Clothing Damage/Live-Action TV

Spoofed in a sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus. The female lead in the fictional movie "Scott of the Sahara" is being chased by a man-eating roll-top desk, and gets her clothes torn off by snagging them on cacti. The thing is, the cacti are spaced so far apart that she has to go out of her way to get her clothes snagged on them. Just as she's about to lose the last of her clothing, John Cleese appears to say, "And now, for something completely different."
Justified in Smallville, as while Clark Kent is indestructible, the clothes he wears aren't. In one episode, he's thrown into a blazing furnace and he's the only thing that survives.
Heroes
- The only time that Elle's electricity powers display any ability to set things on fire is when she shoots lightning at Peter's shirt, prompting him to take it off.
- In season 3, Elle goes one better, when one of her lightning blasts completely disintegrates Sylar's shirt, and a second blast removes his undershirt too.
Doctor Who
- In the story "Bad Wolf", Jack Harkness loses all his clothes when he is zapped by a "defabricator" ray. He lampshades this later, when he says "Ladies, your viewing figures just went up!"
- "The Eleventh Hour" features Matt Smith in David Tennant's clothes, looking all tattered from the regeneration and subsequent TARDIS crash-landing.
Star Trek
- Captain James Tiberius Kirk of the Starship Enterprise was infamous for finding a way to get his shirt torn in just about any conflict that he got in to.
  - It was parodied in the Futurama episode, where Shatner simply tears his own shirt right before a discussion.
- It was also parodied in the actual show. The one episode where Kirk manages to NOT tear his shirt, McCoy walks up behind him and rips the sleeve off... to give Kirk a shot, apparently. All the other characters got the injection in their neck, but Kirk can't be forced to end an episode with his shirt intact!
Star Trek: Enterprise. The Augments in Season 4 wear permanently tattered clothing.
In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, when Cameron launches her One-Cyborg Army assault on the LA County Prison lockup. Her clothes are absolutely riddled with bullet holes, but the only result from that is a lot of red stains from her cyborg blood and one half her face being shredded clean off by a shotgun blast.
The MythBusters tried a variation of this, where the myth was that you could punch a person so hard that his socks would fly off. Turns out, you'd kill the guy several times over long before you could manage to pull it off, and that's including using battering rams and high explosives. Not surprising, given the nature of form-fitting, elastic-banded socks. Regular clothing, however, depending on the fabric and construction, can become shredded or completely torn away at lower, survivable overpressures. Reportedly, people struck by lightning are frequently blown out of their shoes as the electricity instantly vaporizes foot sweat, literally popping them off or splitting them apart.
In The Troop, the borlak's slime actually melts their clothes away.
In the Season 1 finale of Game of Thrones, Daenerys walks into her husband's funeral pyre. Since she is immune to heat, she emerges completely naked and covered in soot, but otherwise unharmed.

Back to Clothing Damage