Hammerspace Hair

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Those aren't hairpins!

This is an old gag. It's where someone seems to have a storage space set in his hair. Usually, that hairstyle is an afro, but not always. Why is he capable of doing this? Because he has Hammerspace Hair!

A minor variation is when a character keeps things stored in his beard. Can also be invoked if a character's entire body is covered with hair.

Subtrope of Hammerspace.

For times when it seems like someone's hair must have been hidden in hammerspace, see Compressed Hair. This is actually a real technique some people employ in street fights, so is often a subtrope of Trying to Catch Me Fighting Dirty.

Examples of Hammerspace Hair include:

Anime and Manga

  • As seen in the page image, Nabeshin from Excel Saga would occasionally keep things in his hair. Like big guns.

Excel: That's some serious dandruff, man.

    • Nabeshin's cameo in Hayate the Combat Butler has him randomly fall over at one point, at which a handful of items fall out. Oh, and he himself was hiding in it before.
  • A line from Mahou Sensei Negima. Kotaro had just pulled a vial out of his hair, with only Chamo asking, "He hid it in his hair?"
  • Lambo from Katekyo Hitman Reborn keeps a bazooka bigger than he is in his hair.
  • Yu Yu Hakusho: Kurama and his Rose Whip. He pulls the rose right out of his hair the first time we see it, and apparently he keeps a lot of other seeds for his plant-weapons up there as well.
  • In the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann movie, Yoko pulls a pistol out of her hair while fighting Adiane.
  • Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo naturally includes this among its many hair-related sight gags.
  • Even when downsized to a puppy, the inugami Byakuei from Ga-Rei still manages to fit a huge double-bladed sword in his tail. His real size is a lot bigger, though.
    • Fujiko plays it mostly straight: she hides shuriken in her, well, wig.
  • In episode seven of Wandaba Style, Michael Hanagata is wearing a spacesuit and gets a call on his cellphone. He manages to take the call without taking off his helmet by shaking his head, dislodging his cellphone from his afro. It's later revealed that he keeps it in there all the time. Also in episode seven, his shoulder devil pops out his afro as well.
  • Dasonu* Maso of Keroro Gunso can travel through space in his own afro, then land wherever he likes (usually the Hinata house) whereupon his limbs, then the rest of him would emerge from it.
  • In One Piece', Ivankov's head is so large he can hide people inside his hair.
  • Iris in Pokémon hides her Axew in her bushy hair.
  • Tails in Sonic X apparently is able to tuck away Chaos Emeralds in the fluff of his tails. In one episode he also gets a screwdriver from apparently nowhere, most likely his... Hammerspace Tail Fur?
  • Duo Maxwell from Gundam Wing subverts this trope. He wears hairpins...ostensibly to control flyaways, but actually used for picking locks.
  • Garterbelt from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt stores all sorts of things in his Funny Afro, including paper messages from Heaven and extra bullet belts for his machine guns.
  • Code Geass has V.V. pulling a machine gun out of his hair. Somewhat subverted in that while the machine gun is bigger than V.V., it is smaller than his hair.

Comic Books

  • Leonard Le Genie often pulls objects out of his beard, most notably a blunderbuss.
  • Monica's Gang has Fluffy/Floquinho, a Lhasa Apso-like dog. Sometimes whole groups of people get lost in it!
  • Modesty Blaise likes to use her signature weapon as a hair pin.
  • 18th-century caricatures poked fun at the huge, elaborate wigs in fashion at the time, sometimes showing them used for smuggling.

Film

  • In Foxy Brown, the title character hides a pistol in her afro.
  • In Coffy, the protagonist (like the character above, also played by Pam Grier) hides small blades in her afro. See below under Real Life.
  • In Braveheart, William Wallace hides a mace behind his hair and down his back.
  • In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Edie McClurg (School Secretary) pulls like three pencils from her fluffy curls and goes back for another!
    • This wasn't a special effect. The actress and director, between takes, wondered how many pencils she could hide in her hair... apparently the answer was "more than 4."
  • In Leprechaun: In the Hood, Ice T pulls a knife and then a baseball bat out of his 'fro.
  • This occurs in the film and novel Hannibal, in which Starling gives officers a pre-arrest warning that their HIV-positive arrest target likes to hide syringes in her hair, knowing that law-enforcement officers like to shove their suspect down by the head when putting them in the car.
  • In Casino, Nicky's wife hides a bunch of stolen diamonds in her hair to sneak it through the airport.

Literature

  • Done in a creepy way in Lorna Landvik's Angry Housewives Eating Bon-Bons: the abusive husband of one of the women forces her to wear her hair in the same outdated, complicated updo that his mother favors. She begins to hide things in her hair - like rolled up tissues, candy, etc - to feel like she was subverting him.
  • In the science fiction novel Steel Beach, a member of an Animal Wrongs Group never bathes or cuts his hair or beard. A number of animals and insects live in his hair.
  • In the Smart Junior books by The Princeton Review, Barnaby's impressive hair is known to provide whatever the team needs at a given moment.
  • In Meredith Ann Pierce's Treasure at the Heart of the Tanglewood, there's Hannah and her fertile tresses.
  • In the Corellian Trilogy of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Chewbacca keeps a few things hidden under his fur, such as a comlink (walkie-talkie/cell phone).
  • In the stand-alone Novel Airman by Eion Colfer, when an older friend and teacher is cornered by Marshal Bonvilain, the villain, Bonvilain says: "Now you probably have a dirk in your beard, or a derringer up your sleeve, or some other spy trick." (He was also a spy for the king, long story)
  • Everyone's favorite vampire executioner Anita Blake likes to hide a goddamn Machete in a spine sheath underneath her waist-length black hair, in case of Oh Crap moments. Or when her many guns run out of ammo.
  • Apparently in Discworld it's a common skill among dwarfs to be able to hide battle axes in one's beard.
  • Beka in the Provost's Dog series braids a spike into her braid in order to give whoever tries to grab it in a fight a nasty surprise, since as a proto-cop in a bad part of town she's well acquainted with dirty fighting tricks.
  • In Megan Whalen Turner's [The Queen's Thief]] series, one of the major plot twists in the first book comes about as the result of the hero's use of this trope.

Live Action TV

Shepard: "How many of those do you have in there?"
Ronon: "How many do you need?"

New Media

Video Games

  • In SNK vs. Capcom, huge Street Fighter wrestler Hugo has tiny Bao from The King of Fighters cameo in his intro. Where does Bao happen to pop up (and hide in when the fights start)? Hugo's sizable hair.
  • In the Neo Geo fighting game Savage Reign, gymnast Carol fights with an Olympic pink ball; if thrown as a projectile, she produces another from underneath her hair. Her hair isn't much past her shoulder, and the ball is about as large as her whole head...
  • In Final Fantasy XIII, Sazh keeps a baby chocobo in his afro.

Web Comics

  • In Ozy and Millie, Ozy goes out in a cold snap before his winter coat comes in. The result is that it comes in all at once, leaving him extremely fluffy. Millie takes advantage of this to hide things in him, up to and including a piano.
  • In the web comic Everyday Heroes, Carrie uses this trope literally once or twice.
  • Eddie from Emergency Exit can pull random things (including [http://eecomics.net/?strip_id=1033 hammers) from his hair.
    • This is eventually revealed to be because he forced a portal into his skull to keep the villains from getting it. It's also apparently when he became such a Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Rufus from Terinu, being a fox furry, has on at least one occasion hidden a locator unit for his ship in his tail.
  • A Loonatics Tale: The Zinc family hair eats things. But since it's normal hair by all other standards, it doesn't actually do anything with this stuff once it's got it. So if it gets a hold of something really important and you need to pull it out, you'll probably bring some debris, and perhaps the odd bird carcass, along with it.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • The Simpsons: Marge Simpson. She has carried money in it at various times and it's strong enough to hold a beach umbrella.
    • And a ten-pin bowling ball, and sometimes Maggie.
  • Gizmo Man of The Super Globetrotters had plenty of space in his hair.

Fluid Man: Man, that Lou's better than traveler's cheques!

  • In an episode of Family Guy, Peter grows a beard in which he keeps several birds.
  • Speaking of which, here's a poem limerick by Edward Lear, 1846, adapted as a cartoon short for Sesame Street:

There was an old man with a beard
 Who said, "It is just as I feared!
 "Two owls and a wren,
 "Four larks and a hen
 "Have all built their nests in my beard!"

  • Uncle Ruckus from The Boondocks suspect Huey is hiding something in his afro, when he's doing a commentary on the season one DVD.
  • In the French cartoon Once Upon a Time, the Maestro has a Hammerspace beard that reaches to his ankles, stores everything in the world, and possibly serves as a Godiva Beard.
  • Shag from Road Rovers.
    • He once hid another team member in his fur.
  • Captain Caveman being completely covered in hair would often pull out things from his chest, anything from a skeleton key to a huge stone barbell, which he presses with ease. Often he could even pull live dinosaurs from it.
  • Val Hallen in Justice Friends, in a one-off gag involving an X-ray.
  • An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes has Heloise keeping one of her gadgets in her ponytail.
  • My Little Pony started doing this with its third cartoon series.
  • The fattest sheep in Shaun the Sheep is sometimes shown to have all kinds of things hidden in its wool.
  • Grandpa Smurf in The Smurfs stores a lot of stuff in his beard.
  • The Harlem Globetrotters cartoon had one of the team members sporting a truly epic Funny Afro. He also just took a moment of rooting around and whatever he wanted could be found in that 'fro.
  • In The Owl House, Eda can use her hair to store books, scrolls, and occasionally her Non-Human Sidekick King (who tends to be possessive if any other creature tries to live there); justified that she can do so, seeing as she's a witch.

Real Life

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