Big Door

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Make the door high, make the gate wide
—Old Danish hymn about the coming of Jesus

Wow, that's a big door.

Some people feel a need to make huge doors just to be dramatic. Sometimes there is a real reason behind making a door so large, but more often, there isn't. This trope is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a giant door.

Compare Cool Gate. See also Cool Key for some of the keys which may fit the door.

Examples of Big Door include:

Film

  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  • The Wizard of Oz: Both the door to enter the Emerald City and the one to the Wizard's palace.
  • King Kong: the giant gate in the giant wall, big enough to let Kong in.
  • Both Tron and Tron: Legacy have a doors so big that the Flynns remark upon it: "That's a big door." It's a vault door to protect the important secrets of the company, though.
  • Futureworld (sequel to Westworld). In a scene with a rocket launch there was a giant circular door, as seen here and here. That door has appeared in other movies as well.
  • Jurassic Park has a big, impressive gate whose sole purpose is to look impressive for park visitors. Malcolm jokes about it looking like the gate from King Kong.
  • There's a big door in Labyrinth which, when it closes, turns into a humungous robot knight. (At the time the largest puppet ever on screen, soon beaten by the Alien queen.)


Literature

  • The Lord of the Rings has a lot of these.
    • The door into the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Then silently a great doorway was outlined, though not a crack or joint had been visible before. Slowly it divided in the middle and swung outwards inch by inch, until both doors lay back against the wall.

    • The Gates of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring.
    • The Black Gate of Mordor in The Two Towers and The Return of the King.
    • The Main Gate of Minas Tirith in The Return of The King.
  • Also a Tolkien example: the gates of Angband from The Silmarillion dwarfed all of the other aforemented Tolkien's Big Doors.
  • In Dinotopia, the second book includes an enormous door as the entrance to the World Beneath.


Music

  • In the paintings accompanying Emerson Lake and Palmer's Pictures at an Exhibition, "The Great Gates of Kiev" is illustrated by a huge pair of doors standing by themselves on an empty plain.


Mythology

  • In the Norse Mythology Valhal, the hall of Odin, have 540 doors, each so big that 800 men kan walk in side by side. Now try to imagine how big that hall is...


Tabletop Games

  • Paranoia supplement Acute Paranoia, adventure "Me and My Shadow Mark IV". The entrance to Hanger 39 is a set of giant clamshell doors. They're at least 35 meters high and 25 meters wide, because that's how big the warbot inside is.


Video Games

  • Boss rooms in the Super Mario series usually wait beyond big doors. The final battle in the original Yoshi's Island has an even bigger door than the standard big boss doors.
    • In Paper Mario:The Thousand Year Door, the Thousand Year Door. It cracks when it opens.
    • Super Mario Galaxy 2 has these in Bowser's levels, sometimes mid way through them as well as before the boss. They have the lock smashed in via flinging meteors into it.
  • Portal 2 has a giant, circular door separating the old Aperture Science facility from the new. Behind it? A wall, with a much smaller door set into it. The developers joked that they were going to put a claim on the box saying, "Features the largest door in video games!"
  • Kingdom Hearts
    • The door to the eponymous world is HUGE.
    • Subverted: The door to the throne room of Disney Castle is shown to be mammoth. Court Wizard Donald Duck strolls up to the door and slowly knocks on the door, causing a regularly-sized door to open at the very bottom of the larger double doors.
  • Super Smash Bros Brawl. At the very end of the Subspace Emissary's Great Maze lies a massive, colorful door where Tabuu resides. It only opens when the player fights the every other boss in the SSE and the clone of every playable character the player had at that point, meaning this excludes Sonic, Jigglypuff, Toon Link, and Wolf.


Web Comics


Western Animation

  • Avatar: The Last Airbender has the Earth King's gigantic "fancy door".
  • In The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, Cilindric the German's arena has a big door which contrasts with the man himself.


Real Life

  • Many prominent downtown bank locations have inexplicably huge doors.
  • The front doors of the National Archives in Washington DC are the largest bronze doors in the world, being a foot thick and 40 feet tall.
  • NASA's Vehicle (formerly Vertical) Assembly Building has the largest doors in the world, 456 feet high. Not done to be impressive, though; NASA roll(ed) entire Space Shuttles and Saturn V rockets, fully assembled and upright, out to the launch pad through those doors.
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