Horse Jump

This, believe it or not, is about jumping over things on horses, usually things it wouldn't be possible to jump over in Real Life. Deep ravines are a perennial favorite, though other things can be substituted. It probably helps if your horse is cooler than average. Quite often, writers will not see any particular difference between making a jump with a horse and making it with a vehicle, since everyone knows horses are just an old-fashioned type of motorbike anyway.

If a Moody Mount refuses to do this, it's an example of Horsing Around.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The protagonist of A Centaur's Life, who is her own horse, is able to casually leap over a car. In a much later chapter she's able to leap and Wall Run while firing off arrows.
• Centorea the centaur in Monster Musume is shown doing this all the time. In her first appearance, she leaps down an embankment that appears to be about the height of a three story building onto the road below, while springing over cars.
• Happens in a Filler episode of Rurouni Kenshin, where Kenshin rode a horse over several boats to jump on a moving train.
• Occurs in Sengoku Basara; Takeda Shingen decided that jumping over a 100+ foot wall while riding two horses just wouldn't be cool enough... so he charged up the wall instead, gravity be damned◊.
  • In the second season Masamune, Motochika and their armies pretty much fly over a ravine on horseback.
  • All of the above is nothing compared to the acrobatics horses get put through in The Movie.

Board Games

• The Knight piece in Chess (which has the appearance of the knight's horse) is the only piece that can jump over other pieces.

Comic Books

• Lucky Luke's horse Jolly Jumper got his name as showed in the story Lucky Kid. A young Lucky Luke on a young Jolly Jumper is fleeing from a lot of wild buffalo, when they come to a cliff. Jolly Jumper jump over, but the buffaloes fall down.

Film — Animated

• Toy Story 2 features Show Within a Show "Woody's Roundup" where he and Bullseye the horse jump over the ravine in order to get to Jessie and Stinky Pete. Unfortunately, the episode ends on a cliffhanger with the pair still in mid-air and the show got cancelled.

Film — Live-Action

• Inverted in the Indian movie Alluda Majaaka, in which the hero slides his horse sideways under a truck. And then keeps riding.
• In Crank: High Voltage, when Chev Chelios and his girlfriend Eve are having sex on the trackfield to create static electricity for his ensured living, a horse jumps over them and Eve and the viewers get to view a horse-dong.
• The Duellists. D'Hubert jumps his horse over a peasant cart (much to their annoyance) in exhilaration over surviving a duel where he expected to be killed.
• Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940 Film Serial). Actress Dorothy Herbert worked as a circus rider, so there are a couple of scenes where her character jumps a horse over a fence while escaping—the first time With My Hands Tied and holding the reins in her teeth, and the second time she jumps the fence while simultaneously pretending to fall backward in the saddle to make the villains think she's been shot.
• In Star Trek: Generations, Kirk twice has his horse dramatically jump over a ditch. This is most likely an excuse to show off William Shatner's truly exceptional equestrian skills. However plotwise the fact that he manages it easily makes him realize No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
  Kirk: I must've jumped that fifty times. Scared the hell out of me each time...except this time...because it isn't real.
• True Lies: Subverted when Harry tries to follow Big Bad Aziz (who had made a motorcycle jump into a pool several stories down), but the horse balks and stops short, pitching Harry off the saddle and almost to his death.
• Sonora Webster, the heroine of Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, learns to dive horses off a high platform into a tank of water as a carnival attraction (see also the Atlantic City example in the Real Life section below; the high point of Sonora's career as a diving girl comes when she performs in Atlantic City).

Literature

• Gone with the Wind makes a Tear Jerker out of a failed jump over a simple fence. Or actually two, one with Scarlett's father and one with her and Rhett's daughter.
• Played With in Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar novel Take a Thief. The young protagonist attempts to steal a horse, despite never having ridden one, and it runs away with him on its back. When he sees a big wagon blocking the road, he sensibly assumes the horse won't be able to jump it and he'll be able to jump off when it stops. He's wrong. It turns out that the horse is actually a magical being known as a Companion, explaining why it's able to perform such impressive jumps.
• In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the most famous ravine jump happens to Liu Bei, who was riding a supposedly unlucky horse and trying to outrun some people out to kill him. The horse makes a tremendous leap to the top of the ravine overlooking the river he'd previously been stuck in, and Liu Bei's reinforcements finally show up.
• In Royal Flash, Flashman gets into a cross-country race with Otto von Bismarck that involves several horse jumps over hedges and ditches.
• In The Saddle Club, Veronica had been showing a disregard for the Stable Owner's instructions concerning jumping and ends up breaking her arm, and causing her horse to suffer a fatal injury after running her horse too fast downhill for the jump.
• In The Silver Brumby in an odd way; Thowra makes it look like he's going to jump a ravine, but instead drops down to a small ledge on the cliff face. Arrow, who was chasing him at the time, attempts to jump the ravine and falls to his death.
• In the final Time Scout book, Skeeter's horse jumps over a crashed wagon, but doesn't land well. In Wagers of Sin, Skeeter jumps a horse over a small shrine, exciting the arena's crowd. Then he takes stands on the horse's back and using a spear to pole vault over the wall, a moment of Horseback Heroism.
• People who attempt this in Tamora Pierce's Tortall Universe novels tend to end up badly. In the Song of the Lioness quartet, this brings about the demise of King Roald, although this is largely viewed as a suicide because of his grief at the death of his wife. In the Trickster's Duet, this is how Sarai and Dove's mother died, as revealed through Backstory.

Radio

• Subverted in The Goon Show: "Dishonoured" (and remake "Dishonoured Again"), in which Bluebottle's noble stallion throws him into the ravine, much to his disgust.

Video Games

• One of the "attacks" used by Wolfgunblood and Garopa from Alien Soldier. A set of high or low walls appear, and they will jump them if the walls are high. You gotta avoid the walls too or you'll take damage.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, with Link riding Epona and jumping the canyon in Gerudo Valley, and escaping the stables after beating Ingo. Horse jumping is so important in the mechanics of this game that you aren't allowed to ride Epona freely until you prove you can do it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has several low gates and fences that you need to jump to advance the game. The open areas are also littered with truncated walls and hedges that can be jumped if you feel like it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild similarly has many fences, rocky outcroppings, and other objects that your horse can jump over, though it's not required to use the feature this time.
• In Minecraft, riding on a horse allows for easily jumping over various obstacles, including an Insurmountable Waist-High Fence. If your horses can't do this, you can breed them, creating possibly a stronger horse.
• Robot Unicorn Attack is all about making your unicorn jump. (A unicorn is an equine, so close enough!)
• Shadow of the Colossus:
  • This comes up at the climax. Subversion — the horse doesn't make it. Or rather, he does make it, but the ground gives away when he lands. Though the ending cutscene reveals the horse survives the fall.
  • It's also possible to do this over at least one broken land bridge towards the west end of the map, as well as off of smaller cliffs.
• Steeplechase Redux is a game about jumping exactly over obstacles with your horse to gain speed and avoid the Advancing Wall of Doom.
• In Wild AR Ms 3, in order to get to areas on the map blocked by ravines, your party will need to get horses that will allow them to jump across.

Western Animation

• Looney Tunes: In "Buckaroo Bugs", a cowboy looking for Bugs Bunny jumps wider and wider gorges (thanks to the assistance of Bugs, who keeps shouting "He went this way") until he jumps over the Grand Canyon. He doesn't quite make that last one.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Feeling Pinkie Keen": The cast jumps across another ravine through convenient stone pillars. One of the pillars falls before Twilight can get across, and the hydra that's chasing them is getting closer. Twilight doesn't make the jump, but the swamp at the bottom produces an enormous bubble that catches her and propels her all the way up. Also a case of Forgot About His Powers, since she can teleport at will.
  • "Dragonshy": Most of the cast effortlessly hop over a ravine while climbing mountains, but Fluttershy balks. After much cajoling, she tries, panics, fails ... and just spans the gap, it being shorter than her outstretched legs.

Real Life

• There are several sports devoted to just this, two of which are in the Olympics: Jumping, featuring a course of obstacles within an arena, and Eventing, featuring a longer course of more natural-style obstacles out in the field. Other forms of equestrian competition involving jumps include the Steeplechase, which is essentially a hurdles race for horses, and Foxhunting, in which the riders may or may not choose to jump their horses over obstacles rather than going around. Arena-based jumping events primarily use fences assembled from poles which are designed to fall apart if knocked into; Eventing and foxhunting, meanwhile, use sturdier obstacles and also frequently involve jumping over ditches and/or water obstacles, and Eventing in particular has come under scrutiny in recent years for the number of fatalities that result when horses fail to clear its immobile and much less forgiving jumps.
• Atlantic City's Steel Pier once hosted an exhibition of Horse Diving, in which trained horses with female riders jumped off an elevated platform into a giant tank of water.

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