Sticky Situation

This is not gonna end well.^note For Wile E. Coyote.

"Hmmm... tree sap. Very sticky. Better not get it on me. Too late."

— Ming-Ming, Wonder Pets!

A classic Comedy Trope: someone comes in contact with something sticky (honey, flypaper, glue, gum, molasses, tape, tar, wallpaper paste, etc.) and it's Played for Laughs.

If it's not actually superglue, the substance tends to act as a far stronger adhesive than it is in reality. Compare Tongue on the Flagpole, where somebody licks something frozen...

If the character sheds footwear or other clothing to escape, this trope becomes Giving Them the Strip. If two characters get stuck to each other, it becomes a case of Chained Heat. Combine this with Why Am I Ticking? and you get Sticky Bomb. Contrast Slippery Skid, which often has the same setup, but the opposite substances and results. Not to be confused with Sticky Fingers, which has more to do with characters who are kleptomaniacs.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland becomes stuck when crossing a chessboard that has been covered in honey.
• Sakuramochi-nesan from Anpanman throws plain, uncoated mochi at her enemies. Thanks to having no coating, it's horribly sticky, sticking enemies (and sometimes others that attempt to copy her ability) to each other and gumming up Baikinman's robots. Since Sakuramochi-nesan's made out of mochi (and has very quick throwing reflexes), she can handle and launch it without any consequences.
• Akihisa Yoshii of Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts accidentally superglues his hand to a table in one episode of the anime. It remains there for the entire episode, until he shatters it by slamming it on the ground.
• A filler episode of Bleach has Yumichika gluing a wig to Ikkaku's bald head when they're in the human world, so that the girl they're staying with will stop crushing on him (she has a fetish for shaved heads). This leads to trouble later when the two Soul Reapers have to go fight a Hollow; Ikkaku is unable to leave his gigai body, since the glue is so strong that the wig is attached not just to the gigai's head but to Ikkaku's soul too. He has to use all his might to detach himself from his gigai, and manages to dispatch the Hollow and rescue the girl in time.
• One of the many gadgets from Doraemon, the Instant Adhesive Gun, can fire blobs of glue on targets holding them in place. It's used in a few movies like Doraemon: Nobita and the Steel Troops and Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan, the latter which turns out extremely useful in holding Gigazombie's robots in place since these robots are made of memory clay capable of reforming themselves in seconds after being destroyed.
• Dropkick on My Devil: Zig-Zagged. Jashin leaves a puddle of glue at the door for Yurine to step on. She does, but she takes off her shoes. Jashin however prepared for this, so she left another puddle of glue, but Yurine takes off her socks as well. This time Jashin did not had a plan to trap her bare feet and Yurine's floors, plus her shoes and socks are ruined, so she cuts Jashin in half.
• In Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, an out-of-control AI Spider Tank proves unstoppable by any means Section 9 tries, until Aramaki browbeats the president of the company that made the tank into turning over the top-secret research and development data on it (by pointing out that having an uncontrollable combat vehicle with the company's name on it means that it's basically unsellable now anyway). The way to beat it turns out to be a BFG that fires an exceptionally sticky material that gums up the tank's joints.
• The first segment of the 25th episode of Kamisama Minarai: Himitsu no Cocotama has Geracho get stuck to a tissue box in Makoto's room after getting some paste on his back.
• One Lupin III movie has the title character using a bazooka loaded with a sticky bomb to immobilize several pursuing ships (gluing them to each-other, not the water).
• In My Hero Academia, Minoru Mineta's superpower is pulling sticky balls off his head and sticking them to things. They are incredibly bouncy to Mineta himself but are very adhesive to everything else. It's not the flashiest superpower, but they can make for a very effective and reliable trap to immobilize opponents.
• In Naruto, a character practices the Bee Honey Technique in order to stop Hinata in sticky honey.
• In Nichijou, one of the Professor's backfiring inventions is a massive jar of glue that gets her, Nano, and Sakamoto all stuck in the hallway until someone can save them.
• One-Punch Man: Genos's cybernetic feet can stealthily release a puddle of glue to immobilize inattentive enemies. Originally conceived against Speed-o'-Sound Sonic, a speedster ninja who likes to suddenly appear behind him, it ends up being used against Awakened Cockroach. The hybrid monster has to cut off his own legs to escape and avoid being vaporized by Genos's weaponry.
• Ranma ½ has a story where Principal Kunō tries to force the students to prostrate themselves before him. One of his tricks is to coat the floor with glue, leaving several of the cast stuck on their hands and knees. Ranma, rather than let himself be humiliated in such a way, rips the entire floor out of the ground.
• The Sailor Moon anime had several villains employ this as an attack, including one in the second season seemingly made of goo, Eudial in season 3, and the Amazoness Quartet in four. Strangely, they never seem to have trouble cleaning it out of their hair.
• The Tenchi Muyo! manga had a pair of alien criminals breaking into the Masaki household to steal a priceless artifact nobody knew was valuable, easily bypassing Washu's most ingenious security traps. When they try again the next day, she's augmented them with tiger pit traps, swinging spiked balls, and a floor coated in glue, none of which the pair had gadgets to deal with. This is all in the Masaki's living room.

Comic Books

• Astro City: Glue-Gun, who is regarded as a joke by the entire superhero community. The only time he appears in a story is to be laughed at.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In a Carl Barks story, Donald Duck and his nephews invent a glue and invite Uncle Scrooge for a celebration at a bar. Upset at them for spending money before knowing if they'll ever make any from marketing the glue, Scrooge used it to stick their money at their hands, which forced him to pay. Later on, taking advantage of the fact the glue only sticks things on people, spread some at Scrooge's money to catch the Beagle Boys.
• Empowered features Sistah Spooky coming upon the aftermath of the title character's disastrous encounter with Glue Gun Gil, considered to be the all-time lamest villain in the city next to Ladder Master.
• Gaston Lagaffe:
  • Gaston has once a Dream Sequence where he uses an old WWII bomber against a whaler boat — dropping a glue bomb of his invention on the crew, leaving them stuck together and unable to hunt any whale, to be freed at the end of the hunting season.
  • The reboot album Lagaffe's Return features several examples:
    • First with "Gaston's Special Flycatcher Coating" which he spread on the ceiling of his office. Chasing a fly on a ladder, Prunelle puts his hand on the ceiling and gets stuck. Lebrac tries to help him, but his first efforts only result in Prunelle losing his pants. Then Lebrac accidentally gets stuck to the ceiling too, and they call for help. By the next Monday, when Gaston comes back, the whole redaction is stuck to the ceiling.
    • Later, the very day Fantasio comes back to replace Prunelle, Gaston accidentally splashes him and Lebrac with a bucket of the same Flycatcher Coating, gluing them together. Furious, Fantasio tries to chase Gaston, despite Lebrac and Bertje being stuck to him. Stumbling into a staircase, they add Jeanne, Boulier, the unnamed secretary and finally Gaston to the mess, resulting in a perfect ball of people stuck together at the bottom of the stairs.
    • There is also Gaston's "non-freezing ice-cream", which proves extremely stingy and sticky. Its first appearance leads to involuntary Building Swing for Gaston (really). At the end of the album, Gaston accidentally entangles a pickpocket in an alley with it. And then the two cops trying to arrest the thief end up hopelessly entangled alongside by the sticky stuff.
• Proving there's more than one way to take a girl out, Green Arrow's first use of his glue arrow was in a battle against future wife Black Canary.
• The 154th issue of Globo's edition of the Brazilian comic character Monica had a story titled "Chiclete, NÃO!", where Monica got stuck to a bench she was sitting on because of some gum. Her efforts to free herself result in her slipping out of her panties, receiving further humiliation when her attempts at removing her panties from the bench put her at risk of other people seeing her bare bottom and ultimately tear her panties up. After racing home with a bush to cover herself to get a new pair of panties, Monica eventually finds out who it was who left chewed up gum on the bench and gets her revenge by using gum to stick the seat of his pants to a trash can.
• In a comic book story of The Smurfs, Gargamel creates a treat that ends up trapping a Smurf that touches it, but as Gargamel runs over to where he has set the trap, he also gets stuck in the trap, and so do birds, a cow, and several other things on his way home. Papa Smurf makes a potion that frees everything that got stuck in the trap — everything, that is, except for Gargamel, which Papa Smurf has no more potion for, but he does leave a recipe for the formula for Gargamel to make up.
• Spider-Man:
  • The Trapster, a.k.a. Paste Pot Pete, centers his whole shtick around this trope. In one case he made a stairway out of glue to flee a building, daring Spider-Man to follow, who simply swung over the trap with his webbing.
  • Not learning from PPP's failure, Mr Stone, one half of a B-List merc team, tries to slow down the wall-crawler by using his Swiss-Army Weapon to coat the entire floor in glue so as to give his life-draining partner Mr. Styx a chance to use his touch of death. Spider-Man easily leaps out of his boots onto the ceiling.
  • On the flip side, Spidey will occasionally use this on his foes, laying down sticky webbing in a spot to keep them where they are. He's more likely to do this if he has time to set up, and then generally on more street-level foes (as anyone with Super-Strength will be able to just pull away).
• Two Tintin books (The Calculus Affair and Flight 714) feature a line of people in succession trying to flick a strip of sticking plaster off their hand. Whenever they succeed, it flies onto the next person, and so on.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Uvo manages to trick Diana and Steve into walking right into a "Magnetic Glazite" wall which they stick to and can do nothing to escape until Di tricks Uvo into shooting it, which disables the power to it and lets them drop to the floor.

Comic Strips

• In one Calvin and Hobbes strip, when trying to assemble a plastic model Calvin got glue on his hands while Hobbes obliviously mused about the tri-lingual instructions.
  Calvin: I hope Mom likes this newspaper here on the floor, because it's sure not going anywhere.
• A week long arc in FoxTrot involved Paige and Jason having their faces stuck together by experimental bubblegum.
• For their pranks, The Katzenjammer Kids tend to use an extremely effective superglue which will always get their victim stuck immediately and completely. However, the kids' rival Rollo often happens to be nearby with a kettle of hot water.

Fairy Tales

• In "The Golden Goose", seven persons become stuck to a goose and each other, and they are dragged through several fields and two towns by the goose's owner, who is oblivious to the hangers-on's antics.

Fan Works

• In Amazing Fantasy, Izuku embarrasses himself on his first day back at school when his Wall Crawling powers develop, sticking a flyer to his hand without him meaning to and struggling to get it off. He quickly manages to get the hang of it and turn it off, but not before several of his classmates gawk at him on their way inside. After destroying his desk by accident with his newly developed Super-Strength, the pieces stick to his hands on reflex.
• In Sonic and the Death Cheese, Sonic initially finds himself unable to combat the Death Cheese because its cheesy aura is so strong he can't move his legs.

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Movie features this with the Kragle (Krazy Glue with some of the letters faded), which is used to trap victims in permanent stasis so that Lord Business can have the orderly world he's always wanted. Unlike most examples, it's Played for Drama, even becoming a Tear Jerker when Bad Cop is coerced into using it against his own parents.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rollercoaster of Friendship: Micro Chips, in his role of Caramel Apple "girl", is soon shown having trouble with the stuff and ends up bogged down in sticky caramel.
  Micro Chips: Do you by any chance have a knife or samurai sword or several tiny but very sharp nail clippers?
• In The Simpsons Movie, Homer's hand gets temporarily stuck to his pants with super glue during a Badass Boast.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has Miles having problems when he's first experiencing his spider powers, as his hands repeatedly get stuck to various objects and he has no idea how to turn the "cling to walls" power off.
  • Most notably, when unwittingly touching Gwen's hair and staying stuck to them, leading to a weird dance in the middle of the hallway with the students looking, where Miles is pulling her around while Gwen resists and urges him to stop, and certainly NOT to pull harder. This finally ends up in the nurse's office, where Gwen has to cut some of her hair (leaving a hand-shaped mark in them; her hair remains asymmetrical for the rest of the film), leaving Miles with a handful of blond hair which he still can't pry from his fingers.
  • Another time, inside Olivia's office, Miles has trouble coming down from a light fixture on the ceiling, and when Peter tells him to just try and do what he does to relax, Miles starts poorly singing Post Malone's "Sunflower", to Peter's chagrin. And when he finally gets unstuck in the middle of a verse, Miles botches the landing hard.
    Peter: [slumping his shoulders] Teenagers are just the worst.
  • While facing Scorpion in Aunt May's living room, Miles' Badass Boast is a bit ruined by the couch cushions sticking to his hands.
• Spies in Disguise: One of Walter's inventions is "Serious Putty", sticky pink goo meant to nonlethally immobilize targets.

Films — Live-Action

• In Alice in Murderland, the killer uses superglue to stick Donna to the toilet. She loses large chunks of her ass cheeks when she is pulled free.
• American Pie 2 has this with Jim's hand and a pornography tape. Then again, since this happened when he mistook superglue for lubricant, he was more worried about what his other hand was glued to.
• The Blues Brothers: "This is glue. Strong stuff." Elwood uses a canister of marine epoxy resin on the Good Old Boy's trailer, specifically the accelerator, meaning when they start chasing the brothers, they run into a "little problem": accelerating out of control and eventually crashing into a lake.
• Laurel and Hardy: In Busy Bodies, Stan hits Ollie in the face with a glue-covered brush; it sticks permanently to his chin. Eventually Stan has to cut and then shave it, as if it were a beard.
• Fatty Arbuckle's short The Butcher Boy gets a lot of mileage from a pail of molasses.
• In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Jamieson delivers Freddy to a party of sailors on shore leave who Freddy had earlier attempted to deceive. The next morning, we see that he has apparently gotten along with them just fine, casually leaning with his hand against a doorframe as the last of them leaves the room. He then asks Jamieson to get his hand un-superglued from the door frame.
• Buster Keaton absentmindedly dips his hand in glue in The Haunted House.
• In Home Alone, one of the traps that Kevin sets for the bad guys involves coating the basement stairs with tar. Marv gets caught on the first two with his shoes, the second two with his socks, and then steps on shingles with expose nails, giving him Agony of the Feet for the rest of the movie.
• Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: Ron Thompson's improvised Booby Trap nails his father in the forehead with a rubber crossbow bolt, which he has trouble peeling off.
  Russ: What's on this thing?
  Ron: Superglue.
  Russ: Superglue?!
  • In the direct-to-video sequel, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, Wayne manages to accidentally shrink himself, his brother, and their wives to the size of cockroaches. Of course, they end up fleeing from a real cockroach into a Roach Motel-like glue trap. Wayne has made a hobby of disassembling these traps for some reason, and knows there's a clear path through which they can safely pass to the other side. His wife, freaking out over being attacked by a giant cockroach, manages to step in the glue and get stuck, with the cockroach biting at her, until Wayne comes back and pulls her free.
• In Into the Woods' version of Cinderella's tale, she loses one of her slippers when she gets stuck in pitch that Prince Charming had spread on the palace stairs to prevent her escape. Later, the survivors lure the woman giant into a sticky puddle as the first step in their plan.
• The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob: In a sequence inside a bubblegum factory, Victor Pivert falls into a huge vat of liquid bubblegum. Afterward, he has some trouble with stuff sticking to him, including the soles of his shoes to the floor, buttons of a phone to his fingers or the chair he sits into.
• In The Man with Two Brains, Dr. Hfuhruhurr consults with his boss, who spends the conversation with his index fingers placed pensively against his upper lip. At the end of the conversation, the doctor asks when the operation to separate his fingers from his lip will happen, and notes that superglue is something you have to be careful with.
• The Myth has a fight scene in a glue factory, which gets the protagonists Jackie and Samantha, as well as a few mooks, stuck in glue while trying to fight each other. Hilarity Ensues, including Jackie and Samantha removing their clothes as impromptu stepping areas while lashing out at random mooks.
• In National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Clark and his wife go to bed after he just cut down a pine tree, coating his hands in sap.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master had Debbie, who is deathly afraid of roaches, being turned into one by Freddy, which led to her walking into a giant roach motel. Most definitely not played for laughs (unless you're Freddy).
• Heartbreakers: In one scene, Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt) gets her feet stuck in mud.
• Happens to The Three Stooges in the movie The Outlaws IS Coming! with Moe getting his butt stuck to a chair, and then his feet stuck to the floor, as he sits in a puddle of spilt bookbinder's glue. This later gives them the brainwave of using the glue to stick the outlaws' gins into their holsters.
• One of the GIs in Saving Private Ryan gets a sticky bomb stuck to his hand just before it's about to detonate. YMMV on how funny that is.
• In Sherlock, Jr., Buster Keaton he runs afoul of a sheet of flypaper.
• Cactus Jack does this in The Villain (which is, in places, basically a live-action Road Runner cartoon). He paints the railroad tracks with glue, and his targets roll over it in their wagon to no effect. Furious, he runs after them... only to be stuck in the glue and hit by a train.
• In Violent Night, Trudy Lightstone tries to help Santa fight off the mercenaries by setting a series of Home Alone-inspired traps. One of these involves tricking the female mercenary codenamed "Candy Cane" into stepping into some kind of glue, subsequently knocking her over so that her head is also stuck to the floor. Candy Cane is flexible enough to pull herself back up and then remove her boots, but she loses a chunk of her hair in the process.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Judge Doom punches a container of glue and gets it on his fist. He then accidentally hits a steam roller and gets stuck to it. He steps in the glue and when he tries to push off the steamroller with his foot, gets that stuck to it as well. He's eventually run over by the steamroller, but he survives because he's a Toon.

Gamebooks

• Sorcery! have one of the more mundane spells in the spellbook, the GUM spell, where wizards can make normal glue super-sticky and bond in seconds. It's usually meant for combat situations where wizards can cast this spell and throw a bottle of glue on enemies, holding them in place and allowing wizards to finish them off with ease.

Literature

• Aesop's Fables: In "The Flies and the Honeypot," a swarm of flies comes across a spilled honey pot and refuse to leave until there's not a single drop left. While they're eating, the honey gets stuck to their feet and wings, preventing them from flying away. They lament how stupid they were, throwing away their lives for a delicious treat.
• Adrian Mole ends up with a model aeroplane glued to his nose at one point, after he tries an experimental sniff of glue when he builds the plane.
• Animorphs: Jake explores his house as a roach, only to accidentally step into a Roach Motel. The chapter ends with him panicking as he realizes he's stuck. In the next chapter, he explains to the others that he demorphed and found himself stuck behind the fridge, where his mother soon found him with Roach Motel stuck to his face.
• Dirk Gently: In The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the Norse god Thor gets glued to the floor by an obnoxious demon who took one of Odin's orders literally. He has his hammer Mjölnir smash the floor apart to free himself, but is left with bits of floorboard stuck to his back.
• The Martian: Mark Watney, when repairing his space helmet's Broken Faceplate, applies resin designed for suit repairs that solidifies in 60 seconds with his fingers, and holds the patch he uses to make the repair on with said fingers as it dries. He has to laugh at the fact he glued his own hand to his face.
• The title character of the Roald Dahl book Matilda glues her father's hat to his head. She also mentions the boy down the road who got Superglue on his finger and then tried to pick his nose, with disastrous results.
• Men, Martians and Machines. Combined with When Trees Attack — one crewman gets swotted by a huge leaf, then carried up into the branches where he's covered in sticky sap. The others use a Ray Gun to cut the branch and then carry him to safety on the leaf, only to find they're stuck as well. When a photographer decides to mock their Sticky Situation, the android J-20 "accidentally" knocks him onto the leaf too.
• In one story in the Paddington Bear books, called: "A Sticky Time", has this as the end result of Paddington's disastrous at making toffee, getting the gunk all over the kitchen as well as all over Paddington himself. The situation gets serious when it appears that the toffee is wrecking havoc on Paddington's digestive system, but fortunately it turned out that it was just toffee that had dripped onto Paddington's stomach.
• Windrunner Radiants in The Stormlight Archive have the ability to bind two objects together with a temporary but virtually unbreakable bond. Often used for comedy, especially when Kaladin is learning his powers and practices by gluing his squadmates to random walls.
• Another Roald Dahl example can be found in The Twits. Every Tuesday night, Mr. Twit coats the branches of the dead tree in their backyard with glue to capture birds for the bird pie he and his wife eat on Wednesdays. In the climax of the novel, the twits themselves get tricked into glueing themselves to the floor of their house.
• Played for horror in "The Walker in the Cemetery", a Cthulhu Mythos short story by Ian Watson. Cthulhu is stalking and killing a group of humans For the Evulz, with one victim caught by a transparent glue the same color as the ground he's walking on. Cthulhu comes for him as he's unlacing his sneaker to jump free.

Live-Action TV

• On Boy Meets World, Cory, Shawn and Topanga get superglued to their classroom desks as part of an Escalating War.
• The Brittas Empire: Gordon gets stuck (with super-glue) to various stuff over the course of "The Trial", culminating in him getting stuck to a chainsaw.
  Gordon: Can I have the solvent, Carole?
• In The Bugaloos episode #6 "If I Had the Wings of a Bugaloo", Benita Bizarre's well camouflaged flypaper glue disks traps Courage and Joy for a while.
• An episode of The Captain and Tennille (a '70s variety show) has a superglue salesman demonstrating his product then accidentally getting his hand stuck to the hand of a pretty housewife. Then her husband came home and his hands got stuck around the salesman's neck.
• In one episode of Cheers, Cliff wins the bar beard-growing competition by super-gluing a fake beard to his face. He then calls a doctor about getting the beard removed, and gets some very bad news: "...Can that be done on an out-patient basis?"
• Fort Boyard: A 2015 challenge involves crawling underneath a bionic spider to steal its eggs, while struggling against its extremely sticky webbing. Latter evolution of the game involves prying out the eggs glued to the floor while wearing a Spider-Man-like suite, and throwing them toward a target (which is very hard since they still stick to the gloves).
• Freddy's Nightmares: In the episode "Judy Miller, Come on Down", the titular woman has a nightmare that she was in a game show, with the lives of her in-laws as the prize. At one point she finds her feet stuck to the floor.
• In the Full House episode "Bye Bye Birdie", Stephanie tries to snoop through D.J.'s diary, breaks the lock, and glues the diary to her hand while trying to fix it. Joey manages to free her hand, but accidentally glues his own hand to the diary in the process.
• Game On: In "Better Late Than Never", Toby - already late for an appointment with the principal to talk about chronic lateness, - gets his hand glued to a piano.
• In Gilligan's Island there are two episodes where this occurs:
  • In the episode "Goodbye Island", the group accidentally discover a new glue when they attempt to use the sap of a local tree to create pancake syrup. They then try to use it to repair their boat. Very clumsily, of course. At the end, the Skipper sits on a gluey brush, getting himself stuck to a chair.
  • In the episode "Beauty Is as Beauty Does", the group holds a beauty contest between the three women. During the talent portion Mary Ann is to perform a dance routine, and Mr. Howell tries to sabotage it by pouring glue onto the stage. Mary Ann, of course, steps right in it, becoming instantly stuck and loses her shoe (which is still stuck in place in a later scene).
• Home Improvement:
  • Tim gets his head stuck to a board while demonstrating Binford's Miracle Glue.
  • In a different episode, he gets both of his hands stuck to a toilet tank's interior wall.
• Hospital Playlist: Ik-joon, a surgeon, gets his head stuck in a Darth Vader helmet because his small son was goofing around with some super glue. He goes to the ER, only to get pressed into service to perform an urgent liver transplant. Which he does, while wearing the Darth Vader helmet.
• I Love Lucy: In the episode "The Moustache", when Ricky grows a mustache that Lucy dislikes, she dons a false beard in protest. It's accidentally attached with Bulldog Cement ("Holds fast forever. Will not let go. Can only be removed with Bulldog Cement Remover Number Three") instead of spirit gum.
• Jonathan Creek: In "The Seer of the Sands", Jonathan and Carla get their heads stuck together when they are attempting to eavesdrop on a conversation with their heads pressed to to the same crack in the wall, and a can of glue on the shelf above gets overturned and drips down over them.
• In episode 125 of the Indian TV series "Laal Ishq", a demoness, played by Priyal Gor, is tricked into stepping barefoot onto a puddle of glue made from the roots of a Dhruva tree, the only way to stop a demoness.
• In Lucille Ball's later sitcom Life With Lucy, her character (yet again named Lucy) becomes stuck to Curtis after a mishap while trying to glue a lamp back together.
• My So-Called Life: In episode 19, Angela has a dream where she tries to follow Jordan, but finds her feet stuck to the floor.
• In Night Court when Bull accidentally broke Roz's favorite coffee mug, Mac gives him some very potent glue to fix it (according to him, it could glue a battleship), and he ends up gluing his fingers to his head.
• One Foot in the Grave: In "Love and Death", Victor decides to cool himself down by applying a glass full of beer to his forehead. Trouble is that Margaret has just put superglue on it, and Victor can't get it removed until the next morning.
• Our Miss Brooks: In the episode "Living Statues", Mr. Conklin orders Miss Brooks to fix the cracks and scratches on his office walls. Joined by Walter and Mr. Boynton, Miss Brooks redoes his office using a clear paint invented by Walter in the school lab. Unfortunately, Walter unknowingly added liquid cement to his concoction...
• The Slammer: In one episode, the Governer, Mr Burgess, Gimbert and Peter have to host the Freedom Show stuck together after Gimbert uses the 'Dangerously Sticky Glue' to repair the showtime lever.
• The main plot in the Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em episode "Wendy House". Walking Disaster Area Frank Spencer has been using superglue to build furniture to replace the items that were destroyed when he and his wife Betty moved to their new house, and is waiting for a bus with a chair he has just made. Also waiting for a bus are an elderly woman who is feeling a bit giddy and her son, who helps her into the chair before Frank can point out that it is made with superglue; inevitably, she gets stuck to it, then the son gets stuck to the bus stop sign after handling the tube of superglue. Frank tries to enlist the help of the conductor of the bus when it arrives, but soon they are both stuck to the chair. When all four of them are taken to Accident and Emergency, they find Frank's DIY instructor, who got superglued to the classroom telephone.
• Super Sentai:
  • Choujin Sentai Jetman: In episode 33, Vyram creates a cockroach monster and attacks citizens with his sticky spray, such as sticking three track runner girls' feet to the floor.
  • Happens in an episode of Samurai Sentai Shinkenger when Chiaki and Ryuunosuke become glued together by the Monster of the Week. Which naturally carried over into the Power Rangers Samurai version of the episode. Given the franchise's predilection for puns, it was naturally titled "A Sticky Situation".
• Deputy Andy Brennan runs afoul of a roll of Scotch tape in Twin Peaks.
• Done with a zombie mask on Victorious, when Tori's ditzy friend uses the wrong glue. She is supposed to be the lead in the play that night, and ends up performing her entire (serious) part wearing the zombie mask. With the author of the play in the audience.

Myths & Religion

• One of the stories about Anansi, spider trickster-spirit of Africa, involves an enemy of his using a "tar baby", a scarecrow-like moppet made of sticky tar, to catch the trickster. Anansi gets angry when the tar baby won't talk to him, tries to punch it, and gets stuck fast.
  
  African-Americans during the slavery period mixed this story with the Br'er Rabbit cycle, putting the title Rabbit in the starring role and making the tar baby a creation of Br'er Fox. Sadly, those tales are almost forgotten in modern America, especially because Disney's Song of the South has been put into permanent storage due to Values Dissonance. It's gotten to the point that even modern people who've heard of the tar baby story think it's some sort of archaic racist remark, when it's nothing of the sort.

Puppet Shows

• Mentioned in Allegra's Window, Reed recalls how when Rondo and Riff were younger and playing Hide and Seek, Reed found them both in a pot of glue and they ended up stuck together for a week.
• The Muppet Show: In the Gilda Radner episode, Dr. Honeydew's superglue spills all over the stage and characters keep getting glued to everything. By the end of the show, everyone is stuck in one big ball. In addition, during their closing scene, it's revealed the glue got onto Staler and Waldorf's balcony, and they get stuck, prompting them to say, "Oh, no!" when they realize they can't leave.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Among D&D monsters making good use of glue are the mimics, which pseudopods can stick very efficiently to immobilize their victims, and also un-stick at will.
  • The Sovereign Glue is a classic magic item that creative PCs can put to multiple uses. It takes another magical fluid, the Salve of Slipperiness, just to prevent it from sticking to its container. And it is safer to have yet another magical fluid, the Universal Solvent, at hand whenever you're using Sovereign Glue, to avoid embarrassing accidents.
  • The web spell is a staple of most editions, creating a mass of sticky strands that entangles its victims like a spiderweb. It also has a few variants, like ectoplasmic web (Ghostwalk) which also affects incorporeal creatures, or ice web (Frostburn) which deals cold damage on contact.
  • 3.0, 3.5 have Tanglefoot Bags, alchemical items that burst open when thrown, miring the target to a mild degree.
  • The Race of the Dragons sourcebook adds the sticky floor spell, that glues all creatures in contact with the floor. It is a favorite of kobold sorcerers to protect their lairs.
  • The spell resinous tar (from Complete Mage) isn't as powerful, but it can still hinder movement on a solid surface made sticky and make it harder to stand up. It can also be cast on objects, thus taking more time to pick one from the floor, drop it, or equip it, although the spell also gives a bonus against getting disarmed.
• In Kill Dr. Lucky, one failure is that the pc's feet momentarily and inexplicably become stuck.
• One Paranoia module has a bunch of indestructible Commie pamphlets that keep showing up, until the Troubleshooters finally get superglued to them (and each other). At least it lets them survive a laser cannon blast.
• Pathfinder has a few monsters that can do this.
  • The Adherants are mummy-like creatures wrapped in layers of extremely sticky fibers. Any melee weapon used on them risks becoming stuck to it, as any player using a bare-handed attack.
  • Giant Flail Snails can also leave behind a trail of glue-like mucus that can trap unwary PCs.

Video Games

• Bloons Tower Defense lets you place Monkey Glue as items on the road that slows down any Bloons coming into contact with it. The fourth game introduces the Glue Gunner, a monkey that shoots globs of glue to slow down Bloons.
• Chex Quest is a game whose entire enemy roster are sticky slime creatures that try to cover you in sticky slime to defeat you.
• Folklore has a class of enemies that releases sticky mucous. The stuff ensnares the player character, who has to fight to escape.
• In Gal*Gun sequel Double Peace, Maya becomes stuck on a demon-catching trap when Houdai accidentally knocks her into it, leading to some compromising positions while getting her unstuck.
• In the Home Alone Licensed Game for the Sega Genesis, one of the traps Kevin can set in one of the five houses is tar, which can slow Harry and Marv down when they walk across it. He can also assemble a glue gun to use against Harry and Marv and temporarily stun them.
• One of the mini-games in the PC adaptation of Monopoly Jr. involves a bumper car popping balloons within a time limit. In the second level of the mini-game, Mr. Monopoly's nephew, Andy will toss cotton candy onto the floors, causing the bumper car to slow down if it drives over it.
• Monster Madness: One of the myriad of weapons was the Glue Cannon, which fired a puddle of goop onto the ground in which ground-based enemies, as well as your fellow players, can get caught (though it mostly only slows them down). As long as the player has the weapon equipped, he/she wears boots that makes him/her immune to becoming stuck in glue.
• Ninjala's main element is gum. Virtually everything is centered around this trope as a result, good or bad.
• A boss that Mario must confront in Paper Mario: The Origami King is a roll of sticky tape that's been made sentient through magic.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: The Sap-Fling flings a ball of sticky sap onto a tile, which makes all zombies walking on it slowed down by half speed.
• Weaponized in Pokémon with the move Sticky Web, which places the aforementioned entry hazard on the opponent's battlefield side. From that moment, every opposing Pokemon who isn't Flying-type or has Levitate ability will have its Speed reduced by 1 point upon entering the battle.
  • Also happens to a Pokemon that uses a contact attack on one with the ability 'Gooey', which covers them with goop to slow their moves. This ability was once unique to the Kalosian Goodra evolution line (and its Hisuian variants), but is now shared with the Paldean Wiglett line.
• Red Alert 3: Paradox: The GOOP, the Allies' other non-lethal weapon of choice after the Freeze Ray, works by trapping enemies in sticky pink foam.
• The Resident Evil series has several enemies that use sticky substances to immobilize the player character. Resident Evil 5 had a bat/scorpion creature that shot sticky slime out of its tail, and Resident Evil 6 has strong mutated enemies which spit sticky mucus. The player character has to fight to break free.
• Revolution (1986): Some levels contain adhesive surfaces, and touching them will cause the bouncing ball to stop bouncing.
• In Spider-Man (PS4) Spider-Man can use his webshooters, as well as special devices like Impact Webbing and Web Bombs to web enemies to walls and other surfaces. Webbing someone up while they're next to a wall or webbing them then throwing them into a wall instantly defeats them.
• Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal: Near the end, when Guybrush's demonic hand acts up and prevents him from telling Winslow what to do, Guybrush cleverly devises a way to stop the situation by opening up the tar barrel and trapping his hand in sticky tar (he even says, "That's what I call a sticky situation!" while looking at the tar puddle again).
• King's Quest V: A puzzle requires Graham to pour honey on the ground to catch an elf.

Web Animation

• Foxy Gets Hooked suggests that the reason why the security guard in Five Nights at Freddy's can't move around is because someone put glue on his chair. He stays stuck to it for the whole video, forcing him to crawl home.
• In episode 3 of the Ninjala anime shorts, Jane gets stuck twice in Ninja Gum on the floor. First a single foot, then both of her feet.
• In a promotional web short for Up, Russell has problems handling Band-Aids, which keep getting stuck to his fingers.

Webcomics

• The Wulfenbach Sentinels from Girl Genius can spray some kind of black super adhesive as a non-lethal restraining round. Agatha ends up cutting off the lower half of a pair of pants and leaving some boots behind to get out of some, only to end up stuck to another character she doesn't care for, who also got hit with the stuff. Luckily Violetta figures which solvent she's carrying works on it quickly.
• The Handbook of Heroes: In "“Minor” Magic Items", Thief sneakily uses Sovereign Glue to stick a black knight to his toilet seat before stabbing him.
• The Order of the Stick: Inside Serini's abode, she reveals that the stools Minrah and Durkon were sitting on are in fact mimics. Durkon's gets nervous and starts secreting glue, sticking his butt to it, followed by his hands after Belkar tricks him into trying a "deep tissue massage" to calm down the mimic.
• From Rusty and Co., Mimic has the standard adhesive ability of a D&D mimic, but employs it very rarely since, as he puts out, "If a ragin' axe-wieldin' berzerker's comin' at ya... gluin' y'self TO him isn't your best strategy!" He puts it to good use during a Gnomish Baseball match, though, turning into the ball and getting the whole opposing troll team stuck together.
• Played for Drama in Sam & Fuzzy when Hazel finally reaches The Pit. The Tar begins sticking to her in a manner resembling this trope, but instead of wacky hijinx as she tries to get it off The Tar pulls her into The Pit, killing her.
• In Jungle Juice one of the Insect Humans who have been merged with a honey bee can generate massive amounts of honey, which is used to trap others.

Web Original

• Whateley Universe: As part of Imp's payback on the Quirky Miniboss Squad which had teamed up to kill her (composed of supervillains and disgraced ex-superheroes whose careers she'd ruined), she tracks them to the hotel they are staying in; while they are sleeping, she chloroforms each of them, then superglues them all to their beds (when she runs out of glue for the last one, she force-feeds him laxatives, instead), before calling the police. Shown here.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Puss in Boots: Jack Sprat steals the Seven League Boots and becomes untouchable thanks to the Super-Speed they bestow... until Puss lays some glue down to trip him up.
• The Animaniacs Warner 65th Anniversary Special has Daffy Duck recounting an incident where the Warner Kids made a movie themselves where they use the flypaper gag, which he admits was funny, but ran several hours too long.
• Atomic Puppet: In the episode "Atomic Goo", AP accidentally glues himself to Joey's hand, resulting in the two getting stuck in superhero mode. Hilarity Ensues as Joey has to hide his secret identity from his family and at school, while AP has to put up with the troubles of being stuck on Joey's hand all day (such as Joey grabbing a hot oven tray) and tries to act own his accord.
• In the Bob's Burgers episode "Glued, Where's My Bob?", the kids get into a prank war that has them gluing various surfaces in an attempt to prank each other. Bob ends up glued to the toilet at the worst possible time: just as a reporter from Coasters magazine is coming to profile the restaurant.
• Five of the Squirrel Scouts from the cartoon Camp Lazlo mistook Raj for a yeti because he was covered in liquid marshmallow & start chasing after him. They later find out their little mistake & decide to return to their cabins... only to find their feet stuck in the same material that Raj used to be covered in.
• In the Chowder episode "Grubble Gum", Chowder eats a type of gum called the Grubble Gum to avoid getting into trouble for accidentally eating all of the gum in the Grubble Gum shop. The resulting explosion he blew while sleeping accidentally gets his face stuck, followed by his body, then Mung Dahl, Schnitzel, Truffles and a random bear. Truffles' rage accidentally causes a part of Mung's kitchen background to be torn in one scene, and eventually all of Marzipan City. Bonus points for playing the Katamari Damacy theme in the background.
• Happens in the Classic Disney Short "Playful Pluto", when Pluto gets stuck on a sheet of fly paper and has a hard time getting it off. (This scene is used prominently in Sullivan's Travels, inspiring the main character's epiphany about the power of laughter.) The scene is remade in "Beach Picnic", where Pluto's struggles are animated exactly the same but in color and higher quality.
• In an episode of Danger Mouse, the heroes are superglued to a roller coaster of doom. Hilarity Ensues when they describe to Colonel K how they escaped it.
• Dinotrux: In "Gluphosaurs", the Gluphosaurs can spit an extremely powerful glue that is nearly impossible to break. In a short fight with them they manage to stick all of the main cast together in one big pile.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy has them as well.
  • In the episode "Know it all Ed", after the Eds spent their Canadian Squirt Gun ammo, the Kankers retaliated by squirting a sticky concoction version of Crankshaft #5 at the Eds' feet, getting them stuck fast for the Kankers to kiss them at the end of the episode.
  • "The Day the Ed Stood Still" has Ed sticking the other kids' to the wall Alien-style by chewed up cereal. Sara even gets stuck trying to peel Jimmy off the wall.
  • "For Your Ed Only" has a furious Sara stick the Ed's to Johnny with gum.
• In Family Guy Stewie and Brian spent most of an episode glued together.
• The Flintstones has an episode "Glue For Two", Fred tries to invent a drink which instead turns into a very sticky goo. He and Barney mutually get their hand stuck to the same bowling ball and had to break it with a chisel. He later tries to invent a new batch, only to realize it only got sticky because he added "Rockbaum's Steel Grip Glue".
• One of the monsters in Godzilla: The Series was King Cobra; a giant snake that was able to spit a glue-like substance from its mouth. It used this to capture multiple people, including briefly the H.E.A.T team (who escaped by getting out of their shoes) before been defeated by Godzilla; H.E.A.T and the JSDF having created a chemical to free the captured humans from the glue.
  • King Cobra would survive its fight with Godzilla and later appear in the "Monster Wars" trilogy - been mind-controlled and sent to Paris as part of the Tachyon's plan to conquer Earth, with the snake again using its glue spit on the French soldiers who attacked it.
• One episode of Handy Manny had Manny's two screwdrivers, Felipe and Turner, get stuck together with glue.
• Il Était Une Fois... la Vie: The episode about the pollutant toxins shows the (anthropomorphized) enzyme responsible for gluing the RNA ribbons struggling with his big glue stick, ending up spreading the stuff everywhere and getting stuck in it.
• Infinity Train: In The Grid Car, Tulip jumps off the train in an attempt to find her way home. However, as she approaches a dead tree not far from the tracks, the ground becomes very muddy, and Tulip gets her feet stuck.
• Jack the Explorer literally has an episode titled "Sticky Situation" in which the entire second half of the episode involves Niko being glued to Chip and Rocket and Sam and Yoko also having their hands glued together. As Jack tries to make a substance capable of freeing them while miniturized, he ends up accidently gluing his cheek and hand to a jar of peanut butter and gets dangerously close to being caught by the adults. All of them have to work together to make the substance and just barely manage to do it without any of the adults finding out.
• The plot of an entire episode of Kick Buttowski: Suburban Daredevil called "Hand in Hand" where the titular character gets stuck together with Kendall due to cave sap... the only way to get them unstuck is by using the anti-sticky agent in Kendall's boyfriends garage.
• Little Bear:
  • The episode "Little Bear's Kite", Little Bear's grandfather is teaching him how to make a kite. Problems start to arise when they try to glue the frame of the kite to the paper.
  • The episode "Balloon Heads" has Owl pop a huge bubble gum bubble and then get stuck between 2 trees by the mess.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • In "Dark Cupid", Ladybug uses a candy apple provided by her Lucky Charm to get Dark Cupid's hand stuck to his bow so he can't fire any more arrows.
  • In "Horrificator", the eponymous monster's goo can neutralize both Ladybug and Cat Noir by sticking them to walls on a direct hit. They're in a hurry to escape before it hardens. Cat Noir even calls the trope by name in the English dub.
• Molly of Denali: In "Raven Saves the Birthday Party," in Jack's raven story, the raven sees a big bucket of what he thinks is ooligan grease, but it was actually spruce pitch, which gets his head stuck inside the bucket. When he finally gets out of it, it seals his beak shut.
• Monster Buster Club:
  • When Gluten appears, he traps the MBC and other victims by throwing his blue ooze at them. "Sticky Situation" is even the title of the episode.
  • In the Halloween Episode, Danny ends up stuck to the floor of a Haunted House — actually an alien pulling a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax — because of a giant alien pet camouflaged as the ground.
• Mr. Bogus:
  • This happens to Ratty and his rottweiler accomplice, after getting squirted with a bottle of glue (thanks to Brattus), in the first act of the episode "Totally Bogus Video".
  • Ratty (again) and Mole both fall victim to this by the weasel mobster pair in the second act of the episode "Bogus Private Eye".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Fall Weather Friends" features a scene where Applejack cheats by kicking down a bucket harvesting maple sap, causing it to spill onto the trail and gluing Rainbow Dash. It's unusually stretchy, requiring Rainbow to slingshot herself in order to snap the sticky sap.
  • "The Cutie Mark Chronicles": At the beginning, yet another attempt at obtaining their cutie marks by doing stunts results in the Cutie Mark Crusaders covered in tree sap (and according to Scootaloo, this isn't the first time). After cleaning up, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle both give a bro-hoof to Scootaloo, but the latter still has tree sap on her hooves, and they end up stuck together.
  • "Ponyville Confidential" has Snips and Snails getting their rears stuck together by bubblegum. When this ends up on the newspaper, they willingly demonstrate it for their classmates (despite still having patches of fur missing from the earlier incident) because they are such class clowns.
    Sweetie Belle: Snips and Snails and bubblegum fail.
  • The Changelings in "A Canterlot Wedding" have the ability to capture their victims in a sticky goop, trapping Celestia inside a cocoon, subduing the royal guards, and gluing Cadance to the floor.
  • In "Make New Friends but Keep Discord", the Smooze's slime is (thankfully) not corrosive, but it is extremely adhesive. We see Rainbow Dash getting entirely unable to take flight once her hooves are glued to the floor by it, despite her efforts. Also, Fluttershy and Tree Hugger end up stuck against a glass window by the slime, Tree Hugger upside-down (not that she seems to care...).
  • In "It Isn't the Mane Thing About You", Pinkie Pie kicks off the episode's plot by spraying the inside of Sugarcube Corner with super-sticky celebration string. Rarity gets a brush stuck in her mane, and Pinkie ends up using a crowbar to detach the Cake twins from the floor.
  • In "The Hearth's Warming Club", the slime covering Spike as a result of the sabotage of the Hearth's Warming Tree proves very sticky, Twilight having to try several times with her telekinesis to pull it off of him.
• PJ Masks: The weapon for Night Ninja and his ninjalino's is sticky splat; spherical projectiles that act like super tough glue. It comes in various forms and colors.
• In the intro for Police Academy: The Animated Series, Tackleberry and House fire a glue gun looking like a bazooka at a jewel thief on the run, sticking him to a wall.
• The Powerpuff Girls: In "Stray Bullet", the girls get their feet stuck on flypaper that Mojo Jojo laid out as a trap.
• Regular Show: "Diary" has Mordecai and Rigby looking after Margaret's apartment. After a fight accidentally rips the lock off her diary, they hastily apply glue to it, leading to a big mess. They try to melt the glue off using a barbecue, with little success. Rigby then tries melting it off by shoving it in the microwave, but is stopped by Mordecai after he remembers shoving clocks into a microwave before, which sent both of them into another dimension and killed Rigby in the process. They then go to Skips for help.
• The title sequence of the two Rotten Ralph animated specials, The Taming of the Ralph and Not-So-Rotten Ralph, features a scene of Ralph pranking Sarah and her parents by gluing their backsides to their chairs.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In Season 5, the B-Squad remaining on Etheria are lured to the village of Elberon to fend off a supposed Horde invasion, but they find only villagers who are acting strangely versus their previous appearance on the show. The villagers eventually ambush them, and the B-Squad must fend them off without harming them. King Micah, a powerful mage, uses a spell to create a purple goo that traps a large group of the villagers to the ground during this non-lethal battle.
• In an episode of SheZow, SheZap coats the city with "Toxic Tangle Hair Gel", sticking dozens of cars to the road. When SheZow and Maz arrive on-scene to assist, they both immediately manage to get their feet stuck in the stuff.
• The Simpsons: In "Lost Our Lisa", Bart decides to glue some novelty items to his face with industrial strength adhesive. Eventually Dr. Hibbert removes the items by making Bart sweat, as apparently human sweat is great at dissolving glue.
• The Smurfs:
  • In "Hogatha's Hearth Throb", Gargamel tries to trap the Smurfs in a sticky glue trap, only to end up trapping Hogatha. She demands to be freed from the trap, but Gargamel tells her to get herself out. Hogatha does, but she uses her magic to put Gargamel into his own sticky trap.
  • In the episode "Stuck on Smurfs", Gargamel casts a spell that causes the Smurfs to get stuck to each other, which Papa Smurf uses to his advantage by having the stuck Smurfs stick on Gargamel, forcing him to come up with a counter-spell that frees him and all the other Smurfs. They then trap Gargamel in an actual glue trap.
  • In "Shamrock Smurfs", Brainy sets up a glue trap for a leprechaun but ends up trapping the other Smurfs.
  • In "The Smurfs That Time Forgot", the Smurfs get stuck in a tar pit.
  • In "Hefty's Heart", Gargamel traps the Smurfs on the table by using glue.
• Played for drama in Sonic Underground's "New Echidna in Town" when Robothik uses glue to immobilize the hedgehogs in preparation to roboticize them, against Knuckles' wishes.
• In the Squirrel Boy episode "The Rod Squad", an escalating situation involving sticky buns ends up with most of the cast stuck together in a huge ball.
• In the TaleSpin episode "Stuck on You", Baloo and Don Karnage are stuck together by a very sticky glue. They have to work together to retrieve the solvent before the glue will set permanently.
• Taz-Mania:
  • In "Gone to Pieces", Taz's attempts to mend a broken vase end up with the vase stuck to the table, and then Taz stuck to the vase.
  • In "Bewitched Bob", Taz's little brother hallucinates Taz as an alien and shoots him with a glue gun, sticking him to the wall.
  • In "Mutton for Nothing", Taz is glued to a target as punishment for trying to steal sheep.
• The Teen Titans episode "Fractured" has a minor villain getting hold of some Reality Warper powers, and Raven, having been knocked into the ocean, can't fly out because the water has turned into glue.
• In the Thomas & Friends episode, "Dirty Objects", the Troublesome Trucks push James into a train of tar wagons, getting him covered in tar. James gets into a similar situation 22 seasons later in "Chucklesome Trucks" when he worries that it will happen to Rebecca.
• Totally Spies! uses this trope many times:
  • In "Here Comes the Sun", the episode's villain amplifies the Sun's heat which melts the tar road and causes the spies' feet to get stuck.
  • In "I, Dude", Jerry gives the spies' a super sticky hair pomade as a gadget. Alex accidentally squirts it on him and he gets his hand stuck to his head. Later they use it on some henchwomen as well by spraying it at their bare feet.
  • In "Creepy Crawly Much?", the girls get trapped in a human-sized roach motel.
• What's with Andy?: In the episode "Molasses", Andy covers the school dance floor with, you guessed it, molasses. The prank works and it traps everyone's feet, but it soon backfires as Andy's crush, Lori, unknowingly pulls him into the dance floor with her and the two get stuck.
  Lori: I can't move my feet!
• Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner uses this many times. It may perhaps be Wile E. Coyote's most recurring trap.
  • In "Out and Out Rout", Wile E. Coyote sets up a glue trap which he gets stuck in and gets flattened by a steamroller.
  • In "Ready, Set, Zoom", he sets up even more glue, but the Road Runner runs right over the stuff and splashes him with it, which gets the dynamite he was holding stuck to his hands.
  • In "Zoom at the Top", he coats a boomerang with glue and gets it stuck to his hand.
  • In "Rushing Roulette", he sets another glue trap. The outcome is what you expect.
• On Wishfart, Akiko has a tendency to get stuck up in gum, as it's the only physical substance that sticks to ghosts in the show's universe. It should come as no surprise then that her archenemy is none other than the Gum King.
• Played for drama in The Wizard of Oz's "Rescue of the Emerald City", where the Witch's secret weapon is a giant glue gun that turns the tide of battle at Fort Nutcracker by gumming the soldiers up and gluing almost everyone else to the ground.
• Wonder Pets!: In "Save The Duckling!," Ming-Ming decides to save a baby squirrel on her own, but it did not need saving, so she goes home since it is gonna rain, but gets covered in tree sap, as shown on the page quote above and gets stuck on the schoolhouse roof.
• Work It Out Wombats!: In "A Super Recipe", the wombats are making cornbread. The first ingredient in making cornbread is honey. The wombats all stick their hands into the honey jar, but they mess up the cookbook and get stuck to it because of how sloppily they ate the honey.

Real Life

• This Krazy Glue ad is not an illusion — but note the carefully prepared surfaces.
• Apparently, it's not unheard of for people to visit an emergency room after mistaking a tube of superglue for personal lubricant. (OW.) From Wikipedia's List of Unusual Deaths, one person died after intentionally doing this, sealing himself shut with epoxy resin instead of using a condom. As a result, he could no longer excrete any urine, destroyed his kidneys, and died a particularly painful death.
• The Sticky Bomb was a real Ally weapon in WWII. It resembled a German stick grenade but with the end coated in glue, to be tossed on the weak parts of enemy tanks. Pulling the pin would pop the end off, revealing the sticky end and arming the device, and having one where the glue leaked onto the handle was a very real possibility. The fact that it was very swiftly replaced by the PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank, a type of weapon that used an extremely powerful spring to launch an anti-tank grenade). The fact that despite the PIAT's brutally punishing recoil and other drawbacks it was swiftly adopted as a replacement to the sticky grenade by British troops should tell just how dangerous they were to the user.
• Police have experimented with a sticky foam gun as a method of non-lethal urban pacification. Besides the obvious cleanup issue is the risk of accidentally (or not) shooting someone in the face.
• Some predators create sticky traps to capture prey, or exploit pre-existing ones:
  • Spider webs are an obvious example. Spitting spiders take it a step further: they spray venomous, liquid silk from their fangs that immobilizes and envenoms their prey.
  • Velvet worms, soft-bodied primitive cousins of arthropods, hunt by spraying streams of glue at smaller invertebrates to stick them to the ground.
  • There is a hazard in nature called a predator trap, where animals can get hopelessly stuck in thick mud or sticky tar (or in some cases, quicksand). Their corpses attract the attention of predators, some of whom may also get mired while feasting on them. The La Brea Tar Pits are arguably the most famous, as well as a paradise for paleontologists.
• The Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919, when a molasses tank burst and a wave of molasses traveling at 35 mph covered a large portion of the city, killing 21 people. It's rumored that to this day, when it gets particularly warm, some can still smell the molasses, over 100 years after the disaster.
• Certain glues are used to capture pests.
• Victims of Parkinson's disease sometimes describe their inability to walk with ease by saying it's like having their feet glued to the floor.
• Gerald Durrell noted that African kids which caught birds for him employed a special glue cooked from various jungle plants. He noted that it was an amazing method of birdcatching as it was completely harmless: unlike various snares, the glue didn't risk breaking bird's bones, and it could be easily washed off or would just dry and fall off in a few hours. A larger, stronger bird would struggle free, though.
• In Danish, the expression "at hoppe på limpinden" (to jump on the glue-stick) means to be tricked, referencing the practice of poaching small birds through the use of gluetraps.
• Trees of Genus Pisonia are known as birdcatcher trees because their sticky seeds adhere themselves to birds that are fledging. If a bird gets one or two seeds on it, it flies off and disperses the seeds far from the parent tree. But if a fledgling bird gets too many seeds on it, it will become unable to fly and starve, providing nutrients for the tree's roots.
• Sundews are carnivorous plants that produce sticky drops that resemble dew on the plant (hence the name). Insects that touch the drops get trapped and consumed by the plant after it curls its leaves up and douses the helpless prey in digestive enzymes.
• Anyone who assembles models that need to be glued together will have experienced at least one incident of gluing pieces of the model to themselves, gluing their fingers together, gluing their fingers to other parts of their body, or gluing themselves to the table or workbench they use.
• A woman named Tessica Brown was out of hairspray and in a rush to leave the house, so she decided to set her hairstyle with spray-on Gorilla Glue instead, thinking she could wash it out later. The glue burned her scalp and was impossible to wash out. In fairness to the Gorilla Glue company, the product did have a warning label that said "do not get in eyes, on skin, or on clothing." Ms. Brown ended up needing surgery to fix her hair and scalp.
• In this video, spiritual leader Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati recalls the time her bare feet were mysteriously stuck to the ground.

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