I think Im right in saying the definitive appearance of this device was in one of the Indiana Jones movies (but please correct me if that isn’t the case); the hero just manages to squeeze through a door that is closing, then reaches back to retrieve his hat, but I’ve seen it referenced in a couple of subsequent movies and I suspect there are many more that I haven’t seen or noticed, so, let’s see if we can list them all; for starters:
Chicken Run - as Rocky and Ginger escape from the pie machine (Ginger’s hat)
Shrek 2 - as the ensemble escape from the potion room (Puss’ hat)
Not a movie, but the entire sequence is parodied in a Simpson’s episode. Bart lifts Homer’s change jar, Homer chases him, trips rolls down the stairs after Bart (a la the Boulder) Bart escapes through the garage door as it is closing and grabs his cap at the last minute.
A recent episode of Scrubs referenced it. The hospital was in lockdown from a suspected case of SARS, and in one of JD’s fantasies, someone was running out as a large door was sliding down. They then reached bck under to grab the hat, a la Indiana Jones.
Not the exact same situation, but Miller’s Crossing is a movie with recurrent references to hats throughout the film. It has been a little while since I’ve seen the movie, but can anyone else recall the hat scenes?
Is it parodied in Toy Story 2? - I know there’s a scene where the toys are rushing to escape the store, Mr Potato Head throws his hat (which itself is a parody of a Bond villain’s sidekick) and wedges the door open, but does he reach back through for the hat?
Raiders doesn’t have a spike chamber. Indy jumps over the chasm, desparately grabs onto a root, slowly climbs out, and goes under the descending wall, grabbing his hat at the last minute.
The spike chamber in ToD would be a repeat of this action (though I can’t honestly say I remember it in that film).
I never got to see him play personally, but I understand Willie Mays used to give his manager a heart attack with his habit of going back to grab his ballcap before running to get underneath a fly ball!
'Course I read a lot of “True Sports Anecdotes” books back when I was a teenager. The book went on to say that he took to wearing an oversized ballcap to make the stunt happen more often. Real crowd-pleaser, that “Say-hey” kid was.
Yep – one of my favorite movies. And not the same thing at all, but lots of references to the hat. Even a line where Tom is talking about a dream where his hat flew off, and Verna guesses that he chased it. Tom: “Nah. It stayed a hat. And no I didn’t go chasing it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat.” (which of course Tom has done in the movie already, literally and figuratively).
Yosemite Sam did something similar to this in the Bugs Bunny short “Piker’s Peak” when he was escaping from a falling boulder. He managed to get out of the way of the rock, but then he went back to grab his hat. As you might expect, he didn’t quite make it and got hit by the boulder.