"Time to do something with that silly hair of yours, Tiny, and use it to extend your feeble jumping skills. Press A Button to jump and then press and hold A Button again while in the air. Go on, give it a twirl!"
— Cranky Kong, Donkey Kong 64.
Gain the power of Flight... through your hair! No doubt spinning is awesome. Just please don't ask us about the feasibility of it.
This is most popularly done with female characters, especially those with long pigtails, and robots that have hair-like appendages. A few male examples exist however, including those with mustaches that somehow do the same.
See Heli-Critter for animal examples. See also Hair Wings for less spinning, more flapping variation.
Sub-Trope to Instant Flight: Just Add Spinning!, Mercury's Wings is a sister trope. Compare Hat of Flight and Prehensile Hair.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In the Hentai manga Petit Roid 3, Kirara is a Robot Girl with Prehensile Hair that she can put to many uses, including creating a pair of rotors to fly.
- Buffalo from One Piece has hair in the shape of a propeller which he can rapidly rotate, thanks to him eating the Spin-Spin Fruit, and fly through the air. He has propellers on his feet too to keep him stable.
- Accel from Sukima no Kuni no Polta uses her hair like a helicopter to fly.
Comic Books
- In Monica's Gang, Jimmy Five's hair
◊ is five long, stiff and sharp strands. At least once they started rotating like a chopper.
Films — Live-Action
- Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams: Gerti Giggles, who provides the page image, has high-tech hair ties that spin her pigtails in circles, giving her this ability.
- Gold Claw has this ability in the Cutey Honey movie
Literature
- This is the subject of one Shel Silverstein poem where a boy who has been mocked his whole life for his long hair finally has enough and uses it to fly away.
Video Games
- Donkey Kong Country:
- Dixie Kong uses her hair to slow her descent in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!
- Donkey Kong 64 sees Dixie's sister Tiny Kong use a nearly identical move.
- Aside from slowing her descent as before, Dixie Kong uses her spinning ponytail in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze to help Donkey Kong himself stay in the air longer. In contrast to Diddy's rocket barrels, which give Donkey more horizontal distance, Dixie's hair lets them shoot up at a diagonal angle.
- Rayman: One of the title hero's trademark abilities is to spin his hair like helicopter blades, giving him limited gliding ability (and in some games, genuine flight, generally when winds allow it).
Web Comics
- Slyphorama has this in the Katri Kopter strip. With a Beyblade rip cord, no less!
Western Animation
- Ben 10: Omniverse: Mole-stache can do this by wrapping his moustache around his head and twirling the ends together.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy, "Ed, Ed, and Away": Ed manages to make Eddy's hair spin fast enough for him to fly when they try to catch a balloon. He does this by pulling Eddy's wallet chain like the starter cord of a lawnmower. Which leads to a hilarious reaction from Edd.
Eddy: This better not mess up my hair, Ed!Edd: (with a look of disbelief on his face) Remind me to ask you how you did that, Ed.
- The Fairly Oddparents: As the result of a wish gone wrong, Timmy ended up with a hair tornado.
- Ellie in the Nicktoons' Zevo-3.
- The Secret Show: Doctor Doctor's hair actually has been shown to have a propeller in it on more than one occasion.
