Jonas: Ah... good to be home. (...) Nothing against Mexico, but I swear I kissed the ground when we got back.
Daniel: It's true. ...It was weird.
—lonelygirl15, "Playing Doctor"
After a character has been Lost at Sea, on a near-deadly airplane flight, or perhaps just on a vacation gone wrong, they'll be so happy to have solid ground beneath their feet or be back home that they'll start to kiss the ground, no matter how filthy it may be. Sometimes for added humor, they'll begin to spit and wipe their mouths in disgust afterwards.
Not to be confused with Beach Kiss, though oftentimes it's much more literal.
Examples:
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Animation
- The villain of Happy Heroes, Big M., crash-lands himself and his assistant Little M. on Planet Xing at the beginning of the series and can't get back to his home planet of Planet Gray for the first three seasons. In the first episode of Season 4, he follows the Supermen onto a train headed from Planet Xing to Planet Gray and kisses the ground once he arrives at the train's destination.
Comic Strips
- Bloom County: When Opus is 'rescued' from Antarctica, as he is getting off the plane, he goes down to the ground at the bottom of the stairway. As the press exclaim that he is kissing American soil, he insists, "I tripped!!!"
- Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin kisses the ground in an early strip after surviving sliding down a playground slide.
Fan Works
- Full Circle has Otto, having dropped ten feet to the ground while riding inside an ice cream truck spaceship, throwing the door of the ice cream truck spaceship wide open and giving a hearty cry of "Earth!" just before he starts kissing the ground. Otis looks from him to Olive while wearing an incredulous expression on his face, and Olive immediately answers his non-spoken question of "Is this how he actually acts?" with "Oh yes, he's always like that."
- In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, Pikachu does this after he, Ash, Pidgeotto, and Butterfree land safely after barely escaping from Hunter J's airship.
Film — Animation
- The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island: Cera kisses the ground after she and her friends got off the island by Elsie.
- The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too", Tigger kisses the snow after being rescued from a tree.
- The Road to El Dorado: Miguel and Tulio both kiss the ground upon their boat arriving in South America. Poor Miguel winds up ending his kiss on a rotten skull!
Film — Live-Action
- America America is An Immigrant's Tale about Stavros's long, long journey from Central Turkey to America—tricked, robbed, and reduced to utter poverty, nearly killed, nearly killed again, robbed again. He eventually steals his fiancee's dowry and absconds to America, only to nearly get arrested and sent back, before he switches papers with another immigrant. After finally passing through Ellis Island by using a fake name, he gets on his hands and knees and kisses the ground of America.
- Flash Gordon (1980). After Flash manages to crash land a plane without killing them, Dale Arden says "Hold me for a second, then drop me, I'll kiss the ground."
- In The Pacifier, Lulu, after a horrible experience with Zoe's driving, happily embraces the ground when they reach school.
Lulu: LAND! Solid land!
- In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the eponymous character does this when he arrives back in England after the Crusades. Then proceeds to find that his father's been executed on false charges and all his lands confiscated.
- Parodied in Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Robin kisses the ground noisily when he lands in England, then spits sand out of his mouth.
Literature
- 1066 and All That: The first action William I (1066) undertook in conquering England was lying down on the beach where he landed and swallowing two mouthfuls of sand.
- "Escape!": Michael Donovan's first action, after returning to Earth from an interstellar trip orchestrated by a half-mad AI, is to kiss the runway of their landing.
- And then, slowly and purposefully, the one with red hair knelt down and planted upon the concrete of the runway a firm, loud kiss.
- Keeper of the Lost Cities: In Nightfall, after Keefe gets off of a rough boat ride, he shouts, "SOLID GROUND!" and bends to kiss the rock beneath him.
- At the end of The Magic School Bus the field trip around the solar system, one of the kids is doing this when the bus returns to Earth.
- Kaufman in The Midnight Meat Train kisses a Manhattan sidewalk after surviving his encounter with the City Fathers.
- The Rest of the Robots: In the preamble to "Lenny", Dr Asimov describes how he hates vacations. When he returned home, he kissed the walls of his attic, where he works, to celebrate his escape from "vacation".
Live-Action TV
- The debut episode of Gilligan's Island has Gilligan first bemoaning that he and the others are stranded on an island than being grateful for being on land in the first place. He kisses the beach and spits out sand.
- On Impractical Jokers, Murr, who has a phobia of heights, is made to go skydiving for a punishment. When he finally lands, he kisses the ground in relief, then turns to kill the other guys.
- It's About Time: In "Twentieth Century Here We Come" upon landing back in the twentieth century, Hector remarks to Mac that they ought to kiss the ground, the astronauts being grateful for being back in their own time. Unfortunately, Literal-Minded cave-people Gronk, Shad, Mlor, and Breer believe this is actually a ceremony one practices on the astronaut's "side of the hill." They kiss the ground.
Shad: Strange custom.
- Sliders, episode "Pilot": Unintentional inter-dimensional traveller Rembrandt kisses the ground when he thinks they've made it back to their home dimension from a world of ice and tornadoes. Unfortunately, of course, he is wrong.
- The Candid Camera Prank show Surprise Sur Prise had the subject watch a news report where the Pope arrived by airplane and kissed the ground, but the Pope was stuck because a terrorist put a few drops of crazy glue in the exact spots to keep him in place. At least they had a drill on hand to get him mobile.
Video Games
- In Anachronox, the first thing Boots does after being adrift in space for days is kiss the floor of the hangar his team's shuttle landed in.
Web Video
- Critical Role: In Campaign 1, Episode 13, Keyleth does this as soon as the party steps outside into Emon. For context, not only have they spent the last week in the Underdark, they've just narrowly escaped an entire city of mindflayers, immediately after fighting and slaying a beholder possessed by the Horn of Orcus. The fact that they all survived and have now teleported to safety is very much worth celebrating.
Western Animation
- In an installment of Katie Kaboom on Animaniacs where she has a disastrous driving lesson due to her temper, her family jumps out of the car and kisses the ground when it's over.
- In the Captain N: The Game Master episode "The Trojan Dragon", Simon has issues piloting the eponymous wooden dragon, and his claustrophobia didn't help either. After landing it in a deep river and getting it out, he runs outside of it and kisses the ground.
- Classic Disney Shorts: When Donald Duck lands on a deserted island in the short "Sea Salts", the ant he was with in the raft kisses the beach.
- Ed does this once in The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley. He then muses that it doesn't really taste as good as you think it will.
- DuckTales (1987): In "A Drain on the Economy", Scrooge kisses a sewer grate after being informed by Huey, Dewey, and Louie that his missing money is in the storm sewer beneath. Scrooge quickly starts spitting when he realizes what he had done.
- Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny kisses the ground as a sign of patriotism against Hessian Sam in "Bunker Hill Bunny."
- The Mr. Men Show: Mr. Quiet does this after Mr. Stubborn takes him on a disastrous plane trip in "Flying".
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- The episode "The Mysterious Mare Do Well". The Mare shows Dash up by saving a cart full of ponies. One pony hops out and kisses the ground out of gratitude for having been saved.
- It happens again in "Princess Twilight Sparkle" after Spike survives riding on Twilight's back. Twilight isn't used to her new wings, and Spike ends up smashing into a window.
- Spike again, toward the end of "The Cutie Re-Mark – Part 2", kisses the floor of the Friendship Castle since he's so happy to see it exists again, proof they are back to the right timeline.
- In "School Raze – Part 1", after being saved from a long fall by Gallus and Ocellus, Yona slumps down and kisses the earth, glad to be on safer ground than a cloud.
- In The Real Ghostbusters episode "Apocalypse... What, Now?", the Ghostbusters arrive at an airport in Greece with a Christian monk. The monk kisses the ground of his homeland after they get off the plane. Soon, Winston kisses the ground as well, not because he's Greek, but because he has a fear of flying and is glad he survived. Once they witness part of the cheap airplane they were just flying on break off, Peter joins them both in kissing the ground.
- Sean from Ready Jet Go! does this sometimes, whenever the gang gets back from space. For example, in One Small Step, Sean kisses the ground towards the end of the movie, then spits out sand.
- In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Heffer does this after a fishing trip with Rocko and Filbert ends with fish trying to catch them.
- In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer, due to circumstances, ends up on a police cruiser with Chief Wiggum, which ends up leaping off an enormous cliff... and straight into a literal mountain of garbage, prompting Homer to kiss the trash pile. He wretches in disgust after every kiss, save the third one, where he expresses a sound of delight and says "I think this used to be pizza."
- The Tex Avery short "The Cat Who Hated People" has the cat flying to the moon to get away from people, only to be driven mad by the moon's inhabitants. After returning to Earth, he hugs the sidewalk and kisses it.
- In Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, Plucky is so happy to be home from a horrible road trip that took all summer that he kisses Hamton's lawn, only to discover that there's fertilizer on it as plants start to grow on his tongue.
- Bob the tomato did this in the VeggieTales episode "An Easter Carol", after he and Mr. Nezzer land on the ground from riding in a runaway cart.
- Welcome to the Wayne: Saraline in "Like a Happy, Happy Bird". Snaps "quiet, I'm floor-kissing" when Ansi interrupts her.
- In The World's Greatest Superfriends episode "The Superfriends Meet Frankenstein", Gleek does this after his rickety airplane lands in Romania.
Real Life
- Pope John Paul II used to do this.
- As a common joke goes, wanting to kiss the ground is a common reaction to flying (old) Alitalia on account of some of their planes having been pretty old.
- Some immigrants to Israel do this.
- From Roman legend, it is said that the sons of Tarquinius Superbus, the last King of Rome, asked the Oracle of Delphi who should rule Rome. She answered, "The first to kiss his mother." Accompanying them was Lucius Junius Brutus, who immediately tripped and kissed the ground, the universal Mother of humanity. Brutus would become a leader of the revolution that deposed Tarquinius and established the The Roman Republic and one of the first Consuls.
- At the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, one post-race tradition both in IndyCar and NASCAR is "kissing the bricks", where the race winner and his pit crew line up and kiss the row of paving bricks that mark the start-finish line. It first began in 1996 when Dale Jarrett won the Brickyard 400. It was exclusively a NASCAR tradition, but it was adapted to the Indianapolis 500 around 2003.
- After a charity basketball game in 1994 in Chicago Stadium — the last game ever played there before its closure — Michael Jordan knelt down and kissed the Bulls logo at center court.
