"oh ever notice how if a cartoon guy has a skateboard the wheels will NEVER be on the ground EVER."
For whatever reason, in promotional art/stock art/what-have-you, anyone depicted on a vehicle is depicted in mid-air, perhaps catching some radically awesome air if they're meant to be "cool".
Note that cars are generally an exception to this rule, unless the image is for an action series.
This follows simple logic — a picture of someone on a skateboard would be realistic but boring, right? You have to capture the attention of those looking with edgy poses! Nothing sells a stunt sports game like a shot of someone in midair.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Attack on Titan:
- It has a photo fad that involve people jumping on "giants"
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- In-series, Eren gets a Pastel-Chalked Freeze Frame (sans the pastel chalk, this pops up a lot in key scenes in the anime, kinda like ThreeHundred's "pause-slomo" gimmick) moment in the 1st opening.
- another occurs in episode 3 where we are shown that Eren can finally proficiently use the 3DMG by having him swing around the woods a bit using the 3DMG boosters the entire time then having him swing to the treetops for a shot of him in midair Against the Setting Sun.
- It has a photo fad that involve people jumping on "giants"
Comic Books
- Wonder Woman (1942): On several Golden Age Wonder Woman covers Di is depicted riding a jumping white horse. Diana very rarely even rides a horse in the tale inside.
Films — Live-Action
- Justified in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the Amblin Entertainment logo that the film inspired. The bike really is flying!
- Played with in the movie version of Ella Enchanted: Ella was "blessed" with obedience, so she must do what she's told. When Ella is ordered by someone to "stop!" during a leap over a barrel, Ella is stopped in mid air in a split.
Live-Action TV
- In a body-painting challenge on Face/Off, one of the backgrounds in front of which a team's models posed depicts an elephant on a skateboard in mid-jump.
Comic Strips
- In B.C., the wheels are shown as hovering to suggest motion.
- Calvin's wagon in Calvin and Hobbes. The family's car is sometimes shown hovering as well, mostly in the earlier strips.
Video Games
- JumpStart Adventures 5th Grade: Jo Hammet, Kid Detective's cover art. Most noticeable in the deluxe edition.
- The cover of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and many other extreme sports video games. Highly justified in the case of the former, as the crazy unrealistic physics may have you in the air for 15 seconds, and that's without cheats.
- God of War's Kratos is often pictured in his◊ "Kratos is about to stab something huge" pose.
Web Animation
- In the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games short "Photo Finished", Photo Finish gets some of these shots of a student playing basketball, with the help of backlighting, a fan, a trampoline, and a bin full of balls.
Web Comics
- Homestuck: Dave Strider provides the page quote, and in-story ends up making the UNREAL AIR... which flies off on its own soon after.
- This edition of Ask Axe Cop (focusing on xtreme sports) shows the titular character doing this.
- Done by a preacher in The Perry Bible Fellowship. It doesn't work out too well.
Western Animation
- Fred's bowling ball sometimes does this on The Flintstones. Moreover, a lot of Hanna-Barbera toons do this with cars.
- Kick Buttowski, being a pint-sized cartoon daredevil and all, poses practically stuck in the air quite often.
- Rocket Power was very fond of this trope, with it showing up in the title sequence and in shots within episodes themselves. Considering the show was about a group of kids that loved pretty much every Totally Radical extreme sport in existence, it lent itself well to this (sometimes it was even invoked by the resident magazine publisher in training or the resident videographer in training).
Real Life
- The Trope Maker is the series of photographs "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop" taken by photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, which demonstrated for the first time that horses have all four hooves simultaneously off the ground at one point while galloping.
- Sean White, the "Flying Tomato", was shown on NBC's Olympic coverage to get at least a good two feet or more of air above other contestants on the halfpipe.
