Feed It a Bomb



""Don't fight him, feed him! Somethin' spicy. Ya know what I mean?""

- Beer guy, Faces of Evil

When a character is facing an enemy with a large mouth and a penchant for eating said character, and tries throwing a bomb into its mouth. The enemy eats it, you hear a "boom", and then see the enemy die. It never occurs to them to just keep their mouth shut and tail sweep/eye beam/claw the character.

See also Eat the Bomb when the bomb doesn't kill the Big Eater.

Subtrope of Stuff Blowing Up. When the hero himself is Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth, see... that trope.

Contrast Mooks Ate My Equipment (where it likes eating your stuff). Compare Insert Grenade Here.

Anime and Manga

 * In the Bount arc of the Bleach anime, Ganju Shiba throws one of his fireworks bombs into the head of a monster made of water and blows it up. Unfortunately, it can easily reform itself and does so.
 * Except the sparks from the firework bomb sizzled out the bottle caps that worked as the water doll's nucleus, killing the monster.
 * In Naruto Sasuke defeats summon, which sucks everything in a large area into its mouth, by shooting a huge fireball down its throat.
 * Asuka and Shinji do this using a battleship set to explode against a giant fish Angel in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
 * One of Gluttony's more gruesome deaths in Fullmetal Alchemist is in this fashion.
 * In one episode of Sonic X, Sonic and friends defeat a giant robot by dropping a bomb into its mouth. In the Japanese version, Sonic even exclaims, in Gratuitous English, "IT'S LUNCH TIME!". It's better than it sounds, particularly because the show's opening theme, "Sonic Drive", plays during the sequence.
 * Shuda in Rave Master can create explosions just about anyplace he wishes. However, when faced with an enemy who causes it to rain on their battlefield (dampening the power of those explosions) Shuda responds by creating one in his enemy's throat.

Comic Books

 * Averted by Matter Eater Lad/Tenzil Kem, who, being from the planet Bismoll, can eat anything, including the raw materials for a bomb, with no ill effects. Unless it's magic.
 * A shark accidentally swallows a mine intended for Tintin's boat in The Red Sea Sharks (title is not Exactly What It Says on the Tin). We hear it hiccup for a while, then it culminates with a "hicBOOOOOOOOOMMMM".

Film
"Brody: Smile, you son of a bitch!"
 * In the film Return to Oz, it's established that chicken eggs are deadly poison to Nomes. At the climax, the Nome King has transformed himself into a giant claymation rock-monster and is dangling Jack Pumpkinhead over his gaping maw. Guess what falls out of Jack's hollow head... the result is more of an implosion, but it's still impressive.
 * Near the end of Tremors, one of the Graboids is killed by tricking it into swallowing a homemade pipe-bomb with a lit fuse, blowing it to bits.
 * In the sequel, this has become the "standard" solution for killing Graboids: send out a toy remote-controlled car with some dynamite strapped to it ("2 pounds of C4 may be a little... excessive"). When a Graboid snags the car, trigger the detonator remotely from a safe distance. This works quite well, until
 * In Men in Black, after the Bug has eaten the BFGs, K goads it into eating him. He survives being swallowed, finds the gun and fires it, resulting in the Bug's abdomen being split open, letting K out.
 * At the end of the Hellboy film, HB yanks the pins out of an entire belt of grenades just before he and the belt are swallowed by a betentacled monster. Hellboy is fireproof; the monster isn't.
 * In a b-movie called Spiders, the mightiest of the Giant Spiders is heavily armored, able to resist bullets and explosives. It is finally beaten when a bazooka is fired into its mouth.
 * In the Starship Troopers movie, Dizzy's CMOA is when she chucks a grenade into the non-gaping maw of a tanker bug, American football style.
 * Chief Brody does this in the Jaws movie. After the shark gets an air tank wedged in its mouth, Brody shoots at it and ruptures it, causing a titanic explosion that blows the shark's head to bits.


 * Busted, unfortunately, by the MythBusters. While you can puncture an air tank, and the jet of air rushing out will make mincemeat out of a shark who has one wedged in its mouth, it's not going to explode unless you have a pyrotechnics team to rig it with remote-detonated C4 beforehand.
 * Referenced in Resident Evil 2, with a T-virus mutated, sewer-dwelling alligator taking the shark's place. Not necessary, mind; you can beat it like most bosses but since it's a Survival Horror game, it's the better, and cooler, choice of the two.


 * Darwin gets offed in this way in X-Men: First Class.
 * How to Train Your Dragon shows what happens when one dragon breathes fire into another's mouth.
 * In The Mask, the protagonist purposely swallows a bomb to prevent it from killing everyone else; his toon-like powers let him survive with little more than slight heartburn.

Folklore

 * In a story that's in the Apocrypha of The Bible, Daniel kills a dragon this way.
 * There's a similiar Polish folktale about a hero named Krak who builds a rudimentary explosive and feeds it to a dragon that's been terrorizing the land. The Polish people are so grateful they name the city of Krakow after him.
 * In another version it was Dratewka the shoemaker who killed the dragon, while Krak was already the ruler.
 * There's also an English folktale (The Mordiford Wyvern) about a man killing a dragon by covering a barrel in spikes and hiding inside it. The dragon swallows the barrel and suffers fatal wounds from the spikes. Of course the man dies too as getting swallowed by an bled on by a dragon is not good for your health.

Literature

 * In Wrath of the Lemming Men (Vol. 3 of the Chronicles of Isambard Smith) Captain smith does this to defeat the Ghast (Giant ant man) Number 8, ramming its own grenade down its throat,  (He gets better.)
 * In Gateways, a two-headed alligator snapping turtle chomps and swallows anything that moves near her. This proves unwise when Jack fends off her attacks by tossing a grenade.

Live-Action TV

 * Used twice in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Doomsday Machine" by first flying a shuttle into the maw of the machine and detonating the engines, having only a small effect. Then flying the wreckage of a starship into the the machine and detonating the impulse engines destroying the machine's insides but leaving the hull intact.
 * You encounter another in Star Trek Online. The only way to defeat it is by shooting special torpedoes into its mouth - right after it blasts at you.
 * Subverted in the last season of Stargate SG-1, when Teal'c tried to get rid of the Sangraal's guardian by throwing C-4 into it's mouth. Said guardian was a wyvern dragon.
 * One Ed Sullivan skit (based on an old IBM training video) was about a Cookie Monster-lookalike taking a machine apart piece-by-piece and eating it. The skit ends with the machine warning the monster that destroying all of the components of said machine will cause it to perform its primary function as the most powerful explosive weapon known to man, as a result the monster combusts.
 * Done once figuratively in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (against Pudgy Pig) and once literally in Power Rangers Turbo (against Goldgoyle).

Video Games

 * The Dodongo from The Legend of Zelda games are giant dinosaurs who when fed Link's bombs will damage it or make it susceptible to attack from his sword.
 * Oddly, in the original The Legend of Zelda game, it was more effective to let a bomb explode in front of the Dodongo. This stunned it and let you kill it in one shot (and one bomb), while it had to swallow three bombs to kill it that way.
 * Pretty much every other boss in The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games involves Link throwing bombs in its mouth, such as the aforementioned Dodongo, and other bosses like the giant spinning Head Thwomp and the frequent mini-boss Facade.
 * The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess does this too; a giant frog boss in the Lakebed Temple stuns itself when it falls from the ceiling. However, when it opens its mouth, you can toss a bomb in there to stun him again, thus preventing most of its attack pattern.
 * Before the Lakebed Temple, there are carnivorous plants in the Forest Temple which can only be killed by lobbing Bomblings into them. Similarly, there's a miniboss that's a cross between one of the above plants with a Deku Baba. The plant can only be bombed once the Baba is killed.
 * It occurs at least once in The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks, with the Fire Babas, fireball-spitting, Link-eating plants that can swallow bombs if you throw them with the proper timing. This kills them in one hit, which is good, since the usual method of fighting them (with your sword), can be quite tedious, and runs the risk of you getting swallowed and taking a fair amount of damage.
 * What seems like every other enemy in The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass is defeated this way.
 * In The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker, the enemies called Armos Knights and the boss Gohdan are defeated this way.
 * Scaldera in The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword requires this strategy as well. And, while it's far from the only way to kill them, throwing a bomb at a Deku Baba or Quadro Baba will cause them to instinctively grab it with their mouth, at which point all you have to do is sit back and wait for it to explode.
 * Several enemies and bosses in the Metroid Prime series require you to morph into a ball, get swallowed, and lay bombs inside the enemy's stomach to damage them. These include the Stone Toad from the very first Prime game and Amorbis from Metroid Prime 2.
 * Also, the Metroid Queen from Metroid II; you don't have to do it to beat the Queen, but it's generally faster and healthier (for you) than the alternative.
 * A variant occurs in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. One boss is a huge mining machine with two settings, cutting laser and vacuum. The only way to harm it is to blast some Mook enemies while it's in vacuum mode, so their bodies get sucked inside to jam the laser.
 * Another variant, also from Prime 3. In one of the deep pits you have to jump into on Phaaze, there's a creature that grabs Samus while she's in Morph Ball form; you have to use the Hyper Ball to kill it (if you don't move to the side to keep it from grabbing you). Weird creature dislikes radioactive lightning.
 * Now taken Up to Eleven in Metroid: Other M. You have to jump into the mouth of  and release a Power Bomb in its bowels. A freaking Power Bomb. To put this into perspective, releasing what is acknowledged as the strongest weapon in Samus's extensive arsenal in this way is like taking a nuke and placing it in within a containment field that's been reinforced like hell from the inside-out. And it still ends up trashing the place beyond repair.
 * A boss from Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! runs this way. You have to "feed" it three times, then get out of the way before it gives off an explosion, and only then can you actually deliver a blow that will actually hurt it.
 * It's not always bombs, though-- Psychonauts has the same effect on a boss with boxes of iron nails.
 * Psychonauts also features Nightmares who can only be defeated by shooting their heads off and throwing one of their own bombs down the resulting neck stump.
 * The rancor in Knights of the Old Republic. Although you actually sneak it into its food, rather than tossing it into its mouth.
 * Check Calo Nord's journal in Davik's mansion. Calo played it straight, chucking grenades into a rancor's mouth WHILE RIDING ON ITS SHOULDERS. Also, the defeat of the Krayt Dragon on Tatooine parallels this trope, even if it's not QUITE a matter of eating mines.
 * The Chaos 6 boss from Sonic Adventure tries to suck you into its mouth. You defeat it by getting it to suck in the freeze bombs (Chaos is a sentient, shapeshifting water creature) that Robotnik keeps chucking at you and then smashing it when it freezes; rinse, repeat.
 * Weldar, the visually impaired welding torch from Banjo-Tooie is defeated by using grenade eggs when he tries to suck the player up. You can also use Fire Eggs, cause hey, he's full of gas.
 * Andross from the Star FOX series is a well-known example. Firing a bomb in his mouth stuns him briefly, leaving his weak points wide open.
 * Except in the original, SNES game, where it does...nothing. But since there's no enemies after this point, might as well use your bombs for something visually appealing.
 * Wart, the antagonist and final boss of Super Mario Bros. 2, can only be killed by Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad throwing five vegetables into his mouth.
 * The Chain Chomp in Super Mario 64 could be stunned by throwing it a Bob-omb on the face.
 * The Shlurp family of enemies in Super Paper Mario has unlimited defense on the outside so it can only be killed by feeding it a bomb.
 * In Super Mario Sunshine, King Boo dislikes spicy things, so Mario must stun him by throwing a spicy pepper into his mouth.
 * The Piranha plants in this game also need to be sprayed in the mouth with water. They always open their mouth for no reason.
 * Not quite an explosive, but when Sigma opens his mouth to fire his huge mouth laser in Mega Man X 6, feed him a giant rock For Massive Damage.
 * In Super Mario Galaxy 2, if Yoshi swallows a Bullet Bill (which he uses to smash open glass cages upon spitting it out) and it stays in his mouth too long, then after a few seconds the Bill will explode and cause both him (and Mario) to take damage.
 * The only way to kill the sandworms in an early mission of Jedi Academy was to lob a thermal detonator with the timer going on the sand and hope they ate it—the AI and object collision detection made this a bit of a spotty proposition, but they would at least be distracted by it. That's right; they included an enemy even a lightsaber couldn't kill.
 * The final boss of Pikmin was a lot easier if you fed it bombs like this. The Expys of that boss in Pikmin 2 had a similar weakness, but had to be lured into eating bombs already lying on the ground.
 * This is an extremely easy way of farming gavial meat in Metal Gear Solid 3. Cock a grenade and wait until the gavial yawns. Another very, shall we say, "unique" example in MGS3, where one boss looks for food when he runs low on stamina. By leaving rotten or poisoned food lying around, you can make him vomit to death, for which you are rewarded.
 * Early on in The Neverhood, you have to feed a statue of yourself made of TNT to a Giant Enemy Crab, which then explodes violently in a cutscene. Your cousin then begins eating its now-cooked remains, something that's a good bit funnier than it sounds.
 * One of the bosses in Aquaria can only be defeated by luring the mooks that he spawn into a gas vent and dragging the resulting gas-bloated explosive mooks into his mouth when he tries a vortex attack.
 * In Bomberman 64, chucking a bomb into the mouth of the Leviathan boss in Blue Resort nets the player a Gold Card. It also deals twice the damage the bomb would've normally done. This isn't required to defeat the boss, though.
 * In Gears of War 2, you fight a giant fish who likes to chomp down on your boat. He's defeated by moving into his mouth and chucking grenades into his throat.
 * In Wario Land Shake It, this is the only way to defeat both the man eating treasure chests in Boogie Mansion and the boss Large Fry in world 5.
 * Like the Jaws example above, Space Quest IV features Roger in a battle with a giant Sea Slug, which he won in the nick of time with an oxygen tank, his clever thinking, and his, uh... cleverness.
 * Done first in Space Quest I, by getting a monster to eat some dehydrated water.
 * World of Warcraft makes multiple uses of this trope.
 * The Un'Goro Crater zone has a direct Shout-Out to the original Zelda example in the form of a kodo named Dodonga. You don't actually feed it a bomb, though.
 * Several quests involve feeding bombs to various creatures in order to blow them up—most notably, some worms in Dragonblight, Storm Peaks, and the Molten Front. In some of those, you subsequently collect the tasty meat that is now scattered across the snow.
 * Time Splitters: The second time you fight 'Princess', 'she' has a propane tank in her mouth.
 * A boss in House of the Dead 4 is a four-armed zombie with a large tongue. You can deal massive damage to it by throwing grenades in its mouth.
 * This is actually a common occurrence in any rail-driven gun game, if it has a part that opens, its generally a good idea to shoot at it. Featured most prominently in alien shumps in days of arcade yore, though most players never bother, prefering to just shoot the projectiles and then plug the monster full of lead. For a mechanized version of the trope, the boss of Russia in SNES Super Scope game Battle Clash is nearly invulnerable except on tiny missile pods until he opens his crab-mech's giant 'eyes' which have huge pulse cannons inside. Generally speaking, shooting them in an opening mouth or eye will at the very least stun them for a few frames, or even do additional damage.
 * U8 in Resident Evil 5 is especially weak to this. Once its limbs are hit enough, its head falls on to the platform after which an input-action to throw a grenade into its mouth (with obligatory cheesy action movie one-liner to boot) and leap out of the way appears. Definitely the easiest way to defeat it.
 * In Borderlands you can land a critical hit by shooting enemies in a certain weakpoint For Massive Damage in the case of Skag type enemies a critical hit occurs when the player lands an attack when the creatures open their mouth and roar or spit depending on type.
 * The huge Leviathan boss in Resistance 2 can be harmed by firing rockets into its mouth.
 * One of the bosses works this way in Fullmetal Alchemist: Broken Angel. Bonus, because you have to transmute said bombs while avoiding attacks. And it heals itself.
 * Something like this in Kameo: Elements of Power. The demon-tree boss thing can only be killed by throwing enough rocks into its mouth when it's gloating in laughter.
 * Donkey Kong Country 3 has Belcha, the first boss. He is defeated by throwing beetles when his "mouth" is open.
 * Hapurubokka, a giant sand fish/worm/toad thing from Monster Hunter. One of the easiest ways to deal damage to it is to plant some bombs or Shock Traps and make him chase you into them with its mouth open. Once they go off, it'll stagger him, giving an opening. Another thing is that the most vulnerable part of him is his Uvula.
 * In Blinx, the best way to kill Keroppers (frog monsters who swallow anything fired at them from the front whole) is to shoot bombs at them.
 * The player can be vulnerable to this in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Kirby, Dedede, and Wario can each swallow explosive items. While this causes about 5 damage, it's most likely a lot more preferable to what most explosives do when they go off.
 * This happens to Bean in Sonic the Fighters if he is hit by a opponent related throw.
 * In NieR, the most effective way to deal with the final form of the Junk Heap boss is to toss bombs into its mouth when it fires its laser.
 * A variation in Conker's Bad Fur Day, where in order to defeat the Great Mighty Poo, Conker has to hurl rolls of toilet paper into its - admittedly huge - mouth.
 * It's not a literal bomb, but the lizards do explode when inflated sufficiently by the player in Dig Dug.

Web Comics
"Dweebley: But.... there's no way that should have worked... that thing is obviously designed to devour starships... It should't have had any trouble ingesting an antimatter reactor core. Quentyn: Well, yes... if it's allowed to "digest" it properly. But having it detonate inside its defences - it's the difference between eating a hot pepper and having one sprayed in your face."
 * Exterminatus Now here.
 * Brawl in the Family has the phrase in Ode to Minions
 * In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, in the Bad Future, this is Mitzi and Dan McNinja's Dying Moment of Awesome. To kill the Horrorsaurus, Mitzi allows it to swallow her while she's got explosives strapped to her chest. Dan follows, because "You didn't pack enough."
 * In Beyond the Canopy, a bloompod monster attacks a Cascadian soldier, eating his water-lance and the fish inside it. The fish then turns itself into fire, explodes the monster, and returns to his owner unharmed.
 * Quentyn Quinn Space Ranger once got a rather desperate crew pursued by a Planet Eater resort to such desperate measures, though even this was only enough to make it back off.


 * Vexxarr figured out that eating Silicon-Based Life requires very active chemistry in digestion system and fed a "predatory moon" several tons of sugars to cause very explosive case of indigestion. Later they discovered that remnants of these things turned out to contain lots of caesium and the crew wanted to simply mine a corpse rather than catch a whole cloud of shrapnel and then see which ones were actually worth chasing, so they killed a predatory moon without an explosion using a lump of scones imitating dead silicon predator. A single scone is enough to fry an individual pig-sized predator with only minor fireworks.

Western Animation

 * In a non-video game example, Deadpool tries this move on the Hulk in Hulk vs Wolverine. It does not end well for Deadpool.
 * In Extreme Ghostbusters, one of the villains has the power to break technology, rendering the proton packs liable to explode. So a friendly ghost takes the proton pack bombs and tosses them down the evil ghost's mouth, killing them both.
 * In War Planets: Shadow Raiders, the Beast Planet is pursuing the heroes. They come across Planet Jungle, inhabited solely by vegetation, and get permission from the sentient jungle to rig it as a booby trap for the Beast. They overload Planet Jungle's World Engines, allow the Beast to devour it, and it explodes... and the Beast doesn't even slow down.
 * In the animated Transformers movie, Bumblebee and Spike try to stop Unicron by rigging moon base 2 with explosives which would detonate as Unicron ate the moon. The explosives detonate, and... oh, shit.
 * A deleted scene from The Little Mermaid that was supposed to happen toward the end of the film, during the wedding of Eric and Vanessa, just right before all of the animals discover that Vanessa is actually Ursula in disguise and attack her, Glut, the shark that attacked Ariel earlier in the film has actually come back to have his revenge. Flounder and Scuttle then immediately dispatch him by tricking Glut into biting into a barrel of gunpowder, causing him to explode.
 * Happens frequently in Tom and Jerry. However, there is one episode where Tom tries to feed a microscopic yellow dog with a TNT sample to make it explode, only to discover that the dog is unaffected by the explosion and actually gives it a reason to bite the poor cat a lot.
 * Double-subverted in the Michel Lah-directed Droopy cartoon "Blackboard Jumble": the Droopies give the protagonist an apple with a burning wick, so he simply pulls the wick out and takes a bite. A second later, the bite explodes, leaving smoke from his ears. He looks dumbfounded at the wick... which explodes too, ashfacing him. Then the apple explodes.
 * The Simpsons: Itchy feeds Scratchy a bomb in more than one episode of their Show Within a Show.