Baby Boomers

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D'aw! What a cute baby! Wait... ma'am, is your baby ticking?

Baby carriages are prime locations for stashing a moving bomb. It's easy to hide a complex explosive in all that swaddling, and you can even drop a baby doll in there to distract onlookers. This trope is most commonly seen with old-fashioned baby buggies and commonly involves a baby's cry being recorded and played back.

It's especially effective against superheroes, as leaving one in obvious peril will attract the do-gooders to it while keeping everyone else away.

Related to Wave of Babies. Not to be confused with Tyke Bomb. Nor is it to be confused with the post-World War II generation.

Examples of Baby Boomers include:


Anime & Manga


Film

  • In The Rock they are searching through a box for dangerous compounds and find a baby doll which sprays acid at them.
  • In a scene from Johnny Dangerously, a baby in a carriage turns out to be a gun-wielding mobster in disguise.
  • In Blade: Trinity Abigail Whistler poses as a single mother trying to just get home with a bag of groceries. She's attacked by four vampires, one of which steals her 'child' only to find out it spits liquid garlic and is in fact a plastic doll.
  • La Résistance in Death Race 2000 destroys one of the drivers looking for an easy kill with a baby doll strapped with dynamite.


Literature

  • There is a Saki story, "The Easter Egg," that features a young child, if not exactly a baby, used to deliver a bomb.
  • There's a bomb in a baby carriage in The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran.


Live Action TV

  • Used in the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "The Bishop", during a baptism. "Don't say the kid's name Vic!"
  • Angel: Angel flees Hyperion Hotel to draw W&H mercenaries, a vampire cult, a group of demons and a gang of bikers away. After being surrounded, Angel gives up his "baby", which then proceeds to explode. The real baby was safe and protected by Team Angel.


Music

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio


Video Games

  • Fallout 3 has traps which are constructed out of baby buggies and explode violently after crying for a moment.
  • In Condemned 2 you enter a doll factory, where a bunch of baby dolls crawl towards you. When they get close enough, they pull their own pull strings and wave to you before blowing up. You can disable them and use them as very creepy hand grenades.
  • In BioShock (series), you find your first gun inside a baby carriage, where a crazy Splicer was treating it like an actual baby.
  • The Crawlers from Dead Space 2


Western Animation

  • On The Itchy and Scratchy Show, Scratchy meets, falls in love with, and marries a female cat literally Made of Explodium by Itchy. They have offspring which are half cat and half bomb, but don't go off. Then, as Scratchy and his wife are sitting on their front porch in their old age, she finally goes off. (Subverted in that the offspring don't explode.)

Comic Books

  • A particularly ghastly version early in Howard Chaykin's City of Tomorrow miniseries: terrorists put a bomb in a (presumably just-murdered) infant. A suicide bomber posing as her father and cheerfully claiming she was sleeping soundly carried her into a large, crowded shopping mall.