History Main / StrippedToTheBone

* ''WesternAnimation/TheOwlHouse''
** As shown in "Follies at the Coven Day Parade", Hooty can take off his skin at will, leaving him as a very, ''very'' long spinal column with an owl skull at the end.
** In "Thanks to Them", [[spoiler:all of the animals Belos possesses meet this fate as he consumes them from the inside out, leaving only the bones behind. Hunter avoids this fate by prematurely driving Belos out of his body, but judging by the fact that he's left CoveredInScars and barely clinging to life, it was a pretty close call.]]

* ''ComicBook/RobinSeries'': Most of the people whose life energy Johnny Warlock drains leave behind a desiccated skeletal corpse with only shriveled scraps of their flesh left.

* In the live action ''Film/SuperMarioBros'' movie, King Koopa's former lover Lena has her flesh instantly disintegrated and her skeleton blasted into the wall by dimensional radiation after she attempts to reunite a meteorite shard into the whole.

* A variation in ''Manga/FistOfTheNorthStar''. Usually, people explode into LudicrousGibs, but the Colonel of Godland is killed by Kenshiro in a manner that takes a new spin on the concept. As expected, the Colonel explodes into a gory mess when he dies... by ''ejecting his entire skeleton from his body.'' The skeleton ''also'' explodes in the anime, but is implied to be left behind in Godland in the manga.

* From ''Manga/{{Toriko}}'' this is [[EvilOldFolks Chiyo]]'s favorite method of killing, as she demonstrates on some poor guy: Stripping flesh and organs, leaving clean white bone, in the blink of an eye. The guy [[YouAreAlreadyDead didn't even realize it]] until he looked down and saw his entire midsection was missing.

* A ''ComicBook/SecretSix'' (second version, after the 60's originals but before the anti-villain incarnations)story from the late 80's in Action Comics Weekly (briefly an anthology series) had a corporation set a very corrosive cloud of acid rain over a small town, hoping to sell people protection from this 'new threat' later on. In the opener, the rain begins to fall; two teen girls part ways and try to make it home. One clearly does not. She passes out on the sidewalk, and the next panel shows she has been skeletonized; the next panel shows she is gone entirely, and the plot tells that the whole town was lost, though if everyone met her exact fate is never revealed.

** ComicBook/{{Wolverine}} , when he's in the middle of an explosion, is completely destroyed, with the exception of his [[{{Unobtainium}} adamantium]] bones. He [[FromASingleCell regenerates from a few brain cells that survive]]. This is, of course, {{justified|Trope}} because Wolverine's skeleton really IS indestructible. But the regeneration power [[DependingOnTheWriter depends on the writer]], so in ''ComicBook/DaysOfFuturePast'', Wolverine is stripped to the bone, but here it means KilledOffForReal.

* In ''Caltiki, the Immortal Monster,'' a ''Blob'' knock-off, one man's arm is partially consumed by the titular monster, leaving only the bones of his forearm and hand. Later, Cal finishes the job, enveloping him entirely [[spoiler: but not before dissolving the flesh of his face, leaving a visible skull as the man's last arm flails about. Evidently his brain was still functioning through all this.]]

** In the original ''Film/{{Go|jira}}dzilla'' (or ''[[SpellMyNameWithAnS Gojira]]''), the device that ultimately defeated Franchise/{{Godzilla}} skeletonized him, and pretty much every living thing in the general area.

* The opening scenes of ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay'' established that human skeletons can survive nuclear Armageddon, but not being stepped on by a T-800 chassis. Later in the movie, Sarah Connor's dream in the Mexican desert shows her hanging to a fence when caught in the blast of a nuclear weapon. The flesh is blown away like dust, yet the skeleton remains intact, held together, and ''keeps hanging on the fence''. It is AllADream, of course.

* In ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', when vampires are slain, their skeletons are often briefly visible before they entirely crumble into dust. This trope is played much straighter with the Master, an old and powerful vampire, whose flesh and clothes spectacularly evaporate as he dies, leaving behind a perfect, intact skeleton, suitable for resurrection. Buffy and gang fix that with a sledgehammer a few months later. One wonders why similarly old and powerful vampires (like Kakistos and the Turok-Han) don't leave behind similar keepsakes.
** Notably, the skeletons appearing for a second didn't start occurring until the third season when the show's budget increased. Since ''Angel'' shared ''Buffy's'' budget from the get-go, it managed to have the "skeleton" effect right from its start.

* The MysticalPlague that God will send on those who fight against Jerusalem in Zechariah 14:12 (usually interpreted by modern readers as the effects of a nuclear bomb):
-->''And this will be the pestilence with which the Lord will strike all the peoples who go to battle against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot as they stand on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.''

* In some scenes in ''VideoGame/BrainDead13'' when Lance gets... in a {{squick}}y manner... reduced to a skeletal pile of bones, like getting doused in acid, or getting pulled apart from his skin in a two-way manner by Fritz! Of course, being as BadassNormal as our hero is, he revives from being a pile of bones, back to being flesh and blood.

* In ''VideoGame/Doom3'' one unfortunate scientist in Alpha Labs Sector 4 is trapped in a reactor room. You can [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential activate]] the reactor in question, which gives you a GoryDiscretionShot of the scientist being killed, only leaving behind his skeleton once the reactor opens up again. In gameplay, killing a civilian zombie with the shotgun or chainsaw will cause their flesh to literally disintegrate, leaving behind a blood-soaked skeleton.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3Mt2E1M6dU These ants]] manage to strip away an entire gecko into a skeleton in a few hours.

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'': [[http://scp-wiki.net/scp-165 SCP-165 ("The Creeping, Hungry Sands of Tule")]]. SCP-165 is a swarming mass of microscopic mites that can strip an animal of all of its flesh in minutes.

* In ''VideoGame/Doom3'' one unfortunate scientist in Alpha Labs Sector 4 is trapped in a reactor room. You can [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential activate]] the reactor in question, which gives you a GoryDiscretionShot of the scientist being killed, only leaving behind his skeleton once the reactor opens up again.

The purpose of this trope, of course, is shock-effect rather than realism: i.e. to visibly communicate the fact that the person is ''really dead'' since their simply ''disappearing'' wouldn't have nearly the same impact as seeing them instantly turned into The Grim Reaper's twin brother. Meanwhile, at the same time, it's "cleaner" and less gruesome to show a person turned into a Halloween-type skeleton than the blood-and-gore of nastier deaths, while likewise being more devastating since it would obviously take more of an impact to strip someone to the bones than simply gouge the flesh. A variant of this trope is to have a person be reduced to a skeleton, let them stay like that for the briefest of moments, and ''then'' have the skeleton disintegrate or disappear.

* ''ComicBook/{{Sword}}'': During issue 4, a Knull-possessed Cable inflicts this on Fabian Cortez and Sunfire, in a manner of seconds.

** This later happens to [[spoiler:Robert Accutrone]] when Yhwach conducts a second [[ThePurge Auswählen]].

*** The writers just [[McLeaned wanted Adam gone]].

* [[ComicBook/IncredibleHulk The Hulk]] has done it on occasion.

* Several characters in the ''Franchise/MortalKombat'' series have [[FinishingMove fatalities]] that can do this, such as Scorpion (who breathes fire) or Reptile (who vomits acid). This also happens in the Dead Pool stage fatality from ''VideoGame/MortalKombat2'', in which the opponent is knocked into a pool of acid.

* ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBros'' features the series' BigBad, Bowser, falling into lava and being skeletonized (which is depicted in surprisingly horrific detail for this series). Later on, you get to fight Bowser's animated skeletal remains. Though he eventually recovers later on with a little help from Bowser Jr.

* ''VideoGame/EternalChampions'' (the Dark Side) has a much more intense version of this trope. In Midknight's stage (Belgrave Square Labs), the sudden death involves the losing player being sent to a microwave machine. The machine quickly strips the player layer-by-layer by melting off their skin first, after a few seconds, the machine eventually melts off the muscles (reducing them to a skeleton). The trope is played even further when the bones are stripped (or burned) away themselves, leaving the losing victim into a framework of their nerves and internal organs which eventually explode and shatter the window.

** [[spoiler:Barragan has an ability in his released form that will rot away all of the flesh, muscle, and organs of a person until all that is left are the bones.]] It's implied that [[spoiler:it keeps aging until the point where the bones would be gone as well, but it takes a LONG time for bones to decay.]] In the anime, it's not just implied. When [[spoiler:Soifon is hit in the arm, and summarily cuts it off to stop the decay from spreading,]] the bones turn to dust and vanish. This makes sense since Barragan can age rocks and concrete into nothingness.

The human skeleton is pretty tough. If you drink a lot of milk and get plenty of sunshine, your bones can grow to be stronger than concrete[[labelnote:*]]By weight, anyway. A pound of bone is stronger than a pound of concrete, but only just.[[/labelnote]]; shattering a bone requires a really, really strong hit, as in "crashing your car at 60 km/h"-strong. Did you know that crematoria actually grind bones because otherwise, the fragments could be too big to fit in the urns?

* During an aerial battle-scene in ''WesternAnimation/{{Epic}}'', Mandrake's rot-arrow reduces a riding bat to a bare skeleton, which falls apart as its Leafman rider goes plummeting to the ground.

* The alien death rays in the ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice'' episode "Failsafe" reduce those shot (y'know, like Franchise/{{Batman}}, Franchise/GreenLantern, ''the teenage heroes of the show''...) into skeletons for a brief but memorable second before ''[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill disintegrating the skeletons, too.]]''

* In the Marvel mini-series ''Mys-Tech Wars'', [[spoiler: Nick Fury]] is captured by the villains and strapped to a device that is supposed to flay "skin from bone and soul from body." The end result is not pretty. [[spoiler: Hard to believe, but he does get better.]]