Desperate gridlocks when you're late for the office call for drastic measures.
Car Chase meets Roof Hopping. The pursued character is getting away along a highway in a car or on a bike and the pursuer, lacking equivalent transportation, hops across multiple car hoods to close in on them. Explosions may be involved.
Sometimes the character slides over the hood for the extra cool factor.
See also Outside Ride.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- During a highway chase scene in the Birdy the Mighty anime, Birdy and an arkazoid leap across moving vehicles
in rush hour traffic.
- A running joke has the series' aliens continuously wrecking the same two guys' car this way.
- The opening fight scene of K: Return of Kings has the Kings doing this a bit.
- Homura has to do one of these in Episode 6 of Puella Magi Madoka Magica in order to retrieve Sayaka's Soul Gem from a speeding truck, which Madoka had thrown over the bridge in an attempt to stop the former's fight with Kyoko.
Comic Books
- Batman: Black and White: In "Greetings from... Gotham City", Batman pursues a getaway car by hopping from roof to roof of traffic moving in the same direction.
- Robin:
- At one point when Tim and Ted Grant are chasing a gang of car thieves they launch themselves across the rooftops of the cars on a congested Gotham interstate. Tim notes how ridiculously dangerous it is, especially when they start getting shot at.
- Tim hops from the trunk lid of one car onto the hood of the semi Riot Act stole, then hitches a ride on the roof of another car to catch back up after he has to flip out of the way of Riot's attempt to shoot him in the face.
- In the first episode of Transmetropolitan Spider Jerusalem gets frustrated with a traffic jam and gets out of his car to walk, over the other cars.
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: In the Golden Age Wonder Woman very frequently crossed busy streets by hopping across the rooftops of the cars on them.
Fanfic
- In The Seven Misfortunes of Lady Fortune, the whole of Chapter 7 in Adrien chasing a motorcycle. First half is across the roofs, the other is this trope.
Film — Animated
- In Oliver & Company, Dodger eludes Oliver by jumping over cars. Oliver follows, but falls through the sunroof of one car.
Film — Live-Action
- The Accountant in Drive Angry makes it look easy.
- In Enchanted, Prince Edward does this while trying to find Giselle, and "slays" a city bus.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Captain America does this to catch a HYDRA spy in Captain America: The First Avenger.
- He also performs this trope in The Avengers to avoid explosions.
- The Matrix Reloaded has an Agent doing this to pursue Trinity and the Keymaker. He crushes the front end of the car he jumps on when he lands.
- In Minority Report, Tom Cruise's character leaps from car to car while they're moving vertically.
- George Clooney does this while chasing a terrorist with a backpack nuke in The Peacemaker.
- In The Phantom, the Phantom does this while pursuing Drax's car in New York.
- In Singin' in the Rain, Gene Kelly's character does this escaping from his fans after his car blows a flat.
- That Darn Cat!: While D.C. causes trouble at the Drive-In Theater, an employee chases him over a line of cars until he falls into an open convertible.
Literature
- In The '80s Soldiers of Barrabas action series, the Heroes "R" Us are chasing some villains across a gridlocked street in Rio, so one of the SOB's suggests they play Frogger to catch up. Cue them outraging drivers as they ruin their luxury cars by leaping from one to the other.
Live-Action TV
- On Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a suspect hops on top of cars in a traffic jam to escape Jake and Charles. Jake follows, but falls through an open sunroof and hurts himself.
- CSI: NY:
- In "Dead Inside," a suspect wakes up in a house that's being transported via highway, freaks out and hops his way from car to car to get out of traffic.
- In "Hammer Down," Mac hops from car to car thru a junkyard in pursuit of one of the suspects in a human trafficking ring.
- Doctor Who: The Doctor does this in "Gridlock". They were flying cars, and the Doctor was not only leaping from hood to hood, but getting in the cars through the top and out through the bottom.
- A non-moving example: In an episode of Quantum Leap, Sam leaps into the body of Dr. Ruth Westheimer. During the climax, he is trying to stop a woman from being murdered, and the taxi he's in gets caught in a traffic jam. Having no time to spare, he exits the cab and runs to the woman's apartment by leaping from car to car; the reflection of Dr. Ruth is cast through the windows of various cars.
Video Games
- The level "Route 666" in Bayonetta is like this.
- In many Grand Theft Auto games, your character can jump over a car hood when close enough to a vehicle.
- A stage in Super Smash Bros. Melee has the fighters fighting on top of F-Zero vehicles, jumping from one to another as they got too far ahead or behind.
- WET has an entire level about this, aptly titled "Vehicular Carnage".
- Just Cause and its sequels have a 'stunt button' that lets Rico do this, along with other action-hero feats.
Web Animation
- The RWBY volume 2 episode "Painting the Town" features a chase scene of Blake and Sun fleeing on foot from Roman Torchwick in a stolen Mini-Mecha. Part of the chase scene takes them onto one of the city of Vale's highways with Blake and Sun leaping between cars while Torchwick smashes through traffic in pursuit.
Webcomics
- Schlock Mercenary:
- Kathryn is a practitioner of Parkata Urbatsu, and tries this at one point on a bunch of Flying Cars. Except the self-driving algorithms are so tight she can't even touch them.
Kathryn: I'm losing sight of her, and you'll need to put "can't kick the broad side of a bus" on my next performance review.
- Schlock does it later, with much more success. It helps that he wasn't wearing a flight belt; the cars avoid fliers like Kathryn to prevent injuries, but they try to rescue free-fallers.
Trevor: Kathryn once said she trained Schlock in Parkata Urbatsu. The advanced katas include using vehicles as stepping-stones.
Elf: And?
Trevor: Kathryn is a pretty good teacher, but I think Schlock just performed a doctoral dissertation.
- Kathryn is a practitioner of Parkata Urbatsu, and tries this at one point on a bunch of Flying Cars. Except the self-driving algorithms are so tight she can't even touch them.
Western Animation
- We Bare Bears: In the episode "Captain Craboo", when the bears go on the run after their pet crab is falsely accused of attacking Nom Nom unprovoked, at one point they hop across a series of cars while fleeing the authorities.
