Ramp Jump

Evel Knievel demonstrating the trope in Real Life.

"So one afternoon, he set out to jump ten milk trucks. He nailed the take-off, but when he landed, something terrible happened. His front tire exploded like a cannonball, and his handle bars went straight through his head. Blood was everywhere. His teeth were ground down to a powder, and the front of his face exploded out the back of his skull. He died instantly... the next day."

— Rod Kimble, Hot Rod

This is when somebody dramatically jumps over a ravine, river, pit, or other gap by driving a vehicle very fast up a ramp (or something vaguely ramp-like). Often, it's part of a car chase of some sort, with the jumpers either trying to escape somebody, or trying to pursue somebody who took an easier route that's now blocked somehow. People just love to scream "you/we are not going to make it" when that happens. Bonus points if somebody else (especially Lemming Cops) then tries the same jump but fails. If there isn't a ramp handy, you may need to use Ramp-rovisation.

Unfortunately (as proven by MythBusters), a Ramp Jump is nowhere near as easy to execute as it looks in fiction: The car should ideally land with all four wheels hitting the ground simultaneously, but in Real Life, the vehicle will tend to pitch downwards in flight, causing it to hit the ground nose first (instead of on all fours) with an impact force similar to any other head-on impact: Severe damage to the car's engine and frame (doubly so for sports cars, whose frames are specifically designed to crumple on impact ^note because softening the blow of impact makes the crash less deadly to the driver/passengers, but it can still injure them.), which leaves the car in a more or less inoperable state.

Motorcycles have it a bit easier in this department, as the bike's relatively lighter weight means the rider can shift their center of gravity enough to help avoid the bike tipping over in midair, to ensure a clean two-wheel landing. The professional practice of "loading" helps too — compressing the front springs before takeoff helps keep the bike from tipping over to begin with. However, the risk of landing unbalanced is still very real: Keep in mind just how often professional motocross racers crash, even when they specifically train to make jumps off specifically designed ramps (definitely Don't Try This at Home).

So how do they accomplish such scenes in action movies? With the vehicular equivalent of a Stunt Double, of course! Launch a sacrificial car (even just an empty hull) off the ramp, then quickly cut to a different scene that depicts the heroes (having been launched from a much smaller, safer ramp) making their landing. Nevermind what happens to the stunt car after the cut. If a long shot of the vehicle flying triumphantly through the air is desired, that can also be filmed separately using a third vehicle (launched from a separate ramp under specific conditions). Hollywood movie magic at its finest!

In any case, it's technically possible to set up ramps in such a way that the vehicle can take off and land without tipping over in the process, but this requires some specially contrived setups that you're not likely to see in action-movie scenes involving explosions and high-speed improvisation. But at least it looks undeniably cool, right? Expect to see Slo-Mo Big Air added in for all it's worth.

A Sister Trope to Jump Physics. It can also be tried with horses, as they presumably don't need ramps.

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Examples

Anime

• Black Lagoon: What do you do when you're a bottom-rung Japanese salaryman on a boat piloted by a bunch of pirates who kidnapped you at gunpoint and are now being pursued by an attack helicopter? You tell them to turn around, launch the boat off a wrecked ship, and fire a torpedo at the chopper. And that's how Rock joined the Lagoon Trading Company.
• In an episode of the TV series of Future GPX Cyber Formula, Hayato and his navigator Elena are in a no-rules race called "Fireball", and during the race, they are chased by a racer with a huge truck-like car and the driver bumped his car, the Asurada GSX. Then Hayato saw a car with a slant that looks like a ramp and uses Asurada's effect fans to jump and escape from the racer.
• Rebuild World:
  • When Akira buys a heavy duty wilderness Cool Bike with features like a futuristic suspension, his Virtual Sidekick Alpha has him jump over a huge section of a ruined city to get to the pristine inside in a Dungeon Bypass. He shows an interest in doing things like that himself.
  • Akira shows a Chekhov's Skill of being able to make superb jumps with that bike. Reina and Togami marvel at how he’s able to jump and land perfectly on top of his APC. This pays off, when completely without any assistance, he jumps into the air while being shot at with missiles, to jump off his bike onto an assault aircraft pursuing him to attack it at point blank range.
• Straight Cougar's alter car in s-CRY-ed has special spring jumpers for this too, though I can't remember it jumping over anything extremely impressive at the moment.
• Speed Racer about Once an Episode, with the assistance of his built-in jacks (which for the record weren't intended to make the car jump, they were there to... jack up the car, for maintenance).

Comic Books

• Sin City cars ramp off cliffs, hills, and apparently jump just by going down the street. This is obviously Rule of Cool.
• Another example (or rather two) with cars is from one of the short English-made comics with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The turtles in their van are hunting a foot soldier in a cab. The cab first flees though a busy intersection, but lucky enough for the turtles, there was a ramp at hand, so they can jump over the traffic. Shortly afterwards, the cab escapes over a bridge, which is opening right after. But that of course doesn't stop the turtles, who again jump over with the van.

Fan Works

• All Guardsmen Party: The Guardsmen are in the middle of a high speed pursuit in a Hive city and perform a ramp jump to cross a gap in a bridge. The moment is made decidedly less awesome by their shitty van barely making the distance.

Films — Animation

• The Simpsons Movie: Homer and Bart try to jump the gorge on a motorcycle at the end of the movie. They come up short, but Bart uses his slingshot to snag a protruding rock and catapult them to safety on the far side. They land next to the ambulance that crashed trying to get Homer to the hospital the first time around.
• Wreck-It Ralph: There's a large jump on the unused track in Diet Cola Mountain.

Films — Live-Action

• Batman Begins: The Batmobile. Its entrance into the Batcave is by jumping across a small chasm through a waterfall, and it has several scenes where it jumps and drives across rooftops. When they first show it, it's explained that it was designed to make a no-ramp jump for crossing rivers with a cable in order to build temporary bridges.
• The Batman (2022): During a scene where Batman is chasing The Penguin down a crowded freeway, The Penguin tries to lose the Batmobile in traffic and causes a semi truck to jackknife. This starts a massive chain reaction that collects multiple cars, including a flatbed truck that serves as a convenient ramp that lets the Batmobile jump the wreckage.
• The Blues Brothers: Elwood shows off his new car, a retired police cruiser, to Jake by jumping the gap between two halves of a raised drawbridge. Since the car landed on a slope, this one is at least plausible, if still incredibly dangerous.
• John Wayne in the 1975 movie Brannigan during a Car Chase. The main he's chasing makes it as the bridge has only just started to rise. Brannigan is not so lucky and crashes his car on the other side.
  Brannigan: The view from the Bridge was terrific.
• The courageous motorbike jump in The Cabin in the Woods fails with fatal consequences when the bike rider hits a Beehive Barrier forcefield sealing off the cabin from the outside world.
• In a variant, the Lamborgini in Cannonball Run III does a ramp jump onto a lake and skips across the surface. Ironically, MythBusters tested this stunt, and discovered that it could work ... but only if you dispense with the ramp, ensuring that the car strikes the water at a very low angle.
• The good guys in Der Clown – Payday pull a Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)-style ramp jump over a Road Block of police cars. In slow motion, of course. In contrast to most other movies, including Gone in 60 Seconds, their car does a corkscrew in mid-air. In contrast to most cars flying corkscrews, it still runs afterwards! The ramp, by the way, is a piece of helicopter scrap that doesn't budge when a minivan races over it.
• Plays a big part in the 1971 Biopic and drive-in classic starring George Hamilton, Evel Knievel, for obvious reasons.
• Gone in 60 Seconds (2000) (where the car just barely limps in)
• The Gumball Rally: during the opening race scene in New York, a convertible makes an attempt and breaks in half.
• After causing a commotion in a pub, the cast of Happy Birthday to Me hop into their vehicles and drive over a drawbridge that is opening, leading to a series of these. The main character freaks out when the car she is in makes the jump, since it's almost totaled by the drop.
• Im Juli scores extra points for having the jump attempted by a physics teacher who was previously seen putting this exact problem on the blackboard as an exercise. He still fails, because he has only an estimate of the width of the river to go on.
• It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World begins with Jimmy Durante careening along a mountain highway in a '57 Ford and then just...sailing out there. Didn't land well.
• James Bond does this a fair bit:
  • In The Man with the Golden Gun, there was a visually impressive corkscrew jump across a river. It was the first such stunt to be developed in a computer simulation, and the driver successfully pulled off the actual jump on the first take (and pocketed a $30,000 bonus for it). For some reason, though, the composer decided that it just had to be accompanied by a stupid cartoon-style slide whistle sound effect.
    • Perhaps on purpose, because the originator of the Jump, who refused to ever reveal how it's done, never wanted anyone else to try it. Thus the addition of the slide whistle would make it seem simply impossible to do.
  • Octopussy: happens with an auto rickshaw (since it happens in India) when Bond and Vijay are chased by henchman Gobinda and his men.
  • In A View to a Kill, Bond managed a drawbridge jump in a fire truck while being chased by the cops.
  • In The Living Daylights, there's a car jump to escape some pursuing Czechoslovak guards, some of whom try and fail to emulate the jump in order to follow him.
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond jumps from one building to another on a motorcycle... over a helicopter full of bad guys with guns which is hovering in the street... while he's handcuffed to a Chinese secret agent. There is a nod towards reality when Bond asks said agent to move further back to balance the bike. Not much, but...
• One in Mannequin (really) results in a car being wedged in-between two buildings (the ramp had been set up in an alleyway).
• Owen jumps a motorcycle off a ramp and into a taxiing plane in Jurassic World Dominion to catch up with Claire and escape the ''Atrociraptors‘’ chasing him. One still makes it onto the plane with him and he turns the bike around, pushes it at the raptor, and both bike and dinosaur end up in the water below.
• In Razorback, the road to Benny and Dicko's place incorporates a ramp jump. Benny and Dicko, it should be pointed out, are crazy.
• Road Trip, where the car doesn't survive the landing. The shocks go through the hood of the car.
• Smokey and the Bandit was the source of the "Reynolds Ramp" phrase. The Bandit jumped over a lake in that movie.
• The climax of The Soldier (1982) has Ken Wahl leaping the Berlin Wall in a Porsche via a ramp set up by the Israeli Secret Service in a Time for Plan B (he was originally just supposed to drive through Checkpoint Charlie, but got recognized and pursued by a guard). Earlier in the film there's a ski chase where the Soldier uses a snow bank for a jump, then turns in mid-air and machine-guns his pursuer.
• In Speed, the bus ends up on an unfinished elevated freeway and has to jump across a missing section of it.
• In True Lies, the Big Bad motorcycle jumped across from a taller building to a swimming pool of a shorter building to escape from Arnold's character on a horse.
• The movie Spice World has a bus jump across Tower Bridge as it opens.
• Van Helsing does this with a freaking CARRIAGE. And without even a ramp.

Literature

• Choo Choo (1937): When Choo Choo, after running away, comes to the drawbridge, it's been raised to let a boat through. She speeds up the bridge and jumps it, just making it across. She loses her tender in the process, and Jim, Oley, and Archibald find it in the barge that the boat was hauling.
• The car chase in Matthew Reilly's Scarecrow ends with Knight jumping over a rising drawbridge in a truck, to escape from mercenaries. Unfortunately, he got stuck on the other side.
• In Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch, Edwin and Geneviève are travelling through Shadow London, an otherworld where the legendary places and character of London's history live on, when the antagonists try to block their path by raising the folding part of Tower Bridge. Edwin guns the motorcycle they're riding and does a ramp jump to clear it. Because Shadow London is a realm of myths and legends, it's taken to an extreme where the ramp is up nearly vertical when the motor cycle's wheels grab air, and it still clears the distance and sticks the landing.
• In Terry Pratchett's Thud!, a "boy racer" Ankh-Morpork coach driver gets a rush of blood to the head and attempts to pull off this feat - in a horse-drawn coach. He is dissuaded by Sam Vimes.
• Subverted in The Wish List; Belch tries to do this near the climax on a motorcycle but just ends up getting himself tangled up in a fence he could easily have plowed straight through had he any actual experience using a motorbike.

Live Action TV

• Seen in The Benny Hill Show at least once, involving a red Ford Gran Torino during a Stock Visual Metaphor.
• The Dukes of Hazzard. It seemed to happen almost every episode, in fact. Cue the General Lee making the jump. Cue Roscoe not making it.
  • Happens in the opening credits, in fact. On YouTube at 0:12.
  • In a lot of these examples, the 'leap' is possible..... just not the landing. They went through so many General Lees - estimated at over 300 - that it's the main reason why the 1969 Dodge Charger is so rare.
  • Naturally, one of these jumps was in The Film of the Series. The MythBusters demonstrated that the claimed jump distance was entirely possible. Driving away, on the other hand ....
• Standard occurrence in The Fall Guy. And probably the reason why Colt's GMC truck has a massive lift kit.
• In an episode of Happy Days Fonzie sets a new world record by jumping over 14 garbage cans on his motorcycle. He makes it, but crashes after landing. He also does another ramp jump over a shark later in the series on a pair of water skis, naming a trope in the process.^note The reason the trope is named after this moment is because, in the episode where Fonzie crashes after jumping the garbage cans, he admitted the stunt was stupid and vowed not to do anything like it again. Jumping over the shark ignored this Character Development and was treated in-universe as a good thing.
• Knight Rider did this more than once. Usually, the "turbo boost" button was involved. In fact, with the Turbo Boost KITT could jump without a ramp.
• In the Miami Vice episode "Viking Bikers from Hell," one of the bikers jumps his motorcycle over a police car.
• Top Gear:
  • Stuntman has attempted a few of these, with mixed results. And the original Stig (of sainted memory) met his end when he did one of these off an aircraft carrier. He used nitrous. One particularly awesome example was a ramp jump off a ski ramp... in a snowmobile.
  • Another awesome ski jump was done with a (unmanned) rocket-powered Austin Mini.
• Many, many, many such jumps are featured on World's Dumbest.... Many scenes of automotive destruction ensue. Sometimes, the commentators even reference The Dukes of Hazzard.

Pinball

• The Cliff Jump from Banzai Run, a vertical ramp in the backbox.
• Data East's Batman pinball has a ramp for players to launch pinballs into the Joker's face.
• Bone Busters has the Long Jump, which must be made to start multiball.
• Comet has the Cycle Jump, which launches the ball into one of three saucers. Making the farthest one is required to collect the One Million shot.
• The backglass for the Evel Knievel pinball uses animated lights to depict Knievel's Real Life 1975 jump over fourteen busses.
• Frank Thomas' Big Hurt has a ramp with a baseball glove. The player will get awards either for shooting one of the holes behind it or hitting the glove itself enough times.
• A pop-up ramp is used in Sega Pinball's GoldenEye to allow the player to shoot pinballs into the GoldenEye satellite dish.
• Occurs in Premier's Hollywood Heat, which features a "Hot Shot" ramp that catapults pinballs from the bottom of the playfield to an enclosed area in the center.
• The Lord of the Rings has the Ring Ramp, located in the center of the playfield.
• NBA has the left jump ramp, which vaults pinballs towards the playfield basket; a magnet in the backboard grabs the ball and drops it through the hoop.
• No Fear: Dangerous Sports has one in the jump loop, with the magnetic accelerator giving it a speed boost.
• No Good Gofers has a "slam ramp" that drops down for short intervals; players can shoot the ramp to launch the ball to the upper playfield and try for a hole-in-one.
• In RoboCop, there is an Entry Ramp that stretches along the back of the playfield and requires the player to clear the gap to complete.
• A variation appears in Sega's Sapporo, which has a "Ski Jump" lane on the left side of the playfield. As the ball rolls down the lane, the player must press the left flipper button to operate the lower side wall and make the ball roll over the farthest of four blue switches.
• The main gimmick of Shaq Attaq is a moving basketball hoop; players use a mid-court ramp to shoot balls into it.
• Stern Pinball's Star Trek has the Warp ramp, which launches balls clockwise back to the upper-rght flipper.
• Tee'd Off has the "Pitch 'n Putt" ramp, where the player tries to shoot the ball into the Mean Green Hole.
• Transformers has a chute in front of Optimus Prime that rises at certain times, allowing players to use a Ramp Jump to launch the pinball and hit him.

Radio

• One Afternoon Play by the name of Hudson and Pepperdine Save the Planet had a bus attempting to jump over Tower Bridge, but it fails and lands across the gap.
  "We're fine. Just everyone get off the bus."
  * SPLASH*
  "Not the middle doors!"

Theme Parks

• At Universal Studios:
  • The high-speed finale of Fast & Furious: Supercharged ends with both the protagonists and the riders going over a ramp, sending them crashing down into a warehouse, miraculously unharmed.
  • Two of them occur in the water stadium scene in The Simpsons Ride, with one being enough to send the Simpsons and the riders into the stadium bleachers.

Video Games

• 1080° Snowboarding: Air Make is a very short race course set inside an indoors snowboarding stadium which consists of sliding onto a big ramp and, upon jumping past it, perform as many tricks as possible (or a very difficult one) to score points. If the player lands on the ground badly, the accumulated points will drop to zero, and the level only provides one chance.
• Bloody Zombies sees you running from what seems like a hundred zombies, in a Run or Die moment, where you escape by jumping over the Tower Bridge just as it's drawing open.
• All over the place in the Borderlands games. In the Torgue DLC for Borderlands2, ramping into the Badass Crater of Badassitude nets the player an achievement.
• Burnout Paradise. Jumps, flips, spins, rolls! One of the Collection Sidequests is to land every "super jump" in the city.
• The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 mission "Cliffhanger" has you jump a snowmobile across a 100+ foot crevasse at the end.
• Cobra Triangle has stages that require the use of ramps to jump across waterfalls. If you haven't gathered enough Speed-Up power-ups from the previous stages, you won't be able to clear them.
• Driver:
  • In Driver 2, you have to jump your car onto a boat on at least two occasions. In the "Caine's Compound" mission, you jump a drawbridge at the end.
  • Driver: San Francisco has car transporters that can be used as a mobile ramp. One early mission has Tanner doing just that.
• Eternal Evil has one in Marcus' introductory cutscene, where he grabs a woman jumping over an opening drawbridge while fleeing from the ghoul swarm.
• Fatal Racing had what were known as Twister Jumps, because they also caused your car to barrel roll in flight, thus requiring driving at the right speed, and some luck, to land on your wheels.
• 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. "Yo Fiddy! Hit that big-ass ramp!"
• A lot of the Grand Theft Auto games designate a number of Unique Stunt Jumps, which are particularly impressive jumps of this kind, for players to find and complete (sometimes required for 100% Completion).
• In Harry the Handsome Executive, you perform ramp jumps in a Swivel Chair.
• In Last Scenario, this was used to launch an amphibious boat over an airship so the heroes could jump onto said airship.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the Goron Roll ability allows you to do this automatically any time you're going fast enough (with remaining MP) that spikes pop out. It also painfully subverts the trope any time you lack either the spikes or the ramp.
• This is a feature of many Mario Kart tracks, especially in the later installments.
• In Mercenaries, a bridge over a river in the final Ace Contract mission is destroyed by the North Koreans. When destroyed, a section of the bridge tilts 45 degrees upwards. Considering the mercenary can't swim, well...
• The Midtown Madness series has rising bridges that the player can jump over.
• No More Heroes: The final Side Job tasks Travis to perform a risky jump across a ramp aiming at the sea of Santa Destroy. In order to succeed, Travis has to reach the ramp at full speed, or else he'll flub the jump and fail the job's objective instantly.
• PlanetSide 2 has many natural ramps for the Sunderer, Flash quadbike, and Harasser to take. The Harasser and Flash are capable of rolling mid-air, but tend to uncontrollably nosedive in prolonged flight, while the Sunderer just kinda flops and rolls over before exploding. Vehicles are capable of surviving surprisingly long falls, but they will outright explode if they hit something while moving too fast. The Flash has a unique type of Nitro Boost that effectively acts like a rocket, allowing it to alter its trajectory mid-flight.
• San Francisco Rush. Jumps, flips, spins, rolls!
• In Speed Kills, a lot of the tracks have jumps somewhere in them. Entering them at an angle, especially if travelling at high speed, is a good way to go flying off the track.
• In Stuntman, this is one of the most common types of stunts you pull off (including one film that's The Dukes of Hazzard in all but name), and at some point you even have to ramp jump onto another moving vehicle.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • In the Strong Bad Email "monster truck", one of the stunts advertised at Awexomecross '98 is The Cheat jumping the Tire over the King of Town eating a cardboard box covered in pancake syrup.
  • The SBEmail "mile" is a Powered-by-The-Cheat cartoon that features Strong Bad doing cartwheels for a mile. At one point he goes over a ramp and jumps nineteen buses ("A NEW RECORD!").
    PBTC Bubs: Hey, Strong Bad, you jumped over some of my buses!

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: A Honda Accord, leaping over a pile of cars with a tow-truck's loading bed as a ramp. A gorilla was driving. It all makes perfect sense in context. There were also zombies.

Western Animation

• The Patrick Star Show: In "Best Served Cold", the ice cream man is driving his truck away from Patrick. The only exit is to launch off a drawbridge that's going up. He jumps out of the ocean and crashes the truck front-first into the ground. Patrick still manages to catch up to him somehow.
• The Simpsons:
  • An episode has Homer trying to jump over Springfield Gorge on a skateboard. His descent into the gorge (and the hijinks that ensue when medical help tries to get him out) is one of the show's most famous moments.
  • In Bart's Comet after the only bridge out of town is destroyed, a number of citizens try to jump the gorge with their cars (and fail).
• The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!: In "Toad Warriors", King Koopa and Toad face each other in a Game of Chicken to drive towards a ravine. Neither of them chicken out and they both jump their vehicles over the edge. While Toad lands on the other side, Koopa crashes into the cliff face.
• Thomas & Friends has the titular character jump over a missing piece of track over a cliff in the special The Great Discovery. The scene has been lampooned for its lack of realism (though the show has been lacking this for a long time).
• Transformers: Cybertron has Hot Shot do this in one episode to cross a canyon after Ransack and Crumplezone destroy the bridge. The ramp in question? Optimus Prime's ladder/cannons.
• Welcome to Tonka Town: In “Race Day In Tonka Town”, Chuck uses a convenient ramp to jump out of the pit- and, thanks to some Fake Interactivity (It Makes Sense in Context), he does it with enough speed that he ends up flying straight to the finish line.

Real Life

• Famed daredevil Evel Knievel was renown for this in The '70s. In his career, he attempted over seventy-five ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps over cars and buses, including a failed jump across Idaho's Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket.^note He cleared the canyon, but his parachute deployed early and the winds pulled him back into the canyon
• In 1952, a London bus driver found themselves on one of the rising bascules of Tower Bridge, and had to do a ramp jump to safety.

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