"Now remember: we're parked in the Itchy lot."
— Homer Simpson, The Simpsons, "Itchy & Scratchy Land"
As this has happened to just about everyone at some point or another this is probably a common trope. Someone walks out of a building, looks around with a perplexed look, and realizes that they don't know where their car is parked. Bonus points if they're in a ridiculously huge lot or garage that takes hours to navigate.
May be justified if the car was actually stolen or towed. May also overlap with My Car Hates Me if the tracking feature refuses to work or the car doesn't start when they do find it.
Not to be confused with the movie Dude, Where's My Car?, or the other movie this trope's name is derived from.
Examples
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Film - Animated
- Early on in Megamind, Megamind and Minion forget where they've parked the invisible car. Becomes a Brick Joke much later, when they rediscover where they parked.
Film - Live Action
- Dude, Where's My Car? is the Trope Namer, though in this case the car was stolen.
- This exact line happens in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, when the titular duo's car is stolen by Neil Patrick Harris.
- Parodied in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home with the cloaked Klingon ship. "Everyone remember where we parked!"
Literature
- In The Real Thing by Catherine Alliot, the protagonist cannot find her car and panics that it has been stolen. She calls the police to report the theft, only to remember five minutes later where she had parked it.
Live-Action TV
- In High&Low, Masaki Amamiya got his bike towed to hilarious effect.
- The Seinfeld episode "The Parking Garage". They spend the entire episode searching for the car and when they finally found it at the very last minute of the episode, it wouldn't start. The car-not-starting bit was also a case of Throw It In!; the original ending called for them to drive away but be unable to find the exit.
- A Sabrina the Teenage Witch episode where Sabrina and her friend buy a car together. Hilarity Ensues. Best say with this quote, "How does it feel to the car three times in the same parking lot on the same day?!"
- A Running Gag in Jekyll involves Tom Jackman waking up somewhere and discovering that he has no idea where his other personality parked the car.
- Happens to Hawkeye and Radar on M*A*S*H with a jeep. They steal another one, which turns out to belong to a general.
- In the pilot episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, the landing party gets in a scuffle with Suliban and consequently end up coming out of the building they were in in an unfamiliar area. They are confused as to where their shuttlecraft is.
- Happens from time-to-time on Parking Wars, when impounded cars are misplaced and their owners must scour the impound lot, or if they need their ownership, registration certificate, proof of insurance or even personal items to have their car released from impound.
- Who Dares Wins had a song called "Who's That Man?" about an anonymous figure who is responsible for all of life's annoyances. One of his 'crimes' is "He hides in high-rise parking lots, and then he moves your car!".
Radio
- In The X-Files spoof, The X Fools, Agent Smolder asks Sore Throat why they always had to meet in a parking garage. Sore Throat replies that he'd forgotten where he'd parked his station wagon back in '89 and was still looking for it.
Video Games
- Guild Wars 2: If you're playing a norn, one option in character creation is that you got blackout-drunk at a recent moot. During a personal story mission, you find out what happened while you were smashed — you and a charr drinking buddy (who was just as drunk as you) went joyriding in his warband's tank, and now have to find it.
Webcomics
- There's a PVP strip that has Brent walking through the rain trying to find his car, not remembering that they had actually taken Jade's car.
- This is actually parodied as a Running Gag in El Goonish Shive. Whenever the cast leaves the mall, they inevitably ask 'Dude, where's my car?', only to find that they left by the wrong entrance, or one of the others will point out that it's 'right there'. They also serve as Dude, Where's My Car? references:
Western Animation
- The Simpsons has used this a few times.
- In "The Homer They Fall" Homer fights Drederic Tatum and once they leave he can't remember where he parked the car (likely due to so much head trauma), so Marge says they'll just wait until everyone else leaves.
- The episode "Itchy And Scratchy Land" has the family parking their car and saying "OK, we're parked in the Itchy lot," only to zoom out and reveal that the car park only has two, absolutely massive lots: Itchy and Scratchy. (This is of course a parody of Disneyland's character-named lots.)
- This was a Brick Joke in a Garfield and Friends episode. Jon refuses to write down a parking location (the lot is coded by numbers and colors) and says he'll memorize it only to get more and more confused as everyone around him keeps mentioning colors and numbers. Eventually Garfield and Odie get home themselves, while at the end of the episode, Jon is still hunting in the gigantic parking lot.
- On Rocko's Modern Life, "Who Gives A Buck?" features a parking lot so large, some people have been wandering it for years looking for their cars. One of them is a grown man dressed like a little boy and still looking for "mommy's car," and a few scenes later Rocko and Heffer pass a senile old woman going "Son? Have you found the car yet?"
- In Invader Zim, Dib once found himself in a parking lot inhabited by a group of people who got lost looking for their car and have become convinced they are "rat people." (Not those rat people.)
"Rat Person": I was once a man...
Dib: But you're a woman... - A running gag in the "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy" episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants is the heroic duo's nearly impossible-to-find "Invisible Boatmobile." Subverted in one episode, where they use the key fob to beep the horn.
- One of Cartoon Network's early promotional shorts had Space Ghost offer Fred Flintstone his parking space, then wonder where the heck he parked his car, then remembering that he flew into work. Silly him.
- Zig-zagged in the Danger Mouse episode "What A Three-Point Turn-Up For The Book." DM and Penfold are rushing to an awards ceremony when their car, the Mk. III jets off without them.
- Futurama: This turns out to be the cause of the mysterious alien signal in "Game of Tones". On New Year's Eve 1999, Nibbler and Digby were celebrating knocking Fry into the cryogenic tube when they drunkenly dropped the keys to their spaceship down a drain. After taking a taxi back to their home planet, Digby spent the next thousand years roaming the universe using a spare set of keys to try and trigger the spaceship's alarm.
