Parasol Parachute

Don't laugh, or he'll beat you up with it.

"The sun shines on this Parasol of mine. Where I walk, enemies balk, and I float gently down..."

— Description of the Parasol ability, Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land.

A Sub-Trope of Improvised Parachute and Puny Parachute, in many cartoons and video games, an umbrella or parasol can be used as an improvised parachute, allowing someone who opens it in midair to float safely down to the ground.

Of course, the umbrella or parasol may fail, turning inside-out and sending the unfortunate user plummeting to the earth below. Don't Try This at Home, especially not off the roof.

MythBusters tested this, alongside other forms of hindering falling: surprise, surprise, it didn't work. Real parachutes have vent-holes in the top to help keep it stable, but that would defeat the purpose of an umbrella in the first place. Theoretically, it is still better than nothing since it makes you fall feet-first, so the main impact won't be on your head.

Compare Parachute Petticoat.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Subverted in a 1976 commercial for Kellogg's Raisin Bran. One defective raisin is considered not sweet enough to qualify for the signature 2 scoops and gets jettisoned in the air by Sunny. The hapless raisin parachutes to the ground with an umbrella that quickly fails.
• Ads for Travelers insurance (now part of Citigroup) featured men in black pinstripe suits carrying gigantic red umbrellas (Travelers' logo) in this manner.

Anime & Manga

• In Bleach, Liltotto Lamperd arrives on the battlefield floating down on a little umbrella.
• Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto: To save a bird caught in a thunderstorm, Sakamoto let the wind pick him up, then opened his umbrella to gently drift down.
• This is Older Than They Think, actually. In a rather creepy episode of Mahou no Mako-chan, one of the titular Magical Girl's rivals is a Creepy Child who uses his red parasol (a traditional Japanese one) this way when he jumps off a building and escapes from her.
• In the first episode of Majokko Meg-chan, Megu flys down into the human world using an umbrella. This becomes her iconic item.
• This is a primary mode of transportation, both up and down, for the stuffed-animal Mary Land characters in Onegai My Melody.
• Miss Valentine in One Piece has this as her main gimmick, which along with the ability to change her weight to anywhere from 1 to 10,000 kilos allows her to float using her parasol — or turn it around and crush her enemies flat.
• Shiro floats around using his parasol in Project K.
• In the first arc of Sailor Moon, Usagi uses a parasol to gently float down from a 4th-floor balcony. As if that isn't bad enough, she had Tuxedo Kamen — a young man — hanging on to her during the descent. This is perhaps justified as the parasol was created as part of a magical disguise, so it could very well be magical itself.
• One episode of Smile Pretty Cure! has the team, shrunk down to insect size, summon umbrellas from the Umbrella Decor and use it to float down to ground level from the window ledge, with the acrophobic Akane and Nao hanging onto one umbrella in a panic.
• The Ame-Warashi in ×××HOLiC is seen doing this in the opening credits with her umbrella, as well as once in the manga. Then again, she is the Rain Spirit, so her use of it might not be entirely unjustified.

Asian Animation

• Lamput: In "Opera", Fat Doc tries to scoop up Lamput from below him using an umbrella. He accidentally drops the umbrella, which opens while Lamput is clinging to it and floats slowly towards the audience below until Mr. Moustache grabs it.

Comic Books

• One Archie Comics story has Archie and Veronica go for an afternoon drive. With Archie unable to close the roof of his jalopy, they use an umbrella to protect themselves from the sun and lower the windshield to catch a breeze. The breeze eventually becomes so strong, it blows both the umbrella and Veronica away, but they land safely in Reggie's car.
  Reggie: Don't tell me, I know the name...Mary...Mary Popoff!
• This is a classic shtick of Batman's Penguin who would have special umbrellas that were either designed to be strong enough to act as a parachute or have a helicopter function instead.
• DuckTales: During the first segment of Scrooge's Quest, Scrooge uses his umbrella as a parachute while he's chasing his hat (and the money he tucked inside the band). Later, when he falls off an ice bridge at the North Pole, he uses it again, although he admits that it's not going to be able to save him here. Luckily, it doesn't have to, as the boys call Launchpad, who catches him with the plane.
• Improbably used by British WWII soldier Percy Pinkerton in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.

Comic Strips

• Calvin finds out that umbrellas don't work that way in Calvin and Hobbes. He also orders a propeller beanie from the back of a cereal box and is disappointed when it doesn't let him fly like a helicopter.

Films — Animation

• In The Aristocats, Edgar used an umbrella when he jumped off the windmill trying to evade the dogs but turned inside out seconds later.
• Arlo the Alligator Boy: Arlo does this in the final chorus of "Beyond These Walls", using a parasol given by Jeromio to parachute past various floating New York landmarks and aspects.
• While falling out of the spaghetti twister in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Flint grabbed hold of an umbrella, only for it to turn inside out after a few seconds.
• This happens to Pooh at the end of the song "Heffalumps and Woozles" in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
• Happens to John Darling during the song "You Can Fly!" from Peter Pan.
• Pinocchio (and also Fun and Fancy Free) - This is Jiminy Cricket's chosen mode of conveyance. It probably helps that he is, well, a cricket.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Meet the Pegasus: After he gets launched into the sky and knocks the wings off Prince Pegasus, Wolffy quickly grabs a parasol to ease his fall, making the joke that "The first secret of beauty is to keep away from UV rays!" as he does so.
• The Rugrats Movie: The circus monkeys jumped off the roof of a crash train cart and used an umbrella to float down. Phil and Lil attempt to do the same with a broken umbrella but falls down faster than the monkeys.
• In Scooby-Doo! and the Samurai Sword, Scooby and Shaggy use a paper umbrella to first fly (using paper fans as wings) and then parachute. It works fine till Scooby tries climbing on top of it.
• In Tarzan, a baby baboon does this with Jane's umbrella after he and the other baboons chase her down for the sketch she drew of him.
• The Three Caballeros/Saludos Amigos - José Carioca is typically seen carrying an umbrella. And since he never seems to use it to keep the rain off of him, Parasol Parachute is one of the alternate uses he has for it.
• White Snake (2019): Blanca enchants Xuan's umbrella to be capable of Flight and they share it as they have a Flight of Romance sequence, complete with an Accidental Hand-Hold moment as they both clutch it.

Films — Live-Action

• Jackie Chan does this at some point in The Accidental Spy, as he is chased in Turkey. There are no special effects in the scene, he really did it himself. Like almost every other crazy thing he has done in his movies (of course, lots of the times he ends up severely injured... while in the movie he immediately continues to run or whatever)... Medallion was a lot less realistic in this aspect (although to be fair, people died from falls, it was the titular Medallion that brought them back to life with super-natural powers).
• Played straight in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, when Bond uses a poolside umbrella to slow his fall when jumping off a wall. It's also useful as a momentary visual shield to avoid bullets.
• Near the climax of Inspector Gadget (1999), Gadget and his love interest are plummeting from the top of a skyscraper, so he begins shouting out every possible gadget he can think of that might slow their fall or soften their landing (after he tries "parachute" he glances up for a second because it's actually plausible), eventually trying "parasol", which works. The parachute does open — after they've landed, providing only privacy for an intimate moment.
• Mary Poppins: Mary P can propel herself upwards with one, as well, with help from the West Wind.
• The conclusion of Practical Magic.
• In Radio Flyer, there are seven wondrous abilities that people have while they're children, which become lost as adults. One of them is this, although the scene demonstrating it is played realistically, with Bobby's attempt to use an umbrella to float down is met with him landing heavily on a pile of flowerpots.
• Though not exactly a parasol, Short Circuit 2 has Johnny 5 use a built-in hang glider to slow his fall from a skyrise building. Read that again: a multi-hundred-pound robot breaks his fall with a dinky hang glider small enough to fold into a standard-sized toolbox, all while falling upside-down from several stories of a New York high rise. To be fair, they somehow had to spice up the previous scene from the first movie, in which he saved himself with a common parachute.

Literature

• Main function of umbrella belonging to one of main protagonists of Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium. It's also very sturdy and doubles as Parasol of Pain (see there).
• The title character of Big Max is a detective who travels by flying with his umbrella, and has to help a king find his missing elephant. Turns out, the elephant escaped by building a staircase made from ice blocks and went back to the jungle so it can attend an elephant party.
• Subverted in Astrid Lindgren's Madicken where the titular heroine tries this jumping off a roof, fails miserably, and is home with a concussion in the next chapter.
• In Scott Westerfield's Pretties, Tally has a dream where she's a princess who gets out of a tower with a Parasol Parachute. Even in a dream, it doesn't work like she thinks it should.
• This goes back to L. Frank Baum's Sky Island, in which the child Button Bright has a magical umbrella that flies him wherever he wants to go.
• Ruth Plumly Thompson's Speedy in Oz (1934).

Live-Action TV

• In Arrested Development Tobias tries this (while dressed up as a British nanny) to rekindle some wonder from Maebe. Naturally, he just ends up falling through the living room table.
• Missy does this in Doctor Who as part of an intentional Mary Poppins homage. Most likely she had an anti-gravity device or something hidden inside.
• MythBusters tested it. The best thing that can be said about trying this is that it makes you less likely to fall on your head, and more likely to land feet-first, injuring your legs instead of your brain.
• On Preacher (2016) Cassidy tries this when he is forced to jump out of a plane without a parachute. It helps him land feet first but most of his body still ends up as a bloody mangled mess. However, he is a vampire and he gets better after he drinks enough blood.
• Readalong: In the animated intro of the show, the last kid to jump into the book first pulls out an umbrella and uses it to slowly descend into said book.
• Thunderbirds: In "The Cham-Cham", Parker climbs on the roof of a cable car careering down a wire at a high speed. Lady Penelope offers him her umbrella, to help him attach hooks to it lowered by Thunderbird 2. When Parker falls off the roof, he uses the umbrella as a parachute.
• At the beginning of the The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss episode, "Norval the Great", The Cat in the Hat uses his umbrella to slowly descend as he jumps from a 15-story-high painting of his Uncle Lou.

Music Videos

• The music video "Tonight Tonight" by The Smashing Pumpkins (an homage to the 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune) features the two characters using parasols to slow their fall to the moon's surface. (Well, the lady uses a parasol. The gentleman uses a more masculine umbrella.) It becomes a Parasol of Pain when the Moonmen attack.

Tabletop Games

• d20 Modern has the Umbrella of Feather Falling, which functions as a feather fall spell when opened.
• In the original Dungeons & Dragons setting of Mystara, one of the more controversial "goofy" elements was the fact that the Retebius Air Fleet (an aerial branch of the military for the empire of Thyatis) and the Knights of the Air (a Thyatian club for nobles and adventurers interested in flight) both make use of the "Bumber-Chute", an enchanted umbrella that allows the user to slowly descend from heights, as an emergency protection against being knocked from the sky.

Video Games

• Adventure Island IV features parasol as a powerup. It can be used for Master Higging to fall slower, helping him to cross larger gaps.
• Alice in Wonderland, released in 1985 for the Commodore 64. Though most plummeting descents would leave Alice stunned on her ass with her bloomers in the air, with the parasol she could guide her descent to reach ledges she otherwise couldn't. Alternating this with the top hat, which allowed her to float up in the same way, she could reach a lot of hidden characters, treasures, and Easter Eggs.
• Lieselotte of Arcana Heart enters matches by floating down with her parasol.
• Rachel Alucard of BlazBlue can slow her descent using her Shapeshifting cat, Nago as a parasol.
• The protagonist of the BBC Micro game Boffin used his umbrella to slow falls.
• The Drowning Doom Bride units from Brütal Legend do this when they spawn: they hold open their parasols and gently float to the ground after jumping off your stage.
• In C Js Elephant Antics and its sequel CJ in the USA, the titular elephant uses an umbrella as a parachute.
• At one point of The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush fell from a cliff and had to use the umbrella he had in the inventory to float safely to a cave in there. Else he'd fall, crash with the rocks and the bottom and splash on the water...just to surface at the shore seconds later to try again.
• Dodge The Prank: Used by the girl if equipped to her by the player after the prankster stretched the bottom of her trampoline while she was trying to rescue a cat.
• Fortnite: Battle Royale gives umbrellas as a Cosmetic Award glider-replacement for winning a Victory Royale. "The Umbrella" is awarded for your first win ever, and a special limited-edition umbrella for your first win in each season.
• The main character in Goblins 3 uses an umbrella to slow down his fall after jumping off the flying ship where the game starts.
• One of Faust's entrances in the Guilty Gear series has him floating down from offscreen using an oversized umbrella.
• In Holy Umbrella, the Gliding Brooch upgrades the umbrella to allow the player to do this.
• In King & Balloon, the titular king will gently float down to the ground with an umbrella any time the player shoots down a balloon that has captured him.
• Many games in the Kirby series feature the Parasol Copy Ability, which typically has the additional perk of allowing Kirby to use the parasol to gently float downward.
• Baby O'Hara from Jitsu Squad carries a paper umbrella, and when tapping jump while in mid-air, she'll open it up and float a bit around the area. It helps that she's a rabbit and one of the lightest heroes.
• One of the main power-ups from Knytt Stories is an umbrella used this way.
• The Penguin has one of these in the LEGO Batman game, which can also be used as a weapon.
• Lemmings allows you to create floaters who use umbrellas to avoid splattering after falling long distances.
• Looney Tunes games:
  • In Sylvester and Tweety in Cagey Capers, one of the items that Sylvester can use is the umbrella, which allows him to make slow descents.
  • In Desert Demolition Starring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, one of Wile E.'s ACME items is a tiny umbrella used to gently float down.
• Olaf from The Lost Vikings does this with a wooden shield. Despite likely weighing as much as the other two vikings combined.
• Mario Party 3: There is a mini-game called Parasol Plummet, where you have to avoid hammers while descending with a parasol and catching the coins and coin bags thrown by some of the Hammer Bros. that hang on the beanstalks. Closing the parasol makes you fall down faster, while opening it will allow you to steer sideways to grab the loot.
• Subverted in Mega Man Battle Network 6, Lan tries this...and the umbrella collapses.
• P.B. Winterbottom's umbrella from The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. Doubles as a weapon.
• An ancient ZX Spectrum Donkey Kong ripoff named Monkey Biznes used this, making it Older Than the NES.
• Older Than the NES: Occurs in Richard Bartle's original MUD.
• Nosferatu Lilinor: Lilinor has a parasol that she can use to slowly descend as long as she has it open. It can be swapped out for other parasols in the Character Customization part.
• This trope is built into the Parasol Stars video game.
• There's a level of Power Stone where you are falling from a broken airship, and have to grab umbrellas to slow you as you fall. In Power Stone 2, Julia came pre-equipped with an umbrella, letting her do this. In the aforementioned level, she still needs to grab one of the other umbrellas, though, or splat.
• In Ronald in the Magical World for the Game Gear, Ronald collects Mr. Joke's magical stick in the game's opening cutscene, and one of the things it can do is turn itself into a parasol. Ronald can use this parasol to make slow descents, and in the final world, Magical Castle, Ronald can use this on the fans to propel him up to the top floor of Mr. Joke's castle.
• Okuni can do this in Samurai Warriors. Given that the game doesn't have falling damage, this doesn't serve much purpose, but gliding with her umbrella is faster than running so if she starts on top of a hill, she can cover a decent bit of ground fairly quickly if she doesn't have a horse.
• Sonic Advance: In the third game, when Cream is paired up with Amy, she can produce a parasol out of nowhere to significantly slow her falls, trading her ability to fly.
• Sonic Heroes Team Rose can do this with Big's umbrella. It's actually a Shout-Out to the Studio Ghibli movie My Neighbor Totoro.
• One of the standard tools in the Super Granny series is a parachute umbrella. Jumping off of things while using it is sometimes accompanied by a voice clip of Granny saying "Supercalifragilistic."
• In Super Animal Royale, everyone parachutes down to the island this way. The parachutes can be swapped out for custom ones you earn or buy like other cosmetic items.
• Super Mario Bros.: Princess Peach uses parasols in several games.
  • In the Super Smash Bros. series, Peach uses a parasol for her up special attack. More specifically, she jumps, allowing her to strike opponents above her, and then opens the parasol, which causes her to float down gently. In Ultimate, Daisy, an Echo Fighter of Peach, is also able to use a parasol.
  • In one cutscene in Super Mario RPG, she jumps from the top floor of her castle and uses her parasol to slow her descent.
  • In Super Paper Mario to increase her jumping distance.
  • Yoshi's Island DS allows her to use her parasol in this way as well.
• The Parasol in Super Smash Bros. Melee also works like this, automatically slowing your descent if you jump while holding it. It's reproduced from the Kirby games and is more useful to the combatants who can't fly.
• In Tamagotchi: Party On!, one of the possible games you play upon landing on a Gotchi Game space has you pressing a specific button at just the right time to make a falling Tamagotchi open an umbrella they're holding and use it as a parachute.
• In Terramex, you find an umbrella early in the game that allows you to float down from heights that would otherwise kill you.
• Terraria: The Umbrella is a very early-game weapon that, when wielded, makes the player fall slowly, at the same rate as a Featherfall potion, and negates Falling Damage. The Tragic Umbrella that you can buy from the Clothier has the same effect.
• Tower Bloxx: People who enter the building do so by floating with a parasol to it.
• The Shadowlands expansion of World of Warcraft includes a repeatable quest that revolves around catching spheres of anima to keep one of these working long enough to reach the landing zone.
• The tutorial of Zack and Wiki uses this to slow your descent after jumping from a blowing-up plane. The tutorial then uses the opportunity of you holding an item to show you how to drop items. While you're still falling.

Web Animation

• This is done in RWBY by Neo. A few times, she's shown using her umbrella to slow her landing. This is eventually used against her at the end of Volume 3, as she was whisked away by the wind when Ruby activated her parasol on top of an airship.

Web Comics

• Homestuck:
  • When more powerful monsters first approach John's house, one of the imps who had been bothering him up until that point quickly absconds by jumping over the side of the roof while using an umbrella as a makeshift parachute.
  • Towards the close of Act 5, when airdropping a large shaving cream-based bomb on Jade's house, the Courtyard Droll hops off the bomb before it lands and parachutes the rest of the way down with an umbrella.
• Pacificators: Muneca Powell can do this using her Gravity Master powers. We could see this on-screen here (it also happens several times throughout the comic, but usually implied).

Western Animation

• In the opening credits of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Oblina scares a man holding an umbrella by disguising herself as the umbrella's handle. The man tosses her into the air, and she uses the umbrella to float into the chimney of a schoolhouse, where she scares the children inside.
• In Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, "Seer No Evil", Chip fell out of a window but had his fall slowed by an umbrella. (Of course, thanks to the Square-Cube Law, even a fall lacking in increased drag would have perhaps only left him momentarily dazed, so the "flying horse" wouldn't have exactly saved him...)
• In Dogstar, Gran's cyborg arm includes an umbrella which she sometimes uses as a parachute.
• In the Futurama episode "The Mutants Are Revolting", the gang is thrown down into the sewer. Zoidberg, however, had the foresight to bring an umbrella and gently floats down while the others drop like stones.
• The Hair Bear Bunch are in town on their invisible motorcycle with Peevly and Botch chasing them. The keepers crash out their jeep into a street vendor hot dog stand. Peevly is jettisoned up into the air and floats to Earth using the stand's umbrella. From the missing scenes from the episode "Rare Bear Bungle."
  Square Bear: Look...it's Mary Poppins!
• Inspector Gadget: Gadget's mechanical arms produce a pink ruffled "Gadget-brella" for comic effect during a fall. Sometimes the gadget-hammer would appear instead, providing no help at all.
• In the Looney Tunes short "The Dixie Fryer", when Foghorn Leghorn is riding in a balloon basket, he jumps out, using an umbrella as a parachute, and floats gently.
• The opening sequence on the Mr. Magoo TV cartoons has him blithely causing chaos while driving. A construction crane hurls his car into the sky and he slows his fall with an umbrella - landing on a roller coaster track.
• In The Perils of Penelope Pitstop episode "Jungle Jeopardy", a single small umbrella is enough to lower the entire Ant Hill Mob and Chuggaboom safely to the ground.
• At the end of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an elf onboard Santa Claus' sleigh actually gives all of the misfit toys umbrellas to soften their landing after being dropped from the sleigh... ...except for the toy bird that can swim but cannot fly. He refuses to give the bird an umbrella, and pushes him off the sleigh instead!
• The music video for the Shaun the Sheep theme tune has one of the sheep jumping off the roof of the farmer's house using an umbrella.
• In the Sofia the First episode "The Secret Library", Sofia uses this technique on Prince Roderick, hooking his belt with her Aunt Tilly's umbrella, causing him to fall off of his pegasus and descend to the ground, unharmed but irritated.
• Parker does this in Thunderbirds after falling off a cable car and is forced to use Lady Penelope's umbrella as a parachute. The scene serves as a Shout-Out to Mary Poppins.
• In The Venture Bros., Dr. Henry Killinger uses his umbrella to float away like Mary Poppins. However a Hank Venture is shown trying the same from the roof of the Venture compound and plummeting to his death.
• Wacky Races: In "Fast Track to Hackensack", Penelope Pitstop loses her umbrella, and it lands in the Bouldermobile, blinding Rock and Gravel Slag and causing them to drive their car up a hill. When they drive it off a cliff, they use Penelope's umbrella to slowly descend, and land in the Army Surplus Special.

Real Life

• A man in China once tried this and found that this trope doesn't work in real life (he injured his legs).
• Qin Shi Huangdi liked to jump from the Great Wall of China carrying an open umbrella over his head. Existing accounts say that he was never hurt. (However, the Great Wall is only 5-8 meters tall, so it's not really much of a drop anyway.)

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