Rake Take

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Common in cartoons, an innocuous-looking rake (or hoe, or shovel...) is lying on the ground. A character steps on it the wrong way and gets a face full of the stick part. Ouch.

Obviously Truth in Television for anyone who tried that. In real life, however, it usually results in a nosebleed or, if bad enough, a trip to the emergency room - Looney Tunes jokes notwithstanding. And if an actual rake fails to rise and smack you, it may instead hurt your foot.

Examples of Rake Take include:

Film

• A variation happens in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, when Clark keeps stepping on loose floorboards in the attic.

Literature

• A humorous aside in the Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor's Hand notes a group of monks injuring themselves stepping on discarded gardening tools while fleeing from an unexpectedly-landing shuttlecraft. Seems even in the 41st millennium, this joke still happens.

Live Action TV

• Happens to the Skipper on the Gilligans Island episode "Waiting for Watubi"; the "rake" was made of bamboo and coconuts.
• Happens to Jack a couple of times on Threes Company.
• On One Thousand Ways to Die, one young woman who gardened as a hobby died of suffocation by stepping on a rake with a zucchini in her mouth as she prepared for a date.
• In The Late Show with David Letterman's Top Ten List of the most dangerous toys (from November 1997), Number 8 was "'Ouch!' The Step-On-A-Rake Game".

Newspaper Comics

• The Far Side has the African Rakesnake.

Other

• This gif

Video Games

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Turtles in Time has loose planks on the pirate ship level that smack the player character whenever they step on them. It's the same gag.
• This happens to Guybrush in Monkey Island 2 Le Chucks Revenge.
• Plants vs. Zombies allows you to buy a rake for your lawn that kills the first zombie that it encounters; it lasts three levels, after which you can buy a new one.
• A rare level hazard in the Tiny Toon Adventures game for the Sega Genesis. In some levels, enemies can attack you while the rake has incapacitated you.
• One of the rake-type traps is present in Runescape in Isafdar forest. However, this trap has something else than just a stick at the end of rake.
• This can happen to Pac-Man in Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures at the farm.

Web Comics

• Sluggy Freelance:

Torg (thinking): Alone, surrounded by vampires. My only hope is to dive for the rake by my feet, breaking the shaft into a wooden stake. But how am I going to find it in this mist? WAP!*

Western Animation

• Tom the cat gets it frequently in Tom and Jerry.
• This happens to Sideshow Bob a lot in The Simpsons, particularly in the "Cape Feare" story where he repeatedly stepped on a bunch of rakes in a row. Hanging onto the bottom on a car after it went through a bunch of cacti apparently left him too out of it even notice how they were all there completely littering the ground.
  • In the DVD commentary, the creators admit they were filling for time.
  • It becomes a Running Gag or possibly even a Brick Joke in later episodes.

Sideshow Bob: Rakes! My old arch enemy... Bart: I thought I was your arch enemy? Sideshow Bob: I have a life outside of you, you know.

• In Ice Age, Sid the sloth walks on something in the abandoned human camp and gets whacked in the face.
• Monster Allergy has it with Bombo in the opening theme of season 1.