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Door Step Baby: Difference between revisions
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Also known as a [[Foundling]]. Often causes [[Changeling Fantasy]]. See also [[Parental Abandonment]], [[Missing Mom]].
Lead-in to [[Moses in The
{{examples
== Anime & Manga ==
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== Comics ==
* [[Superman]] is arguably an instance of this trope. Of course, in this case, the doorstep is Kansas, and the note's either missing or undecipherable. In some versions it's more the [[Moses in The
* The Silver Age ''[[The Flash|Flash]]'' was published for more than a decade before the Flash and his wife Iris discovered that Iris had actually been born in the far future to time-traveling parents who abandoned her as an infant on the doorstep of a 20th-century couple. Iris's 20th-century parents had never told her that she was a foundling, and they never suspected that she was from the future. Eventually, Iris was reunited with her next-millennium parents. This plot development was followed for a while, then dropped, and most readers either forgot about it or assumed that it had been retconned out of existence. When Iris was murdered in the 1980s, no mention was made of her far-future origins. A couple of years later, when the Flash comic book was due to be cancelled, Flash was apparently killed ... but a twist ending revealed that he and Iris were both still alive in the distant future with Iris's parents.
* Skeezix Wallet, in Frank King's ''[[Gasoline Alley]]'', was left on Walt Wallet's doorstep as an infant. More than a decade later, Walt Wallet acquired a girl named Judy in the same manner.
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== Films -- Animation ==
* A version of this is the beginning of Quasimodo's life in [[Disney]]'s ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney)|The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]''. Frollo is so disgusted by the child's appearance that he is about to drop him down a well... but the Archdeacon of Notre Dame Cathedral informs him that killing an innocent child, even a deformed one, will certainly lead to damnation. In the face of that, Frollo has no choice. Interestingly, in the book Frollo ''was ''the archdeacon of Notre Dame, as well as being not quite such a bastard. So it's kind of like he got split apart and his better three-eighths popped out of the cathedral to restrain him from infanticide.
* Variation: in ''[[Kung Fu Panda (Animation)|Kung Fu Panda]]'', Tai Lung is left on the doorstep of the Jade Palace in perfectly beautiful weather, and we never see or are told who the mother was or why she abandoned him. And far from growing up to [[Moses in The
** Also done in [[Kung Fu Panda 2 (Animation)|the sequel]]. Po's father tells the story of how he found him in a radish box from the vegetable order delivered to him. He waited for someone to come by, but when no one came, he adopted Po.
* The opening scene in ''[[Meet the Robinsons]]''.
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== Films -- Live Action ==
* Oswald Cobblepot -- alias The Penguin -- in the movie ''[[Batman|Batman Returns]]''. Not so much left on the doorstep as [[Moses in The
* The live-action movie ''[[Little Man]]'' has a gangster who is supposed to be able to pass for a baby leave himself at someone's doorstep.
** Basically, it's a live-action ripoff of the Bugs Bunny cartoon below.
* Happened in the ''[[Super Mario Bros (Film)|Super Mario Bros]]'' movie, in an opening scene. Daisy's mother leaves her (in an egg... yeah) at a chapel in Brooklyn, along with a [[Orphan's Plot Trinket|meteorite shard]], which Daisy later wears as a necklace. Yes, Samantha Mathis plays a [[Chrono Trigger (Video Game)|Reptite]]. Sounds good already, doesn't it?
* This happens in ''[[The Curious Case of Benjamin Button]]'', where a baby is born old and ages backwards. The baby's mother died in childbirth, making the father swear that he'll have a place in the world. When the father gets a glimpse of his child, he's horrified and repulsed, and runs out the door with it. He seems to be about to throw the baby into a river when a policeman scares him away, so he leaves him on the doorstep of an old people's home. Unusually for this trope, not only do the people running the place -- a black couple -- not notice until they nearly step on him, but later [[Luke, I Am Your Father|the father meets and recognizes his son.]]
* Swee-Pea in ''[[Popeye (Film)|Popeye]]''.
* In ''[[Breakfast On Pluto]]'', [[Cillian Murphy|Patrick/Kitten]] is left by his mother on the doorstep of his father -- the priest. (He's placed with a foster family.)
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== Live Action TV ==
* In the ''[[
* In an episode of ''[[Seventh Heaven|7th Heaven]]'', Simon helps a friend turn her newborn she can't take care of over to a hospital in a [[Very Special Episode|didactic script intended to publicize the existence]] of "safe haven" laws.
** ''[[
** While not as [[Anvilicious]], ''[[Joan of Arcadia]]'' had an episode dealing with an abandoned baby. A "safe haven" law is referenced during a discussion.
* On ''[[The Golden Girls]]'', Rose tells of having been left in a basket at an orphanage... along with some beefsticks, cheeses, and "some kind of cracker that didn't go with anything." She's Minnesotan, for those who find this scenario confusing.
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** In one of the many parallels between {{spoiler|the mortal enemies}} the same happened to {{spoiler|Voldemort}} except he was left with an orphanage.
* This trope applies to the novel ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Literature)|The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]'', in which Quasimodo is abandoned outside Notre Dame and Frollo takes him in out of kindness.
* In the ''[[Discworld]]'' novel ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Thief of Time|Thief of Time]]'', both Lobsang Ludd and Jeremy Clockson were left on doorsteps as infants (Jeremy at the Clockmaker's Guild, and Lobsang at the Thieves' Guild before he was discovered in his late teens by the History Monks). It turns out they're {{spoiler|[[Luke, I Am Your Father|brothers,]] [[Split At Birth|in a manner of speaking.]]}}
* [[Keith Laumer]] did this, although in his version the baby was a huge insect- or crustacean-looking thing and it took the army with lots of artillery to kill it -- and ''then'' they decoded the message which read, "Please take good care of my little girl." Somewhere between [[Tear Jerker]] and [[Squick]] there.
* The [[Jacqueline Wilson]] novel ''[[Dustbin Baby]]'', about a Doorstop Baby (actually found abandoned in a bin, as the title suggests) who sets out to trace her past on the day of her 14th birthday.
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* On one episode of ''[[Camp Lazlo]]'', Chip and Skip did this to themselves to get Jane, the scoutmistress of the girls' camp, to adopt them. Jane assumed Lumpus did it to get out of taking care of them, and was less than pleased with him.
* [[Classic Disney Shorts|Mickey Mouse]] winds up with a kid this way in the cartoon ''Mickey Plays Papa'' (a cartoon which notably featured Mickey dressing as his muse [[Charlie Chaplin|The Tramp]] to entertain the child). The cloaked anonymous mother in the beginning is actually quite sinister looking.
* In the short ''Officer Duck'', [[Donald Duck]] disguises himself as a [[Door
* The title character of ''[[Little Elvis Jones and The Truckstoppers]]'' was left on the doorstop of a truckstop in a guitar case, by a mysterious Cadillac that vanished into the night. His parents, Elvis fanatics, are convinced that he's really the son of the King. The kid himself does not believe this, and at times grows quite irritated with their obsession... which, among other things, include venerating a snotty handkerchief used by Elvis at a concert his adoptive mother attended, and forcing him to grow his (red) hair into an Elvis-like coif.
** Lil Elvis has doubts about the situation, and [[Once an Episode]] he speculates over who might have left him there, usually related to the current episode.
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*** It was a bad few months. Parents were driving hundreds of miles from out-of-state to drop off their older children. One woman drove all the way from ''California'' and dropped her teenage son off at the first hospital past the state line mere hours before the age restrictions took effect.
*** Tragically, some people did this with older children as the only way they could get the children adequate mental health care.
*** We can thank (now former) Nebraska state senator, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Chambers Ernie Chambers], for this one. [[What the Hell, Hero?|He didn't want a safe haven law to be passed at all]], and [[Holding the Floor|blocked it for years]]. (Nebraska was one of the last states to pass one.) He assumed it wouldn't pass without the age limit, but eventually enough senators decided they'd rather risk a fiasco than infant lives.
* Further [[Truth in Television]]: There was something in the paper recently about how Italian hospitals were reintroducing foundling wheels to deal with these sorts of cases.
** Some German hospitals have them too.
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