Not the worst smelling landing you can have, at least.
"Eddy, my chute has been secretly treated with a silicone lubricant, making it... the fastest slide to ANY basement ANYWHERE!"
— Edd, Ed, Edd n Eddy, "3 Squares and an Ed"
A hotel or Big Fancy House may have a laundry chute, which takes the form of a hatch in the wall or the floor, through which dirty laundry can be deposited, usually ending up in a basement, or laundry room on the ground floor or basement. If a chute is big enough, a human might enter one, perhaps to make a quick escape; or they might be pushed in by somebody else. If the chute is narrow, it may lead to a Help, I'm Stuck! situation. It is usually impossible to climb out again, as laundry chutes are usually vertical, with smooth interior walls (to prevent clothes being snagged).
Entering a laundry chute is a terrible idea in real life. Laundry chutes, as the name suggests, are designed for laundry to tumble down, not a full-grown (or even growing) human being. If the space is even wide enough for a person to pass through without getting stuck, laundry chutes are often fully vertical and in hotels are likely to be multi-story. Real-life incidents range from the humiliating
to the tragic. So, Do Not Try This at Home, because Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress.
This is becoming a Discredited Trope in modern houses, where laundry chutes are rarely constructed now, because of concerns about child safety, and preventing fire from travelling from one room to another.
For other unconventional ways of travelling between rooms, compare Air-Vent Passageway, Banister Slide, Bookcase Passage, Chimney Entry, Crash in Through the Ceiling, Dumb Waiter Ride, Well Entry.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- X-Treme X-Men (2001): In issue #1, the Spanish La Guardia Civil attacks the X-Men at a hotel they were in, leaving only Sage and Rogue on the loose. They try to capture Sage, but she defeats them and makes her escape through a laundry chute.
Films — Live-Action
- Home Alone: Kevin plays at shooting toys down the laundry chute, with a gun. Later, he sets up a booby trap with a hot iron balanced at the top of the chute. In the basement, Marv pulls a string hanging down, believing it to be a cord for switching on the light, and the iron falls and lands on his face, leaving a burn mark on it.
- Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves: At one point, the shrunken adults wind up going down the laundry chute in the Szalinski family home and land in a basket of clothes.
- The Ritz: Googie Gomez tosses chubby-chaser Claude down a laundry chute after he ruins her act. After he hurls insults at her from the other end of the chute, she goes diving in herself to beat him up.
- Tango & Cash: During their first night In Prison with the Rogues, Tango and Cash are abducted by their fellow inmates, stuffed in laundry bags, and forced down a laundry chute to the prison basement for an unpleasant welcoming party. They have a hard landing on the concrete floor.
- Wonka: While Willy Wonka is trapped in the boarding house, he sneaks in and out through the laundry chute every day to go into the city and sell chocolate. The other boarding house residents help hide him from Scrubitt and Bleacher while he escapes.
Literature
- Good Dog, Carl!: Carl pushes Madeline down a laundry chute as a makeshift slide, and lands in a pile of clothes in the first book.
- The Hardy Boys: In "Mystery of the Chinese Junk," while investigating the second floor of a mansion, Frank is suddenly ambushed from behind. Joe finds his brother in the basement after Frank's assailant threw him down the laundry chute.
- Peace Talks: Harry Dresden and Lara Raith have to do this to rescue Thomas from the depths of Marcone's dungeon. For illusion-related reasons (and Rule of Funny) they first must take off their clothes and slide down the chute in their underwear. (This moment was considered so important that it's in the trailer for the book.)
Live-Action TV
- 1000 Ways to Die: In "Goon Interrupted", a hitman who copped an insanity plea to avoid jail time plots an escape. He tries to sneak through a laundry chute, but a worker dumps soiled laundry down the chute, causing the hitman to plummet 50 feet to his death.
- Castle (2009): In "One Man's Treasure", the Body of the Week is discovered having been stuffed into a high-rise apartment building's garbage chute: he got stuck between floors, and is dislodged when a resident of a lower floor has problems dumping her own garbage.
- Chespirito: In a one-hour-long Caquitos episode, Botija and Chimoltrufia want to help sargento Refugio buy his mom a washing machine. Botija makes Chompiras sign up for an insurance policy, and to get the payout, Botija convinces Chompiras to go down the laundry chute of the hotel, and make the claim that Chompiras got hurt while at work.
- Played for Drama and tragedy in a Season 1 episode of Chicago Fire. Two brothers are playing hide-and-seek, and one of them decides to use the laundry chute as his hiding spot, and falls down it. In spite of the rescuers' efforts to get him out, the boy could not be saved in time, since the fall alone already broke his neck.
- CSI: NY: Implied in "Crime and Misdemeanor." When a female murder victim is discovered among a load of hotel sheets by workers in an industrial laundry facility, it is assumed that her killer threw the body down the laundry chute in order to hide his crime.
- High Potential: In "The Sauna at the End of the Stairs", the team investigates a cold case in which the victim was thought to have died in the titular basement sauna. However, Morgan realizes that he was in fact killed upstairs, and his body moved to the basement via the laundry chute.
- Incredible Games: In the second series, if a contestant loses the Dark Knight or Crystal Caves game, they fall down a chute, ending up in a laundry container in the basement, meaning that their team has to go down to rescue them, which costs them levels.
- Man vs. Baby: In episode 3, the unattended baby rides down a laundry chute and soon knocks into Trevor, who was searching for him on the lower floor.
Puzzles
- "The Hospital" edition of Talking Jigsaw Puzzle features a guy in a set of scrubs being dumped out of a chute into the laundry room while introducing himself (in upside-down letters): "Jones is the name!" Other characters' dialogue is intended to let the person assembling the puzzle figure out which rooms are located above him (and give a few clues about why he's traveling via laundry chute): He apparently stole a nurse's uniform and jumped down the chute rather than get an injection.
Radio
- The Vinyl Cafe: "Springhill" (later renamed "The Laundry Chute") has a flashback to when Dave was nine and he got stuck in his mom's laundry chute. He and his little sister Annie were the only ones home, and he became terrified and started crying. Annie sat down at the top of the laundry chute and reminded him of funny family stories ("Remember when Auntie Brenda sat on the birthday cake?"), told knock-knock jokes, and sang songs to keep him calm until their mother got home.
Video Games
- Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise: Kayla's house has a laundry chute from the bathroom to the basement. This chute is the only way Fatty Bear can access the basement, as the cellar door inexplicably only opens from the inside.
- Hitman: Absolution: The laundry chute in "Blackwater Park" can be used to dispose of bodies; the "Laundry Day" challenge requires 47 to dispose of three bodies using the chute without being detected.
- Hitman (2016): The laundry chute in Sapienza can be used to dispose of bodies, though putting a body into it pretty much guarantees that it will be found. A chute similar to the one in Absolution can be found in Hitman 2's New York level near the basement, though it is a much safer option for body disposal.
- Hugo's House of Horrors: In Whodunit, Hugo enters a Bookcase Passage, and disappears for most of the game. At the end, he is in a small locked room, having fallen down the laundry chute. The walls of the chute are very smooth and offer no chance of climbing up, so he has to find a way to escape.
- Luigi's Mansion 3: At the end of the prologue, Luigi is trapped in a hallway with King Boo advancing towards him, intending to trap him in a portrait like Mario, Peach and the Toads. Luigi is unable to fight back, and can only run to the laundry chute at the end of the hallway to escape.
Web Video
- Rats SMP: The rats often travel up and down the laundry chute to access the Basement of the Mansion.
Western Animation
- Amphibia: In "A Night at the Inn", the kids are eager to try this out while staying at the Dandelion Inn. Polly later uses it to escape the inn’s cannibal owners.
- Batman: The Animated Series: In "Joker's Millions", when the guards find that Harley Quinn is missing, one of them suggests that she went down the laundry chute, but another objects that even Arkham inmates aren't crazy enough to do that (Poison Ivy overhears this and finds his naivete hilarious). Cue Harley stuck in a washing machine.
- Captain Flamingo: In "Beyond the Thundermonkey Dome", after various little kids called for the Captain to help, as they are being constantly wedgied by the Warrior Monkey, Milo, alongside his baby brother Thor complete with a dirty diaper, both escape from his room by going down through the laundry chute of the house, in order for them to go outside and help them.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: The episode "3 Squares and an Ed" starts with Edd and Eddy riding down the laundry chute in Edd’s house, at double speed, because the chute has been lubricated.
- My Goldfish Is Evil!: A variation happens in the second episode, "The Army of Sea Dudes"; Beanie realizes Admiral Bubbles and his new army of Sea Dudes escaped through the apartment buildings garbage chute, and he decides to follow them. It is only after he already entered the chute and is falling that he realizes there might be something dangerous on the other end and laments he should have thought of that before. Fortunately for him, he makes a safe Trash Landing.
- The Simpsons: In "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", Bart and Lisa try to escape from Mr. Burns by going down the laundry chute of his mansion. Burns somehow beats them to the basement.
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Princesses", Star and Marco try to escape the staff of the titular school via the laundry chute. Star makes it down safely, carrying Pony Head, but thanks to Marco's absurdly poofy dress, he can’t fit, and is subsequently caught.