Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball

*bang* "COMBO x 3!" *tching* "COMBO x 4!" *crash* "JACKPOT!!!"^note My vase!

"This thing caused the 1977 New York blackout. A practical joke by the Great Attractor. He thought it was funny as hell."

— Agent K (about a one-inch diameter ball), Men in Black

A ball (or some other projectile) bounces around incredibly quickly in a small location and causes vast amounts of damage. Hilarity Ensues.

Unlike the Pinball Projectile, the trajectory of the Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball is completely random and always leaves a swath of destruction in its wake. It tends to display unbelievable lack of inertia and won't stop ricocheting unless someone/thing catches it. It also takes the Law of Conservation of Momentum and throws it out the window, as it's not uncommon for one to inexplicably speed up when it hits a wall. No wonder it's generally Played for Laughs.

Confuse it with Happy Fun Ball at your peril. There's also a safer version for sing-alongs. Also see Bouncing Battler, when a character becomes one of these to fight foes. A Reflecting Laser can be this.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In a '90s Chuck E. Cheese ad, the narrator says, "At boring restaurants, nothing goes right." A boy pokes an absurdly large pea with his fork and accidentally causes pandemonium.

Anime & Manga

• In Ranma ½, the detachable blade ring of the Kinjakan acts exactly like this when used in an enclosed space. Like, say, a narrow cavern.
• In Medaka Box, Unzan uses superballs as his weapon. They defy the laws of physics, breaking concrete with ease. In one instance, they also deploy wires to try and detain Medaka.
• In Katanagatari, Maniwa Pengin uses this as his weapon, since he was Born Lucky enough to avoid being hit.
• In One Piece, the main character Luffy is made of rubber and one of his techniques is called Gear 4 Boundman, where he inflates his muscles, making himself look like a giant bouncy ball. He bounces repeatedly to increase his speed and destructive power, thus making him a living Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball.
• In Mashin Hero Wataru, Wataru gains a bicoloured one of these in the second episode. An element of further chaos is introduced in that the red-coloured half of the ball bounces harmlessly off of things, but the blue half does not, as Schwarvenegger learned to his regret.

Comic Books

• In an Archie Comics story where the cast are portrayed as superheroes, Evilheart (Reggie) and Pureheart (Archie) fight a baddie who has a ring that causes objects to rapidly degrade. Every weapon they fire at him, he simply destroys. To get the better of him, Evilheart tosses out a little black ball, which bounces all over the room. Because it is so quick, the villain can't hit it, and eventually his weapon runs out of juice. However, in trying to destroy the ball, the villain also destroys all his loot — which means it can't be returned to the victims, forcing Evilheart to pay reparations.
• Gaston Lagaffe:
  • This comes up on three occasions: once when Gaston throws around a superballe and it bounces crazily until his office is devastated (and Fantasio swallows it); once when his cat tries to grab it and goes into a frenzy; and once again when he plays jokari with it.
  • He also once makes a kangaroo ball — the kind that you sit on and bounce around — out of the same stuff that superballes are made of. The final panel reads like he died committing this stunt — it claims that the last person to see him was a flight attendant in a plane several miles off the ground. Thankfully for him, the Negative Continuity kicks in.
• In Astro City, the Junkman has trick marbles that are attracted to a target and adhere to him. The more the target tries to dislodge, the faster he attracts them.
• Judge Dredd:
  • The miracle plastic Boing® is a spray-on substance that expands and encases the user in a very bouncy ball. It's legal to use for various games and activities (appropriately referred to as "boinging") at special facilities that cater to these interests (namely, the Palais de Boing®), but boinging outside of such facilities is very dangerous and highly illegal.
  • Another Judge Dredd example is the Rubber Richochet bullets used by the Judges. Mostly used by the big JD himself to pull off "impossible" shots. Nothing hilarious about these babies. Justified in that real life rubber bullets (intended to be non-lethal) have killed.
• The Donald Duck comic "Paperino contro i veggenti viola." Donald Duck and Fethry Duck are secret agents with a collection of nifty gadgets, including one such a ball.
• The French comic L'Imploseur features one as the ultimate security system, being released inside a sealed tunnel so it would eventually go through everything human-soft, killing everyone on the team but the hero and his girl (and even then only because they found the exit in time).
• Rogue did this once in The Uncanny X-Men with a Susan B Anthony dollar, throwing it into the sensor bubble of the SHIELD Helicarrier to disable its sensors to allow her to effect a rescue of Michael Rossi. However, she was under the influence of Carol Danvers, who knew just where to throw the coin to make it effective.

Comic Strips

• FoxTrot:
  • This happens when Jason hurls a superball from a lacrosse racket indoors. He also mentions having once hit a golf ball in the basement.
  • One Sunday strip saw Jason and Marcus try and pick out a rubber ball to buy by dumping them all on the floor and letting them bounce all over the store to see which one can go higher; afterwards, Marcus goes to turn off the lights so they can locate one of their choices (a glow-in-the-dark one). The last panel implies that they've done this before, as Roger and Andy discuss how a toy store with a number of injury lawsuits is closing.
• A piece of toast does this in Garfield after Jon fixed the toaster.

Fan Works

• In a majority of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction, the titular character basically becomes one.
• In a related example, the Naruto fanfiction Yet again, with a little extra help by Thirdfang gives Choji an additional jutsu to make his body react like superpowered rubber. Pair that with Human Boulder and Needle Jizo, and the sister of the character that taught him this combo comments it to be 'bouncy spinning hedgehog style at its finest'.
• In the Facing the Future Series, Jack Fenton invents the "Ecto-Bondo", which fires one of these that don't stop until they hit ectoplasm. Naturally, Hilarity Ensues.
• Played for laughs in this well-made Doctor Who video, in which a rock tossed aside by the 5th Doctor bounces around the Doctor Who universe causing mayhem.
• In This Bites!, Jeremiah Cross uses a bazooka to turn Satori's Hell of Balls into a giant three dimensional game of billiards, scattering the cloud balls and their dangerous ammo all over the place. Cross did this to counter Satori's observation haki, since one of the haki's weaknesses is that you can't predict a completely random attack.

Films — Animation

• In The Incredibles, the Omnidroid acts somewhat as one when it retracts its claws. It somehow can turn directions as a smooth metal sphere, and the fact that it is at least five stories tall adds to the "Destructive" bit.

Films — Live-Action

• In a trailer for Dennis the Menace, a marble shot from the title character's slingshot (first bounced off the Warner Brothers logo) breaks various objects in Mr. Wilson's house and ends up getting the guy in a pen in his shirt pocket.
• Jingle All the Way features a ping-pong-like raffle ball doing this within a mall. Even though the movie is supposed to be a comedy of sorts, everything up until now was not this goofy and did not suspend the laws of physics this much, making this scene feel out of place. After this happens, several other very goofy scenes show up. If it weren't for the ridiculous ball, the other scenes' departure from the apparent laws of physics within the movie might have come as more of a shock.
• This happens in Flubber whenever a liquid form of the titular material is sprayed on an object. Justified in that that's half the point of the substance, exotic matter aside.
• According to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, this happens to bullets if they're fired inside a tank.
• In Men in Black, J touches some alien device and it bounces wildly all over the headquarters until K catches it; notably, bulls-eyeing a donut hole, nailing one poor guy right in the forehead ("Somebody get him some ice!"), and totally wrecking a chemistry lab full of glass apparati. According to K, the ball was the actual cause of the 1977 New York Blackout because some alien prankster thought it was funny. In J's defense, it was just floating out in the open. Judging by Z's non-reaction to it entering his office, it's far from the first time it happened.
• In Mystery Men, the Bowler's bowling ball (which houses the spirit of her dead father) does this when finally unleashed.
• In Explorers, the little force field ball that Wolfgang creates does this when his cat jumps on the keyboard, destroying half the basement.
• Not quite as hyper as most examples, but in Godzilla: Final Wars, Anguirus can roll himself up into an armored ball of spiky death and bounce around. He uses this technique to destroy one of mankind's flying battleships.
• In I Come in Peace (1990), an alien sawblade-like disk does this quite memorably, until caught (attracted?) mid-flight with a strong magnet.
• In Strange Brew, bullets stuck up Bob Mckenzie's nose to staunch a nosebleed shoot around the courtroom after he fails to suppress his laughter.
• In Superhero Movie, Rick / The Dragonfly tries fending off the Hourglass by throwing a paperweight. He missed, the paperweight bounces around the room for a dozen seconds before hitting Rick in his head and knocking him out cold.

Jokes

• There's a Russian joke that goes like this:
  The Chinese have dropped a nuclear bomb on USSR. 5 million dead, Lots of fuss in the media, statements from politicians, etc.
  A couple days later there's another media explosion: In retaliation the Russians have dropped a rubber bomb on China. 50 million already dead. The bomb keeps bouncing.

Literature

• There's a nasty use of this in Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds. The party are in a mysterious alien structure that requires them to solve puzzles to move from room to room. When they take too long over one of the early rooms, a small ball pops out of one wall and starts bouncing around, getting harder and faster and causing bruises, then broken bones, until it finally goes clean through someone's arm. And these guys are wearing Powered Armor.
• Walter Tevis' slightly mad scientist Farnsworth creates a form of rubber that absorbs energy from its surroundings to fuel ever-increasing bounces in "The Big Bounce".
• In Peter Graves, Houghton Furlong invents an anti-gravity alloy named Furloy, thus a ball of the stuff bounces higher with each bounce. Tragically, the bouncing ball ends up destroying his house.
• In Harry Potter, Bludgers are balls enchanted so that they do this during Quidditch matches.

Live-Action TV

• Warehouse 13 featured a pair of croquet balls with this property.
  • There was also a dodgeball that would duplicate itself every time it struck something, eventually resulting in a ceaseless bombardment.
  • Artie also finds himself on the receiving end of a ball that bounced off his head at high speed until he caught it. Not deadly, but disorienting.
• Saturday Night Live gives us a fake toy called "Happy Fun Ball", which may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds. And that's just the start.

Music Videos

• In The Black Eyed Peas' video for "Pump It", Will.I.Am manages to invoke this with a bowling ball while fighting a thug. Closer inspection reveals it to be a soccer ball. No less impressive though.
• "The Boxer" by The Chemical Brothers has this as its main focus. That thing just will not die.

Pinball

• Seen on the backglass of Capcom's Breakshot (1996), which shows a pool player bouncing the cue ball off the table, knocks a glass out of the redhead's hand, ricochets off the nose of a stuffed moose, then bounces off a brunette's behind to settle back onto the table.
• The playfield for Cirqus Voltaire has the Menagerie Ball, a rubber ball contained in a spherical cage. The player must hit the ball to Join The Cirqus, and it frequently wreaks havoc with the pinball's movement.

Video Games

• Commander Keen: In the third episode, Billy encounters Jack Balls that bounce around at great speed and, while not deadly upin contact, they can push him towards hazards or enemies, and those can kill him.
• In Jak 3: Wastelander, there is an upgrade on one of the weapons that allows the bullets to bounce off of walls. When used outside it would usually only hit one or two walls and fly into the sky, but when used indoors and in small spaces it could cause HDBB effect (especially if you rapidly send out shot after shot, created a Multi-Hyper Destructive Bouncing Ball effect).
• The very gameplay of Arkanoid (and all Breakout-derived games) is based on smashing things with a bouncing ball. But things get serious when the ball no longer bounces off: many games in this genre include a power-up that makes the ball smash through anything (except the edges of the screen) without deflecting or even slowing down. Often a level-ender.
• Bangai-O: One of the selectable weapons shoots bouncy balls of energy that are a bit weaker than other projectiles, but can still destroy several enemies and obstacles and do so from good angles thanks to their ability to bounce between walls.
• Mega Man:
  • In Mega Man 10, the Rebound Striker gains more destructive power the more it bounces. Strike Man's version is both this trope and Pinball Projectile — on the final bounce, his ball heads directly for Mega Man.
  • In the original Mega Man X, Armored Armadillo did this as his standard attack. It was effectively invincible, unless you managed to electrocute him, which would make his armor fall off.
  • Violen in Megaman X 2 has a big spiked ball on his back which, when fighting him, he can hurl around the room like a wrecking ball, making it bounce off the walls wildly.
  • In Mega Man X5, X acquires the "Spike Ball" after defeating Axle the Red. This weapon, in its charged up mode, fires one of these, a purple ball of spikes and vines that ricochets in a random pattern 4 times on the screen before leaving the premises. Also doubles as a Spike Balls of Doom.
  • Mega Man 11 introduces us to Bounce Man, whose main attack is... bouncing all over the place. His weapon, Bounce Ball, lets Mega Man fire three smaller balls that can do the same, and three more if using the Power Gear.
• In Bully, the Rubber Band Ball is a soccer ball sized mass of rubber bands that flies around on a random destructive path, eventually stopping but barely losing momentum before then and KOing anyone it hits except you. You can launch multiple ones at a time. For the Lulz, unleash them in the enclosed space of the dorms.
• Half-Life:
  • Combine dark energy cores in Half-Life 2 are a rare serious interpretation. The sphere stores dark matter plasma for the Combine and is relatively safe so long as it remains confined in a storage device or generator. If released, it accelerates rapidly and smashes about before exploding; organic matter is disintegrated on contact, vaporizing the victim into thin air while floating them upwards due to their mass being canceled out by the process. Especially notable as the Combine doesn't use it merely as a portable power source but actually weaponized it as the grenade launcher-equivalent on the Pulse Rifle.
  • "Orb", a map made for a Half-Life mapping competition, is about a deadly sphere-like artifact that utterly devastates a facility while displaying all the characteristics of a Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball.
• The Portal games use this trope as a puzzle mechanic.
  • In the first game, the Aperture Science High-Energy Pellet looks and functions the same way as the Combine energy core, and will disintegrate you and the Portal Gun if you're hit.
  • In Portal 2, Repulsion Gel acts as this trope when objects are coated in it. When Chell does so with a Weighted Storage Cube, it builds up momentum and smashes out of the glass box it was in, and perpetually bounces around the test chamber until water cleans the gel off.
• In Lazerman you play as one.
• In Super Mario Land, instead of gaining the power to throw fire balls, you get the power to throw these instead. It makes a return in Super Mario Maker 2 as an unlockable powerup.
• The Red Fireballs in Mario Bros.. They start out slow; faster ones appear the longer you stay in the level.
• The "Proximity Pinball" secondary function on the Grenades in Perfect Dark. The grenade will bounce around for a good while until it comes close to a character, which, in close quarters, could easily be you.
• Postal 2 has a napalm launcher with a fire mode that shoots a bouncing napalm canister. One that spills fuel that ignites in a second. After a few seconds, it'll explode in a big puff of fire.
• Kirby's Ball ability in Kirby's Adventure bounces slowly at first and picks up speed, then starts to glow and ricochets off of the floor and ceiling rapidly, causing some of the highest damage out of all the abilities upon contact.
• The Super Ball item in Final Fantasy VI, which deals damage to up to four enemies during a battle, and can even hit one target multiple times occasionally.
• Bulletstorm: The Bouncer weapon fires a large explosive cannonball which you can bounce around knocking enemies over before detonating it. Its charge shot causes the ball to release an explosion every time it bounces. You can kick it around to direct the blasts!
• Orianna from League of Legends is capable of chucking her ball around like this.
• The Soccer Ball from Dead Rising is capable of being this in tight spaces like the elevator.
• Castlevania:
  • In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, the Globus glyph sends out two bouncing balls like this. In tight spaces it can get very destructive, especially if you power up the strike attribute and keep spamming them. It's one of the easiest (and most fun) ways to destroy some of the Demonic Spiders you face in the Bonus Dungeon.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night also has the "Rebound Stone". In an open space it's essentially a slower knife weapon that fires at an unusual angle, but it can clear a tight hallway of weaker enemies with one shot.
• JezzBall —from the good 'OLE Windows Entertainment Pack— was about damage control caused by such balls. Or something.
• Touhou Project:
  • Reimu Hakurei's Yin Yang Orbs. She usually uses it as options that fires additional bullets when you're playing as her. But when you're facing her, expect to dodge a swarm of balls bouncing around the screen in a chaotic manner. This leads to inevitable Double Entendre and Memetic Mutation: "I was killed by Reimu Hakurei's balls."
  • In the fighting games, Yukari can use Ran and/or Chen like this.
  • In Touhou Fuumaroku ~ the Story of Eastern Wonderland, Meira's final attack is to sheathe her sword and start shooting bouncing balls across the screen.
  • Fittingly, given that it's a breakout-style game, Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers features this as the main way the player can attack enemies, by directing the bouncing Yin-Yang Orb to them. If they're not careful, though, the Orb can flatten Reimu if it hits her, causing the player to lose a life. This is the origin for many of Reimu's Yin-Yang Orb attacks later in the series.
• Berzerk villain character Evil Otto is a bouncing ball with a smiley face.
• Metal Warriors features the Ballistic. A spherical mecha that can do a charge attack.
• Borderlands 2 gives us rubberized grenades, which bounce off hard surfaces and detonate on impact with enemies, elemental barrels, and possibly the player. Jack help you if you have a rubberized Bonus Package grenade mod and you try to use it in an enclosed space.
• The Ratchet & Clank series has the Bouncer weapon, a gun which shoots out a large bomb that, once it explodes, dispenses even more bomblets. Leveling it up increases the size and power of all the involved bombs, and they have a slight homing property as well.
• This is your weapon (other than crushing monsters with apples) in Mr. Do!. Especially useful because the game taken place in narrow corridors dug out by your hero, thus usually allowing you to predict the trajectory. However, you only have one "Power Ball" at your disposal and must go and retrieve it if it fails to hit a monsters.
• In Algodoo (a physics simulation game), any object with restitution cranked up way too high will end up being this, before clipping through whatever it hits due to flying around at ludicrous speeds, and going into space, never to be seen again.
• In Metroid, fiery Multiviolas bounce off walls, ceilings and floor, getting faster the deeper into the planet you go.
• A bouncy ball in Scribblenauts will bounce all over the place once summoned and placed, sometimes stopping but often not losing any momentum until it hits something in the way. One of the deadliest things you can create is made by adding the adjective "deadly" to a bouncy ball, resulting in the energetic ball killing anyone it runs into, including the player.
• The Super Bouncy Ball in South Park: The Stick of Truth can bounce 9 times so long as there are at least 3 enemies to bounce on.

Web Animation

• In Red vs. Blue, Agent North Dakota traps the Insurrectionist Sniper and his mooks under a Beehive Barrier dome. The Sniper warns his men not to try to shoot it. One of his men doesn't listen. The bullet bounces all over the place and kills them all.

Webcomics

• In The Order of the Stick, Xykon casts Symbol of Insanity on a superball and tosses it into a group of paladins, creating a Hate Plague that causes them to slaughter each other (hey, it's a Conflict Ball!). The damage is not done by the ball itself, which behaves like any bouncy ball, but from the spell cast on it.
• Gregory pulls off an version of this in Dominic Deegan. Gregory is the only defense against an army of Chaotic Evil cultists. Being the pure-hearted White Mage, he cast a spell on a bouncy ball and lets it fly. He apparently also did the same to Dominic's crystal ball in his youth.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation has SCP-018, a 6cm red ball that, in a standing affront to the laws of thermodynamics, can bounce with 200% efficiency. A normal bouncing ball put through SCP-914 on "Fine" and "Very Fine" settings thrice also has this property. The former caused 5 civilian injuries and is currently sitting in a tank of goo, while the latter caused 45 casualties upon being dropped and is currently thought to be orbiting Mars.

Web Videos

• It is the plot of Corridor Digital's Ballin' Out of Control, the originality of it being the fact that it is shot from the point of view of the ball.
• In "Ponyville's Incident," while playing football, Applejack kicks the ball so hard that it bounces around all of Ponyville without losing momentum, completely destroying the town in the process.

Western Animation

• In an episode of American Dad!, Steve Smith learns how to become a lucid dreamer by using a bouncing red ball in his dreams, to remind him he is dreaming and the dream can therefore be whatever he wants it to be. Being a teenage boy, he uses this for sex and revenge dreams often set in the school that derides him for being a nerd. When he refuses to teach the technique to Hayley or Klaus, they take revenge by bouncing a red ball at his feet while he is fully awake. Led to believe that he is dreaming, he drives to school (causing traffic chaos and pile-ups) while wearing only his underpants, punches a teacher, sexually molests a cheerleader, and leaps out of the window with her believing that they can fly...
• When Ben 10 changes into Cannonbolt, he can become one of these. Saves the day in The Big Tick.
• In the Darkwing Duck episode "Smarter Than a Speeding Bullet," the evil agency F.O.W.L. invents the "Fowl Ball" (cue groaning) — a giant, remote-controlled rubber ball that bounces around and smashes everything it lands on.
• In the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "The Big Leblooski", this happens with a bowling ball, to show how bad Mac is at bowling.
• In one episode of the French CGI show Grabouillon, the titular dog finds his old bouncy ball in the attic and immediately throws it, knocking himself out. He gets up and throws it again but it is even more chaotic and destructive. He and his friends try to get rid of it but the ball turns into an angry Animate Inanimate Object and attacks them. They manage to lock it up in a chest, but it grows big and bursts out, followed by several other small ones. The balls are about to end the heroes... then it turns out it was All Just a Dream that Grabouillon was having after being K.O.-ed.
• The power of Bouncing Boy from the cartoon adaption of Legion of Super Heroes (2006) was that he could use himself as a Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball.
• Miraculous Ladybug: In "Evillustrator", Ladybug's Lucky Charm ends up summoning a bouncy ball. She uses it to quickly break every light source in Chloé's room to prevent the titular villain from being able to draw.
• Happens in one episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It's definitely one of Pinkie Pie's weirder moments. Upon getting nervous she becomes the titular object, bounces repeatedly around the room and smashes a hole in the wall.
• Happens in the Oggy and the Cockroaches episode "Bugball". Think of an exaggerated version of the roaches' mischief contained in a bouncing ball.
• In one episode Recess, after Vince lost his drive at kickball, his friends decided to pull a Confidence Building Scheme using a kickball molded from a material Gretche had made that could bounce cartoonishly ridiculous amounts no matter how you drop it. After Vince sends the ball he kicked into orbit, the others found out that Gus had lost the ball they had made and Vince kicked an actual ball into space. Turns out that Ms. Finster had found it, and when she threw it into the sports shed, it caused all of the balls to start bouncing like this.
• Rocko's Modern Life: In one episode, Ed Bighead has a flashback where he was about to win a bowling championship, and, after deliberately getting a gutter to prove he could win with only one ball, ended up botching it by sending the ball flying all over the bowling alley. The only thing left standing after that were the bowling pins on his own lane.
• In the first episode of Steven Universe, when the title character summons a shield for the first time, the first thing that happens after that is the shield bouncing around the house until it hits the TV, breaking it.
• One of the Toyman's weapons in Superman: The Animated Series was a substance that bounces faster the longer it bounces. The idea is that eventually it'll become fast enough that the impact'll break bones. When he uses it on some of Intergang's goons, the ball is denting their armored car by the time Superman arrives. No explanation is given as to why it didn't rip right through the thin metal roof, walls or wooden doors of the warehouse, even if it never happened to hit one of the windows.
• Total Dramarama: In the first episode, Owen wins a super bouncy ball from a claw machine, but ends up getting it confiscated by Chef. Once the kids have gotten it back from the confiscated toy shelf, the ball accidentally falls from a great height. This causes it to bounce around enough to tear the entire daycare down.

Real Life

• As mentioned in the Indiana Jones entry above, a bullet fired inside a tank will act like this. Obviously, the bullet will slow down quickly due to energy loss on the rebounds and passing through softer objects. It's still a very bad thing.
  • Or, more likely, shatter on the very first impact and shower anyone near with shrapnel. Not much better.
  • Mythbusters demonstrated that if you're bouncing the bullet off anything soft enough that it won't shatter on the first impact, by the third ricochet, it's moving so slowly that it would merely be annoying if it hit you.
  • Of course, of some primary concern is the fact that the "softer objects" inside an armored vehicle often includes the crew, and the very cramped conditions inside said vehicles...
  • Real Life 7.92x107mm ammo devised by the Polish Army just before World War II was designed for this: flatten upon impact to light armor used in tanks of the time and spall one or more chunks of armor off the inside to ricochet around and cut the crew to pieces. It was very efficient against the thin, 15-20mm or so armor of early World War II tanks, but after 1943 it became obsolete. More recently, anti-tank ammo using the same principle has come back into vogue.
  • The M3 tank produced by the US as an interim measure until the M4 was ready for production had a serious flaw: its armor was riveted together rather than cast or welded. A hit by an armor-piercing round that didn't penetrate, or a sufficiently strong explosion near the tank, would cause the rivets to pop out, bounce around, and massacre the crew. One nickname for the tank was "a coffin for six/seven brothers" (different versions had different numbers of crew members).
• The US has developed a device called the Kinetic Fireball Incendiary that is basically this trope. As Cracked puts it:
  "The idea is to launch lots of hollow balls of rubberized rocket fuel with a hole in one side, and light them on fire.. They become rocket-powered fireballs that bounce around inside the building, killing everything near them in the most cartoonish yet horrifying way possible. The thing is, the flaming balls don't actually have to hit you. The concept works something like a martini shaker; the reason the shaker cools your delicious drink faster than simply mixing in ice cubes is because they move around the liquid inside, cooling a higher volume in a much shorter time. With the KFI, you get essentially the same thing, except the ice cubes are flaming balls that raise the ambient air temperature to over 1000 degrees in seconds, not to mention knocking down doors and spreading the same horror throughout the building."
• The criticism made by many a Conspiracy Theorist of the theory that a single bullet killed John F. Kennedy and wounded one of the passengers in the car he was riding in. They claim that in order to cause all of the wounds it did, this bullet would've have to act like a Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball, earning it the derisive name "the magic bullet". Of course, there are other theories, such as that Lee Harvey Oswald simply fired more than one bullet (difficult but possible for a trained marksman, which he was), or that there was another shooter who was never found.
  • Or a more recent theory of the car being modified so the second victim^note For the record, that second victim was then-Governor John Connelly, who would survive the assassination attempt was seated off to one side in front of JFK, allowing a straight-line shot for the bullet.
  • Classic/military full metal jacket bullets can fly through a human's body and injure a second one if they are very close to each other. This is why they are not recommended for hunting - too fast-flying to ensure a quick kill of the beast, but also too dangerous to people nearby.
• Anyone who has owned a toy bouncy ball (also known as a Super Ball) knows why you shouldn't let children play with them in the house. These innocuous little rubber balls are so elastic that they barely slow down at all when they bounce. It's only a matter of time before one of the little geniuses throws it against the floor as hard as he can, and it's going to ricochet off of every surface in the house until it inevitably breaks something, possibly a Priceless Ming Vase.
• Muzzle-loading cannonballs have been known to behave like this; a ball fired horizontally will skip off the ground and keep going, obliterating anything in its path and kicking up debris which can cause further injuries.

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