Telephone Polearm



The use of extremely long and thick objects (get your mind out of the gutter) as blunt weaponry carried one-handed over the shoulder but swung two-handed in a devastating arc: think telephone poles, streetlamps, trees...

See also Improbable Weapon User, Blade on a Stick, Carry a Big Stick, Drop the Hammer, and Epic Flail.

Pretty much a combination of Batter Up and BFS; subtrope of the former.

Some overlap with Improvised Weapon.

Anime and Manga

 * Bleach: During Chad's first fight against a Hollow (which he can't even see at the time), he rips a telephone pole out of the ground and sweeps it around until it hits something. This is before he gains any powers whatsoever; he's just that Badass.
 * Thorkell in Vinland Saga uses tree-sized sharpened stakes as either melee or ship-sinking ranged weapons.
 * Within the anime of Ranma ½, Ryoga uproots a concrete utility pole and swings it at Ranma after Nabiki convinces him the pills she gave him grant Super Strength. Of course, Ryoga already had super strength and could have done this at any time...
 * This is occasionally used by Durarara!!'s Shizuo Heiwajima—Sometimes with actual telephone poles, and other times with equally unwieldy objects like roadside guardrails.
 * Including, memorably, the use of a large motorway signpost, complete with sign, that he used to slice the top off a van.
 * Don't forget the tree he completely uprooted. The poor sap in the tree certainly didn't.
 * A Filler Arc in the Naruto anime included a boat trip for the protagonists. When, during an attack, their ship becomes unseaworthy, Sakura rips out its mainmast to use as a giant club. Especially notable in that, until this point in the series, Sakura had done very little in combat that had proven even mildly useful. It could also count as foreshadowing, since after the Time Skip Super Strength becomes her primary ability and her combat-effectiveness skyrockets.
 * During the chariot race in the Part 2 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Joseph takes the first weapon available, a warhammer suspended from a pillar. Wham's response? "If you take the warhammer... I'LL TAKE THE PILLAR!" And he does so. (Later, since one of the race's gimmicks was that weapons would be hung from that pillar, Cars forces two vampires to fill in for it.)
 * One Piece character Urouge wields one of these. Word of God states that it is actually a pencil...and he's looking for a sharpener.

Comics

 * Jason X Special features Jason killing a couple by ripping a tree out of the ground and crushing them with it. Later, he kills another pair of teenagers by beating them with a picnic table.
 * In one X-men comics, X-men are trapped in another dimention and forced to take part in a large battle. Colossus (for who the whole arc is a serious case of It's Personal) goes to battle swinging a tree. The narration lampshades how horrified he would be at the damage if he wasn't so angry.

Film

 * The Matrix: Reloaded. During the Burly Brawl with the hundred Smiths, Neo uses an actual sign post, torn out of the ground, as a staff.
 * In Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, Optimus smacks Megatron around with a couple of trees during the forest battle.
 * Manfred the mammoth in Ice Age uses a tree trunk against the saber-tooths in the climax of the first film.
 * In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers : The Movie, giant-sized Ivan Ooze rips out a phone pole to duel the Ninja Megazord with.
 * Planchett in the 1973 adaption of The Three Musketeers 1973 helps D'Artagnan out in a duel by hitting Rochefort with a tree.

Tabletop Games

 * GURPS: Supers (4th edition) has rules for using such polearms, based on their length and how hard it is to hold them in hand.

Video Games

 * Taurens in WarCraft 3 use their totems (essentially enormous, decorated logs) like this.
 * The Taunka in World of Warcraft use these totems as well.
 * The Mountain Giants can also use trees as giant clubs.
 * An old side-scrolling beat-em up named Crude Buster had this as standard. Larger poles were picked up and thrown while smaller ones were used as clubs. You could also throw cars.
 * Hualin (one of the shopkeepers from Soul Calibur III and a bonus character) uses an enchanted staff that can shift length and thickness to fight, and often shifts it to telephone pole dimensions for stronger attacks. It's based on the staff from Journey to the West, which could change length and width. See also, Goku's Power Pole.
 * 'El Gigante' in Resident Evil 4 can wield a tree at you. Roughly the same thing happens in Resident Evil 5, too.
 * Joachim in Shadow Hearts: Covenant uses mailboxes and pillars as his weapons. He loves his Improvised Weapons.
 * Some characters in Freedom Force could rip poles right out of the ground and swing them. You could bring down a building by throwing enough trash cans at it or pounding it with light poles.
 * This is possible in the Hulk video games.
 * Also possible in Transformers games.
 * In Time Crisis 2 the second stage boss is a huge Scary Black Man who fights you by bear-hugging a nuclear missile by the business end and beating you over the head with it in the second stage of the fight.
 * The Gargantuar from Plants vs. Zombies can use a telephone pole as one of its weapons to instantly smash one of your plants. The others weapons it uses are street signs and another zombie.
 * In Fallout 3, the Super Mutant Behemoth enemies carry an improvised club consisting of a fire hydrant at the end of a water pipe. It's also larger than any other in-game fire hydrant by a factor of two, making it about as big as the player without the pipe...
 * It's larger than in-game hydrants because the Behemoth was meant to be rather less big. It got changed late in the game by punching up the stats and increasing the size of the model, resulting in the huge hydrant, not to mention the shopping trolley it uses as a backpack being a lot larger than what you'd expect.
 * Fallout: New Vegas also has the super mutant favorite Rebar Club, a trio of steel rebar beams, still attached to a large chunk of concrete. The player can also utilize it to full effect, through it takes a nearly maxed out strength score to make the most of it.
 * The unique version is added in Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC, called Nuka Breaker, which is a Nuka Cola neon sign. This itself is a Shout-Out to Fallout: Nuka Break.
 * Nexus War allows characters with the Cloak of Steel skill (or its upgraded variations) to do this with telephone poles, streetlamps, and uprooted trees. While it's possible to splatter a maximum-level character in three or four hits this way, such weapons are usually much less accurate than normal-size melee weapons.
 * Karok in Vindictus wields a battle pillar. It isn't improvised, but it's certainly big enough.
 * The larger characters in Power Stone are able to make use of street lights and telephone poles as weapons.
 * Pokémon Black and White: Timburr fights by using a piece of wood that's enormous when compared to it, and it even juggles it on a regular basis. Its evolutions are also examples, but to a lesser extent, though only because they're bigger in comparison: Gurdurr and Conkeldurr, who swing around girders and concrete support beams, respectively.
 * Flint gets to use Lighter's four-by-four in Mother 3. That same weapon is later used to Ouch.
 * Some large creatures in Disciples use ripped out tree trunks as weapons.
 * Trolls in The Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle Earth can rip out trees to use them as clubs.
 * So has the RuneScape troll Dad, who fights with a tree trunk. Justified, as he's much larger than most other trolls - the average mountain troll is more human-sized and uses weapons like large hammers of bones.
 * In Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires, Meng Huo wields a large stone pillar.
 * City of Heroes had the Titan Weapons powerset, which basically allowed you to do this with either oversized regular weapons, or improvised ones like a huge chunk of concrete on the end of a steel post.

Webcomics

 * Ping yanks a streetlamp out of the ground and swings away with it in Megatokyo. Not only has she used a telephone pole as a weapon/tool on more than one occasion, at least once she has fixed it back in place afterwards (and thanked it).

Web Original

 * Used against Tennyo in the Whateley Universe story "Boston Brawl" when the Arch-Fiend rips up a streetlight and lets her have it. On the other hand, smashing Tennyo into the pavement doesn't stop her.

Western Animation

 * In the Justice League Unlimited episode "Hawk and Dove", Hawk rips a tree out of the ground and uses it to smack the Annihilator around.
 * A Looney Tunes short, 'Scaredy Cat', ends with Sylvester ripping a branch off a tree, ready to charge into battle ... before throwing it away, uprooting the tree, and charging.
 * In Beast Wars, Rhinox uses a tree he knocked over earlier to swat Waspinator.

Real Life

 * Caber tossing comes pretty close.