Abnormal Ammo / Live-Action TV

• The A-Team once built a couple of cannons that shot cabbages at the bad guys. Yes, cabbages.
• Bones:
  • While pursuing a bad guy, Brennan and Booth are stunned by the bomb the perp dropped. You know how bombs sometimes have nails and such attached to them to increase damage? This one had human teeth.
  • In the episode "The Shot in the Dark", a stalker at the Jeffersonian shot Brennan in the chest. While she was recovering from the gunshot, the Squints were stymied at the lack of either a bullet or an exit wound. Hodgins considered the ice bullet theory, but recognized that ice bullets would vaporize in a conventional gun due to the heat of igniting gunpowder, and since ice is less dense than lead they wouldn't do that much damage anyway. He later suggested the theory that Brennan's would-be killer used a high-powered air-brush as his 'gun', and froze human blood inside a container of liquid nitrogen to produce the bullets; since blood plasma is denser than water, the frozen blood would make an effective bullet, and melt seemingly without a trace. The fact that Brennan at one point suffered complications from receiving the wrong bloodtype, although hospital records confirmed she received the correct type, also pointed to a blood bullet. Brennan was able to prove Hodgins' theory by undergoing exploratory surgery that allowed the doctors to retrieve traces of the blood bullet that nicked her ribs.
• Bottom: Spudgun was named for his ability to fire potatoes out of a certain part of his anatomy.
  Richie: Why do they call you Spudgun?
  Spudgun: Give me a potato and I'll show you why.
  Eddie: No-no, you don't want to see that Rich!
  Richie: And why do they call you Hedgehog?
  Dave Hedgehog: Give me a hedgehog and I'll show you why!
• CSI: One episode has a killer make a bullet out of frozen ground beef.
• Dad's Army: In one episode, the Walmington-on-Sea Platoon fails to complete a task set by a training instructor and the following morning find themselves with the prospect of repelling a simulated attack without the training shells they were supposed to acquire in the previous excercise, Private Fraser has an epiphany and points out the artillery piece they have with them is a smooth-bore weapon and can fire practically anything, Sergeant Wilson adds they just need something hard but not lethal, Captain Mainwaring starts to say they don't have anything hard but not lethal but remembers there's several hundred onions in the back of Jone's van. The Training Instructor gives them full marks for ingenuity.
• The Day of the Triffids (1981) includes an anti-Triffid gun that fires little spinning sawblades at the Triffid's slender stems.
• Doctor Who:
  • Shotguns loaded with rock-salt are used in "Image of the Fendahl". This happens to be Truth in Television, rock-salt is sometimes loaded into shotguns to cause pain but little damage. In this case, though, the ammo is used because the salt is a lethal poison to the Fendahleen. The Doctor also surmises that this fact is the source of the belief that salt is a powerful defense against black magic.
  • In "Asylum of the Daleks", the Daleks fire the Doctor at the eponymous asylum from space, assuming a Person of Mass Destruction like him will inevitably wreck the facility once there.
• Farscape: The wormhole weapons can shoot a) black holes that grow geometrically or b) wormholes that can then shoot chunks of plasma-hot star at a target. If you include the Peacekeeper Wars TV movie, you get to see both occur in the course of the series. While it isn't immediately obvious, what the wormhole weapon did was connect two points in space - a sun and an enemy ship. That's where the plasma came from and that's why it's so cumbersome to use.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Anguy briefly commissions Gendry to forge bodkin points for piercing plate, though the stated effective range of 200 yards is quite excessive.
  • At the end of "Breaker of Chains", Daenerys' catapults fire barrels full of broken slave collars over the walls to encourage the slaves inside to revolt.
• Get Smart. A KAOS assassin posing as a vampire used a gun that fires twin ice bullets, leaving the distinctive Vampire Bites Suck mark, but no evidence of any weapon.
• J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai: The final episode features the heroes launching a missile that turns into a rat in midair.
• Jonathan Creek: In "The Letters of Septimus Noone", Ridley proposes a solution to the crime that involves the victim being shot with a crossbow bolt made of frozen blood. He's wrong, especially as his theory also involves the victim lying on the floor doing stretching exercises in her underwear when she was shot.
• Junkyard Wars: Anytime the series has its teams build weapons of any sort you can count on at least one of them scrounging up something odd to cram down their barrel — like the balls off iron bedposts, cement-filled spray paint cans, or pieces of rebar — not always with fireable success. Other times they would specifically task the teams with designing machines to "fire" large objects - a washing machine catapult, or "car curling".
• Legends of Tomorrow: In "Outlaw Country", Quentin Turnball uses dwarf star alloy bullets, ammo that explodes into blue flames, and can even penetrate Nate's bulletproof skin.
• In M*A*S*H, Col. Potter, who has having a crisis of confidence in his surgical skills, has a meltdown when a visiting officer is giving a presentation of dealing with wounds created by the Chinese using white phosphorus ammunition.
• Monk: In "Mr. Monk and the TV Star," there is a CSI parody called Crime Lab: SF. When Monk, Sharona, Stottlemeyer and Disher walk into the dubbing studio to arrest star/executive producer Brad Terry for murder, he's in the middle of doing dubbing work for an episode in which a killer covers his tracks with bullets made of frozen blood.
• The MythBusters:
  • They have made air cannons that have shot the following: conventional cannonballs, baseballs, chickens (frozen and thawed), straws and twigs, piano wire, Kevlar-wrapped steak, a net, styrofoam cups full of liquid, and a whole host of other strange items. There was also the section of sewer-type pipe they modified to shoot Buster, their much-abused crash test dummy, with a blast of high explosives. The ice, gelatin, and frozen meat bullets mentioned elsewhere in this trope were all tested and all were busted. They also modified a rifle to fire a penny—this time, it was potentially lethal.
  • Also, inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean example, they loaded up a whole variety of odd ammo into a US Civil War era cannon to test their effectiveness. Examples included bottles of rum, wooden legs, silverware, steak knives, nails, lengths of chain, and cheese, with varying levels of effectiveness.
  • Cigarette butts shoved into the barrel of a shotgun, which proved to be potentially lethal at close range. (Unsmoked cigarettes were less useful, and almost resulted in a false Busted.) Additionally, those were supermarket cigarettes; the myth in question involved a couple of hillbillies, so they probably smoked roll-your-owns — no lightweight filter, more mass, more impact force... you get the point.
  • Or the Korean Hwacha. A salvo of arrows. Arrows propelled 500 yards by gunpowder rockets. That then exploded when they land.
  • Or the bowling ball fired from a modified gas cylinder, using match heads as propellant.
  • Soda. It started with styro cup with ice, cup with soda, soda and ice, slushy, and culminated w/Jamie's shoulder-mounted pop-gun.
  • Not strictly ammo, but in a late 2009 episode, they built a cannon out of duct tape. That fired a five-pound iron ball several hundred feet. They've also built and tested both a wood cannon and a leather cannon.
  • They have crafted cannonballs from ice. As opposed to the aforementioned ice bullet myth, where the bullets simply melted, they successfully fired these things out of a genuine cannon with enough force to blow off their target dummy's arm with a just a glancing hit.
  • In the same episode they fired an intact ping-pong ball at Mach 1.4. The impact itself was not lethal, but the cannon left one hell of a pneumatic trauma injury.
  • Finally, they created a hook cannon for a Batmobile high-speed turn myth.
  • There's also a quote from Adam that sums this up pretty well:
  Adam: Is this awesome or what? We tripped all three of the ShockWatch stickers, which tells us something we often learn here at MythBusters: Everyday objects can in fact be lethal if Jamie builds a gun to shoot them.
• Odd Squad often resorts to this kind of ammo when agents need to defeat villains, due to its kid-friendly nature. Some examples include Olive, Oscar, Otto and Orson knocking out a large group of villains with ice cream in "Undercover Olive" and Evil Teddy's teddy bear minions attacking two agents-in-training with, what else, teddy bears in "Assistant's Creed", among many others.
• Rizzoli & Isles: In "Knockout", the killer uses bullets made out of dental gypsum and bone fragments that break up inside the body of the victim, leaving no bullet for a ballistics match.
• Royal Canadian Air Farce: "Chicken Cannon: Target of the Week", originally a dig at pitiful mid-nineties Canadian military budgets, has a cannon used to fire upon pictures of whomever the show's writers thought were deserving of a little public humiliation. The traditional projectile of a rubber chicken was often supplemented with "custom" ammo suited to the situation at hand (e.g., sawdust for someone involved in the softwood lumber dispute, or Eggos for a politician who was perceived to waffle. And sometimes Jell-O for the hell of it — or, more accurately, because there's always room for Jell-O.)
• In Smallville, one villain of the week used Kryptonite bullets to shoot Clark Kent, nearly killing the future Man of Steel.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Played with in "Field of Fire", in which a series of murders on the station are tied to a ballistic weapon that fired a physical projectile, which, in an era when all firearms are directed energy weapons such as phasers and disruptors, is highly unusual. All the more still when said ballistic weapon uses a microtransporter to teleport the projectiles right in front of the killer's victims.
• Supernatural: The Winchester brothers use shotguns loaded with rock salt for ghost-dispersal.
• Super Sentai (and by extension Power Rangers) have featured this from time to time, even when most of the shows have the heroes firing lasers:
  • Some seasons have team cannons that use ammo or power cells of some kind — everything from Earth-empowered artillery shells to giant chi power spheres to the souls of extradimensional car mecha.
  • Chouriki Sentai Ohranger / Power Rangers Zeo had a cannon in their Home Base that fired their Humongous Mecha to the battlefield. It was as awesome as it sounds.
  • Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger could never decide on whether or not the heroes and villains were using bullets, lasers or both; at least once, a criminal is explained to have used "old-fashioned bullets", implying all the weapons in their world fall under this, being "charged up" in some fashion.
  • Engine Sentai Go-onger had a Monster of the Week managing to pull a Grand Theft Me on the team's Red Ranger; they manage to reclaim his body by loading his soul into the team's BFG and firing it (represented by an image of his head surrounded by flames) at his body, which forcibly ejects the monster.
• Top Gear (UK) once used a gun that fired cars. The kind you drive. In the episode, they fired a selection of old cars into a quarry. At a colossal dartboard. Richard Hammond won. By crushing a caravan with a flying Volvo.
• Top Gear (US) had Adam create an anti-moron car (a 1990s Impala) armed with a variety of abnormal weaponry. Tanner tried tailgating him, only for Adam to fire the squid cannon, showering Tanner's car in hundreds of dead squid. The Impala was also kitted out with a series of paint guns.
• True Blood: Jason uses a wooden bullet to dispatch Stalker with a Crush Franklin.
• Ultraseven has the eponymous alien shrink down to about an inch high, run into the barrel of Ultra Garrison officer Furuhashi's BFG, then fly out the business end when Furuhashi fired the next shot, all to destroy robot kaijuu Crazygon.
• X-Play: Parodied when auxiliary character "Johnny Extreme" proposes a video game idea that involves rocket launchers that shoot chainsaws that explode.

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