You'd think they'd have gotten the hint by now.
"Send help! I'm trapped in a bottle factory! Right next door to the fortune-cookie place!"
— Description for the Message in a Bottle, Wario Land: Shake It!
Someone is trapped, or forced to work against their will, in some kind of facility that produces publicly available goods (such as fortune cookie fortunes, or candybar wrappings). They proceed to use them as a means of communicating with the outside world and asking for help.
In comedic versions, it's usually just a throwaway gag, and the fate of the mysterious victim isn't ever mentioned. And whether it's played for laughs or drama, it's a subtrope of Distress Call.
Compare Quiet Cry for Help, Covert Emergency Call, Covert Distress Code. Not to be confused with: I'm trapped here, and Trope Co. is forcing me to type up trope entries! Send help!
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Case Closed: A writer has disappeared, though he continues to turn in manuscripts to his editors; however, Conan discovers that said manuscripts contain a coded message for help. Ultimately subverted, as the author was simply terminally ill and had faked his own kidnapping in hopes that one of his fans could solve the puzzle he'd devised before he passed away.
Comic Books
- WildStorm: Warren Ellis in DC's house ads for the 2017 relaunch claims to have been abducted and to be using the ads to plead for help.
Q. What made you come back to WildStorm?
A. I was abducted. Please help. I'm sending this message out through an advertisement in the hope that Jim Lee won't see it and therefore won't give me the hose again. I'm in a bunker under a building in Burbank. Please help me. - The Simpsons: In a 2-part story, Mr. Burns and several other billionaires have been kidnapped and replaced with look-alikes, while they themselves are forced to work in a sweatshop in Mexico. Eventually, Burns hides a note about his predicament in one of the products that's being shipped out, and it just happens to be delivered to Homer Simpson.
Fan Works
- Celia's Stupid Romhack: The options for Button Mode are “HELP,” “I’M TRAPPED,” and “IN A MENU!”
Films — Animation
- Madeline: Lost in Paris: Madeline ends up in a sweatshop making lace, and she and the other girls attempt to knot lace patterns that spell out a message for help.
- The New Scooby-Doo Movies: In The Haunted Candy Factory, Cass Elliot, locked in a room in the Sugar Plum candy factory, throws a "candy bar" (actually something hard with a note) out the window. When the Scooby gang sees that she's being held captive there, they come to the rescue.
Films — Live-Action
- Dude Bro Party Massacre 3: Whenever French is spoken, the subtitles are pleadings of help by the subtitler, who is being held against his will. This extends to the end credits, where Subtitles are credited to "HELP THIS IS NOT A JOKE".
- Without a Clue: The man forced to counterfeit pound notes for Professor Moriarty prints a clue on them about his location. Ironically, Holmes and Watson completely misunderstand the clue, yet stumble on his location anyway.
Literature
- Canned, by Alex Shearer: Fergal and Charlotte find a can containing the message "HELP", along with several cans containing some more gruesome clues.
- According to Dave Barry, when the dome of the United States Capitol was being built nobody realized the writing on the ceiling was Italian for "Help I'm trapped up here and am starving to death".
- Discworld
- Hogfather: A message is in a Hogswatch cracker and says "Help help help Ive fallen in the crakker machine I cant keep runin on this roller please get me ou-". Someone says it's the same old mottos as when they were kids.
- Interesting Times: The Silver Horde interrupt a tax collector in the Forbidden City, just as he's writing (in the traditional poetic form) that Seven Lucky Logs owes one pig and three measurements of rice. Before they take him along as a guide, Cohen dictates a replacement for that text, and so the collector leaves a note reading "Roses are red, violets are blue. Seven Lucky Logs to be given one pig and all the rice he can carry because he is One Lucky Peasant. By order of Six Beneficient Winds, Collector of Revenues. Help. Help. If anyone reads this I am being held prisoner by an evil eunuch. Help."
- Double or Die: Fairburn plants cryptic clues (literally: he is a cryptic crossword compiler) in the letter he is allowed to send his students. If correctly interpreted, these clues reveal that is a prisoner and where he is being held.
- Goldfinger: James Bond leaves a note on the underside of the toilet on a plane, telling of Goldfinger's plot and saying that delivery of the note to Felix Leiter of the CIA will result in a reward, hoping that the cleaning crew will find it; but doesn't know whether or not it got found & delivered, or thrown out, or found by the bad guys. The note reaches Leiter just in time for him to call in the FBI and military and stop Goldfinger from looting Fort Knox.
- Good Omens: The rare "Buggre all this" edition of the Bible that Aziraphale has a copy of is a standard Bible in all parts except for a section where the typesetter breaks up the text to complain at some length about his bosses and his miserable work conditions.
And bye the border of Afher, fromme the east side even untoe the west side, a portion for Naphtali.
And bye the border of Naphtali, from the east side untoe the west side, a portion for Manaffeh.
Buggre all this for a Larke. I amme sick to mye hart of typesettinge. Master Biltonn is no Gentelmann, and Master Scagges noe more than a tighte fisted Southwarke Knobbesticke. I telle you, onne a daye laike this ennywone with half an oz. of sense should bee oute in the sunneshain, ane nott stucke here alle the liuelong daie inn thif mowldey olde By-Our-Lady workeshoppe. @*"AE@;!*
And bye the border of Ephraim, from the east fide even untoe the west fide, a portion for Reuben. - Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, by Donald E. Westlake: The message "HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER" begins to appear in various kinds of goods produced in a prison soon after compulsive practical joker Harry arrives there. With every message that appears, Harry finds himself more trapped between the rock of the warden and the hard place of his fellow convicts. Subverted: Harry wasn't sending the messages, it was the gardener who was about to be released and didn't want to leave.
- Room: Ma mentions that she tried to escape by leaving notes in the trash, without success.
- The Tightrope Walker by Dorothy Gilman: The plot starts when the owner of a second-hand store finds a "Please help" message hidden in one of the objects in her store.
Live-Action TV
- 2point4 Children: In "One Night in Bangkok", a passenger finds a note under their chicken Kiev and coleslaw reading "Help! I am being held prisoner in an airline meals factory. My only hope is to make a pistol out of Edam. Please do not eat your tomato as I need it for ammunition".
- Doctor Who: In "Kerblam!", the Doctor receives a rather overdue package from the titular MegaCorp with "HELP ME" typed on the back of the packing slip inside. This prompts her and her companions to head off for the company's headquarters to investigate. The trope ends up being subverted, as the message didn't originate from a trapped worker, but from Kerblam!'s operating system. It had discovered one employee's plans to execute a terrorist attack by rigging thousands of packages with bombs, while nobody else in the company noticed anything amiss. Ryan, who works in a warehouse back in Sheffield, initially dismisses the message as a prank, implying that he and his co-workers used to do similar things as pranks at work.
- Mock the Week: One Scenes We'd Like to See round has Weird Things to See on a Road Sign to which Frankie Boyle claims to be trapped in a sign-making factory.
- Another has Gary Delaney with Unusual Things to See in a Greeting Card.
- NewsRadio: When Dave is reading cards from a complaint box, one claims to be held prisoner in a complaint box, which he finds kind of funny.
- Stephen Colbert used this trope
in a Colbert Report — Apocalypse Mao: Murdered by the Orient's Success.
- Ted (2024): At one point, Ted mentions that his "mom" is an 11-year old kid in China who sewed a note into his leg claiming that she never had a vegetable.
Newspaper Comics
Print Media
- GAMES Magazine once printed a medium-difficulty crossword with no obvious theme but with certain clues marked with asterisks. Just guess what those clues said once the crossword was completed...
Tabletop Games
- Box One, a tabletop game by Neil Patrick Harris, begins as a sequential trivia game until one card reveals that the rest of the card deck is fake, and contains clues to the whereabouts of the game's true designer, who was kidnapped by NPH.
- Magic: The Gathering: The flavor text for "Gleemax", a card from a joke set, is a plea from help from the R&D team asking to be freed from the giant telepathic brain mentally controlling them and banking on the fact that it doesn't care enough about flavor text to read it.
- Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder: One card is titled "Help! I'm trapped in a shipping card game!", and shows Cheerilee frantically beating at the card's "screen".
Urban Legends
- There's an urban legend of an immigrant or other forced labor using the fortune cookie as a "I'm being held prisoner at [a Chinese food preparation place]." The earliest documented one is from 1955 (listed here) but like most urban legends, it's probably been around for longer than that.
Video Games
- Animaniacs Game Pack: One of the closing animations you get after quitting the game is Wakko yelling "Help! We're trapped in a software company!"
- Arcaea: On April Fools' Day 2022, the game added a menu that would appear after each song to give a list of silly reasons for any changes to the player's Potential score, one of which read "Help I'm stuck in a Potential factory".
- Cookie Clicker:
- One of the Valentine's Day candy-heart-cookies just says "help".
- One of the fortune cookie upgrades says "Help, I'm trapped in a browser game!"
- If a lunatic character hatches a dragon in the "A Game of Thrones" mod for Crusader Kings III, it's possible that they'll name it "ThisIsBearPleaseSendHelp", after one of the mod's developers.
- Fairy Godmother Tycoon has a story part where someone finds a wig — there's a little note attached. "Please help. Kidnapped. Forced to make wigs. Rapunzel." Not to mention the tip, "Help, I'm trapped in a tip-writing factory."
- FE000000: One of the news tickers reads "help im trapped in a news ticker factory".
- Fez: One of the pillars reads, when translated, "Please send help. Trapped in a fez factory." Though downplayed given it's written on a stone pillar and not a fez.
- Hades II: Played for Drama, as the Fates have been captured by Chronos. One of their Minor Prophecies is an earnest plea to the Player Character titled "Melinoë, Help Us".
- Plague Inc. A news ticker update may sometimes say: "Xml_3rr0R$/?$-HELP.i.am.trapped.in.the.newsbar!.^".
- Pony Clicker: One of the news items reads "Send help. Trapped in Equestria, being forced to write silly news messages."
- Shadow Warrior (2013): One of the fortune cookies reads "Help! Help! I'm trapped in a video game factory!"
- Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon: Once Roger gets a high score in "Astro Chicken", he'll find a secret message pleading for help by the Two Guys from Andromeda, the programmers of the game.
- Starbound: If playing as an Apex and inspecting a standard issue chair, the player character will note that they are mass produced in factories... and add that they once found the words "Help us" engraved in a chair frame like this. Given that the Apex are suffering under an oppressive, totalitarian regime, it's not at all played for laughs.
- World of Warcraft has a fortune card that reads "Help! I'm being held prisoner in a fortune cookie bakery!"
- You Don't Know Jack:
- A Couch Gag in The Lost Gold reads: "Help! I'm being held hostage in a tagline factory!"
- Played for Drama in Full Stream, where the Jack Attack prompts for "Escape The Simulation" are Cookie's cries for help after he realizes that he's been trapped Inside a Computer System by Binjpipe.
Web Animation
- CliffSide: The newspaper at the end has a section from someone claiming to be trapped in the CliffSide newspaper company by monsters.
Webcomics
- Gunnerkrigg Court: The eye chart in the first panel of this guest comic spells out "H E L P I M S T U C K I N A N E Y E C H A R T F A C T O R Y".
- Housepets!: The third panel of this comic has a news crawl reading "trapped in editing room send help;&"
- In this strip from Loading Artist, a child finds a "HELP US" note stuffed inside a Christmas toy, presumably from whoever made it. The family treats it as a genuine cry for help, with the father demanding "what kind of factories are they running over there??" The punchline is that his big solution is to return it to the store for a replacement.
- The Noob has a guy with PHD in Egyptology held in the Clichequest offices basement.
- Oglaf: A poet has been violently enslaved in his own home by a muse that's a Brawn Hilda, emphasis on "Brawn", and writes "Please please please help me" on every volume's dedication page. He's later rescued by the personification of his own crippling self-doubt.
- qxlkbh: The alt text for 28 reads "Help I\'m stuck in a title text"
- Schlock Mercenary: The trope is discussed and then used as context for Bristlecone discovering that the very unfriendly and homicidal AI Tagii has a fragment of herself holed up inside Ennesby thanks to Tagii filling tac-info shared between Bristlecone and Ennesby with messages about it.
- xkcd:
- "Pi Equals": The notation of pi is broken up by someone trapped in a "universe factory".
- "Exploits of a Mom": The alt text mentions that the titular mother named her daughter "Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory" as a way to mess with people.
- xkcd fans like variations of this too; one strip consists of a chat log where a character trapped in another's computer is trying to message for help with the other denies their presence.
- "Pi Equals
Web Original
- CollegeHumor: In a Photoshop tutorial video, a guy who has been kidnapped by North Korea to edit their publicity photographs eventually tries to use the instructional video to give his co-ordinates to any possible rescuer, only to be beaten up by the guard.
- Facebook's "Fortune Cookie" app has "Help! I'm trapped in a Chinese bakery!" as one possible fortune.
- Neopets: In accordance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (a.k.a. COPPA), which forbids collecting personal data from people under 13 without parental consent, users under 13 years old are locked out of most things that involve entering text beyond things like their usernames and pet namesnote . Areas of the site that would allow custom text and HTML to most users only gives a selection of canned plaintext responses if your account is in this protected state. One of the 31 available options for a shop description is: "Help! I'm stuck in the shop and all I have to communicate with is this drop down list!"
- In this Not Always Working story, a practical joker in a fast food restaurant thinks it would be funny to put a message like this in one of the meals. The customer didn't realise it was a joke and called the police.
- The SCP Foundation's Log of Anomalous Items includes a piece of charcoal that causes anyone using it to write "Somebody help me! I'm trapped in the charcoal!" every several seconds.
Western Animation
- BoJack Horseman: One of the items on the news crawl in "Bojack Hates the Troops" reads "I wanted to write novels you know."
- Big Mouth: In "The Head Pusher", Nick finds a bottle of "Cotton Candy Brandy" at his sister's house party, which proudly touts itself as the first liquor made "for kids, by kids." The words "please send help" are written on the label as well. He's naturally horrified at this, but Jay uses it as an opportunity to brag about how his dad tried (and failed) to defend it in court.
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In "The Sweet Stench of Success", Bloo becomes a celebrity, but his agent won't let him go. As such, on his variety show, Bloo tap dances a Morse code message saying "Help me, Mac!" so Mac and the rest of the friends who are watching can go to the studio and save him.
Mac: Oh my gosh! He needs help! But why?
Wilt: Who knows? First I've heard of it. Before this, he did funny sketches and songs like "My Evil Producer Has Kidnapped Me and Won't Let Me Go", the "Somebody Save Me" magic show, and "A Little Help from My Imaginary Fr—" (realization) I am so stupid! - Futurama: In "Related To Items You've Viewed", Bender gets a job at a Momazon warehouse on the moon. When it eventually becomes clear that he's stuck there and won't be able to leave, he resorts to sending a note for help inside a delivery of diarrhea medicine and getting "Invasa" to recommend a joke to Fry and Leela that's just him shouting "Help me!"
- Looney Tunes: The Daffy Duck short "China Jones" parodies the "being held in a Chinese bakery" one. Daffy himself ends up being held in a Chinese laundry to pay off his tab.
- Ninjago: In season 4, when Cole is eliminated from the Tournament of Elements and forced to work in Chen's noodle factory, he puts a message in a fortune cookie to alert his friends to the situation and his upcoming escape attempt. In this case, the cookie isn't going out into the world at large, but to a party for Chen's cult and the other elemental masters (most of whom don't realize at this point that they're already prisoners), and Cole is highly aware that there's a very real possibility that the cookie will wind up going to someone on the wrong side. In fact, Chen very nearly reads the fortune himself before he gets distracted and it winds up in the hands of Skylor.
- Regular Show: In "That's my Television" Mordecai and Rigby win a fee to meet RGB2 when he autographs the box set for them. He writes "Meet me in the bathroom" to tell them that he is being held prisoner by the studio executives and wants to escape.
- Rick and Morty: In "Final DeSmithation", the writer of the fortune cookies starts creating absurd fortunes to get people to investigate the factory. He ends up getting Rick's attention when Jerry gets a fortune saying he will have sex with his mother and Rick notices that the probability of that happening has suddenly increased dramatically.
- Robot Chicken: The episode titles of the first part of the fourth season form the message "Help me. I'm trapped in a DVD factory. They took my thumbs. Two weeks without food. Tell my mom I love her, but not in that way. Love, Maurice PS: Yes, in that way." In a twist to this trope, the second half's episodes titles make up the factory's response: "Dear Consumer, we are a humble factory. Maurice was caught unionizing our labor. President Hu forbids it! Due to constraints of time and budget, the ramblings of Maurice cannot be erased, so sorry. Please do not notify our contractors. Especially the animal Keith Crofford!"
Real Life
- Downplayed during the Middle Ages, when disgruntled scribes would insert complaints about the drudgery of their jobs in the margins of the books they hand-copied.
"The work is written, master, give me a drink. Let the right hand of the scribe be free from the oppressiveness of pain."
"Let me not be blamed for the script, for the ink is bad, and the vellum defective, and the day is dark."
"St Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing."
"Oh, my hand." - In 2017, in Corpus Christi, Texas, customers at a Bank of America ATM were dispensed notes for help from a contractor who got stuck inside the facility without his phone on hand.
- A woman whose boyfriend was holding her and her three children against their will called for help through an order with the Pizza Hut app.
- There have been several reports of Chinese prison laborers facing harsh conditions slipping letters calling for help into products meant for export.
- In 2012, a woman bought some Halloween decorations from a K-Mart store, and discovered a note that claimed that the man who packaged that product was arrested, and sent to a prison for "reeducation through labor."
- In 2017, a woman bought a purse at a Walmart in Arizona, and found a note from a man in the factory where it was made detailing how prisoners employed there were forced to work long hours to finish a quota, got a beating for not finishing, and were served little food because most of it was eaten by the guards.
- In 2019, an English girl was writing Christmas cards when she discovered one with a plea for help from a Chinese prisoner inside, along with instructions to contact the English journalist Peter Humphrey, who was previously imprisoned at Qingpu Prison in China, where the inmate claimed to be serving time at. Humphrey was contacted, investigated the situation and declared it was real, while the Chinese government denied the report.
- In 2012,
- The anime adaptation of My Sister, My Writer, which was very poorly received due to its frequently Off-Model art and animation, has one of the staff credited as 正直困太 ("Shoujiki Komatta"). That's not a real person's name—it instead translates to "honestly troublesome", but can also be read as "we're in deep trouble", referring to the anime's own Troubled Production.
- Some versions of System 7 (starting with 7.0.1) have messages hidden in the System file's data fork along the lines of "Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a system software factory!", most likely a reference to that release of the software's Troubled Production, as well as to the protracted and ultimately fruitless development of Taligent, MacOS's anointed successor at the time.