Law Of Inverse Recoil - Television Tropes & Idioms

The recoil of a real-life projectile weapon on television is inversely related to the recoil it has in real life.

Firearms depicted in films and television seldom, if ever, demonstrate realistic recoil action (Ironically, it is usually more realistic in comedies, or when used for comedic effect). The practical reason for this is because blank-firing prop guns have no projectile, hence minimal recoil - it is not true that they have none, however, or they would not even be able to cycle their own action. No matter what type of small arms are used in fiction — even fully-automatic, high caliber ordnance and heavy gauge shotguns — the shooter will not so much as flinch.

This often leads to nasty

surprises

for first-time shooters who expect that the 10-gauge shotgun or .454 Casull revolver they rented at the range will have no discernible "kick," when both actually sport recoil powerful enough to bruise the shoulder or sprain the wrist -possibly even fly back and smack the unprepared shooter in the face- respectively.

Naturally, this makes Guns Akimbo with automatic weapons wholly impractical in real life. (Of course, impractical

never stopped anyone in pursuit of cool.)

On the flip side, real shoulder fired rocket launchers have very little to no recoil: They are open at the back and the booster charge ejects a counterweight such as a bag of sand, imparting no momentum ("Recoil") on the shooter. Yet, when used by a fictitious character, they somehow pack enough force to violently push back the wielder. Presumably, this is due to the erroneous belief that anything that dangerous has to have a powerful kick. See Missing Backblast and Blown Across The Room for related misconceptions.

The trick to this trope is finding any film or TV show that doesn't do this. WW 2 First Person Shooter Video games tend to be more realistic in regards to firearms, but explosive "launching" weapons still pack monstrously unrealistic recoil. (On the other hand, player characters tend to not be blown to smithereens for using such weapons indoors or with their back to a wall, something suicidal except for a few selected, currently experimental models.) In some video games, you can even use recoil for extra propulsion.

The other side of Blown Across The Room.

Since the trope is so prevalent, it's only worth listing exceptions:

Anime and Manga

In the final chapter of Macross Plus, when struggling against Sharon Apple and other threats, Myung has the common sense to arm herself with the submachine gun of a fallen guard (by itself, quite a rare occurrence) but wastes almost the entire magazine when she tries to use it in full-auto, being overcome by recoil and spraying bullets everywhere. She gets a few shots in the right direction, however...
In Zero No Tsukaima, the male lead Saito fires off a rocket launcher which doesn't recoil in the least. Or possibly because the animators got lazy.
Seras Victoria in Hellsing notes after becoming a vampire that she barely feels the kick on a huge gun, demonstrating her new super strength. She later gets an even bigger gun and can fire it with ease.
- Interesting fact: typically, the larger the handgun, the less the recoil -provided that the caliber and amount of powder remain the same and the gun is either automatic or semiautomatic. Thus, a small 9mm semiautomatic carries more punch than a larger one.
In the manga BLAME!, not only does Killy's graviton beam emitter pistol produce recoil, but on the first occasion when he turned it up to full power the recoil was enough to break his arm.
In Gunslinger Girl all the weapons have realistic recoil, including handguns. The only reason that the girls can handle even large weapons, despite their own small size, is that they are cybernetically enhanced.
Yhe manga Cannon God Exaxxion features guns so powerful that they're just as likely to kill somebody standing several feet behind as well as in front of them unless you're wearing a suit of Powered Armor. This is often a source of dramatic tension, as the main character is trying to be as heroic as possible in a world far into the cynical end of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism & accidentally vaporizing innocent bystanders isn't exactly the sort of thing heroes do.
In Goku's first tournament in Dragonball, Jackie Chun is knocked out of the ring, he manges to get himself back to the ring with the recoil from a Kamehameha. Goku learns from this, and at the next tournament, pulls off a similar trick to defeat Tien while he's busy taunting him about how he can fly and block his Kamehameha. And at the tournament after that, he uses a Kamehameha out of his feet to propel himself.
- Negi uses a similar tactic with a magic arrow to avoid a blast by his father during their fight in the Mahora Budokai.
In Cowboy Bebop Spike fires his pistol several times in space, using the recoil to push himself back towards the spaceship to avoid being blown to smithereens. Based on how fast he winds up moving, his gun has recoil similar to that of the Noisy Cricket of Men In Black fame.
In the movie version of Ghost In The Shell most characters are cyborgs, but a mook must brace himself before firing hypervelocity armour-piercing bullets from a submachine gun. Said armour-piercing bullets effectively ruin the gun's accuracy, leaving him open to summary beatdown shortly afterwards.
- Batou's anti-tank rifle ("Your standard issue big gun") features a realistic recoil dampener (a device to temporarily store the kinetic energy and then slowly dissipate it, converting the sudden "kick" into more manageable "sliding" action).
In Kino's Journey not only tiny Kino is able to use a massive Persuader revolver with no visible recoil, one of the OVA episodes showed her practicing as a little girl with the same gun, and still be unaffected by the kick.
Early on in Elfen Lied, Bandou ends up getting his new cybernetic arm torn up by the recoil of a fifty caliber, but in an earlier scene, Lucy handles an assault rifle just fine, one handed. Then again, Diclonii do exhibit super-human traits most of the time, which explains the partially played straight part.
Black Lagoon has a ten year old ~~girl~~ ~~boy~~ kid who, after having been abused by both a Soviet satellite orphanage and the Mafia, is able to fire a Browning 1919 BAR.
- Not as silly as it sounds - although the BAR fires a very powerful round, the sheer weight of it (nearly 20 pounds when loaded, absurd even for a LMG) soaks up most of the recoil. Of course, a ten year old probably couldn't even lift it.
In episode 2 of Rocket Girls, the protagonist, a lightly built teenage girl, is given a gun and told to practice firing on a shooting range. She doesn't expect the recoil and falls over backwards.
Suou in the Darker Than Black second season shoots PTRD antitank rifle from the hip like it's a pop gun, regardless of it being larger than she is, extremely heavy, and having a really mean recoil even despite its huge muzzle brake. Justified by the gun being not real but manifested through her super powers. When her twin brother Shion shoots it, he uses a real rifle with all its drawbacks accounted for.
The Jagd Mirage's main caliber, Twin Towers buster launchers in The Five Star Stories neatly avert the trope. Jagd, a heavy artillery support MH, generally needed to properly deploy before firing, releasing numerous additional arms and legs to anchor itself in the ground, brace its own structure and deploy special shields to protect itself from the enormous recoil and backblast of its own guns. It was also mentioned that it was almost completely defenceless in the deployed mode, and thus was always accompanied by a squad of other mechas for protection. It didn't enjoy a large series — only two were ever built.

Comic Books

A sequence in the DC Comics Mini Series Guy Gardner Reborn, parodying Marvel's The Punisher, has the title character burst into a room with Guns Akimbo, and rapidly lose control of them, injuring himself.
The undersized, weedy, egotistical villain Odin "Meatman" Quincannon in Preacher has a suitably oversized weapon (a sodding great magnum — Not Compensating For Anything of course). When he tries to shoot it one-handed, it breaks his arm.
- Also in Preacher, a very young Tulip is carefully taught about guns; a powerful handgun sends her slamming back into a deep snowdrift.

Film

In Big Trouble in Little China, Jack attempts to fire a fully-automatic submachinegun, but ends up spraying bullets in every direction, only taking out a bad guy by accident.
In Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End, the midget member of Jack's crew charges out of a cellar wielding what looks to be a cannon over his arm. He shoots it and is blown right back into the cellar.
- Back then, cannons really did have a harsh recoil (they still do. It's rocket launchers that don't.), meaning that every time you used one, it rolled back. This made it a great retreating tactic occasionally used in the American Civil War, where retreating Union soldiers often took their cannons with them by firing them at the Confederates because they didn't have the manpower to move them otherwise.
  - On the other hand, it's annoying to have to wheel the thing back each time, so prepared artillery positions usually had shallow pits dug underneath the cannon so that they would roll-back after firing.
True Lies, when Jamie Curtis' character attempts to fire a MAC-10 at the terrorists — and completely loses control of the weapon due to its recoil, sending it tumbling down a flight of stairs, firing by itself all the way down.
Men In Black has an absurdly tiny gun called the Noisy Cricket. When Agent J fires it, the recoil tosses him into a wall from halfway across the street.
- In fairness considering the size it's likely he was expecting something akin to a 9mm and got the equivalent of firing a tank round. Of course since it is alien tech it could have been designed for a much larger species.
In Toy Soldiers when teenaged preppy Wil Wheaton picks up a full-auto AK and tries to blast the villains with it; about two bullets go in the right direction, the rest of the magazine goes into the ceiling. And he obviously would like to make the gun stop but can't.
- On the History Channel series Lock and Load, it's shown to be completely common with the AK-47. Even the trained shooter had trouble keeping it on target at short range.
The "recoiling rocket launcher" is actually avoided in Rambo: First Blood Part II, but at the cost of an even bigger goof. During their escape, Rambo and the POWs he came in to rescue pile into a helicopter, and a Soviet attack helicopter gives chase. Rambo finally brings it down by firing a shoulder-mounted rocket from inside the cockpit, the backblast of which should have turned the POWs behind him into crispy briquettes (and probably destroyed the helicopter altogether).
In Police Academy 4, Tackleberry lets one of the new recruits, an old lady, use his giant .357 Magnum. She she fires it, it sends her flying into the back wall of the shooting range.
In the movie The Enforcer, there is a military demonstration of a LAWS rocket, and new Inspector Moore is trying to see what it does, by standing behind the shooter. Dirty Harry grabs her by the collar and pulls her back in time, just for us to see where there is a huge scorch mark on the berm where she would have been in the way, behind the shooter, who did not experience any recoil effect.
- Played straight with Harry's .44 magnum, which he seems to have no problem firing one-handed (He does mention he uses custom bullets to minimize the kick, but still, it's powerful enough "to blow your head clean off.")
Explicable in The Terminator (where Arnie fires shotguns and assault rifles one handed) by the fact that he is a cyborg. Except in later Arnie action movies (where he's playing a human) he kept on doing the same thing. It should be noted that Arnold Schwarzenegger, a former soldier and gun enthusiast, has mentioned in interviews that he's well aware of how unrealistic this is.
In the Japanese film version of Hakaider (a Darker And Edgier story starring a villain from sentai series Kikaider), the titular Android uses a custom shotgun that acts more like a handheld cannon. When a mook gets his hands on it and attempts to fire, the recoil literally (and gorily) tears his arm out of its' socket.
During the production of Dirty Harry, Eastwood spent time firing a real .44 Magnum revolver so he could accurately portray its recoil.
Half Past Dead has a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher that pack enough recoil to lauch a person back by a considerable distance. The immediate shot after then shows no recoil whatsoever.

Literature

In The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King, a gunman quickly loses control of his heavy automatic weapon while trying to shoot Eddie because he does not expect such a huge recoil. Lampshaded by the narrator's going into some detail about the absurdity of the trope. As King points out, unless the hitman gets Eddie with the first few shots he will probably miss entirely as recoil spins him slowly around, and this is exactly what happens.
- This is slightly ironic, as the trope is also played straight by Eddie himself during that same gunfight. No prior firearms experience, and he's firing one of Roland's .45s with no trouble at all.
- Likewise in Cell when one of the protagonists is fatally injured by hit-and-run hooligans. Another character had picked up an [AKS-47] assault rifle from a gun enthusiast's house, but when he fires 'Sir Speedy' it empties most of the bullets into the air.
There's a non-fiction book in which it's pointed out that Rambo should have two spontaneously-dislocating shoulders due to the abuse they've taken from firing machine guns akimbo. (He'd be stone deaf too, but that's another trope entirely).
The novel Gradisil by Adam Roberts plays about with this one a little, in the form of sniper rifles designed for use in space. Because of the whole weightlessness thing, a hugely powerful rifle fired during a space walk would have a tendency to fire the shooter backwards off whatever he was standing on. Instead of the obvious solution (fastening the shooter or gun to the deck) the guns are specifically designed to emit an equal and opposite blast of gas on firing meaning that the net recoil is zero. Unfortunately, Roberts tends to forget that the same implications apply when guns are fired inside space craft.
In Sharpe, the recoil of muskets bruising people's shoulders is repeatedly mentioned, and in particular the seven-volley Nock gun has such a powerful recoil that only exceptionally tall, bulky and strong men like Sergeant Harper can safely fire it. Which was Truth In Television. Also more briefly covered in the TV adaptation.
Sci-fi author Harry Harrison loves averting this trope with 'recoilless' handweapons ranging from a .75 calibre Hand Cannon (see The Stainless Steel Rat) to an underarm-fired .50 calibre BFG in "Starworld".

Live Action TV

In an episode of The West Wing, CJ Cregg's temporarily-assigned Secret Service agent takes her to a firing range. She aims, pulls the trigger... and falls on her ass. Watch it here. It's pretty hilarious, especially if you already know a bit about handguns.
- The second half is extra hilarious for anyone who watches NCIS, as her agent is the same actor who plays Leroy Jethro Gibbs, a Marine corps-trained sniper. Apparently Mark Harmon's characters are very good shots.
- Toby also falls on his ass in a later episode while skeet shooting.
In one episode of CSI Miami, a criminal is identified by the characteristic injuries he received from the recoil when he fired a rocket launcher.
- Which is strange in and itself, since a rocket launcher doesn't have that big recoil. An ordinary rifle or shotgun kicks more.
- In another episode, Deep Freeze, Natalia dislocated her shoulder after doing some shooting practice with a shotgun.
- In another episode, a criminal is found dead after having used a rocket launcher to destroy the wall of a courthouse for an escape to take place... but chose his concealed firing position poorly (inside a cement mixer).
An episode of Psych has Det. Lassiter training a rookie detective who happens to be completely insane. When he takes her to the firing range, he comments that she isn't bracing herself properly to fire his gun, but she shrugs him off. The recoil from the gun blows it out of her hands.
Almost echoing a scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, one episode of Young Indiana Jones has Young Indy in a hot air balloon with Remy and a captured German officer being chased by a squadron of fighter planes. Indy tries to fend them off with a machine gun, oblivious to warnings that the gun will "walk up" if he doesn't brace properly, and sure enough, the recoil sends the barrel pointing upwards and punching several nasty holes in the balloon. ("That is walking up.")
While Teal'c from Stargate SG-1 does do Guns Akimbo, it should be noted that Teal'c is a truly exceptional individual from a race of bred warriors. The rest of the cast hold their guns with both hands, even when firing pistols.
- In the P90's case, this isn't exactly a bad idea, as its recoil is almost negligible.
- Don't forget the first season finale, where Daniel Jackson of all people actually goes Guns Akimbo with an M9 in one hand and an MP5 in the other.
  - And winds up doing more damage to the walls than anything else.
In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Robin takes Marshall to a shooting range to help him get over Lily leaving him for the summer. He picks up the gun, shoots it, and it recoils to smack him right in the face, knocking him on his ass.
In Farscape, John Crichton uses a pulse rifle to propel himself from one spaceship to another in one episode. Whether an energy weapon would produce enough recoil to do this is another question entirely.
- In the Farscape-verse, pulse rifles are actually projectile weapons that fire highly energised pulses of a refined explosive oil (oh, you know what I mean). Guns have been shown to malfunction, sending the pulse a few inches before it nose-dives and makes a hole in the floor.
A somewhat questionable aversion occurs in the second Quatermass serial, when an astronaut fires a submachine gun on an asteroid, and the recoil knocks him off the low gravity surface and out into space.
Averted in an episode of Sue Thomas FB Eye, where a semi-trained sniper killer was identified by a black left eye. They were able to figure out that he was only an amateur copycat (and not the expert killer they were tracking) as he put his face too close to the scope and got smacked in the eye by the recoil, a mistake that real snipers would never make.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40000 goes out of its way to avoid this, in a setting that normally has a total disregard for such details: Imperial Guard rocket launchers are stated to have no recoil when used properly, and a bolter in the hands of a non-Super Soldier has been known to break bones.
- And this is despite the fact that Bolter ammunition is explicitly stated in several places to be self propelled. Probably the charge needed to actually get the bolt out of the weapon would not be enough to break somebody's arm. Sisters of Battle, for all intents and purposes (given the setting) normal women, seem to have few problems using them.
- Normal women... in POWER ARMOR.
In the Rifts RPG, the Glitter Boy boom gun (the BFG of all BFGs) requires the wearer of the armour to engage foot anchors and backpack thrusters to absorb the massive recoil.
GURPS, in its relentless pursuit of accuracy, avoids this at every turn and even tries to establish realistic recoil of weapons that don't exist.
In one Call Of Cthulhu sourcebook it is stated that while firing both barrels of a large calibre elephant gun might just save your life, it will break your shoulder even so.
The Traveller science-fiction RPG has man-portable energy weapons (the game's BFG) that can only be fired while wearing a suit of powered armor that automatically locks your body into one of several safe firing positions.

Video Games

In Metal Gear Solid 3 (and possibly the earlier installments) the RPG-7 has minor recoil, allowing Snake all the time he needs to fix another grenade to the end of the weapon and fire again before his target can react.
While all of the Resident Evil titles have featured appropriate recoil for small arms (but pointedly not for rocket and grenade launchers, which kick hardest of all), part 5 was the first to introduce muzzle climb on fully automatic weapons. Realistic, but a good example of why its absence is usually considered an Acceptable Break From Reality.
In the Halo series, automatic rifles, submachine guns, and even a semi-automatic shotgun capable of sending a charging Flood zombie flying two feet backwards if hit at close range produce no recoil whatsoever, to the point that you can fire them while in mid-air and not alter your trajectory whatsoever. Admittedly, though, the Master Chief does have superhuman strength and his armor is said to weigh half a ton, so perhaps it's more realistic than it seems. That, of course, brings up the question of why you can't kill people by jumping on them.
- SMG's actually do have recoil, especially when dual wielded.
- Averted in Halo 3: ODST, where automatic and semi-automatic weapons have much more noticable recoil. For example, rapidly pulling the trigger on a pistol will result in signifigant muzzle climb, while slowing the rate of fire down will result in much more fire control. This is justified in the story by the player characters not being augmented and power armor wearing super soldiers, but elite unagumented soldiers.
Avoided some of the Call Of Duty games. The rocket launchers have zero recoil, the cannon on the first game's tank will actually make you move back a couple feet and all guns have as realistic recoil as possible.
The tank cannon in Grand Theft Auto 3 causes the vehicle to roll backward slightly if it is stationary when you fire. It's possible, when driving forwards, to rotate the cannon and fire repeatedly behind you, using it as a makeshift booster and accelerating the tank to huge speeds.
- Possible additional subversion in San Andreas - CJ's adjustment to the recoil of a Desert Eagle could be the reason it's not a one-hit kill until "gangster" skill is reached with it, while in the preceeding Vice City a .357 Colt Python is.
In Far Cry 2 the PKM has so much recoil that you'd get better range with a shotgun.
Explained with a hand wave in the Hitman series. Forty-Seven, being a peak-human clone, handles any sort of gun with ease, minus the recoil.
Lego Batman avoids this, as several firearms cause recoil, and shooting things from a small ledge is not recommended. Whether the developers did this to be realistic or simply add more Fake Difficulty is up to the individual.
In Killzone, all the standard rifles, pistols, and grenade lanchers have realistic ammounts of recoil, the rocket launchers have no recoil at all (which would make the helghast launcher a bit of a game breaker in multiplayer if ammo wasn't almost nonexistent for it) and the really big guns, the chain gun and squad cannon (an anti-material repeater) have such high recoil (excluding the alt fire for the chain gun) and are so bulky that they require a steadycam-esque harness in order to be even wielded effectively.
Team Fortress 2 features both the "rocket launcher with unrealistic amount of recoil" and "powerful guns with barely any recoil" variants. Of course, in the Heavy's case the lack of visible recoil from his minigun is somewhat justifiable by his enormous size and strength. Though we do see the gun jerk around a lot when it is fired.
- On the other hand, the Scout's Force-A-Nature unlockable shotgun takes knockback to its illogical extreme. It has so much recoil that a single shot can send ol' Scoutsy flying into the air.
- Also on the other hand, the Soldier never actually feels any of the recoil from his rocket launcher. He is only pushed back if he is in the blast radius of his own rocket.
In Eternal Darkness, recoil is usual shown with at least some realism, with all shotguns and rifles having some recoil, and the Holland & Holland elephant gun literally knocking the character to the floor if they doesn't take a moment to brace themself. (Doing so still causes the character to take a long step back.)
In Oni the ballistic weapons all have fairly realistic recoil (the energy weapons, on the other hand, have none...). The SCRAM Cannon, Superball gun, and grenade launcher function on the Wave Motion Cannon have little to no recoil. Go full-auto without compensation on the pistol or SMG, and you'll likely wind up shooting the ceiling.
In Super Smash Bros Brawl, Diddy Kong gets recoil from his Peanut Popgun when he shoots it. He also gets more recoil the more he charges it before firing it.
- Lucas's PK Fire has enough recoil to be considered a possible recovery technique when fired in the opposite direction.
- Samus's charge beam also has a bigger recoil the more charged it is. Her missiles don't have nearly as much, though.
In the Half Life series the .357 magnum has ridiculous recoil and the RPG has very little. Also, the alt-fire of the pistol, which empties the entire magazine, can cause serious recoil if used on a full magazine.
- Then there's the M249 from Opposing Force, which will visibly push you backwards as it fires.
In Earthworm Jim, where at one point when you're hanging from a pully, the only way to move forward is to shoot in the opposite direction.
Avoided in Red Orchestra, where all guns have realistic recoil - line up every shot with your rifle, or you'll be pumping enough lead in the ceiling to make the room a radiation shelter.
In Cave Story, a fully-powered-up machine gun has enough recoil to enable you to fly by pointing it downward.
A Slig's sub-machine gun has some recoil in Oddworld: Abe's Exodus, and this is actually a troubling aspect in the game where you have to possess a Slig in order to kill around 50+ Slogs in order to progress, but you have to watch where the Slig is being pushed back, because there's an electrical fence right behind him, and touching those things is instant death.
In Battlefield: Bad Company none of the weapons have discernible muzzle climb ingame (ie. the aim doesn't change). However, if you watch the gun when fired from the shoulder without using the sights, it kicks very aggressively in the shoulder. This is particularly noticeable on the automatic weapons like assault rifles, SMGs and machineguns.
Quake 2's machine gun features muzzle climb as you hold down the trigger. It was usually a good idea to aim slightly below where you wanted the bullets to go, and let the muzzle climb rake gunfire up your target.
In the 3rd case of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the fact that the murder weapon was a 45-caliber revolver is a high point of contention, as the feeling is that it could only be used by someone with a large enough frame to take its recoil.
In Jak And Daxter Jak's BFG actually does jerk back after firing. However, that doesn't stop him from running around and shooting everything in sight with a machine gun.
The AVRiL from Unreal Tournament 2004 pushes the player back several feet, potentially knocking them off a platform. Oddly, the Redeemer, a nuclear cruise missile launcher, has minimum recoil.
A fully charged shot in Mega Man 5 and the enhanced Mega Buster in Mega Man IV are powerful enough to push the player back by a few pixels.
In Silent Hill 3 Heather's wrists jerk from the recoil of her initial handgun, and she's thrown completely off-balance from shooting the shotgun.

Web Comics

This Dr McNinja comic subverts it pretty well: [1]
- Also; note the Alt Text
Subverted in It's Walky!: "Get a smaller gun, Joyce."
In Girl Genius, when three Jaegermonsters attempt to fire a Clank gun, which sound effects indicate is meant to act like a machinegun, the one holding the weapon from behind is realistically enough slammed into the wall behind him.
- Of course, Jagers being Jagers, the one who did the firing recovered in short order with nothing more than a broken nose ("Oooh! Lemme see!").
- Klaus, on the other hand, has no trouble at all shooting one all by himself.
  - Different model of same gun. The one in the first example is so big it takes all three of the Jaegers to hold it up.
Dead Winter, here. Note the Unsound Effect.

Western Animation

In the first episode of The Boondocks, "The Garden Party", Ed Wuncler III asks Riley (an 8-year old) to shoot him with his SPAS-12 combat shotgun to prove his bullet-proof armor works. Riley gladly obliges, and while the armor works, the force of the gun knocks Ed over and out a second-story window, and causes Riley to fall over and suffer an injured wrist.
In an episode of The Simpsons, where Bart and Lisa are shipped off to a military school. The instructor gives them submachine guns when they train on the firing range. ("As you've transferred here from a public school, you should already have experience with smaller arms.") Whereas Bart does quite well, Lisa's gun gets stuck on autofire, the uncontrollable recoil pushing her every which way — including up off the ground when the gun is pointing downward.
In an episode of Transformers, Heavy Metal War, Wheeljack tries his new "shock blast cannon", a shoulder-mounted bazooka-like weapon, out on an incoming Megatron - only to knock himself to the floor with the quip, "That's a shock, alright..." Kind of a justification, as Wheeljack built the thing himself, and as a Mad Scientist, it probably wouldn't be the first time he'd forgotten to take into account something as simple as recoil.

Real Life

From World War II and on, bazookas and other anti-tank weaponry were referred to as "recoilless rifles" since the traditional anti-tank rifle had so much recoil that it was impractical. While almost Exactly What It Says On The Tin, recoilless rifles were essentially guns that fired large projectiles from a tube, typically on a rocket propulsion type system.
- A Recoilless Rifle is not the same as a rocket launcher. Rocket launchers fire fin stabilized, self-propelled rockets. Recoilless rifles fire normal artillery shells from a rifled barrel, but use special perforated cartridges and a Venturi chamber to proper the combustion gases out the back at a high velocity canceling out the recoil force. They are a modern evolution of the old back to back recoilless cannons of the 10th century.
In the "Ammo" episode of the History series "Lock 'n Load", R. Lee Ermey points out the effects of recoil when shooting a Barret .50 cal sniper rifle - he hadn't allowed for it properly, and the scope hit him in the face and cut him on the bridge of his nose.
- This, or the black eye mentioned above, frequently accompanied by a nasty arc-shaped cut right below the eyebrow, was a common injury suffered by first-time big-game hunters on safari in Kenya "back in the day", due to using big-bore, hard-recoiling bolt-action rifles like the .375 Holland & Holland or .458 Winchester Model 70 African with a telescopic sight with insufficient "eye relief" (the distance between your eye and the eyepiece when you are "locked in" to the 'scope and have the correct field of view through it). According to the late Col. Jeff Cooper, the professional hunters who led the safaris referred to this as "Kaibab eye", and few people who ended up needing stitches for the cut made the same mistake twice. (Most often, they took the 'scope off and used the rifle's iron sights exclusively after such an experience.) The professional hunters, by comparison, rarely bothered with telescopic sights on their "working rifles" in these heavy calibers, as they would (a) usually only shoot to "finish off" an animal that had only been wounded, not killed, by the client's shot and (b) most shooting at heavy game such as rhino, Cape buffalo, etc., was done at ranges under 50 yards, where a telescopic sight was more of a hindrance than a help anyway.