Parachute Petticoat

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Falling is a very unladylike activity on the whole. There's lots of tumbling and screaming, your hair and clothes get ruined and there's the danger people below may see your underwear. This trope offers an alternative for the more ladylike and feminine of tumblers especially Princess characters with a Pimped-Out Dress. Basically, a character's dress or skirt flares out in mid-air forming a parachute shape and somehow slowing their descent.

The thicker and more layered the material the better. Don't worry about terminal velocities and drag coefficients (see Puny Parachute), the laws of physics tend to give way to the opportunity to see a slightly comical petticoat exposure.

Often a form of Improvised Parachute, but just as often it's accidental.

Compare Parasol Parachute (often found on similar sorts of characters).

Examples of Parachute Petticoat include:

Comic Books

  • Jet Dream: In one story, Marlene's dress billows out into a "Tunic Chute" to save her from falling off a cliff to her death. Technically not "improvised," but a piece of spy gear designed for the purpose. It's a pretty goofy design, though, and one of the less "ladylike" examples, as just about any angle other than that chosen by the artist would give Marlene "full exposure." See Marlene's Tunic Chute in all its glory.
  • A Liloand Stitch comic from Disney Adventures' Comic Zone has the characters playing with "jump jelly," goop that acts as a super-trampoline if charged with electricity. When Pleakley tries it, he wears one of Nani's dresses as a safety precaution. Stitch turns the electricity up and Pleakley bounces extra-high, using the dress as a parachute to float back down with.

Film-Animated

Film-Live Action

  • Happens in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, when the Baroness is launched into the air from Chitty's Ejection Seat.
  • During the boxing match at the end of The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, one of the fighters is slammed into the crowd with such force that one of the saloon girls is catapulted skyward, only to drift back down. (Then again, since she was dancing the cancan earlier, we'd already seen her petti's...)

Literature

Live Action TV

  • In the first episode of Jack of All Trades, Jack rescues President Jefferson's niece from a French fort in Canada. To escape the fort, Jack and the girl jump off a high cliff. They are saved because Jack grabs on to her feet and her dress billows out to form a parachute showing her bloomers. (Jack also gets an excellent view of her petticoats.)

Video Games

Western Animation

  • In the Classic Disney Shorts "Plane Crazy", Minnie Mouse's bloomers deploy like a parachute.
  • Baby Piggy in Muppet Babies, as she told her version of the Lewis Carrol story, had this happen to her own Alice character, her dress taking a parachute-like means as she fell down a rabbit-, er, I mean tadpole-hole.
  • In Jem, one of the Misfits videos "Lovesick" had Pizzazz do a parachute petticoat.
  • At the end of the Kim Possible half-episode "Rufus in Show" Kim presses a button so her spy suit becomes a dress to serve this function.
  • Rugrats had Chuckie and Phil try this while wearing dresses for the first time. It actually worked for a second.