I'm Melting!

"You cursed brat! I'm melting! MELTING! Oh, what a world, what a world! Make sure to cancel my newspaper delivery...!"

Maybe you ran out of time to fix the killer poison. Maybe you're made of paint or something. Maybe someone froze you and then heated you up really fast. Or, maybe you opened the Ark of the Covenant. Maybe you fell into lava or acid or something else that makes people melt. Point is, you're about to learn how a snowman feels in the spring.

I'm Melting is when a character or other life form, for one reason or another, has a literal meltdown. It might look like:

• Collapsing into lumpy goo:. Probably one of the best and nastiest looking meltdowns one can find, it basically occurs when the subject slowly turns to goo all over, flesh falling and dripping from their body onto the floor. It doesn't usually leave a viscous puddle either, so much as a pile of soggy dough. This method was popularized by Raiders of the Lost Ark, and was cause for many a nightmare among kids at the time.
• From the ground up. The most classic example, in which only the part of the subject that touches the ground actually turns to liquid. Of course, this means that, sequentially, every part of the body will touch the ground, often giving the illusion of sinking into a shallow puddle. (The easiest way to stage this effect in live-action settings is to do exactly that, lowering the actor on a hidden trap door, often with their clothing gathering on the ground for added effect. See The Wizard of Oz or any of several Star Trek episodes.) Oddly, the victim will never be considered dead until their head has melted, which will be alive and speaking until the end despite their heart and lungs melting beforehand.
• Soda pop. This one was quite popular with Disney cartoons in the early to mid-'90s. In short, this one is very similar to From the ground up, except with the added effect of being very, VERY fizzy. Bubbles tend to actually rise off of the subject and pop in mid-air. Imagine an alka-seltzer sitting in a puddle of water, and you've got the idea here. Sometimes this will leave a nice clean puddle as if the resultant soda went flat, but other times, the subject may completely dissolve into a shrinking pile of fizz, or conveniently evaporate to leave nothing behind.
• Bones. One of the rarest types of meltdown, this is when everything but the skeleton is reduced to a puddle of Pepto-Bismol. Truth in Television, since bones, especially human bones, are very difficult to completely destroy. Cremated remains are mainly bits of bone — everything else evaporates. Another Nightmare Fuel method of melting someone.
• Vaporization. This is regarded as melting, but looks like it didn't just stop with turning the victim to a liquid. In fact, often, the liquid isn't even seen. It's as if they skipped a step, steaming and sublimating from the ground up.

This is a common fate of enemies weak to water, sunlight, salt, certain poisons/acids, and of course, deconstructive nanobots.

Note that this can be a subtrope of No Body Left Behind and Everything Fades, although it can lead to Empty Piles of Clothing in works where Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing. It can also be played for comedic effect, with the victim restored to normal in the next scene. A subtrope of this is Lustful Melt. When the character in question doesn't die and is played for laughs, it's Harmless Liquefaction.

Due to the fact in fiction people often say this when they are melting (often as a Stock Shout-Out to The Wizard of Oz), this could be considered an example of Captain Obvious.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• A commercial for Energizer batteries featured The Wicked Witch of the West herself attempting to destroy the Energizer Bunny by setting him on fire with her broom. She ends up setting off a sprinkler system that melts her.
• M&M's: One commercial features an anthropomorphic chocolate bar who joins Red and Yellow at the pool on a hot summer day with a woman. While Red and Yellow remain unharmed by the heat thanks to their shells, Chocolate Bar melts into a puddle of chocolate goo.
• Several football players begin to suffer a meltdown thanks to the heat, until Boomer Esasion passes them all bottles of Pepsi. As they chug, the melting is not just stopped, but reversed. Hm... Does that mean that Pepsi really does bring your ancestors back from the dead?
• The same principle was used in a Sierra Mist commercial with a man whose legs fuse to the ground as he walks toward a vending machine, getting shorter and shorter as he leaves a denim-textured trail of goo behind him. He gets his drink in time to chug himself back to normal only moments before he would have been unable to reach the machine, then he just has to pour out a single drop to restore his poor puddle of a dog.

Animation

• In I'll Return as the Rain, after Flying on a Cloud for a bit, Guda-Guda the snowman and a girl land in a sunny area. The location proves to be a bit too sunny for the snowman, as he becomes exhausted from the heat and starts to melt. The girl tries to find some snow to help revive him, but by the time she comes back Guda-Guda has melted completely. Thankfully, Guda-Guda later comes back to life in the form of raindrops, and he and the girl are soon happily playing together once more.

Anime & Manga

• An infamous example would be the anime adaptation of Barefoot Gen during the scene in which Hiroshima was bombed. It's an absolutely horrific 3-and-a-half minute sequence of men, women, children and animals graphically melting from the atom bomb's extreme heat. Usually the first part of them to melt is their eyes, which gruesomely drip out of their sockets. Truth in Television, of course, since that actually happened to those unfortunate to be caught in the blast radius during the atomic bombings.
• Amayo Jingorou from Basilisk can turn his body into semi-liquid ooze by covering himself with salt. This is why he's absolutely terrified of the sea, since the salt water dissolves his body completely. This is exactly how he meets his end.
• This is what happens to all the witches in Brynhildr in the Darkness whenever their "eject" button is pressed or they run out of "death suppressant" pills.
• In Case Closed, due to the action of APTX, victims eventually melt — even for our survivors (to them APTX became a Fountain of Youth), they did feel their bones melting, and smoke came out from their bodies.
• In Dragon Ball Z, the "collapse into lumpy goo" variant is how Imperfect Cell absorbs people. When Piccolo first confronts Cell, the latter stabs a man with his tail and kills him this way. Unlike most of the lumpy goo types, it's doesn't show it in a bloody fashion, surprisingly for Dragon Ball Z, as their skin actually remains mostly intact (albeit turning gray and rotting). He's unable to use this on the Androids, so he has to eat them whole.
• Elfen Lied has a particularly gruesome case in the last chapter. Lucy's psychic powers slowly damage her body on a molecular level and during the finale she uses them to such a great extent that parts of her slowly start to liquefy. In her moment of redemption, she uses all the power she has to save Kouta and his friends which literally causes her skin and flesh to melt. First, the arms and legs fall off and during the death scene she is only a melting skull and torso and asks to be covered by a jacket so the others (and the readers) don't have to see her like that during her final minutes. To add to the heartbreak, she uses her one vector to give a gun to Kouta as she begs him to end her suffering.
• Happens twice in Guyver: the first time to Lisker when Guyver II's damaged control medal is smashed, and again later in the series when Sho as Guyver I has his control medal torn out by Enzyme. Temporarily subverted in that the second occurrence doesn't immediately result in melting, but Guyot psychically causing Enzyme's body to burst apart when the berserking Guyver I tackled him behind reduce both Enzyme and Sho to a rapidly-disintegrating mound of bioflesh and bones.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, this happens to anyone hit with a lethal dose of the skin-corroding viruses of Fugo's Stand, Purple Haze. As their body starts succumbing to the illness, they will slowly, painfully melt to death. Just ask Illuso.
  • The effects of Vitamin C in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion causes its targets to soften and melt into a liquid-like state while still alive.
• Little Witch Academia: A monster hit with poison melts into a puddle of goo, which promptly eats a clean circular hole through the floor.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • End of Evangelion has everyone getting hugged by a hallucination of their most loved person and then promptly collapsing into primordial soup. Anti-AT field: quick, painless and 100% effective.
  • Episode 20 has a similar thing happening to Shinji: he immersed into his berserking Eva so much his body melted into LCL and they had to figure out how to rebuild it and bind his soul in it. Same thing happened to his mother while he was watching, by the way.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Happens to the Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon when Yugi fuses a Zombie to it.
• One of the manga based on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link briefly saw series antagonist Ganon return, only to rapidly melt away after being impaled with the Magical Sword.

Comic Books

• Would you believe that wholesome Archie Comics published not one, but two stories featuring this trope?
  • The original Life with Archie series (1958-1991) featured longer, more "adventure" oriented stories than the typical Archie titles, including one with a mysterious Satanic box that melts people's faces off.
  • From 1972 to 1974, Archie published a Sabrina the Teenage Witch spinoff, Chilling Adventures in Sorcery as Told by Sabrina. It had the odd combination of straight-up horror stories with art in the familiar Archie house style and Sabrina acting as Horror Host. One story, in particular, stands out, featuring a boy who teases a stutterer at school. The kindly teacher happens to be a witch, and gives him an enchanted book that melts his face off, and possibly kills him!
• "The Man who Waxed and Waned", a story from issue 13 of DC's 70s anthology series Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion tells of a mobster who winds up in the care of an elderly witch. He soon discovers the witch is using Wax voodoo dolls to kill random people. The crook tries to get the old lady's secret but ends up killing her and setting her house ablaze before fleeing. Unsurprisingly, she's already made a wax doll of him that he left in the burning house. The man tries to book a plane and meets an especially awful version of this fate as his body begins heating up intensely before dissolving into a blob of molten flesh with what remained of his face still visible. All while a nearby family with a young daughter was watching. The cover really gives it away.◊
• Judge Dredd: In "The Pit" arc, corrupt SJS chief Herman Roth tries to flee the sector after Dredd exposes him, only to be killed by his mob contacts by getting dunked in a barrel full of bio-acid. His flesh has been melted off his bones when the Judges find what's left of him.
• It would appear that this was the ultimate fate of Dr. Light. Although he was first turned into a candle by The Spectre.
• This is one of the ways heroes can die from the Morituri Effect in Strikeforce: Morituri.
• In a story from the Post-Crisis Wonder Woman (1987), Wonder Woman's clone, who was created by Ares' daughter to stir up mistrust and hatred among the people of the world invited to Themyscira for a goodwill feast, eventually melted into a pile of goo when she attempts to strangle Lois Lane.
• The unfortunate result of one college student's unstable mutation in X-Men. Already holding anti-mutant prejudice, added to activating in front of all his peers, he's horrified enough by his body suddenly melting that he commits suicide before Hope Summers can get to him and stabilize his powers.

Comic Strips

• The classic Wicked Witch melting is parodied in Brevity.
  Wicked Witch of the West: I'm melting! MELTING!!! And on the good rug too...
• In a strip by 19th century German artist Wilhelm Busch. Boy Peter leaves the house on a very cold winter day despite being told not to for ice skating, where he promptly freezes in the cold. Fortunately, the hunter finds him and brings him home; but in the oven heat, this trope happens, and all the dolorous parents can do is wipe up the liquid and store it in a jar, which they keep in the larder.
• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • One of Calvin's Imagine Spots involves it being so hot outside that he melts, leaving only his clothes behind. His melted remains then evaporate and then rain, restoring him to solid form, and a now naked Calvin runs off. The strip ends with Calvin's mother picking up his clothes off the sidewalk while muttering "Not again!"
  • In another Imagine Spot, Calvin imagines drinking one glass of water too many, so that his body becomes 90% water and melts.
• In one early Dilbert story-line, Dilbert is sent to Accounting. In Dilbert's company, Accounting is a horrific nightmare realm whose employees are literal trolls and their superior is an evil witch (or wizard — gender doesn't really matter in Accounting). Dilbert transforms him into a troll just from breathing the air, and he is promptly put to work erasing budgets for various departments. Then he is given the budget of the Accounting department itself...
  Head of Accounting: Help me! I'm melting! Aaaagh!
• This happens to Little Nemo once when he has hoped to merely thaw out of a block of ice.

Fan Works

• In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf adaptation of Smurfette's origin, Papa Smurf causes Smurfette's physical form to melt back into a lump of clay before he casts the spell that reshapes her into her current real Smurf form. In the story "Days Of Future Smurfed", Empath in one of his jumps into the future sees Smurfette melting back into a lump of clay after Papa Smurf's spell that turns her into a real Smurf eventually fails.
• When the Entity enters Twilight Sparkle's body in the beginning of The Power of the Equinox, her transformation into Dimmed Star begins by the melting of her flesh, which is followed by the melting of her skeleton. She's too busy laughing madly about the revenge she intends to exact upon Queen Chrysalis to notice this. Her heart remains intact in the buddle that forms, and her new body forms around the heart from said buddle.
• After the demons stop possessing Professor Peach's in Remnant Inferis: DOOM, what's left of her body (her upper torso due to being cut in half) melts into a bloody puddle.
• The Tooniverse Emissary: Instead of turning into trophies as in the fanfiction's source material The Subspace Emissary, cartoon characters are melted into puddles of lifeless paints, which are then scooped up into vials to prevent anybody from reviving them.
• The Undying: As per Undertale canon, Undyne starts melting due to the sheer amount of determination she's mustered up to stop the human being incompatible with her physiology as a monster. However, Alphys is able to stop her from melting by augmenting her body with a new kind of armor that can handle her excess determination.

Films — Animation

• Happens to Rasputin in Don Bluth's Anastasia when the heroine smashes the artifact he gained his power from. It's been foreshadowed several times that he's technically a zombie, and the relic is the only thing keeping him alive, so it was pretty obvious this would happen.
• Glim in Mune: Guardian of the Moon is a girl made of wax, so naturally, she's quite frightened of heat because she doesn't want to melt. She later performs a Heroic Sacrifice by keeping the fires of the Sun lit, saving the Sun but melting in the process. Luckily, she gets resculpted and brought back.
• Thrax's fate in Osmosis Jones when he falls into a jar of rubbing alcohol, which, due to him being a microscopic virus, has the same effect on him as concentrated acid would to a human.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Late in the animated movie Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Freddy, Daphne, and Velma are tied up, as wax voodoo dolls of themselves are tossed dangerously close to a fire (Oh, and btw, the supernatural stuff is for real this time.) The actual character's faces visually start to melt before Scooby runs in and pulls the voodoo dolls away from the fire.
  • In the sequel to the above, Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost Shaggy runs into Sarah Ravencroft, a real witch, or the ghost of her, and tries this. She just glared at Shaggy.
  Sarah: What was that?
  Shaggy: You're not melting! Like, it worked in The Wizard of Oz!
  Sarah: Fool! I shall destroy thee!
• In a scene near the end of The Transformers: The Movie, a number of anonymous Cybertronian robots are shown dissolving in a pit of molten metal inside Unicron's "belly", in order to set up a Big Damn Heroes moment when Daniel and the Autobots come to rescue the ones we actually care about. Their demise is accompanied by the usual splashing, struggling, then turning cherry red and sinking out of sight.

Films — Live-Action

• The Joker subverts this trope (what else?) in Batman, when Vicki Vale throws a pitcher of water at him in order to distract him. After impersonating The Wicked Witch and crying "I'm melting!" for a few seconds, he then shouts "Boo!" at Vicki, just before Batman smashes through the skylight in probably the iconic Big Damn Heroes moment of the film. This also reveals that the Joker's iconic chalky-white skin really is his skin now in this version, not makeup like we've been led to believe, and that the normal skin tone he had before in this scene is the makeup instead.
• The final battle of The Battle Wizard, a fantasy kung-fu film, has its main villain dying from dissolving into a pool of white foam after being overloaded with too much chi.
• This is what happens to anyone who is consumed and digested by The Blob, shown in graphic detail. Some of them have their eyes being liquefied into pools of blood. Others seem to no longer have skin or bones after being snared and entrapped in the terrible stuff. Try to pull them out of the Blob, you'll probably only succeed in pulling an arm off.
• The 1993 Aussie Body Horror film Body Melt involves an experimental diet pill created to make the perfect human, but it goes horribly wrong, causing various horrifying mutations including growing tentacles, exploding body parts, and of course the titular melting bodies.
• In the "Overtoke" segment from Campfire Tales, an oddly destructive weed causes its users to break apart and ultimately melt into a green puddle after prolonged use.
• The ghostly trio of Casper are melted away when exposed to sunlight. This is merely a ruse.
• Cube Zero: A particularly disgusting example happens when a character who appears in the opening minutes gets completely sprayed with some sort of odorless tissue-eating acid. He initially thinks that it's water, thirstily gulping it down before noticing that his skin turns waxy and starts to flake off.
• When Zack in The Curse tries to get his mother out of their house that's collapsing due to the meteor's influence, he finds out that she has mutated to the point that her entire body breaks apart and melts into a puddle of black goo.
• The climax of The Devil's Rain shows the satanic cult melting due to the eponymous occurrence.
• In Dracula Untold, the spokesman vampire toward the end of the film has this fate, with his impaled body dripping off of his bones until he is a very emaciated corpse on the stake he was impaled with.
• This happens partially in Electroma, where two robots, wishing to be human, have masks that looked like human faces. Unfortunately the masks melt in the sun.
• In Flash Gordon (1980), General Kala is shot on a staircase and falls prone, after which a pool of black liquid flows down the steps from her collapsing costume.
• Happens to an unlucky guy in the The Fly II when the angry man-fly hybrid monster attacks him.
• In Food of the Gods 2, "evil" scientist Edmond Delhurst suffers a meltdown death after he accidentally infects himself with a mixture of dog cancer cells and the titular growth hormone. He promptly turns into a gloppy puddle of cancerous goo.
  Neil Hamilton: Edmond? God, you look awful!
• Several of the vampire deaths in From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, as the staked vampires' partially fleshed skeletons remain intact while a nasty black fluid flows out of them, forming a puddle on the ground.
• Godzilla:
  • Happens to Godzilla at the end of Godzilla vs. Destoroyah as he's dying of a literal nuclear meltdown. His body temperature has reached the critical 12,000 degrees which causes the flesh to start melting off of his bones. One close-up shot even shows his own dorsal fins melting away.
  • Godzilla vs. Hedorah's titular Big Bad, the pollution monster Hedorah, is shown killing unfortunate people in numerous different ways as he seeks out new sources of pollution to feed on, this method being one of them. Hedorah is able to fire concentrated jets of sulphuric acid vapour from his body which reduce anyone unlucky enough to be caught by the jets to nothing but bones on the ground.
• In Gremlins, the title creatures melt into puddles of green goo (leaving only a skeleton behind) when exposed to sunlight. Gremlins 2: The New Batch shows that somehow, you get the same effect when you get them wet then electrocute them, too.
• Guyver:
  • In the film adaptation of The Guyver, after Sean has the unit literally pulled out from his head by Lisker.
  • Also in the more successful sequel, Guyver: Dark Hero. Once the villainous Guyver Zoanoid is mortally wounded in battle, Sean pulls out the unit from his head. It melts down to a skeleton, which was only briefly seen before Guyver finished him off in his signature style.
• The Incredible Melting Man tells the unfortunate tale of an astronaut who is slowly, painfully, experiencing this effect.
• Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. "DON'T LOOK, MARION! KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT!" This is what Indiana Jones tells Marion when Belloq, Dietrich, Toht and the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant. Indy and Marion wisely keep their eyes closed, while the Nazis and Belloq suffer God's wrath. Those who look end up being killed gruesomely by the Ark, but Toht is the one whose death stands out, as his face literally melts off of his skull in liquid form. He is left gurgling on his own blood even after most of his skin has been graphically reduced to a fleshy puddle, implying that he's drowning in his own blood as his flesh liquefies.
• When Jason has to switch bodies in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, the former one graphically rots away.
• The eponymous Monster Clowns from Killer Klowns from Outer Space melt down a security guard by throwing acid pies at him.
  Security guard: What are you gonna do with those pies, boys?
• In Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life, the main villain gets thrown into a pit of black acid-like liquid. He spends a few dozen seconds thrashing around while his skin and muscle slowly melt off him.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Combined with shrinking in Ant-Man, when Darren Cross uses an imperfect shrink ray to reduce an intransigent investor to a tiny glob of fleshy goo.
  • Thor: Ragnarok: The Grandmaster uses a weapon looking like a rod topped by a sphere to execute people who displeased him, as he demonstrates with his "cousin" next to Thor. This results in the victim melting into a blue goo, to Thor's horror. Then the Grandmaster complains that he got some on his shoes. In a later scene, he refers to it as "the melt stick".
• Taken to Crosses the Line Twice levels in Planet Terror, when a would-be rapist's genitals melt off.
• In RoboCop, one of Clarence Boddicker's goons, Emil Antonowsky, gets soaked in industrial waste after running his van into a tank of the corrosive stuff. He starts slowly melting (while still alive!), while shambling around in pain. Clarence eventually hits Emil with his car, at which point he's so melted that his body literally explodes into goo on impact. Being Clarence, he seems more upset over the mild inconvenience Emil's goo had on driving than the death of his lackey, the jerk.
• Subverted in Sky High, in that melting into goo is actually Ethan's power.
• In Street Trash, a long-expired alcoholic drink called "Tenafly Viper" causes those who drink it to slowly and grotesquely melt into multicolored sludge. The most famous scene involves a hobo slowly melting into the toilet bowl he's sitting on, his arm breaking off at the wrist when he tries to grab the flush handle to pull himself out. He's quickly reduced to a groaning, half-melted head bobbing around in the bowl.
• The Super Mario Bros. has Koopa mention early in the film that all life started out as primeval slime, foreshadowing the film's climax, where Mario and Luigi turn the De-evolutionizing De-vo guns on him until he turns back into primeval slime himself. Interestingly, there was a deleted clip from early in the film in which the De-vo chamber operator himself was De-evolved into slime. If you watch the film closely, you'll notice a green puddle during the De-vo chamber fight.
• In Sweet Home, Yamamura dies in a very graphic way as his flesh melts off of his body, leaving only a crumbling skeleton behind. The scene is present in the video game adaptation as well, and is no less grisly on the Famicom.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: The T-1000 after he is shot in the gut with a grenade by the T-800. He falls into a vat of molten steel, where he shrieks (and transforms into his victims) as he melts away.
• Volcano: Stan when he jumps into the lava to save the subway motorman, and in the process, has his entire body melted into the lava. It probably wasn't meant to be as funny as it turned out.
• The Wizard of Oz is the Trope Namer, for a scene where Dorothy accidentally splashes the Wicked Witch of the West, who does not react well to water.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't show it often, but did bring it to disturbing levels with the Dip. When Judge Doom, the Big Bad, is revealed to be a Toon, he meets his end by his own concoction, and his death is very much a Shout-Out to the Wicked Witch's death in The Wizard of Oz.
• X-Men Film Series
  • Seen in X-Men, with Senator Kelly, whose body has turned very unstable by Magneto's mutation-inducing machine. It starts with the hand Storm was clutching, and then everything is broken down until becoming pure water!
  • Iceman in X-Men: Days of Future Past by three Sentinels in the climax, as his "frozen body" form is torn down.

Gamebooks

• In the world of Lone Wolf, many an Undead (above the standard skeletons or zombies) dissolves into foul-smelling goo upon destruction. Notably the case for Vordaks or Helghast among the servants of the Darklords, or for the mutated boss undead of Deathlord Ixiataaga from Book 17.

Literature

• In Attack of the Mutant, the protagonist defeats the titular supervillain by getting him to melt himself. (The Masked Mutant is a shapeshifter who can turn into any solid at will and change back again. The protagonist tricks the Mutant into turning into a wave of sulfuric acid — which is a liquid, meaning he can't change back.)
• In Michael Reaves' The Burning Realm, the Deathlings are human victims of a supernatural disease inflicted by a vengeful Cthon. They become more and more sensitive to sensations, and more vulnerable to injury, until they're incapacitated by their condition, go into convulsions, and literally disintegrate into melting flesh and cracked bone.
• Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.: In Death Warmed Over, several zombies and other unfortunate Unnaturals get reduced to goo by an anti-Unnatural racist's plot to annihilate their kind.
• The villains of Robin Jarvis' Deptford Histories book Thomas have poisoned weapons that doom their victims to melting into piles of steaming sludge at the slightest prick.
• In The Dunwich Horror, Wilbur Whateley's non-human heritage is revealed when his furry, scaly, tentacled, nine-foot corpse dissolves into paste, leaving nothing behind but some discoloration to the floor.
• The Elenium: In The Tamuli, people are terrified of the Shining Ones for their ability to inflict an extremely nasty fate with a touch: their victims' flesh sloughs off their bones as they rot alive. The Shining Ones are equally horrified by it.
• Enchanted Forest Chronicles:
  • Wizards react the same way to soapy water with a little lemon juice in it. Why this occurs is never explained; it seems to have something to do with their magic, and probably also with the fact their appearance is repeatedly described as "greasy". They recover somehow, but it does put them out of commission for awhile. The lemon juice is a critical component, as well.
  • Later on, Telemain develops a spell that replicates the effect. It's more portable than buckets and can be used multiple times in rapid succession without having to reload (again unlike a bucket), but it doesn't last quite as long as an actual bucketful of soapy lemon water (possibly because the puddle is pure wizard, without the melting agent mixed in).
  • Averted by a friendly witch who was splashed at the same time as the wizards in one book. The princess who soaked them figured the witch would be safe (if wet) because she kept a very tidy and clean home, and there's no way someone that good at house-cleaning would have any problems with soap and water.
• In Peter Straub's Floating Dragon, the nerve agent DRG-16 is accidentally released from a Department of Defense chemical plant, and causes a number of people to meet this fate.
• In Hallow Mass Chester Sawyer's body dissolves into slime upon his death.
• This is part of the drawback of Kent's power in Hero Worship. Over the course of the day, he becomes more and more liquid until he's a puddle on the ground. When he sleeps, he reforms into whatever shape the liquid settles in. To look human, he sleeps in a mold.
• Humanx Commonwealth: This happens to one of a villain's underlings in Mid-Flinx when he falls prey to some jungle animals' drug-laced and flesh-liquefying stingers. Thanks to the former, he doesn't even realize it's happening until too late.
• In Hans Christian Andersen's original version of The Little Mermaid, mer-people dissolve into sea foam when they die. This is the fate that threatens the title character if she can't win the prince's love. In the end it does happen, but her spirit lives on.
• A messy version happens to Messalla when he is caught in a pod with a laser of golden light in Mockingjay.
• In Naked Lunch, one of the parties of Interzone are the Liquefactionists, a group devoted to liquidating and absorbing their rivals. Inevitably, they always turn on each other. Eventually, there will only be one Liquefactionist left, and that person will have won. Most readers interpret them as a caricature of the cutthroat nature of capitalism.
• This is how Heroic RRoD and Villainous RRoD manifest in Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner. If one spends too much time without devouring anyone, their bodies will start consuming themselves and soon will melt into a black, tar-like goo.
• In the Isaac Asimov short story "Rain, Rain, Go Away", a family of nosy neighbors nonetheless makes friends with a new family that moved in. They noted that the new family seems to be deathly afraid of rain, but writes it off as everyone having their own special quirks. They invite the new family to a carnival, where everyone has a good time until they see storm clouds. The new family is desperate to get home, up to and including crying when they hear radio reports that the rain is going to strike soon. When they finally get home, they only make it halfway:
  Mother: Honestly! You'd think they were... [rain suddenly starts at the family proceeds to melt] ... made of sugar and afraid they would melt?
• Red Dwarf: This is how Rimmer dies in Backwards, being melted from the inside out until he's just a pile of human flesh containing his eyeballs, thanks to the Armageddon virus making it into his light bee. He's aware of the whole process, too.
• Septimus Heap: This is how DomDaniel ends in the climax of Flyte, by melting down in a puddle of slime.
• Toy Academy: In the climax of Book 1, Bootleg attempts to melt Commander Hedgehog to death by putting him in a Margie Bake Oven. Justified because Commander Hedgehog is made of plastic. Fortunately, Grumbolt unplugs the oven and lets Commander Hedgehog out before any real harm is done to him.
• Translation State: Presger Translators need to "match" with someone in a Permafusion at the end of their maturation; if they don't, their biology gets so unstable that they literally fall apart. A Translator who tries to force a match is publicly executed by being sealed in an observation room alone.
• Not shown, but it's mentioned in Unseen Academicals that Unseen University's sports instructor, Evans the Striped, died by spontaneous evaporation. Ridcully's a bit put out that one of UU's wizards would die in such an unimpressive fashion.
• Vorkosigan Saga: In Diplomatic Immunity, we find that the Star Creche has a bioweapon that melts people.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the inspiration for the Trope Namer. After the Wicked Witch of the West steals one of the Silver Slippers from Dorothy, the girl becomes so enraged, she dumps a bucket of water all over the witch, who then melts before Dorothy's eyes. Note that it's not nearly instantaneous: the witch has enough time for a dialogue in which she asks the stupid question "did you not know water could destroy me?" Even (especially) as a child, it's obvious to the reader that had she known, Dorothy would have done it weeks ago. Worth noting is that the book provides a surprisingly legitimate reason for this: The witch magically kept herself alive for so long that her body had essentially mummified and dried to a dust that, due to this same magic, held intact right where it all belonged "like brown sugar", until Dorothy introduced a solvent to it. In the film though, water simply causes her to evaporate into steam, presumably because "it's Oz".

Live-Action TV

• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., this is the result of Radcliffe's failed Inhuman experiment.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "The Dark Age", an old friend of Giles has been killed by a demon they used to summon up, who then inhabits his body. When things get rough for the demon he leaves the body, which promptly dissolves into a puddle of greenish goo.
• The Doctor Who story "Dragonfire" has the villain Kane, a low-temperature lifeform, commit suicide by exposing himself to strong sunlight, causing him to melt. Probably one of the most gruesome sequences in the history of the show (you see his face drip off his skull), and astonishing when you think it got broadcast in an early-evening family show.
• In the Goosebumps (1995) episode "Attack of the Mutant", said mutant's supervillain power was his ability to turn into anything, with one exception: If he turns into a liquid, he can't turn back. The Kid Hero defeats him by telling him he should try turning into acid. This is depicted as the villain evaporating away while his costume (and mask) crumple up flat, into a steamy pile of clothes.
• The Tokusatsu show Message from Space: Galactic Battle (Uchu kara no messeji: Ginga taisen, better known as San Ku Kaï in Europe or Sankuokai in Latin America) features one villain of the week with water-based powers who melts into foam when killed, which then takes fire. (It stands out because most other villains would rather explode.)
• In an episode of The Mighty Boosh, The Hitcher takes a shower in the Fountain of Youth so that he can become younger and more powerful. Naboo flushes the nearby toilet to stop him, heating up the water in the shower and melting The Hitcher into a green milkshake-like slime.
• This is what Witchblade in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers says after being destroyed by the Shogun Megazord, except this trope is averted, as instead of melting, she topples over and explodes while saying:
  Witchblade: Oh no, I'm falling... falling... what a world...!
• In the Halloween special of Phil of the Future, the evil cyborg Debbie melted into black goo after overheating when the students disobeyed her orders.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Course: Oblivion", the crew of Voyager discover that they are biomimetic copies of themselves when the Doctor injects B'Elanna Torres's dead body with a dichromate catalyst, which instantly causes it to revert into a blob of "silver blood" from the earlier "Demon" episode. Later on, the biomimetic Voyager itself disintegrates into formless particles when force fields holding the dissolving ship together fail.
• In the pilot episode of Supernatural, the Woman in White and her children dissolve into a puddle of water before bursting into flame.
• Vampires in True Blood melt into horrible bloody goo when they get staked.
• The various Ultra Series' have their monsters killed off in this manner:
  • In Ultraman, Banila is killed by Aboras's Acidic Foam spraying him.
  • Ultraseven:
    • Gabura melts into Yellow Slim after the Alien Shadow's Ship is destroyed.
    • Dally is reduced into Bubbles by a one-time only attack from Ultra Seven.
    • Dancan dies in the "Soda Pop" style after Seven hits him with the Emerium Ray.
  • Return of Ultraman:
    • Alien Nackle goes out like this when he dies after being dropped on his head by Jack.
    • Sasahiller is reduced into foam by Jack's Specium Ray.
  • Big Bad Commander Black turns into green foamy goo at the end of Ultraman Leo.
• The X-Files:
  • An entire episode revolves around an assassin erasing clones from existence by using a powerful acid in his blood.
  • Alien hybrids most often dissolve into green goo when killed.

Music

• The Christmas song "Frosty the Snowman" mentions having fun before he melts away. In the animation based on the song, he melts in the greenhouse where he takes a little girl to keep her warm. Tear Jerker.
• The album Death Valley High by Zombina and the Skeletones is a concept album that tells the story of a troubled young girl who slaughters her classmates in the song "Janie's Got a Dissolvo Ray".

Pinballs

• Occurs in Jersey Jack Pinball's The Wizard of Oz with the Wicked Witch, of course.

Radio

• In The Goon Show episode "The Childe Harold Rewarde," Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty reduce Seagoon to liquid in a steam-bath and trap him in a bottle. They then threaten to drink him as part of an extortion scheme. Because this is The Goon Show, Seagoon begged the audience for help from within his bottle.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition:
  • The spell infallible servant from the book Exemplar of Evil can turn a creature into a foul sludge if slain or captured after casting, making it impossible to interrogate or resurrect. Note that this spell is mostly cast on willing subjects.
  • The Keepers, an Outsider race described in the Fiend Folio, have this as a racial trait. If they are captured or pinned down for more than 10 rounds, they dissolve into a puddle of poison.
• Red Dwarf: Wax droids risk this if put into too high a temperature setting. Having a wax droid and an iguana in the same party can cause major headaches due to iguanas becoming unresponsive in low temperature settings.
• Shadowrun: The spell Turn To Goo does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and (because it affects flesh but not implants) is popular with those who like pawning slain opponents' secondhand cyberware.

Theatre

• In the stage adaptation of The Little Mermaid, Ursula dies in this manner after Ariel destroys her nautilus shell.
• In Shrek: The Musical, Lord Farquaad is killed in this manner by getting incinerated by Dragon's fiery breath.
• In The Snow Maiden that's how the title character meets her end.
• Subverted in Wicked, in which Elphaba is indeed splashed with water by Dorothy, only to be revealed to have faked her own death using a trapdoor in order for her and Fiyero (who Elphaba cast a spell on so he wouldn't be executed, turning him into The Scarecrow) to leave Oz together. A heartbroken Glinda, though, still thinks her best friend is dead.

Toys

• In BIONICLE, it is implied that Zaktan may have done something like this to a Toa of Plasma, since the only sign of him left was an orange puddle, although it's still ambiguous as to what actually happened in that room. Tahu also partly melts Nektann using his heat powers in self-defense, but manages to avoid killing him.

Video Games

• Characters in the Army Men games who are attacked with a flamethrower will flatten out into a puddle and fade away. Justified because all the characters are plastic toy soldiers, which will melt in high temperatures.
• The death screen for the Scions in Battlezone II: Combat Commander has a hand desperately trying to reach out from a pool of biometal as it melts. The ISDF on the other hand features Ludicrous Gibs as a soldier is ripped apart from weapons fire whilst simultaneously melting from said weapons fire. Presumably, the ESRB saw neither judging by the game's rating.
• Brain Dead 13: In one death scene in the cocoon chamber, a spray of acid hits Lance's face, resulting in his entire face and head melting (except for the eyeballs) along with his entire body, which melts away into nothingness at all.
• In the Bubsy series, one of Bubsy's death animations has him melting into a puddle.
• A variant occurs in Conker's Bad Fur Day, when Conker defeats the Great Mighty Poo via flushing him down the toilet. Also doubles as a nice Shout-Out to the Wizard of Oz example.
  Great Mighty Poo: Arrgh, you cursed squirrel! Look what you have done! I'm flushing, I'm flushing! Oh what a world, what a world. Who would've thought a good little squirrel like you could destroy my beautiful clagginess?
• In Crusader: No Regret the LNR-81 "Liquefier" Catalytic Cartridge rifle fires projectiles with explosive warheads intended to disperse a catalytic chemical that breaks down molecular bonds especially in organic matter. Living things that get hit vaporize into a ghostly outline before collapsing to the ground into a puddle of base matter.
• In Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, enemies you kill melt into puddles of blood regardless of the method used to kill them.
• Memorably, hilariously/disturbingly, and unintentionally occurred in the early releases of Dwarf Fortress v.2010. Due to a mistake in the materials files, if a dwarf got wet in hot weather, all of their body fat would melt off and they'd bleed to death.
• Supplemental material for the EXA_PICO series indicates that this happens to Pureblooded Reyvateils when they die — their bodies are created from biofluid, and only retain that shape for as long as the Reyvateil lives. (This doesn't happen to Halfblooded Reyvateils because they're functionally humans with Reyvateil powers.)
• In the Fallout games, plasma weapons have a special effects death wherein the victim dissolves into a puddle of green slime. In Fallout 3, this is accompanied by a wet, slurpy sort of sound — lasers, which burn the target to ashes, have a crisp, crackling, burning sort of noise. The Fallout 3 versions are considerably different from Fallout and Fallout 2, though plasma still reduces its victim to goo. Or rather, it melts the flesh off the bones, which promptly collapse into the resultant puddle for a stereotypical 'Bones' version. Lasers just cut victims in half (or thirds depending). Fallout 3's lasers actually act more like Fallout 2's pulse rifles in that regard, incidentally. This also happens to the player character upon activating Project Purity at the end of the game, unless the Broken Steel expansion pack is installed. Since there are too many of them to leave intact corpses without excessive performance drag, the Marked Men in the final battle of Lonesome Road all undergo plasma melting after death.
• The Particle Beam in First Encounter Assault Recon disintegrates enemies. Alma also does it to several FEAR and Delta soldiers.
• Almost all the enemies in Grabbed by the Ghoulies will do this upon death. The effect interestingly begins with the enemy's body glowing a bright green light before falling into a body-shaped stain on the floor.
• In Gruntz, this is how Gruntz die (if not blown up, crushed falling into hazards, or exploded) - they turn into a pile of goo that can be later sucked up to reuse for creation of another grunt. Also said word for word as one of their death quotes.
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land: The Big Bad, Fecto Forgo, is forced to be contained in the "Eternal Capsule" after being split apart from Elfilin, the side of them that's good at showing compassion and friendliness, making them a Dark Lord on Life Support who can barely stay alive in the outside world. And should they get out, they will go unstable and start heavily melting.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Like-likes will slowly melt into a puddle before burning away.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past features an enemy made of ice completely resistant to everything but fire magic, which reduces it to a shrinking puddle.
  • In some older 2.5 betas of Zelda Classic, there is some unused sprites of Wizzrobes, depicting them as melting into a pile of clothes, and reappearing elsewhere. Since there is no way to place these sprites in a Wizzrobe's animation (they just flicker with their normal sprites), this never took off.
  • In Zelda: Wand of Gamelon, Hectan undergoes the effervescent variety when Zelda defeats him, leaving behind a (suspiciously beating) Heart Container.
    Hectan: YOU'VE KILLED ME! [dissolves away]
    Zelda: Good.
• Parodied at the end of the first level of LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, when Sandman is hit with water, making him vulnerable for the exact opposite reason of this trope.
  Sandman: I'm melting! MELTING! No wait, I mean, I'm solidifying! SOLIDIFYING! Oh, what a world...
• This can happen to Larry Laffer in Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! if he doesn't bother to remove his leisure suit before either jumping into the mud bath or entering the sauna at La Costa Lotta.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect: Some weapon mods like incendiary or toxic ammo cause this on enemies when they're killed.
  • In the sequel, this is the final fate of those captured by the collectors, and not rescued in time; or a random colonist if you save everyone...well, everyone else, that is.
• Metroid:
  • Shoot tinbots with the plasma beam in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and they will sink into bright puddles.
  • Super Metroid: A particularly brutal and graphic example occurs when the mini-boss Crocomire is pushed into a pit of acid. After bobbing up and down a bit trying to get out, it screams at a very high pitch and flesh starts peeling off in gooey streaks until only the skeleton remains.
• In FunOrb's Miner Disturbance, the trope name can be your epitaph in case of death by lava.
• Monster Hunter (PC) have this fate happening to Man Eating Plants, Gremlins and blobs once they're killed. Surprisingly enough, this doesn't happen to Wicked Witches, an enemy type which resembles the one from Wizard of Oz, where witches upon defeat are turned into frogs.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • In Mortal Kombat II, one of Shang Tsung's Fatalties causes his opponent's flesh to melt off of their skin as he takes their soul. There's also knocking an opponent into the Deadpool.
  • In Mortal Kombat 9, one of Smoke's Fatalities has him fill his opponent's body with corrosive smoke, causing their flesh to melt off of their bones.
  • In Mortal Kombat X, one of Reptile's Fatalities has him spit a puddle of acid at the opponent's feet, causing their body to slowly dissolve until only an arm is left.
  • Downplayed in Mortal Kombat 11 with one of Erron Black's fatalities, wherein he throws a jar of acid on the ground, kneecaps his opponent, then pushes their head into the acid puddle, melting half of their head before stomping on the remaining half.
• In one of the Moshi Monsters missions, Tomba the walking snowman melts when you have to melt the ice that another character is frozen in. You get awarded a bonus for making it cold again so that he freezes again.
• This also happens to dead enemies in Ninja Gaiden Black/Sigma.
• There exist a couple of Pokémon (especially blobby or water-based ones) that can learn a move called Acid Armor, which is sort of invoking this trope. Contrary to the trope's outcome, though, it doesn't kill the Pokémon, it just raises its defense a lot.
• Enemies in Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 melt after death. The Novistador's acid attacks inflict grisly melting on Leon's face.
• Space Quest:
  • In Sierra's Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter, being hit by a drop of acid has it "sear its way to your feet" (through your head), but the VGA remake dissolves Roger the protagonist top-down, into a puddle of goo and a really stupid-looking head in a protective helmet. The VGA remake also features the trope name spoken in a sound clip when this happens.
  • In Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge, Roger can fall into a death trap of green acid. Contrary to type, it kills him gradually, complete with descriptive text!
  • In Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon (and an easter egg in Space Quest IV), going unprotected on a volcanic world causes Roger to melt into a puddle. Roger can also (rather easily) fall into the lava, and the Have a Nice Death picture was accompanied with a half-melted, mostly skeletal Roger trying to get out of the goo.
  • In Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, being caught by a slime monster causes Roger to fall straight into it, with a suitable shot of his half-skeletal form trying to claw his way back out.
  • Nobody melts in Space Quest V: The Next Mutation. We thought we'd mention that for the novelty value. The Pukoids seem half-melted, though.
  • In Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier, Roger can fall into a pool of acid, with a suitable scene of flailing around and bobbing to the surface with his flesh melted off before a ground-up sizzling into oblivion.
• In Star Control Origins, the Pinthi virus is stated to cause a wide variety of symptoms among different lifeforms, but almost all of them eventually end up liquefying in the end. The Pinthi themselves often use "liquefy" as a synonym for "kill".
  Pinthi viral colony: If you were to look upon us directly with your eyes, we would appear to you as a pile of sludge. Your eyes would then also turn into sludge. Followed by the rest of you.
• F.A.N.G.'s Establishing Character Moment in the story mode of Street Fighter V has him chase a female scientist and kill her this way. Her melting isn't shown onscreen as the scene cuts to black, but all that's left of her afterwards is a puddle of purple goo, with F.A.N.G. nastily licking some of it.
• Super Mario Sunshine has several enemies and even allies that appear to be made of paint. Water, which is your main weapon in the game, will cause these paint beings to melt into a puddle of paint.
• In Tales of Monkey Island, when Demon Bride Elaine sprays Ghost Pirate Guybrush with root beer, he dissolves into a skeleton, before he thankfully rematerializes back into the Crossroads Center.
• Tomodachi Life has this as a representation of a Mii responding to their absolute least favorite food ever.
• Is present in Undertale in a most nightmarish way possible. Killing Undyne causes her to melt. In Neutral Route, her sprite wavers while piano version of "Ruins" plays in the background, and then she melts while screaming that she can't die yet. In Genocide attempting to kill Monster Kid causes her to sacrifice herself. Than her sprite begins wavering again, but now she decides that she cannot die yet and becomes one of two Genocide bosses that actually can do something to stop you. In the end, she melts, but this time she's smiling, because she is sure that someone will stop you. This is explained on a Pacifist Route in the True Lab. It turns out that monsters can't handle large amounts of Determination like humans can; too much of it causes them to melt. While the Amalgamates were injected with Determination that was taken from human souls, it's implied that Undyne had some of her own, although it's unknown if it's possible with other monsters or not.

Visual Novels

• The Patient S Remedy: The premise involves the terminal disease known as "Candle Syndrome", in which the body seems to almost melt like a candle due to cellular degeneration.

Web Animation

• generic purple protogen: In "A Protogen Goes Outside (during summer)", the purple protogen melts into a puddle of purple liquid as a consequence of going outside in Texas during the summer.
• This is the fate of the Ice Cream Man in Mokey's Show after being slapped by the sun.
  Ice Cream Man: [screaming]
  Mokey: MR ICE CREAM MAN, NO!
  Ice Cream Man: I'M MELTING MOKEY! AAAAAA— [disappears]
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: In the Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island segment in "Weird Mario Games Be Like...", Yoshi melt Baby Mario using Nap Time.

Webcomics

• In Cheshire Crossing, all witches are vulnerable to this in Oz. This not only explains why the Wicked Witch of the West had buckets of water all over the place (in case the Good Witches came calling), but also allows her to ambush and incapacitate an invading Mary Poppins.
• Girl Genius: One of the many deaths of Count Beausoleil is depicted as one of his remote bodies liquefying and dripping with the unsound effect melt.
• In Goblins, K'seliss the "lizard-ogre" gets dissolved bit by bit by a horrifying undead abomination. And still manages to take the damn thing down with him with all four limbs and his tail gone.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: When Molly's steam-powered robot snowman (unsurprisingly) melts, Jean quotes the Wicked Witch: "What a world! What a world!"
• In Jupiter-Men, Quintin panics when he first gets his powers as his arms are stumps melting into green slime. He shuts his eyes and has a Rapid-Fire "No!" as he wishes it to stop. He's relieved when he opens his eyes and his hands are back.
• Knights of Buena Vista subverts this. Bill thinks Ilene's Snowlem character will melt in the summer, but instead snow creatures in this game just lose lots of defense points.
• Seen in Metroid: Third Derivative when a Pirate challenged Samus. Unfortunately, he was standing in a high concentration of phazon at the time. Samus delivered a spin on the Trope name, in response to this.
• In The Noob, the ZERG team encounters a "cute little squirrel" in a high level forest. It doesn't end well.
• Professor Corwin's Apsinthion Device does a this to coeds in Tales of Gnosis College. They love it.
• Sam & Fuzzy: Direct contact with The Tar causes this effect in anything made from it. This includes most non-human life in the setting, including those capable of breeding descendants on their own, and even humans who have pieces of non-humans in them, like Hazel.

Web Original

• In Mortasheen, the creature Waxwork can do this to your skin and then absorb the melted flesh into itself.
• Whateley Universe: Mixed with Kill It with Water, when it's revealed in Call the Thunder: Chapter 5 - Idiots 'R Us, that:
  [Hijacker] was "The big Meanie" who had once chased [the Three Little Witches] with a bucket of water wanting to see who'd melt.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-2207 ("Dimensional Razor") is a plastic knife that can cut open portals to other universes, but it also messes with the physical laws of those universes as a result, resulting in an "Yggdrasil-Severance Event" that disconnects each universe from the multiverse. One example happens in Exploration #46, where everything, including living beings, sags down and melts in less than 10 minutes.
  • SCP-3001 ("Red Reality") is a Pocket Dimension with extremely low Hume levels. Foundation researcher Robert Scranton got trapped inside it thanks to a Freak Lab Accident. As time passed by, his own Hume levels started to decrease, causing his body to disappear piece by piece. Even worse, he remained alive and conscious through it all.
• Many examples in Sheigala: Vampire Business Women one of the vampire henchwomen melts into bones when she's staked in the heart. And in the final episode, the main villainess Santrina melts into a puddle of gore after eating meat tainted with garlic.

Western Animation

• This is what happens when the Warners get really, really, really bored in Animaniacs.
• Arthur himself in "D.W.'s Name Game" during D.W.'s Dream Sequence, being that the episode is a Whole-Plot Reference to The Wizard of Oz. D.W. obtains the word needed to fight Arthur, and when she whispers it to him, he melts!
  DW: Nobody told me you'd melt! Arthur! [scoops up Arthur with her Mary Moo Cow cup before his melted body goes down the storm drain]
  Arthur: Calling people names can be dangerous to their health!
• Batman:
  • Batman: The Animated Series, when several of Poison Ivy's "children" (and seemingly herself) come in contact with weed killer.
  • Batman Beyond, when Inque comes in contact with water. And later, when her protégé tries to become like her. Oh, he survives. Unfortunately. Worth noting is that Inque is not permanently incapacitated by water, it's just a major inconvenience. However, her form makes her dependent on mutagen, and when someone slips something nasty into it later on, she completely dissolves and evaporates. Although she is never seen again in the series after this, Batman still doesn't trust that she is gone for good.
• A Celebrity Deathmatch episode with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos vs. Naomi Campbell, in which Rebecca is sprayed with stomach acid, reducing her to a puddle of mush.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • "Operation: I.-S.C.R.E.A.M." had Sector V at the mercy of a giant ice cream monster. Fortunately, Numbah 3 had cranked the heater to maximum, making the monster melt. ("Who puts a heater in an ice cream factory?!")
  • In "Operation: C.H.O.C.O.L.A.T.E.", when Heinrich Von Marzipan is fighting Numbuh Five in a spacecraft, she has it en route for the sun. Getting the spacecraft close enough, it's enough for Heinrich's chocolaty body to melt (this is due to Heinrich having fallen in the chocolate volcano in "Operation: R.A.B.B.I.T.", causing him to mutate into a chocolate monster).
• Courage the Cowardly Dog, at least twice.
  • Once when a snowman removes the "anti-melting gene" from Eustace.
  • Again when courage overcomes his personality issues in the last episode, which causes the anthropomorphic personification of his self-depreciation (that looks like a Sadist Teacher) to dissolve in a black puddle.
• Darkwing Duck has a lot of fun with this:
  • Bud Flood yells this word-for-word after falling into a vat of contaminated water. Darkwing thinks he's being a baby as he tries to pull him out...until he sees that the pole he was trying to grab him with had dissolved. This is a unique instance of this trope as not only did Bud survive, he actually benefited from it and became the Liquidator. A water-based being with the power to control all water.
  • Honker dispatches a pair of giant slugs with the salt packet from his french fries.
  • In "Slime Okay, You're Okay", one of Bushroot's failed experiments in creating companionship for himself results in "Intelligence, Indigestion, Insanity, and In a Puddle" — and almost kills Gosalyn when she gets exposed to it. (She still hates the cure: plain soap and water.)
  • Splatter Phoenix, a villainess who could turn any painting into a Portal Picture, attempts to kill the heroes in this manner by dousing the picture they were trapped in with turpentine. Too bad for her that that particular picture was penciled as well as painted. However, she herself was just painted, making her demise a case of Death by Irony.
• Duck Dodgers sees Dodgers and the Cadet do this to a vampire after getting him to eat garlic.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • In "Pop Goes the Ed", when the boys try to cool off in a freezer. Sarah kicks them out as one large block of ice, which quickly melts in the sun... taking the boys with it.
  • "One + One = Ed" had Jimmy melt down into a puddle because Eddy removed his "outer lines" (in other words, he pulled off of the ink outlines like they were wires and left the colored part to melt away). The episode later has Sarah confront Ed about it, holding Jimmy in a lemonade pitcher. Turns out it was just their imagination and never happened...or did it?
    Sarah: [yelling] Wait 'till I tell Mom what you did you Jimmy! [holds up pitcher]
    Jimmy: Don't spill me!
• In the Family Guy episode "Quagmire's Baby", Stewie creates less-than-intelligent clones of himself and Brian to act as assistants, only for them to become unstable when their bodies literally fall apart and collapse into fleshy gooey puddles.
• Futurama:
  • This happens to Roberto when he eats a piece of Hermes' skin, thanks to years of LaBarbara's extremely spicy cooking.
  • The Horrible Gelatinous Blob and his son Brett melt into green gooey puddles whenever they come into contact with salt. Luckily for them, this is only temporary and they re-solidify after a while.
• The Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon episode "The Land of Odd" had Haggy Maggie melt after being dripped on by Clogged Duane. She even references the famous scene from The Wizard of Oz.
  Haggy Maggie: I'm melting! Who would've thought a gross little kid like you would ruin my wonderful badness! What a world!
• Goof Troop, when Goofy introduces a monster made of toxic waste to a whiff of fresh air. The monster's puddle actually swirls into nothing, with a hilarious toilet flushing sound effect.
• Gravity Falls:
  • In "Headhunters", the wax figure of Abraham Lincoln is found melted under a sunny window. Grunkle Stan immediately suspects Wax John Wilkes Booth. The living wax figures are later defeated in the same way, with Wax Sherlock Holmes melting onscreen.
  • In "Double Dipper", the copier clones can be destroyed by liquids. Dipper triggers the fire sprinklers to kill most of them, while Tyrone accidentally kills himself by drinking soda.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In "Ecto Cooler", Billy recites a poem claiming that looking at Sperg's mother would cause your face to melt. Surely enough, Principal Goodvibes looks at her and his face promptly melts.
  Goodvibes: Could someone get me a tissue?
• Infinity Train: In the season 3 finale, a Ghom catches Simon just after he tries to "wheel" Grace and sucks out his life force, causing the flesh to melt from his bones and ultimately reducing him to nothing but a pile of ash.
• Johnny Bravo:
  • "Super Duped": When Sweet Cheeks, the candy-themed supervillain in a striped costume, captures Little Suzy and tries to turn her into a large chocolate bunny, Johnny accidentally hoses him down and defeats him while trying to wash mud off his favorite shirt.
  • In a much later episode, a frost giant swallows him while he's having extremely spicy food as last meal. The next moment, Johnny is drowning in a large puddle.
• KaBlam!:
  • June once does this (using a magnifying glass against the sun) to both her and Henry in an episode.
  • "And Meltman with the power to... uh... melt."
• This happens a lot on Kim Possible:
  • "Kimitation Nation": When Drakken sent clones of Kim and Bonnie, as well as Ron and Rufus, to attack Kim, Kim was able to melt the clones by spraying soda water at them.
  • "Day of the Snowmen": Kim and Ron held an army of zombie snowmen at bay by melting them with a flamethrower and packets of hot-sauce.
  • "So the Drama": Eric met his defeat when Rufus bit him in the ankle, causing his syntho-gel to leak.
  • Shortly after Kim and Ron got together, Ron had a recurring nightmare that, after their first dance, Kim turned into a syntho-drone and melted.
• Looney Tunes: An Abominable Snowman follows Bugs Bunny to Palm Springs — he sits in a lounge chair, sweating heavily, occasionally muttering "Gosh, it's hot!" before melting completely into a puddle of water — seems he really was a snowman.
• In Men in Black: The Series, quick clones tend to melt after a while.
• The Oh Yeah! Cartoons short "Super Santa: South Pole Joe" had a giant gingerbread man scream that he was melting after a splash of milk turns him into gingerbread pudding.
• Over the Garden Wall: In "Lullaby in Frogland", Adelaide of the Pasture dissolves into smoke and blows away when Beatrice opens the window and exposes Adelaide to the night air.
• The Owl House: In the Grand Finale "Watching And Dreaming", Emperor Belos is subjected to boiling rain, which liquifies his skin and flesh and reduces him to a rotten pile of bones until even that melts away. Only his skull remains once all is said and done, which Eda, King and Raine promptly stomp into the ground.
• Pirates of Dark Water had one-off villainess, Cray. She was a skilled alchemist obsessed with regaining her lost youth. After blackmailing Ren to obtain a sample of Darkwater, Cray creates a potion to restores her lost beauty. Towards the end of the episode, the nefarious liquid starts to consume her from the inside and she is reduced to an inky black puddle.
• The Proud Family:
  • In "Tween Town", Al Roker grants Penny's wish of making the adults disappear after she and her friends get caught sneaking out to his nightclub at the mall and get grounded. After all that fun, the kids soon decide they miss their parents and want them to come home and need Roker to reverse the wish. The only way to do that is with a game of Double Dutch, but Roker defeats Penny by one jump, and could likely have Bebe and Cece working for him along with the other adults making his one-size-fits-all Roker wear. However, Uncle Bobby managed to avoid becoming a victim of the wish, being that he's a kid at heart, and because he's the only adult who never fell victim to the wish, Penny's contract is declared null and void. The outcome for Roker: he melts!
  • The movie has the family facing off with the mad scientist Dr. Carver. The real Dr. Carver invented a powerful Peanut Liquefication Gas to turn any bad experiments into peanut butter. When the Dr. Carver clone creates an army of Super Genomes to take over the world, plus, evil clones of the titular family, Penny takes the gas and risks her life to defeat the clone and stop the army. She succeeds, and the clone picks up the smell of the gas and destabilizes into a little peanut when he is mere moments away from hitting the water after falling off the blimp.
• A Robot Chicken sketch features the Wicked Witch of the West herself taking a shower. As the water begins to melt her, the Witch says "I'm such an idiot!".
• The Simpsons: The episode "Brother from the Same Planet" has Bart's infamous Imagine Spot of Homer's face graphically melting, arguably one of the most frightening moments of the series.
  Homer: Now how 'bout a hug?
• In The Smurfs episode "The Smurfs of the Round Table", Morgan le Fey steals Excalibur, uses it to turn King Arthur and his men to wax, and then casts a spell on the sun to make it burn hotter so that King Arthur and everything in Camelot will melt away. Fortunately, the melting process takes time, which gives the Smurfs enough time to get Excalibur back from the evil sorceress and to restore everyone in Camelot to normal.
• Happens occasionally in Spongebob Squarepants:
  • In "Pre-Hibernation Week", SpongeBob melts into yellow goo when Sandy takes him on one dangerous exercise regimen too many.
    SpongeBob: This squirrel's trying to kill me! Any more of these stunts and I'll be reduced to a puddle.
  • In "Chocolate with Nuts", SpongeBob and Patrick melt when the crazed fish that has been chasing them throughout the episode asks to buy all their chocolate.
  • In "Moving Bubble Bass", this happens to Bubble Bass when Patrick intimidates him for making SpongeBob move his junk, leaving his Eye Glasses floating in midair until they drop into the puddle.
• Stunt Dawgs: When Richard P. Fungus destroyed the old camera that somehow allowed the ghost of his deceased Grandfather to exist, said ghost started disappearing and shouted that he was melting. Fungus (correctly) pointed out his Grandfather was shrinking instead.
• He was already basically made of acid, but Meltdown from Transformers: Animated collapses into a puddle when exposed to a malfunctioning "genetic modifier". The episode's last shot was of his face appearing in the liquid, but nothing came of it.
• Played for Laughs in the episode "Perfect Moment" from Unikitty!, where after finally confessing his feelings for Dr. Fox and being accepted by her, Hawkodile states that he feels like "his heart is melting", then Dr. Fox says that she is melting too, but it quickly becomes clear that she is literally melting, horrifying Hawkodile. Then it is revealed that such Dr. Fox was a clone and that for some unknown reason, her clones tend to melt off.

Real Life

• Gastropods. Small, harmless creatures (on land anyways), some with shells. Most of their body is held together with water, so when a little salt is applied, they simply burst.
• Baculoviruses cause their insect victims to gradually melt into a slimy goo. Ironically, they're actually potentially beneficial to humans.
• Inverted by slime molds, which transform from a stream of amoeboid "goo" to a cohesive, stalked sporing body as a part of their life cycle.
• The only working rocket-powered fighter in history, the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, was quite infamous for this. The fuel it used was extremely corrosive, and the storage compartment was located right next to the cockpit. This means that one good hit or an unfortunate crash could see the content of the storage tank leaking into the cockpit, reducing the unfortunate pilot inside to human jelly.

---

What a world, what a world...

---