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Common in cartoons, an innocuous-looking rake (or hoe, or shovel...) is lying on the ground. A character steps on it the wrong way and gets a face full of the stick part. Ouch.
Obviously Truth in Television for anyone who tried that. In real life, however, it usually results in a nosebleed or, if bad enough, a trip to the emergency room - Looney Tunes jokes notwithstanding. And if an actual rake fails to rise and smack you, it may instead hurt your foot.
Film[]
- A variation happens in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, when Clark keeps stepping on loose floorboards in the attic.
Literature[]
- A humorous aside in the Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor's Hand notes a group of monks injuring themselves stepping on discarded gardening tools while fleeing from an unexpectedly-landing shuttlecraft. Seems even in the 41st millennium, this joke still happens.
Live Action TV[]
- Happens to the Skipper on the Gilligan's Island episode "Waiting for Watubi"; the "rake" was made of bamboo and coconuts.
- Happens to Jack a couple of times on Three's Company.
- On One Thousand Ways to Die, one young woman who gardened as a hobby died of suffocation by stepping on a rake with a zucchini in her mouth as she prepared for a date.
- In The Late Show with David Letterman's Top Ten List of the most dangerous toys (from November 1997), Number 8 was "'Ouch!' The Step-On-A-Rake Game".
Newspaper Comics[]
- The Far Side has the African Rakesnake.
Other[]
Video Games[]
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Turtles in Time has loose planks on the pirate ship level that smack the player character whenever they step on them. It's the same gag.
- This happens to Guybrush in Monkey Island 2 Le Chucks Revenge.
- Plants vs. Zombies allows you to buy a rake for your lawn that kills the first zombie that it encounters; it lasts three levels, after which you can buy a new one.
- A rare level hazard in the Tiny Toon Adventures game for the Sega Genesis. In some levels, enemies can attack you while the rake has incapacitated you.
- One of the rake-type traps is present in RuneScape in Isafdar forest. However, this trap has something else than just a stick at the end of rake.
- This can happen to Pac-Man in Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures at the farm.
Web Comics[]
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Torg (thinking): Alone, surrounded by vampires. My only hope is to dive for the rake by my feet, breaking the shaft into a wooden stake. But how am I going to find it in this mist?
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Western Animation[]
- Tom the cat gets it frequently in Tom and Jerry.
- This happens to Sideshow Bob a lot in The Simpsons, particularly in the "Cape Feare" story where he repeatedly stepped on a bunch of rakes in a row. Hanging onto the bottom on a car after it went through a bunch of cacti apparently left him too out of it even notice how they were all there completely littering the ground.
- In the DVD commentary, the creators admit they were filling for time.
- It becomes a Running Gag or possibly even a Brick Joke in later episodes.
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Sideshow Bob: Rakes! My old arch enemy... |
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- In Ice Age, Sid the sloth walks on something in the abandoned human camp and gets whacked in the face.
- Monster Allergy has it with Bombo in the opening theme of season 1.