Stuck in the Doorway

Rabbit begins to wonder if he'll ever be able to use his front door again.

"Ah, tried to sneak through the door, man! Can't make it. Can't make it, this shit's stuck! OUT OF MY WAY SON! Door stuck! DOOR STUCK! PLEASE! I BEG YOU! We're dead! You're a genuine dicksucker!"

— A Counter-Strike player from this viral video

In this modern day and age, people come in all shapes and sizes. However, the doorways in which they pass through on a daily basis has less of a variety. This can be a bit of a problem since a lot of life's doorways aren't designed for really plus-sized individuals or numerous people trying to go through at once. It's basically like one of those kids shape hole toys and you try to fit a certain shape into the wrong hole: very difficult.

It's a common joke where a person who is considered really large or overweight, or a small group of people, winds up getting wedged in a doorway that is thinner or smaller than they are. You can expect other people on one or both sides to start trying to push them through with varying levels of success. When it gets desperate, more extreme methods like breaking down the walls or getting the fire department to cut them out will occur, much to the stuck individual/s' embarrassment. So unless they got a stick of butter in their pockets, expect wacky hijinks and slapstick to occur.

Usually Played for Laughs. Sub-Trope of Help, I'm Stuck!. Sister Trope to Stuck in a Chimney. May result from a Balloon Belly or Temporary Bulk Change if the character is not normally that large. Compare with Low Clearance and Belly-Scraping Flight.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In a Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial, an obese dog tries to chase after a car, but can't leave the house because he gets stuck in the doggy door. A Training Montage then follows, as the dog exercises to lose the weight, and the commercial ends with the dog skinny enough to once again chase cars to his heart's content.

Anime & Manga

• Magical Hat: In one episode, Hat and Spin turn fat and round from eating a strange type of food from a town full of large people. Spin gets stuck twice trying to fit through tight passageways until she gets a shove from Hat.
• Mysterious Joker:
  • In the second episode of Season 2, Queen and Roko (just Queen in the Manga version) become really fat and round from chef Millefuille's cooking which is very addictive and fattening. When Queen tries to exit the room she's in, she gets stuck firmly in the doorway until she eventually uses her sword to cut herself free.
  • Joker and Hachi experience this in another episode when their disguises start to fail and swell up like balloons before they explode.

Asian Animation

• Bread Barbershop: In the first episode, the big-headed cupcake has trouble getting into the barbershop because his head is that big, causing him to get lodged in the doorway.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: In Flying Island: The Sky Adventure episode 31, Balloon City goes into a state of emergency and the citizens are asked to leave for their homes. One of the balloon students is too big to fit through the school doorway easily, so the goats spend a good minute or so trying to get him unstuck.
• In the Simple Samosa episode "Dadi Ke Saath", Dhokla gets stuck in the door of a train due to how wide he is. Samosa tries to push him into the train, and ultimately resorts to poking him to make him deflate to a much thinner size, which works.

Fan Works

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Torian and a dragon can't get through a doorway together, since it's too small.
• Rocketship Voyager. In the climatic fight with the Psiborg Collective, half-a-dozen people try cramming into an air-lock meant for only two in full space armor, because they're desperate to get inside Voyager's protective hull. To shut the door so they can pressurize the air-lock, B'Elanna Torres has to give up her place and go outside again.

Films — Animation

• Balto II: Wolf Quest: When Aleu was about to find her way out after getting slammed by the iceberg, she got herself stuck between the ice glaciers. Luckily, She managed to squeeze through and swam to the surface where Nava was.
• Chicken Little: Runt gets stuck in the main entrance of the alien spaceship when the group try to escape the ship after rescuing Fish.
• In Dumbo, during the scene where the circus animals are being loaded into Casey Jr.'s train cars, the Elephant Matriarch gets stuck in the doorway of her car and has to be pushed through by the circus' workers. After she's pushed through, she glares angrily at the workers before the door shuts on her.
• Hercules: When Pegasus tries to follow Hercules into Phil's house, his rear end proves too big to fit through Phil's satyr-sized doorframe, and after trying to squeeze through anyway he winds up stuck at the door.
• The Incredibles: When Mirage sends Bob out to fight the "Rogue" Omnidroid, they try to slide him into a drop pod via a mechanical chair. But Bob's gained weight since his glory days, and his bigger gut gets stuck in the pod door. After a few failed attempts, the grunt cranks up the power on the mechanical chair and just holds the button down until Bob pops in. Then when the pod lands on the island, Bob has just as much trouble getting out of it. He gives up on trying to fit through the door, and simply breaks the pod into pieces from the inside.
• The Jungle Book 2: During the elephant stampede, Colonel Hathi tries to lead his troop into a cave in order to hide from humans, but gets stuck in the cave opening until the rest of his troop ram into him and force each other inside.
• In The Little Mermaid (1989), the movie opens with Ariel and Flounder exploring a sunken ship. Flounder ends up getting stuck in a porthole twice, once in trying to get into the ship and again when Ariel and he are attacked by a shark and must flee, both times requiring Ariel to pull/push him through. Said shark is likewise prevented from pursuing them when it gets stuck in the hole of an anchor handle.
• In a Turning Red promo, Mei gets stuck in a invisible doorway as a giant red panda and must turn human to fit and pass through.

Films — Live-Action

• In Enchanted, Giselle gets stuck in the doorway, although she's not fat, she's just wearing a lot of clothes.
• A scene in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has Jacob Kowalski briefly get stuck trying to enter Newt's briefcase.

Literature

• In Dave, Dave the fat cat gets stuck in his cat flap.
• Winnie the Pooh winds up getting stuck in Rabbit's den entrance a few times through the franchise.

Live-Action TV

• Friends: During the final Thanksgiving episode Rachel, Phoebe, Ross and Joey do a Scooby Stack through Chandler and Monica's chained front door. When they try to leave, Joey's head gets stuck in the gap.
• iCarly In iQuit iCarly when Carly, Sam, Dave, and Fleck argue about who would leave the Groovie Smoothe first, all four of them go out the door at the same time and briefly get stuck.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch:
  • In the episode "Pancake Madness", Sabrina becomes extremely fat from eating a ton of pancakes and gets wedged in her front door trying to get inside.
  • Another episode has Salem get stuck in a pet door after he's been overeating.
• In The Three Stooges, a Running Gag was for all 3 of them to try to go through the same door all at once, and them getting stuck as a result.
• Sometimes used in Trigger Happy TV in the "fat guy" pranks, usually forcing bystanders to squeeze past them when not blocking them off outright. That Dom Joly and his cohorts made no effort to disguise that they were wearing obvious fat suits made it that much funnier.

Puppet Shows

• "The Mighty Megalosaurus", the first episode of Dinosaurs, has Earl begin the story of Baby's birth with Earl getting stuck in the doorway of his house on his way to dinner. Fortunately, he manages to free himself.
• Fraggle Rock:
  • In the episode, "A Friend In Need", Sprocket chases Gobo into the Fraggle hole and winds up getting stuck. Gobo spends the rest of the episode doing all he can to help him.
  • In "The Trial of Cotterpin Doozer", Large Marvin tries to enter the Doozer Dome and gets stuck in the doorway.
• In Episode 2795 of Sesame Street, a big party is planned at Hooper's Store to celebrate its grand re-opening. Snuffy gets stuck in the front door when he tries to go inside the store, so everyone else has to get in through the back door so they can push him out.

Video Games

• In the Club Penguin short "Never Wake A Sleeping Sensei", three of the four ninjas all get stuck in the dojo's doorway with the fourth one pushing them all out of the way as they pursue their supposedly sleepwalking Sensei.
• Counter-Strike: A classic viral video shows a Counter-Strike player finding themselves stuck in a doorway when their teammate keeps closing it on them, preventing them from moving through it as the enemy team approaches. Much panicking ("DOOR STUCK! DOOR STUCK!"), pleading and hilarity ensues!
• LISA: The Painful RPG: Watching his father replace him with a "new, thin-hipped son" wasn't what hurt Salvation Black the most but the fact they didn't notice him stuck in the doorway for two weeks.
• Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon: In the Ditto Gang sidequest, a Cook mentions he was late for work because he got stuck in his front door after he "ate too much yummy food".
• This happens in-between phases for the Octo Samurai in Splatoon 2. He'll respawn from the hole within his Octocycle, but his girth prevents him from getting out immediately.
• Spyro: Year of the Dragon: When Hunter first tried to enter the hole on the ground that the villains escaped into, he got stuck in it. An elder dragon smacks him with his tail to make him go down the hole.
• The Walking Dead (Arcade): Happens when the characters make their way through a kitchen area and have to get through a food conveyor slot due to the door being locked. One of them, a rather chubby fellow, ends up briefly stuck and you have to hold off the Walker horde until he finally manages to squeeze through.

Web Animation

• In RWBY, Cardin The Bully unfolds Jaune's shield at just the right moment to get the shield stuck in the door.
• In Etra chan saw it!, Azami tried to break into a house by getting through a window but she was so fat she couldn't get in completely and ended up needing the police to get her out.

Webcomics

• Questionable Content: In this strip, Renee, Claire, Clinton, and Brun all try to go through a door at once while tipsy and end up stuck.
  Renee: Elliot, push!
  Claire: Don't push!
• Radio Silence: In this strip, Wren's bandmates hear her distressed run-in with an ex in the bathroom and try to shove through the door all at once, getting stuck.
• Rusty and Co.: In Level 8: 93, Madeline has trouble getting through a doorway with a stretcher, because the stretcher is not aligned with it.

Western Animation

• In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode, "Musta Been a Beautiful Baby", Tails swells up to the size of a parade float after he eats some dehydrated food at an instant food factory, then drinks a glass of water. When Sonic tries to get them away from Scratch and Grounder, Tails gets stuck in a doorway. He is soon freed when Scratch and Grounder accidentally de-age him into a baby rather than age him and Sonic into seniors as they intended.
• ARPO The Robot For All Kids: Emma occasionally has this happen to her when she's fat. She even winds up getting stuck in a magic portal once.
• In the Count Duckula episode, "Hi-Duck", Nanny gets stuck in the doorway of the airplane that she, Duckula, and Igor travel to Nice in. As Igor tries to push her through the doorway, he complains to Duckula that they never have this problem when they travel by their castle. When Nanny finally gets through, the flight attendant (whom she is sitting atop) tells her that she should have booked on a Jumbo Jet.
• Dennis the Menace (1986): At the beginning of "Spa Blahs", Mrs. Wilson signs Mr. Wilson up for a gym membership so he can lose weight. Mr. Wilson assures his wife that he's in perfect shape, but as he tries to get into his car to go to the gym, he gets stuck in the doorway and Mrs. Wilson has to push him through.
• In The Fairly OddParents! episode "Just Desserts!", this happens to an obese Timmy and his classmates when they try to exit their classroom all at once.
• Family Guy:
  • In "Life of Brian", after Brian's death, Stewie asks if they can get rid of the doggie door so Chris won't keep getting stuck in it.
    Chris: Every day, I get a little further in.
  • In "Saturated Fat Guy", Peter winds up gaining a ton of weight from all the junk food on his food truck. When he is informed that the Bing car is passing by his house, Peter tries to leave the truck to get in the picture, only to get stuck in the truck door with the fire department having to cut him out. Its when this happens does the Bing car circle back around and takes a picture of him on a harness getting sprayed with a fire hose.
• Gravedale High: The episode "Long Day's Gurney Into Night" has Cleofatra get stuck in the door of the school bus before Frankentyke pushes her out.
• Jacob Two-Two: Principal Greedyguts has difficulty getting through normal-sized doorways when he tries to enter a room.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series: The titular "French Fry" ends up making Lilo and Stitch fat due to his food being additicte and fatting to the point they can barely move. Naturally this happens a few times, especially when they're warned by Jumba that French Fry then proceed to cook those it fattens up and have to make a escape.
• In the Martha Speaks episode "Too Much Martha", Martha gains weight and starts having trouble going through the pet door.
• Producing Parker: This happens to Dee a few times when she becomes morbidly obese in order to gain ratings in "The Skinny on Parker."
• In A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, the gang gets wedged in a doorway trying to escape from "The Babysitter From Beyond" (episode title).
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Brush With Greatness", Homer gets stuck in a tube slide at a water park. The staff sends several kids down at once in an attempt to dislodge him, but it doesn't work, so the tube has to be dismantled to free him.
  • In "Little Big Mom", Marge tries to donate the family's useless junk and locks the front door the keep the others from stopping her. Homer tries to initiate "Plan B", which involves him going through the doggy door, but he's too fat to go through, so Bart and Lisa try to push his butt through. He ends up breaking off a chunk of the door, and runs around with the doggy hole stuck around his waist.
  • In "Pranksta Rap", Homer has trouble fitting through the cat flap.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Library Cards," Patrick reads a bunch of books and becomes really smart, also making his head really big. He is unable to leave SpongeBob's library and his head gets stuck in the doorway. The rest of the episode is about SpongeBob trying to shrink Patrick's head so he can leave the room.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Royal Pain", Helios mentions the front door of the Diaz house is a tight squeeze before he smashes right through the wall.

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