Shopping Cart Antics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Shopping Cart Antics are those crazy things characters do with shopping carts outside of the carts' original purposes, whether they ride them or ram them into stuff.

See also Doomed Supermarket Display.

Examples of Shopping Cart Antics include:

Advertising

  • The 21st Century insurance company has a commercial with a mass of shopping carts being dropped onto two cars from overhead. The object is to illustrate how both cars get the same damage and repairs, but the 21st Century insurance owner pays less.
  • A British anti-drinking PSA had an interviewer trying to persuade pasers-by to do sober things they might do when drunk. One of the suggestions was to climb into a shopping trolley and have a mate shove it into a wall as hard as possible.

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Film

  • In the opening scene of Jackass: The Movie, the cast are riding in a shopping cart
  • There's a Jackie Chan movie (Rumble in The Bronx?) where a shopping cart plays a crucial role during a fight scene.
  • Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. During her song "I Want It Now", Veruca Salt grabs a shopping cart, uses it to threaten some Oompa-Loompas, then sends it into a pile of boxes and knocks them down.
  • In Animal House, after the infamous toga party, Larry leaves a drunk girl (whom he met at the supermarket) at her parents' front door in a shopping cart.
  • Hot Fuzz: two huge chains of shopping carts were used as a Battering Ram.
  • Joe Dante's Matinee gave us the movie-within-a-movie The Shook-Up Shopping Cart, a Disney sendup where the usual supermarket shenanigans involve a man who's been transformed into a cart - and a young Naomi Watts plays the man/cart's niece!
  • In Satan's Little Helper, the main character gets the serial killer he is obliviously helping out to push him around in a shopping cart, and run random people down.

Literature

  • Johnny and The Bomb: Johnny and Kirsty escape some Men In Black by riding a bag-lady's shopping cart down a steep hill.
  • In the Discworld book Reaper Man, you get a lot of varied shopping trolley shenanigans as those things are alive (and initially hiding it) due to rather plot-relevant events. But they're useful to store things in. And dangerous when they take off on their own, leaving people running behind them screaming about what's inside them. Or screaming about being inside them. One memorable instance is when one is hijacked and used to store the Bursar in - and it then takes off for the hills. A massive comedic Chase Scene (complete with misguided magic blasts) ensues. This is not the only such scene, but is one of the stand-outs. In short, there is a whole chunk of Reaper Man devoted to this trope.

Live-Action TV

  • Married... with Children: The Bundys and the Darcys both win a shot at a local grocery store's Supermarket Sweep-type contest. The Bundys show up with a Pimped Out cart. The Darcys find the best cart possible, but it's disqualified for not being from that store so they have to make do with a rickety old cart with wheels that go all which way.
  • In the CSI: NY episode "Obsession", one of the murders centers around a race run using shopping carts and where it is customary to sabotage the other teams.
  • Done on Bit Com (a short, live action comedy show that runs as filler between programs on ABC3 in Australia) where the discovery of a shopping cart in the parking lot causes the two main characters to completely abandon their plans in favor of playing with it.
  • A Mad TV parody of Jackass has a fake Kenny Rogers riding a shopping cart as it gets rammed into a curb. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In Arrested Development, whenever the "series of escalating dares" leading to Gob's marriage to Amy Poehler is mentioned, you see a still of the pair racing in shopping carts. This is, of couse, played with in a later episode.

Music

  • Rihanna's music video for "We Found Love".
  • Gavin DeGraw's music video for "In Love With a Girl".

Video Games

  • In the first No More Heroes game, the assassin Speed Buster is an old lady with a shopping cart full of groceries ... which is actually a disguise for its function as a devastating Wave Motion Gun.
  • Dead Rising: one of the psychopaths uses a modified shopping cart as a weapon. Defeating him will give Frank West that shopping cart.
  • Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars: one of Frank West's specials has a zombie barreling down the field in a shopping cart, toppling his opponent. In response, Frank screams, "Oh my God!"
  • Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Frank West uses a modified shopping cart as one of his hypers. It has chainsaws mounted on it.
  • There's a flash game called Shopping Cart Hero where you jump off a ramp in a shopping cart.

Western Animation

  • Garfield and Friends:
    • "Supermarket Mania" had Jon and Garfield go to a supermarket that had shopping carts with crooked wheels, causing them to veer into shelves.
    • "Don't Move" had Odie riding down the sidewalk in a shopping cart.
  • Near the end of the Veggie Tales episode, "Madame Blueberry", Bob and Madame Blueberry both commandeer shopping carts in order to race towards the sight of where her house was tipping over, except poor Larry, who just winds up dragging along a little handheld shopping basket instead.
  • On The Simpsons, Marge rides a shopping cart like a scooter because she is bored. It crashes into a large display, and she walks away like nothing happened.
  • The Ladybugs in American Dad assassinate unruly members with shopping carts and make it look like an accident.