"I flew upstream in a plane with pontoons, and landed on the Amazon above Belim without seeing a single person in a loincloth, although I saw many Michael Jordan T-shirts."
A Discredited Trope from the days of the White Man's Burden in works depicting deepest darkest Africa, generally describing the moment before the Hollywood Natives rise up and overrun the compound, or abduct the white woman for sacrifice. Often indicated by the natives playing Jungle Drums. The phrase is said to go back to the 1933 film Island of Lost Souls, in which Dr. Moreau says this of his half-human / half-beast creations, and has since become a stock phrase for trouble brewing in a group of people. Often a prelude to being Chased by Angry Natives. Natives, like white villagers, may take up Torches and Pitchforks when they get restless enough to form a mob. See also Powderkeg Crowd.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- MAD once had an article Modern endings to classic movie lines. One of the lines featured was "The natives are restless tonight", cut to a disco filled with partying locals.
Films — Live-Action
- In Five Came Back, there are headhunters in the Amazon jungle who are about to kill the plane crash survivors. The crash survivors know this, because they can hear the beating drums that mean the headhunters are about to attack. Certainly not very culturally sensitive, but necessary in this instance to provide the dramatic tension, as the survivors have to fix the plane so they can escape before they're killed.
- Island of Lost Souls: Trope Namer.
- Terry and the Pirates: Dr. Lee's sidekick actually says "The natives are acting strangely." The reason is that evil baddie Fang's men have arrived and are getting the Chinese natives to abandon the caravan, to leave Dr. Lee and his two white companions defenseless.
Literature
- In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Beyond the Black River," the Picts, who are using Jungle Drums and raiding the colonists. To be sure the Picts are both white (a point lampshaded in the story) and in what would one day be Europe, but the trope is treated identically.
- Played straight in Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth, The Mark of the Horse Lord, Frontier Wolf and other novels, except that the natives are the ancient British annoying the colonial Romans.
- McAuslan by George MacDonald Fraser. When his unit is posted to a desert fort and part of their remit is to put down any "native uprisings", MacNeill concludes that some staff officer has been watching The Desert Song. Given that the soldiers aren't silly enough to antagonise the locals (who are more interested in their own affairs than the nationalist sentiment of the city dwellers) they have no incentive to rebel.
- In his black farces of South Africa in The Apartheid Era, Tom Sharpe uses this as a theme: he exploits the paranoia of white South Africans, especially Afrikaaners that They Will Rise Up And Slaughter Us In Our Beds and that prior to being slaughtered, Our Womenfolk Will Experience A Fate Worse Than Death. In Indecent Exposure, this is a preoccupation of the South African Police Force, especially BOSS.
- Done in A Very Strange Trip by L. Ron Hubbard - the protagonist interrupts the spooked natives with a sniper rifle that shoots joke holograms, starting with Elvis Presley's ghosts dancing around a cursing Josef Stalin (long story).
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: Security chief Garibaldi uses the phrase to comment on rising tensions between the station's inhabitants and the rowdy, recently-arrived Earth Force Marine Corps using the place as a stopover.
- Doctor Who:
- In "Inferno," a mineral slime from inside the earth's crust turns people exposed to it into homicidal werewolf-like Primords. At one point, a character (trapped in a building with them) says to the Doctor, "The natives are getting restless."
- In "Carnival of Monsters", we get the variation "The functionaries are restive".
- A Victorian era hunter in "Ghostlight" comments that "The ladies are restless" during a catfight.
- Parodied in The Goodies, in an episode set in South Africa where "Apart-Height" has replaced apartheid and a group of jockeys are planning an uprising; Tim observes that "the jockeys are restless tonight".
Music
- Jimmy Buffett's song "The Natives Are Restless Tonight", in which the singer warns people not to go outside, because... yeah.
- The Cramps have a song called "The Natives Are Restless" on their 1981 album "Psychedelic Jungle".
- Pandora's Box has the song "Original Sin (The Natives Are Restless Tonight)".
Newspaper Comics
- There was a collection of The Far Side entitled The Chickens Are Restless.
- One specific strip had a bunch of native tribesmen meeting outside their huts in the middle of the night with a caption like "And, hey, here comes N'Butu. Looks like none of us can get to sleep tonight!"
Video Games
- A modern variation is appears in Act of War, where the Task Force Talon is driving through London at the onset of a major summit, with thousands of protesters lining the streets. Jefferson even quotes the trope name word by word.
- In what may be a subversion, the crowd does not actually turn aggressive, but it is riled into panic by gunmen firing at the crowd.
- In Rimworld, your colony may be attacked by hostile Future Primitives, the low-tech descendants of the planet's past civilisation. They'll send raiding parties to cause havoc, and despite their primitive weaponry, their sheer numbers and melee prowess can overwhelm your colonists if defences are inadequate. If you want a Perspective Flip, the Lost Tribe starting scenario allows you to play as these planetary natives and fend off pirate attacks. Incidentally, without a Game Mod that adds a Tribal equivalent to the pirate factions, the only way to get these attacks on a regular basis is if you do something to anger them.
- Alluded to in Starcraft II Wings Of Liberty single player campaign. After the Terran forces land on the heavily Zerg-infested world of Char and make a temporary stronghold on it's surface, Tychus J. Findlay says these exact words when implying the Zerg are preparing for massive counterattack.
Western Animation
- In The Jetsons episode "Test Pilot", a small robot called the "Peek-a-Boo Capsule" is travelling through George's body and finds that his heartbeat is unusually rhythmic.
Doctor: That's kind of a strange beat, isn't it?Capsule: Yeah, guess the natives are restless tonight.