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Slappy: What about the plot, Hemingway? What's an anvil got to do with this story? Skippy: Who cares? Anvils are funny!
While in a cartoon, always beware of falling anvils! These large solid metal objects weigh a ton, are invariably dropped from great height and are used to crush heads, though hands, feet and rib cages sometimes create soft landing spots. Sometimes used to create Accordion Man. They may drop without warning, or they may be heralded by the Shadow Of Impending Doom and the Bomb Whistle. The victim usually just has time to look up and see the falling object before it lands on him.
An anvil is a work surface for making wrought iron or steel objects — the metal is heated in a forge until it glows white and is then pounded and shaped against the anvil with a hammer and tongs. Naturally, the anvil has to be something heavy, hard, strong and relatively insensitive to heat — like iron. Several other crafts — such as any clothwork that uses riveting — also make use of anvils, though usually much smaller and lighter ones. If you take a look at a stapler, you'll find an anvil right beneath the place where the staple comes out. The staple comes out of the cartridge, goes through the paper, and bends back on itself when it hits the anvil.
In some cases, especially if full-body crushing is desired, an n-ton weight may be substituted for the anvil. This is a metal weight shaped like a pyramid with the top cut off, a ring at the top for attaching a rope, and the exact weight (usually 1, 10, or 16 tons) painted in white on the front. The 16-ton weight was favored by Monty Python's Flying Circus. In cartoons, if the toon is driven completely out of sight, often a Cranial Eruption will shove the weight out of the way.
And once in a while, it's a safe. In those, occasionally the safe's lock whirls open and the character, who has somehow wound up inside the safe, falls out. Grand pianos are used as well, in which case the character will either end up inside where the strings are, or with a mouth full of piano keys for teeth. Another sometimes used option is for a tree or telephone pole to fall over on top of the character, repeatedly bouncing on their head and driving them into the ground like a piledriver.
Not to be confused with Dropped A Bridge On Him. Or Anvilicious.
Examples:
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Advertising
- There's a wonderful commercial for Clarica investment company
 (now merged with Sun Life) in which a woman is sitting at a bus stop. Suddenly, a man at the bus stop across the street looks hectically up at the sky, then madly starts gesticulating, pointing, and yelling, but she can't hear him. Finally someone else comes along, sees what the man's so freaked out about, pulls out a piece of cardboard and a marker, draws a big up arrow, and shows it to the woman. She looks up, then dives out of the way an instant before a falling piano crushes the bus stop. The tagline: "There's a lot to be said for clarity."
- And don't forget the Orbital Anvil Delivery System, for all your spammer-flattening and clue delivery needs!
Anime and Manga
- The rough Japanese equivalent of the anvil is a large falling basin, its purpose much the same — land on somebody's head. Two characters prone to summoning these basins onto people's heads are Koyomi in Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou (on accident) and Yukari in Rosario To Vampire (on purpose).
- The Americaphilic author of Jojos Bizarre Adventure included a semi-serious version of this. The heroes, during a gritty seinen action/adventure story, drop an anvil on a zombie's head. Of course, the results are realistically gory.
Film
- In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the movie opens with a cartoon short that ends with a refrigerator being dropped on Roger. Later, toon prop magnate Marvin Acme is killed by a safe falling on his head. Halfway through the film, Eddie Valiant reveals that his grudge against toons stems from his brother Teddy's death, which was caused by a rogue toon dropping a piano on him.
Literature
- Terry Pratchett uses that frequently to deal with minor characters in his Discworld books. One petty thug dies when he's hit with an armadillo, another one - falling bed, and the alternate universe Carrot dies when he's hit with an aardvark. A vampire in bat form was stunned by a thrown (garlic) sausage and then eaten by a cat.
- Of course, the cat in question was Greebo, whom Nanny Ogg still sees as a tiny, adorable kitten, and everyone else sees as death on four legs who will attempt to fight or rape anything up to and including a four-draft-horse logging wagon, the local equivalent of a Mack Truck.
- The Eyre Affair pays homage to the anvil tradition in the subplot involving the Minotaur who has been tagged with a slapstick marker.
Live Action TV
- Monty Pythons Flying Circus and You Cant Do That On Television favored the X-ton weight.
- Turns out there's actually a Live Action example. Supernatural has a Groundhog Day Loop where each day a certain character dies a different death. The beginning of the day always starts the same way, and when they go outside, one of the things they see is movers trying to get a desk into a building from the ground floor. At the end of one Tuesday, out of nowhere it drops on our hero and kills him. Turns out the movers had spent the rest of the day trying to get it in the window.
- Top Gear — except substitute 'piano' for 'anvil' and 'Morris Marina' for 'head.'
Newspaper Comics
- A Far Side cartoon featured children being warned not to play under the Anvil Tree. While what happened next is not depicted, there is an obvious outcome: this trope.
Radio
- In The Goon Show episode "The case of the Missing CD Plates" Neddie Seagoon is struck down by a steamroller but can't sue for damages because it has diplomatic immunity, as indicated by the attached CD plates of the title. Neddie is then struck by a falling piano which doesn't have CD plates, but is tricked into attching one to it. It just isn't his day.
Video Games
- Video game example: In the opera house scene in Final Fantasy VI, Ultros tries to kill Celes by dropping a four-ton weight on her while she is on stage.
- For another example, try annoying the robot in charge of the armory in Space Quest 1 (VGA remake) by entering a restricted area, repeatedly asking for a gun, etc. He'll give a talk about your stupidity before dropping an anvil on you!
- In Final Fantasy VII, the enemy skill ???? (yes, that is its name) takes the form of a falling weight.
- Similarly, the skill "Press" in Star Ocean 2 drops a weight on an enemy, with the upgraded "Gravity Press" dropping a whole bunch of them.
- Videogame example: In Discworld II: Mortality Bytes/Missing Presumed...?!, one of the puzzles requires you to smash in a wall. At a different point in the game, you steal a prop 1 ton weight. If you try to swing this at the wall, it bounces off and clobbers you. Once you add a 0 to make it a 10 ton weight, puzzle solved.
- The SNES game Yoshi's Safari got a boss where you need to shoot a flying (wings included) anvil so that it falls on the boss.
- Lemmings (the first one) had the 10-ton weight version as one of the many traps that could eviscerate the green-haired critters.
- In the old video game Quest For Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero?, breaking into the wrong room drops a guard Antwerp on your head. (They're basically very large creatures said to be nearly impossible to defeat, much less capture.)
- In the online flash game, Jelly Battle, the "Random Drop" attack will make an anvil, heavy weights, or a piano fall on an opponent.
- This is often the primary attack method of the Stone copy ability in most Kirby Games. Kirby Super Star and It's remake in partuicular allows the user of the ability to transform into various heavy objects, including a heavy wieght. The ability to change into a weight is also seen in the Super Smash Bros games as one of Kirby's special moves.
- Banjo-Tooie's obligatory end of the game game show segment has massive anvils hovering over the contestants which Gruntilda will drop on the loser of the round. She seems to have little concern for the fact that two of the contestants are her sisters, or the fact that she could just drop the anvil over Banjo and Kazooie without any reason besides the fact that she's evil. In fact, it's not until after she flees the room that she actually considers this. Fortunately Banjo is already gone when the weight drops.
- In Sonic Shuffle, Eggman would drop a 16t weight on the character who was unfortunate enough to be the furthest away from the Precioustone after it has been collected, causing the victim to lose half his/her rings.
- Attacking someone whilst riding the OpaOpa Machine in Sonic Riders resulted in the victim getting a weight dropped on them.
- Sid & Al's Incredible Toons
Webcomics
- Webcomic example: Stickman And Cube has been known to drop quite a few weights on characters. Some of them weigh "infinity tonnes" and others weigh "N tonnes". At one point, a dropped weight was so heavy it smashed through the bottom of Panel 3 into Panel 6. It must have pretty cheap panels.
- Used brilliantly by Deux Ex Machina Man in this strip.
- This strip of the B Movie Comic, and the associated rant.
- Picking up a coin? Why, it's perfectly ... safe.
- 8-Bit Theater once had Black Mage get the entire continent of Australia dropped on him
Western Animation
Web Animation
- The internet flash 'toon Homestar Runner favors the "Heavy Lourde", a weight of indeterminate mass. Oddly (for a cartoon), we're initially led to believe that Homsar was killed in this manner, but it is later revealed that he was merely hospitalized.
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