Often there is a row of motorcycles parked at a bar (or restaurant, or any other building, but usually it's a seedy biker bar located on the edge of town). Naturally, someone's going to hit one, and it will fall and hit another, and that will fall and hit another and so on — like the old Disaster Dominoes. That'll get a swarm of (stereotypical) bikers real angry and desiring revenge on the offender. Oh, Crap!
A variant of this is a hero character walking into the wrong bar or otherwise ending up on the wrong side of a group of bikers and being tossed on to the street beaten and bloody by a jeering mob. The beaten hero then takes revenge by sabotaging the motorcycles in this way with his own vehicle or doing something like tying them together so that anyone attempting to chase him ends up dominoing their own side.
It should be noted that this is Artistic License, as in real-life groups like this usually have a low ranking or prospective member guarding the motorcycles at all times - and something like this would fail to happen whether accidentally or by design.
Used either for comedy or as a distraction.
See also The Precious, Precious Car, Human Traffic Jam.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Appears in one of the Progressive Insurance commercials
: one of the Strawman Competitors knocks over a row of motorcycles. Flo says "It's not like bikers love their bikes more than life itself. I doubt anyone will notice." Cue big, burly, angry biker.
- A man on a little scooter knocks over a row of motorbikes at a funfair. And so he ends up on his scooter being circled by the bikers in dodgem cars... perfectly relaxed and contented. Happiness, you see, is a cigar called Hamlet.
Anime & Manga
- Happens in Higurashi: When They Cry. Keiichi trips and knocks over several motorcycles in the Watanagashi-hen question arc, and Shion comes to his rescue. In the Meakashi-hen answer arc, Shion gets in trouble with the same group of bikers two times like this, a year apart, and is aided first by Satoshi, and later by Keiichi.
- In episode 18 of Brave Police J-Decker, a giant panda (Don't ask) manages to achieve this trope with a row of tanks after treating one of them as a little toy.
Comic Strips
- A Western example occurs in The Far Side, only involving horses instead of motorcycles.
- In the German comic Rudi, in combination with What Does This Button Do?. (It automatically moves the kickstand.)
Films — Animation
- In Onward, Wilden accidentally knocks over the pixies' parked bikes, angering them and necessitating an escape.
Films — Live-Action
- Every Which Way but Loose, where Clint Eastwood's character constantly damages the Biker gang's motorcycles in different ways.
- Happens near the middle of Friday the 13th Part III when two of the teens accidentally back their car into a row of motorcycles, causing the bikers to try to get even with them (by stealing their gas) and end up running into Jason.
- In Pee-wee's Big Adventure. He meant to do that, by the way. And of course, it arouses the ire of some ornery bikers.
Pee-Wee: I barely touched them!
- Happened with bicycles in the James Bond film Goldeneye.
- Smokey and the Bandit did a variation on this one: After Cledus gets beat up by bikers because his dog supposedly bit one of them, he stumbles outside and sees their bikes lined up. So he gets in his semi and runs over the entire line of them on his way out of the parking lot.
- Played with in Vin Diesel's xXx, when a row of motorcycles, instead of being knocked over like a set of dominoes, explodes in series.
- Scavenger Hunt (1979): After being thrown out of the biker bar, Selsome pauses to gloat over the fact that none of the bikers noticed him pocketing the fox tail. As he does so, he knocks over one of the bikes: triggering a domino chain reaction. Seconds later, the bikers are chasing him again.
Jokes
- Joke example: A small Norwegian truck driver walks into a Greasy Spoon, and a group of bikers pick on him: pushing him around, taunting him, etc. The truck driver does nothing, just eats his meal as if nothing were going on. Then he leaves, and one of the bikers says to the waitress, "That Norwegian isn't much of a man, is he?" The waitress replies, "No, and he's not much of a truck driver either. He just ran his truck into a row of motorcycles parked outside."
Literature
- In one of the New English Library pulp-alarmist shock novels about the Hell's Angels, a stereotypical left-liberal film director trying to make a sympathetic film about the hardest Angels chapter in Britain gets exasperated when the hard bikers refuse to act to the camera in the way he wants them to. In a strop, he kicks over an Angel's bike which sets off the domino chain... big mistake, as he is then on the receiving end of some fairly graphic and prolonged retribution for daring to damage Angel bikes. This sets off a chain of havoc and destruction, including the gang-rape of several members of the crew and cast, when the Angels decide they're tired of playing the game. Still, the leading actress was the sort of promiscuous Leftie who was assisting in dragging Britain into the moral mire, so that made it alright by the NEL's hidden agenda.
- Talked about in book series Agent of Hel. Daisy, the protagonist, has to visit a seedy bar that is run by a bunch of tough biker ghouls, a type of emotion-draining vampire. She makes a wide arc around all their bikes perfectly lined up in a row. When her partner, a werewolf cop named Cody, asks her what she's doing, she uses the Pee-wee's Big Adventure example of what mind happen if she gets too close.
Live-Action TV
- Turk does this in Scrubs before JD arrives to heroically stop the bikers from pummeling Turk. The part about the bikers getting angry is then subverted, as JD makes up for the knocked-over bikes by buying them cappuccinos.
- TV Variation: In the first episode of the failed late '80s Van Patten project The Master (feature-lengthified and dubiously immortalized under the title Master Ninja), the guy the camera is pointed at most of the time is first shown being thrown bodily out of a bar by a biker gang. In retaliation, he hooks their bikes together with steel cable and baits them into chasing his van, so that when they speed off, the bikes pull themselves apart and send their riders flying onto the concrete.
Music Videos
- Tom Petty's music video for "Into the Great Wide Open" features Johnny Depp's character doing this after he's dropped by his record label.
Video Games
- In Police Quest 1: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, you can knock over a bunch of motorcycles. Nothing happens, though the text says that "Someone has to answer to four angry people!"
- Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers: You do this to distract a bunch of futuristic bikers (The Monochrome Boys) at a bar, all to steal some matches. When the Boys find out what happened, they don’t take it lightly and start speeding around trying to run you over.
- The Urbz has this in Gasoline Row. You can "admire" a row of motorcycles by kicking one and watching them fall over. (However, all the local bikers will rush over and beat you up in response.)
Western Animation
- Happens in Rocko's Modern Life, when Heffer knocks over the walkers of Senior citizens on a cruise line designed for the elderly.
- Subverted in an episode of American Dad! where Stan and Steve are on a road trip. Steve accidentally knocks over a line of motorcycles, but the owners (all badass, Hells Angels-looking types) are very understanding, saying it was just an accident and that there's nothing to get upset about.
- Generator Rex: Rex kicks over a row of motor scooters in "Breach".
- In the Mickey Mouse (2013) short "Road Hogs", Mickey's scooter, which is sentient, knocks over some also sentient motorcycles owned by a gang of hog bikers, the last one leaking out a puddle of oil. Immediately after that, Mickey accidentally knocks over the sitting bikers themselves and they fall like dominoes as well (perhaps mercifully, the puddle of oil is excluded from the second round).
- Fillmore!: In "Play On, Maestro, Play On", a kite yanks over a pushbike triggering a domino chain of bicycles as part of the Rube Goldberg Device used in stealing the Ultrabox.
- In "A Life In A Day" from Spongebob Squarepants, while SpongeBob is asking what made the biker gang all cranky after Patrick has enough of trying to live like Larry, he accidentally knocks all of the motorbikes in this effect. The bikers state that Patrick did exactly that to tick them off, resulting in them knocking SpongeBob in the air from the motorcycle circle.
- In a Phineas and Ferb special, Doofenshmirtz does this intentionally in a montage of misdemeanors he's doing with his new entourage. The bikers were too intimidated to react due to that new entourage consisting of several big-name supervillains, just standing there stunned while Doofenshmirtz follows that up with giving each one a pie to the face.
Real Life
