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Scooby-Dooby Doors - TV Tropes

A very standardized visual comedy sequence. A static shot down a hallway lined with doors, like a hotel or mansion corridor, comes up in the middle of the chase scene. The chaser and one or more groups of chasees enter a door. Then they emerge from a different door. Or opposite doors.

There are a few different gags used for the climax:

1. The characters being chased start doing the chasing.
2. The characters appear more than once in the same frame.
3. Another character appears: they will either be questioned and then disappear from the plot for good, have this as their debut scene, or get more involved in the plot if they have appeared before.
4. A character will suddenly either use a weapon or be seen riding a bicycle or a unicycle.
5. All the characters in the chase collide into a pile in the center.
6. A character seemingly teleports between doors, i.e. runs from left to right door, then somehow appears again from the left.

A Running Gag, literally and figuratively, this one is unique for one reason; every instance of the trope subverts itself by the time the scene is over. Thus, this trope was discredited as soon as it was created, yet still good for a laugh.

Usually animated, but can be done in live-action by locking off the camera at the end of the hallway to hide edits and allow room switches. In animation, allows tremendous savings on budget, since the same cross-frame run-cycle cels can be used over and over and over for the entire sequence.

Related to One of These Doors Is Not Like the Other, a trope in video games that often has characters repeating a single screen just like this, and Fighting Across Time and Space, a different sort of teleportation-based chase scene.

This trope is Older Than Television, dating to the old days of French Farce. It showed up on film in the 1930's. Even with animation, it predates its Trope Namer by some thirty years. In live theater, certain kinds of screwball comedies are known as "door slammers" for a climactic scene or scenes where the whole cast is chasing one another, in one door and out another, everyone just missing everyone else by an instant; notable examples include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Lend Me a Tenor.

Also called a "Freleng Door Gag", after Warner Bros. director Friz Freleng, who may not have created it but took it to a whole other level. Sub-Trope to Spoofy-Doo.

Here is a compilation with a lot of examples.

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 

• In a rare use, a series of Cartoon Network gag commercials poking fun at The Blair Witch Project (known as The Scooby-Doo Project) have Velma of the Scooby-Doo gang holding a camcorder during a chase scene and running into a few rooms shouting that she hates these door sequences before placing the camera down on an end table so it can resume the familiar angle as they go through the switch.
• A commercial for Eggos did this once. The Guy in the Eggo suit saw 3 doors for brown sugar on one side and 3 doors for cinnamon on the other. He then experimented with one of the doors, and found it to be so amusing, he ran back and fourth between the doors, changing flavor based on which side he came out of. Eventually, he acquired both flavors split down the middle, and all 6 doors fell over because they were used that much. They crushed him while trying to escape. The commercial then moved on to the details.

  "Leggo my eggo."

• In this McDonald's commercial, after The Hamburglar steals a plate of cheeseburgers from Ronald, the two go on a wacky chase through a hallway of doors.
• A TV commercial for Wario Land 3 had Wario running through such doors that were shaped liked the purple Game Boy Color and getting affected by the various hazards and status changes from the game.
• A 2003 station ident for BBC Two had several robot versions of its famous numeral "2" symbol trundling around in an invisible version of this gag. In a rare subversion, however, this was one of the more serious idents used by BBC Two between 2001 and 2007, as it was often used to link to the news and the like. Especially noteworthy, as it was part of a package that was infamous for being seen as silly and bright, with the robot "2"s often doing wacky hijinks, all of them happening in a bright yellow void.

    Anime & Manga 

• The climax of Doraemon: Nobita and the Island of Miracles ~Animal Adventure~ have Doraemon, Nobita and the gang - including their new friend Nobisuke / Dakke - chasing each other in this manner underneath the legs of Sherman's gigantic Glyptodon mecha, running between the mech's legs which functions as pillars. Although they're not chasing after something, rather to distract Sherman long enough for their giant beetle ally Kabuto to recover.
• Also in episode 112 of Inazuma Eleven. Played fairly straight though.
• A Mental World version showed up in the fourth episode of Kaiba.
• Happens in episode 9 of Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, where Fololo and Falala are trying to keep Kirby's two halves away from Dedede, Escargoon and the episode's monster Slice N' Splice. In between slapstick antics, there are repeated scenes of everyone running between columns, complete with the "multiple versions of one character" joke.
• Even Osamu Tezuka himself does it with seashells in his experimental film Mermaid.
• Happens in episode 40 of Ojamajo Doremi, although the chase takes place between two adjacent ruins so no doors are opened.
• This gag happens in Episode 1 of the 1988 version of Osomatsu-kun, between Iyami and the Sextuplets.
• A similar gag shows up in an episode of One Piece during the "Thriller Bark" arc, for a Chase Scene where Perona's minion Bearsy chases Usopp through a forest of pillars. Parodied in AMV Hell 4 by adding "Yakety Sax" (The Benny Hill Show theme) and Scooby-Doo footage.
• Definitely happens in Pokémon the Series a few times.
• Happens in episode 32 of Urusei Yatsura. Adolf Hitler even makes an appearance in the scene.

    Asian Animation 

• Happy Friends: In Season 5 episode 23, Happy S., Careless S., Big M., Little M., Shao Long, and the school nurse with her giant injector all chase each other through a row of six doors in part of the school hall, going in and out of different doors and becoming mixed up as to who should be chasing who.
• Lamput: "Some Kind of Magic" features an extended sequence where Lamput and the docs take their chase to three doors that happen to be behind the stage where the magic show is being performed, with Lamput and the docs going through all the doors multiple times with no rules as to which door they come out of regardless of which door they enter. The sequence ends with Lamput getting the docs to hit each other after they come out of two of the doors, with the docs realizing Lamput is still there and running to locate him elsewhere.
• In the Simple Samosa episode "Kakadi Kabaddi", Samosa's gang is being chased around by the townsfolk in the hospital. There is a brief scene where both groups run through various doorways in the same hall, emerging from a different one than they came in each time.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 

• In Alice in Wonderland (1951), the Queen of Heart's labyrinth serves as a setting for one between Alice, the Queen of Hearts and the Playing Card Soldiers.
• Happens in Atlantis: The Lost Empire when the professors at the Smithsonian try to get away from Milo.
• Frozen: The "Love is an Open Door" sequence contains a variant involving Anna, Hans and three horse stall doors.
• Done with slight variation in Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. Flip and Nemo run between two rows of large pillars while being chased by guards.
• Looney Tunes: Back in Action has a scene in the Louvre where Elmer Fudd is going after Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and the three jump into various paintings. It eventually becomes this when the three are jumping back and forth between the paintings in the hallway, dressed up as characters and/or scenery of said paintings.
• The trope of chasing each other through doors in improbable ways occurred in Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw when the protagonists are trying to keep the Bone of Scone away from McNasty and his henchmen.
• Robin Hood (1973) has a sequence using the fair tents between Robin and Little John, the guards, and Lady Kluck; it ended up with the large guards propelling one tent like a train with the apropos sound effect and a mock American football run! The animation of the beginning is actually copied from the Alice in Wonderland scene.
• SCOOB!: Well, it is a Scooby-Doo film, so of course it has a variant. During the climax, Scooby, Shaggy, and Cerberus do this near Greek pillars.
• A somewhat subtle version is done in Shrek as Dragon is chasing after Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey through the columns of the dragon's keep. The audio commentary even refers to it as the "Scooby-Doo Scene".
• Snoopy, Come Home, the second Peanuts movie, has this kind of a scene when the crazy girl Clara, who kidnaps Snoopy and Woodstock, chases them through her house.
• Spider-Ham: Caught in a Ham has a sequence where Doctor Crawdaddy pursues Spider-Ham, and they run through a hallway of doors, with many wacky variations along the way.
• The Beatles' Yellow Submarine:
  • A sequence early in the film features a variant on this, where creatures and things ran back and forth between doors in a long hallway only when the main characters were not present. One has to wonder whether The Beatles were aware of it or not; since they never saw the creatures, they may not know their house is inhabited by so many zany creatures. Since they later open one door and see King Kong about to abscond with Fay Wray, and another door has a locomotive chugging towards them until the door is closed, it's possible they had some idea.
  • There's also a more traditional sequence in Pepperland where the Fab Four are chased by Meanies in an area bordered by two lines of bushes.
• Hydee and the Hytops: The Movie done this in a music store with Hydee, Mariko, Samantha and Charlotte running from Floyd (the store clerk) during the "We're Going Crazy" song.

    Films — Live-Action 

• Indian fantasy-comedy Ajooba have one such chase when the titular character flees from some enemy soldiers in the marketplace, including a gag where Ajooba runs up a flight of steps to lose enemy mooks, have a mook perform a Double Take while contemplating to go up the steps or not, and Ajooba suddenly surprising said mook by patting him in the back.
• A rare dramatic example: in The Adjustment Bureau, the Adjusters are able to travel from their secret base to anywhere in New York by passing through any doorway. When Matt Damon gets his hands on an Adjuster's hat, he and Elise are able to evade them, going from downtown Manhattan to Yankee Stadium to Ellis Island in rapid succession.
• In Baby Doll, Baby Doll and Silva end up chasing each other through the upper floor of Fox Tail Mansion, and the sequence is set up this way.
• Attempted in one scene in Bimbos B.C.. Unfortunately, all of the characters involved are walking, making the joke lose its pacing and fall flat.

  The Cinema Snob: You are not Scooby-Doo!

• A variation appears in The Cocoanuts, with Penelope and Mrs. Potter's adjoining hotel rooms — Groucho, Harpo, Chico, detective Hennessy, Mrs. Potter, and Penelope chase and hide from each other between two rooms, four doors, and a bed.
• In Death Valley The Revenge Of Bloody Bill, the curse placed on the ghost town somehow did this with the entire surrounding geography, no matter which way you leave town, you'll always end up right back at the center. Try doing one of these in the middle of the desert while being chased by zombies.
• A very early example, the 1919 Ernst Lubitsch Silent Film The Doll (1919) combines this with Everyone Chasing You. It's set in the town square, rather than a hallway, but very much fits the spirit of the trope otherwise.
• The Stephen Chow action-comedy Fight Back To School ends with a live-action version, in the backstage of a school's auditorium between Stephen's character, a bunch of students, and several gun-wielding mooks. Chow notably slips between three doors in the same area while two mooks tries to follow - as the first mook enters an open area he blindly fires at someone coming through, only to kill his partner. Then Stephen slips in from a different door from behind, surprising the mook before he tries giving chase.
• Le Gendarme à New York has a comparatively mild version of this when the Gendarmes are lost aboard the huge cruise ship.
• Done in live-action outdoors using a long series of paired signboards in the film version of Godspell.
• Borderline example in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. The Power Trio end up in the pound. Sassy escapes before they lock her in, hides until the handlers pass her by, and springs Chance and Shadow. One of the handlers walks in and finds them, so she leads him on a merry chase back and forth in a T-intersection, taunting him the whole time. After coming back from the same hallway she went down for four or five times, she struts back on-screen from the opposite hallway, congratulating herself.
• Even though The Little Rascals comedy short films were made LONG BEFORE Scooby-Doo, one scene in the 1923 short film The Dogs of War! features these as a guard chases after the eponymous gang of kids when they trespass inside of a movie studio. The results are still hilarious.
• Lost in Alaska: Done with igloos in the final battle between Tom and George on one side and Stillman and his guys on the other, as the pair flee into an igloo, come out the other side and end up jumping between them somehow.
• The Master of Disguise has a deleted scene combining this trope with Door Roulette where two villains chase Pistachio into a hallway of doors and Pistachio somehow appears in a different disguise behind every door which somehow open and close by themselves, leaving the bad guys thoroughly confused. A few moments from this scene and a few extras that weren't used in it can also be found in the movie's end credits.
• In the Jackie Chan movie Mr. Nice Guy, there is a brief door scene where two goons pursuing Jackie Chan's character pop out of two different doors, see each other, scream in surprise, and slam the doors. The first thug then hesitantly opens his door. The other door pops open and out comes Jackie Chan with the second thug in a headlock.
• Subverted (with identical twin sisters entering and exiting adjacent rooms) and played straight in Buster Keaton's The Playhouse.
• The Pink Panther (1963): Done during the automobile chase at the end of the film, with all the various cars zooming back and forth through the same multi-street intersection, until finally, inevitably, they all collide.
• This happens with some frequency in the movie version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, when R and G try to find their way around Elsinore. While chasing after the Player King, they end up in a different hallway than him. This is meant as a sign of how the Player knows his way around the castle (and the play) while R and G keep getting lost in their roles.
• There's a brief moment of this in Some Like It Hot when the gangsters are chasing the heroes around the hotel, though they cycle rapidly through the same hallway intersection rather than a collection of doors.
• Strange Psychokinetic Strategy has Lupin and Jigen relaxing in an abandoned construction area for the night, with man-sized concrete pipes all over the place. Zenigata and his subordinates come looking for Lupin. Jigen expects a fight, but is told to leave by Lupin. Lupin leads the cops on a merry chase with the pipes substituting for doors, even sitting down to a picnic in the middle of the chase while the police officers are running around the construction site trying to capture him.
• A variant appears in Top Secret!: The protagonist, Nick, is trying to escape a jail cell. He pries open a vent and crawls into it... only to be deposited back into the cell through another vent on the same wall. The camera pans out to show there is also a vent on the opposite wall, as well as the floor and ceiling. He tries the vent in the other wall... and comes out of the medicine cabinet on the opposite wall. He goes back in and pops up from the toilet.

    Game Shows 

• BrainSurge has a puzzle where a family chases a moose, and after the chase, the contestants has to select which door the moose never goes through.

    Live-Action TV 

• Homaged in live-action with Doctor Who episodes:
  • An abbreviated version is briefly used in "World War Three", inside 10 Downing Street, as a Slitheen chases Rose and Harriet Jones, MP Flydale North, involving only two doors.
  • "Love & Monsters". Some considered this overly cartoonish and silly, while others thought it was all part of an enjoyably offbeat Formula-Breaking Episode. Some however, have cited it as evidence that Elton, the episode's focus and narrator, is an unreliable one.
• The Full House episode "The Perfect Couple" has a subplot where Stephanie is babysitting Nicky and Alex who refuse to get ready for bed. One scene in the hallway features a Benny Hill-style chase sequence, complete with saxophone music, cartoonish sound effects, and sped-up footage. The boys and Stephanie run in and out of the bathroom and three bedrooms, with Michelle and Comet, the family dog, being involved as well. Stephanie ends up chasing Comet, and the boys, thinking they outsmarted her, jump around in celebration until Stephanie comes up the stairs from behind and catches them.
• Get Smart:
  • In "The Impossible Mission" Max and 99 are undercover at a studio and while dressed as Charlie Chaplin end up being chased in and out of the doors of a film set by two KAOS agents, accompanied by the appropriate zany music.
  • In another episode, Max and 99 are attempting to leave their staterooms while under surveillance; every time they open their door someone else in the hallway also pops their head out.
• A live-action variant appears in an episode of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. Through various misunderstandings, several of the main cast arrange secret trysts with two different women in the same house. Hilarity ensues as they burst in and out of the various doors to the same room, all miraculously managing to just miss each other.
• The 2012 Halloween Episode of Jessie, which ended with Jessie (the chaser) getting chased by the kids into one door, going “Wait a minute!” and resuming chasing them.
• One of the Just for Laughs: Gags pranks involves reproducing this trope with two pairs of twin actors. A thief steals a woman's purse, and when a cop goes after him, he throws it to the prank target. The target's attention is then drawn to a hallway of doors as a chase ensues.
• Moonlighting: The very silly chase scene at the climax of "Los Dos DiPestos". Det. Arredondo and Paul, the bad guys, chase Clara, Agnes, and Herbert into the hallway. Our heroes dive into another building. In classic trope style, all the characters go careening in and out of various doors, as things get goofier and goofier—a housewife says "Come back! I'm so lonely!", Arredondo comes out of one apartment with his arm on fire, and a ballerina comes twirling out of one door before going into another.

  Clara: What was that?
  Herbert: Oh, just a little homage to the golden age of TV comedy.

• The Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn episode "The Sad Tail of Gary-Chip-Tiny Elvis-Squishy Paws" involves the show's titular Harper quadruplets trying to hide their dog from his former owner, a woman whom they mistakenly believe to be "a real-life Cruella de Vil". A chase scene ensues in the woman's mansion.
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide uses a chase scene like this in one of the episodes, involving Ned and his friend Cookie being chased by Loomer (the leather jacket-sporting bully). It involves going up and down staircases, whirling in and out of a classroom, and even the three stopping at an intersection with Loomer patting Ned on the back.
• The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash has a number called "Cheese and Onions" accompanying an animated film called "Yellow Submarine Sandwich", which naturally spoofs the Beatles' Yellow Submarine and includes a parody of that film's doors sequence.
• Supernatural: In the "ScoobyNatural" Crossover with Scooby-Doo, the famous sequence is recreated in animation. In keeping with tradition, one Unexpected Character (Scrappy Doo) makes a brief appearance, never to be seen again in the episode.

    Manhua 

• An Old Master Q story have the titular character stumbling into a Haunted Castle, finding out the owner is a vampire, and quickly going on a Scooby-Doo-style chase◊ through a corridor full of doors after his attempts at tricking the vampire ("You can suck my blood, but I have AIDs...") didn't quite work. It ends with Master Q running around with a banner declaring, "This is childish".

    Pinball 

• Foo Fighters (2023): Both Area 51 Multiball and "Times Like These" show the band running between various corridors/buildings to escape the Big Bad's henchmen (brainwashed humans in the former, robots in the latter). The shot is framed exactly like in Scooby-Doo.

    Pro Wrestling 

• Chikara: The Oct. 6, 2012 episode had a skit where The Mysterious and Handsome Stranger chases deviANT through a series of doors, though they were at least all on the same wall.
• During the "Ultimate Deletion" skit, Bray Wyatt and Matt Hardy chase each other through a bunch of fake tombstones with this effect.

    Puppet Shows 

• In the animated lyric video for Sesame Street's "Monster in the Mirror," Grover and other Halloween-dressed Sesame Street monsters race through a whole lot of colored doors during the a-cappella chorus.

    Theatre 

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum often features this in its third act. The play frequently calls for multiple doors or passageways onstage that performers can enter and exit through, and the third act is where this stage design comes to a head. With all the subplots converging at the same time, the cast of heroes, villains, and side characters all chase each other throughout the streets of Rome, causing a chaotic mess of confusion until everybody bumps into each other all at once to start the ending.
• The Dutch play Buurman & Buurman gaan verhuizen (roughly translated as Pat and Mat Are Moving) features a two person version of this confusion, even with two Mats briefly in one room at the same time at one point.

    Video Games 

• In Dead Rising 2, during his boss battle, Brandon Whittaker repeatedly enters a bathroom stall and ambushes the hero from another one. Justified in that bathroom stalls don't have ceilings, and if you angle the camera right you can see Brandon leaping over the walls from one stall to another.
• DragonFable features one in a Scooby-Doo parody where the Hero and their pet baby dragon, joined by a crew of Mystery Inc. Captain Ersatzes, get chased by a Casper lookalike through a hallway of doors.
• There's a minor puzzle in Final Fantasy VII that is basically this. Suffice it to say that it wasn't the greatest puzzle around.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, Diabolos' fight utilizes these as a pseudo memory game, you have to find the right door and open it while he's casting shadow orb in order to avoid it.
• Part of two puzzles in Goodbye Deponia: First, Rufus has to put laundry through a quirky laundering machine in a specific order so he can get out with Cletus' outfit; then, Rufus has to go in and out of various hallways and doors to ensure that Cletus is stuck in a room with Donna, ensuring that he and Goal can escape safely.
• In Grim Fandango, all of the tunnels in the Petrified Forest clearing lead to one another. Glottis notices the first time and says, "Hey, wait a minute."
• Used in more than one stage in Ghoul Panic, where the level is filled with doors and / or windows (even doors on the ceiling!) and you'll need to shoot chibi-looking ghosts coming out from one door and exiting through another. You'll get penalized for shooting black ghosts or ghosts having the same colour as your player.
• Mario & Luigi:
  • Upon entering the Gritzy Desert in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the brothers disturb the horde of Shroobs who have taken over the Koopaseum. While they mostly evade detection, Luigi and the babies end up getting spotted by a solitary Shroob, who chases them off while Mario starts to receive exposition from Kylie Koopa. Throughout the ensuing lore dump, this trope is happening in the background, including the trio getting chased with various configurations of the babies being carried by Luigi, Luigi running from the Shroob who's running from the babies, and Luigi and the Shroob backing into each other before resuming the chase.
  • The Magic Window attack from Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has a similar effect, with Mario and Luigi jumping through a magic portal and one or both brothers popping out at random to jump on the enemy. This can go on potentially forever if your reflexes are utterly inhuman, and it doesn't take long for multiple copies of each bro to appear onscreen at once.
• Mario Party 7 involves a minigame full of warp pipes, called Warp Pipe Dreams. Jumping into one results in popping out of a different one. The objective is to find the one that leads to the next area.
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance has a more sinister version where an Odin-empowered Dr. Doom uses his powers to create a hall of doors like this, with the simple task of finding a way out. The trick is to go back the way you came in.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge uses a gimmick similar to this late in the game in the form of the Hinterlands. Entering one path transports you to another area of the forest. Also serves as That One Level for some.
• In Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia this happens in one of the extra missions due to Palkia's powers, causing the player character, Sven and a guy from the Haruba desert to be randomly sent through several locations in Almia before finding Palkia and restoring everything to normal.
• In Professor Layton and the Last Specter, the Black Raven pulls this off while Layton, Luke, and Emmy give chase. It's later revealed that there were multiple "Black Ravens" running around at the moment in order to achieve this effect.
• As you might expect, more than one Scooby-Doo game uses this, often as a puzzle.
  • The SNES/Genesis game Scooby Doo: Mystery has one in its first mystery. On the upper floor of an old ski lodge is a hallway with seven doors (the one at the end of the hall is locked). Opening each of the other six doors in turn – you'll be chased by the Phantom every time, and yes there's at least one point where two Scoobys cross paths –- literally breaks the trope, as the six doors suddenly open all at once and Shaggy and Scooby exit from the locked room, allowing you to reenter that room and progress the game.
  • The Game Boy Color port of Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers also uses this gimmick as a puzzle; you go through three doors, then have to choose a fourth door that leads to a secret room. The secret? The key door is whichever door the second door was.
  • A different Scooby-Doo video game used the trope in a different way: as you approach the infamous hallway, a large group of ghosts go in through the doors on one side and leave through the doors on the other. Your job is to go through the one door that the ghosts didn't go through, lest you lose some of your health from a fright.
• Most of the doors in town in The Secret of Monkey Island work this way, to keep you from being arbitrarily locked out of buildings you can't actually access. There are a few in The Curse of Monkey Island too, which are actually handy shortcuts from one end of the town set to the other.
• Silent Hill:
  • In Silent Hill 2's Nightmare Hotel, one of the most nightmare fuelish and Mind Screwy locations in the series, going in a room door dumps you out at a certain other door in the hallway, and one of the doors transports you to the otherwise-inaccessible east wing of the building.

    Web Animation 

• True to form for the participating Trope Namer, this happens midway through the DEATH BATTLE! between Scooby-Doo and Courage the Cowardly Dog, when Scooby and Courage are being chased by the monster actually Eustace in disguise.
• In Ducktalez 2, with The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville" playing over it. A bunch of funny background events occur during said chase.
• Subverted in the Evil Josh And Billy episode Speak No Evil. Evil Josh and his archrival, Super Someone, run through a door, and... cut to Josh jumping outside a window.
• In Slamacow's Minecraft animation, Spider Encounter, the protagonists are chased by monsters and go through this, in true Scooby-Doo style — complete with the cast of that show wandering through a door or two.
• A humorous variant in The Most Popular Girls in School Episode 75, while trying to infiltrate Saison for Brittany, they follow her and baby daughter back and forth around the Eiffel Tower, and they ending switching positions and get chased by a policewoman
• Parodied in the Mystery Skulls Animated video for "Ghost". At first it's just the main trio and Lewis by themselves, then a whole army of each character goes between the doors.
• Done in a Scooby homage during the second season of RWBY Chibi with Team JNPR parodying Mystery Inc., Zwei as Scooby-Doo, and a Beowolf Grimm as the monster. There's also a random appearance by Qrow wearing nothing but a speedo, a cape and a pair of goggles.

  Neptune: So wait, what does this accomplish?
  Sun: I dunno, but it's like, ninety percent of what they do!

• Episode 3 of Super Mario Bros. Z has Scooby-Dooby Pipes. Justified, since warp-pipes in the Mario games never really worked like regular doors to begin with.
• Fazbear and Friends (ZAMination): In "Chainsaw Man is right behind you." Chainsaw Man chases the builder through a series of doors in the Backrooms, out of which PJ Pug-a-pillar, Bendy, Freddy and Monika emerge. Unable to catch him, Chainsaw Man screams in frustration and destroys the doors in anger.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 

• SCP Foundation:
  • The joke article SCP-K9-J-EX, being a Whole-Plot Reference to Scooby-Doo, mentions an anomalous hallway full of doorways that transport whoever enters one into another that leads back into the hallway.
  • A more serious entry, SCP-3008, has this trope mentioned in the journal of one of the victims of the anomalous store.

    You ever see one of those cartoons where they're going through doors in a hallway and they just pop out of another door in the same hallway? That's how I feel right now. I've seen nothing but the same identical bookshelf for 2 days now. Just row after row after row of them.

    Web Videos 

• Call Me Kevin: In his Sims 4 series, when Jim moves to his third home, the home includes a set of Bookcase Passages, one leading to the basement and the others going to empty rooms. It doesn't take long before Artificial Stupidity kicks in, causing Human Racket to enter and exit two of the ones that lead to an empty room repeatedly, which Kevin compares to "a bad episode of Scooby-Doo", upon which he cues a Song Parody of What's New, Scooby-Doo?, set to a montage of Human Racket opening and closing random doors (including a fridge door) to create the full effect.
• A chilling variant occurs in Entry #23 of Marble Hornets, wherein Jay is exploring the upstairs of a house, but no matter which door he goes in, he always winds up back in the hallway near the Slenderdoll. Especially freaky as it is shown from the first-person POV.
• In the Smosh episode "That Damn Prison Escape", Billy-Jean and Cletus are chased by the Neighbor on a segway and a Police Officer in the same style; at one point, Robin runs out of one of the doors and the Officer is riding on an office chair.
• In the video "What Your Favorite Miraculous Ladybug Ship Says About You," the show's unending Two Person Love Square is described as "the relationship equivalent of a Scooby-Doo door gag."

    Western Animation 

• Ben 10: Omniverse: At one point in "Mystery, Incorporeal", Ben Kevin, Rook and Zed chase Dante (actually Darkstar in disguise), who is levitating a kidnapped Gwen, across through door to door in the halls of Gwen's university. At one point Ben actually reaches his hand through one door to see it come out of a door on the other side of the hallway, indicating the doors are actually portals.
• Bluey: The episode 'Ghostbasket' features a chase sequence through the Heeler house in this style.
• Anthology series CB Bears does it at least twice:
  • A rather straight example when the CB Bears go through them trying to escape the villain in "The Fright Farm".
  • A more comedic example in the Shake, Rattle & Roll segment "Spooking The Spooks". The titular ghosts are trying to escape Sidney Merciless's ghost chasing robot, leading to one of these chases...where the ghosts float through all the closed doors, and the robot following them breaks through them.
• The Cuphead Show! does a variation of this with columns in the first Episode of Season 3. As the Devil is chasing Cuphead and Mugman for stealing the Devil's pitchfork, the three keep darting out of sight behind the columns, only to come back with the Devil chasing them in some new form. At one point, the Devil is being chased instead, and in another, the Devil is riding Cuphead and Mugman's bike while the cups are chasing him.
• Danger Mouse was rather fond of this trope:
  • When DM and Penfold are first abducted by the title object in "The Dream Machine", Greenback explains his fiendish plans for them as they stand at the end of two long rows of doors, while various bizarre creatures run out of one door and into another (in at least one case, the same creatures rush then rush out of a different door and into yet another one).
  • "Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind" features several chase sequences involving DM and Penfold trying to escape the guards on Dr. Zokk's spaceship using a hoverpod; in some shots, we see several parallel walkways as the various chasers appear on first one, then another, and then another (complete with variations in the "order of procession"), while in other shots, we see a top-down view of a room with four doors as the chasers repeatedly emerge from different doors than the ones they entered.
• Dennis the Menace:
  • "Chitty Chitty Moon Walk" does this in a hayfield with Dennis and Joey in Henry's solar-powered moon walker, a pair of spies in a forklift disguised as a haystack, and a police officer chasing them. It ends with the police officer crashing into the spies and arresting them.
• Spoofed in the Drawn Together episode "Clara's Dirty Little Secret", which first showed a similar situation with the house guests chasing each other and emerging from random doors, then zoomed out to reveal that the doors were all connected by a series of tubes, which the characters swam through.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Hilariously parodied in the episode where Timmy sneaks into Cosmo and Wanda's home in the fish bowl. With each door switch Timmy, Cosmo, and Marianne (an escaped bad godchild) would change clothes. And that was the least weird detail... in one shot, Timmy dives into a door on the floor which clearly has stairs going down and then immediately falls out of another door ON THE CEILING IN THE SAME ROOM.
  • In the TV movie special, "Channel Chasers", Timmy wishes himself into the television and visits multiple parodies of popular cartoons including a show parodying Scooby-Doo. Upon meeting the Mystery Gang parody, they are all chased by a guy in a yeti costume and naturally end up running around through multiple doors in a nearby spooky mansion. This is even lampshaded when a bird from an earlier Flintstones parody shows up out of nowhere from one of the doors and comments, "eh it's a chase scene".
• The Felix the Cat (Joe Oriolo) pulls this in two episodes, "Felix Finder and the Ghost Town" (Felix is darting in and out of deserted buildings in the town and going so fast he runs into himself) and "Felix The Cat Suit" (the Professor and Felix tiptoeing in and out of open compartments in a hallway).
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends:
  • Subverted: the camera is at the right angle, the hallway is full of doors, and the characters are being chased at the time. They run through the door, followed by what's chasing them, then... nothing for about one second, then the scene changes.
  • Played straight in the pilot House of Bloo's where Wilt, Eduardo and Coco are trying to save Bloo from being adopted by a bratty little girl, only due to a case of the Idiot Ball, they aren't aware that the others are trying to help, so they end up trying to keep Bloo away from each other as well. They engage in this trope and midway through start switching who's carrying who (at one point Coco is carrying Eduardo). It ends with Bloo ending up carrying the bratty girl and running off with the others chasing after him. The scene repeats in the episode's credits, where at one point a previously introduced imaginary friend (who looks just like Mojo Jojo) makes an appearance.
• Futurama:
  • Set up in their Scooby-Doo parody in "Saturday Morning Fun Pit", by having Shaggy/Fry, Scooby/Bender, and the Monster of the Week go through a cloning machine, seeing Fry and Bender go through one set of doors... and cut to the next scene.
  • "The Farnsworth Parabox" has an unusual variation: instead of doors there are several boxes, each of which contains an alternate universe, and each universe in turn has its own set of universe-boxes. This sets up a complicated cross-universe chase sequence with everyone jumping into and out of the boxes.
• The Galaxy High School episode "Those Eyes, Those Lips" had the main characters chasing each other through doors in impossible ways in one scene.
• Used in an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. The gang are being chased by a mad man with an axe throughout a castle; different characters ran through the doors including Scooby and the gang at one point.
• Johnny Bravo used it during the self-referential Scooby-Doo Crossover episode "Bravo-Dooby Doo" (as pictured above). Eventually, it gets to a point where there two Johnnys appear on screen and make an Aside Glance at the viewer.
• Kaeloo:
  • In Episode 70, Kaeloo and Quack Quack chase Stumpy through a bunch of Portal Doors during a game of "interdimensional hide and seek" and he always comes out through a different door. At one point, Stumpy from another dimension runs through the door and meets up with the original Stumpy.
  • It happens again in Episode 110, this time with Kaeloo and Mr. Cat chasing Stumpy through a haunted castle with a bunch of doors.
• Little Dracula: "The Chamber of Unspeakable Terror" features a gag where Little Dracula, Werebunny, Millicent, Garlic Man, Maggot and the Man with No Eyes chase each other through a hallway of doors in improbable ways.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): In “Gailbreak” This happens though several aisles as Monban chases Minka around The Largest Ever Pet Shop.
• Pops up in several Looney Tunes shorts, including Frank Tashlin's Porky Pig's Feat (1943), Friz Freleng's Room And Bird (1951), and Robert McKimson's Hot Cross Bunny (1948), The Oily American (1954) and Boston Quackie (1957).
  • Friz Freleng had his own variant: two characters chasing each other (with Mickey Mousing hopping steps) in a room full of doors: the chaser will see the chasee go into one door, go to it, but just as he opens it, the chasee comes out a completely different door; chaser goes to new door, cycle repeats. It shows up in Little Red Riding Rabbit (1944), and also in Buccaneer Bunny (1948), where one door suddenly has a cannon behind it.
• Tex Avery was fond of this during his days at MGM (he especially loved exaggerating it).
  • Its occurrence in the Screwy Squirrel cartoon "Lonesome Lenny" was not only over-the-top (with additional chasers and chasees being added at random, including a cow, a lech chasing a screaming woman, and various clones of Screwy and Lenny), but self-referential, as the cow briefly stopped in the middle of the chase to hold up a sign reading, "Silly, isn't it?"
  • Tex also provided an interesting variation in The Screwy Truant and Little Rural Riding Hood: the chase sequence would happen in a seemingly normal room (with only two or three doors), but then additional doors would be quickly created as needed — the trick was to open a door violently, and a new opening was instantaneously created where it had hit the wall; this worked completely regardless of the door's hinges, so that when there was no room left on walls, doors were created on the floor and ceiling as well. All accompanied by the song "In and Out the Window".
• Mickey Mouse Funhouse: In "King Mickey”, this happens when Mickey is chasing the weasels through different rooms
• Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures:
  • Shows up in the episode "The Bride of Mighty Mouse" when a pig steals a farmer's hat and everyone chases the pig to try and get it back.
  • It also happens in the episode "Don't Touch That Dial" when Mighty ends up in the Ring-a-Ding show and the gang chases him, which is a parody of Scooby-Doo.
• The Mr. Magoo cartoon "Spellbound Hound" features one of these when Magoo mistakes his friend Ralph for an escaped criminal and chases him around with a shotgun and a bloodhound chasing after him trying to prove Ralph's innocence.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Used in the episode "A Bird in the Hoof", while Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle chases after Philomena to the tune of a Yakkety Sax sound-alike. This may actually be a subtle subversion, as the characters always exit through the same side that they enter (until the very end, where Philomena seems to exit the chase without needing a door).
• The Penguins of Madagascar plays with this in the episode "Cradle and All", where the penguins have to chase a human baby through a maze of crates. First the gag is played straight, with the penguins and baby entering and emerging from random pathways for a good few seconds, but then Kowalski realizes what's happening and gets the team to defy the trope.

  Kowalski: I've seen this before. We'll continue chasing him back and forth, to-and-fro, right and left, over and under, until we start chasing each other.

• Phineas and Ferb:
  • Used in part one of "Phineas and Ferb's Hawaiian Vacation", where it happens in one of the hotel's hallways as Phineas and Ferb try to chase after the A-Primes (and the hotel manager tries to chase after both of them). At one point, the Giant Floating Baby Head makes an appearance.
  • Done yet again again in "Misperceived Monotreme" during the "Livin' in a Fun House" number. Subverted since Perry the Platypus isn't being chased, but is simply trying to find the exit. He ends up turning the room upside-down, seeing multiple copies of himself, and nearly getting his cover blown.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • In the middle of the night, a burglar goes to rob the Powerpuff Girls' house not knowing who they are. The Girls confront him and when he finds out they have superpowers, he immediately hides in a lamp. The lamp breaks and the burglar still inside the broken lamp hops all around the house with the Girls chasing him.
  • When the Powerpuff Girls' next-door neighbors, The Smiths, become a family of vengeful supervillains, they try to run over both the Girls and the Professor with their mechanically modified car. The Girls carry the Professor to safety flying from room to room in the hall while the Smiths destroy each door so they can follow them.
• Razzberry Jazzberry Jam: A non-chase scene variation occurs in “Move To The Beat”- as RC and Billie are looking for Ella, they go in and out of various rooms in a downright non-euclidean fashion.
• Rocko's Modern Life had one in the episode "I See London, I See France", but near a French canal instead of in a building. The chase involved Rocko trying to find and impress a female wallaby, Heffer following a truck advertising a Chewy Chicken restaurant, and an insane tour guide hunting them down in his bus. At one point, the characters (including the vehicles) start walking up and down the sides of buildings and riding boats through the canal.
• Scooby-Doo, even though it didn't invent the trope, certainly standardized it and used it often enough that it became an institution intimately associated with the franchise, hence the name. Every modern usage includes at least a nod to the canine detective and the gang, if only in the music chosen^* (some form of light pop-rock, which first became a staple in the second season of Where Are You!). The sequence has been homaged and parodied to hell and back so often since 1969 that even Scooby-Doo itself can't use it straight anymore.
  • A particularly weird subversion comes in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, where after the Phantom, Shaggy, Scooby, and Harry (a dummy) do this in the back of a tour van using some doors and shelves with curtains. However, Shaggy and Scooby eventually decide to just hide in one place about the same time the Phantom gets tired of doing this and decided to just set the entire vehicle on fire which Shaggy and Scooby narrowly escape before it explodes.
  • There was a game based on this trope featuring the gang and "Toxic Monster" from the opening mystery from Scooby-Doo Abracadabra movie. You open the door for the good guys and close the door for the monster. Here's a link for you to use.
  • Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? does this in many episodes, each time initially starting the gag straight, but then taking a wacky twist (often with the gang suddenly wearing goofy costumes that may or may not be relevant to the story). Alex Trebek even mentions during the middle of a chase how the trope originated in French Farce.
  • Lampshaded in The Scooby-Doo Project, in which Velma declares she hates 'the part with the doors'.
• Slight variation of the usual setup: In a cartoon for Die Sendung mit der Maus the mouse and the elephant can't find each other due to interfering Scooby Doors. With her slight Reality Warper powers, the mouse solves the problem by unhinging each door and piling them up until only one remains - behind which the elephant has to be and is.
• Sidekick did this several times.
  • Played straight in "House of Helmut", followed by Trevor running into a closed door, knocking down the whole wall, and having the others comes out of one of the knocked down doors.
• The Simpsons did this in the "Reaper Madness" segment of "Treehouse of Horror XIV" with Death in the upstairs of their house. Death came to collect Bart, Marge tells him to run, and he, Death, and rest of the family (as well as Santa's Little Helper) all run through the upstairs doors giving a chase that eventually ends with Homer killing Death. Bonus points goes for them actually using Yakkety Sax for the scene in question.
• The Smurfs (1981):
  • Used in the episode "Lost Smurf" when Papa Smurf, Hefty, Brainy, Wild, and Sassette get chased through a series of doors in a long hallway inside Castle Captor.
• A brief variant was used in the Sofia the First episode "When You Wish Upon a Well", which had Sofia (who was wished into being a cat by Amber) being chased by James, Clover, Rex, and Wormwood in a hedgemaze during a musical number.
• South Park:
  • Used during the episode "Cartman Joins NAMBLA" in a chase scene between a large group of young boys, a gang of naked pedophiles (the entire South Park NAMBLA chapter), the National Association of Marlon Brando Look-Alikes (the "other NAMBLA"), the police, the FBI, and Kenny chasing his pregnant mother with a plunger. It ends when Kenny's father stumbles into the melee, and gets gang-raped by the NAMBLA chapter. There's also a random appearance by a poodle balancing on a ball and two gents on penny-farthings. Also, a waiter keeps coming down the hallway and getting knocked down by the chase ("Sacrébleu!").
• In an episode of Steven Universe, Steven and the Gems get lost in a Fortress that essentially features doors like these. Behind the doors however are death traps, and even if they survive the traps, the Doors take them right back to the start, that would force them to keep redoing the traps over and over again. Luckily, Steven finds the actual way out.
• In The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! episode "Mighty McMario and the Pot of Gold", Luigi and Toad lead Mouser and Troopa through some of these.

  Mouser: (Collapses, exhausted) This is so frustrating!

The music choice for the chase scene is very odd, and in a case of what was most likely lazy animation, the characters simply go through the same doors over and over.

• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Done in the episode "Mad Mod", during a Scooby-Doo-inspired musical chase scene with the Titans pursuing Mad Mod through his surreal, trap-laden lair. This also contains a number of references to the Yellow Submarine doors, with Beast Boy doubling as the animals — there's even a scene where the Titans have to navigate a sea of holes. And at one point during that doors sequence, Mad Mod drives a car with the exact same colour scheme◊ as the car in Yellow Submarine. At least twice during this sequence, it's further mixed up with Perspective Magic; characters will emerge from a door, head to one either farther or nearer the viewer, but won't change size like they would if they were running down a normal hallway. The hinges on the doors aren't consistent either - not just swinging towards doorknobs, but dropping like drawbridges and rising like garage doors — even acting as if the lower halves were actually doggy doors for the mini-Titans to charge through. It gets retrospectively justified at the episode's end, which reveals that Mad Mod's lair is an enormous theatrical stage set up with all manner of hologrammatic and practical special effects, with his plan being to either drive the Titans insane or kill them, and he's not concerned which outcome he gets.
  • A later episode, also featuring Mad Mod, had them do it with cars in the middle of a street. Though the camera pans across the street, the effect is the same. That sequence is more a direct homage to The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night.
• Timon & Pumbaa does this once in an episode where both title characters are kidnapped by a UFO, and they have to try to escape before it self-destructs. For the sequence, both of them HAVE been cloned, so the multiple versions of themselves actually makes some sense.
• The Tom and Jerry short The Yankee Doodle Mouse has Jerry running between crates being chased by sentient sparks from a firecracker.
• Lampshaded in the first episode of Villainous when the crew is fighting a superhero in a Haunted House and cloudcuckoolander Demencia gets lost in "one of those halls where you go in one door and come out a different one". She then sticks her head into one of them and sees the rest of her body from the other side. When it cuts back to her, she opens another set of doors across from each other that loop into themselves, creating a Droste Image. For bonus points, three kids resembling expies of Fred, Shaggy, and Velma appear at the start of the episode.
• We Bare Bears: In "Charlie's Halloween Thing 2", one of the segments has the Baby Bears being chased by monsters as part of an extended parody of Scooby Doo. This includes a chase through a hall of doors, which leads to sight gags like the monsters running around in a stack like the Bears, and two Ice Bears running into each other.
• This has happened a couple times in Zig & Sharko such as in "Work in Progress" when Sharko chases Zig through the rooms in Marina's house, and another time when they're on a cruise ship and Sharko chases Zig who has Marina on a dinner cart.

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