"Why am I smashing my hand with this hammer? Why am I smashing my car with this hammer? Why am I smashing my table with this beautiful wood? Why am I smashing this 6000 pound car with the bug bazooka? To show you how I'm going to smash you, your family, and even your dog if you don't pay a fortune to me for whatever I'm selling."
Sometimes you want to show that something is really, really tough. Indestructible even. The easiest way show off its indestructibility is to employ The Worf Barrage. But sometimes, one barrage isn't enough. Instead, you might have one, or three, or a dozen.
Enter the Indestructibility Montage.
Someone will try every trick in the book to get this object or person to budge or flinch. They might shoot them, toss them off a building, and then ram a truck into them to no avail. In more extreme examples, they might pull out a Weapon of Mass Destruction, only for the indestructible object to come out with nary a scratch.
When Played for Drama, this can easily show how much stronger someone has gotten after a Training Montage. Expect the aggressor to go to comical lengths to deal anything close to Scratch Damage when it's Played for Laughs. May often overlap with The Juggernaut, where an advancing force has no chance of being stopped by outside opposition; and with Failure Montage if a character is specifically trying to destroy the object to no avail.
Contrast Rasputinian Death, where a character survives multiple attempts on their life before they finally die.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Overlord (2012) has a couple, specifically to show off just how powerful Ainz is.
- Ainz demonstrates his superiority to Clementine by taking everything she can dish out to him. She tries everything, from stabbing him to martial arts to simply flailing around with Super-Strength. But Ainz is a Physical God who remains completely unfazed by it all while slowly crushing her to death in his embrace.
- The Raiders arc is essentially a long, excruciating montage of how invincible Nazarick is (Ainz had to specifically disable most of the tomb's defenses and set teleport traps so some of the raiders could actually face him), with the adventurers suffering entirely overly grim deaths (the one Asshole Victim got off with an almost instantaneous death).
- Episode 10 of Space☆Dandy features a "Groundhog Day" Loop where Dandy, Meow, and QT they are stuck in a mobius loop and reliving the same day over and over again. They discover that the tear-off calendar on the wall has been infused in Pyonium. A short montage is shown of them trying every destructive method they can think of to remove the calendar off the wall or tear the page off, but nothing works. Eventually, they get the idea to use an industrial lathe machine to force a drill bit into the edge of the calendar to eventually pry it off and force the next day to come.
Comic Books
- Agent X: Issue #10 has Agent X attempting to complete a contract on a Flying Brick named Fight Man. He goes along with it just because he's too depressed by both his living situation and the fact that his ex-wife was the one putting out the hit. Bullets bounce off, cars are equally useless, as well as acid baths, explosives, electrocution, poisoning, and attempting to hang himself using suspension cable off a bridge just breaks the bridge. They might have succeeded when it turns he's vulnerable to choking on food, but Agent X gives him a heimlich kick before thinking.
- Gaston Lagaffe: A drawn-out gag has Gaston wanting to crack a walnut that proves to be incredibly tough. After clenching a nutcracker with all his strength, to no avail, Gaston tries stomping on it — only to hurt his foot. Then he attempts smashing it with a hammer, which ends with several bandaged fingers. He even drops a bowling ball on it, making the whole floor shakes, for sole result to have the nut stuck in one of the holes. In a later strip, Gaston makes one last attempt by putting the walnut on the rail of a tramway — leading to the tramway car derailing.
Gaston: Never seen a walnut that hard!
Fan Works
- In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, the entirety of Izuku's rematch with Bakugou is this. The latter pulls out all the stops and uses every underhanded trick he has to try and bring Izuku down. He stuffs bombs in Izuku's hoodie before detonating them, blasts Izuku out of the building with his grenade gauntlets, and tries to wrestle him to the floor for a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. But Izuku is Kryptonian, and he barely feels it aside from ringing ears and a lightly singed costume.
Films — Animation
- Despicable Me 2: When Eduardo introduces the first evil purple minion, the minion is shown to be able to be able to take all kinds of abuse. He is subject to machine gun fire, a flamethrower, an axe, a nuclear bomb, and a police car. He come out unscathed, even eating the latter three.
- The Incredibles: Edna shows Helen the new suits she designed for the Parrs, starting with Jack-Jack. She runs the suit, worn by a mechanical baby mannequin, through a series of tests, including shooting it with flamethrowers and machine guns to show how indestructible it is. She also shows Helen's suit being stretched to match her Rubber Man abilities, then hit by missiles that leave barely a scratch.
- The Simpsons Movie: Once the townspeople snap after being trapped in the dome for a long time, they form a mob and try to break it open. Their efforts prove futile, including jackhammers, a Battering Ram, and even an elephant. The elephant does make a small crack in the dome, however, convincing Russ Cargill he needs to blow up Springfield before anyone can escape.
Films — Live-Action
- Leonard Part 6 has a sequence where Bill Cosby's titular hero tries and fails to blow down a door with a series of gadgets and weapons on his elaborate battle suit.
- Superman: The Movie. In a deleted scene, as Superman follows a tunnel to Lex Luthor's underground lair, Luthor activates traps to try to kill him. The traps are, in order: machine guns firing from the walls, flamethrowers covering him in fire, and tubes blowing a blizzard of snow onto him and covering him with ice. Superman calmly survives all of these attacks and continues on.
Literature
- In Kovrigin's Chronicles by Vadim Shefner,, after Andrei manages to produce his universal material, he puts it in a device specifically intended to test durability. The machine freezes it, heats it, hammers it, drills it, tries to blow it up... and at the end, spits it out without a single scratch and becomes obsolete.
- In Microserfs, several programmers do this to a Microsoft "Ship-It" award plaque by pouring acid on the plaque, dragging it behind their car on a rope, and so on. The result? A few almost-invisible scratches.
Live-Action TV
- Played for Laughs in The Office when Dwight performs his own series of intense tests on Jan's expensive stroller, reasoning that if it's going to cost over a thousand dollars, it had better be near indestructible. It is.
- Sleepy Hollow: When faced with the ultimatum of returning the Headless Horseman's Head, Abbie Mills and Ichabod Crane try their hardest to destroy it. Nothing from shooting, hitting it repeatedly with a sledgehammer, and even explosives makes a single dent.
Web Animation
- Mario's Castle Calamity (part one
and two) were montages of Mario's failed attempts to destroy the castle after defeating the boss, like in Super Mario World. These were popular enough to merit two collab projects.
- Stickdeath has a scene where The Beast can easily withstand flamethrowers and machine gun fire alike without being wounded, much less killed.
- The aforementioned YouTube Poop quotation is a parody of Billy Mays' tendency to hit objects with hammers to demonstrate either their durability, or in the case of the Ding King, hitting a car with a hammer to show how easily the Ding King could reverse the effects.
Western Animation
- The whole plot of The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Vase" is how Gumball, Darwin, and Anais try to destroy an impossibly tacky vase that happens to be Made of Indestructium. For example, hitting the vase head-on with a fully loaded semi-truck and trailer just results in the truck flipping itself over on impact.
- The Fairly OddParents!: In "Boy Toy", Vicky gets a hold of Timmy's Crimson Chin action figure and aims to destroy it, but Timmy thinks fast and wishes for his fairies to make it indestructible. This results in Vicky using increasingly violent (and fruitless) methods to destroy it, with the Chin suffering nary a scratch.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: "One of Those Eds" has the Eds along with Rolf, Kevin, Jimmy, and Sarah, all trying to dislodge a quarter from the sidewalk. Even Edd building a heavy digging crane couldn't get it out, making a crater around everything but the coin. Then Jonny comes along and effortlessly picks the quarter out, revealing it was held in place by mere chewing gum, to Edd's bafflement.
- Looney Tunes: In "Much Ado About Nutting", a squirrel spends the entire cartoon trying to break open a coconut. Nothing it tries works, culminating in him dropping it from a tall skyscraper and only succeeding in pounding in the pavement below. Once it finally does crack (with only minimum effort), the shell opens to reveal another shell.
- My Life as a Teenage Robot: Near the end of "This Time With Feeling". After her mechanical nerve endings set to "PAIN" allow her to get pummeled to near-defeat by Himcules, Jenny is finally able to gets them set to "TICKLE". Confused that she can now take a hit and laugh, Himcules tries to crush her with larger and heavier objects, but Jenny is totally undamaged by them and keeps on laughing.
- The Regular Show short "Time Loop" has the groundskeepers attempting to destroy a time orb Rigby brought to the park to stop it from resetting time. Not only is the orb indestructible, but each attempt to destroy it gets undone.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Wet Painters", SpongeBob and Patrick try to find a way to wash the paint off Mr. Krabs' first dollar earned, including putting it on the washing machine, sand blasting it, spraying it, even using technology (slamming a computer on top of it), to no avail.
- Tom and Jerry: In "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse", Tom's poison to kill Jerry ends up turning him into a super-strong mouse. As he menacingly advances toward Tom, the cat tries to harm with a fire iron and a phone book, but they do no good and he ends up running for his life.
- In the What A Cartoon! Show short, "Yuckie Duck in Short Orders" has the title character serve a customer a steak that refuses to be cut and goes through every tool imaginable with zero results.
