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Cool Gate

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/sg1_1020_stargate.png
The coolest Cool Gate there is. It even spins, for added coolness... 'Cause it's cool!!

Stargate,
It’s a great big world,
With a great big swirl that you step inside to another world.

We’re talking Stargate,
It’s a crazy trip,
You can go quite far and you don’t need a car or even a ship.
— Joe Mallozzi, Paul Mullie, and Peter DeLuise singing the lyrics they invented for the Stargate SG-1 intro music

First you're here. Walk through this here gate—possibly only when the moon is gibbous, or you have yellow violets in your left hand, possibly only with the Applied Phlebotinum and Techno Babble of quantum mechanics or folding space-time or maybe even magic—and then you are... there.

Cool, ain't it?

Unlike Cool Car, Cool Boat, etc., this is not about distinctly cool gates. Gates tend to be rare enough that they are all cool. Even when they interconnect into a Portal Network.

This is a common way of getting to Magical Land. After all, even the coolest of airplanes and boats have a little trouble with the travel there; subtropes include Portal Pool, Portal Door, and Portal Picture.

It's also common in Science Fiction.

Be warned that there is no guarantee of pleasantness or even familiar physics on the other side. Alien Geometries are not unknown.

After a time, Portal Slam may result, or it may close when in use.

Since there's no real-world analog to teleportation, writers can apply any variety of bizarre special effects to the act of being transported without hurting Willing Suspension of Disbelief. On the other hand, they can also appear relentlessly mundane—perhaps a simple arched doorway in a wall of crumbling stone—until you look or step through them, and notice the discrepancy.

Note that Thinking Up Portals is the trope for characters who can create holes in reality to transport themselves without crossing the intervening distances. This is a kind of Teleportation with Drawbacks due to placing restrictions on an entrance or exit. It may overlap Our Wormholes Are Different.

Has nothing to do with media or political scandals being referred to with a reference to "Watergate" or with a particular brand of toothpaste.

You go in here...

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • Cats in elaborate Friskies catfood commercials step through portals into a world of tasty CGI fish, chickens, and other cat treats.

    Anime and Manga 
  • Ah! My Goddess:
    • In one of the later manga volumes, we get to meet the gate between Earth and Heaven, and she's a kinda cute creepy girl. One that wants to have some fun and won't open for anyone till she's had some. Eventually, Keiichi is dragooned into opening her, with a (big) key.
    • In the movie, there is also a magic gate that only true lovers could pass through and still remain together. Guess what happened.
  • Bleach:
    • The Gate To Hell.
    • The gate (that looked like a big sliding door) that Soul Reapers could create to travel from the world of the living to the Soul Society (Captain Kuchiki uses one early in the series to return himself, Rukia and Renji).
  • SD Gundam Force: The Zakurello Gate, a sentient dimensional doorway is used by the Dark Axis to travel between their world and Neotopia's. Entering the Gate is like flying into the jaws of some beast. Of course, it being self-aware has its own set of problems. Shute is able to trick the Gate into opening by impersonating Zapper Zaku, and when the Gundam Force use the Gate to leave Neotopia is Episode 27, the Zakos force it to change the destination mid-transport, stranding the Cool Ship in the Void Between Worlds. In the last episode, the Gate disappears to parts unknown altogether.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Johan reveals in Season 3 that Duel Monsters cards don't contain and release monsters, but are actually the gates monsters use to travel between their world and their master's.

    Card Games 
  • The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game happens to have multiple takes on this, including 'Different Dimension Gate', 'Monster Gate', and even a card meant to restrict attacks, "The Dark Door", which takes the form of a Cool Gate (or at least a door out of a very freakish universe).
  • Magic: The Gathering provides us with Door To Nothingness, a cool gate to a non-cool place.

    Comic Books 
  • The DCU:
    • Wonder Woman: Under Themyscira is a gate to Hades, at least in Post-Crisis continuity, in the Justice League cartoon and in Wonder Woman (Rebirth). Though just what dimension or pocket dimension Paradise Island/Themyscira is in has always been subject to the whims of the writers. The place has consitantly been host to and guardian of Doom's Doorway, a rift which leads to the outer realms of Hades and the Underworld, ever since the Post-Crisis Reboot.
    • JLA (1997) has Portal Gates at certain times that seemed to link the JLA moonbase to a few key locations. Not used very often (at least "on screen").
    • In the Star Wars comics, they introduce the Infinity Gates built by the Kwa using the technology of the Celestials. Apparently, there was a network that allowed instantaneous travel nearly anywhere in the galaxy. Oh and for added fun, they could be used as devastating superweapons, projecting Infinity Waves which destroyed all life and matter at the target and made hyperspace travel impossible in its vicinity.
    • Boom Tubes in the New Gods mythos. They can be summoned anywhere with a Mother Box computer, and are in general used by the Gods on a regular basis.
    • Dimensional portals show up quite frequently in Supergirl stories:
      • In Demon Spawn, villainous sorceress Nightflame opens a dimensional rift to travel from her universe to the physical world.
        Suddenly, it appears — hanging in mid-air... Here, on a street in San Francisco... Shimmering, crackling and growing... a crack, a rip in the very fabric of the universe! And out of it comes a figure... humanoid, yet huge... an Amazon... brandishing a fiery sword!
      • The Supergirl from Krypton (2004): Supergirl's rescue party use a mother box to reach Apokolips, and later Superman uses another to go from the Sun to the Wall Source.
      • In Supergirl (Volume 1) issue #5 a villain uses a dimensional gate resembling a normal door to drag the Girl of Steel in another dimension.
      • In Good-Looking Corpse, a group of villains use portals to find and harass heroes.
      • In the beginning of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade's Grand Finale, a glowing space-time vortex opens in Linda and Lena's dorm, and an alternate Supergirl flies out of it.
      • In Strangers at the Heart's Core, a glowing, golden rift in the fabric of the reality lets Kryptonian villain Shyla Kor-Onn get out of the Phantom Zone and fly into the physical world.
      • In Escape from the Phantom Zone, the Tycho Eidolon device generates a dimensional portal shaped as a glowing energy sphere which drags everything surrounding it into the Phantom Zone.
    • In the Superman storyline Kryptonite Nevermore, Quarrm's life-forms slip in Earth through several translucent "holes" in the air.
    • In The Phantom Zone, Superman and Quex-Ul go through several dimensional portals during their journey: an energy wall surrounding the Phantom Zone, a sun which works as a gate when it is glowing yellow, a whirlpool, the flames of a hearth...
  • Marvel Universe:
    • For a while the X-Men were the proud owners of the Siege Perilous (named for the Arthurian myth), a magical portal which shrunk down to handy portable size. Passing through it would reboot your life (and give you amnesia along the way).
    • There's a Shi'Ar Stargate at the edge of the solar system. Don't tell anyone, though, because using it can destabilize the Sun. The Shi'Ar also use smaller personal Gates.
    • The Fantastic Four withold the Forever Gate, a portal that takes anyone anywhere in space and time.
    • The Mighty Thor: In The Surtur Saga, capturing the warp-gate assembled by the Fire Demons at New York City became crucial for Asgardian and Earth forces in stopping the invasion of the Fire Demons, as it allows them to reach the Sahara Desert, where an even BIGGER warp-gate linking directly to Muspelheim is located and allows the endless Fire Demon hordes to pour forth.
  • The Authority can call the Carrier for a Door to anywhere in the world, or back to the Carrier, and at least once to parallel universes.
  • The Sandman (1989) has several magic gates. Each of the Endless has a gallery which they use to talk and visit each other's realms. In the real world, any labyrinth can be used as a gate to Destiny's realm. Destruction creates a gate (with an appropriate big explosion) that Orpheus uses to visit Death's realm. Dream's realm has an ornately carved big gate at the front which dreams pass through.
  • Played for laughs a lot of times in Mortadelo y Filemón, as the way the two agents often go to the T. I. A. headquarters -and expect someone attempting the same after both have entered, just to fail miserably.- Examples include them entering into a traffic signal by opening it, into the Sun one lifting the other as if it was just a window, and entering into an open coffin, complete with a corpse, in a funeral parlour.

    Fairy Tales 
  • In Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "King Goldenlocks", a giant teaches Goldenlocks tells Goldenlocks to strike a certain rock with a club and then walk into the crack to reach the garden of paradise. The giant also warns him that he must go back quickly or the dimensional portal will close.

    Fan Works 
  • Split Second (My Little Pony) has Death's wings as a portal to the afterlife.
  • Sunsplit Saga: From Sunshipped, it's Implied, due to the source material, that Sunset Shimmer visits the human world just by walking into a horse statue, and ends up exiting through a magic mirror.
  • Dungeon Keeper Ami: As part of the two sets of Portal Networks:
    • Underworlder Portal installations, which connect to other ones, first seen in "Into the Portal," are described as:
      The portal reminded Ami of pictures of Stonehenge. Four arches, composed of two tall stone pillars with a horizontal crossbar on top, were arranged in such a way that they touched at the corners. The area inside the square they formed glowed with hazy images of faraway territories and emitted a warm orange light
    • At least one "hero gate network" exists, as said in "No Wonder Cure", and such gates are, as seen in "More Lessons":
      a structure that resembled a canopy tent, except that it was made of stone and rested on four thick, round pillars. Within the structure wavered a water-like surface, forming an upright oval that looked like a full-length mirror.
  • In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/The Chronicles of Narnia crossover "The Lion, the Cat and the Turtles," after Leonardo travels through a ‘random’ portal to Narnia in the New York sewers, his family, April and Klunk track down the now-elderly Susan in New York, where she is able to open a door to Narnia using a photograph of the wardrobe and invoking her status as a Queen of Narnia.
  • A Crown of Stars: Several portals leading to other dimensions show up as soon as the first chapter when Daniel opens one inside Shinji and Asuka's tent to pick them up and take them to Avalon. During their stay in Avalon, both teenagers found out that magic and technology capable to create or build inter-dimensional gates or time doors are commomnplace. Also, bad things happen when a portal collapses, leaving the main characters cut off and stuck on other dimension.
    Asuka’s rest did not last long undisturbed. Shinji was just rising from replacing his cello in its padded trunk when the sun rose in their tent.
    Shinji whirled around. “What?” He blinked his eyes repeatedly against the sudden blaze of gold. A perfect seven-foot circle of seeming daylight stood on the far side of the tent, filling the tent with noontime brightness. Shading his eyes with his hand allowed Shinji a slightly better look at it. Almost too bright to look at directly, it seemed for all the world like a floodlit pool stood on its side. Shinji had only a moment to stare in confusion when the light dimmed as a man stepped out of it. This did not diminish his puzzlement.
    “Pilot Ikari Shinji-san?” The man inquired in Japanese.
    “Third, what’s th—-” Asuka blinked awake in her suddenly brightly lit sleeping bag, then bolted upright. “Who the hell are you?! What is that?”
    “Fräulein Pilot Asuka Langley Sohryu? I’m sorry to interrupt your rest, but this is the earliest I could arrive.” Shinji still could hardly see the backlit figure, just a caped silhouette. The figure noted his squint. “Ah, my apologies for the brightness of the portal. Rather a large energy differential between here and home. Let me get that.” He snapped his fingers and the glowing mini-sun shrank to a point and vanished. The near-daylight illumination dropped to just the solitary camp lantern hanging at the tent’s entryway.

    Films — Animation 
  • The door leading out of Howl's Moving Castle, which has multiple selectable destinations.
  • In Treasure Planet, it turns out this is how Flint managed to plunder so many planets.
  • When activated, the Doors in Monsters, Inc. connect the monster's world to children's bedrooms throughout the human world. When inactive, they are ordinary doors connecting the bedrooms to closets, etc. That is why the monster is never there when your parents open the door to check.
  • The BFG: In this version of the story, the titular Big Friendly Giant, whilst running through the sky, reaches Giant Country through some kind of swirling ethereal tunnel. In Giant Country, a hollow mountain houses a towering column of light, jumping into which leads to Dream Country.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Phantasm: The gate in the mausoleum consisted of two metal poles stuck in the floor. Anything that passed through them went to the planet which the Tall Man came from.
  • Poltergeist: The ghosts who are haunting the house creates a gate in the children's closet leading to the other side: another gate in the ceiling of the living room leads back to our world.
  • Stargate, which in 1994 began its franchise about portals being left by Ancient Astronauts. The movie is focused on the discovery of a portal found in Egypt, which the villains used to capture and take human slaves to the alien desert planet of Abydos before the humans revolted and buried the Earth Stargate, while the humans stuck in Abydos are still at the mercy of the Goa'uld posing as Ra.
  • The Tannhäuser Gate was merely mentioned once in Blade Runner, and its function not even described, but Memetic Mutation has made it a Cool Gate nonetheless.
  • In The Neverending Story, Atreyu passes through a mirror that serves this purpose.
  • In Time Bandits, the characters rely on a map to locate "time holes" that lead to various points in time and space.
  • El Santo's time machine (of course he can build a time machine!) in Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula is basically a cheaper-looking version of TV's The Time Tunnel.
  • There are nine gates in the title sequence of Polanski's The Ninth Gate, made all the more portentous by Wojciech Kilar's score.
  • Warcraft (2016) has the appropriately-named Portal, which is a gate through which Mass Teleportation can be conducted.

    Literature 
  • In The Catastrophe of the Emerald Queen, the magical teleportation device called the Shimmer. Powered by crystals and activated by stepping into a dip in a stone floor. The effect is described as like watching a stone being dropped into water. Can also be rigged or tampered with to enable users to arrive helpless.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • Chrysalis (RinoZ): All of the surface races use magical gates to travel large distances through the Dungeon. The ants are able to capture some, but can't determine how to activate them; nonetheless, they're determined to work it out in order to interconnect all their nests.
  • In The Dresden Files, wizards and others practitioners of magic are able to open a hole into the Nevernever (usually the Land of Faerie, the region closest to the physical world), an alternate dimension where physics, geometry, and time don't always work the way they do here. The upside? Rapid transportation for wizards, especially since their magic makes mundane travel hard. The downside? The wizard has to hold it open, and even powerful wizards can only open small holes. It takes a very powerful wizard (Harry's caliber or so) to be able to open a crossing in more than a few places to begin with. And while the Ways are great for getting places, the Nevernever is also where most of the Eldritch Abominations live.
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl: Carl comes across references to the Gate of the Feral Gods while fighting his way through the fifth floor. It can open a portal through the Nothing to anywhere the user can work out the coordinates for, but as the portal closes, a feral god will emerge from one end (depending on how precisely it's set up). Mordecai dismisses it as pointless, since it still won't allow them to travel to a later floor (it can open a portal, but it's impossible for crawlers to enter it), and then the feral god will likely kill them. Carl, on the other hand, starts getting ideas. First, he hands it off to different crawlers so that they can escape the "bubbles" that have them trapped. A feral god is left behind in each bubble, but since they can't escape, that's fine. Then he publicly makes plans to drop a feral god on some army fortifications on the Ninth Floor, which will cause a lot of damage and cost his enemies money but not much else. Then what he actually does is flood an NPC city with shark-infested water, killing all the merchants who would sell to the hunters who would be killing crawlers, and keeps the Gate to use later. It's mentioned several times that the Gate is a huge Game-Breaker that tripped all sorts of balance checks and warnings by showing up so early; normally something like this wouldn't show up until the tenth floor at the earliest.
  • The door in Dan Abnett's Ravenor, a plain wooden door that opens through space and time. Originally, it used by special trained operators, to let the questions of those who came to them direct it; when the house was broken, Ravenor operated it to put his powerful psionic abilities into play.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel His Last Command, Chaos warp gates open up in boulders to let out monsters. When Maggs is thrown through one, and Mkoll jumps after him, they find a frigid, impossible landscape with the stars all wrong and blocks of stone floating in the sky. They stagger to another gate, which lands them at the foot of another boulder, both of them covered with frost (on the other side, they communicate back through the vox, though it finds them both out of range and within ten kilometers at once).
  • In the Myth Adventures series, Skeeve's tiny tent leads into a huge luxurious mansion. The mansion is actually in another dimension, which occasionally leads to some problems.
  • Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Mirrors are frequently used as portals to other realms. There's just something about mirrors...
  • In C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine Cycle, the planet-based gates allow both interstellar and Time Travel. Not to mention body-switching. Also, any Time Travel leading to a Time Paradox triggers a Time Crash which wipes out civilization on every planet containing a gate, which is why Morgaine is on a quest to shut down the Portal Network.
  • Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Powerful Old Ones (such as Merriman Lyon) are able to summon a magical gate (which looks like a pair of doors) that allows travel through time and space.
  • John DeChancie likes this trope; his Castle Perilous has 144,000 doors, each leading to an Alternate Universe, and they don't just wait for you to walk through—the portals wander, and actively seek out those who want to travel or get away. His Skyway series has "Tollbooths" (no doubt named as a Shout-Out to The Phantom Tollbooth) which use miles-tall columns of virtual particles to create wormholes linking a vast Road across thousands of planetary surfaces.
  • In The Redemption of Althalus by David Eddings, the protagonists live in a house with as many rooms as they like, as large as they like (they occasionally have armies on the march through the corridors) and can open doors to literally anywhere on command. One of the protagonists attempt, out of curiosity, to open a door to "nowhere"—although they avert the attempt before they succeed, the concept is enough to freak out their patron goddess something fierce.
  • Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series. Inter-dimensional machines/gates.
  • There's a magical hole in the wall of some sort in Coraline, by Neil Gaiman.
  • The interstellar gates in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Tunnel in the Sky.
  • In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, Mother Ragga (an Elemental Personification) has a house whose doors can open, it seems, anywhere in the world.
  • The door leading out of the title castle in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle.
  • The Wheel of Time has them in at least three flavors:
    • The redstone doorways look like empty doorframes, but walking through one will transport you to a dimension populated by weird aliens who see the future or grant wishes.
    • The Waygates, built of finely carved white stone and having nice reflection visual effect, which lead to a place where the distance between the Gates is less than outside
    • The One Power-created Gateways for Skimming (travel via subspace) and Traveling (instant teleportation).
    • There are also Portal Stones, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They link not only to other portal stones in the world, but also to Portal Stones in Parallel worlds. Very handy, if not well understood at all.
  • The title tollbooth of Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth.
  • The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key. An inter-dimensional machine/gate.
  • In Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series, the Gate Spell reaches across the Void Between the Worlds in order to provide instantaneous travel from one physical place to another. The spell has a number of important limitations; each Gate is a single-use construction created by a powerful mage using his own life force, must be built with both ends in a doorway or similar structure (frames often used for Gates are attuned to the proper energies and are easier to use), and can only go somewhere said mage has been to and knows well. The ancient Adepts of the Mage Wars, on the other hand, knew the secrets of Permanent Gates, which once created are simple to activate and use. From what we see of the mysterious Eastern Empire, it has overcome all the limitations of Gates, to the point of building them into a Magitek society and using them to control vast swaths of territory. This poses a major problem for the Empire when The Magic Goes Away.
  • Reality Thresholds are pretty much the driving force behind the entire book in Darkness Visible. Venturers can tear holes in the fabric of reality with their bare hands and, if they're focusing properly, simultaneously open a second Threshold in another location, allowing them to step instantly between the two places. If they aren't focusing properly, bad things happen... Deliberately abusing Thresholds may lead to even worse things happening.
  • In Lee Lightner's Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf novel Sons of Fenris, Cadmus's Blood Magic lets him open a portal to a Chaos Space Marine.
    • In Wolf's Honour, they conclude that the entire planet is riddled with gates, allowing the Chaos Space Marines to invade at will.
  • In Patricia A. McKillip's The Bell at Sealey Head, Emma keeps opening doors and finding Princess Ysabo. She never dares go in for fear that she can't come back. And one day when she opens the door to her grandmother's room, it shows the princess in a different room. She closes it, reopens it, and finds her grandmother's room.
  • In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novel Dead Sky Black Sun, when Sergeant Ellard confesses to having actually seen the rumored daemon on a battle field, he explains that in the end, it summoned up a black gate and vanished into it.
  • In the Horus Heresy novels The Unremembered Empire and Pharos, the Pharos device can connect two locations directly via quantum entanglement. While it primarily functions as a Subspace Ansible, it can also be used to instantly transport people from one planet to another, and is even used to save several characters from Konrad Curze.
  • Andre Norton's Witch World has dozens of these.
    • How Simon Tregarth got there in Witch World.
    • Where the Kolder had come from.
    • Where Simon and Jaelithe vanished to, and Kaththea found them and Hilarion.
  • His Dark Materials, as if to fight back against Narnia listed above, has a knife that can make a gate anywhere by cutting holes in the fabric of the universe. Unfortunately, it has the nasty side effect of unleashing soul-eating beings of nothing whenever it's used.
  • James H. Schmitz set The Lion Game on a planet in the Hub where all transportation was done by gates. The villains in that story have another Cool Gate — the Vingarran Gate is too long-range to be useful on the planet surface, but it's ideal for them to transfer people to and from their spaceships hiding in the outer reaches of the solar system.
  • Once: An ancient book, kept by successive acquaintances of the faerefolkis, can be used by smaller faeries as a portal.
  • Looking glass bosons, in the John Ringo (and later Travis S. Taylor) series Into the Looking Glass (with shout outs a-plenty to the other looking glass portal, mentioned above).
  • The Manticore Wormhole Junction, and similar junctions elsewhere, in the Honor Harrington novels.
  • The Green Door in H. G. Wells' short story of the same name.
  • In Patricia C. Wrede's Talking to Dragons, Morwen has one door to all the rooms in her house. When it keeps giving Daystar the wrong ones, she tells him he has to be firm.
  • The novelization of the Doom series had the Gate to "Hell" actually be a matter transmitter leading to aliens who used psychological warfare, by imitating feared images from humanity's collective unconscious. But, unlike most fictional interstellar teleportation, it was not faster than light.
  • The Veil in the Department of Mysteries that claimed Sirius is an example of such a portal from Harry Potter. Maybe. It's in the Department of Mysteries because they're not really sure exactly how it works, except that no-one who passes through ever comes back. And the shade of Sirius is later able to be summoned by the Resurrection Stone.
  • In Sergey Lukyanenko's Rough Draft series, the portals to Alternate Universes are shown as regular doors, although they can only be opened by the customs officer-Functional who lives at the customs office. This, as well as the abilities of the Functionals, is explained by their advanced understanding of quantum physics.
  • The Young Wizards series has "world gates", small patches of space-time only visible to wizards, which occur naturally but can also be created by magic or very advanced technology. Though wizards can teleport without world gates, using a gate requires much less energy, especially for trips that are measured in light-years. On Earth world gate complexes are maintained by teams of cat wizards, since cats are the only Earth species which is naturally capable of seeing the string structures which the gates are made from.
  • One means of getting around in the endless world of The Neverending Story is The Temple of a Thousand Doors (Der Tausend-Türen-Tempel) which contains an infinite number of hexagon-shaped rooms with three doors each. Every door different in colour, shape, material etc. To get to the place you wish to go, you only need to pass through the rooms until you find the door that reminds you strongest of the thing/place/person you're looking for. This may take some time.
  • In Spin there is the Arch, a gigantic structure connecting to another planet.
  • The portable door in The Portable Door by Tom Holt. A door-shaped sheet of something that can be rolled up, but when put against a wall will open to the desired location.
  • In Stephen King's The Dark Tower, Roland discovers a series of doors which allow him to look into other worlds, possess a specific individual on the other side when he steps through the door, and pull that person back through the door into his own world. This is how he eventually gathers his three traveling companions who follow him in the later books.
  • In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Door opens doors. All doors. Her family house had its locations all over the place because they could open the doors between them.
  • The Farcasters connecting the WorldWeb, in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos.
  • Doors that open to distant locations, times, and/or realities are a dime a dozen in the Nightside series, and one minor character even operates a business where people can pay to pass through any of the hundreds of Cool Gate doorways he's stocked his shop with.
  • The Great Door Of Time in Septimus Heap.
  • In Devon Monk's Dead Iron, what LeFel is trying to build.
  • The Flumes in "The Pendragon Adventure".
  • In Andre Norton's Dread Companion, Bartare opens one to transport them from the planet.
  • The Power of Five: The Gates that keep the Old Ones at bay are kinda cool, once you look past how terrifying the entire concept is.
    • On a considerably less scary note, there are also the 25 doors with blue star symbols which allow the Five and up to one other each to travel to any one of their choosing.
  • The whole Kadingir saga revolves around this, what with the characters being able to open dimensional portals between their world and Earth. The main title itself, Kadingir, means "The Gate of the Gods" in old Sumerian.
  • Twilight gates from the setting of A Tale of the Unwithering Realm. They're golden ring-shaped portals whose rims have the form of three-dimensional Mobius strips, and when they are active a rainbow of colors and a spherical light-bending interdimensional rift appears in the middle.
  • Stonemover's portals from Wings of Fire, which connect the Rain kingdom and Sand kingdoms with each other and also with the Night kingdom.
  • Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: The Wayhouse network Portal Network is referenced multiple times:
    • In the first episode, Princesses Don't Do Summer School, a network failure is why the titular princesses can't go home for the summer.
    • One of their installations are seen in the seventh episode, Princesses in the Darkest Depths, and some Teleportation Sickness is indicated:
      The Wayhouse of Bargoczy was among the newest wave of civic construction to wash over the city, [...] it was solidly built of quarried chalkstone fitted with dark mortar, then stained with strong primary colors. [...] the Wayhouse network's convenience was hampered only by its range. In order to go any appreciable distance, one had to suffer through a daisy chain of transfer points. Few people were willing to pay the cumulative costs, and a larger number of stomachs were unwilling to deal with the stress of so many transfers.
  • Gate that is about a gate from Japan to a medium-fantasy world.
  • In Douglas Adams's unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt, one chapter that takes place 1.2 million years into the future mentions a mysterious "Way of the Nostril", and his own planned plot summary for the finished book talks about Dirk Gently travelling "through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos". The implication of this being that someone apparently discovered a method of time travelling that somehow involves passing through a rhino's nose.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Jumpgates in Babylon 5 are used to enter and exit hyperspace.
  • In the Doctor Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace", clockwork androids from the future use the hyperspace drive of a spaceship to create temporal gates disguised as mirrors, tapestries and fireplaces to stalk Madame de Pompadour's lifespan, finding the proper moment in her life to take her.
  • Eerie, Indiana: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", Ned came to Earth through a tachyon portal, arriving in Siberia in 1908. The portal broke down immediately afterwards. He founded the Loyal Order of Corn and encouraged the development of radio and television so that human technology would be advanced enough to build another tachyon portal so that he could return home. While investigating the portal, Marshall and Dash X accidentally send Simon to an ice planet.
  • Foreign Exchange is about a boy and a girl discovering a portal connecting his house in Perth, Australia to her school in Galway, Ireland. The writers started ignoring the time difference after a few episodes.
  • Lost: turning the wheel under the Orchid moves the island and teleports the wheel-turner to the Tunisian desert.
  • The comedy-fantasy Mister Merlin has a door in Merlin's house that lead to a magical realm.
  • The Outer Limits (1963) episode "The Borderland". Scientists generate a gate to another dimension.
  • The Stargate-verse. Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe, all four of 'em had the title gates be as cool as possible. While the details vary between gates, all of the gates activate with an unstable vortex that destroys anything in its path, before settling into a rippling event horizon with the appearance of standing water.
    • The original SG-1 gate◊ is the most iconic. Made of a nigh-indestructible stone-like material inscribed with a ring of constellations, at first glance it looks like a mysterious ancient construct along the lines of Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads. When given power however, the inner ring is able to spin, the chevrons light up, and the gate can be dialed like a rotary phone.
    • The Atlantis gate◊ is like a digital counterpart to the original gate's analogue. Just as indestructible as its predecessor, these gates don't spin at all. Instead, the spinning is replaced with the glyphs lighting up like LEDs, and the sound of stone grinding against stone is replaced with distinctly electronic humming. Additionally, unlike its Milky Way counterparts, many of these gates are in orbit around planets, requiring a ship capable of flying through the gate to traverse safely.
    • In stark contrast to the Atlantis gate is the Universe gate◊, the prototype to the Milky Way gates. These gates may not be as indestructible as its successors, but they're still just as cool. Instead of just an inner ring spinning, the entire gate spins, and instead of the more familiar watery blue event horizon of the other gates, this gate's event horizon is silver.
    • Last but certainly not least is the Supergate◊ from SG-1, an absolutely massive Stargate designed for use by starships. Since making these gates in one solid piece would be extremely impractical — especially in a new galaxy — it's instead build of individual segments sent through a standard Stargate which then assemble themselves in orbit. Due to the astronomical power requirement for these gates to function, they eschew any sort of traditional power source to draw energy directly from a nearby black hole.
  • Star Trek:
  • In Stranger Things the monster can seemingly turn any surface into a gate between the normal world and the Upside Down.
  • The titular device from The Time Tunnel.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Little Girl Lost". The title character accidentally falls through a spontaneously appearing gate in the wall of her room and ends up in another dimension. Her parents and a family friend try desperately to get her back before the gate closes.
  • In the Kaamelott episode "Stargate", a "Gate of Chaos", through which "the worst possible creatures" are going to arrive, is opened in Kaamelott. Arthur and Lancelot investigate, Bohort panics until... Perceval steps through. And then a chicken flies through. It turns out the gate leads to another part of the castle.
  • First, you see something like shattered glass floating in the air. Next thing you know, you are being chased by a velociraptor. Welcome to Primeval.
  • Angel has portals to Pylea. They can only be opened at psychic hotspots and can't be opened too many times.
  • The Legend of Dick and Dom has an episode, "Valley of the Bigheads", where the heroes want to use a Cool Gate guarded by the Bigheads; to be allowed to use it, they need to prove they are geniuses, which is rather difficult for them. It turns out the gate only transports you ten yards further along the road, and the Bigheads only bother to guard it for lulz.
  • Kamen Rider Fourze has an ordinary school locker which connects to a base on the moon.
  • The Librarians has The Door. A globe connected to the closet door in the Annex which can magically connect to any other door on the planet.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Wall", a group of scientists were researching wormhole physics when a freak accident resulted in the creation of a portal, which is dubbed "the Gate" for lack of a better name. Four volunteers (2nd Lt. Emilio Perez, Sergeants Evelyn Marx and Glenn Sinclair and Captain Henry Kincaid) were sent through the Gate to determine what was on the other side but they failed to return. When the fifth volunteer, Major Alex McAndrews, goes through, he discovers that it leads to a Paradise Planet where the people live a simple, agrarian existence free of the social problems that plague Earth. The US government hopes to use the Gate in order to launch preemptive strikes on its enemies. Although the Gate is constantly visible on Earth, the refraction of light on the other planet means that it can only be seen at night.

    Music 
  • The movement The Great Gate of Kiev (in Russian Богатырскія ворота (Въ стольномъ городѣ Кіевѣ), meaning The Bogatyr Gates (in the Capital in Kiev)) from Modest Mussorgsky's magnum opus Pictures at an Exhibition.
  • Touhou – ZUN's Music Collection: The honest men in Dolls in Pseudo Paradise enter Gensokyo through an entrance hidden in a peach tree.

    Pinball 
  • Varkon features a stone gate through which the monstrous Varkon can be seen. Playing well on the main table enables the lower level, allowing players to attack Varkon on the other side.
  • The Stargate pinball has the titular gate as the centerpiece of the backbox, using a mirrored "infinity" effect to give the illusion of entering it.
  • The "transphazers" of TX-Sector, which are used to teleport pinballs across the playfield.

    Roleplay 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • The portals of the Planescape setting.
    • The Forgotten Realms have many magical Gates, most of which are (naturally) forgotten.
    • The Gate of the Silver Keys in adventure X2 Castle Amber, which leads to the land of Averoigne on another plane.
    • Module Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. A temple in a Drow city has a mural of a starry sky which is a Gate. If the PCs pass through an image of Lolth and touch it, they will be transferred to the level of the Abyss where Lolth's Demonweb exists.
  • The Necrons of Warhammer 40,000 use portal technology to teleport with impunity. Chaos forces occasionally use portals of their own to access the Warp without waiting for a Negative Space Wedgie.
  • Call of Cthulhu has spells that create Gates through time or space.
  • Eclipse Phase's Pandora Gates, leftovers of The Singularity and the only current method of reaching planets outside the solar system.
  • Fading Suns has Jumpgates, ancient relics created by the mysterious Annunaki. They they form the Jumpweb that allows Humanity to travel from planet to planet, connecting Known Space.
  • In Nomine has Tethers, nearly all of which connect a specific point on Earth to a specific point in either Heaven or Hell and can only be traveled by celestial beings. A rare few connect Earth to The Marches instead, and exactly three connect The Marches to either Heaven or Hell.
  • While not shaped like gates in the conventional sense, every Pantheon in Scion has an Axis Mundi, something that links that Pantheon's Godrealm to the World that's tied to their myth or their people's culture. As examples, the Aesir use Yggdrasil to get between Asgard and any ash tree on Earth, while the Amatsukami use the Pillar of Heaven to get into the Overworld from anywhere that Japanese culture is strong.
  • Fringeworthy (1982) was built entirely around this trope: Player Characters were members of a UN military exploration force, walking from world to world through circular portals left by an alien race millions of years before.
    • Rumor has it that a copy of the game was given to the writers of a certain motion picture on the assumption that "Tri-Tac is out of business, and besides, our lawyers are bigger."
  • Exalted has bits of First Age technology called the Gates of Auspicious Passage, allowing one to cross vast distances with a single step (although only to a similar Gate). They require truly monstrous amounts of power to function even for brief periods however, and are extraordinarily difficult to build, repair and program.
  • Similar to the Call of Cthulhu example, Arkham Horror has gates to other universes that the players must close in order to win.

    Theme Parks 

    Toys 

    Video Games 
  • Distorted Travesty 3 gives us big swirly holes with blue (or red, in the case of nightmare gates) lightning scything out of it. They can send you to various video game worlds. Such as Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, and Mario, just to name a few.
  • Age of Mythology has a whole bundle of them—the adamantine, gods-can't-break-'em Gates of Tartarus alone are worthy of mention. There's also:
    • The gates of Troy (duh), which are as close to magically-indestructible as mortals can get.
      • The even more almost-indestructible Atlantean Gate, made of green granite or something.
    • The cavernous Underworld Passage that Apollo allows you to summon in-game
    • The strip-mined entrance to Erebus constructed by Gargarensis in Iolchis
    • The folding staircase over nothingness leading out of Erebus that Zeus summons to save Arkantos
    • The Well of Urd, also an entrance to Erebus
    • The Sky Passages that Oranos uses to get his followers from place to place
    • The hellhound-sized Tartarus entrance that Hekate summons to release her little minions—shaped like a skull
    • And the various entryways the Titans use when you summon them. Cerberus, Ymir, and the Atlantean rock-thing (Typhon) all have big pit/mound shafts that collapse behind them, but Horus requires you to build him a god-sized landing platform, appropriately decorated, of course.
  • Chrono Trigger's aptly-named Gates.
  • City of Heroes, being filled with superhero tropes, has a generous number of these- from Portal Corps' eponymous portals (which are huge, glowing, have moving bits, and are bloody loud) to the fairy ring portals into the spirit world, to the annoyingly random portals throughout the mystic lost city of Oranbega. It's got something for everyone.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • The Psijic Order, a powerful Magical Society and the oldest monastic order in Tamriel, has the "Dreaming Cave" on their home island of Artaeum. The Dreaming Cave is a portal to Oblivion and allows for communicating with the Daedric Princes.
    • The Oblivion Gates from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which let Daedra out of the gate's titular dimension. Note that they are shaped like the rune on the box art, which is the letter "O" in Daedric.
  • All of the major powers in EVE Online have their distinct stargate designs to facilitate interstellar travel.
    • Coolest are the massive border stargates over 20 km across setup at the boundaries of each empire.
      • Not to mention the EVE Gate itself.
  • If it's in anyway made from the Zilart race, places in Final Fantasy XI feature tons of portals, gates, and what have you. Several other portals and gates also qualify.
    • Some examples. Many of them have special items that allow you to open them like normal doors, but you generally have to be able to get behind the door first:
      • The "Moongate", which only opens for a very short period of time in the rather lengthy in-game moon phases.
      • A certain door only opens when you have a White Mage, a Red Mage, and a Black Mage stand on their respective panels
      • One dungeon has doors which require a certain amount of 'weight' to be placed on sensors (determined by the amount of player characters, and what race they belong to)
  • Disgaea's dimensional gates warp the user to the selected location.
  • In Ghost Hunter, a painting in a mansion becomes a doorway. On the other side the portal is a plain doorway standing in the open, through which the interior of the mansion can be seen.
  • Mailboxes in Glider PRO have instantaneous delivery. It's also common to place teleporters in mirrors and paintings of Ozma.
  • Kingdom Hearts has lots of them. Most notably the door to the titular heart of all worlds. It's a game in which the main character wields a gigantic key. Doors tend to be prominent.
  • Interstellar gates are a possible technology in the first two Master of Orion games.
  • The gates between Dark and Light Aether in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.
  • The protagonist's wand is seen to produce a very cool one in the trailer for Ni no Kuni. Presumably it takes him to the titular Another World.
  • The Spirit Gate in Ōkami. It takes the player 100 years into the past. The Golden Gates also serve as checkpoints, and Devil Gates lead to a battlefield with more enemies than usual for the area.
  • The Flower Gate in Paper Mario's Toad Town led to Flower Fields—but only when the four Bub-ulb seeds had been planted in the garden.
  • Portal. Apart from the titular portals, there is the "Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill." In order to prevent you from carting useful (and possibly game-breaking) objects into other levels or putting portals across levels, each level end is blocked by a shimmering particle field that dissolves unauthorized objects as they pass through it, and closes all portals. It may, in semi-rare cases, emancipate dental fillings, crowns, tooth enamel, and teeth, as well as ear tubes. It is especially gratifying to drag the robot turrets through it.
    Robot turret: Ow! Ow! Ow!
  • Rift Gates in Primal.
  • Comically averted in the 7th installment of the Touhou Project series (Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom): at the end of the 4th stage, the playable character Marisa Kirisame comes across a giant gate at the entrance to the Netherworld; she notices that the gate is magically sealed, and states that a novice magician such as herself wouldn't be able to open it. Then, she is greeted by three ghost musician sisters, and finds out that they were invited for a celebratory musical performance into the Netherworld and are able to enter and leave it at will. Marisa then demands that they open the gate for her, and the three of them fight her. After the ghost musicians are defeated, Marisa tells them to open the gate, and the ghosts say that the gate won't open. Marisa then asks how they enter and leave the Netherworld at will, only to hear that they fly above it.
  • Turok's ever present Warp Portals.
  • The Vanishing Point in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.
  • The Ultima series had Moongates, which got cooler and cooler each game up to the 9th. Drop a pebble in a ring of standing stones, and with a clap of thunder a bright, shimmering indigo gate springs from the ground.
    • Initially Time Gates (in Ultima ][, directly inspired by Time Bandits), they quickly became associated with the phases of the moon, and then got increasingly complicated as blue, red, and black moongates were introduced.
  • The Dark Portal from Warcraft, particularly on the Outland◊ side.
    • The warlock class can create demonic gates through which other party members can be summoned to the gate's location.
    • The mage class can create temporary portals to their respective side's capital cities, as well as the neutral cities added with the expansion packs.
    • The Death Knight class can create a Death Gate, the purpose of which is to allow easy access to Acherus: The Ebon Hold, their Class Order Hall.
    • There are also the portals to the Emerald Dream. Four portals in forested areas around Azeroth (Duskwood, Hinterlands, Feralas and Ashenvale), guarded by hostile dragons until the dragons were removed at the start of the Cataclysm expansion. The other side was not originally accessible in-game, but according to the lore it leads to another dimension that is what Azeroth would be without intelligent humanoid life of any kind, populated by myriad magical beasts. In the Legion expansion the portals opened up and were used by druids to access the Emerald Dreamway which connected to their Class Hall.
    • The Burning Legion actually needs to make huge and powerful magical portals to send their strongest to Azeroth.
  • The original Doom has the Phobos and Deimos anomalies, two ancient, connected portals discovered on each of the Martian moons. Unfortunately for the researches studying the anomalies, they work by teleporting matter straight through Hell. When an experiment goes out of control, Deimos is pulled completely through its anomaly and ends up drifting above Hell, forcing the Space Marine to use the Phobos Anomaly to reach it. The anomalies also serve as the basis of the in-game teleporters, which work like a Portal Network and, if the player's not careful, can lead to the trope-naming Tele-Frag.
    • The Continuity Reboot sequel Doom 3 changes the story to remove Phobos and Deimos. Instead, the portals that cause all the current trouble were built by the UAC colonists and based on the Martian civilization's ancient schematics (the schematics were actually meant as a warning, but the scientists missed the fine print). The original ancient portal that doomed the Martians does become a plot point late in the game as, once the human portals have been shut down and the Demonic Invaders seemingly stopped, they blast open the original Martian portal instead.
  • It's a fairly big plot point that the Citadel in Mass Effect is one of these, linking the known galaxy to wherever the Reapers are.
  • As mentioned in the Tabletop RPGs section above, Planescape: Torment has a ton of these. It's part of the setting, after all.
  • Achron's teleporters and chronoporters (that facilitate mass teleportation and mass time travel respectively) look like cool spinning stargates. Which is a bit unnecessary since no unit actually walks through them.
  • Egosoft's X-Universe series has both Jump Gates, linking sectors of space, (which may or may not be neighboring in actual space, or millions of light years apart.), while the Terran race has two Jumpgates for Earth, and a network of Trans-Orbital Accelerators, which are basically starship railguns, flinging ships across the Sol system, though they cannot be targeted by the jumpdrive.
    • X: Rebirth retains the Jump Gates, and adds in massive Super Highway gates, which create streams of energy capable of accelerating ships to faster-than-light speeds for interplanetary travel, and smaller highways for travel within planetary orbit.
  • Far Gate's wormholes. Basically a combination of this and Swirly Energy Thingy with DNA-shaped pink and blue strands coming out from the middle.
  • The Arkonians of The Crystal Key used simple arches activated by the titular key to provide direct transport between their colony planets. The number of places you can go is determined by the number of "planes" attached to the key. They recently perfected the ability to design portable portals as well, from small remote-controlled ones you can carry around - and which go with you when used, to huge rods mounted on spaceships, which the Arkonians used to deter the malevolent psychic warlord, Ozgar.
  • In Minecraft is possible to build nether portals with obsidian, obsidian being the most time consuming resource to acquire.
    • As of Beta 1.9Pre4, End Portals are also available. These are even more difficult to find since they are only found in strongholds and only 128 of those spawn on the entire map. Also, the Enderdragon is on the other side of End portal.
      • As of 1.9, after you kill the Enderdragon, yet another Cool Gate spawns in the sky. There is no way to enter it without using an ender pearl, and if you do enter it, you are taken about a kilometre away from the central Floating Continent in the End, where you find endless seas of islands with purple trees and strange castles, sometimes with a Cool Airship docked at them.
  • Inverted in Galactic Civilizations. Star Gates were once used for interstellar travel, but they suppressed exploration of other parts of the galaxy because they could only move ships between any two of them, plus it took quite a while for them to transport ships. The rise of Humanity gave rise to Hyper Drive, which allowed ships to travel great distances on their own, rendering the Star Gates obsolete and setting the stage for the game's plot.
  • The Gate of Time in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
    • The very similar-looking Gate to the Twilight Realm in Twilight Princess, as well as the door to the past in the Temple of Time.
  • Sunless Sea gives us the Avid Horizon, a creepy portal ornated with two reaperesque figures located at the northernmost point of the Neath. Stars can be seen twinkling above it despite the whole Neath being buried underground, Correspondence sigils are everywhere and the seafloor around it glows an eerie red light. While what lies behind it is never disclosed in Sunless Sea, its sequel Sunless Skies revealed that it leads to the High Wilderness, located deep in space.
  • EV Nova has a network of Lost Technology hypergates that serve as a Warp Whistle of sorts. Once you get a license to use them via the Sigma Shipyards questline, they allow you to travel between certain star systems instantaneously, whereas using your hyperdrive causes the In-Universe Game Clock to increment between 1 and 3 days depending on your ship's mass. A smart player will memorize the hypergate network, as it's sometimes the only way to get rush jobs done by the deadline.
  • Earth & Beyond had a few varieties of gates. Ancient Gates, which according to some in-game material may have been sentient, and could send a ship as far as 100,000 light years. Reverse engineered InfinityGates, far less powerful with only a few light year range. And the singular Tada-O Gate, also reverse engineered from the Ancient Gates, but thought to connect to another galaxy... oops.
  • In Civilization: Beyond Earth, the victory conditions for the Purity and Supremacy affinities involves building the Exodus and Emancipation Gate, respectively. They are so huge that they require a whole game cell to build. They look pretty much identical, except the Exodus Gate generates a red portal in which the energy appears to flow outward, while the Emancipation Gate flows inward and glows yellow. The former is used to bring in refugees from the building faction's territory on Earth to settle on the new world. The latter is used to send troops back to Earth to undergo Unwilling Roboticisation.
  • No Man's Sky has these at mysterious alien temples, which can take players who find them across the universe almost instantaneously (after briefly covering them in a liquid-like substance)... Without their ship, of course; but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
  • In Find the Cure! the player character travels through one of these in search of a cure to a plague that will wipe out humanity within 25 years.
  • One of the ways to get to new locations in Witches' Legacy. They are often both ways, sometimes they lead to some form of Eldritch Location and other times just somewhere new.
  • The conspiracies' agents in The Secret World travel using Agartha, a network of portals in and around the branches of enormous biomechanical trees located in the Hollow Earth. (It's that kind of game.) Only a handful of others can use Agartha without ... consequences.
  • The Conduit from Nexus Clash has the power to create wormhole gates between two points, no matter how distant. Wormholes are stable enough to march an army through - which is usually exactly what Conduits want them for.
  • Geometry Dash has these. Enter the blue one, and you come out of the orange one, placed somewhere above or below the blue one. It doesn't work the other way around, though.
  • God of War (PS4) features the Bifrost, which is connected to the World Tree and puts down roots to link realms, as seen here.
  • Subnautica has mysterious arches strewn about the map that heavily resemble a Stargate. Aside from one pair, they're only activated in the endgame as a Door to Before.
  • Splitgate has Portal's portals pretty much wholesale, with the caveat that now you also have actual guns to shoot through them. This opens up a lot of trickery depending on the map and your reflexes.

    Web Animation 
  • In Minilife TV, Minilife Studios has its own time machine which also doubles as a teleporter.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • Associated Space uses Catapult Points for interstellar travel. These are giant metal circles placed in orbit around a sun, which gives the devices the immense amount of power necessary to use the things. Once a ship goes into the circle, the gate activates, creating an effect that zaps the ship to another star system, which catches you with similar catapult point, using its immense power to disrupt the effect.
  • Tech Infantry has several types.
    • Jump Gates, immobile spaceborne structures that open up a portal to Hyperspace for ships that can't open up a jump point on their own.
    • Digital Gates, immobile spaceborne structures that scan an entering ship, convert it to pure energy, and beam that energy in the form of tachyons, to another digital gate in a distant star system, which re-converts the ship back into matter at the other end, for near-instantaneous interstellar travel.
    • Correspondence Portals, which certain Mages can create as a sort of magical emergency point-to-point teleportation system.
    • Transit Beacons, a weaponized military version of the Correspondence Portal, built into a starship, and used to teleport whole formations of soldiers at once down to the surface of a hostile planet.

    Western Animation 
  • The Where's Waldo? cartoon (possibly a video-only series) utilized Waldo's "hiding" aspect by making his cane magical—he traced a ring with its tip in the air in front of him to create a portal to anywhere. It was his Evil Twin Odlaw's desire to steal this cane and use it for nefarious purposes.
  • In the Doctor Strange animated movie, the Sanctum Sanctorum contained a gate to Dormammu's realm.
  • Family Guy's Poltergeist parody has Meg's butt as one end of a portal.
  • ReBoot copied the Stargate in one episode and brought it back in a later episode. The show also had sphere portals, which functioned in a similar manner.
  • In Transformers: Prime the GroundBridge and its big brother SpaceBridges function as long-distance (in the latter case, at least interplanetary) transport gates, with the space "in between" being spacious enough to fight in.
    • The Space Bridge has been seen in many Transformers series - never the same in any two versions, but pretty darned cool in all of them! Depending on the version, sometimes you only need a device on the "sending" end and can target it anywhere, but sometimes you need a device at both ends. There are also versions where they're part of a Portal Network similar to the Stargate-verse's gates, only visible when in use and no hardware ever seen; sometimes bots seem to summon portals out of nowhere but are unable to do it to a place that 'doesn't have a space bridge.'
  • The portal in Gravity Falls that Stanford Pines built and fell in.
  • In Legion of Super-Heroes, we once see a Portal Network's hub, with some very Stargate-verse-esque gates.

    Real Life 
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Stargate First Activation

With Daniel's 7th symbol, the SGC can finally make Earth's Stargate dial out.

Swirly Photosho...

To the Rabbit H...

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Stargate First Activation

With Daniel's 7th symbol, the SGC can finally make Earth's Stargate dial out.

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Stargate First ...

Swirly Photosho...

To the Rabbit H...