How did safes become such cartoon commonplaces? Mention the word and most likely the first image that anyone has in mind is of one landing on a character! But how did this happen? Why not a simple chair or table; why not a television set; why not another cartoon character?
It isn’t only safes, of course, that land on cartoon characters’ heads – anvils and pianos have also traditionally shared that role. Yet it is arguably more common to encounter a safe fulfilling the requirement than anything else. This is probably because the squarish dimensions of the typical safe as drawn in cartoons lends itself most easily to the desired result of a perfectly flattened-out victim.
After all, a piano is likely to break into pieces itself, and while the top and bottom sides of an anvil is as flat as any safe, the solid block-like shape of many safes immediately suggests pulverization – so much so, viewers are likely to already visualize the fact before any actually lands on a character!
Perhaps it’s to do with a paradoxical juxtaposition of words and ideas – a pun on the word “safe,” as in safety, and the idea of a safe being quite dangerous, falling as it is out of the sky. Maybe it’s the idea of untold riches landing on someone, killing him, outright flattening him to a pancake. Or perhaps it’s something that actually used to happen years and years ago, when clumsy movers would drop safes the way they would drop pianos, in the manner of a Laurel and Hardy skit.
Indeed, it’s become quite a cliché, the dropping combination safe. But whatever it is, it all begs the question of how these things became a universal cartoon shorthand for “death from above.” Like many a meme, there is no clear lineage to be found.
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