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Most often seen in Warner Brothers Looney Tunes productions, this is any of several often surreal comedic bits surrounding the use of elevators in cartoons.
In the simplest variety, an improbable location (like a hole in the side of a shallow ravine) will suddenly manifest an elevator under the control of a Trickster character, complete with doors, call buttons beside them, and a floor indicator above the opening. The Trickster will then use the elevator, often "ascending" to an upper level that obviously doesn't exist.
The next variety uses a real elevator; the trickster acts as an old-style elevator operator in a department store and announces any variety of improbable items for each floor, often deceiving a villain into launching himself out of the elevator and into some unpleasant location.
Slightly more aggressive is the acceleration of the elevator at improbable speeds by the Trickster operator, leaving the villain flattened against the floor or ceiling. Sufficiently fierce acceleration will render the villain a blob or coinlike disk, from which form he must exert himself to recover.
Elevators may also pass or open onto unlikely settings, including ones that may well be inhospitable to careless or villainous characters.
Less common are elevator races or chases between Trickster and villain, running from ground floor to roof.
Because of the style of many elevators in the period when this trope evolved, they are usually depicted as having frosted glass windows in their doors, behind which a moving elevator is indicated as a band of light moving up or down. Elevator travel may also be indicated on the outside of buildings by the movement of lit windows; sometimes, like Star Trek turbolifts, they go sideways to get around the "stepping" in the sides of a skyscraper.
Old-fashioned elevators sometimes have clockface-style indicators above the doors with an arrow that points at the number which correspond to the floor the elevator is currently on. In comedies, it is possible to control elevators by manipulating these indicators -- pulling the arrow to move the elevator car, or, alternately, trapping the elevator on or between floors by blocking the arrow.
Films -- Animation
- The accelerating elevator is inflicted upon Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, with Droopy Dog as the operator. It also has a unique variant: the elevator doesn't come all the way up to the floor when the doors open, and Droopy is standing on a box to reach the controls. "Mind the step, sir."
Films -- Live-Action
- A Three Stooges short ended with them in an elevator with a gorilla, who is throwing the controls to make the car speed up and down, finally crashing through the roof and hurtling through space. Just a typical day for them.
- The Laurel and Hardy silent short Double Whoopee has The Boys employed at an expensive hotel. On three separate occasions they cause a European prince (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Erich von Stroheim) to fall down an empty elevator shaft - fortunately only from the ground floor into the maintenance pit.
Literature
- The Great Glass Elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and even more so in the sequel, titled Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It can go sideways, and also can crash through the roof without being shattered if it gets up enough speed. In the sequel, Willy Wonka tries to get them as high up as possible in order to break through the roof of the Chocolate Factory (no one knows why they couldn't use the hole they'd left through), but they don't reverse direction in time and end up shooting into outer space. In an elevator made of glass.
- Played dead serious in the Percy Jackson series: Mount Olympus is on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building.
Live-Action TV
- The elevator in Police Squad!'s station house opened on such diverse scenes as a mountainside meadow, the stage of an opera house during a production, and a swimming pool.
Web Comics
- Xkcd mixes it with Zeppelins from Another World.
- The Clap Your Hands If You Believe realm of the Fae in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures gives you this. Of note is that they're on an island in the sky.
- Floor 9000!
Western Animation
- This is a standard gag used by Bugs Bunny when he is operating in a skyscraper setting.
- One of the best-known examples is the 1945 cartoon Hare Conditioned, in which Bugs announces, "Fifth floor! Rubber tires, sugar, bourbon, butter, and other picture postcards!" In the same cartoon, the villain attempts to pursue Bugs Bunny in an elevator, only to watch Bugs appear on each floor he passes, using a different edge of the elevator opening as a floor (as seen in the image on this page).
- Bugs' own burrow often has an elevator. In Acrobatty Bunny it even winds along with the tunnel.
- It makes one of its earliest appearances in 1939's Hare-um Scare-um, where a very early version of Bugs Bunny -- not yet named at that point -- uses it to confound the dog who is pursuing him.
- Bugs Bunny does the acceleration variant to a construction worker repeatedly in Homeless Hare, but he overdoes it and inadvertently sends the elevator crashing through the roof of the building.
- In Jack-Wabbit and the Beanstalk, there is an elevator built into the beanstalk.
- Wile E. Coyote builds his own elevator booth to get into Bugs' burrow.
- The Donald Duck short Bellboy Donald involves much hijinks between Donald and a mischievous kid on an elevator.
- Porky in Wackyland offers an excellent example of the "elevator out of nowhere" variation.
- Porky also got the 'absurd speed' variation in Daffy Duck Slept Here, where he asks to go to the 30th floor of a hotel.
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- Filmations Ghostbusters:
- The "Skelevator" would often accelerate so quickly that it punched holes through their Haunted Headquarters, and entering a secret code would cause said elevator to enter the strange dimension where the Transformation Sequence would occur.
- When the Ghostbusters were out on assignment, they often relied upon a portable version to change into uniform.
- Rocky and Bullwinkle became ensnared in one of these while hunting for forged box tops (don't ask). The elevator went up and down very effectively (read: quickly), but failed to stop at the top floor..
- In two episodes of The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, the Hooded Claw tampered with an elevator occupied by Penelope so it would rise at an abnormally high speed.
- On one of the Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner shorts in The Looney Tunes Show, Wile E. is climbing a cliff to get at the Roadrunner. He feels around for a hold and stumbles onto an elevator on the cliff wall, which he then takes to the top.