Smoothie, anyone?
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by FastLaneDesign. Used with permission.
by FastLaneDesign. Used with permission.Gordon: Mount the curb!
Bill Corbett: We're gonna hit a fruit stand if it's the last thing we do!
Bill Corbett: We're gonna hit a fruit stand if it's the last thing we do!
— RiffTrax on The Dark Knight
From Roger Ebert's dictionary of movie clichés, fast chase scenes require a fruit cart being plowed into, preferably by a Drives Like Crazy Red Shirt in hot pursuit. Almost always pops up in "ethnic" neighborhoods (e.g. Chinatown, Little Italy, etc.). If a chase scene takes place in one, you're supposed to chant "Fruit Cart! Fruit Cart! Fruit Cart!" repeatedly until its inevitable destruction in a spray of melon rind.
Occasionally the fruit cart is replaced by a newspaper stand, a pile of garbage, or a row of garbage cans, but the fruit stand is still a favorite, mostly because the crash will create a very colorful explosion.
In real life, driving through a fruit stand would leave the car in no condition to continue the chase.
In a related trope, action movies with a gunfight in an outdoor market will inevitably result in the shooting of one or more exploding melons.
Also note: If the cart contains prominently placed oranges, you're probably doomed.
Subtrope of Chase-Scene Obstacle Course.
The Sheet of Glass is often used in the same manner. For an indoor version see Doomed Supermarket Display.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Two adverts for the Nissan Almera spoofed these sorts of shows, complete with Fruit Cart moment.
- The first one, homaging The Professionals...
Bodie: Turn left!Doyle: Why?Bodie: Litter! Makes the car look good!- And as for The Sweeney...
Regan: MARKET! *piles through fruit cart in a market*Carter: Stop shouting!Regan: I CAN'T!- "Market!" was a Mondegreen of the show's famous catchphrase "Mark it!"
- A commercial for Marvin Windows broadcast during March 2005 hit all the chase-scene tropes, which cars running through carts, crates of chickens, crowds on sidewalks — only to come to a screeching halt so as not to damage a huge Marvin window being rolled slowly across the street.
Anime & Manga
- Shows up in the 2004 Appleseed film of all places; while in pursuit of Deunan and Hitomi, the van being driven by the robot ninja ladies smashes a watermelon stand that seems to have been placed there just to be crashed into, as it's in a Shining City of the future without the crowded marketplaces of the present. Though this trope starts off the chase rather than being mid-way through it.
- In the Cowboy Bebop episode "Cowboy Funk", the Fruit Cart is destroyed by an incompetent rival of the heroes.
- Batou pursues an optic-camo user through a market in Ghost in the Shell (1995). His invisible quarry shoves customers aside and plows through a pile of melons, which Batou then shoots to disrupt his camo.
- Played straight in Great Teacher Onizuka, with the Vice Principal's beloved Toyota Cresta.
- Lampshaded/mentioned in Naruto where a move of Jiraiya's involving summoning a giant toad to crush something by landing on it is called the "Food Cart Destroyer Technique".
- On Pecola, this trope is the main reason for Mr. Saruyama the melon vendor's existence, even though he is a series regular.
- In the Speed Racer episode "Race For Revenge, Part I", Melange drives clean through a fruit stand while being pursued by the police and the Mach 5.
Comic Books
- In Daredevil, a hand-to-hand fight sailing out the third floor of a building sends Daredevil and a beefy criminal on a cocaine rush crunching into a fruit stand on the street below. The proprietors respectively say to "Watch it, man, watch it!" and "Closin' early today!" while Daredevil's Super-Senses are occupied for a panel by, "orange tomato banana grape apple eggplant..."
Fan Works
- The Bolt Chronicles: When Bolt frantically pushes a shopping cart containing his friends towards the exit in "The Supermarket," he plows it into displays holding bananas, tomatoes, pies, and eclairs.
- Subverted in the story Garfield in: "Along Came a Splut"; Garfield, while being chased in the DeLorean, runs down everything in his path except fruit carts "which Garfield adores more than anything in life itself".
- In The Girl Who Loved Harry and Chibi-Usa fall off Tokyo Tower. Harry manages to enlarge his broom in time to save them, but they end up plowing into a food vendor's cart.
- In This Bites!, while being chased by the Unluckies through Water 7, Cross ended up having to jump over a large cart full of vegetables. After causing Miss Friday to catch fire and crash into it, he heard a cry of "MY CABBAGES!", and much to his dismay, it wasn't from Soundbite.
- Vow of Nudity: One gets destroyed during the chariot chase scene while Haara's escaping the demon city.
Films — Live-Action
- Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie uses this as well as every other chase scene trope on the entire list. In the same chase scene.
- In Batman (1989), a car containing the Joker's goons drives through garbage cans while taking a shortcut across a street corner, then later gets into a multi-vehicle pileup including a truck whose cargo of cabbages go all over the place.
- In the opening scene of Beverly Hills Cop, the stolen cigarette truck hits a flatbed truck selling fruit and vegetables off the bed. As an added bonus, the spilled juice from the fruit causes a huge commuter bus to skid and spin out 180 degrees in the street.
- During the opening chase scene of Colombiana, a motorbike rider chasing the protagonist does a dramatic slide into bowls of spices at a covered market.
- Played with in the movie Conspiracy Theory: During a chase scene, a hotdog stand careens down a street, plowing into cars.
- Averted with Cop and a Half. While we see one, it sadly never gets pulverized.
- This trope is as least as old as 1909 and The Curtain Pole, in which M. Dupont's runaway carriage knocks over a cart of lettuce/cabbage.
- In the final car chase of Death Proof, the girls are amused when they drive through an old boat sitting out in the middle of a field for no apparent reason. "Did you just hit a boat?"
- In Diamonds on Wheels, the Mini being driven by one of the teams of feuding drivers crashes through a roadside fruit stand after a disastrous overtaking attempt.
- Averted through at least the first six films of The Fast and the Furious, to the confusion of at least one writer.
- In Fighting Mad (1976), evil developers try to intimidate the locals off their land by driving a bus through a pumpkin stand outside a church.
- Flaming Brothers have a tuk-tuk chase in the streets of Bangkok with a cart of coconuts getting smashed up at one point.
- Freebie and the Bean: During one chase scene, the shooter's van smashes through a fruit stand and several newspaper stands.
Owner: Hey, sucker! You just bought 60 crates of apples!
- The garbage-pile variant is used in The French Connection.
- In Girl Shy, Harold Lloyd crashes into a farmer's cart, spilling fruit everywhere, as he races to stop his girlfriend's marriage. In an even earlier Lloyd film, the short From Hand to Mouth, he collides with a fruit cart while running from the cops on foot.
- The 1977 film Grand Theft Auto note featured a chase scene where a crazy hillbilly family attempts to stop the protagonists' car with thrown sticks of dynamite. Then one of them inexplicably yells "frickin' fruit stand!" and proceeds to detonate one that is just lying by the side of the road. Huh.
- We see a fruit cart being turned over during the pogrom in The Great Dictator.
- The cast of Jackass: The Movie go flying into a fruit cart at the end of the opening credits.
- Little Annie Rooney: A spin on the old trope. No one crashes into a fruit cart, but the brawling kids wind up spooking a horse attached to a fruit cart, which promptly bolts, spilling fruit everywhere.
- During Malcolm's final chase scene, the protagonists knock over a magazine stand with their van.
- The Matrix features a Shout-Out to a scene in Ghost in the Shell (1995) where Agent Smith shoots the melons on the cart while pursuing Neo through a crowded market in the Matrix.
- This counts, at least as a play on the trope: in Maximum Risk, Jean-Claude Van Damme is in a chase scene where he's driving a fruit cart. It is, of course, destroyed at the end.
- In Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident, Alec knocks out some thugs in a pile of cabbages.
- In The Mummy, some fruit and vegetable stands are knocked over when Rick is driving through Cairo to escape from Imhotep.
- At one point in Pain & Gain, Kershaw chased Daniel down in the middle of market, knocking over several carts.
- In Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, Captain Harris and Lt. Proctor commandeer a bus and go chasing after the Mastermind. In a Shout-Out to Ebert and his co-reviewer Gene Siskel, the bus just manages to avoid hitting "Gene and Roger's Fruit Stand."
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) features a chase scene at the market in Cairo, involving fruit carts and many other stalls.
- The Rock did this hilariously during the car chase through San Francisco.
- Happens at least once in Ronin (1998), although made more bearable because the fruit vendor is then shot. That movie has enormous collateral damage. It's later played straight when pursuing cars race through a mid-town market. One car sideswipes a fruit stand, the other car crashes through a pile of wooden boxes.
- In Serenity, when the crew is escaping on the Mule from the Reaver raiding party, they crash through a fruit cart on the way back to the ship. In a bit of unfortunate editing, the Reavers following them pass right by the same, undamaged, fruit cart.
- Buster Keaton's Seven Chances uses this trope with, of all things, boxes of bees.
- Ski Patrol actually had a fruit cart with a sign reading "Siskel and Ebert's Fruit Cart" on it.
- In Sunburn (1979), Ellie drives the protagonists' car through a lemon stand during a car chase.
- In 2010's The Tourist, Johnny Depp's character's escape from the bad guys, on foot, involves dropping into an open-air market from above, taking out a fruit stand in the process.
- Wayne's World 2. Wayne performs Lamp Shade Hanging by wondering why some workers are setting up a display of watermelons, chickens, and a Sheet of Glass.
Wayne Campbell: Excuse me, what are you guys doing here in the middle of the street?
Chicken-man: Well, I'm putting these chickens in crates, and stacking them right here. Jim's job is to make sure we always have plenty of watermelons.
Wayne Campbell: Oh, so you're selling watermelons.
Jim: No, no sir. We just have to make sure we have plenty of them stacked at all times, just like with these here chickens.
Garth Algar: What do these guys do?
Chicken-man: Well, their job is to walk back and forth with this big plate-glass window every couple of minutes.
Garth Algar: Weird.
Wayne Campbell: Yeah, you've got to wonder if this is gonna pay off later on. - Happens in the finale of What's New Pussycat?, with a go-cart chase.
- In the Jackie Chan film Who Am I? (1998), the protagonists, while being pursued, smash through a stall selling nothing but oranges. Some enter through the side windows, and others become embedded in the fender of the car, where they remain for the remaining duration of the chase. After the pursuit has ended, one of the characters that was in the car can be seen eating one of the oranges.
Literature
- In Animorphs, when Marco drives.
Jake: Do you just hate trash cans? Is that your problem? Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?!!
Marco: I can't drive with you screaming in my ear.
Jake: YOU CAN'T DRIVE AT ALL! - Demitri Martin wrote a short story for his book from the point of view of a fruit vendor writing in his journal. Every time he fixes it, another high-speed chase destroys it. Eventually he gives up and sells the cart.
- Discworld:
- Moving Pictures. Two wizards fly a broomstick into a barn as part of a high-speed chase. The farmers, watching, observe that in the movies they would come out covered with panicked chickens. The owner of the barn comments that he'd like to see that because that barn is filled with cabbages. Thanks to the influence of "Holy Wood magic" and the Theory of Narrative Causality, they do in fact come out covered with chickens.
- The Truth in which a minor disaster in the city streets results in the destruction of several fruit vendors', hagglers, and flour carts, provoking Sacharissa Cripslock to describe the incident in a headline as "The City's Biggest Cake-Mix-Up."
- In Night Watch, the fleeing watchmen deliberately use this to slow down the men chasing them. One of them even apologizes to the cart driver. Also in Night Watch, the aforementioned fruit, egg, and flour carts are trampled by runaway oxen. One of the soldiers suggests making a giant cake.
- Feet of Clay, while Commander Vimes is pursuing a fleeing suspect, he mentions getting close a few times before having to maneuver around a large fruit cart that has just poked out of a convenient alley. The accompanying footnote suggests that the commonness of this occurrence or ones like it are probably the work of a secret society.
- Older Than Television: Early in the climactic car chase in the short story Graft by Frederick Nebel, the heroes' car runs over a fruit cart. Graft was first published in the May 1929 issue of Black Mask.
- Even older, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) has the Saw-Horse "upsetting a fruit cart, overturning several meek-looking men, and finally bowling over the new Guardian of the Gates" as the heroes flee the Palace.
- Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett points out the related chase scene trope of marketplaces, where there are chickens and kamikaze rickshaws, and Johnny wonders if it's actually the same marketplace each time and what the stallholders must think.
- In The Pushcart War, a cart being hit by a truck in The Big Rotten Apple kicks off the entire plot. When Morris the Florist's cart is destroyed and he's knocked into a barrel, the other pushcart peddlers gather to collect money to help him, and the meeting eventually turns to fighting back against the trucks.
- In A Song of Ice and Fire, a fruit stall at a market is knocked over during a dragon chase.
- At the end of the Dr. Seuss book Ten Apples up on Top, when the three main characters finally balance ten apples on each of their heads, an army of bears wants to make the apples fall off. The bears chase the three friends into a cart carrying apples, sending the apples flying. Conveniently, ten apples land on each of everyone's heads.
Live-Action TV
- The Book of Boba Fett. When the majordomo in a speeder is being chased by the Mods through the streets of Mos Espa, he knocks over at least two fruit stalls before finally crashing into an entire fruit market, burying his speeder in Meiloorun fruit. He also manages to tip over an astromech's cargo of crates, smash through a painting of concept art for Return of the Jedi, and break the supports of a water tank—the contents of which probably cost more than everything else he damaged put together.
- The pilot for Burn Notice uses this one before the first commercial: Michael is on a motorcycle in Nigeria, pursued by a car full of mooks with SMGs. He dodges around a cart, while the car plows into it. Michael's narration comments how, as the gun-running capital of Africa, Nigeria is a bad place to drive a fast-moving car through a crowded market square. The mooks step out and wave their guns around, only to have fifty pistols aimed at their faces.
- Community: In "Basic Rocket Science," as Annie pilots the Kentucky Fried Chicken Eleven Herbs and Space Simulator on its triumphant return to Greendale, it sideswipes a table with a crate of apples which are then scattered impressively.
- CSI: NY: "Unspoken." Foot chase variant: The suspect of the week runs after shooting at a politician during a stumping speech. He then runs like heck, pushing a concession cart out of the way and right into Lindsay, who ended up with a nasty concussion.
- Game of Thrones. In "No One," Arya Stark is being chased through the streets of Braavos by the Waif who is intent on killing her. At one point she does a reckless leap off a balcony, followed by a Staircase Tumble through several baskets of oranges.
- Parodied in Garth Marenghis Darkplace when a chase scene ends with the Monster of the Week crashing into a huge mountain of cardboard boxes sitting in the middle of a forest for no apparent reason.
- Subverted in The Goodies episode "Invasion of the Moon Creatures." Super-intelligent rabbits from the Moon are launching an Alien Invasion, including turning Bill and Tim into giant rabbits whereupon they dress up like droogs from A Clockwork Orange and go around committing acts of hooliganism. On passing a vegetable cart, however, they don't knock it over but instead instantaneously strip it bare and eat all the vegetables.
- Even realistic police procedural Hill Street Blues couldn't resist doing this at least once, albeit with a newspaper kiosk instead of a literal fruit cart, which gets demolished by Hill and Renko's patrol car when the passenger in a fleeing car takes "shotgun seat" a bit more literally than usual and forces Andy to swerve to avoid getting a faceful of buckshot. Captain Furillo is not terribly pleased when he sees the mess they made.
- Parodied in the "Dog City" episode of The Jim Henson Hour, in which the chase between Ace and Bugsy does indeed knock over a fruit cart, but it turns out to stock squeaky toys that happen to be shaped like fruit.
- The first episode of the fourth season of Lost opens with a still shot of a pile of fruit against a blue sky backdrop. It's a very peaceful image...then Hurley plows through it in his Camaro.
- MythBusters covers this along with several other Hollywood car crash cliches on their Demolition Derby special. The resulting explosion of melons, tomatoes, bananas, carrots, etc. looked damn impressive (not to mention on high-speed camera), "just like the movies," but an actual car, it turns out, isn't likely to be driveable afterwards.
- Our Miss Brooks: Memorably, in "Trial by Jury," Miss Brooks finds herself charged with speeding, reckless driving, driving the wrong way, and crashing into a fruit stand. The unfortunate fruit stand owner again suffers at the hands of Miss Brooks and Mr. Conklin's automobile mishaps in "Miss Brooks' New Car." At the end of the episode, Miss Brooks takes a wagon load of fruit to the Conklins as a peace offering. The fruit stand owner had decided to give Miss Brooks his stock and start again in another city.
- Sesame Street: Mr. Mortimer Macintosh, who appeared off and on between 1971 and 1992.
- The Starsky & Hutch episode "Bust Amboy" combines this with cardboard boxes. A hearse the protagonists are chasing smashes into a fruit stand; a moment later, the Torino drives through the boxes scattered on the ground.
- Street Hawk: Enforced several times in the pilot's opening chase scene, in order to demonstrate the woeful ineffectiveness of lumbering, unsteerable police cruisers when chasing after criminals on nimble, go-anywhere motorcycles.
- Variant: Top Gear (UK): in the "Car for a 17-Year-Old" challenge the presenters demolish a flower cart, a bus shelter, a row of bicycles, and a parked car or two while pretending to drive like teenagers.
- Also a bit of a subversion. While the impacts look just as exciting as in the movies, the cars did not escape unscathed - Clarkson's car started spraying washer fluid, obstructing his vision, and Hammond's run ended prematurely when he rammed a parked car the others had avoided. Only Captain Slow's car, which he'd driven the way his nickname implies, seemed to come out none the worse for wear.note
- Also, in the episode where they go to Albania, the presenters get into a high-speed chase with the police after robbing a bank. During the chase, Clarkson and Hammond drive past a man carrying a crate of oranges, which promptly spill all over the road. The above-mentioned symbolism for the oranges is prevalent here, as the episode was kicked off by a request from an Albanian mob boss, and while Jeremy and Richard make it safely to the getaway ferry, James isn't so fortunate....
Music Videos
- A dog topples a fruit cart in the video for Who Let The Dogs Out by Baha Men.
- Seen in the Bollywood-flavored video for "Romeo" by Basement Jaxx.
- Soul Decision's "Ooh, It's Kinda Crazy" features the garbage can version of this trope.
Newspaper Comics
- In a Peanuts strip, Charlie Brown told Linus about a movie he saw in which this trope played out. He noted that "No one ever goes back to pick up the oranges..."
Professional Wrestling
- While not a Fruit Cart in the strictest of senses, any time a pro wrestling event has a backstage brawl, it's almost a given that it will eventually stumble on the craft services table or possible a concession stand, and yes, the same messy destruction will occur (usually with a wrestler instead of a car.) Large bulk bags of popcorn frequently appear.
- Pro wrestling also has its own variant of this during backstage brawls. When the fight gets taken backstage, almost inevitably someone will eventually get thrown into a vertical bundle of thin metal poles (think tentpoles) that scatter and make a nice loud clanging noise for effect. These poles have been something of a mystery to wrestling fans for a while because, unlike other typical backstage props such as empty equipment trunks and electrical gear, nobody has been able to ascertain what the function of those poles is supposed to be beyond being fight scene props because they never seem to be actually used for anything.
Radio
- Our Miss Brooks: Memorably, in "Reckless Driving," Miss Brooks finds herself charged with speeding, reckless driving, driving the wrong way, and crashing into a fruit stand.
Tabletop Games
- In the Pulp Fiction D20 mini-RPG from Polyhedron magazine, one of the possible random events occurring in a car chase is "Fruitcart!"
Theatre
- Parodied in The Complete History of America (Abridged), where a fruit stand (represented by a bunch of plastic fruit thrown by one of the actors at the other two) is merely the first of many hilarious obstacles encountered on a motorcycle race to Berlin.
- Happens offscreen in Twisted, when the Captain of the guard mentions some fool atop an elephant is holding a parade in the city.
Ja'far: What, with no permits, no clearing of the streets? What of the apple carts?Captain: They're all overturned!
Video Games
- In The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle Episode One: A Dreadly Business the title character and his manservant are chasing a stranger who accidentally switched bags with Bertram when they all plow straight through an orange cart.
- A variation in Counter-Strike: The map "Italy" contains at its center a small market, complete with destroyable watermelons and oranges. You can bet that in a typical match, the rind will splatter everywhere.
- One stage of the fighting game Dead Or Alive 4 features a market with multiple fruit carts. You can destroy them by throwing your opponents into them.
- Parodied in Jim Pond & the Agents of F.A.R.T. where the title character remarks that on his way to work to accept his latest assignment he paused to "drive my car through a market stall on screeching wheels (helps to keep my hand in)."
- During car chases in the Roguelike Liberal Crime Squad, various obstacles will appear, such as red lights and fruit stands. The "safe" option to choose when encountering one is to drive right through it.
- In Shuyan Saga, Shuyan's first appearance has her fleeing from some guards (her own, as it turns out) through a marketplace, with predictable consequences for some of the merchants and market-goers. The guards don't expect their encounter with this trope to go down well:
Guard: I'm sure the Queen will be thrilled to hear that one of her elite palace guards was foiled by a grandmother getting her groceries.
- SPY Fox, another James Bond parody, does this at the beginning of the third game during a Car Chase on a dam. The titular protagonist's car destroys a monkey's fruit stand during his escape, and the monkey angrily tosses a banana into the air, which then morphs into the Big Bad's aerosol space station in an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- In Modern Warfare 3, your van hits a fruit cart near the end of the Chase Scene in "Bag and Drag".
- Not exactly fruit carts, but one mission in Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions requires the player to smash a certain number of Dim Sum stands by driving into them.
Webcomics
- In Impure Blood, the fruit cart stood between Roan and the gates when he had to be out, by dawn, to escape slavery.
- In Swords, a thief tips over a cart of stabbages to cover her escape.
Web Original
- Discussed during his review of Cop and a Half when the Nostalgia Critic goes off on a tangent and chastises the film for averting this trope.
Critic: Hell, there's even a fruit stand they don't knock over. How can you call yourself a 1990s buddy-cop movie and not knock over the goddamned fruit stand?! The one cliche you're supposed to follow, and you fucked it up! Look at Reynolds! He's supposed to be acting in this scene, but you know all he's thinking in his head is "God I wanna hit that fruit stand God I wanna hit that fruit stand bam-bam-bam oranges flying everywhere!"
- An article in The Onion included an interview with a Fruit Cart owner who, after having his fruit cart run over in many many chase scenes, was selling it and going into the plate glass delivery business.
- Stupid Plot Tricks on Things We Learned At The Movies, # "127. The most unstable object in creation is a roadside fruit seller's cart."
- As with Myth Busters above, the The Slow Mo Guys examined what driving through a fruit cart would actually look like.
Web Animation
- In Helluva Boss, this is done not with fruit, but with hellfire torches.
Wally Wackford: Torches! I say, I say get yer inconvenient torches here!
Western Animation
- The heroes of the short-lived The Adventures of T-Rex destroyed a newspaper stand every time they drove out of their secret base. As the series went on, the owner of this stand resorted to ever more elaborate methods to save his livelihood, all of which failed even more spectacularly.
- Around the World with Willy Fog: In the third episode, Dix and Bully are using a borrowed bicycle to chase Fog and his party through the streets of Paris when Bully, who's meant to be steering the bicycle, crashes into a vegetable waggon.
- The stars of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender have run into a variation in the form of the same cabbage cart in three different cities, much to the despair of the salesman. This always results in an anguished cry of "my cabbages!" Near the end of the show's run, they mention (and watch) an in-universe play chronicling the events of the series (with... dubious accuracy). One of the sources? "A surprisingly knowledgeable merchant of cabbages". The Cabbage Merchant has become quite the memetic character.
- It's four cities if you count the unattended cabbage cart in "Jet".
- In the sequel, said cabbage vendor has expanded into a multinational manufacturer of cars and airships. Said corporation is accused of funding the anti-Bender revolution in secret and gets raided, with the CEO even saying "Not my Cabbage Corp!" They probably got tired of all the benders trashing their carts.
- One episode of Dexter's Laboratory had Dexter accidentally start driving a car. Due to him being so short, he can't see over the dashboard and as such runs not only through a fruit cart, but also a stack of empty cardboard boxes.
- Family Guy hangs a lampshade on it by having Stewie plow into a Fruit Cart and wondering aloud why they always seem to appear in car chases. The scene then cuts to a garage where fruit carts are being dispatched like taxicabs to the scene of a reported police chase.
- The Mordhaus in Metalocalypse has everything, including Dethklok roadies running fruit stands and carrying sheets of glass when Toki and Doctor Rockzo go joyriding through the compound.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- "Sleepless in Ponyville" inverts it. Scootaloo is zipping along on her scooter and she encounters a fruit cart, already turned over, in the middle of the street. She uses it as an impromptu ramp to get some major airtime.
- "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" has Diamond Tiara tip over a fruit cart to delay the Cutie Mark Crusaders during a chase. Unfortunately for her, they're in the middle of a song, so the Crusaders use Offscreen Teleportation to appear ahead of Diamond Tiara to keep singing.
- "All Bottled Up" inverts it as well. Bulk Biceps, who has become an unwitting vessel of Starlight Glimmer's anger, throws his own nut cart at a fleeing Trixie.
- Parodied in the Robot Chicken episode "Vegetable Funfest," where one of the "channel flip" linking segments involves a near-miss with a fruit cart during a chase scene. Then the vendor is hit by a safe.
- Parodied again in the Baby Terminator skit, where during a very slow chase with a cyborg puppy, the mini-truck it’s riding is about to slowly collide with a fruit stand much bigger than the actual vehicle, until the vendor, with no effort at all, slowly turns the truck with its foot on the grill.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: One of SpongeBob's many failed driving tests had him hit a watermelon stand.
Vendor: Hey, what do you got against the melons?
- In the series Star Wars Rebels episode "Fighter Flight", Zeb and Ezra are sent on a Snipe Hunt to get the bickering pair out of everyone else's hair on the Ghost. One thing led to another, and they ended up hijacking a TIE fighter. Inside the cockpit, they start bickering again. In the ensuing scuffle, they accidentally cause the craft's laser cannons to discharge repeatedly, once into a fruit cart that the low-flying craft was near. The ensuing explosion of fruit pulp completely obscures the canopy, causing them to fly over the Ghost without seeing it and nearly crash into a pillar of rock.
- In the episode "The Rider" of Wander over Yonder, our heroes crash into one in space! Wander stops the chase to pick up all the fruit.
