Since
Power Glows, everything emits light before it blows up, often in brilliant beams that work their way out of cracks in the surface of the doomed object. Often the object bulges like a balloon being squeezed before finally blowing to pieces.
May also cause a
Pillar Of Light. A
Sub Trope of
Power Glows
Examples:
- Virtually anything touched by Kei or Yuri in Dirty Pair.
- When Mr. Fujisawa is dogpiled by Bugrom in the first episode of El Hazard The Magnificent World, the pile emits a Pre Explosion Glow before he bursts out of it.
- A number of targets destroyed by the heroines of Sakura Taisen.
- Destroyed Strains in Soukou No Strain.
- It's been said no Slayers series or movie can truly begin before Lina's nearly disintegrated a building of some kind with her trademark Fireball spell(Actually, every series begins with her blowing something up with her trademark nuke-level Dragon Slave spell). And that's not including the countless times it'll happen after that.
- Heh, well, Slayers Revolution (4th season) is kicked off with someone ELSE blowing something up with the Dragon Slave, which seriously pisses Lina off and causes her to complain about it for an episode and a half.
- "Dragonball Z" has a number of these with almost all of the main characters.
- Agent Smith goes out this way in The Matrix.
- Wing Gundam, from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, emits these when it self destructs. If this one is remembering correctly, and he sincerely believes that he is, so does Gundam Sandrock before it also self destructs. Additionally, in the movie/three episode post-series OVA, all mobile suits self-destructed seem to exhibit this glow. Y'know what? I could've made this shorter by simply saying "In Gundam, if it self destructs, it glows like a Christmas tree."
- Destroyed capital ships in the original Colony Wars game exhibited this, with pure white light spilling out of giant cracks in the hull right before the explosion blanks out the entire screen with white. Later games in the series toned this down a bit.
- At least one boss in Star Fox 64 goes bye-bye this way.
- Voltorb and Electrode in the Pokemon anime have an almost evolution-like glow before using Self Destruct or Explosion.
- The Beast in Disney's Beauty And The Beast gets all kinds of Pre Explosion Glow when turning back into a human.
- Most bosses in Mega Man X 4 onwards, as well as the entire Mega Man Zero and ZX series.
- All the bosses explode like this in the Mega Man Zero series. Every one. And ZX upped the bar by having the screen go dark except for the exploding robots.
- Animated example: In the 90's X Men cartoon, whatever object Cable shot would glow like this before it exploded. Probably to give anyone enough time to escape before it exploded.
- Inverted in the new Battlestar Galactica series. When the Pegasus slams into a cylon base star, a careful eye will notice that all the lights on the ship go -out- before it explodes.
- Justified in an episode of Batman The Animated Series, as the explosive was slowed in a time-warping field.
- In The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess, there are Armos statues that hop after you in an attempt to smash you with a hammer. After being hit in the back enough times they will proceed to charge around violently for a few seconds while emitting beams of light, before they die explosively (Just like everything else in the game).
- Bowser's Galaxy Reactor goes out this way at the end of Super Mario Galaxy.
- The second Death Star in Return of the Jedi flashes lights, minor explosions and gouts of flame all over before it blows up.
- Ted Sprague, the radioactive man from Heroes as well as Peter and Sylar after they both gain Ted's power.
- Chzo Mythos, in 6 days a sacrifice when the bomb is going off in the underground complex, you first see strays of light breaking through the ground before the explosion erupts.
