Obstacle Ski Course
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You'd think characters would be more careful about where they practice dangerous sports, but that wouldn't be funny or, for Video Games, fun, so when a character goes skiing he'll inevitably have to dodge all sort of obstacles such as snow mounds, snowmen, boulders, trees, and likely other skiers.
For added Rule of Funny, the ski-tracks go on both sides of the trees, leading to people staring at that and wondering how it could be possible (a gag first used by Charles Addams in a '40s New Yorker magazine cartoon).
A common way to set this up is to have a character accidentally (or not, if daring, boastful, ignorant or just not smart enough) starts descending while oblivious to anything you need to know about skiing to not die horribly, and end up as a Human Snowball.
Film
- Happens in the Queen Latifa flick Last Holiday.
- The ski-off at the end of Better Off Dead ends up this way, but not by design.
Music
- Thoroughly invoked in the Chad Mitchell Trio song "Super Skier".
Video Games
- Two levels in Yoshi's Island is based around this, the second one being a Nintendo Hard Bonus Level.
- The entire Snowboard Kids series.
- Several mini-games in the various Mario Party games take place on such slopes (including one where you have to try to outrun a Human Snowball).
- The entire point of the game SkiFree.
- And of the second half of Horace Goes Skiing (the first half is a Frogger clone).
- Sonic the Hedgehog series does this frequently on a snowboard. Still loads of stuff to dodge. White Acropolis in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is notable for HORRIBLE controls and jumping being almost impossible to pull off.
Western Animation
- SpongeBob SquarePants does something related with snowboarding, on a sand mound, using his tongue as board.
- The Simpsons does this. Homer tries to remember an important lesson about skiing his skiing instructor taught him, but he can only remember Flanders in a skin-tight suit.
- On Futurama, Prof. Farnsworth is seen skiing while fast asleep. By the time he arrives at the ski lodge and wakes up, he has apparently entered a skiing competition, and placed third, as indicated by his bronze medal. (According to Word of God via DVD commentary, having him come first would have been too implausible.)
- The Classic Disney Short "The Art of Skiing" has Goofy doing all kinds of variations of this, most memorably accidentally skiing backwards.
- Rocko's Modern Life: Rocko goes skiing at a ski lodge. He's not very good at it. Hilarity Ensues.
- ReBoot has a Santa Claus User play one of these. Enzo gets to kill him with a large icicle.
- There's an episode of Adventures from the Book of Virtues in which Annie was challenged by a trio of bigger kids called the Wolf Pack to ski with them in a race. Upon hearing this, Zach tries to talk her out, telling her that it's too dangerous to ski with the trio. However, Annie doesn't listen to him; she sprains her ankle by accident while skiing with the Wolf Pack.