Bedsheet Ladder: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:Bedsheet Rope.jpg|link=Code Geass|frame|We lose most of our [[Rebellious Princess|princesses that way]]...]]

 

A character is stuck in a room for any reason. The room has a bed and a window. The prisoner makes a rope using the sheets off the bed and climbs out the window.

A princess, especially a [[Rebellious Princess]], will frequently do this. That goes double if she's a [[Girl in the Tower]].

 

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'', Mokuba attempts to escape from Pegasus' castle by climbing down a bed sheet rope. It doesn't work, as he runs out of sheets a fair way up the tower. As he panics, two of the sheet's knots slip, and he plummets. However, in a bit of standard cartoon magic, he survives. This despite the fact he clearly falls from ''above the height of the trees''.

** ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series|Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series]]''' take: [[Didn't Think This Through|"I probably should have thought this throoooooouugh!"]]

* In ''[[Junjou Romantica]]'', Usami's brother Haurhiko locks Misaki [[Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard|in a store room where bedsheets are kept]] (alongside a desk full of notebooks that Usami wrote stories in as a kid). Misaki soon sees his way out, though the sheets rip causing him to fall and sprain his ankle.

 

* During ''[[The Mask (comics)|The Mask]]'' comic series, Walter escapes from his hospital room this way, although the actual escape is never shown, only the aftermath. The two detectives viewing the scene snark that he must watch too many movies for trying that stunt - and eat way too much popcorn for the bedsheets to tear.

 

* Calvin uses this in one episode of ''[[Calvin and Hobbes: The Series]]''.

 

* Subverted in ''[[Monty Python and the Holy Grail]]''. Prince Herbert puts together a bedsheet ladder to escape from the tower, but is stalled by Lancelot's hesitance until his father cuts the rope and sends him plummeting to his doom. Of course, as we all know, he was [[Not Quite Dead]].

* Subverted in the first ''[[Charlie's Angels]]'' movie, Bosley tries this one, but the Thin Man happened to be stationed below the window the ''Bedsheet Ladder''.

* In ''[[Up (animation)|Up]]'', Carl tries to lower down Russell with one of these. Then he drops it, being about seventy. Fortunately, it was a [[Daydream Surprise]].

* In ''[[Corpse Bride]]'', Victoria does with a quilt, though she does nearly get caught by her father.

 

* In ''[[World War Z]]'', one of the anecdotes is an Otaku telling the chronicler that he escaped from his high rise in Japan by making a Bedsheet Ladder...it was slow going and extremely dangerous given that he was weaponless, the high rise was full of [[Zombie Apocalypse|zombies]], and he had to break into a new apartment every couple of floors to get more sheets.

* An ''[[Encyclopedia Brown]]'' mystery revolved around this trope - a starlet said that a big, masked intruder broke into the room, knocked out her bodyguard, grabbed a diamond-encrusted statue, and climbed out the window from a bedsheet ladder tied to one of the bedposts. However, Chief Brown and his son proved them to be lying by asking Bugs Meany (who happened to be around at the time) to climb up the bedsheets so he could meet the starlet - when he did so, his (significantly less than the alleged intruder) weight pulled the bed from the wall and released a fountain pen trapped in between.

* In [[The Bible]] itself, Michal helps her beloved David escape her father, King Saul's, wrath with this trick.

** Perhaps because one, it's not one of the more well-known passages, and two, because it isn't clear from the text that this was the method by which she let him down from the window. She did, however, cover an image so that when the messengers went to bring him to the king, Michal could tell them he was sick so they wouldn't get close enough to find out he wasn't there.

* In [[Robert E. Howard]]'s "[[Xuthal of the Dusk|The Slithering Shadow]]", [[Conan the Barbarian]] uses a tapestry instead of sheets.

 

* A rare subversion occurred on ''[[Jeeves and Wooster (TV series)|Jeeves and Wooster]]'' when Gussie wanted to use Bertie's sheet to escape. Bertie refused to let him, as much because it wouldn't work as because he didn't want his sheets dirty and knotted.

** To be fair, Bertie's been known to use his sheets for the same purpose. At least in [[Jeeves and Wooster (novel)|the books]].

* ''[[Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries]]'': In "Unnatural Habits", a bedsheet ladder is planted to make it look like the murdered girl had escaped from the confinement cell through the window. Phryne sees through it because the knots used would not have held the girl's weight.

 

* Referenced in ''[[Alice's Restaurant (music)|Alice's Restaurant]]'' by Arlo Guthrie. Officer Obie takes the toilet paper out of Arlo's cell so that he can't "bend the bars, roll the paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape."

 

== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==

* Nasty uses one to escape from Hunter Yurk's compund in ''[[Terry and the Pirates]]''.

 

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* In ''[[Sinfest]]'', [https://web.archive.org/web/20131005033824/http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3155 Fuschia's escape].

 

 

* Bloo tries it in an episode of ''[[Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends]]'', but forgets to tie the other end down.

* [[Daffy Duck]] does it to escape from gangsters in the [[Looney Tunes]] short ''Golden Yeggs'', but the bottom half of the ladder turns out the be the gangsters themselves.

* This is how Fievel and the others escape the sweatshop in ''[[An American Tail]]''.

 

* Estonian thief Martin Vaiksaar used knotted bedsheets to scale 3 23-foot walls to escape from a jail near Finland's capital city of Helsinki. Despite the facility being brand new with a (presumably) recent staff, it took them an entire day to notice that he had escaped. The tale gets weirder in that he managed to get back to Estonia to find that the police were not interested in the fact that Finnish and Estonian authorities were both meant to be after him.

* In May 2008, a thief named Aaron Stephen Forden [http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/new-way-into-prison-and-an-old-way-out/ escaped a New Zealand prison]. Bonus points for referencing this wiki.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Improvised Index]]

[[Category:Escape Tropes]]

[[Category:Older Than Feudalism]]

[[Category:Tropes Examined by the Mythbusters]]