Bag of Holding

You call that practical? Wait until she pulls that chair out of the painting...
"Do you rent space in that thing?"
—Senator Clark on a waitress' handbag in Seven Days in May

A specific portable item which is Bigger on the Inside than it is on the outside. Much bigger. It may not look it, but that's because it contains Hammerspace. Because the holding capacity of the bag comes from internal Hammerspace, a thoroughly-packed Bag of Holding will weigh no more than a full normal bag. Odds are, it will weigh no more than an empty normal bag.

Because of the sheer amount of goods you can store in one, trying to find something specific usually results in a Rummage Fail.

The Trope Namer is Dungeons & Dragons, whose "Bag of Holding" is a common and invaluable magical item; it also has an evil cousin, the Bag of Devouring, which looks the same but will eat anything you put in it.

A Portable Hole is a similar device. In universes where the two coexist, it's never a good idea for them to intermingle (i.e. don't put the portable hole in the bag of holding...)

In RPGs you can have an entire Hyperspace Arsenal in Trouser Space, capable of holding a Hyperspace Mallet or... an RPG.

Compare Clown Car Base. See also Bag of Sharing and Bag of Spilling.

For an entire room or building that is Bigger on the Inside, see that.

Examples of Bag of Holding include:

Anime

  • Dennou Coil, in spades. Makes sense when half the things in the world are VR superimposed on the world and only visible through cyber-glasses. No tactile feedback, though—at one point the main character wishes she could feel her virtual dog's fur. Presumably they've just gotten used to acting as if the VR constructs were actually present for convenience of use. That virtual keyboard is going to be useless if you can't get used to poking the same relative location for the Enter key.
  • In Part 5 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, the heroes eventually get a hold of a turtle with a stand called Mr. President, which causes its shell to become a Bag of Holding. It's even stocked with a fridge and a functional bathroom, which is a source of confusion for more than one of the heroes, who wonders where everything goes.
  • Doraemon has a fourth dimensional pocket for this purpose. Unfortunately, he's horrendously disorganized, so often times he can't find what he wants in a pinch.
  • The "Hoi-Poi Capsules" ("Dyna-Caps" in the dub) of Dragon Ball are small enough to fit a dozen in your pockets, and can contain anything from cars to aircraft to entire reservoirs of water. Understandably, this has made their inventor, Dr Briefs (father of main character Bulma), one of the richest people on Earth.
  • August 7 of Darker than Black won the Superpower Lottery and gained the ability to distort the space around him. He uses it to keep an arsenal of sabres and shotguns on his person at all times.
  • In Naruto all ninja bags, pouches, etc. can be considered Bags of Holding. Just look at how many shuriken and kunai any ninja pulls from his or her pouch. Not to mention full-sized paperbacks, such as those Kakashi stashes in his, and the endless array of snacks Chouji pulls from his own.
    • Not to mention the scrolls from the same story. Items at least the size of a human can be transformed into a symbol written on the scroll and released again later, allowing for easy transport.
    • Remember Jiraiya's Toad of Holding? People could walk around inside its throat.
  • Black Butler gives us a person of holding. During his duel with Sebastian, Claude reaches down Hannah's throat, like all the way down and produces a freaking BFS. Its just as gross sounding as it looked.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: This is part of Homura's powers. It's either behind her shield or up her sleeve. It's hard to tell.
  • In Pokémon Special, it is shown that props and accessories are kept in capsules, which is how they fit in a prop case.


Comics

  • In Scott Pilgrim Ramona pulls all sorts of crazy stuff from her handbag. This includes a titanium baseball bat (+ 1 against blonds) and a sledgehammer (+ 2 against girls). Scott also hides in it.
    • In the final volume, it's revealed to be a gateway into her head too, as Scott enters the bag to find not only Ramona, but a gigantic Gideon Graves holding her captive, as well.
  • The page illustration used to be of the Dutch comic Douwe Dabbert who's got a literal bag of holding which sometimes works cryptically seeing as it provides him with equipment he'll need but not always understand. Once stuck on a road because of a spell, it gave him a pair of shoes.. Only for him to realize that he had to take off his shoes, put the new pair on and repeat until he reached the side of the road.
  • Marvel Comics: There was a period where Hank Pym of the Avengers wore a trench coat that acted as a Bag of Holding because he had used "Pym Particles" (the same ones previously used to make him into Ant-Man/Giant Man/Yellowjacket) to shrink all manner of useful gadgets so that they fit in his pockets.

"You know, what you should have asked is why I would bother to shrink these things in the first place." ::clocks the villain with a sledgehammer that he grows back to normal size as he swings it::

    • His current Wasp persona revisits this idea. One of the shrunken items he keeps on him is a fully functional lab.
  • Shaman from Marvel Comics Alpha Flight. His bag holds any number of magical spells. Only for him. Anyone else? Just don't look into it. Or stick your arm into it. It doesn't like giving arms back.
    • It was also revealed to be a bad idea to turn it inside-out.
  • Savant Garde. A WILDC.A.T.S. spin-off title. The main character has a less malicious bag of holding. Which is a blessing when you are a bibliophile archeologist.
  • There was a long-running story arc, the Bag Wars, in Knights of the Dinner Table. The party stored an enormous amount of treasure, equipment and magical items in a Bag of Holding. They decided to place their hirelings inside too, to save money on horses - and then forgot to feed them or let them out for several months. When they tried to retrieve an object, they discovered the hirelings had constructed a fortress inside the bag, and were prepared to use the party's own equipment to defend it. The inside of the bag is still inhabited by the hirelings' descendants, and now sports several settlements and at least one large city.
    • The idea was later expanded into the concept of "Bag Wurld". A certain percentage of "large capacity storage items" do not open onto individual storage spaces, but onto an otherdimensional planet, where items from individual bags and devices rest in "Bag Zones" separated by many miles. Once a character is aware of this, the option is available to enter a bag and travel to other Bag Zones for various purposes (most often theft of other bag holders' property, but at least one recurring antagonist was established to be using travel via bag as an escape route, and in fact had built his own hideaway within Bag Wurld). Another twist is that the usual dimensional-explodey badness does not happen when you put one Bag Wurld-connected item inside another; while the storage item placed inside is destroyed (and its Bag Zone is disconnected permanently), the other bag and all other Bag Wurld-connected bags have their Bag Zones shuffled. (The good news? Your stuff isn't "lost" as in "destroyed for all time". The bad news? It is "lost" as in "million-to-one odds of ever finding said stuff again".)
  • Disney character Eega Beeva wears a skirted garment which contains an incredible number of objects, often huge objects. The problem is finding useful objects in a reasonable amount of time. Usually, he manages to find what he's looking for, but only after extracting refrigerators, truck tires, furniture and other big and useless stuff.
  • Drywall from Scud the Disposable Assassin can hold anything from weapons to furniture inside his body.
  • Milestone Comics. Been known to manifest anything from lipstick to a tank from her 'bag'. Most items are colored pink for some reason.
  • Fables. Jack claims to have carried around a Bag of Holding in his earlier adventures, but giving his proclivity for lying, who knows? However, in modern day, a briefcase that started out with actual physical limits has become a Briefcase of Holding. Even Jack is surprised. Being Jack of -All- Tales comes with a Weirdness Magnet.
  • Bruce Banner built himself one of these, though unusually for this trope, it actually connects to his lab in the same dimension. Amadeus Cho once defeated an Eldritch Abomination by stuffing it inside. Since this meant said abomination was now running around his lab, Banner was annoyed.
  • Snarfquest a comic strip in the old Dragon Magazine had a moment when the hero, Snarf, wanted to impress a robot from outer space by showing him the revolver pistol he got. Although that obviously would not have impressed the robot, the machine was astounded to see him search his magic pack of holding (essentially a medieval fanny pack) for the gun until he literally climbed into it.
  • Erstwhile: A heroine packs three dresses in a nutshell. This is not a metaphor; we see her do it.


Fan Fiction

  • Lampshaded in the fanfiction I, Eternity based on The Elder Scrolls series. The protagonist, Leon, does in fact have a magic bag that can hold an infinite amount of objects as long as he can carry the weight. It was a joke on the inventory system from Morrowind and Oblivion.
  • In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry has a mokeskin bag that he actually calls a Bag Of Holding. His luggage counts as well.
  • George's “closet” in With Strings Attached. He can store stuff in some unfathomable limbo by holding a thing and changing into himself not holding it, then retrieve it by changing into himself holding it. So far he can put anything in there that he can actually lift, though he hasn't dared try it with a living creature more complex than a plant.
  • The Hypercube (a small Rubik's Cube) in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series.


Film

  • Live-action movie / literature example: Mary Poppins, wherein the eponymous character's carpet-bag contains, among other things, a lit floor lamp and a full-length mirror.
  • Harpo Marx often pulled impossibly large and numerous objects out of his coat pockets. This was most likely the inspiration for Wakko Warner, the Doctor, and probably most of the more comical examples listed herein. Unlike most examples of this trope, Harpo initially developed this as a gag for live performances on stage.
  • In The Mask, Jim Carrey's character Stanley Ipkiss is searched by cops while wearing the titular magical artifact, and they find an impossibly huge stash of items in his trouser pockets, including (but not limited to) a bazooka, a bowling pin, giant sunglasses, and a picture of Lt. Callaway's wife.
  • In Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, Eric Applebaum brings Mr. Magorium some pajamas during his stay in the hospital, and also produces a number of improbable items, such as a garden hose, a euphonium, a plank of wood, etc., from a paper grocery bag.
  • In the Disney adaptation of The Sword in the Stone, Merlin casts a spell (along with a song and dance routine) to place the contents of his entire house inside his bag, because he was going on a trip.
  • Both films of Temptation Island has Suzanne/Serafina's make-up box.
  • In Disney Channel's Halloweentown series of movies, Agatha Cromwell has one of these that's also alive.

Literature

  • In Harry Potter, Hermione creates one of these out of her handbag using an Undetectable Extension Charm.
    • And in a similar vein, the Weasleys own a pup tent that is the size of a 3 bedroom apartment on the inside.
    • This is an ever-present theme in Harry Potter. The Ford Anglia in Chamber of Secrets was magically expanded, allowing 6 or 7 people to fit comfortably in the back seat, and all their luggage in the trunk. Also, the tiny pouch that Hagrid gives Harry will shrink either itself or the objects in it (unclear) as needed.
      • The pouch actual shrinks both itself and the objects it contains, as it is made out of a lizard that can shrink completely if it feels in danger.
    • And a true Gryffindor may pull Godric Gryffindor's sword out of the Sorting Hat. You know, the hat sized to fit on 11-year-olds' heads? (Granted, it is not confirmed if they are actually pulling it from the hat, or from wherever it is when it isn't in use.)
  • In Donita K. Paul's Dragon Keeper Chronicles, Kale's moonbeam cloak has pockets like this.
  • In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, The Luggage is a vaguely malevolent version of this trope, which will regularly eat people but still give you your clothes cleaned and pressed a few seconds later. It's also fanatically devoted to its owner, able to transcend time and space to reach him, and will stomp over or eat anything that gets in its way.
    • Also the Cabinet of Curiosity in Making Money "Technically it appears to be a classic Bag of Holding..."
    • In an interview, Pratchett revealed that he originally created the Luggage for an actual D&D game he was running. It would carry everyone's gear and do whatever it was told, but would do only' what it was told and was something of a Literal Genie. Players had to word their requests very carefully, or they risked it walking of a cliff carrying the entire party inventory.
  • Nakor from Raymond E. Feist's The Riftwar Cycle has an empty Bag of Holding which seems to contain infinite oranges. It's actually a regular sack with a portable rift hidden inside it, with the other end located in an orange storeroom.
    • Later comments suggest the other end of the portal is just above a fruit merchant's stand.
    • Eventually it starts producing apples instead, whoever's on the other side having apparently changed their storage system.
  • Young Wizards features pockets in space that a wizard can access from anywhere, allowing them to put in any number of heavy or cumbersome things and just pull them out when they're needed.
    • Kit has learned the trick of opening his up inside of his pocket, allowing him to retrieve and store objects even while in the presence of Muggles.
    • The series combines a room sized version of Bag of Holding with Portable Hole to get wizardly "pup tents": slap the pup tent up against the nearest convenient wall and it turns into a doorway to your own personal-and-portable bedroom. Or, in a pinch, use magic to hang it off of thin air.
  • In the Whateley Universe, Generator has a 'purse of holding', designed by her boyfriend, who's a size warper. She has a superpowered way of preventing Rummage Fail.
    • And Phase's utility belt. Built by a deviser, it looks like a wide belt with fake pockets that couldn't possibly hold anything bigger than a matchbook. Phase routinely stuffs the pockets with all kinds of devices and weapons.
  • In Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Gwen/Hazel has a purse like this, courtesy of a small space warp.
    • Rufo also has a "fold box" in Glory Road, which keeps opening up, revealing more, and bigger, compartments full of the equipment needed for their quest.
      • Until he trips while folding it up one morning and drops it into a pond, resulting in a forced march and a mud bath when it spontaneously unfolds.
  • In Fablehaven's fourth book, Kendra gets a knapsack that has an entire storage room inside of it.
  • In Malazan Book of the Fallen, Mappo Runt was given a bag with an entire warren inside of it by the shoulderwomen of his tribe.
  • A variant of this is given to Gurgi at the end of The Book of Three, the first book of the Prydain Chronicles. His wallet holds an infinite supply of food, which magically restocks itself.
  • In Percy Jackson and The Olympians, Chiron hides his horse legs in a magic wheelchair.
  • In the second book of the Finder's Stone trilogy, The Wyvern's Spur, Olive (a halfling) tries to hide in a miniature bag of holding. It doesn't work, though, because it's too small.


Live Action TV

  • In Doctor Who, the Doctor has pulled objects out of his pockets which, even if they fit, would have been clearly present by ruining the lines of his suit. This is justified by the Doctor's pockets being bigger on the inside, a common feature of Time Lord technology.
  • This trope is common in commercials as well, most often used to indicate how spacious a car's interior is, how comprehensive a store's inventory is (most often by a woman pulling more stuff out of one shopping bag than it could possibly hold), or how portable and advanced a piece of technology is (the recent General Electric ad with the doctor in India.)
  • The immortals of Highlander invariably had something of the sort. The men tended to wear longcoats which never revealed the scabbard underneath, despite the laws of physics demanding otherwise. The women tended to be even more overt in their breaking from reality, with slinky catsuits, sometimes with bare midriffs, often being able to hide very long swords that never seemed to reduce said female's agility before being drawn from... somewhere. It's probably best you don't think about it.
  • All That had the recurring character Baggin' Saggin' Barry who could produce at will almost anything a person asked for from his pants. At one point that included an airplane after missing his flight because he kept setting off the metal detector.
  • Chris from Everybody Hates Chris speculates this is what his mother's purse must be like.

Mom: "Ah, that's where I left my purse!"

  • pulls identical purse out of purse*
  • The Friendly Giant - Rusty the Rooster not only kept his stuff in one of these, but lived there as well.
  • Jerry in Parker Lewis Can't Lose owned a trenchcoat from which he could instantly extract any needed item, to the accompaniment of ripping Velcro.
  • The transporters in Star Trek are often used as one of these, holding whatever's being transported in the thing's "pattern buffer" to sneak them past customs or to keep them in suspended animation until the crew can figure out how to solve the current problem. Scotty used them to avoid being killed and was respawned a century or so later in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation appearing no older.
  • Kamen Rider Decade's Ride Booker, the device that holds all the cards he uses in battle, is explicitly stated to contain a Klein bottle that gives it infinite capacity for both cards and bullets, stores a sword blade, and allows him to draw whatever card he needs instantly without Rummage Fail. Taking it a step further, the Ride Booker will occasionally eject cards into the air in order to let him get to them faster.
    • Likewise Kamen Rider Diend's card holder, which is smaller and much less fancy.[1] It's implied that Decade and Diend both dip into the same "well", explaining why Diend only uses primary Riders after Decade has unlocked them.
  • Barney and Friends had the Barney Bag, which was capable of holding anything and everything needed for a given episode.
  • In The Aunty Jack Show, Kid Eager is shown to have large number of items hidden in his oversized, suspendered trousers, at one stage believed to include Thin Arthur's upright piano and Aunty Jack's motorbike.
  • Dave's red hat on Imagination Movers
  • On How I Met Your Mother Robin is the designated "vice girl" at funerals, carrying a bag with every form of intoxicant or other carnal delight the mourners might need to handle their grief. The bag's so well stocked that it becomes a cross between this trope and Crazy Prepared; if she's even able to produce a copy of Crocodile Dundee 3 on demand, what all else must she have in there?
  • An early Emma Peel episode of The Avengers shows Steed able to produce a steaming pot of tea from a valise.
  • The titular brothers in the Norwegian comedy series Brødrene Dal have an old-fashioned hiking backpack containing just about everything you can imagine. The backpack itself contains a tent which looks like an ordinary tent on the outside, but on the inside has several floors, a wooden staircase, telephone, TV etc.
  • In Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, the titular pirates have belt buckles that store their Ranger Keys. Despite being no bigger than a pack of cards, it seems to hold an infinite number of keys and will eject them if the Gokaiger in question doesn't have a free hand.[2] One episode shows that the buckles are linked to the treasure chest that holds all the keys normally and resides on the Gokaigers' home ship, as well as demonstrating the process by which a buckle is linked to the chest (done for the just-recently-joined Sixth Ranger).


Mythology

  • Santa Claus carries his toys and other gifts in one of these, naturally.
  • Older Than Print: Celtic Mythology has a couple:
    • There's the crane bag of Aoife, owned by Manannan Mac Lir. In one story ("Manannan at Play"), he pulls out of it a long string of silk, a hare, a dog, a boy, and a woman; and you can figure out happens next.
    • In the Mabinogion the crafty Rhiannon uses a what is specifically described a small bag to trick her unwanted suitor, Gwawl. It holds an entire feast's worth of food without being full and when he puts both feet into it, Gwawl himself, with enough space to tie the bag closed over his head.


Tabletop Games

  • The eponymous example from Dungeons & Dragons is a sack that does pretty much exactly what the intro describes, with a few caveats. A bag of holding has a set weight, meaning that a normal empty bag would weigh less than an empty bag of holding. They also have maximum sizes and weight limits, and you don't want to put sharp objects in them without some sort of protection. To get a good idea of what a bag of holding is, just imagine a sack whose opening goes into a tiny pocket universe with a burlap border, outside of which is the vast inky void of infinity. Also do not, under any circumstances, put one Bag of Holding inside another.
    • Actually, there is no limit on the number of times you can recurse with a Bag of Holding. You just have to search all of them.
    • This is taken to its (il)logical extreme with the legend, told in Neverwinter Nights, of a kender founding a city in his Bag of Holding.
    • Another Dungeons & Dragons example is the portable hole, a hole that can be picked up and folded like a handkerchief. Some halflings (being the smallest race) line the inside of the portable hole with thin wooden boards to build a one room apartment for camping. Many wizards fill them with well-organised folding bookshelves, which can be pulled out to form a small library. The kobolds make bigger ones that they use for portable, 50-foot deep, pit traps.
      • Here's a fun trick - slap a Portable Hole onto something living, like a dragon... horrors of falling entrails aside, then throw in said Bag of Holding. Can you say, "divided by zero?"
      • An alternative version of the portable hole has been changed in the latest edition. It's a five-foot circle of fabric that, when you place it against a flat surface, it instantly makes a five-foot deep hole through that surface. (This means that if it's less than 5' thick, it's open on the other end.) Anyone can grab an edge (from either side, if it's open on both) and pull it off, as long as the hole is empty at the time. It's no longer an infinite-storage item, now you can pull stunts that would make Wile E. Coyote proud.
    • A third, Heward's Handy Haversack, specifically avoids the Rummage Fail problem by automatically producing the item its user is thinking of. It acts like a standard Bag of Holding otherwise.
      • As this item is shaped like a backpack and holds as much as most players are ever able to carry, this is widely considered to be the "normal" backpack of any kick-in-the-door campaign.
    • A fourth example is the Quiver of Ehlonna, an Archer's best friend: holds 50 arrows, and allows the wearer to carry around nearly a small armory's worth of polearms and the like. Oh, and even if you only have 1 arrow of a certain type out of the 50, you'll always grab it if you want it.
    • And a fifth example is the Quiver of Plenty, which produces an infinite supply of arrows: whenever you want one, reach into the quiver and there it is.
    • However...watch out for the Bag Of Devouring, which looks like a Bag of Holding, and even acts like one at first, but will eat your equipment... and you, too, if you're not careful.
    • Knights of the Dinner Table produces stats and story for a magic item in every edition. One such item is a variant of the Bag of Holding, a hat which contains a home of varying size and quality on the inside. The rim expands to allow people to enter, and the inside can be anything from a comfortable, one room apartment to an immense manor house.
    • A fairly low-level spell in Edition 2 was Deeppockets, which temporarily enchanted a wizard's robe with a large number of pockets so that they became miniature bags of holding. No matter how many pockets it had, the robe as a whole could hold no more than 100 pounds and 5 cubic feet, but it weighed only 10 pounds, and the pockets didn't bulge at all.
  • GURPS: Magic has the Cornucopia enchantment which is a variation on this. The container can produce an infinite amount of any one sort of ammunition, but it has to be taken out one by one and by hand. To prevent the spell from destroying the economy created objects only last for a minute.
  • Hackmaster 4E (which was based on Dungeons & Dragons 1E and 2E) had not only the Bag of Endless Storage (based on the D&D Bag of Holding) but also the Bag of Hefty Storage Capacity, which, depending on the version, could hold from 2.5 million tons and 5 cubic miles of material up to 10 billion tons and 4,000 cubic miles of stuff.


Video Games

  • In The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, Link has a pouch on his belt. In at least one cutscene, he pulls an item out of it several times the pouch's size. He also manages to store Oocoo (an intelligent creature about as big as a goose) in his tunic.
    • In his appearances in Super Smash Brothers and Soul Calibur, he's shown pulling the items from his hat (or that general area).
    • He does one better in The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask, putting a child-sized Deku Princess into a bottle!
    • In Skyward Sword you can fit shields in your adventure pouch, a tiny sack you wear on your belt.
  • Diablo II goes even further with the Horadric Cube, which takes up four inventory spaces, but holds twelve spaces worth of stuff.
  • The Prinnies of the Disgaea series all wear fanny packs in which they store their various weaponry (Dual swords, bombs, and a magical, beam shooting skull). The Prinny forms of some characters keep other things in it, like Kurtis, who keeps rocket fists in his, and Asagi, who keeps an entire arsenal of heavy-duty weaponry including a rocket launcher, gatling gun, and flamethrower in hers.
  • Nethack contains several types of containers - large boxes, chests, ice boxes, sacks and literal Bags of Holding. All five have the main property of the Bag - they can hold as much stuff inside as they want, without a practical limit. However, the first three containers are awfully heavy, and unfit for being lugged around - the other two are viable, though. Due to how inventory works in Nethack the real use for containers is circumventing the limit of 52 carried types of items (and it's a quickly hit cap, with every wand taking up one slot, items of different beatitude not stacking etc). They're also useful for protecting items from damage - scrolls burn and potions boil when the player is subjected to fire, but inside a sack, they're perfectly safe. The Bag of Holding has an extra benefit - items inside one weigh much less. However, putting some items inside it is a Bad Idea - a wand of cancellation or another Bag of Holding cause the Bag to explode and disappear.
  • Ancient Domains of Mystery doesn't have an official Bag of Holding, but your inventory pack basically functions as one: you can carry as much weight as your character is strong enough to walk with, up to and including logs, ore-bearing boulders, anvils, dead dragons, marble statues, and so forth. There's also one hidden location in the game the Quickling Tree that is Bigger on the Inside; it has a tiny entrance which leads to a full-size dungeon level, and time passes a lot faster than normal in there (suggesting it is a small metaplane, not part of the Drakalor Chain).
  • The titular Simon the Sorcerer has a pointy wizard hat of Holding.
  • Every Final Fantasy XI adventurer starts the game with a Gobbiebag as the standard inventory. The Mog Satchel is another Bag of Holding... that requires the purchase of a $10 Security Token. And the Mog Sack is yet a third one, which has to be purchased from a Moogle vendor.
  • The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy game had The Thing That Your Aunt Gave You That You Don't Know What It Is.
  • Guybrush Threepwood of Monkey Island has Pants of Holding. He's been known to stuff such things as a dog, a monkey and a ladder down his pants with no discomfort.

"That's the second biggest duck I've ever had in my pants!"

  • In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the titular plumbers store everything they collect in a suitcase given to them by Toadsworth. The sequel also utilizes a suitcase, though this particular one is an anthropomorphic suitcase named Stuffwell, created by E. Gadd. The third game features the Star Menu, which the characters use to hold their things via Starlow.
  • As an Improbable Weapon User, Jess from Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis uses this as her weapon, throwing all sorts of objects at enemies: from chemicals, bombs, even life-sized chariots...
    • It gets stranger when "team leader" Flay wants to speak with Muppy who has apparently gone off to some nearby hills. Jess reaches into her bag and somehow pulls Muppy out of it.
  • Clank in Ratchet and Clank somehow shrinks things and stores them in his abdomen. It's been speculated that this is how Ratchet carries around all his weapons.
  • Yoko in Resident Evil Outbreak carries a tiny backpack that gives her 4 extra item slots, which can be a lifesaver. Amusingly, In File #2 Yoko herself becomes the Bag of Holding. Enterprising players noticed that the only way to finish "Desperate Times" by yourself on the hardest setting was to kill Yoko in the front gate area, then stash her body full of health and ammo.
  • Wario Land: Shake It takes this trope quite literally. There is a Bag that you can Shake for An INFINITE amount of coins.
  • Pokémon seemed to be a notable aversion (especially RBY, oh boy...) until the fourth generation, where the bag switched from realistic to Palkia brand. However, even though you had a limited amount of space in your inventory back then, you could hold up to 99 of any usable item.
    • How about the Pokeballs themselves? Ever wonder how you can carry around a Wailord in your pocket as if it not only weighed nothing, but took up no space whatsoever?
    • Delibird's delivery bag.
  • Banjo's famous blue backpack is able to carry pretty much every Plot Coupon in the game without trouble, along with his partner, Kazooie. He also uses it in the sequel for a specific move that transports items that are as big - or bigger - than he is. But only if Kazooie gets out first.
  • The Rune Factory (and probably Harvest Moon) games' watering can deserves special mention. While it's stored in a standard Bag Of Holding inventory, it can be upgraded to hold several times as much water as at first, without becoming larger in any dimension.
  • Hocus Pocus Pink, a point-and-click adventure, released in 1999, has this in spades. The Pink Panther stores stuff he needs in his own skin, which can even hold a woolly mammoth. Link (and see how much Hammer Space went into it).
  • Opening your inventory in Terranigma involves hopping into a jewelry box, which contains a pocket dimension that stores all of your armor, weapons, and knickknacks.
  • Scarface the World Is Yours has a car trunk of holding. You can put any number of weapons in car's trunk, even ones nearly as big as the car itself. To a lesser extent, Scarface himself. A big point of the game is cops investigate people waving guns. Hiding a pistol in your pants? No more panicky civilians. But Tony Montana is awesome enough to hide a bazooka. In his pants.
  • Resident Evil 2 had storage lockers. They were huge and the item selection was small so it wasn't too hard to think everything could fit inside. But no matter how many different lockers you found, the same items were inside.
  • Recettear has this. The vending machines are probably the most extreme - they can sell any item you have. This includes other vending machines. It's quite possible to stuff ten vending machines into the one currently in your shop.
  • Baldurs Gate 2. Literally. You get the Bag of Holding sometime after you find Imoen again.
    • And there is another one for sale in a magic shop in the "Throne Of Bhaal" expansion, if you find that one isn't enough for you.
  • Turok's titular characters pass down a Bag of Holding down their bloodline known as the Light Burden, a satchel that can basically carry anything. Whoever possesses the Light Burden takes up the title of Turok as well.
  • Star Wars games have a tendency to allow the player to carry far more items than humanely possible. Knights of the Old Republic games take it one step further, giving you a bottomless inventory, that is accessible to all party members, at all times, regardless of the circumstances (with the exception of one instance per game, when all items are confiscated and must be recovered).
  • Mega Man has a bag of holding installed in his arm. He holds around 8 weapon ammunition types in the buster. PER GAME. It's Especially evident in 9, where he holds concrete mix, trident heads, robot bees, magma, a tornado creator, jewels, an electricity shooter, a black hole generator, and a regular laser shooter all in a device about the size of his fist!
    • Subverted with Gravity Man. His special weapon is so large, he is larger than any other robot masters in Mega Man 5, and even then, his secondary weapon is only a weak arm cannon.
  • The Bottomless Box from Dark Souls, for when you need to declutter your inventory.
  • The interactive-fiction game Lost allowed the player to acquire a box which opened into a pocket dimension, allowing you to store anything you could pick up. Just make sure not to put any other type of container in it; it's not pretty.
  • By exploiting certain game mechanics in both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, you too can make your own bag of holding. Just find (or make) a corpse, stuff it with whatever items you wish to put inside it, sever one of its limbs and voila! All you need to do now is to use the "grab" function key (default Z on the PC) and carry the severed appendage to the next town. It may slow you down a little, but it certainly beats the burden of maximum encumbrance.
    • You can also fill a foot-wide desk drawer with enough guns, armor and ammo to equip an army. Unlike in the first two games, containers have no upper limit.
  • Gasald's sack in The Game of the Ages is big enough to carry the entire nearby cave. The character's counterpart in the source novel had an entire world in his sack.
  • Karol from Tales of Vesperia keeps a large handbag on his person that he uses as a blunt weapon, and to store the various items he uses as weapons in his different arts. The largest one he can get has flavor text claiming it's big enough to fit Ba'ul inside, and considering that he can store a Super Robot in there in the Play Station 3 version, it seems fairly probable that it's true.


Web Comics

Karn: We'll use...THE BAG!

  • Gertrude & Brunhilda of The KAMics have magical bags of holding inside their helmets.
  • Red Mage owned a Bag of Holding in Eight Bit Theater, Thief stole offscreen and used to store his loot. Thief apparently filled it to the non-existent limit with "more riches than actually exist". Later in the story, Red Mage used it to trap Kary, Fiend of Fire and cast a Universe-freezing spell within it. The bag was finally destroyed along with Kary and Thief's treasures when White Mage impulsively smashed the frozen bag of holding with her hammer.
  • In WTC Comics characters will occasionally reach into what appears to be an ordinary bag, sometimes going shoulder deep into it, and pull out something large. Like in once scene where the groups warrior, Straha, pulls a huge warhammer out of a small bag.
  • Kiran from Chirault is in possession of such a bag.
  • When Natasha Wing from Electric Wonderland graduated college, her parents gave her a cardboard box with an unlimited capacity. She put all of her furniture in the box when moving out of the dorm, but a truck ran over it as she exited.
  • Samurai Princess's Jacquline apron pocket appears to be housing a very large fishing net and who knows what else.
  • Homestuck features "captchalogue" cards, which in practice work like this. They are small enough to fit inside a wallet, yet can contain a whole car or ten tons of pipe tobacco.
    • They also come in many different forms, with different carrying capacities and methods of retrieving items. They can be weaponized and may have some parameters for storage. Really it all depends on how many captchalogue cards you have and how much each one is allowed to hold.
  • The Order of the Stick has these being a fantasy dungeons and dragons comic.
    • More to the point, Bags of Holding are used as a Hand Wave to explain why many of the characters' weapons and other equipment isn't visible on their stick-figure selves.
  • Lardee's red bag from My Milk Toof can hold seemingly all he wants. He bought ickle a blue bag that may or may not have the same skill.
  • DM of the Rings mentions it here:

Gimli: I'm just saying... You don't have a backpack. What you have there is an invisible leather TARDIS.


Web Original

  • The Whateley Universe has loads. Whether it be through technological means; magical means; mutant powers to expand the insides of stuff, or shrink things to fit more in regular bags; or having sponsors who are awesome Chinese trickster gods; between bags, utility belts, pockets, cars, rooms, or simple Hammerspace, loads of characters have more holdouts and hidden gear of their own than the average platoon of soldiers.
    • Most prominently, Ayla/Phase went to a secret Mad Scientist open market and met a student named Mobius, who was selling a Utility Belt whose every pocket functioned as a Bag of Holding. Phase paid four times the asking price, telling Mobius that he should charge at least that much for something that is so useful and immediately put himself forward as a marketing manager and legal advisor for ten percent of the profits.
  • Sam G in Avatar Adventures has one of these. It has a much cooler name, though.
  • There are several of these in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe. The "bag o' tricks" wielded by Chuckles the Happy Clown contained anything that Chuckles could imagine... but only if it was funny. The mutant wanderer known as "Pockets" could literally turn any pocket on any piece of clothing he was wearing into one of these (and more... at least once, he kept an entire alternate dimension in one of his coat pockets). Doctor Ka's mansion technically counts as one of these, being much, much bigger on the inside than on the outside.
  • The party in Critical Hit have a Handy Haversack to share their stuff between them.
  • Cracked Photoplasty advertises jeans with such a pocket in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.


Western Animation

  • Dora the Explorer: "Backpack, Backpack!"
  • The "Ghost Packs" worn by Filmations Ghostbusters, and before that (in The Ghost Busters), Tracy's carpet-bag.
  • In The Legend of Zelda, Link is explicitly shown to have a pouch of this nature on his belt; items shrink when placed in the bag and grow to normal once removed.
  • Merlin, in Disney's The Sword in the Stone, packs everything in his cottage into a single suitcase by shrinking it down. In this case, he also has a Cottage of holding, since the stuff that he has, once unpacked, would take up far more space than his cottage would allow. But of course, A Wizard Did It.
  • Simon Belmont's backpack in Captain N: The Game Master.
  • In Animaniacs, Wakko explicitly has one of these, referred to in the show as his 'Gag Bag'.
  • Similarly, in one episode of The Fairly OddParents, Francis shoplifts from a giant mall by shoving such things as tires, vending machines, and televisions in his pants.
  • Felix the Cat had one in one of his incarnations.
    • Specifically, it was the 1950s TV incarnation, which was later used for The Movie.
  • Bender's internal compartment from Futurama definitely counts as one.
  • Although RJ's bag in Over the Hedge may not be limitless, it is shown to contain a lot of different items, including a boomerang he pulls out whenever he's looking for things.
  • Rico in The Penguins of Madagascar keeps an inordinate amount of items in his gullet, everything from dynamite sticks (pre-lit, even), to binoculars, to a flame thrower, a running chainsaw, and even a safe.
  • In Transformers Animated Swindle has a compartment in his chest that hooks into his own private pocket dimension where he keeps all his wares. Because of the way Space Bridges work, it's possible for someone else to come out of his chest through a remote location.
    • Wreck-Gar from the same series has a backpack like this. He can pull out many useful (and even more useless) items from it at any given time.
  • Sport Billy's Super Sack is a Bag of Holding if ever there was one.
  • The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series had at least three examples of this: Presto's hat, Zandora's Box, and the Box of Balefire. Except that Zandora's Box usually acts more like a portal to other planes of existence (including ours!), and the Box of Balefire summons a very nasty Big Bad.
  • One of Jimmy Neutron's inventions (the Hypercube) is a small box with infinite space inside. He uses it as a Bag of Holding in some episodes.
  • In the Wacky Races Spin-Off, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Pockets, one of the Ant Hill Mob, always seemed to have an unlimited amount of gadgets and gizmos in his "pockets."
  • In The Super Globetrotters, Gizmo had an "afro of holding".
  • Hamilton's box on Maggie and the Ferocious Beast. Not only is it Hamilton's home, he also seems to be able to pull out of it just about anything that he, Maggie or the Ferocious Beast need.
  • In the animated series version of Pac-Man, one of the ghosts (Correct if I'm wrong, but I //think// it was Inky) had a front pocket to himself that was this way. I distinctly remember him pulling a full length ladder from it once.
  • In Wakfu, Ruel's Havresac is big enough to accommodate whole Five-Man Band, with room to spare.
  • In Drawn Together, Wooldor Sockbat does a literal Ass Pull, producing items from his rectum.
  • In The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That, The Cat in the Hat often uses his hat as one.
  • Batman's utility belt seems to function as a Bag of Holding in the DCAU. When Luthor manages to open it in "Injustice For All", the Batarangs and other gadgets that spill out of of the belt are far larger than any of the pouches could possibly contain.


Real Life

  • ThinkGeek.com's aptly named Bag of Holding. It is actually bigger on the inside! In that when fully loaded it can contain up to 16" x 13.5" x 8" but when empty and folded in half it is roughly 8" x 13.5" x 2".
    • There are library satchels designed that have a sleeve in its bottom that can hold the entire satchel inside itself, so it can be stored in a pocket. The mini-bag when unpacked holds a satchel that can carry about 12-16 paperback books, about 5 large bound books, or one dictionary. I know this because I own one.
  • There are any number of "As Seen On TV!"-type ads that want you to believe that this is true of their products.
    • Possibly true for vacuum-sealing procedures (such as Space Bag, assuming it works). But that involves the actual process of compressing it down, then returning it to normal.
  • As noted above, a Klein bottle has no distinct "in" and "out" sides, so basically everything is inside it. Doesn't mean it's easy to retrieve, though.
  • Women's purses manage to contain an improbable volume of seemingly-incongruent-yet-oddly-practical clutter, as noted by male and female comedians and humorists.
  • If you type to search for this article, you get directed instead to the Laconic version with a link to the full version, making it a Self-Demonstrating Article.
  1. ↑ As well as being a Recycled Prop from Kamen Rider Den-O
  2. ↑ Best demonstrated in Episode 4, where Gokai Blue is quintuple-wielding swords and his buckle ejects five keys for a Finishing Move
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