Helicopter Blender - Television Tropes & Idioms

The hero is being chased by baddies in a helicopter. He's probably on a car or motorbike (rarely running). The baddies are shooting automatic weapons at him, but they've of course attended the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, so all they manage to hit are nearby objects and maybe other people who have the bad luck of passing by at the wrong moment.

But wait, the hero has just gotten himself into a wide open space with no exit! He's trapped! The helicopter first comes to a low altitude, and you may think the baddies would just open fire en masse and rain hot lead all over the place because, hey, there's only so many bullets a hero can avoid. But no, that'd be too easy.

Instead the helicopter first hovers right above ground, then tilts forward at a very steep angle. It then proceeds to slowly move forward, its rotor becoming a deadly, razor-sharp weapon that slices and dices everything it touches. All sorts of objects, people, even vehicles are thrown aside and shredded to pieces by the Helicopter Blender.

The hero seems doomed, but at the last moment he always finds a way out (bonus points if it involves jumping over the helicopter).

A variant: sometimes the helicopter is just hovering in midair, not doing anything much, and someone falls off a cliff (or something), gets blended by the blades and ends up as a red mess on the canopy. The helicopter invariably keeps hovering in place, its pilot(s) deeply disgusted by the new shade they're seeing the world through but otherwise fearing no consequence.
Another variant: sometimes the helicopter itself breaks up, but the still-spinning rotor is used to deal damage to someone.

Now let's get out of Hollywood Land and into real life. It is possible for a real-life rotating-wing aircraft to lean at quite extreme angles. This usually happens in either military or aerobatic maneuvers (see here

and here

for spectacular examples) executed in high-performance helicopters. Civilian models may or may not be able to perform them, but if they for some reason had to it'd be waaay up in the sky, to give the pilot time to recover from such a dramatic maneuver.

Furthermore, leaning forward is how a helicopter gains speed. It is therefore physically impossible for any helicopter to lean that much and not start rapidly moving forward—or, due to those pesky laws of physics, not immediately lose lift and smash into the ground.

Finally, main rotor blades aren't very tough. A blade strike (that is, a blade touching any object with significant mass while the rotor is spinning) almost inevitably causes a crash-landing. ...Unless it happens at high altitude, at which point it simply causes a crash.

Long story short, no helicopter pilot with a brain would ever try to purposefully strike anything with his blades. If he did, the result would very probably kill someone—namely, himself, when the spinny things keeping him in the air fell off his vehicle. The same thing would happen if a man fell through them, with the same disastrous results. (Proof of concept: what happens when a bird—an object of quite smaller mass than your average bear—should happen to get ingested into the engine of an airplane?)

It should also be noted that if the rotors are intact when a helicopter loses power, they are usually designed to autogyro (or "autorotate", the terminology varies), allowing the helicopter to land (mostly) safely so long as the rotors are intact and the pilot can find a safe place to land quickly. In fact, learning how to do this, through actual practice, is usually a requirement in getting a helicopter pilot's licence. Many real-world helicopter accidents are caused by damage to either the rotor (which is actually a wing, hence the alternate term 'rotary wing aircraft' - which also means that the leading edge is the blunt side, not the narrow side) or the stabilizer, which can cause the craft to go out of control if the pilot can't cut the power in time.

Compare Turbine Blender.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Mobile Suit Victory Gundam justifies this with humongous mecha equipped with beam rotors. That is to say, their blades were effectively lightsabers, so chopping things up with them would be rather easy.
- Actually flying, however, not so much.
- In the Gundam SEED Astray: Red Frame short, Lowe attaches the head of a BuCUE to Red Frame's arm so he can use the double-ended beam saber in it's "mouth". He then rigs it to spin, creating much the same effect as a Beam Rotor. May or may not have been a Shout Out, given that the upgrade was a one-shot with a shorter lifespan than most of the Red Frame's.
Big Volfogg's Murasame Sword attack uses the blades of the Gungrue, a transforming helicopter, as a spinning sword attack, because Everythings Better With Spinning.

Film

007: Tomorrow Never Dies has this (and is indeed the movie that inspired this trope). Everybody's favourite secret agent finds himself in a large square on a motorbike, with a helicopter leaning forward and trying to blend him (and his female companion). It fails, as they manage to jump over it and motor away, but cuts up plenty of material while trying. Oh, and only after 007 and the Girl Of The Week jump over it do the crew realize it wasn't such a bright idea, as the helicopter slams on a wall and blows up.
- Ok, correction time. The jumping over the helicopter came before the blender part. They did that to cross a road. When the blender was coming, they slid under the blades and threw a very thick rope and hook into the blades to tangle them up. This is what led to it crashing into the wall.
Later averted in The World Is Not Enough, where the helicopter just has several enormous rotary saw blades dangling from a helicopter instead.
- Possibly justified, as the helicopters in question were supposedly designed to fly above treetop level and use the rotary saw blades below it to clear branches.
- And they are real: http://www.helimatic-gmbh.de/en_1.htm
Done in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The Silver Surfer flies above the place where Mr Fantastic and Invisible Woman are having their wedding, disrupting the controls of a nearby press helicopter. It careens wildly and crashes right on the place where the ceremony is being held. As it's skidding, its rotor blades hit the ground and start throwing chairs and other assorted objects in the air. The chopper is then stopped rather unceremoniously by The Thing, who proceeds to rip its tail off. It's a bit less unrealistic, as the helicopter is not deliberately used as a weapon, but the rotor really should have broken up and/or flipped the helicopter over...
In Grindhouse helicopter blades are used to cut through zombies.
- Not that Grindhouse ever claimed it should be taken seriously
Ditto in 28 Weeks Later, with infected people in place of zombies the pilot doesn't recover and it's a military chopper so a little more believable.
- Believable? Military choppers have guns on them!
Underworld Evolution has the third variant of this trope: a military helicopter is hit and takes a dive down a hole in the ground. The rotor shatters upon hitting said hole's walls, which also keep the helicopter in position, nose-down, after it stops moving. Despite the crash, the impacts, the physical damage and the fact that nobody's at the controls, the engines keep working and the transmission is miraculously still intact. This causes the stumps of the blades to keep rotating, and they promptly blend the Big Bad as the heroine pushes him into them.
The flying saucers ("Velocipods") that Syndrome's minions used in The Incredibles were apparently designed with this trope in mind. The craft fly by means of a spinning metal disc—a cross between helicopter rotors and a sawblade—around the edge. The rotor is capable of tilting (for keeping the craft upright while turning, and for trying to slice trespassers to bits) and strong enough to cut through a palm tree without sustaining notable damage.
- There are schematics that appear in the background of the special features indicating that the blades are quite a lot shorter and wider than those of your average 'copter. Better for chopping stuff with, for sure, but let's not ask how they handle so well...
  - The answer is pretty obvious really.
Near the end of the first Mission Impossible film, a baddie flies a helicopter into a train tunnel and attempts this on the protagonist. The rotors even bounce off the walls with no ill effects (only some pretty sparks).
- Additionally, the writers don't take any thought to the aerodynamics of the passing train, which would leave a VERY low-pressure area immediately behind it, which would make maneuvering the helicopter EXTREMELY difficult as it neared the train— particularly in a tunnel due to the inability for air to move freely; however the movie features the chopper maneuvering as easily as if it was in an open field with no wind.
In the generic Bruce Willis actioner The Last Boy Scout, the climactic fight with the Dragon, the boss's toughest henchman occurs up in the lights over a crowded football stadium. Inexplicably, in the middle of the fight, a helicopter flies into the stadium and underneath the two men fighting on the highest catwalk, not only endangering those aboard, but thousands of football fans directly below them. Why would the chopper pilot do something this insane? Why, so Bruce can kick his opponent off the catwalk and downward into the Helicopter Blender. Take that, bad guy!
Played realistically in John Woo's Broken Arrow. A helicopter strapped to a flatbed traincar is preparing for takeoff when a mook is knocked up into the path of the rotor blades, resulting in only a large gash in his chest as he is flung thirty or so feet. Notably, this happens while the helicopter is still grounded, so there are no flight issues.
Although it violated several other laws of physics, The Italian Job remake played this part straight. The pilot didn't threaten the main character with his rotorblade, and when he tried to block his mini with his tail-rotor, the mini won. Of course, this brings up the question of exactly what he planned to do in a helicopter with no method of attacking.
- Ride to the airport and catch his plane out of town. He hadn't planned on needing a ground-attack chopper that day.
An accidental, fixed-wing variation concludes Indy's fight with the Giant Mook in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
- This is at least Plausible, in the words of the Mythbusters, who showed that a fixed-wing prop can cause a serious amount of damage without sustaining much injury itself when they tested the "shredded plane" myth.
This troper remembers Terminal Velocity ending with the main baddie parachuting on a wind generator. We don't get to see the blending, but the next scene shows one of the blades with blood on it, implying it's killed him. The blade has no damage whatsoever, despite the rather muscular human that slammed on it.
Averted in the film Year of the Comet, in which the protagonists use a helicopter to chase the villain who is driving a car. The female lead believes that they've got the advantage, to which the male lead says "What do you want me to do, hover him to death?"
In Shoot Em Up near the end of the skydiving shootout sequence Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) kicks some mook towards a helicopter that just happened to be nearby.
- Though to be fair, nothing in the movie is supposed to be remotely realistic or taken seriously.
George A. Romero's Dawn Of The Dead features an accidental zombie decapitation by the still-rotating main rotors of a landed helicopter.
- This was a Chekhovs Gun for the original Downer Ending, where the heroine commits suicide by sticking her own head in the rotors.
An interesting variation appears in Transformers, where Blackout uses his main rotor as a hand weapon. And then they have Lennox using a motorcycle to slide beneath him.
Completely averted in Arabesque, where the Hero defeats the Big Bad, by dropping a ladder on his helicopter, completely shattering the rotor, and causing the aircraft to fall.

Literature

Played ~~realistically~~ straight in Max Brook's World War Z. A helicopter pilot attempts to chop up zombies with the rotors, but he clips a car and crashes (that the pilot would even try this loses the realism points, sorry guys).
- Not that this makes it any less heroic, as he did kill dozens of zombies while some of his fellow soldiers were killing civilians to get away from the undead. The bitter cynical war veteran telling the story even refers to the driver as a "Brave, beautiful motherfucker."
- Besides, it's implied that the pilot meant to make a Heroic Sacrifice, knowing he was only going to buy time for a moment so more people could escape.
- At what point did the soldiers begin shooting civilians? Yonkers was evacuated, the soldiers were panic-firing at the zombies. Anyway, this was one more stupid moment in an in-universe stupid engagement.
In the Able Team action/adventure novels (a spin-off of 'The Executioner' series) there's a scene where a group of South American bad-guys are terrifying the locals by zooming down at them in their helicopter, pretending to strafe them. One old farmer deliberately runs for a solitary tree knowing that the pilot, flying low and focusing on him, will fly right into it. Fortunately the Big Bad points out the danger in time. In an earlier book 'Gadgets' Schwatz destroys a helicopter machine-gunning his friends by throwing a roll of barbed wire (he's standing on a cliff above it) whereupon the wire gets sucked into the helicopters rotor blades, locking them together and crashing the chopper.
Averted in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. A terrorist leader is escaping down the freeway in a Jaguar, and Rainbow's transport helicopter is the only unit available at the moment to follow him. The pilot briefly puzzles over how the hell he's going to stop a car with an unarmed Blackhawk, before he decides to just run parallel with the car about 30 meters off the ground while one of his passengers empties his pistol at the car out the side door.
- The scene even included a moment where the first attempt to shoot the car failed when the chopper had to pull up suddenly to avoid flying into a road sign.
In a Godzilla novel, a harpooner is turned into a Pink Mist by a helicopter rotor that is torn off by Godzilla during a sea battle with the behemoth.
Cassie of the Animorphs once tried to deliberately jam up a helicopter's blades with her own transformed-into-a-humpback whale body: a desperate ploy to be sure, but they believed that if Cassie were in the form of a humpback whale, she would survive. And they were correct in predicting that the helicopter wouldn't have survived this attack, and that this particular helicopter was so important that it was worth the risk. The helicopter, seeing an enemy coming down towards its propeller, dodged out of the way and so both the helicopter and Cassie were safe. But as luck would have it, an ordinary seagull got caught in its propeller, and this was the end of the threat posed by that helicopter.

Live Action TV

In an episode of ER a careless move during a landing in a blizzard costs one doctor an arm.
- He gets it back, but not well enough to continue as a surgeon.
  - He barges into his boss's office and throws a massive fit about the spoiler (his coverage apparently wasn't good enough to get him back into a position where he could do his job) while she's in a meeting, destroying bits of the office with exaggerated clumsiness and damaging an end table on the way out, just for petty spite.
  - Then later on he is killed by that same helicopter crashing down on top of him in a fireball of death.

Videogame

One of the missions in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ends with both versions of this trope: a police helicopter tilts forward, threatening to slice up the protagonists' vehicle, and a police officer on the hood of said vehicle ends up minced in the process.
- Additionally, if you yourself gain control of a helicopter, you can practice this trope on any random passersby you run across.
  - In GTAIV, helicopter blending is the most popular (if not the only) pastime in online multiplayer.
  - In "Chopper vs. Chopper" mode of The Lost And Damned add-on, this is one of the best ways to kill your opponent.
  - On the other hand, this troper once hit a streetlight with the rotor blades, causing the entire rotor mechanism to snap off and go flying down the street, in the middle of the highway, with cops chasing. Oops.
- The RC helicopter in GTA:Vice City can do this, somehow. You know you're living in Vice City when even kids' toys double as a lethal weapon.
In "Urban Chaos: Riot Response": after you shoot some hostage-taking psycho he will fall off the edge of the building and get cut to pieces by the T-Zero helicopter much to the annoyance of the pilot ("Damn it Mason, I only just got it cleaned!")
The heavily-armored Final Boss of the second Syphon Filter game can only be killed by using the knockback from a shotgun to knock him into a handy helicopter's tail rotor. At least this one isn't in the air...
Peahat in The Legend Of Zelda attacks like this in some games.
Bystanders in Sim Copter can be killed or injured by the rotary blades while landing. You lose points for doing so unless it's a fleeing criminal.
The complete opposite of this trope occurs in Metal Gear Solid. After Snake uses a Stinger to shoot down Liquid in his attack chopper, it explodes into a ball of flame. However, later, Snake sees a parachute and knows that Liquid is still alive - since he ejected from the chopper. It's even lampshaded when Campbell says that he couldn't have survived - "He'd have been chopped up like an onion in an informercial."
- Many helicopters have ejection seats. They just use shaped explosive charges to blow off the rotor blades a split second before they launch.
The reverse of this complete opposite concludes Resident Evil 4. After stealing the final sample, Ada jumps off of a platform. Less than five second later, a helicopter rises over the platform with Ada in the passenger compartment.
One of the missions in the Spider Man II videogame features Spidey chasing a copter. While the copter doesn't try to blender you, a few careless swings can result in you crashing into the rotor, which hurts.
The helicopter mini-bosses in Viewtiful Joe use this technique. While it may be tempting to go into slo-mo mode and pound away at the chopper while it's flying, you'll lose valuable VFX power if the blades are spinning and pink.
One of the bosses in Contra:Hard Corps uses this as an attack, complete with sparks flying as it grinds towards the vertical shaft walls. Might be justified in that it's meant to be a versatile killed mecha to begin with, but it's probably more of a question of Rule Of Cool being in effect, considering this is Contra we're talking about.
Call Of Duty 4 has a helicopter being shot down and diging itself into the ground while sliding towards the player and his partner. The later one franticaly tries to get away from the blades, and ends up being just so slightly touched at the side of his legs, as the blades come to a stop.
In Half Life 2's Ravenholm, there are several makeshift devices that are basically helicopter blenders, without the helicopter. Such a device is just an engine with a scrap-metal blade crudely attached to the drive shaft. It cuts zombies, and you, if you're not careful, in half!
- Speaking of Half-Life 2... manhacks, anyone?
In the Wolverine Origins game, Wolvie's status quo for taking down a helicopter is to pounce on its windshield, punch through it, pull out the pilot, and stuff his head up into the blades.

Webcomics

Gordon Frohman does this unintentionally to a Combine Gunship with a Combine Soldier uniform in Concerned. Loads of Combine Soldiers are killed after the Gunship lost control when its turbine was wrecked in the blending process. Funnier than it sounds.

Western Animation

Many Transformers with helicopter alternate modes can do this, in part because their rotors usually become a sword or blade weapon, and partly because they are the copter and can thus maneuver correctly without falling.
The first episode of Metalocalypse has the band telling their current helicopter chef that all their previous helicopter chefs have died in freak accidents. Cue an unsettling grinding sound as the chopper goes off-balance and the chef freaks out — then cut to the pilot assuring them that "we're just chewing through a few thousand doves up here; don't worry, the rotors will grind them into paste in no time."
- Later, the chef is launched out a window upwards into the blades and torn to shreds. He got better ... mostly.
  - "SEWN! BACK! TOGETHER WRONG!"
- This is Dethklok's personal transport chopper we're talking about. I can't even imagine what those rotor blades could be made out of. Whatever it is, they are certainly designed to do this kind of thing.
An episode of Robot Chicken parodies this trope; a series of quick skits throughout the episode feature a parade of increasingly ridiculous objects falling off a cliff and getting shredded by the rotors of a nearby helicopter; the final skit has the helicopter falling over the cliff and into another helicopter.
In an episode of the Sam & Max animated series, the duo are sent on an important mission in a forgotten corner of Central Park. How are they to parachute down through the dense canopy of trees, inquires Max? Simple. That's what the blades are for, says Sam, as the helicopter flips upside down.
An old Yogi Bear cartoon by Hanna-Barbera showed Yogi flying a helicopter upside-down over the treetops, trimming them all to the same height like a lawn mower.
In The Super Hero Squad Show, the Falcon's pet falcon, Redbird (a Butt Monkey of epic degree... like Falcon himself) flies out of the SHIELD Helicarrier. An instant after Falcon yells "Watch for the rotors!" we hear the sound of a buzzsaw. Redbird only suffered Amusing Injuries.

Truth In Television

Parachutists getting killed by rotor blades is unfortunately Truth In Television.
Not quite a helicopter but this troper's Grandfather saw a man chopped into three pieces by an airplane propeller during WWII. It was in a hangar, I believe, and the man was chasing a pack of cigarettes that had been picked up by the wind.
- Airplane propellers tend to be tougher than helicopter rotors, and can easily chop a person in half. Of course, if the propeller strikes anything more solid than a human, severe engine damage usually results.
This troper seems to remember a news piece about a Navy officer who was headed for a transport helicopter but - apparently due to the wind from the rotors lifting up a cloud of debris - missed the door and instead walked into the tail rotor with predictably messy results.
Very sadly Truth In Television in the case of the Twilight Zone movie - Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed rather horribly by a helicopter being used in filming that spun out of control and struck them, due to the director's insistence that the helicopter pilot fly lower and lower, and the fact that he worked the pilot past the point of exhaustion, completely ignoring film industry safety regulations. I believe he was charged with criminally negligent homicide in the three deaths.
- Though eventually acquitted.
This troper's girlfriend works for a geological exploration company. She has told him many stories of the bush pilots, some of which have to do with using to blades to clear away branches to make landings. Of course they're bush pilots and hence usually quite insane.
- According to Vietnam war memoir 'Chickenhawk', the blades of the UH-1 Iroquois (better known as the Huey) are reinforced along the leading edge, and have very heavy weights on the ends - to facilitate exactly this kind of activity.
This Troper has heard that large cargo helicopters have signs when exiting the cargo bay directing personnel to turn such that they won't walk into the tail or tail rotor.
Vietnam-era Huey helicopters had unusually tough rotor blades. Pilots, when called to extract troops from clearings which hadn't been cleared quite well enough, would sometimes use this to their advantages, and essentially chop their way down low enough through the tree branches (though not trunks...) - it's not blending people, but it's still awesome.