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A Red Shirt in his natural state.
Kirk: All right, men, this is a dangerous mission. And it's likely one of us will be killed. The landing party will consist of myself, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Ensign Ricky.
Ensign Ricky: Ah, crap.
Boone: Red shirt. You ever watch Star Trek? Locke: No, not really. Boone: The crew guys that would go down to the planet with the main guys, the Captain and the guy with the pointy ears, they always wore red shirts and they always got killed. Locke: Yeah? Boone: Yeah. Locke: Sounds like a piss poor Captain. -- Lost
The color of shirt worn by the nameless security personnel on the original Star Trek series. Their only job was to get eaten/shot/stabbed/disrupted/frozen/desalinated, and give William Shatner or DeForest Kelly a corpse to emote over.
A Red Shirt is the good cousin of Evil Minions -- set filler for our heroes' side. Their purpose is almost exclusively to give the writers someone to kill who isn't a main character, although they can also serve as a Spear Carrier. They are used to show how the monster works, and demonstrate that it is indeed a deadly menace, without having to lose anyone important.
In mass quantities, they make up the Redshirt Army.
Anyone Can Die is the polar opposite of this trope.
Compare to The Worf Effect where, once again, a character is brutalized to show the enemy's power, with the notable difference that it is a main character, and they don't die.
See also Retirony, Mauve Shirt, Sacrificial Lamb.
Examples:
- Parodied magnificently in Space Quest 5, where miscellaneous crew members all wear blue shirt, and Roger Wilco, the protagonist (and ship's captain) is the one who wears a red shirt. Guess who gets shot at all the time?
Droole: This may be dangerous, lets split up so we can cover more territory.
Roger: Don't you think we should stick together?
Droole: Only if you do a quick wardrobe change, sir.
Roger: This is hardly a time play Fashion critic.
Droole: It's not that, it's your shirt... it's... well... so red... It's bad luck.
(They separate, and minutes later Roger is indeed attacked.)
- In Crime And Punishment shows, the newly deceased Red Shirt only has one week left to go before retirement. At the opposite end of a career-span, the first CSI episode had a Red Shirt who had only been on the job for a week. (Also done in The Bill.)
- Redshirts getting killed just because are rather standard in pretty much any fiction portraying a battle or war, possibly somewhat reasonable, because... well, it is a battle or war, after all.
- This trope was parodied very effectively in Galaxy Quest in the character of Guy Fleegman, "Crewman Number Six" -- who is the only cast member NOT killed during the climactic final battle! (Although a bit of time travel makes everyone else better). Lamp Shade Hanging at its finest (also see Plucky Comic Relief).
- The Captain survives too. He has to if he's gonna hit the reset button. Hurt isn't killed.
- A film that seriously plays with the concept is Aliens. Hey, who can forget Hudson's "Four more weeks and out" tirade?
- Everyone who fast forwards past it because he's a whiner.
- During the conversation in the page quote, on Lost, Boone was tying red shirts to trees. Eight episodes later, he died (and was the first main character to do so.) Lampshade Hanging and Foreshadowing at the same time.
- This scene is even more ironic because the actor who played Locke had been in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he wore, you guessed it, a red shirt. He didn't die in the episode. Being that his Star Trek character got court martialed and imprisoned for his poor decisions as Captain, he probably doesn't have the right to call Kirk "a piss poor Captain" (although Kirk had his fair share of court martials as well).
- The show itself performs many a Lampshade Hanging on its actual red shirts. The characters Scott and Steve, for instance, are always confused by important characters, even after one of them dies (Hurley's eulogy for him boils down to "Sorry I could never remember your name.") The character Dr. Arzt is introduced near the end of season 1 and complains about how everyone (i.e., the main characters) acts like a high school clique.
- A final point of irony in this quote comes from the fact that J.J. Abrams (the show's co-creator, writer, executive producer, and director) went on to direct and produce Star Trek XI (coming out 2009.) This troper wonders how many red shirts will be killed in the movie.
- Parodied in Futurama, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", in which the entire Star Trek The Original Series cast is threatened by a jealous energy being, but only Welshy (a parody of Jonas Quinn for Scotty), who's dressed in the classic Red Shirt, gets killed. Three times over. Additionally, Zapp Brannigan's entire brigade all wear red which accurately shows how he often sacrifices them freely and considers all missions suicide missions.
- Parodied in Kim Possible, in the Trapped In TV Land episode called "Dimension Twist", when Kim is temporarily sent to a Star Trek-esque tv show and appears in a red uniform:
Wade: This is the part of the show where they pick series regulars to go on a mission. Just make sure you're not the one wearing...
Kim: ...a red shirt?
Pseudo-Kirk: And... (to Kim) you! You're expendable.
- The Finnish Star Trek/Babylon 5 spoof Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
 put the Trek redshirts against the B5 security forces. The carnage was horrible.
- Subverted in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, where the appropriately red-shirted Lieutenant (later Lieutenant-Commander) Der Trihs (Red Shirt spelled backwards) is repeatedly injured in various grievous ways, including being reduced to a head-in-a-jar a couple of times, but never actually dies. Instead, he actually 'wins the game' by retiring from the mercenary business to live with a pretty girl on a paradisaical vacation-planet. It is revealed at one point that his skull is quite nearly impervious to harm.
- Parodied in the same Family Guy episode that the quote at the top of this article comes from: when Peter is running in the road with William Shatner, the latter gets hit and killed by a car. The camera then pans to Ensign Ricky, who declares: "I did not see that coming."
- Subverted in the Star Trek Expanded Universe novel The Eyes of the Beholders, by A.C. Crispin. The apparent red shirt for a mission not only survives but saves the rest of the away team.
- Another literary example: Brilliantly skewered in the James Alan Gardner novel Expendable.
- Cleverly spoofed in a short Star Trek parody film, ''Steam Trek: The Moving Picture'' (premise: Trek as it would be done 100 years ago by George Melies), where the expendable member of the away team wears a shirt with a target on the back.
- Lampshaded in Stone Trek: Every time a redshirt dies, a "Dead Redshirt Count" is shown.
- A discreet spoof in the movie The Running Man: Two contestants wore yellow jumpsuits while two wore red. Guess who died?
- Parodied many times over in filk, from Leslie Fish's "Landing Party Blues" to "Redshirt's Lament":
Tis a gift to wear a gold shirt or a blue, you see
But look, my dear, what they have done to me
Even Engineering would a blessing be
But no, they've made me Security
Whe-en the landing party's gone
I'll be there with my red shirt on
I'll make sure my estate's all orderly
Because that is the last that you'll see of me
- The amateur PC Adventure Game Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, which is pretty much what it sounds like, takes the trope to its logical extreme by making redshirts into a commodity cloned and sold in 5-packs. They die in a great number of interesting ways. In fact it's actually impossible for an away mission to end any way but the death of the redshirt.
- Similarly, the Tabletop Games Paranoia has the players taking the roles of Troubleshooters tasked with the job of shooting trouble wherever it should arise in Alpha Complex. The starting rank is "Red". As each character is part of a six-pack of clones, the body count can rack up astronomically quickly...
- In Star Munchkin, there is a hireling called a red shirt. Their only use is to die when you lose a battle, thus preventing the "Bad Stuff" from happening to you. However, they have, on a success, a one in six chance of getting overexcited and sacrificing themselves anyway.
- In one issue of Toyfare's Twisted Toyfare Theatre, Kirk returns from a mission in which "only a dozen redshirts died," to find himself in the Mirror Universe, where the meek and pragmatic Mirror Kirk is protected by the immortal Redshirts.
- The countless native African servants and carriers in the Allan Quartermain movie adaptions exist only to be eaten by crocodiles or killed by traps so that the danger can be demonstrated without killing off a main character.
- The Red Shirt gets his revenge in Robot Chicken with a Star Trek sketch. When the crew teleported down to a planet to survive the Enterprise exploding, the crew reasons that to survive one of them must be sacrificed as food. Obviously they choose the Red Shirt first, but the Red Shirt tells them off by saying "On behalf of all the redshirts that fell before me, it makes me proud to say the following sentence... I'm the only one who brought a gun." He proceeds to kill and eat them all.
- Jean Jack Gibson, from SNATCHER. His outfit is more of a burgundy-orange, but it doesn't change the fact that his only purpose in-story is to be brutally murdered half an hour into the game.◊
- Played straight in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series and averted in one notable example: Helo was originally supposed to die during the miniseries, but the fans took a liking to him so the writers brought him back. Helo has since gotten his own season-long subplot, his own episode and has started a family with one of the core characters, as well as displaying morality that is more admirable and consistent than almost any other character on the show.
- Random military types in Doctor Who often are used as cannon fodder. UNIT personnel are frequent victims. In the New Series, they have red hats too.
- Any CTU field agent who isn't Jack Bauer or the season's Colonel Makepeace is a red shirt. In season 4 and part of season 5, CTU HQ's security officers actually wore red shirts - that is, until they were all killed at once in a nerve gas attack.
- In Combat! they aren't so much red shirts as Redemption Equals Death shirts. In fact, a good way to tell if someone will die is if they are given a name.
- In Gears of War, Carmine (whose name is a shade of red) is a faceless rookie squadmember (he's the only character to wear a helmet and mask). He's also the first squad member to die in the game (and actually 1 of the only 2 characters who die), shot in the head by a sniper after the first couple of levels.
- This troper knew that Carmine was going six feet under the moment he appeared in the game. First, he's got a helmet, which means he's faceless. Second, he's young and energetic (overly so). Third, he's clearly impressed and awed to be working the renowned Marcus Fenix. It was only a matter of time before he got sniped.
- Funnily enough, he is supposed to return in Gears of War 2... although exactly how hasn't been revealed yet.
- I've also been told Carmine's death is an inside joke for the developers, as wearing a helmet that covers everything aside from the eyes is asking to get flanked and shot.
- Almost every friendly NPC in the first-person shooter Half Life was a redshirt. The security guards would tag along and give support, but their low hit points and wimpy pistols meant they never lasted long. And the scientists, oh those poor scientists. Almost all of them only existed to die in scripted set-pieces to remind you of how insanely dangerous everything was.
- One of the guards, however, got his own spin-off. You don't mess with Barney.
- Occurs in Gundam Seed, in which Athurn's buddy Rusty (who never shows his face or has any dialog) is killed. He's wearing Red, which ironically is supposed to be the uniform of ZAFT's elite.
- Funimation voice actor Vic Mignogna wrote a song about the Red Shirt anime equivalents, called "Soldier A":
Soldier A, Soldier A
The unsung hero of anime
Hip hooray for Soldier A
He only has one line but saves the day
He's called upon to grunt or yell or scream
Even if his mouth is never seen
Through the fray with ne'er to say
He'll lead the way, he's Soldier A
- Lampshaded endlessly in an episode of The Venture Bros, where Mauve Shirt Henchmen #21 and #24 repeatedly taunt the previously unseen Henchman #1 for his red shirt status. By the end of the episode, #1 is beaten to death by Brock Samson, as the genre savvy #21 and #24 miraculously escape harm.
- Finding creative ways to kill off redshirts was part of the fun for some of the writers of the Leagueof Intergalactic Cosmic Champions (other writers thought we were sick.)
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