How many instances can we come up with “the scene”? You’ve seen it a hundred times - a static long shot of a hallway with multiple doors facing each other. One or more folks are being chased by opponents. They chase each other through one door, to emerge through another, then another, then another. Popular in cartoons, but there are live action examples.
Here’s an example of one such chase in this Snoopy cartoon. It starts about at 5:58 minutes into the clip. (I couldn’t find a shorter clip that just cut to the chaseBa-dump bump!)
This is such a standard trope, that I can’t believe it doesn’t have a name for it. Anybody know what this is called? How old is this gimmick? Was it originally a cartoon trope or did it originate in live-action movies (I wouldn’t be surprised to know the Three Stooges or Oliver & Hardy did at one time or another.)
Know often as Scooby Doo Doors, it’s been around. The earliest use listed here is 1931 in a “Flip the Frog” cartoon. A search on Wikipedia comes up with a claim that the Three Stooges used it, with no cite.
It’s not a chase, but there’s a scene like this in Yellow Submarine when Old Fred follows Ringo into a hallway lined with doors where they gather the other Beatles. Everytime they enter a door, the hallway fills with monsters and assorted surrealistic objects darting in and out of the doors.
Heh, the Three Stooges used it a lot in their shorts (often using recycled footage) - one example was ‘For Crimin’ Out Loud’, but there were many more.
A slightly different example (no criminal intent involved) was ‘A Merry Mix-up’, where three sets of ‘identical’ triplet Stooges (9 stooge ‘brothers’ all together) run in and out of the doors of a Nightclub hallway, confusing the heck of a frustrated waiter (well, he had a cleaver, so maybe some criminal intent was involved) .
Jackie Chan’s “Mr. Nice Guy” had one. It takes place in a construction site so there’s no roof (camera can follow the action from overhead) and it’s high off the ground so eventually someone has to open a door and start to charge through before realizing they’re about to leap into thin air.
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