Sticky Situation



""Now, that's what I call a sticky situation.""

- Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny, South Park

A classic Comedy Trope: someone comes in contact something sticky (flypaper, glue, gum, molasses, tape, tar, wallpaper paste, etc.) and Hilarity Ensues.

If it's not actually superglue, the substance tends to act as a far stronger adhesive than it is in reality. When bad guys use this stuff, it's almost an Obligatory Joke for them to trap themselves with it.

Anime and Manga

 * The Sailor Moon anime had several villains employ this as an attack, including one in the second season seemingly made of goo, Eudial in season 3, and the Amazoness Quartet in four. Strangely, they never seem to have trouble cleaning it out of their hair.
 * One Lupin III movie had the title character using a bazooka loaded with a sticky bomb to immobilize several pursuing ships (gluing them to each-other, not the water).
 * Ranma ½ had a story where Principle Kuno tried to force the students to prostrate themselves before him. One of his tricks was to coat the floor with glue, leaving several of the cast stuck on their hands and knees. Ranma, rather than let himself be humiliated in such a way, ripped the entire floor out of the ground.
 * The Tenchi Muyo! manga had a pair of alien criminals breaking into the Masaki houehold to steal a priceless artifact nobody knew was valuable, easily bypassing Washu's most ingenious security traps. When they try again the next day, she's augmented them with tiger pit traps, swinging spiked balls, and a floor coated in glue, none of which the pair had gadgets to deal with. This is all in the Masaki's living room.

Comic Books

 * The Trapster, aka Paste Pot Pete centers his whole shtick around this trope. In one case he made a stairway out of glue to flee a building, daring Spider-Man to follow, who simply swung over the trap with his webbing.
 * Astro City has an Expy of the Trapster called Glue Gun.
 * Not learning from PPP's failure, Mr Stone, one half of a B-List merc team in Spider-Man tried to slow down the wall-crawler by using his Swiss Army Weapon to coat the entire floor in glue so as to give his life-draining partner Mr. Styx a chance to use his touch of death. Spiderman easily leaped out of his boots onto the ceiling.
 * Proving there's more than one way to take a girl out, Green Arrow's first use of his glue arrow was in a battle against future wife Black Canary.
 * Empowered features Sistah Spooky coming upon the aftermath of the title character's disastrous encounter with Glue Gun Gil, considered to be the all-time lamest villain in the city next to Ladder Master.
 * In a comic book story of The Smurfs, Gargamel creates a treat that ends up trapping a Smurf that touches it, but as Gargamel runs over to where he has set the trap, he also gets stuck in the trap, and so do birds, a cow, and several other things on his way home. Papa Smurf makes a potion that frees everything that got stuck in the trap — everything, that is, except for Gargamel, which Papa Smurf has no more potion for, but he does leave a recipe for the formula for Gargamel to make up.
 * In PS238 Centurion armor suits have integrated glue guns that spit substance strong enough to hold even metahumans with Super Strength, though it decays after a few minutes.
 * The Smurfs In one of Peyo's original comics, Gargamel sets a trap for the Smurfs, a sundae made of glue. He catches one of them, but trips mid-gloating, falling onto it a getting himself stuck. Then, when he tries to get home to get unglued, two birds become stuck, and by the time Papa Smurf and the others show up with an "ungluer" to save the trapped Smurf, a beaver, two chipmunks, and even a cow are stuck to it, Gargamel clearly having made it worse in his rage to free himself.
 * Spider-Man's webbing. It's a chemical which, when shot from his web-shooters, can restrain foes even stronger than he is.
 * Adhesive-X is an invention of Captain America's foe Baron Zemo, that can glue anything together and is practically indissolvable. The Avengers had to consult the currently-jailed Trapster in order to create a solvent. The stuff can also be corrosive when it's too concentrated, and is what caused the horrific scars on Zemo's face. Zemo eventually considered it a failed experiment.

Film

 * Fatty Arbuckle's short The Butcher Boy gets a lot of mileage from a pail of molasses.
 * Charlie Chaplin's A Day's Pleasure features fresh asphalt.
 * Buster Keaton uses this gag a lot.
 * He absentmindedly dips his hand in glue in The Haunted House. It Gets Worse.
 * In Sherlock, Jr. he runs afoul of a sheet of flypaper.
 * One of the best remembered segments in Song of the South is about the Tar Baby. (You thought it meant something else?)
 * Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: Judge Doom punches a container of glue and gets it on his fist. He then accidentally hits a steam roller and gets stuck to it. He steps in the glue and when he tries to push off the steamroller with his foot, gets that stuck to it as well. He's eventually run over by the steamroller, but he survives because he's a toon. Watch it here, starting at 1:40.
 * In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Jamieson delivers Freddy to a party of sailors on shore leave who Freddy had earlier attempted to deceive. The next morning, we see that he has apparently gotten along with them just fine, casually leaning with his hand against a doorframe as the last of them leaves the room. He then asks Jamieson to get his hand un-superglued from the door frame.
 * In The Man With Two Brains, Dr. Hfuhruhurr consults with his boss, who spends the conversation with his index fingers placed pensively against his upper lip. At the end of the conversation, the doctor asks when the operation to separate his fingers from his lip will happen, and notes that superglue is something you have to be careful with.
 * In National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Clark and his wife go to bed after he just cut down a pine tree, coating his hands in sap.
 * IIRC one of the GIs in Saving Private Ryan gets a sticky bomb stuck to his hand just before it's about to detonate. YMMV on how funny that is.
 * American Pie 2 has this with Jim's hand and a pornography tape.
 * Actually, as Jim's mistaken superglue for lubricant, he's more worried about what his other hand is glued to... The tape is just an embarrassing bonus.
 * In The Simpsons Movie, Homer's hand gets stuck to his pants with super glue during a Badass Boast.
 * Happens to The Three Stooges in the movie The Outlaws Is Coming.
 * In a promotional web short for Up, Russell has problems handling Band-Aids, which keep getting stuck to his fingers.
 * The third Nightmare On Elm Street had a girl deathly afraid of roaches start to turn into one, which led to her walking into a giant roach motel. Most definitely not played for laughs (unless you're Freddy).
 * Cactus Jack does this in The Villain (which is, in places, basically a live-action Roadrunner cartoon). He paints the railroad tracks with glue, and his targets roll over it in their wagon to no effect. Furious, he runs after them... only to be stuck in the glue and hit by a train.
 * In Honey We Shrunk Ourselves, the direct-to-video sequel of Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Wayne manages to accidentally shrink himself, his brother, and their wives to the size of cockroaches. Of course, they end up fleeing from a real cockroach into a Roach Motel-like glue trap. Wayne has made a hobby of disassembling these traps for some reason, and knows there's a clear path through which they can safely pass to the other side. His wife, freaking out over being attacked by a giant cockroach, manages to step in the glue and get stuck, with the cockroach biting at her, until Wayne comes back and pulls her free.

Literature

 * The title character of the Roald Dahl book Matilda glues her father's hat to his head. She also mentions the boy down the road who got Superglue on his finger and then tried to pick his nose, with disastrous results.
 * Adrian Mole ends up with a model aeroplane glued to his nose at one point, prompting accusations that he was trying to sniff it.

Live Action TV

 * I Love Lucy: In the episode "The Moustache," when Ricky grows a mustache that Lucy dislikes, she dons a false beard in protest. It's accidentally attached with Bulldog Cement ("Holds fast forever. Will not let go. Can only be removed with Bulldog Cement Remover Number Three") instead of spirit gum.
 * In Lucille Ball's later sitcom Life With Lucy, her character (yet again named Lucy) becomes stuck to Curtis after a mishap while trying to glue a lamp back together.
 * An episode of The Captain and Tennille (a 70's variety show) had a superglue salesman demonstrating his product then accidentally getting his hand stuck to the hand of a pretty housewife. Then her husband came home and his hands got stuck around the salesman's neck.
 * The Muppet Show: In the Gilda Radner episode, Dr. Honeydew's superglue spills all over the stage and characters keep getting glued to everything. By the end of the show, everyone is stuck in one big ball.
 * Deputy Andy Brennan runs afoul of a roll of Scotch tape in Twin Peaks.
 * Done with a zombie mask on Victorious, when Tori's ditzy friend uses the wrong glue. She is supposed to be the lead in the play that night, and ends up performing her entire (serious) part wearing the zombie mask. With the author of the play in the audience.
 * Tim gets his head stuck to a board while demonstrating Binford's Miracle Glue on Home Improvement. In a different episode, he gets both of his hands stuck to a toilet tank's interior wall.
 * Happens in an episode of Samurai Sentai Shinkenger when Chiaki and Ryuunosuke become glued together by the Monster of the Week.
 * Which naturally carried over into the Power Rangers Samurai version of the episode. Which, given Power Rangers' predilection for puns, was naturally titled "A Sticky Situation".
 * On Boy Meets World, Cory, Shawn and Topanga get superglued to their classroom desks as part of an Escalating War.
 * In Gilligan's Island there are two episodes where this occurs:
 * In the episode "Goodbye Island", the group accidentally discover a new glue when they attempt to use the sap of a local tree to create pancake syrup. They then try to use it to repair their boat. Very clumsily, of course.
 * In the episode "Beauty Is As Beauty Does" the group holds a beauty contest between the three women. During the talent portion Mary Ann is to perform a dance routine, and Mr. Howell tries to sabotage it by pouring glue onto the stage. Mary Ann, of course, steps right in it, becoming instantly stuck and loses her shoe (which is still stuck in place in a later scene).
 * Happened in the Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em episode, "Wendy House".

Newspaper Comics

 * In one Calvin and Hobbes strip, when trying to assemble a plastic model Calvin got glue on his hands while Hobbes obliviously mused about the tri-lingual instructions.
 * A week long arc in FoxTrot involved Paige and jason having their faces stuck together by experimental bubblegum.
 * For their pranks, The Katzenjammer Kids tended to used an extremely effective superglue which would always get their victim stuck immediately and completely. However, the kids' Genre Savvy rival Rollo would often happen to be nearby with a kettle of hot water.
 * In a Garfield strip (seen here), Jon has to go to the hospital after picking his nose while trying to assemble a model airplane.

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons & Dragons has a few ways to do this, such as Sovereign Glue. There's also Wand of Viscid Globes that shoots glue-y blobs.

Video Games

 * Near the end of Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, Guybrush cleverly devises a way to stop the situation by opening up the tar barrel and trapping his hand in sticky tar (he even says, "That's what I call a sticky situation!" while looking at the tar puddle again).
 * The GOOP in Red Alert 3 Paradox, the Allies' other non-lethal weapon of choice after the Freeze Ray, works by trapping enemies in sticky pink foam.
 * One of the myriad of weapons in Monster Madness was the Glue Cannon, which fired a puddle of goop onto the ground in which ground-based enemies, as well as your fellow players, can get caught (though it mostly only slows them down). As long as the player has the weapon equipped, he/she wears boots that makes him/her immune to becoming stuck in glue.

Web Comics

 * In Schlock Mercenary immobilizers that shoot sticky "goober rounds" are common security weapons. Advantages over other Stun Guns is that goo doesn't care much about target species and body armor - with right sort of gum (and enough of it), even powered exosuits can be slowed down for quite a while. The goober-goo is not just passive glue, thanks to nanomachines it's motile and can stick well, yet avoid suffocating the target, as it moves away from breathing openings. Even though it can hold a lot of weight, using more elastic goo for emergency grapple "web-shooting" is a bad idea, however.

Wen Original

 * From SCP Foundation, SCP-170 is super-sticky super glue.

Western Animation

 * There was an episode of The Flintstones (and every other cartoon in existence, I'm sure) dealing with Fred's attempt to invent a new, unbreakable superglue, and getting stuck to Barney (as I recall) in the process. In the end it turns out the secret ingredient was.
 * In Family Guy Stewie and Bryan spent most of an episode glued together.
 * In the Tale Spin episode "Stuck on You", Baloo and Don Karnage are stuck together by an experimental superglue.
 * In the Squirrel Boy episode "The Rod Squad," an escalating situation involving sticky buns ends up with most of the cast stuck together in a huge ball.
 * One of many traps Wile E. Coyote has used to catch the Road Runner.
 * Totally Spies! used this trope several times, involving everything from glue guns to a human sized roach-motel when one of the girls became an insect hybrid.
 * Animaniacs had a character recounting an incident where the Warner Kids made a movie themselves where they use the flypaper gag, which the person admitted was funny, but ran several hours too long.
 * Teen Titans had a minor villain getting hold of some Reality Warper powers, and Raven, having been knocked into the ocean, discovered the hard way that the water had turned into glue.
 * Happens in the classic Disney short "Playful Pluto", when Pluto gets stuck on a sheet of fly paper and has a hard time getting it off. (This scene is used prominently in Sullivans Travels, inspiring the main character's epiphany about the power of laughter.)
 * Gargamel tries to trap The Smurfs in a sticky glue trap, only to end up trapping Hogatha who is none too pleased about it. She demands to be freed from the trap, but Gargamel tells her to get herself out. Hogatha does, but she uses her magic to put Gargamel into his own sticky trap.
 * In another episode, Gargamel casts a spell that causes the Smurfs to get stuck to each other, which Papa Smurf uses to his advantage by having the stuck Smurfs stick on Gargamel, forcing him to come up with a counter-spell that frees him and all the other Smurfs.
 * In an episode of Chowder, the titular cat...bear...thing gets some Grubble Gum. Unfortunately, it gets stuck on his face, then his body, then to Mung Dahl, Schnitzel, Truffles, a random bear, and eventually all of Marzipan City. Bonus points for playing the Katamari Damacy theme in the background.
 * The plot of an entire episode of Kick Buttowski called "Hand in Hand" where the titular character gets stuck together with Kendall due to cave sap... the only way to get them unstuck is by using the anti-sticky agent in Kendall's boyfriends garage.
 * In an episode of Danger Mouse, the heroes are superglued to a roller coaster of doom. Hilarity Ensues when they describe to Colonel K how they escaped it.
 * The Pieman from the original Strawberry Shortcake specials is such a Lethal Chef, his pies are glue-like to begin with, so in of the specials he tries to use them as such, to set a trap for the heroine. Naturally, given his rotten luck as a cartoon supervillain, she takes a shortcut (riding her tricycle over the tarp he is hiding under) and predictably, he gets snagged in his own trap.

Real Life

 * This Krazy Glue ad is not an illusion—but note the carefully prepared surfaces.
 * Apparently, it's not unheard of for people to visit an emergency room after mistaking a tube of superglue for personal lubricant. (OW.)
 * The Sticky Bomb was a real ally weapon in WW 2. It resembled a German stick grenade but with the end coated in glue, to be tossed on the weak-parts on enemy tanks. Pulling the pin would pop the end off, revealing the sticky end and arming the device, and having one where the glue leaked onto the handle was a very real possibility.
 * Police have experimented with a sticky foam gun as a method of non-lethal urban pacification. Besides the obvious cleanup issue is the risk of accidentally (or not) shooting someone in the face.
 * Velvet worms, soft-bodied primitive cousins of arthropods, hunt by spraying streams of glue at smaller invertebrates to stick them to the ground.
 * The Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919, when a molasses tank burst and a wave of molasses traveling at 35 mph covered a large portion of the city, killing 21 people. It's rumored that to this day, when it gets particularly warm, some can still smell the molasses, over a century after the disaster.