pranks in one day, was diagnosed with ADD and put on "Focusyn". The episode was more focused on the side-effects of the drug, which wound up making him insane and paranoid. Although... he turned out to be right about major league baseball spying on people with satellites. In fact, his reaction to the medication is Truth in Television. ADHD medications like Ritalin and Adderall have increased anxiety as one of the nastier side effects. Psychiatrists sometimes prescribe anti-depressants or anti-anxiety meds with the stimulants to balance that out and symptoms of depression are official contraindications against usage of the drugs.
  • There's another one, in which he's committed to writing a school essay:

    Bart: Gotta study, gotta study, gotta look at that bird...

  • Even in the early episodes before the characters became very exaggerated Bart showed signs of having concentration issues. In "Bart Gets an F", a season 2 episode, he promises to do better on the next history test, as the teachers were saying he might have to repeat his grade, and when he really sits down at his desk (which he put in the basement so he would not get distracted by the fun snow day everyone else was having), he finds he cannot remember anything and cannot concentrate. Even after studying hard he still fails the test, and only scrapes a D by remembering a bit of information that was historical and a fact but was not really relevant.
  • Homer also shows signs of this one. For example, this exchange in "The Joy of Sect" between him and a recruiter for the Movementarian cult:

    Homer: Wait, I'm confused. So the cops knew that internal affairs were setting them up?
    Recruiter: What are you talking about? There was nothing like that in the movie...
    Homer: I know, you see when I get bored I make up my own movie, I have a very short attention span... look a bird!
    [runs outside and chases it]

  • In "Fear of Flying", upon discovering a man identical to himself lying knocked out in front of Moe's:

    Homer: [gasp] Oh, my god, this man is my exact double! [GASP] That dog has a puffy tail! [chases dog] Here puff, here puff! [giggles]

  • In "Homer Goes to College", he left the classroom to chase a dog, running merrily around a tree.
  • When Marge wrote a novel and Homer promised to read it:

    Homer: No, gotta read Marge's book. Can't get distracted. Distracted, that's a funny word. Does anyone ever get "tracted"? I'm gonna call the suicide hotline and ask them.

  • More a case of I Resemble That Remark! but it qualifies for this as well:

    Homer: ...and I'm not easily impressed! WOW, a blue car!

  • Played for Drama in "Alone Again, Natura-Diddily" where Homer taunts girls at a racetrack into firing their T-shirt cannons at him. They do, but Homer gets distracted when he sees a bobby pin on the ground. He bends down to pick it up, and the T-shirts hit Maude as she returns to her seat with food for her family. Maude is knocked over the grandstand and falls to her death.
• The South Park episode "Timmy 2000" has the entire elementary school diagnosed with ADHD, and every single kid in town was prescribed Ritalin; the teachers then complained that the school was now calm to the point of dullness (and how did they illustrate this dullness? Everyone suddenly had a yearning to go and see Phil Collins in concert), and everyone was prescribed a Ritalin antidote, Ritalout.
• Superman: The Animated Series:
  • Lobo just might have this problem, if this line when he shoots up a police station to draw Supes is any indication...

    Lobo: Man, this is getting lame, I thought he'd be here by now... WHOA!! MOSQUITO!!! (opens fire on bug)

  • Lois Lane gives her dockside informant Bibbo Bibbowski some coins with instructions to call the Daily Planet if she doesn't return from her investigation of a suspicious ship. He gets distracted and buys himself a soda instead. Fortunately, Superman shows up anyway.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) portrays Michelangelo as easily distracted. Best exemplified in this quote from "The Pulverizer".

  Michelangelo: You guys always underestimate me— Ooh, gum!

• The Tick, of course. In a Journey to the Center of the Mind episode, his own brain explains "I'm easily distracted by shiny objects." Later on, Tick sees something shiny in the distance and runs off to check it out.
• Rusty Venture from The Venture Bros. demonstrates a serious case of this in "Escape To The House Of Mummies Part II", getting distracted from trying to rescue his sons and bodyguard to having a Magic Versus Science shrinking contest with Dr Orpheus, getting distracted from that to filling out a celebrity crush questionnaire with White and Billy, and then they all go eat rice pudding (while Rusty wonders if he forgot something). It shows up in other episodes too. Maybe his early-seasons amphetamine habit was a form of self-medication.
  • Rusty's son Hank sure seems to have inherited whatever it is, but a lot more of a goofy "lookit the shiny" version. In one episode, while asking his twin brother Dean if his Mr. Imagination tendencies might point to something more serious being wrong with him, Dean tells him he probably just has an overactive mind... but Hank has already gotten distracted.
  • Pete White has a repeated tendency to get distracted by shiny objects belonging to his and Billy's Arch-Enemy St Cloud, which usually gets on Billy's nerves. Billy isn't totally above the shiny object fascination, though, getting swatted by White in one episode for trying to grab an OSI agent's shiny, shiny gun.
• The Mask:
  • The Mask declares that he is going to save the day and stop the villains but first he's going to goof around or get distracted by trivial things which does tend to let the villains get away but he does get himself back on track to stop them eventually.
  • Masked Milo gets distracted by other things as well but does get himself back on track as well.
  • Eve also suffers from this as she tends to focus more on kissing Stanley while there's something happening but she does get herself back on track.
• In Episode 11 of Wild Kratts, Martin is in a bass suit and sees a fish lure, causing him to say "Shiny... Flashy... YUMMY!" as he then darts at the lure, trying to eat it.
• Violet from WordGirl is easily distracted by anything remotely cute or pretty. Puppies, butterflies, paintings, cats...

---

Ooh, another trope!

---

Rebound

Rebound gets distracted by a ball while trying to be focused.

Alternative Title(s): Distracted By The Shiny, ADHD, Easily Distracted, No Attention Span, Attention Deficit Oh Shiny

Box Ring Design Tool Distracted By Shiny Objects

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AttentionDeficitOohShiny

Posted by: stewartfralke.blogspot.com

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