"Nation's Eldery Hit Hard By Closing Automatic Doors."
Technology has proven to be quite useful over the years, and none more so than the automatic door, which has helped remove the need for people to physically open doors. However, like all technology, automatic doors have an opportunity to go wrong at the worst times, usually by opening or closing when they are not intended to or just refusing to open at all when they should.
This can be Played for Laughs by having someone suffer Amusing Injuries by virtue of being in the way of the doors when they close on them. However, this can also be Played for Drama, either by having the person suffer serious injury (usually by having their fingers seriously harmed from within the door), trapping them in a dangerous location, or even outright killing them depending on the force of the door closing. The exact reason for this varies — sometimes, it's a simple malfunction, but other times, it may be engineered by a third party, usually either to cause mayhem, trap the person in a needed location, or as a way of killing them. Sometimes, the doors may get broken as a result of a person not realizing that they're automatic and trying to force them open manually.
Compare Door Slams You. May also be exploited by someone as a form of Door Judo, Tactical Door Use, or Tae Kwon Door. If the automatic doors belong to an elevator, it may lead to Elevator Failure.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Golden Wind: During his fight with Formaggio, Narancia attempts to enter a building while his body is shrinking, with the automatic doors unable to open due to his low weight, and when he does manage to get it open, they shut immediately with him stuck between.
- Stone Ocean: Upon Pucci achieving Made In Heaven, as Ermes steps into a nearby building, the automatic doors open and shut so quickly, her foot was nearly crushed.
- Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible: As part of Shiraishi's ability to be practically invisible, he notes to Kubo-san that sometimes automatic doors don't detect him, necessitating him doing things like hopping up and down or jogging in place.
Comic Books
- The Simpsons: In "Tales from the Kwik-E-Mart", a man walks into the store only to get bifurcated when a malfunctioned automatic door closes abruptly.
Eastern Animation
- Booba: In "Supermarket", Booba tries to leave the supermarket, but the automatic doors leading out refuse to open for them. The doors themselves seem to be sentient, having picked up that he was trying to grab a block of cheese without paying, and even seems to be laughing at his misfortune. It isn't until he exercises the cheese away that they open up.
Film — Animation
- Toy Story 2: Not technically a malfunction, as the door works as intended, but the toys who go to Al's Toy Barn to attempt to rescue Woody discover they can't open the automatic door, as they are too light for the pressure pad that activates it. Buzz has the idea for them all to jump at the same time, which activates it.
- WALL•E: While WALL•E stalks EVE in a supermarket, he clumsily knocks over a bunch of trolleys that start rolling in his direction. He tries to escape through an automatic door but it fails on him and so he gets crushed by the trolleys. Then the door opens for extra mockery.
Film — Live-Action
- In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Sam is on the verge of returning to America but witnesses the attack of a woman in an art gallery by a mysterious black-gloved assailant dressed in a raincoat. Attempting to reach her, Sam is trapped between two mechanically-operated glass doors and can only watch as the villain makes his escape.
- In La Chèvre, the Born Unlucky hero detective Perrin runs into a sliding door at the airport that fails to open
. This slapstick scene becomes a plot point when Perrin learns from the airport nurse that the missing girl he is after had the same happening to her which provides a lead for him to follow.
- Gremlins:
- Gremlins (1984): The novelization mentions that the Gremlins messed with automatic doors in some stores by making them open normally but then slam shut with enough speed and force to injure people.
- Gremlins 2: The New Batch: The Clamp Entrymatic, the automatic revolving door to the Clamp Building, malfunctions as a person tries to go through it, suddenly spinning at a fast speed that causes the person to get thrown into another.
- The Living Daylights: After making contact with James Bond at an amusement park, Saunders gets killed when Necros rigs an automatic door to close extremely fast when the former walks through it.
Literature
- Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest: Kousuke Endou is such an Invisible Introvert that he reportedly sometimes went unnoticed by automatic doors back in Japan.
- In Life, the Universe and Everything, all the doors on The Heart of Gold are controlled by AIs who enjoy their work a little too much: every time someone walks through them, they either thank the user or just sigh with pleasure. When Zaphod Beeblebrox realizes a bunch of Krikkit robots has boarded the ship, he very emphatically tells the door that he needs it to open and close silently, so as to not give away his position to the hostile robots. The door does open and close silently for him—then immediately afterward, loudly asks Zaphod if that was quiet enough for him.
- Tales of the Bounty Hunters: In "Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88," the killer robot IG-88 copies his mind to the second Death Star's central computer, intending to hijack it for his own war against all organic life. But until that war can begin, he bides his time by trolling Emperor Palpatine with the station's automatic doors, opening and closing them at the least convenient times.
Live-Action TV
- The Brittas Empire:
- In "Opening Day", the automated doors leading to the centre begin to malfunction, closing and opening when they shouldn't and at one point trapping the baby carriage containing Carole's son Ben between the doors. It's a bit of a problem as it's meant to be the opening day for the Leisure Centre and it's not helped when Brittas kicks out the person meant to fix it under the belief that he was Laura's friend Michael with a grubby dress sense. Eventually, Michael does show up, gets trapped within the doors, and gets electrocuted trying to reach the opening mechanisms for the door, trapping everyone inside as a result.
- In "http://etc", Tim and Gavin enlist the help of a Teen Genius to disrupt the recently computerised centre with a virus, causing the automatic doors to cause havoc and trapping Councillor Drugget, Mr. Driscoll, and a random elderly man between them.
- In the closing credits for Get Smart, Max walks through a series of doors that close automatically behind him. When the last set of doors fails to close he walks back toward them to see what the problem is. Then they close and hit him on the nose.
- Just Shoot Me!: In "King Lear Jet," Jack has a remote control installed for his office door, which begins flipping open and closed whenever someone uses the microwave. More malfunctions crop up when a thunderstorm begins, and at the end of the episode it clobbers Maya into semiconsciousness, leading to her and Jack reenacting Cordelia's death scene from King Lear.
- Odd Squad:
- Invoked by O'Brian in "Life of O'Brian". He accepts Olive's apology about her throwing a basketball that accidentally hit him on the head, but refuses to accept her apology about "the other thing" she did. As a result, she gets mad and begins to march back to the bullpen, but finds that he locked the automatic doors as a way to troll her. He ends up opening them again when she sarcastically thanks him and tells him he's making her day.
- In "There Might Be Dragons", a power failure in Headquarters causes the automatic doors to stop working, including the doors in the tube lobby (which Otto ends up slamming into when he tries to walk through them) and the doors leading into the bullpen. Olive and Otto are forced to manually pry these doors open to get to where they need to go.
- Invoked by O'Malley in "O is Not For Old", when he forcefully closes the automatic doors in the tube lobby to prevent Oprah from going through them to get to the bullpen. Oprah, being a Pintsized Powerhouse, manages to slightly pry open both ten-ton doors, but O'Malley forcefully closes them again and then sends a few enemies down the tubes for her to fight as a diversion.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "Contagion", the Enterprise crew witnesses its sister ship, the Yamato, explode with all hands lost due to a failure of its antimatter fuel containment.note The clue leading them to the cause is within the Yamato Captain's personal log; a long-abandoned planet known as Iconia, and an alien scanning probe that the ship encountered while in orbit. As the Enterprise travels towards Iconia, they begin having systems problems, including the invoked trope of the automatic doors failing at random times. When they arrive, the Enterprise encounters an identical probe launched from the surface, and Captain Picard plans to tractor it into the ship to study it. Geordi, suddenly discovering the cause of the malfunctions, desperately tries to hail the bridge, but the communication systems go down at that very moment. The trope is then invoked for drama, as he also tries to use a turbolift in Main Engineering to quickly get to the bridge, but the doors fail to open there as well. Geordi is only able to just get to the bridge in time, after being thrown about in the malfunctioning turbolift on his way, to warn Picard and the bridge crew of the danger that the probe poses.
- An episode of Star Trek: Voyager has Seven of Nine make some modifications to Voyager's computer, causing a number of malfunctions on board the ship. One of these involves Chakotay having trouble leaving his quarters, where the doors to his quarters keep opening and closing randomly, so he has to leap through the doors in order to leave his quarters.
Video Games
- This is a recurring obstacle in the Dead Space games, requiring Isaac to use his Stasis module to slow said malfunctioning doors down, lest he risk being smashed to pieces by them.
- The hacking system in FTL: Faster Than Light can send a drone to target one of the enemy ship's systems, additionally shutting the doors leading to that system, forcing the ship's crew to use firepower to breach them while opening for potential boarders. Using a hacking drone on the ship's door system allows for applying that effect to all the doors on the ship.
- Instinct contains a lethal version in one of the labs, where a malfunctioning, automated sliding door covered in blood crushes everything that tries crossing and turning zombies coming from the other room into a pile of red stuff. You'll need to find a control panel to stop said door momentarily before dashing through, but take note that said door can suddenly reactivate and squash you.
- One of Yakuza 4's Revelations sees a drunk salaryman wearing a Necktie Headband confronting a young punk harassing a woman. While he exits the Poppo convenience store, the tie gets caught onto the automatic sliding door behind him, which causes the salaryman to fly backwards, delivering a kick into the punk's face, and the salaryman to fall flat on his back, with the automatic doors trying to close in on him. It gives Saejima the Essence of Clotheslining and Kiryu the Essence of Taunting.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Painting", Richard tries to go to work, but the automatic door doesn't work for him. He has to go behind another employee to get inside. He spends so much time struggling with both the automatic door and the elevator that he gets fired.
- Futurama:
- As part of the Running Gag of Fry being injured by doors in "Space Pilot 3000", he gets hit several times by automatic doors, with one even slamming down on his head. These comedic failures also help to promote the idea that the future is not as great as one would think.
- Part of Bender's ability to manipulate electric objects as a ghost in "Ghost in the Machines" includes being able to open and close automatic doors. Naturally, he uses it in an attempt to scare Fry to death, who is left having to time his jump through one of the doors of the Planet Express Building.
- The Simpsons: In "Bart Sells His Soul", Bart tries to get into the automatic doors of the Kwik-E-Mart, but finds that they won't open for him. The fact that it opens up for everyone else leads Bart to become convinced that he really has sold his soul away.
