Trouser Space

"I always keep a spare pack in my pants. Some would say "pocket", I say "in my pants".
—Strong Bad, SBEmail #197, your edge
There's plenty of space in my trousers... sadly.
—Richie, Bottom, after smuggling a BBC camera
Some guy reaches right into his pants. Oh, God! He's pulling out... Well the good news is that it's not his penis. The bad news is that it's still disturbing.
Basically a Hammerspace spot where the sun don't shine. Can be Accidental Nightmare Fuel for some, usually for the characters watching more than the audience.
Women can pull this trick too, but it does not have the same phallic implications.
When the Trouser Space region is explicitly the character's rectum, then that's an Ass Shove. When the item retrieved is a gun, then its a Pants Positive Safety.
Not to be confused with Magic Pants, or, despite being the trouser version of Hammerspace, Hammerpants.
Compare Victoria's Secret Compartment, You Do NOT Want To Know and Treasure Chest Cavity.
Contrast Freud Was Right.
==Examples:==
====Anime and Manga====
*In Full Metal Alchemist, Al likes to store things in his loincloth. Despite the fact that the loincloth is not actually hiding anything due to his... metallic nature, it never fails to freak out the people who see it. They usually tell him to stop doing it, but he seems to like the attention.
*As seen in the pic, one of the demons in Wedding Peach pulls a carnival style strength test out of his pants, actually freaking out his devil master by doing so.
*In Bleach, Ururu turns around, bends over and pulls a bazooka from out her skirt◊.
**The Arrancar Pesh keeps his sword ULTIMAA!!! down the front of his loincloth, and massively squicks Mad Scientist Szayel Aporro Grantz in the process. That's quite an accomplishment, given how disgusting most of what Szayel does is.
*Buso Renkin's Papillon has the disturbing tendecy to pull whatever item he needs out of his butterfly speedos, ranging from a key to his kakugane to even a second copy of his costume, and of course various copies of his trademark butterfly mask.
**Disturbingly, he seems to have had this habit [and the speedos] since before he turned into a humanoid homunculus, as the speedos were under his clothes pre-transformation and the key was clearly in there before the fact as well.
**There might be a Shout Out here to the book and film Papillon, which includes a lot of detail about storing things via an unpleasant method.
*In Potemayo, Guchuko can store corncobs, snakes and whatnot in her underwear. She also keeps her battle-axe there when she's not using it.
*The titular Mysterious Girlfriend X does this with one or two pairs of scissors, but they're more "holstered" than "hidden" in her underwear (or bikini bottom, if it's summer).
*Bulma in Dragon Ball once hid a very large diamond in her panties - leaving no visible bulge, which has made some of the more dirty-minded readers wonder exactly where it was kept. After Bulma gets her shorts, shoes and socks back on, she unzips her fly down to grab a diamond out of her underpants. In fact, in the manga, Krillin says he can "tell by the smell where you hid it!"
**Which is weird, because he once beat a smelly opponent due to his lack of a nose (though he assumed he could smell Bacterian in the past oddly)
**Another (slightly more innocent) version has Krillin saying "It doesn't smell at all" while seeming somewhat surprised. Bulma replies "Why should it?"
*In Axis Powers Hetalia, Italy has pulled at least once a pair of boxers... out from his own pair.
*Shuichi in the Gravitation manga apparently keeps an important photo Yuki gave him close to, uh, his important member. This causes an awkward moment when Yuki, who wants to fully explain the significance of the photo to him, has to stuff his hand down his pants to retrieve it.
*Excel from Excel Saga does this on episode 22.
*An amateur filmmakers in Planetes making a movie on a space station without authorization has all of equipment confiscated, and has to resort to a backup camera he stored in his pants.
*In the first episode of Trigun, the strap on Millie's "stun gun" breaks and it falls on the floor from where it's concealed. She's wearing a very voluminous cloak and later on she's revealed to be wearing a shirt, tie, and slacks underneath, but it's nonetheless a rather alarming sight. Not least because what she terms a "stun gun" is the size of a minigun that fires ammo which appears to have been made on the assumption that the "stun" they were shooting for was "clobber into submission".
*In the G8 filler of One Piece, Luffy hid the inflatable octopus from Skypiea in his pants. Everyone was confused.
**Zoro: Didn't it feel funny down there?
**Luffy: Down where?
*Sexy Commando
*In one chapter of Death Note, Mello was depicted stashing his gun down the front of his pants as he left his meeting with Near. This bit (likely understandably) didn't make it into the anime adaptation.
**Though the anime team did choose to actually depict just where Light stashed Misa's Death Note when he had to "hold" it. In the manga, it was implied he strapped it to himself with a corset. In the anime, well...
***It's the place to keep your Artifact of Doom Weapon Of Mass Destruction!
*In Mobile Suit Gundam, a Zeon soldier captured in White Base criticized his captors for not making a proper cavity search before taking out a piece of metal from his mouth and a cord from inside his pants.
**Gundam Wing's Heero Yuy occasionally keeps a handgun tucked into the rear waistband of his spandex shorts. Considering the fandom the series attracted, one can imagine the jokes that were made before this was revealed.
*Black Butler II: In episode 7 Hannah pulls a rather large gatling gun from her skirt.
*FLCL: Haruko seems to be able to fit her Rickenbacker bass guitar inside her underwear. That, a giant boxing glove on a spring and who knows what else...
*Poemi roots around in the front of her skirt for rather long, with her arm rather far in, before she pulls out her pager.
*Kochikame: Special Detective Kitano who only wears a speedo and equipped with sidearms always pulls a banana to eat from that spot along with cell phones and other stuffs.
====Films====
*From Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Gay Perry pulls a gun from here. It freaks Harry out.
*From Blazing Saddles:
**Bart: Excuse me while I whip this out.(reaches into waistline as crowd gasps and screams; Bart pulls out paper, they sigh with relief)(Or was it disappointment?)
*Done with a not ridiculously large object in Snatch, but still lampshaded and spoofed. At one point two wannabe gangsters are going to turn over a huge diamond to a mob boss in order to get themselves out of trouble with said mob boss. When they're outside the mobster's headquarters, it turns out that the slightly ditzy one has hidden it in Trouser Space. The Following conversation takes place:
**Sol: Well why did you put it down there?
**Vince: In case we got mugged.
**Sol: You're not from this planet are you, Vincent? Who is gonna mug two black fellas, who're holding pistols, while sitting in a car that's worth less than your shirt?!!
***And then right after this, a different gangster who is after the diamond taps on the window of their car with his Desert Eagle. It turns out Trouser Space actually keeps the diamond hidden a little longer.
*Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). Watched by a wide-eyed Mina Harker, Lucy Westenra appears to be reaching into the trousers of her American suitor, saying "Let me touch it; it's so big!" only to remove a huge Bowie knife.
*Lampshaded and parodied in Lean on Me, where one high school character imitates the Principal's demeanor while unlocking a door. He reaches into his beltline, finds something, and says "ooh, thats not the key".
*The Sting. Johnny Hooker demonstrates trouser space when suggesting that a money courier should hide his money there. This was a trick. During the demonstration, Hooker switched the courier's money for a wad of plain paper.
*The Mask: When the Mask is searched by some policemen, they extract all kinds of crazy stuff from his trouser pockets, including a bazooka and a framed portrait of the lead detective's wife.
*In Tropic Thunder, Jeff Portnoy is in just his underpants during an intense firefight. He reaches into said underpants, and after struggling for a moment pulls out a pistol and fires a bunch of blanks.
*The Emperor's New Groove: Yzma hikes up her skirt, saying "I bet you weren't expecting ... THIS!" Pacha and Kuzco are scared at first ... and then realize she's just pulling out a vicious-looking dagger, and sigh in relief.
*In 3 Dev Adam, El Santo never pulls an overly-large object out of his wrestling shorts. However, he does stuff much of Spider-Man's lair into the front of them during his search. Lampshaded in a review by website I-Mockery when El Santo carries around a corpse of Spider-Man, the reviewer comments that El Santo must have ran out of room to stuff him in.
*In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Baby Brent sticks the giant ceremonial scissors for the unveiling of Sardineland down the back of his pants. You can even see the handles stick out as he turns around.
*In Broken Arrow, after she encounters him on the train, Terry picks up a SIG-Sauer P228 from Max and puts it in the back of her pants. When they are cornered by one of Deakins' men, Hale tricks him into "drop a gun," grabs the hidden SIG-Sauer P228 and places a Beretta 92FS into Terry's trouser.
*City Heat. In the final shootout Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds keep producing larger pistols in an attempt to both shoot the mooks and one-up each other. Clint naturally has the biggest gun, an absurdly long-barreled revolver which he pulls out of his trousers.
*Similarly, In Batman The Joker pulls an absurdly long-barreled revolver out of the front of his trousers.
*Let's Get Harry (1986). A group of construction workers, financed by a gung-ho businessman and advised by a mercenary, go down to Columbia to rescue a colleague. The mercenary, who's given them strict instructions not to try bringing guns into the country, walks into their hotel room, grabs the businessman by the crotch and says, "I want you to give me this." While the others are gaping at this apparent Ho Yay, the businessman gives a shamefaced grin and produces a 9mm pistol from his underpants.
====Live Action TV====
*In an episode of The Goodies, Tim is shown to be keeping all manner of things in his boxers, including a wad of cash and a Union Jack tea mug.
*A running gag in 'Allo 'Allo! was putting things down people's trousers to hide them. This included sausages, money, and rolled-up valuable paintings.
**Also batteries, sticks of dynamite, rolled-up copies of valuable paintings, batteries disguised as sausages, sticks of dynamite disguised as sausages, valuable paintings and copies thereof rolled up and stored inside sausages, the same stored inside baguettes... Are we getting the idea, here?
*Gaius Baltar has done this in Battlestar Galactica. Played totally straight, even with a strip search.
*Played magnificently in an episode of All That, which featured Baggin' Saggin' Barry, a guy who could pull anything out of his comically oversized pants. When a similarly abilitied rival came into town, he was at first depressed. Then a Magical Negro told him to "reach down deep". The result? A Trouser Space contest with his rival, which he won by pulling out Abraham Lincoln.
*Bill on The Red Green Show is a master of this trope, constantly pulling things out of "storage space" in his overalls, up to and including a whole bicycle.
*Richie in Bottom fit a whole BBC camera in down there.
*There's plenty of space in my trousers... sadly.
*The Doctor Who episode, "The Runaway Bride". Donna is forced to hang a lampshade on how The Doctor manages to carry around a large two-handed R/C controller complete with aerial in his trousers.
*
*:The Doctor: Bigger on the inside. * wink*
*In the first episode of Wiseguy, The Mafia is surprised to see an Arms Dealer bring his woman to their meeting. As things go badly we see her casually unbuttoning her skirt (how she does this without attracting attention is not explained), then she somehow produces an Ingram MAC-10 and starts blazing away. Now admittedly the MAC-10 is quite small for an SMG, but it's still a large chunk of metal to be hiding between your legs while wearing a tight skirt. It's worth noting that this scene was based on a real-life arms deal in which the narrator noticed the women at the meeting were concealing firearms between their legs just from the way they sat down.
*In the episode 6 of Al TV, during an interview with Ozzy Osbourne, "Weird Al" Yankovic recalls that it's just where he's put his bologna﻿ sandwich.
*In a season 3 episode of Due South, Fraser manages to smuggle files for Ray out of the police station by hiding them in the front of his trousers.
*Ray Kowalski: You're empty handed.
*Fraser: Yes, but I am not empty trouser-ed.
**Possibly justified, the jodhpurs probably have enough space for it at least.
*Late night comedian Craig Ferguson made this trope into a Running Gag on his show, first setting up the joke and then using a robotic sidekick named Geoffrey Peterson to deliver the punchline "In your pants!"
*Similarly, "In my pants!" became a running gag of Gilbert Gottfried's for a while on the remade Hollywood Squares.
*3000 MST3K - Torgo delivers a pizza to Doctor F. and Frank. He starts to get their complimentary 'crazy bread', reaching into his trousers before they holler "NO!!!"
*In an episode of Babylon 5, Sheridan is going to negotiate with a Mad Bomber and wants to keep a com line open with Garibaldi. He knows that his com link will be visible if it's on his hand as usual, and that the bomber will likely think of checking if he hides it in his shirt. So he drops it down his pants. It works great until he sits on it.
====Video Games====
*Lampshaded in Zork: Grand Inquisitor: From the beginning of the game, the player possesses a "permasuck machine" which is basically a canister vacuum. When he places it on the ground, Dalboz asks, "Just where were you keeping that?"
*The original Secret of Monkey Island game. Guybrush Threepwood stores his entire (Significant) inventory in his pants, with a particularly notable example involving the 'Key' to the Monkey-Cave (A gigantic cotton swab)... seeing him pull that out of his pants is vaguely disturbing. In LeChuck's Revenge, he acquires a jacket, and starts storing large objects in his inner pockets instead. Which is a real shame, since he picks up a living monkey at one point, and the sheer number of puns and bad jokes that could've resulted from him stuffing that in his pants would be terrifying.
**Don't forget the large dog he's able to shove into his coat.
**At one point in LeChuck's Revenge, he finds his entire (usually sizable by that point) inventory has been into a single manila envelope, which he can (and really should) pick up and put in his pants. Upon opening it....
**Guybrush: Hey! That tickles.
**The storing-stuff-in-his-pants aspect is returned and played up even more in Curse of Monkey Island, especially as you see Guybrush putting everything into and out of his pants. This includes a 60-pound block of tofu at one point in the game.
**Don't forget the banana picker Guybrush puts in his pants at one point. And there's a scene in the third game where he's stuck in quicksand: "Hang on, the quicksand is sucking all the cool stuff I found in that snake from my pants. Now THERE'S an odd sensation."
***On several occasions during Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush will suggestively waggle his eyebrows at the camera as he puts some implausible device (such as a ten-foot-long boat pole) into his pants.
**Escape from Monkey Island doesn't animate you taking things out of your pants per se, but if you pull up your inventory in the company of other characters, they will often call you out on the fact that you're technically rifling through your pants (with vaguely naughty jokes thrown in).
**Homage is paid to this by Awakener.
**A bit subverted in Tales of Monkey Island: Chapters 1 through 4 has Guybrush mention his "trousers" or "pants pockets" when he places items in his inventory; but in Chapter 5, when he places the tiny pyrite parrots into the tip jar he has gotten, he says, "Sorry, guys. I need to keep you in a more contained space than my jacket pockets!"
*Played straight in another LucasArts adventure game - The Dig. Somewhat justified in that you're never carrying a great number of objects and none of them are particularly large - your shovel is a pocket shovel - but still beyond what anyone could realistically carry.
**Many of these same jokes make it into Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, as many of the Lucasarts people from the MI series reconvened at Telltale.
*Lampshaded in the computer game Space Quest III:
*You put the ladder in your pocket. Ouch!
*And again in Space Quest VI, after trying to pick up a plank:
*Narrator: Bet you can't fit that thing in your pants. Guess I was wrong, it does fit. There must be plenty of spare room in there.
*Speaking of Sierra, this trope is lampshaded Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (In Several Wrong Places) where Larry has to collect a 36-gallon trashcan-sized Grotesque Gulp soda. The narrator wonders how Larry's going to carry it with him...and then remembers that this is an adventure game and lets Larry just stuff the drink in his pocket.
*Tex Murphy pulls a 4-foot long bamboo pole out of his in The Pandora Directive.
*All of the (bearded) freed prisoners in Metal Slug hide bonuses in their underwear. Including weapons. Is that a Super Grenade in your pocket or are you happy to... Aw, never mind. What makes it hilarious is the giant grin they give you as they shake the bonus out.
**The boxers are comically-large and he manages to pull them out of his pants in one-piece and then put them back in easily.
*When becoming Calamity Jane in Wild Arms 3, Maya has a chain gun drop out of her skirt.
*Trucy does it with her panties as a magic trick in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. Fortunately for the sanity of us all, they aren't panties that she actually wears.
*When Johnny Cage wins a round in the original Mortal Kombat, where exactly does he pull his sunglasses from?
*Miyamoto Musashi from Sengoku Basara keeps some sort of giant broom/sword/thing don't the front of his trousers, which he pulls out whenever it's time to really kick some butt.
*In The Saboteur, Sean Devlin is always seen pulling out his guns somewhere inside his torso or pants.
*Lampshaded in Thy Dungeonman, who is constantly putting stuff into his "roomy loin-cheese cloth".
*Pajama Sam, who seems to have plenty of space in the dropseat of his pajamas.
*In The Sims series of games, people pull anything from an engagement ring to garden tools from their pants. Can be made interesting if they are doing that while in their underwear, or naked if you have certain Game Mods installed.
**With the Sims 2 inventory system, Sims could pull minivans out of their trousers.
*Lampshaded by Barney halfway through Heart Of Evil, when he expresses concern over the fact that Percy might have accidently ejaculated on the Roasted Moose given to him at the beginning of the game.
**Later on, Barney himself yells in disgust after he apparently peed himself. It turns out that he had just spilled his glass of applejuice in his underpants. Needless to say, you stock up on the little food you can get during a war.
====Western Animation====
*Joker in Batman The Brave And The Bold once decided against the gas gun, knife, or pie he had up his sleeve and instead went for the bazooka that came out of his pants.
*An episode of Fairly OddParents had Francis the Bully shoplifting and sticking increasingly enormous items into his pants, including a large-screen TV, a generator, a car tire, and a 55 gallon drum.
*One episode of Total Drama Island features Cody somehow storing a loaf of bread and a can of soda in his pants without any apparent difficulty walking.
*Cody: I was gonna make us a...romantic picnic.
*Gwen: With bread from your pants?!
*The dragons in Dragon Tales have pouches that they can store seemingly anything in. They don't wear pants, but it's close.
*Futurama: While thinking he is a robot, Fry takes some sandwiches from his pants and offers them to his friends, saying he took them from his compartment. They are not interested.
*Animaniacs's Yakko keeps lots of things in his pants. Wakko would count if he wore pants.
**He does keep Baloney in his Slacks...
*A running gag in Looney Tunes is that often characters will pull anything they need out of their pants - most commonly binoculars.
*In the abysmal FernGully sequel, a circus performer pulls a fishing pole out of his pants to save his granddaughter.
**Also, Greasy Weasel reaches down a circus performer's pants in search of the last Chaos Emerald (and in order to cop a feel), but all he gets is his hand caught in a mouse trap.
*In The Simpsons episode "You Only Move Twice", Scorpio hands Homer some un-packaged sugar from his pants pocket. He then offers cream to which Homer quickly refuses.
*Histeria has Mr. Smartypants, and the segment of the show "What's in my pants" which always caused the Network Censor an ulcer.
*In an episode of She Ra Princess Of Power, her brother He-Man pulls out an absurdly long grappling hook from his furry, extremely short tights. It was long enough for She-Ra to hook it onto a space ship, while it was in space, from the surface of her planet. Try not to let Fridge Logic set in, it will be too painful.
**He used the same grappling hook in some episodes of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The animators' intention could have been that he pulled it from his belt, but it's still a very tight belt. Maybe the pouch of the 2002 figure was a try at Hand Waving it.
*On Rugrats, Tommy often pulls stuff out of his diaper, usually his trusty toy screwdriver. Phil and Lil have been known to keep stuff there, too, such as god-knows-how-old graham crackers. Which makes one wonder, how often do the parents change the kids diapers if they never know they have all this stuff in them?
*We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story where at the end Stubbs the Clown starts pulling a bunch of random stuff out of his pants while probably giving an I Quit Speech. Among the random things were his backstage pass, his rabbit, the rabbit's back stage pass; a lucky wale tooth, which was around his size, and a whole host of other weird stuff
Category:Hammerspace