"Lemon, put aside my thinking cap. I need my mystery solving hat!"
A form of Stock Shout-Out to Sherlock Holmes, in which a character (usually of the Cloud Cuckoolander variety), when confronted with a mystery of some form, spontaneously produces a deerstalker hat out of nowhere and starts rattling off deductions.
The other characters are rarely surprised by the hat's presence, and in some cases, the hat might simply be part of an Imagine Spot and not actually there.
Inverness capes and Distinguished Gentlemans Pipes (Bubble Pipes in the case of child or childish characters) can also be used for the same purpose. It may also be accompanied by a large magnifying glass. The key elements of the trope are:
- The hat is deployed in the context of solving a mystery (not for other purposes such as cosplay, hunting trips, etc)
- The hat is not a normal part of the character's attire.
- It is never explained why the character has that hat or where it came from. It appears between shots or panels of the same scene.
Subtrope of Offscreen Reality Warp, Hyperspace Wardrobe. Compare Sherlock Homage.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In the "KiraKira Special Issue" segment for Episode 5 of Asteroid in Love, Mikage, Mai and Endo-sensei discuss strata, index fossils, and facies fossils. Since the latter two can, respectively, indicate the timing and geological nature of the layer, suddenly Mikage (and eventually Mai) changes into full Sherlock Holmes costume, since they think it's like of like resolving a mystery.
- In episode 3 of Himouto! Umaru-chan R, Umaru gains the deerstalker while watching an Expy of Case Closed and resolving to solve the mystery faster than the main character.
- In the His and Her Circumstances anime, when Aya is trying to convince Yukino and Maho to star in her play, they take comically desperate measures to avoid her. At one point she's shown wearing a deerstalker hat and smoking a pipe while deducing their next hiding spot.
- Downplayed in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. Fujiwara's "Love Detective" hat actually does have an explanation for where it came from (she got it from the drama club), but outside of its very first appearance it tends to just show up out of nowhere.
- Cilan of Pokémon the Series, a generally over-the-top character, does this whenever he gets to participate in one of his beloved mysteries.
- Touhou Project:
- In her manga appearances, Reimu is known for pulling out a deerstalker and capelet whenever there's a mystery afoot (particularly in Wild and Horned Hermit and Forbidden Scrollery). Notably, due to Gensokyo's isolation it's unclear whether Reimu even knows who Holmes is, or just picked up the detective thing through Pop-Cultural Osmosis.
- Kasen briefly dons the deerstalker and cape in one chapter of Wild and Horned Hermit as well.
- Forbidden Scrollery has Kosuzu dressing as another fictional Great Detective, Kosuke Kindaichi👁 Image
, in order to investigate Kokoro. In this case it's justified in-universe as a drab outfit intended to help her stay incognito.
- In her manga appearances, Reimu is known for pulling out a deerstalker and capelet whenever there's a mystery afoot (particularly in Wild and Horned Hermit and Forbidden Scrollery). Notably, due to Gensokyo's isolation it's unclear whether Reimu even knows who Holmes is, or just picked up the detective thing through Pop-Cultural Osmosis.
Comic Strips
- Marigold the unicorn from Phoebe and Her Unicorn ends up wearing one impaled on her horn.
Live-Action TV
- The Addams Family: Gomez briefly acquires one in "Thing Is Missing", along with a pipe.
- Doctor Who: In "The Snowmen", the Doctor manages to rustle up a hat and matching Inverness cape to impersonate Holmes when he confronts the Great Intelligence. Then again, he was in the Victorian Era at the time, so he possibly could have just gone out and bought them. This was a Mythology Gag to the Fourth Doctor story "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" where the Fourth Doctor decides to go around in Victorian London in a cape and deerstalker, even though his usual outfit is Victorian-era appropriate.
Web Animation
- Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City: An infrequent gag in the series involves Lime putting on detective attire when a mystery needs to be solved.
- In "Who Stole The Pies" and "Beast of Berry Bog", she changes into a full Sherlock Homage outfit offscreen when the mystery is first presented.
- In "Dreamy Dessert", she decides that Strawberry needs “a detective’s skills” to help her remember her dream recipe, and pulls out a deerstalker cap from offscreen.
Webcomics
- In El Goonish Shive, Diane, of all people, shows off her deductive reasoning skills in a Holmes outfit at one point in this strip.👁 Image
- Jamie of Girls with Slingshots has this ability when she goes into her "Romance Detective" mode. (A cape and magnifying glass usually come with it.)
Western Animation
- Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender does a bubble pipe variant. Katara wonders where he got it from.
- In an episode of Babar, Zephyr produces a deerstalker by turning his usual hat inside-out to investigate the theft of Babar's crown.
- DuckTales (1987): In "A Case of Mistaken Secret Identity" (the title itself is a parody of the Sherlock Holmes story "A Case of Identity"), Huey, Dewey and Louie go into a closet under the stairs, coming out a few seconds later dressed as Sherlock Holmes - each with deerstalker hat, inverness cape and oversized magnifying glass.
- In the second act of the Mr. Bogus episode "Museum Madness", Bogus briefly wears a deerstalker's cap as he starts following a trail of paw prints on the floor which leads him to the Doberman that had been chasing him earlier. When the Doberman chases after Bogus again, Bogus loses the cap.
- Pinkie Pie, in an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic manages to summon not only a deerstalker and Bubble Pipe for herself, but also a bowler hat for her "lowly assistant who asks silly questions," Twilight. The two of them swap hats and roles frequently throughout the episode.
- In a Peanuts animated special Snoopy dons the deerstalker when on the trail of Woodstock's missing nest.
- Razzberry Jazzberry Jam: In “Phantom Of The Jam”, Ella produces not only a deerstalker hat but an entire Sherlock Holmes outfit to give to RC when he decides to lead the investigation into the titular phantom.
- Beast Boy does this in the Teen Titans (2003) episode "Apprentice, Part 2".