Made of Explodium: Difference between revisions

|'''Teal'c''', ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', "200"}}

 

 

In the wonderful world of fiction, nothing ever just breaks. If it's even slightly mechanical or electronic, its destruction is loud and accompanied by [[Impressive Pyrotechnics]]. Apparently, [[Explosive Instrumentation|circuit boards]], moving parts, and [[The Tokyo Fireball|Tokyo]] are the most volatile substances in the universe.

 

Related to [[You Have to Burn the Web]]. Also related to [[Unrelated Effects]], where the focus is on how awesome the weapon causing destruction is, rather than how explode-y the item being destroyed is. See also [[Incendiary Exponent]] and [[Catastrophic Countdown]].

 

== Advertising ==

* Bugs in commercials for ''Raid''.

** They've achieved [[Neon Genesis Evangelion|Instrumentality]]?

 

* ''[[Mazinger Z]]'': Many [[Robeast|Mechanical Beasts]] exploded easily -and spectacularly- even if there was no reason for it (other than animating spectacular explosions, of course). Aeros B3 reinforced this trope: it was loaded with explosives since its purpose was diving in Mount Fuji and exploding within to awaken the volcano and bury the Institute under a tidal wave of lava. A subversion was Balanger M1, that were clusters of submarine, guided mines did NOT exploded but stuck to their target and shocked it with electricity. Several Warrior Monsters and Saucer Beast from ''[[Great Mazinger]]'' and ''[[UFO Robo Grendizer]]'' also followed this trope.

* ''[[Daimos]]'': Some [[Robeast]]s exploded even if Kazuya only had punched through them or sliced in two pieces with a karate chop or sweeping kick. It was justified in the episode 9, though, when he fought a mecha had a nuke inside.

* [[One Piece]] has Mr. 5 whose devil fruit makes his entire body this.

* [[Ranma ½]]: Bakusai Tenketsu. Okay, even if you can destroy things by hitting some sort of [[Attack Its Weak Point|natural weak point in their structure]] with [[Finger-Poke of Doom|your bare finger]] ([[Fridge Logic|even though your finger couldn't penetrate their surface in the first place, realistically]])...why would they ''blow up with maximum shrapnel''?!

 

== Comic Books ==

* As [[Atomic Robo]] put it:

{{quote|"My years with Mr. Tesla have taught me that there's one underlying scientific principle common to all existence...''everything'' explodes."}}

 

== Films -- Animation ==

 

== Films -- Live Action ==

* Happens in pretty much every Michael Bay-directed movie ever made. Particulary in Transformers. In Revenge of the Fallen, even concrete tubes can explode!

* In perhaps the biggest example in film, ''[[Battlefield Earth (film)|Battlefield Earth]]'', Planet Psychlo has an entire atmosphere that is made of explodium! Their air reacts violently with strong radiation, so a strong nuclear bomb is all it takes to destroy the entire planet. Wow.

** Though, arguably, the whole shebang crashed into a parking garage, with all those cars that had fuel in their tanks...

* Used both ways in ''[[Last Action Hero]]'', to [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshade]] this trope. Early on, [[Show Within a Show|in the movies]], every car explodes with one shot. One even explodes just from getting a man thrown through the windshield, and another explodes in midair. Later, [[Refugee From TV Land|in the real world]], Jack Slater fires his gun three times at a fleeing car, expecting it to explode. Three dents appear in the trunk, and the car drives away.

* [[Weird Al]] also sings the title theme of the [[Leslie Nielsen]] film ''[[Spy Hard]]''. The final note of the song is so [[Overly Long Gag|ridiculously drawn-out]] that the song ends with [[Your Head Asplode|Al's head exploding]], [[Ludicrous Gibs|rather]] [[Bloody Hilarious|gruesomely]].

* In ''[[This Is Spinal Tap]]'', the other members of Spinal Tap claim that their third drummer died by spontaneously combusting on-stage, during a show. {{spoiler|The same fate befalls their current drummer, just before they strike it big in Japan.}}

* Parodied in ''[[Loaded Weapon 1|Loaded Weapon I]]'' when the bikes Colt and Luger confiscate from two children explode. Also happens even more improbably when Colt flicks a cigarete butt ''into the sea'' at the start of the film.

* ''[[Con Air]]''. Everything, but everything, including motorbikes just... crashing... explodes like it has c4 strapped to it.

 

== Literature ==

* [[Tom Clancy]] also [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] explodium cars in ''[[Debt of Honor]]''. In a crash involving two sedans and a semi, both sedans exploded in [[Impressive Pyrotechnics|huge fireballs]] soon after the crash. This was an important plot point—the cars had faulty gas tanks—and one of the accident investigators remarked that real cars ''don't'' blow up when they crash, [[This Is Reality|That Only Happens In Movies]].

* The small, doglike swamp dragons of ''[[Discworld]]'' are living, breathing explodium. The internal chemical factory required to breathe fire is incredibly unstable; when a swamp dragon hiccups, people dive for cover. As in the ''Pokémon'' example, this might seem a bad evolutionary decision, but Pratchett points out that there are very few predators prepared to eat explosive prey.

** Played with in a couple of references to [[Bungling Inventor|Bloody Stupid Johnson]]'s inventions, which included a chiming sundial (which tended to explode around noon) and an explosive somehow made out of sand and water, as well as a small ornamental fountain which, when switched on, gurgled ominously for a few minutes then fired a cherub a thousand feet in the air.

* Songs performed by [[Fake Band]] Disaster Area in ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' are described as following "the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for [[Rule of Cool|no adequately explored reason]]."

** Also their actual music, which sounds best when listened to from bunkers at least 40 miles away from the stage. The band itself plays from a spaceship on the planet's orbit—or, preferably, some other planet's. The music once terraformed a planet by causing its crust to flip over (with an assist from a stray Improbability Field in the vicinity).

* In ''[[Animorphs]]'', Yeerk [[Space Fighter|Bug fighters]] routinely go head-to-head with other spaceships armed with [[Frickin' Laser Beams|laser beams]] and [[Faster-Than-Light Travel|zip]] through [[Casual Interstellar Travel|galaxies]] like it's nobody's business, but apparently their [[Achilles' Heel]] is getting gently pushed by a slow-moving bulldozer, which causes them to [[Every Car Is a Pinto|explode]].

* In ''[[The Tomorrow Series]]'' a handy petrol tank gets improvised into a fiery bomb of death on a number of occasions. In the most extreme case, they use {{spoiler|a petrol tanker truck.}}

* Lyra in ''[[His Dark Materials|Northern Lights]]'' manages to, if not totally demolish Bolvangar, at least cause rather a lot of damage by turning on the gas stoves in the kitchen all the way, lighting them and throwing a huge bag of flour in the air. This is [[Truth in Television]], to an extent; see [[Real Life]] below.

 

* ''[[MythBusters]]'' trades in this trope on occasion. Admittedly, most objects are not Made of Explodium until Adam and Jamie (and retired FBI agent Frank Doyle) get to modify them a bit, but their end results would do Monty Python's "not being seen" sketch proud.

** In one episode, inspired by the ending of ''[[Jaws (film)|Jaws]]'', they test to see whether an oxygen tank explodes upon being shot. It doesn't explode, but the gas spewing out of the bullet hole at high pressure would kill a shark just as well.

* Drummers become this upon joining [[Spinal Tap]].

* All of the instruments and amps featured in the music video for "I Don't Love You" by [[My Chemical Romance]]

 

== Radio ==

* ''[[The Goon Show]]'': "Fear of Wages" has two thousand cans of sake explode, possibly because everyone present believes them to be nitroglycerine. "1985" has a desert just randomly explode, possibly because [[The Chew Toy|Bluebottle]] was there.

** Then there's Major Bloodnok, who explodes constantly in a slightly...different fashion.

 

== New Media ==

* As a parody of the old Nintendo Power commercial, James "[[The Angry Video Game Nerd]]" Rolfe eats a Nintendo Power magazine, causing his head to explode—followed by the world and then the freakin' ''galaxy''! Don't worry; it's all for comedy.

** His other works also have their fair share of explosions—specially after he started destroying the games after his ranting reviews. Best example being the one featuring a [[Die Hard]] video game, where he throws the cartridge and it blows up!

 

== Puppet Shows ==

* One episode of ''[[The Muppet Show]]'' is a Western-themed sketch. Kid Fozzie, having discarded his pickles (which function as guns) and his carrot (knife), has an apple bomb which explodes in an impressive display of apple pyrotechnics.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* Most things in ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'' kind of do this. The races really just have enough guns that blow whatever they are pointed at to atomic smithereens to make a nuclear arsenal look like a lot of nerf guns. And they do it in the most [[Ludicrous Gibs|creativly absurd ways possible]]

* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]''

** Some magical items, like the ''staves of power'', can also be broken to provoke a big explosion if the wielder wish to [[Taking You with Me|take his enemies with him.]]

** And of course, there's the gas spore. A variety of floating ''fungus'' full of unstable gas that explodes if it receives so much as a scratch. It doesn't help that, unless looking closely, the gas spore can be easily confused with a beholder—the kind of monster you pretty much attack on sight.

 

== Toys ==

* ''[[Bionicle]]'' has exploding fruit, animals, and boomerangs.

 

== Video Games ==

* All three ''[[EarthBound|Mother]]'' games feature [[Action Bomb|exploding enemies]]—mostly robots, but then you get to the trees. Yes, you read that correctly. ''Exploding trees.'' (one even illustrates this page) The worst offenders are the Territorial Oaks found in ''[[EarthBound]]'''s Peaceful Rest Valley, which appear remarkably similar to the other trees in the landscape (aside from the fact that they're, well, ''moving'').

** Any enemy that explodes in ''[[EarthBound]]'' sucks except the smiling orbs (but those are still pretty bad). They all hurt when you fight them, so you can either kill them last and have them hurt your party, or kill them first and suffer the explosion. The worst offender is the robots that heal HP. So now you really have to decide which one to kill first.

** Despite being about to experience critical existence failures, the robots are nice enough to spin their heads around and beep wildly before exploding; giving you time to get clear.

* Just about everything in ''[[Metal Wolf Chaos]]''. Hell, even ''concrete'' explodes when shot at.

* In [[The Demented Cartoon Movie]] anything can and will explode. Including the earth. Multiple times.

* Parodied in a Weebl and Bob cartoon, ''Armagooden'', where they are "trapped in a Micky Bay film" and "anything we touch is likely to explode." This causes problems when Bob's helmet explodes and he can't get another one.

 

== Web Comics ==

* Discussed in [[Bug Martini|Bug]]; the bug [https://web.archive.org/web/20130516071145/http://www.bugcomic.com/comics/action-movies/ could do without this trope.]

* In ''[[Titanzer]]'', Johnny doesn't believe a robot has been beaten [https://web.archive.org/web/20131219174454/http://titanzer.com/2011/01p24/ until it explodes].

 

== Web Original ==

"Hello!"

Followed by someone else stepping on the Mine Turtle... [[Captain Obvious|which promptly blows up.]] }}

 

== Western Animation ==

{{quote|'''Meatwad:''' Why'd he do that?

'''Shake:''' [[Lampshade Hanging|Why wouldn't he?]] }}

** Their golf game uses this as the raw material for golf balls. No, nobody knows why.

** It was mentioned in another episode. Shake causes the TV to explode and tells Meatwad to go get another from the closet. Upon finding out there aren't any left, Frylock comments that he's been using his cloning device on the TV and they ran out because Shake keeps breaking them. He clones another one, which Shake immediately destroys.

* Pretty much everything in ''[[The Simpsons]]'' is Made of Explodium.

** Played straight in an early episode when Spinal Tap's tour bus is driven off the road by Otto and explodes.

** In another instance, the impossibly [[Badass]] protagonist of a [[Show Within a Show]] ([[Name's the Same|who just happens to be Homer's namesake]]), among other stuff (like picking a bullet in mid-air), he grabs a [[Mook]] and throws him over a couple of other mooks, they explode.

** [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in another episode where Zoidberg claims a giant conch shell on the bottom of the ocean as his home. Later in the episode they return to it to find it's burned down, leaving only a charred framework.

{{quote|'''Zoidberg:''' How could this happen?!

* As do the robots that ''[[Samurai Jack]]'' destroys.

** Jack is just that awesome.

** when grim watches a fostors home for imaginary friends parody, the house explodes for no reason.

** Who could forget the cinema classic, ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htUJM9dHtIU Exploding Penguins 3: Total Annilation]''?

* In ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'', chocolate milk makes a fairly impressive explosion. Justified in that the chocolate milk belonged to a [[Reality Warper]] who's known for doing chaotic things for the lulz, who, before throwing the chocolate milk away, filled a glass from top to bottom with it and then drank the glass.

* In later seasons of ''[[Thomas the Tank Engine]]'', if a train comes off the rails and into a large bush, said bush will explode.

 

== Real Life ==

* Nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors or any installations handling nuclear fuels. Basically any scenario where the mass of fissionable material goes above it's critical mass and you don't control it or do anything to stop it. It's all over...

* [[wikipedia:List of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions|Take a look at the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.]]

** Of course, if it's a tree that gets you, you've been ''lucky''.

** With the ability of several eucalyptus trees to shed dead branches, they don't need to be made out of explodium to kill you, even.

** [http://comm.louisiana.edu/cypress/92/text/explosion.html Grain elevators explode for this reason also.]

** It wasn't a torpedo that Blew the Lusitania, that ''just'' shook up the coal dust in the bunkers, it was a sparking wire that actually set the whole lot off.

* Oil wells and coal mines may not explode, but they won't stop ''burning'' if set aflame. A certain coal mine has been on fire for over ten years.

** Under the right circumstances, a coal mine can catch fire THEN explode. (Without proper ventilation, methane gas can build up. Under exactly the right conditions, it can explode like a fuel-air bomb, but this is rare. More common is a layer of burnable concentration forming, and a sheet of flame ripping through the mine if it's touched off. That's bad, but the horror comes if it hits a pocket of coal dust that's just right to go off in a dust explosion. This is why coal mines that aren't properly maintained are death traps. On the other hand, with proper ventilation, mining practices, maintenance, and protective equipment, coal mining is a quite safe occupation.)

** The metals themselves don't actually explode at all, but react with water to produce hydrogen, which is then ignited by the heat of the reaction. Cesium is better [http://theodoregray.com/periodictable/AlkaliBangs/index.html explained here] .

* Derek Lowe has science blog with category "Things I Won't Work With". Most of the mentioned compounds are explodium of various kinds - and a few of them can be set off by ''infrared light''. Some are produced from more than one material already on that list ("when elemental fluorine is the most easily handled reagent in your scheme, let me tell you, you're in pretty deep").

{{quote|In every case, the solution detonated spontaneously on standing. And by “spontaneously”, they mean “while standing undisturbed in the dark”, so there’s really just no way to deal with this stuff. }}

{{quote|Personally, my metal azide requirements are minimal, and very easily satisfied. I can get all I need by looking at a structure drawn on a whiteboard from about twenty feet away, thanks, and have no desire to actually prepare any of these things. I do not see this as an irrational reluctance. For example, last year I [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/08/28/mercury_azides_ill_get_right_on_those_for_you wrote about mercury azides], a most alarming class of compounds whose synthesis would be much easier if the two solvent layers didn't keep getting disturbed by explosions. }}

{{quote|After warming things up (you'll note the relative use of that term "warming"), they saw that:

> ''"Within minutes, the mixture turned yellow, the color intensified, and a lemon-yellow solid precipitated while the reaction proceeded. Keeping the reaction mixture for about 15 min at -64 °C resulted in a violent explosion that destroyed the sample container and the surrounding stainless-steel Dewar flask."''

Did I mention that this prep was performed on less than one millimole? <ref>< 0.25 g in this case</ref> Spirited stuff, that tetra-azide. The experimental section of the paper enjoins the reader to wear a face shield, leather suit, and ear plugs, to work behind all sorts of blast shields, and to use Teflon and stainless steel apparatus so as to minimize shrapnel. Hmm. Ranking my equipment in terms of its [[Perfectly Cromulent Word|shrapneliferousness]] is not something that's ever occurred to me, I have to say. [[Deadpan Snarker|It's safe to assume that any procedure which involves considering which parts of the apparatus I'd prefer to have flying past me will not get much business in my lab, no matter how dashing I might look in a leather suit.]] }}

* Imagine a factory that makes rocket fuel. Imagine the entire facility coated in highly unstable, incredibly dangerous powdered fuel due to lax safety protocols. Imagine this facility also stockpiling said rocket fuel from floor to ceiling. And then imagine somebody firing up a blowtorch in this same facility. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: [http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=800 the PEPCON Disaster]!

** Now, the same with a highly flammable fertilizer: [[wikipedia:AZF|AZF]].

* ''[[Cracked.com|Cracked]]'' has done a couple:

** [http://www.cracked.com/article_17561_6-things-that-shouldnt-explode-but-did-anyway.html Things That Shouldn't Explode But Did Anyway] lists things that seemingly were made of explodium at some point, even an office chair!

* [[wikipedia:Bombardier beetle|This beetle]] literaly farts out an explosive rocket fuel.

* Early examples of the Russian BMD-series (Infantry Fighting Vehicles designed to be dropped out of planes) had magnesium armor in order to save weight. This was abandoned after it was discovered that the vehicles had a tendency to catch fire when hit by RPGs.

* [[wikipedia:Praya dubia|Praya dubia]] will explode if brought above a certain water level, due to high internal pressure.

* While, strictly speaking, we aren't talking about combustion here, any piece of machinery that involves a compressed air or steam boiler can produce a hell of a bang if it is operated improperly. [[MythBusters]] [[Tropes Examined by the Mythbusters|demonstrated what happens]] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnL8SipXT8 when a water heater explodes--] now imagine that scaled up to the size of a maritime, commercial, or locomotive boiler.

* What happens when farmers misapply chemical growth accelerators to their crops? [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/17/exploding-watermelons-chinese-farming Exploding watermelons!]

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Applied Phlebotinum]]

[[Category:Made of Index]]

[[Category:Spectacle]]

[[Category:Stuff Blowing Up]]