"From this bag here why I can pull most anything imag'nable
Like office desks and lava lights and Bert who is a cannibal."
Hammerspace is the notional place that things come from when they are needed, and where they go back to when not. The term was fan coined as the place cartoon characters and anime/manga characters would store the overly-large hammers and assorted weaponry they had a propensity for hitting each other with, especially for comedic effect.
The actual location of hammerspace is very hard to determine. There seems to be a great deal of it behind people's backs and on the opposite side (
from the camera, that is) of
thin things like lampposts and slender trees. It also hides in people's coats, closets,
Clown cars, large sacks, and occasionally
down their pants.
Further research into the exact location of Hammerspace awaits solution of a few more basic questions. Such as: "What happens when you turn a
Bag of Holding inside out?" and "Why is the inside of
the TARDIS only
that much larger than its exterior?"
It's also referred to as "hyperspace", but that term gets a little confused with the
SF term related to
Faster-than-Light Travel (see
Subspace Or Hyperspace). Just to confuse things further, "subspace" is a word used in
Transformers fandom for Hammerspace. It is called "katanaspace" in
Highlander fandom, "back pockets" in the cartoon
roleplaying game Toon, and referred to simply as "Elsewhere" in the
Fantasy Kitchen Sink roleplaying game
Exalted.
There are multiple versions, in order of size:
- Basic Hammerspace - This version contains only a few things, not because it is limited in capacity, but because that is all it is ever used for - for example a large weapon, or Optimus Prime's trailer. It is usually played for convenience, and most viewers give it a Hand Wave, although there is occasional lampshading.
- Game Hammerspace - Used frequently in games - many of your inventory items are much too large or too heavy to be carried normally, and this is where they are stored until they are used. Game Hammerspace may or may not be infinite, depending on whether your inventory has a limited number of items, but it still holds many things without spoiling the lining of your coat.
- Infinite Hammerspace - This version is played with a bent towards comedy. It can traditionally hold as much as the joke requires it to hold, may have multiple dimensions to its capacity (eg somebody looking in and finding one thing, closing the 'door' and looking in again to find something else), and often gets larger as the show goes on.
To take even more comedy out of what is already impossible, a character with established access to Infinite Hammerspace may, after packing it full of things, finally fill it up. With Basic Hammerspace, they are more likely to lose access to it for some reason and be unable to retrieve an item.
All
Point-and-Click adventure games had this to an extent or another, because of the technical limitations of the medium preventing these games from having the hundreds of thousands of sprites necessary to represent your character holding any combination of inventory items you can have. So it's usually treated humorously instead.
Sub Tropes include:
Physicists are still split over whether or not there is a Hammerspace-
Hammertime continuum.
Example subpages:
Other examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
- The GEICO gecko is apparently an expert at using hammerspace; he is shown to be able to hide a cell phone and wallet larger than his entire body on his person, confusing his boss
. Further confusing the boss is that neither he nor the viewer sees the gecko produce the items. The cell phone was already on the table and the wallet is seen only after he turns back around after he talks to a waiter.
- Cara Confused from the UK's Confused.com ads has been shown to pull various objects from her pocket, including a house! Many people have "confused" this for something dirtier, as the way every instance is animated seems very out of context.
Fan Fic
- In the Jackie Chan Adventures and Teen Titans crossover fanfiction A Shadow Of The Titans, Jade mentally lampshades this with Suzano and his staff (bonus points for actually using the word "hammerspace").
- Mercury uses and abuses the Keeper's storage ability in Dungeon Keeper Ami to great effect. It can be used to construct complicated machinery and archetecture, store spells for later deployment, catch falling minions and deposite them safely, and teleport.
- Calvin grabs a bicycle out of nowhere in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series. "Hey! Where'd you get that bicycle?"
- Nanaki (Red XIII) seems to have this in the fic "Courage to Change the Things You Can." It's used as the story's 'real world' explanation for the massive amounts of storage space the game gives you, but no one else understands how he's doing it and whenthe fic's O.C. main character finally gets mad enough about it to demand an explanation Red replies "I understand your confusion. But I like all of you too much to risk making your primitive hominid brains explode from the revelation."
- Lampshaded in the Memoirs of InuYasha's father. The narrator several times wonders where his clothing and equipment go when he transforms into a dog.
- Later hilariously exploited when the characters need to carry a large amount of luggage, so just give it all to the narrator and have him turn into a dog to whisk it all away to Hammer Space.
- In James Bond fan film Diamond's Cut, terrorist sniper at the beginning of London scene uses a laser sight. Try as hard as you might, there is no way you’re going to find it on his rifle, probably because the actual effect was obtained through the use of laser pointer.
Manhwa
- The Inventories from Tower of God create the illusion of this, but actually, they are just invisible.
Music
Mythology
- Thor of Norse Mythology could make his hammer Mjolnir shrink to an incredibly tiny size, and be pulled out of seemingly nowhere, and is perhaps the first user of this trope. Another god owns a ship that he can fold up and stick in his pocket.
- In traditional Chinese folklore, many powerful people essentially had sleeves that could store everything. Being trapped in one was generally a sign that you were screwed.
Theatre
- In William Shakespeare's Othello, during the eponymous character's final scene, he pulls out weapon after weapon, as if from hammerspace.
Web Animation
- Dead Fantasy Part II. Yuna reaches into her clothing and pulls out two ether bottles to revive an exhausted Tifa. They're so large that there's no way they could have fit in her clothing normally.
