That's one way to put spring in your step.
Screw wheels, treads or walking. For some robots and vehicles, their sole means of mobility is jumping or hopping around, as silly as that might seem at first glance.
In reality, this is a Justified Trope as it enables robots to walk and even climb stairs without having any knees to bend, which simplifies their construction (while also opening them up to falling over, however).
See also Spring Coil.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Kyōju from Bakuten Shoot Beyblade specializes in the Einstein series of beyblades, which have the ability to hop by means of a spring in the center. The main advantage is being able to avoid the opponent's bey. Kyōju isn't primarily a blader himself, but when he enters the ring he shows to be very capable with the mechanic.
- The Moonbits from Doraemon: Nobita's Chronicles of the Moon Exploration, a race of Moon Rabbits, use machines resembling bunny heads on springs to get around.
- As seen in the header, Big Eye from Mega Man reappears in manga form where he demonstrates his jumping ability to crush a guy.
Comic Books
- Gaston Lagaffe's Perpetual Motion Machine, a conical spring with a red ball attached to the top. After its first appearance, it is occasionally seen boinging around the office.
- The Leapfrog from Runaways.
Literature
- At the end of Bert's Hall of Great Inventions, Bert shows Ernie an electric hopping baby carriage. As in the rest of the book, Ernie is reminded of an animal with similar abilities.
- In the opening of Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling, the heroine rescues her brother using a hopping vehicle. Later, that brother has some drugs and other items smuggled across the border to him using a one-legged hopping robot carrier.
- Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus: "Hoppers"—a ludicrous hopping vehicle that was a System-wide fad some years back—is used by Lucky to get out of a large crowd of people when all the regular vehicles are being used to evacuate that sector of the Underwater City. A policeman jokingly suggests the Hopper, which is a tall vehicle with a small cabin. The singular leg is over seven feet tall and designed to launch it into the air. The rotors above the cabin help keep it aloft longer, and jets of air are used to help clear the area as it lands.
- In the Red Dwarf novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, cars on the Spanish-owned port of Mimas on one of the moons of Saturn are a variation on the trope: they normally employ wheels but can also use hydraulic legs to leap into the air in order to bypass the city's notorious traffic congestion. The first chapter, in which Lister is scraping a living hotwiring cabs for the night and picking up fares, goes into some detail about the disadvantages of this technology.
- Parodied in Star Warped, a spoof of the Star Wars movies. The battle on Planet Brathmoki (the Planet Hoth expy) have the Empire spoof sending out Monopods, one-legged machines that moves around by hopping, only to fail spectacularly since said battle is on an ice-covered world which predictably leads to all Monopods slipping and crashing. One of them even tapdances before hitting the ground!
Live-Action TV
- Knight Rider: KITT can do something similar to the Red Dwarf example when the situation warrants, which is pretty much Once an Episode. The production team got through a lot of Trans-Am bodyshells for those stunts.
- Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Black Frog Ninjazord, naturally, what with being a frog.
Tabletop Games
- In BattleTech, the Falconer
◊ Battlemech is memetically known as being one. Due to having jump jets and legs that have no visible knees, it's a running joke that it can't actually walk and is forced to jump everywhere (which is not far off from how players tend to run it).
- GURPS 4th edition Ultratech handbook includes, in its chapter on Nano Machines, the "hopper" type—microbots that resemble metallic fleas or crickets.
Video Games
- In the RTS game Aztec Wars one of the Aztec military units is a cannon that moves by hopping around on one giant foot.
- Beyond Sunset has giant robots capable of hopping, in order to release a Shockwave Stomp on you.
- The spring-like enemies in the Bubble Bobble series. If trapped in a bubble, they tend to take a very short time before breaking out.
- Duke Nukem II has hopping, one-eyed robots as one of the enemy types.
- Dusty Revenge has Craven's mecha in the final battle, who can somehow hop around the area as he tries using his machine to stomp you underfoot.
- The NES game based on Gumby have robots on spring coils pursuing Gumby, though they can be escaped from by running below them as they jump.
- Subverted in GunFu Fighter, where you fight a hopping, spider-legged mecha boss in the fourth level. Besides its turrets, the boss will also hop on you... only to fall into a crashing heap and disable itself momentarily. When it tries getting up, it's time for you to shoot it. The boss will keep on using it's ineffective hopping attack regardless how many times it backfires.
- Hangzo has numerous hopping robot mooks in the factory level, and a boss which is a two-legged mecha whose main attack is by hopping in and out of the screen trying to squash you underneath.
- The X-Bot from Heavy Weapon. Don't let him hop on your tank, it's a One-Hit Kill!
- The kangaroo-like Leaplashers from Horizon Forbidden West move around like real life Kangaroos.
- Kaizou Choujin Schbibinman Zero has some robots with a single spring for feet which hops all over the place trying to land on you.
- Though not technically robots, there are some enemies and statues in The Legend of Zelda that get around by hopping.
- In LEGO Star Wars, when C-3P0 gets hit his leg falls off and he hops to get around.
- The Hopster from Makai Kingdom, which appears again as the TX-6 Jumpstart from Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?. "No one knows if it's supposed to move like that, or if it's just broken."
- The Big Eye from Mega Man. Every game of the original series has its own variation of that enemy.
- The first (of three, this game's really short) boss of Running Volt Gun is a gigantic, red roly-poly robot smiley-face on a vertical, spring-loaded platform that alternates between trying to crush you with each jump or dropping projectile attacks from above.
- The Jumper enemies from Mini Robot Wars. They jump over all your units in a fashion similar to the Pogo Zombie from Plants vs. Zombies.
- The Automated Snowflake Inspector from Pajama Sam 2.
- The second RoboCop game made for arcades have Robocop battling a sentient robotic turret with a single leg, which allows it to jump around the stage while attacking.
- Slashout have robotic enemies in the Miniera Valley stage, one of them being bouncing robots on springs in place of legs who repeatedly tries leaping over and dropping on you. Appropriately enough (given the game's preference of Gratuitous Italian) these enemies are named "Molla" (springs).
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- The Bouncy Boss Robot and Sphere-o-Bot from Sonic Chaos.
- The Marvelous Queen in the second Special Stage, and the Atomic Destroyer Zone Boss 1 from Sonic Triple Trouble.
- The Red Volcano Zone boss from Sonic Blast is this with an added ball and chain.
- The Egg Press from Sonic Advance.
- An enemy in Sonic Frontiers is like a mobile bounce pad that Sonic's attacks will bounce off of unless he attacks with a Ground Pound specifically.
- The Particle, and their mass produced Mark robots from Streets of Rage are only capable of hopping, with the ability to walk being non-existent despite their joints.
- SWAT Police have Spider Tank enemies who, rather than crawling around, hops around on it's four legs instead, from one side of the area to another while firing potshots at you.
- System Shock features robots called Hoppers, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- In Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs' Big Break, Montana Max controls one of these in the final battle against him.
Webcomics
- The Rabbit Ambulance from Achewood.
- In Hue Are YouJump bot is a spring based robot Build-a made for fun. She and Build-b later made a Flip bot to go with it.
- Narbonic's Professor Madblood once attempted to build a giant robot, but he only got as far as building a giant robotic foot, which has to move by hopping.
- In Sluggy Freelance, Riff's Mark-19 robot can do this, but it only works once.
Web Video
- The AT-BT (All Terrain Bouncing Transport, or "Roo-Bot") in the Australian Fan Film Star Wars Downunder. Awesome, but Impractical, as it's difficult to shoot someone when you're jumping up and down like a demented kangaroo.
Western Animation
- Classic Disney Shorts: A Disney homefront Wartime Cartoon starring Goofy proposed saving on rationed gasoline and tires by using pogo sticks as regular transportation.
- Not a robot, but Coil Man from The Impossibles hops around on a spring leg.
- Looney Tunes: Wile E. Coyote tried using a jet-propelled pogo stick - it didn't go well.
- Pixar: The Luxo lamp.
- One of the Convert-A-Car's alternate forms in the Wacky Races uses 'Pogo Power'.
Real Life
- The 3D One-Leg Hopper.
- Semi-example: Self-Healing Minefield.
- The Soviet Mars probe Phobos 2 was intended to drop a hopping lander onto Mars's moon Phobos. Unfortunately, contact was lost with the probe before that could happen.
- Salto, the small one-legged hopping robot from Berkeley.
- The Moon Car proposed by scientist Hermann Oberth in The '50s.
