History Main / AbsurdlyLongStairway

* ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda'':
** The Jade Palace sits on the peak of a mountain. There's a single, straight staircase up to it from the valley floor. Naturally, [[ButtMonkey Po]] spends a good chunk of the film either climbing those stairs, or tumbling down them.

-->-- '''WesternAnimation/BugsBunny''', "[[WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes From Hare to Heir]]"

* During the raid on the Shinra HQ in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'', you can either fight your way through the guards, or [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MhEm5fYPmo climb your way up 59 flights of stairs.]] Barrett whines and complains the whole way up, while Tifa tells him to "[[MemeticMutation stop acting like]] [[ValuesDissonance a retard]] [[MemeticMutation and climb]]!" At the end of the stairway, Barrett says [[ImNotDoingThatAgain he never wants to see any stairs again for the rest of his life]].
** In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIIRemake'', the staircase returns, with the same basic premise, but a new spin on the scene and dialogue for the player's entertainment.
* In ''VideoGame/WildArms2'' nearing the end of the game there's the spiral tower, which has an extremely long staircase leading down into the center of the planet. Once you get to the end of the staircase you have to go through another dungeon then fight several minibosses, and the final boss to beat the game.
** The Photosphere in the original version of ''VideoGame/WildArms1'' has one of these as you get closer to Lolithia and Mother. It's not uncommon for players to use Rudy's rocket skates to speed up progress to the top.

* At the end of Creator/BusterKeaton's ''The Haunted House'', Buster goes up a long set of stairs to heaven, but when St. Peter rejects him, the stairs fold flat and he slides down into Hell. Turns out, it was AllJustADream.

* The ''Website/SCPFoundation'' entry, [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-087 SCP-087]] is a dark staircase that seems to go on forever, with what sounds to be a [[SchmuckBait crying child]] coming at the bottom. Despite this, explorers can never get any closer to the source of the crying, instead encountering a [[NightmareFace creepy face]] and running away from it.

* In ''WesternAnimation/BoyAndTheWorld'', Cuca and his new friend walk up many long stairways in the city.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheBoyAndTheWorld'', Cuca and his new friend walk up many of these in the city.

* The ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'' entry, [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-087 SCP-087]] is a dark staircase that seems to go on forever, with what sounds to be a [[SchmuckBait crying child]] coming at the bottom. Despite this, explorers can never get any closer to the source of the crying, instead encountering a [[NightmareFace creepy face]] and running away from it.

* While it's not too long for a human, the stairway to WesternAnimation/{{Cinderella}}'s room is this trope for Gus and Jaq (who are realistically-sized mice) when they have to carry the key up the stairs to her to let her out of the room when she was locked in by the wicked stepmother.
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheBoyAndTheWorld'', Cuca and his new friend walk up many of these in the city.

* The ending of ''[[VideoGame/TimeCrisis Crisis Zone]]'' has your unit shut town the BigBad's nuclear reactor and now have to climb five kilometers of stairs when the elevator is out of order from the impact.

* ''VideoGame/SuperMario64'' has a looping staircase leading to the final stage, with accompanying music that keeps going up as you did. You can climb it forever if you don't have enough stars, but the staircase itself is not actually very big. (The game accomplishes this by silently warping you to a lower position on the stairs once you've ascended enough steps; however, since the game is programmed to do this based on Mario's forward movement cap, and earlier versions of the game have no ''backward'' movement cap, you can use glitches like the Backwards Long Jump to rocket up the stairs so quickly it freaks out the code and bypasses the "infinite" staircase effect.)

* ''VideoGame/SuperMario64'' has a looping staircase leading to the final stage, with accompanying music that keeps going up as you did. You can climb it forever if you don't have enough stars, but the staircase itself is not actually very big. (The game accomplishes this by loading another instance of the stairs once you've ascended enough steps; however, since the game only checks your ''forward'' motion, a series of backward long jumps can scale the "infinite" staircase without any problems.)
* ''VideoGame/LuigisMansionDarkMoon'' had the second boss at the top of twenty sets of three staircases. Pick one of three, and either keep climbing, or slide all the way back to the beginning. Once you finally get to the top, the boss ghost clearly has a sick sense of humor, as it possesses a flight of stairs to fight Luigi with.

* Both ''VideoGame/StarOceanTheSecondStory'' and ''VideoGame/StarOceanTillTheEndOfTime'' end their TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon with a needlessly long (straight) staircase leading up to the FinalBoss. Especially JustForFun/{{egregious}} in that the staircases in each case conclude a long [[ItsAllUpstairsFromHere climb up a tower]]; in the latter game the tower exists in its own pocket dimension on top of that.

* Any very tall skyscraper will have these. as convenient and nigh-mandatory as elevators are for climbing these buildings, they still require stairs in case of the elevators being unavailable (due to emergency or malfunction).

* ''WesternAnimation/WanderOverYonder'': In [[Recap/WanderOverYonderS1E15TheEpicQuestOfUnfathomableDifficultyTheVoid "The Epic Quest of Unfathomable Difficulty!!!"]], the last step of Wander and Sylvia's quest to find the Intergalactic Guru is to climb his temple's million...QUINQUOG-INTER-QUADRA-TENTILLION STEPS!!!

* ''Manga/DragonBall'', during Goku and Krillin's TrainingFromHell under Master Roshi, one exercise to deliver milk on foot to an entire island. At one point, Roshi tells the boys that their next house is up a flight of stairs that they hsould just walk, not run, up. Krillin's relieved...up until that the stairs go up an entire ''mountain''.

A notable subset of Absurdly Long Stairways are Absurdly Long ''Temple'' Stairways. In RealLife, a somewhat tamer version of this trope is relatively common in temple architecture, and may be observed in various Buddhist, Hindu, and Mesoamerican temples. Sometimes in fiction[[note]]and rarely, in real life too[[/note]], this is taken UpToEleven by placing the temple on the slopes - or even the summit - of a mountain, with stairs leading all the way up. The symbolism of ascending to the temple should be obvious; sometimes, as with the Aztecs, the long temple stairs were also used for a StaircaseTumble when they tossed the bodies of sacrificial victims down them.

* While it's not too long for a human, the stairway to Cinderella's room in Disney's ''WesternAnimation/{{Cinderella}}'' is this trope for Gus and Jaq (who are realistically-sized mice) when they have to carry the key up the stairs to her to let her out of the room when she was locked in by the wicked stepmother.

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

* In ''ComicBook/ScottPilgrim'', Scott defeats Lucas Lee by convincing him to rail grind a huge stairway on his skateboard. After [[ImplausibleBoardingSkills exceeding speeds of 309 kph]] he crashes hard.

[[folder:Film - Live-Action]]

--> '''Sonny''': Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty steps, Detective.