Smoldering Shoes

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No-one knows why smoking boots always remain, no matter how big the explosion. It seems to be just one of those things. —Sourcery

In many less serious works, when a character gets disintegrated, struck by lightning, or otherwise blown away, there is a tendency for the character's shoes to be left behind, wisps of smoke rising from each.

See also Eyes Are Unbreakable for the eye version, and Free Wheel for when the obliteratee is a wheeled vehicle. Compare Empty Piles of Clothing for when there's more than just shoes left behind.

As a Death Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Smoldering Shoes include:

Comic Books

• Asterix's punches often have this effect on the Roman Mooks he fights (although he merely punches them very hard, not actually vaporizing them).
• Subverted in Tintin: The Calculus Affair. Tintin briefly believes Captain Haddock to have been vaporized after receiving a massive electric shock, but he's merely been launched into the overhead chandelier.

Film

• Happens to Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
• Happened in The Green Berets after a mortar shell hit.
• Semi-example: Timerider (1982). Near the end of the movie, the Big Bad has a fatal run-in with the tail rotor of a helicopter. All that's left are his boots standing on the ground, with his calves and feet still inside.
• Hobgoblins, featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000: a character is blown to bits with a hand grenade, leaving nothing but smoking boots. In the same scene, a character is set on fire from head to foot by another grenade. Several scenes later, he's shown to be still alive, albeit with a few sticking plasters and a crutch.

Crow T Robot: So the result of his complete immolation is.. minor redness and irritation.

• Happens to the Trooper when he finds the maguffin in the trunk early in Repo Man.
• In the Three Stooges short "Half-Shot Shooters", the Army sergeant fires a cannon at Moe, Larry, and Curly at the end of the short. All that's left of the boys are three smoldering pairs of boots.
• In the mind-numbingly bad Razor Sharpe, a straight-to-video vanity piece, one mook is blown to bits leaving only his boots. Yeah.
• In Never Say Never Again, the unofficial Bond film (oddly enough a remake of Thunderball starring Sean Connery, who played James Bond in the original Thunderball), Fatima Blush is killed by a delayed-fuse rocket propelled grenade fired from Bond's pen, leaving nothing but her heels and marking the first time Bond was seen killing a woman directly in front of him.
• Befitting its comic book stylings, this happens to an unlucky superhero in The Incredibles, mentioned as part of Edna Mode's "No capes" rant.

Edna: Do you remember Thunderhead? Tall, storm powers? Nice man, good with kids. November 15th of '58! All was well, another day saved, when his cape snagged on a missile fin! (Cuts to a shot of Thunderhead being yanked out of his boots by the missile launching)

• Happens to Starscream in Transformers: The Movie, and in the following season of the cartoon we see this reflected in his memorial in the Decepticon crypt.
• In A Goofy Movie, this happens to Goofy when his car exploded and he was blasted into the air.
• Happens to a bird in Shrek after Princess Fiona sings it to death, causing it to explode after reaching its highest note, leaving its smoking feet behind.
  • A pair of legs from a knight in Dragon's castle also hints at this fate.
• Only Buzz Lightyear's legs are left when Zurg blows him up in Toy Story 2. Luckily, it's just a video game being played.

Literature

• Discworld:
  • Sourcery specifically says that there's always smoking boots left behind, no matter what causes an explosion.
  • Another more specific instance comes in Small Gods, where it's noted that whenever a philosopher comes in and says the gods don't exist, "We find their sandles later, still smoking, with a little sign saying, 'Yes, we do.'"
  • Smoking boots are also mentioned in Mort
  • Also comes up in Thud! A team of dwarfs are sent to kill Sam Vimes' family. One attacks his wife (who is tending the dragons at the time)... with a flamethrower. The dragons are not impressed. Cue white hot iron boots sitting in a pol of molten sand, and the outline of a dwarf scorched onto the doors beyond.
• Happens in one of the The Wheel of Time books where Mat is struck by magical lightning.
• In Turn Coat, book 11 of Dresden Files, this is used as a threat. Ebenezar (Harry's second, better mentor) tells Lara Raith (the life-stealing succubus) that if she touches Harry again, all that will be left of her for her family to bury will be her five-hundred-dollar shoes.
• In Stephen King's novel The Tommyknockers, two cops are almost completely disintegrated with a science-fiction weapon. All that remains is a single smoking shoe - with a foot still in it.
• In one of the follow-on books to the David Drake/S.M. Stirling collaboration The General, a young officer hoping to rally his troops against an invasion by expies of Stirling's The Draka is killed by a tank's cannon.

The shell landed nearly at the Imperial officer's feet, exploding in a puff of smoke with a malignant red snap at its core. One of the lieutenant's boots was left, toppling over slowly. The rest of him was splashed across the paving blocks.

Live-Action TV

• In the Supernatural episode "Hunted," Sam walks into a grenade trap set by fellow hunter Gordon Walker. After the explosion, Gordon sees Sam's Smoldering Shoe on the floor. The trope is subverted when Sam walks up behind Gordon and holds a gun to his head. It helps that Sam had recently met a fellow psychic who had foreseen his death.
• This happens to several fellows unlucky (or stupid) enough to stand in front of an activating Stargate.
• The MythBusters have tested the Asterix punch and decided that it's quite hard to punch someone hard enough to push them out of their shoes/socks. Not even a bomb blast did it.
• Happened in an episode of the bio-terrorism drama The Burning Zone.
• Happens in the 1987 comedy-SF/Horror TV Movie Really Weird Tales. In this anthology film's third segment, "I'll Die Loving", a woman has a bizarre affliction -- she can't show affection or love to anyone or they will explode. She goes to see the mother superior at the convent where she was brought up; in the conversation that follows she accidentally tells the mother superior that she loves her. The mother superior starts shaking uncontrollably and promptly explodes. All that's left of the nun are her smoking boots next to her desk.

Music

• In The Cranberries' "Promises" video, the cowboy fires at the witch/scarecrow, but she catches the bullets in her teeth. She then opens her mouth and emits a ray at the cowboy, leaving a smoldering pair of cowboy boots.

Tabletop Games

• A pair of orc magic boots from Warhammer Fantasy Battle are said to be all that was left of the warboss Bigged, who 'made his last boast in front of an Empire cannon.'
• If a Troubleshooter in Paranoia doesn't have this done to him at some point, the GM is not doing his job right.
  • It's even on the box art for the Paranoia: Mandatory !Bonus Fun! Card Game.
  • In Paranoia 2nd Edition, there's a picture of a smoldering boot with a laser gun sticking out of the ash heap... and a nice big ^TM next to the picture. It's not just a recurring motif in the game - it's a trademark.
    • In the XP edition, a pair of smoking boots is the symbol for the Zap play style, which advocates wild slapstick, excuse plots, and bad puns.
  • Occasionally, a bot's lower ambulatory appendages are portrayed in the same pose.
• Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) Tabletop RPG, supplement Curse of the Chthonians, adventure Dark Carnival. A man is pulled through the iron bars of a gate by ghouls: when his feet get stuck, they're ripped off, leaving them (still inside his shoes) on the ground. The shoes (and feet) are all that's left.
• Magic the Gathering usually avoids the prerequisite level of silliness for this, but the joke set Unhinged is almost overqualified in that respect.
• As the The Order of the Stick example indicates, anyone hit with a Disintegration spell in Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and failing their save will be reduced to dust, but leave their equipment intact. In earlier editions both wearer and equipment was destroyed, but this led to the spell being wholly underused and hated because most players want to keep their loot intact.
  • But magical items were allowed a saving throw, so everything except boots turning into fine ashes was a possible outcome.

Video Games

• In a computer game called Kingdom O'Magic, your character finds a pair of boots in the woods, still smoking. Right next to an axe and a stump. The narrator comments that that tends to happen in enchanted forests.
• The death animation of Spaz in Jazz Jackrabbit II is him exploding and leaving only a shoe behind.
• In Kingdom of Loathing, killing a hobo with over 500 points of hot damage makes only the charred boots remain. Said boots are collected and can be used as part of a "Scarehobo", which also needs hobo skins, eyeballs, skulls, guts and crotches, collected in the same manner with different elemental damage. Yes - you can literally hit a hobo out of his skin.
• In the original Doom games, a defeated cyberdemon explodes, leaving behind only its hooves and a puddle of blood.
• Rise of the Triad has these in its game over screen.
• In Glover, this happens to the boss of the dinosaur world.
• The Prince of Persia-esque game Heart of Darkness is an E-rated game whose pre-teen protagonist can be killed in dozens of ways, most of them only leaving his shoes.
• Frequently seen in the Gremlin Graphics's computer adaptation of Space Crusade.
• Whenever Crash Bandicoot gets killed in an explosion, he always leaves behind one smoking shoe, and, strangely, an eyeball.
  • In the second game, if Crash is riding the Polar bear cub, the bear will be unharmed as Crash's shoes land on either side of it. Followed by Crash's Goofy Print Underwear landing on the bear's head.
• Imps in Dungeon Keeper explode when they die, leaving only their feet behind.
• In The Curse of Monkey Island, this happens to LeChuck when the flaming voodoo cannonball he was about to use against Elaine gets knocked out of his hand. A pair of pirates later find the boots and fish them out of the sea, only to get turned into two more members of LeChuck's undead crew when he recorporates from his boots not long afterwards.

Web Comics

• This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip.
• In this CRFH strip, Antananarivo finds himself on the wrong end of Margaret's battle monkey.
• Variation in this Awkward Zombie strip.
• Daimyo Kubota in The Order of the Stick.

Western Animation

• The Buzz Lightyear game at the beginning of Toy Story 2 has Zurg blasting away Buzz's torso, leaving a smoking, charred cinder on Buzz's waist.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants, Spongebob, as the Quickster, does this after being accidentally lit on fire. He still says "Much better."
• In Recess: School's Out, this happens to Principal Prickly (through unexplained means) after sticking his key in the school door. He turns out to have just been teleported, but how that happened is still completely unexplained.
• In an episode of Beast Wars, this is the aftermath of Tarantulas' death after he is vaporized.
• Combined with Eyes Are Unbreakable for an Imagine Spot in My Life as a Teenage Robot. Sheldon steals Jenny's blueprints to see what makes her tick, but then Vexus gets a hold of them, and Sheldon realizes he'll have to tell Jenny how Vexus has them. But in the Imagine Spot, when he does tell her, Jenny vaporizes him, leading to the above combo.

Real Life

• When Robert Ballard discovered the wreck of the RMS Titanic, he found a few sets of shoes lying side by side in perfect pairs, their owners long since decomposed. He described it as eerie, reminding him that the ship was a giant graveyard.
• In an episode of COPS, a man was hit by a speeding car and his sneakers were found quite a distance away from where he was thrown by the impact.
• Shoes and boots - even moreso the pre-modern era ones - made of leather are usually the toughest part of someone's attire, they escape even raging fires barely singed, while the body is charred like a log.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic example: during an armed clash in the 1989 Romanian Revolution, a group of soldiers had been killed when their light APC exploded under anti-tank gun fire. Throughout the next few days, the media barked they must have been some technologically advanced spies and infiltrators, "since they had boots of exotic materials which did not burn in the explosion". One may ask if it had been so, why weren't they fully dressed in such magical suits that do not burn.