When your characters need to see what's going on in that room over there, but they don't quite wanna risk coming all the way out into the open...
...when your characters all want to see rather than just sending one person to check so s/he can come back and tell the others, what do you do?
The Scooby Stack! We've all Seen It a Million Times in cartoons and comedies: one head pops out from behind a corner or doorframe. Another head pops out above the first. And one more above that.
Because Cartoon Physics works differently, you can even get a Scooby Stack of people popping out from behind a tree or other item too thin for the thinnest person to hide behind.
Though Scooby-Doo's Meddling Kids gets credit for Trope Namer, this trope may be Older than You Think.
Occasionally thwarted by someone surprising them by opening the door so they all fall on top of each other.
Not to be confused with the tall, stacked sandwiches enjoyed by Scooby and Shaggy.
When investigating Mugen Academy in Sailor Moon, the "Inner Senshi" get a Sailor Stack◊, but they get discovered by a security guard and their resulting panic causes them to fall over (except Makoto).
It makes sense she didn't fall. She was standing up in the back without leaning on another one of the girls, so nobody would have made her topple over.
Comes up every now and then in Nerima Daikon Brothers, and lampshaded in episode 5, where the main characters pop up from behind a door, stacked horizontally, and stay in place until Hideki points out what they're doing, and then they all fall down.
Occurs in Bleach anime episode 138. While Captain Ukitake is talking to Rukia in the Soul society, his two lieutenants and Orihime Inoue perform one of these at the side of the doorway.
Ash and two Pokemon form one in a sewer during the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Galactic Battles episode "Leading A Stray!"
FLCL episode "Full Swing". Haruko, Naota's father and the robot Canti look through the center of a door.
In the final episode of Omamori Himari, we get a Scooby Stack featuring the entire Extended Harem. It's so tall, the camera has to pan up to have room for them all, and even then, the Ojou has to walk out into plain view since there's no more room along the doorframe.
Happens in The Spanish Inn when the tenants want to find out how the negotiation between Xavier and the landlord is going, but don't dare get involved themselves.
X-Men: First Class: Beast, Angel, Darwin, Banshee and Mystique do one despite Havok's warning for them to keep back because of how unpredictable his powers are.
A Thanksgiving episode of Friends had half the cast looking around a bolted door like this for most of the episode. It was lampshaded by Chandler, who referred to them as "the floating heads".
The kids in El Chavo del ocho did it when spying on Dońa Clotilde's house.
That's So Raven has the three main characters look around the corner like this in one episode.
Done in an episode of Hannah Montana where Oliver, Lilly and Miley are stacked up like this watching Jackson fail to convince Robbie Ray to up his curfew.
Chuck
The 2000 TNT Original version of Don Quixote did this at one point, with Don, Sancho Panza, and Sancho's donkey all peering around a boulder.
Misfits has one with Curtis, Simon, and Rudy pondering the presence of Seth the Power Broker in the Community Centre.
Golden Sun The Lost Age, the characters are fairly realistically trying to organize one in this shot◊.
While the main couple in Tales Of Hearts is having their penultimate Sweet Moment, the rest of the party spies on them this way from behind a nearby pillar. They fall over on their own.
College Humor parodies this in their sketch Hardly Working: Snooping, where each consecutive person on top crushes the bottom guy more and more until his head explodes.
In the "Gay Chicken" episode of commodoreHUSTLE, Alex, Kathleen and Kathleen's cat do this when Morgan asks if he can stay with them for a few days.
Izzy, Eva and Noah perform one in the season one finale of Total Drama Island while waiting for Justin.
Bridgette and Courtney do it in "Not Quite Famous" from behind a curtain.
Played With in one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants that focuses on SpongeBob trying to train Gary, his pet snail, for the coming snail race. After unsuccessfully trying to get Gary to practice sprints a couple of times, but Gary immediately goes to watch the television, Squidward leans in a nearby window to taunt Spongebob and boast about his purebred snail's chances of success. Cue Patrick leaning in the window above, boasting about his "snail"(it's actually a rock). Squidward lampshades when he asks what Patrick is standing on, cutting to the outside of the windows to see Patrick actually standing on Squidward's back. When Squidward later leaves, Patrick falls out of the window he's in and then pops back in Squidward's window.
Jay, Cole and Zane do it behind a column in the first episode of NinjaGo: The Way of the Ninja.
