Locked in a Freezer: Difference between revisions

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* Used in ''[[Akikan]]'', Melon trying to cooldown as her carbon dioxide was going away. The handle eventually gets pulled off by Kakeru, completely trapping them.

* The ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' episode "Snow Way Out" had Ash and his Pokémon trapped in a snow cave during a blizzard, trying to warm themselves off of Charmander's tail. Ash shields a windy cave opening with his body, which leads to a [[Crowning Moment of Heartwarming]] when the Pokémon refuse to return to their Poké Balls, opting to stay cold with their trainer instead.

* Happens in an episode of ''[[Black Jack]]'', where Black Jack is locked inside a giant nuclear shelter with a bunch of whiny businessmen. As time passes, their oxygen supplies diminish as well. Seeing Black Jack as their only hope, the businessmen offer him huge amounts of money to get them out of there. {{spoiler|He makes sure they honor their word.}}

* Toyed with in [[Hana no Ko Lunlun]]. A little girl is trapped in an unused freezer in Sicily and the man who opens said freezer and saves her is actually a [[Punch Clock Villain]] who's on the run and has great lockpicking skills. {{spoiler|Later, Lunlun tries to stop a robbery and gets locked in a tightair vault; the [[Punch Clock Villain]] hesitates at first since he might get caught right before the state of limitations kicks in, but ultimately saves her... and when he's done, the state has already passed, thus the police lets him go as a free man.}}

== Comics ==

* Played straight in the limited series/graphic novel ''[[~~Arkham Asylum Living Hell|~~Arkham Asylum: Living Hell]]''. Main character Warren White, "the Great White Shark", sent to the eponymous madhouse to escape jail time, finds himself spending several months severely abused by the inmates and asylum employees, culminating to one night where truly psychotic inmate, Jane Doe, kidnaps White during a asylum-wide communications blackout and takes him to the freezer usually used for storing Mr. Freeze. White is then tortured by Doe, discovers that she is going to replace him using a mansuit, made with real skin, and locked in said freezer with the temperature lowered down to an extreme subzero state. The result is White losing several of his fingers, hair, ears and nose and upper lip to frostbite (making for some [[Nightmare Fuel]]). He is eventually saved by, of all people, the ghost of the man who White had pushed to suicide, who wished to haunt White, but ultimately ended up being unable to do so. This all leads up to White's descent into madness that turns him into a "super" villain.

* Played straight in the limited series/graphic novel ''[[Arkham Asylum: Living Hell]]''. Main character Warren White, "the Great White Shark", sent to the eponymous madhouse to escape jail time, finds himself spending several months severely abused by the inmates and asylum employees, culminating to one night where truly psychotic inmate, Jane Doe, kidnaps White during a asylum-wide communications blackout and takes him to the freezer usually used for storing Mr. Freeze. White is then tortured by Doe, discovers that she is going to replace him using a mansuit, made with real skin, and locked in said freezer with the temperature lowered down to an extreme subzero state. The result is White losing several of his fingers, hair, ears and nose and upper lip to frostbite (making for some [[Nightmare Fuel]]). He is eventually saved by, of all people, the ghost of the man who White had pushed to suicide, who wished to haunt White, but ultimately ended up being unable to do so. This all leads up to White's descent into madness that turns him into a "super" villain.

* [[The Flash]] villain known as Heatwave was trapped in one as a child, leading to his crippling fear of coldness and his fire gimmick.

* In ''[[Horndog]]'', Leonard gets locked in a storeroom in a parody of ''[[The Shining]]''.

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* In the comedy ''[[The Tiger Makes Out]]'', the frustrated protagonist attempts to abduct a woman as a social statement - he stalks one potential target, a restaurant worker, into a walk-in freezer, and gets trapped inside as she leaves, totally unaware of him.

* ''[[Under The Rainbow]]'' has a scene where Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher's characters get trapped in this manner. For Fisher, it's made worse by the fact that she's clad only [[Fan Service|in bra and panties]] (leading to a [[You Must Be Cold]] moment).

* Disney's ''[[Tangled]]'' has this with Rapunzel and Flynn in a blocked tunnel filling with water. They have their deep and meaningful and share their deepest secrets; {{spoiler|Rapunzel's, incidentally, gets them out}}.

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* The plot of the Italian novel ''Blackout'' by Gianluca Morozzi. Unusually for the trope, it's [[Shown Their Work|understood]] that the [[Evil Elevator]] is behaving strangely and that there should be an automatic alarm going off, their cell phones should still be working, and the doors shouldn't be wedged shut. It turns out that {{spoiler|the elevator was rigged. Two young TV executives looking to break into the reality show industry came up with the idea to select an apartment at random, fix the lifts, wait until two or three people were in the elevator together, and then put it on lockdown and film the results. Driven by greed, they don't stop the cameras even after some seriously messed-up stuff has gone down, but to protect themselves from liability they decide to market the resulting fiasco as recordings taken by the elevator's security camera, which the station purchased and edited into a TV program after the survivors were rescued, instead of as an event orchestrated by the producers. The book lampshades the fact that "there were so many holes in this version of events, you could have driven a truck through them", [[Hand Wave|explaining]] that the Italian populace is such that they're willing to swallow this for the sake of entertainment, and that the people who comment on the doors working strangely, et cetera, are dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists.}} The American straight-to-video adaptation of the novel just has the elevator crash for no reason.

* In the [[Goosebumps]] novel ''Egg Monsters From Mars'', the twelve-year-old hero is locked in a deep freezer with the eponymous Egg Monsters. They form a blanket over him so he will not freeze, and eventually he escapes. Now consider the implications of this given that the book ends {{spoiler|with him laying an egg on the front lawn.}} [[Squick|Yeah]].

* A key plot point in ''[[The George Elliot Murders]]'' by Edith Skom.

* In ''[[The Stand]]'' (at least the uncut version) there is a series of vignettes about how people who were immune to the superflu died of other causes. A particularly nasty woman who was overjoyed at the death of her husband and child manages to lock herself in a walk-in freezer. The power was off, so she didn't freeze to death but she could die of starvation and thirst. No big loss.

* In a scene in the [[Star Trek]] novel ''The Final Reflection'' by [[John M. Ford]], the protagonist (a Klingon captain) and two loyal subordinates are locked in his ship's walk-in freezer by a traitor. The situation is even more serious for the hero than usual because [[Bizarre Alien Biology|Klingon biology is keyed to very warm temperatures]]; while trying to escape, he remembers stories about exposure to subzero temperatures [[Body Horror|causing the blood to freeze in other Klingons' surface capillaries and the skin to turn black and slough off "like bark from a tree"]].

* In [[O. Henry]]'s ''A Retrieved Reformation'', Jimmy Valentine, a retired safe cracker, has to come out of retirement to save his fiance's niece from a bank vault. Unfortunately, he's still at large, and [[Inspecter Javert|the detective looking for him]] happens to be in the bank watching him. {{spoiler|He lets him go at the end.}}

* The [[Warhammer 40000]] novel, '' Atlas Infernal '' by Rob Sanders has the protagonists attempting to escape an enemy fleet intent on capturing them by purposely flying into a "cold star" (called a Kryonova, it saps all heat from the area around it, should not be possible, but being deep in the [[Negative Space Wedgie]] that is the Eye of Terror, you are ''lucky'' if it is ''only'' the laws of physics working backwards) to inflict [[Locked in a Freezer]] on their pursuers as well as themselves. {{spoiler|To keep from freezing all the way to death and their ship becoming brittle and shattering under its own physics like their pursuers, they set their ship's fusion core to critical meltdown in an attempt to counteract the heat-sapping effects of getting near the Kryonova. Naturally this ruins their ship, but a last minute intervention by the [[Magnificent Bastard]] [[Monster Clown]] Harliquins sees them safely out of the Eye and into the much safer Webway. Of course, the purpose of their intervention isn't quite as nice as it seems...}}

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* ''[[Red Dwarf]]'', "Marooned": With a slight twist, as Lister is in mortal danger, but hologram Rimmer is not.

** Also subverted by the ending, where {{spoiler|[[Jerkass]] Rimmer emerges with a new appreciation of "nice guy" Lister, until he learns Lister lied to his face and then destroyed Rimmer's property to cover up.}}

* ''[[The Brady Bunch]]'' Greg and Bobby get stuck in Sam's meat locker when Bobby closed the door to measure himself to see if he had grown, since he was upset about being short. He felt better after his diminutive size allowed him to climb through the small window on the door.

* In the episode Baby It's Cold Inside of ''[[Three's Company]]'', Jack and Mr. Furley are locked inside Mr. Angelino's freezer after they were robbed. While inside and thinking they were going to die, Jack tells Mr. Furley that he isn't gay.

** Jack, Janet, Cindy and Mr. Furley fake being trapped in an elevator to try to scare Bart Furley into giving Ralph his job back, only to find that Bart is no longer claustrophobic after buying the building just to own an elevator to overcome his fears. (Upon hearing this, it is Ralph that gets claustrophobic.)

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* ''[[One Life to Live]]'' had some episodes involving Viki and Dorian, two of the show's older characters, where trapped in a cave following an avalanche. They learned to respect each other, as well as dreamed of what it was like to be each other.

** In fact, their last scene together was when they were locked in a conference room due to the door jamming. They spent much of the episode remembering the fond memories of each other and the friendship they developed.

* ''[[Kenan and Kel]]'' (not to be confused with ''[[Kevin and Kell]]'') in one episode wherein Kel mistakes the freezer for a restroom in a restaurant due to a faulty sign, which he himself knocked over just then and accidentally placed in the wrong direction. New people keep coming in and locking the door behind themselves before the others can stop them. Eventually ''the entirety of the restaurant, from the staff to the customers'', except for one guy, end up trapped in the freezer. Eventually, that one guy needed to go to the restroom, which results in everybody but him and the main characters running out free.

* An episode of ''[[The Dukes of Hazzard]]'' in which Uncle Jesse and Boss Hogg trapped together in an airtight bank vault subverts this somewhat. The characters come to the required greater understanding of each other, even becoming friendly as the air grows thin. Of course, them Duke Boys show up in the nick of time, and after the rescue mirthfully point out the air vent in the seemingly airtight vault, turning it into [[Locked in a Room]].

* The ''[[MacGyver]]'' episode "Last Stand" has MacGyver and a fellow hostage locked in a freezer by a sadistic armed robber. It's only part of the episode, and Mac, of course, gets the two of them out instead of just sitting around awaiting rescue, but the statutory amount of heart-to-heart talking still manages to take place.

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* ''[[Only Fools and Horses]]'' has one very moving scene where Del and Rodney are trapped in an elevator -- Rodney's wife has recently miscarried, and Del finally manages to get him to talk about it. {{spoiler|It is eventually revealed that Del hit the emergency stop himself, just to trap Rodney into talking.}}

* ''[[Due South]]'' did this a couple of times. Once in an actual meat locker (they wrapped themselves in meat in an attempt to keep warm while they reconciled. Then in another episode they locked themselves in a bank vault (Intentionally, Fraser's idea) to prevent a bank robbery and then...rigged the sprinkler system to slowly fill it with water (also intentionally, also Fraser's idea), not only adding danger and speeding up their buddy talk but {{spoiler|saving the day when the bank vault is finally blown open and thousands of gallons of water deluge the crooks, allowing the duo to take them out.}}

** There was also the time that Fraser and his superior officer, [[Punny Name|Meg Thatcher]], were locked into a giant egg incubator. This lead to a certain amount of stripping, sexual tension, and a near-death near-confession.

* The Canadian show ''[[Fries With That]]?'', being set in a fast food restaurant, tends to have such situations happen every so often.

* ''[[Eureka]]'': "House Rules" is the embodiment of this trope. Later on this happens with Cafe Diem's freezer.

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** This episode is also important to this trope because it is while trapped in the dream reality {{spoiler|(after Rory is killed by one of the aliens, who turns him to dust)}} that Amy realizes it is really Rory she loves {{spoiler|and then she proves it by killing herself and the Doctor by crashing a van, thus destroying the first dream reality}}.

* A ''[[Happy Days]]'' episode has Richie and his friends lock themselves inside an airtight vault in the basement of Howard's hardware store.

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] to within an inch of its life in an episode of ''[[That's My Bush]]''.

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] to within an inch of its life in an episode of ''[[That's My Bush!]]''.

* A variation on ''[[CSI New York]]'' had an investigator trapped in the victim's time-locked panic room with the corpse. Unlike most examples of this trope, the boxed character's life wasn't seriously in jeopardy; rather, it's the ''evidence'' he had to salvage in haste, using improvised materials, before decomposition set in and ruined the clues.

* ''[[True Blood]]'''s [[Seasonal Rot|wacky]] season 2 plot line had Andy and Sam locked in the freezer of Merlotte's while hiding from a deranged mob trying to sacrifice Sam to Satan. They got out eventually, using brute force and some amusing trickery.

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* ''[[Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil]]'' had something of a subversion; the title character was locked in a freezer at work... but the actual danger was that she was locked in with a convicted sex offender obsessed with her.

* Though it didn't involve being locked in a room, a similar situation occurred in the ''[[Code Lyoko]]'' episode "Cold War". Yumi was pinned under a tree in normal winter clothes while the temperature dropped below artic levels. Ulrich refused to leave her side despite all his efforts to save her failing. Considered a main [[Tear Jerker/Animation|TearJerker moment]] by fans.

** The general idea is also used in "New Order", where, thanks to a trap set by XANA, Yumi and Ulrich end up in a sauna (the opposite of a freezer, way to mix it up guys) and must be saved before they overheat and die.

* In one episode of ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'', Squidward runs into the Krusty Krab on a Sunday to get away from Spongebob and accidentally locks himself in the freezer, whefre he is frozen in place for a thousand years and awakens in the distant future.

** A later episode, "Truth or Square", has Spongebob, Patrick, Squidward and Mr. Krabs trapped in the freezer during the Krusty Krab's anniversary celebration. They attempt an [[Air Vent Passageway]] escape, but spend most of the episode lost in a maze of vents, which is where most of the other aspects of this trope play out.

* Though not a literal freezer, [[Iron Man]] in the 90's animated series falls down an ice chasm, and has to review past memories to keep his brain active in order not to die, before he can be rescued.

* ''[[The Fairly Odd Parents]]'' episode "Snow Bound" featured Timmy and Vicky getting trapped in a cave during an avalanche.

* As mentioned in the page intro, Dante and Randal find themselves [[Locked in a Freezer]] in only the second episode of ''[[Clerks the Animated Series]]''. [[Running Gag|And then in Randal's video store, with the thermostat turned way down.]] [[Exaggerated Trope|And then in an ice skating rink...]]

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** In the first season episode 'The Cave of Two Lovers', the original Gaang (+ some traveling hippies,) get stuck in the eponymous cave. Aang, Katara and I think Appa get separated from [[Badass Normal|Sokka]] and the hippies. They're (Aang and Katara) running out of light, and they almost kiss due to 'the only way out is through the power of love' or something, but their light goes out, which lights up the passage to get out. Big [[Ship Tease]]. Sokka and the hippies get out with music and Badgermoles. Yeah, [[It Makes Sense in Context]].

* An episode of ''[[Chowder]]'' featured this where Chowder, Mung, and Snitzel were accidentally trapped in Chowder's bathroom. The worst part about it was that Chowder had to go but needed privacy. Naturally [[Hilarity Ensued]] from this.

* An episode of Disney's ''[[Recess]]'' had this happen as the end result. When Spinelli was given tickets to a wrestling match by the bratty Ashley group, she and her friends were naturally suspicious, except for Mikey and Gus. After many attempts to learn what the trick was, Spinelli, T.J, Vincent, and Gretchen finally broke into the Ashley's clubhouse where they discovered that the tickets were genuine. Unfortunately, the clubhouse's security system locked down, resulting in them trapped while Gus and Mikey went to the fight.

* Rigby from ''[[Regular Show]]'' tried to prevent this with [[Genre Savvy]] common sense to prop the door open before leaving the lockable door. It failed still because he tried to prop the door open with a couple of bags of ice.

* The plot of the ''[[King of the Hill]]'' episode ''Nancy's Boys'' is launched when, during a "random service check," Hank winds up rescuing a restaurant owner from this fate, earning him a reward of free dinner for four.

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** This is actually recommended by some managers as a pretty smart idea, as modern freezers are impossible to seal from the outside and are easy to open from the inside specifically because of this trope. Simply huddle in the freezer for a few minutes then walk out and call the police.

* Used to be a common danger to small children when old fridges and freezers were regularly dumped in skips or on landfill sites, rather than being recycled as is more usual today.

** Supposedly, this happened in Brazil in the 70s. People replaced their old-style freezers by modern ones (which can open from the inside). The old ones were thrown in landfills, and homeless people found them to be nice places to sleep...until they realized they couldn't get out. For a while it was thought to be either suicide or murder, until someone linked the pieces.

** Numerous children simply entered one at home, only to choke to death before their parents realized where they had ended up in. There's a reason why the fridge doors don't lock up, any more.