Stuffed Into a Locker
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Thug 1: "I think we need to teach yer boyfriend here a little lesson!" |
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A Discredited High School trope that is not disappearing any time soon. Every Jerk Jock has done it to the Ordinary High School Student at least once. Even an Alpha Bitch or two has done it to the Naive Everygirl.
If this has ever been done in real life, it must have been during a time before schools were as crowded as they are today and lockers were bigger. So writers, who are almost all well into their thirties regardless of the show's target demographic, may have grown up seeing stuff like this. Many still think it's what kids do today. Or perhaps a really old High School show once did it because the director thought it'd be funny and everyone else followed suit. Who knows.
Chances are, it did happen once or twice, but it could also have originated as a joke, since larger lockers were commonplace in older school buildings. However, today, schools are built to accommodate a higher volume of students, and stacked lockers are more common. Older buildings may still have the larger lockers but these are often ditched during remodeling.
Not to be confused with Stuffed Into the Fridge, aside from establishing how much of a jerk/monster the stuffer is.
Anime and Manga
- In an early episode of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei, Kiri somehow managed to stuff herself in Nozomu's locker, which seemed to be quite small.
- Inazuma Eleven: Kabeyama tries to hide himself in a locker, so he doesn't have to play a soccer match, but he ends up getting stuck in it due to his large body size.
Film
- At the beginning of Lean on Me, a pair of bullies stuff Thomas Sams into a locker (which is somewhat remarkable in itself, since Sams is rather fat) and walk away. Then, to drive home the point of how much the conditions at East Side High had deteriorated in the 20 years of Joe Clark's absence, a janitor lazily walks down a hall that intersects the hall with Sams' locker while reading a newspaper. Sams is screaming for help, and despite the screams being very audible in the empty hallway (the school day had just ended), the janitor completely ignores them.
- Happens in Sky High, to the kid who can glow. In fact, the only reason you know he's in the locker is that it's glowing bright green.
- In the slasher films Hello Mary Lou Prom Night II and The Guard from the Underground, characters are stuffed in lockers, then crushed inside them.
- In the film, Man Of The House, the protagonist meets one of the other kids when said kid is stuffed into a locker while the protagonist does nothing. Never the end of the movie, having bonded, he takes a stand against the bullies. Cut to a shot of the outside of the lockers with the two of them conversing from within the closed lockets.
Live-Action TV
- In Saved by the Bell, Screech apparently has built a labyrinthine series of secret passages throughout the school lockers.
- Larry Kubiac does this to people who annoy him on Parker Lewis Can't Lose.
- Unsurprisingly, this happens a lot to Steve Urkel.
- Boy Meets World
- Shawn used this to his advantage and sometimes used the relative privacy of his locker as a Make-Out Point.
- Happens several times to Merton on Big Wolf on Campus.
- Once he does it himself to a nerdy demon, and notes how refreshing it is to be on the other side of the "being shoved into a locker" thing.
- Lost: A flashback in "Cabin Fever" shows that this was done to Locke in high school.
- Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide "Guide to Vice-Principals": Coconut Head is the third thing Mr. Crubbs removes from Loomer the bully's locker.
- The locker jokes on You Can't Do That on Television aren't really an example, though Lisa once locked Alistair in his locker on purpose, which is closer. He turned it into a TARDIS and threw a party.
- On an episode of Strangers with Candy, one of Jerri's boyfriends did this to her because he didn't want the other kids seeing them together.
- The first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a variant-the guy is stuffed in the locker after he's dead.
- On Degrassi Junior High it was traditional to stuff students into the broom cupboard rather than a locker.
- Played for Drama on Community, in which a Journey to the Center of Abed's Mind ends with Abed's true personality being discovered chained in a locker:
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Abed: It's where I spent a lot of time in junior high. |
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Music
- Played with in the video for My Chemical Romance's "I'm Not Okay"; a teen gets shut in the locker, and uses his position to jump out and scare the locker's owner.
Theatre
- IIRC, this was in the background of this troper's school production of Grease.
Video Games
- In Bully, this is one of many schoolyard torments Jimmy can deliver upon his fellow students.
- Then again, in that game, Jimmy can hide in lockers himself; he does comment on how roomy the Bullworth lockers are at times, too. Unsurprisingly, Bullworth has tall lockers, like some old schools. But they do have only about 61 students in attendance...
- Lockers on the cargo ship and big shell in Metal Gear Solid 2 are large enough for Snake and Raiden to hide in.
Web Comics
- Also in this strip of Loserz.
- Also reversed in this one, where a bully get a locker stuffed into him. That's gotta hurt.
- Referenced (but not depicted) in The Wotch to justify Robin and Jason's decision not to inform Anne that her personified feminine pride had gender bent Tandy Garden High's worst jerk jocks into four "honest and kind" cheerleaders.
- Penny and Aggie, here.
Web Original
- Happens with extremely severe consequences in The Saga of Tuck.
- Tuck is tiny. And, when he got shoved in the locker, he was unconscious and slowly dying. He got better, eventually.
- Taylor's Origin Story in Worm is a direct consequence of being stuffed in a locker with biohazardous materials by the girls bullying her.
Western Animation
- Similarly, the nerds at Springfield Elementary in The Simpsons are shown to have a secret clubhouse/base hidden within the lockers.
- In another episode, Lisa attempts to find common ground with a bully, only to end up...you guessed it.
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Lisa: How about jazz? Do you like jazz? |
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- In an episode of Clone High, JFK boasts of stuffing the entire freshman clsss into only ten lockers. And in another episode, Abe, having gone without sleep for almost a week, stuffs himself into a locker (and since Abe was six-foot-four, he was folded like an accordion).
- X-Men: Evolution did this in the second episode, with Kitty Pryde as the target. Naturally, this was a setup for her to discover her phasing power, and not coincidentally, run into Avalanche, who was the episode's main villain.
- One of the many ways Danny Phantom's intangibility power comes in handy. The opening credits even shows him phasing out and stuffing one of the Jerk Jocks in.
- In the Transformers Animated episode "Autoboot Camp", Bumblebee was stuffed into a locker by Wasp and Ironhide for getting them in trouble to Sentinel Minor. Right after removing his legs.
- In an episode of King of the Hill, one student who's been scaring Bobby by sneaking up to him managed to hide inside Bobby's locker for the next scare.
- In DC Super Hero Girls, Doris and Leslie do this to poor Karen so often that in one episode, she tells them not to bother and does it to herself. Ironically, they don't even know she is Bumblebee any more than she knows they are Giganta and Livewire.
Real Life
- Some full-height lockers had a latch on the inside which would allow anyone this might happen to (regardless of how often it really did happen) to easily escape, presumably after the bullies have left.