Motorcycle Dominoes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Often there is a row of motorcycles parked at a bar (or restaurant, or any other building, but usually it's a seedy biker bar located on the edge of town). Naturally, someone's going to hit one, and it will fall and hit another, and that will fall and hit another and so on—like the old Disaster Dominoes. That'll get a swarm of (stereotypical) bikers real angry and desiring revenge on the offender. Oh Crap.

Used either for comedy or as a distraction.

Examples of Motorcycle Dominoes include:

Film

  • This trope originated from the Clint Eastwood film Every Which Way But Loose, where Eastwood's character constantly damages the Biker gang's motorcycles in different ways.
  • Also in Pee-wee's Big Adventure. He meant to do that, by the way.
  • Happened with bicycles in the James Bond film GoldenEye.
  • Smokey and the Bandit did a variation on this one: After Cledus gets beat up by bikers because his dog supposedly bit one of them, he stumbles outside and sees their bikes lined up. So he gets in his semi and runs over the entire line of them on his way out of the parking lot.
  • Played with in Vin Diesel's XXX, when a row of motorcycles, instead of being knocked over like a set of dominoes, explodes in series.

Jokes

  • Joke example: A small Norwegian truck driver walks into a Greasy Spoon, and a group of bikers pick on him: pushing him around, taunting him, etc. The truck driver does nothing, just eats his meal as if nothing were going on. Then he leaves, and one of the bikers says to the waitress, "That Norwegian isn't much of a man, is he?" The waitress replies, "No, and he's not much of a big-rig driver either. He just ran his truck into a row of motorcycles."

Live Action TV

  • Turk does this in Scrubs, before JD arrives to heroically stop the bikers from pummeling Turk. The part about the bikers getting angry is then subverted, as JD makes up for the knocked-over bikes by buying them cappuccinos.
  • TV Variation: in the first episode of the failed late 80s Van Patten project The Master (feature-lengthified and dubiously immortalized under the title Master Ninja), the guy the camera is pointed at most of the time is first shown being thrown bodily out of a bar by a biker gang. In retaliation, he hooks their bikes together with steel cable and baits them into chasing his van, so that when they speed off, the bikes pull themselves apart and send their riders flying onto the concrete.

Manga and Anime

  • Happens in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Keiichi trips and knocks over several motorcycles in the Watanagashi-hen question arc, and Shion comes to his rescue. In the Meakashi-hen answer arc, Shion gets in trouble with the same group of bikers two times like this, a year apart, and is aided first by Satoshi, and later by Keiichi.

Music Videos

  • Tom Petty's music video for "Into the Great Wide Open" features Johnny Depp's character doing this after he's dropped by his record label.

Newspaper Comics

Video Games

  • In Police Quest, you can knock over a bunch of motorcycles. Nothing happens, though the text says that "Someone has to answer to four angry people!"
  • Also done in Space Quest 4. You do this to distract a bunch of futuristic bikers (The Monochrome Boys) at a bar, all to steal some matches.

Western Animation

  • Happens in Rocko's Modern Life, when Heffer knocks over the walkers of Senior citizens on a cruise line designed for the elderly.
  • Subverted in an episode of American Dad where Stan and Steve are on a road trip. Steve accidentally knocks over a line of motorcycles, but the owners (all Badass, Hells Angels-looking types) are very understanding, saying it was just an accident and that there's nothing to get upset about.

Real Life