History Main / NobodyCanDie

In Labyrinth, No one was allowed to get hurt. A boulder even falls on a goblin, and the flattened goblin even says, "hey, no problem." Jim Henson talks about purposefully doing that in the documentary.

* Parodied in ''PhineasAndFerb''. Anyone who suffers something obviously lethal (car crash, a house falling on them, etc) will remark "I am all right!".

Often used in a LighterAndSofter setting. Compare DeathIsCheap.See also NonLethalKO, where this is the only option.

* DaiGuard features a GiantRobot fighting {{Kaiju}} all across Japan, with copious amounts of property destruction as a result. But never fear, the effected area is always evacuated beforehand! This culminates in the final episodes where [[BeyondTheImpossible the whole of Tokyo]] (which contains about 10% of Japan's ''entire population'') is evacuated to provide a suitable arena.

* The MMORPG ''CityOfHeroes''[=/=]''CityOfVillains'' uses this to [[JustifiedTrope justify]] character respawning. Instead of dying, characters are "defeated" and teleported to the nearest hospital to recover.
** Likewise, the enemies are teleported to jail before they can be killed... most of the time. In CityOfHeroes, anyway. Unsurprisingly, the [[WretchedHive Rogue Isles]] are a bit less accommodating towards supervillain victims.

* The old-school ''GIJoe'' cartoons made a painful point of this. Every time a jet exploded, the pilot would ''always'' escape with a parachute, even if it was a faceless mook.
** Somehow, this happened with destroyed helicopters.

** The closest the series ever came to killing off someone was in the "Worlds Without End" two-parter, where Steeler, Clutch, and Grunt decided to remained in an AlternateUniverse to rebuild the G.I. Joe team of that world. While none of the "real" Joes actually died, we get to see the skeletonized remains of their alternate universe counterparts, foreshadowing their departure from the show.

Often used in a LighterAndSofter setting. Compare DeathIsCheap.

* ''OnePiece'' references characters who are already dead, but no one dies from the action (from main villains to mooks).

* ''{{The Animals of Farthing Wood}}'' avoided this UpToEleven. [[InfantImmortality Babies]], long-time characters, TheWoobie - [[AnyoneCanDie nobody was safe]] (with the shrike's butchering of the mouse babies being the stuff of NightmareFuel). This was like the ''TexasChainsawMassacre'' of children's animation.

* ''The Expendables''. Sure, many bad guys die, but none of the Expendables even get close to dying.

* ''Film/IronMan 2'' features more collateral damage than you can shake an explosion at, including a swarm of combat drones going amok among a crowd of people, and not a single bystander is show with so much as a scratch. Even the test pilot being shown having his ''spine'' snapped ([[BloodlessCarnage bloodlessly]]) is pointed out to have survived.
** So the drivers at the Circuit de Monaco, the decoy prisoner, and those two guards that Vanko hung from the ceiling were all okay?

** So the drivers at the Le Mans, the decoy prisoner, and those two guards that Vanko hung from the ceiling were all okay?

* One Piece references characters who are already dead, but no one dies from the action (from main villains to mooks).

-->--General Specific, ''SheepInTheBigCity''

* DaiGuard features a GiantRobot fighting {{Kaiju}} all across Japan, with copious amounts of property destruction as a result. But never fear, the effected area is always evacuated beforehand! This culminates in the final episodes where [[BeyondTheImpossible the whole of Tokyo]] (which contains about 25% of Japan's ''entire population'', remember) is evacuated to provide a suitable arena.
* This particular trope is in full effect in the Skypeia arc of ''OnePiece'', where two small armies with numbers in the dozens fought a grueling war and not a single one of them was permanently killed. This despite the fact that throughout the arc we have characters who can sense other peoples' locations constantly hearing "voices" disappear and Eneru saying he slaughtered a bunch of people no longer useful to him to try and emphasize deaths ''were'' occurring.

* The live-action ''GeorgeOfTheJungle'' movie. When a guy falls at least 400 meters from a Rope Bridge over a cliff, the Narrator reassures the audience: "Don't worry — nobody dies in this story. They just get really big boo-boos."

* ''PowerRangers'' is accused of this by [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks sentai purists]], but incorrectly. And if you drop the assumption of NoEndorHolocaust and count the deaths of everyone in buildings that were destroyed without a ConvenientlyEmptyBuilding line, the death toll suddenly rises into the five digits. (Of course, ''PowerRangersRPM'' puts the offscreen death toll into the ''billions.'') However, there is an onscreen death toll... just (much) smaller than sentai's.

[[folder: Western Animation]]
* The old-school ''GIJoe'' cartoons made a painful point of this. Every time a jet exploded, the pilot would ALWAYS escape with a parachute, even if it was a faceless mook.
* Joked about in ''GeorgeOfTheJungle''.
* In ''PhineasAndFerb'', this is parodied. Anyone who suffers something that obviously would have killed him (car crash, having a house fall on you) will remark, "I am all right!"
** This was done on most CartoonNetwork shows - parodied on an episode of ''JohnnyBravo'', presumably after the ban was relaxed, in which Johnny becomes a superhero, first when he causes a plane crash, the passengers shout "we're all okay!" and then the plane explodes, and second when he accidentally gets {{Lawyer Friendly Cameo}}s of the DC Heroes ThrownOutTheAirlock, and comments, "It's a good thing there's plenty of air out in space! Wait, no there's not."
* For most of ''BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'', they could only unambiguously kill a character if the plot was some sort of murder mystery. Joker episodes got around this by suggesting Joker venom was sometimes curable, but seldom actually curing it on-screen after the first time.
[[/folder]]

* In ''TransformersGeneration1,'' from the makers of ''GIJoe,'' ungodly amounts of fire could be traded, and really-should-be-fatal injuries taken on both sides, but everyone was always fine next week. TheMovie killed half the cast to [[MerchandiseDriven make room for new toys]], but when the series returned it was back to the same old rules for the most part. (There's the case of a space battle where ships known to be piloted were destroyed, though.)

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* On ''TheATeam'', cars full of {{mooks}} would often crash - at which point the camera would linger for us to overhear brief dialogue between them. ("You okay?" - "Yeah, I'm fine.") Just to assure the viewer that no one had really been hurt.

->--General Specific, ''SheepInTheBigCity''

Sometimes, nobody can die, even when it seems like they should. Unlike NeverSayDie, they're allowed to use the ''words'' "kill" and "die", but for whatever reason no one ever actually ''does'' any killing or dying. AmusingInjuries don't count — the situations faced by the characters are presented as realistically dangerous and the threat of injury or death is definitely present. Nor is it simply PlotArmor — when nobody can die, even the lowliest mook is seemingly immortal. It simply seems to be a law of physics that no situation can result in the death of a person — gunshots leave people [[AlmostLethalWeapons injured but alive]], explosions cause lots of property damage but never seem to happen with people in the blast radius, etc. Note that, since ''talking'' about death is allowed, there may be references to characters that have died in the past, but onscreen deaths are still verboten.

* The ''{{Zoids}}'' franchise, featuring GiantRobot Animal battles, uses this. ''Chaotic Century'' revolves around a full-scale war between two nations, while ''New Century'' focuses on mecha {{Blood Sport}}s. Not a single person, from main character to faceless mook, is ever killed in either series.

** Likewise, the enemies are teleported to jail before they can be killed.

->"Thank you, Major Panic, but none of us are going to die. Not on ''this'' network."