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Master Chief: Sir, permission to leave the station?
Lord Hood: For what purpose, Master Chief?
Master Chief: To give the Covenant back their bomb.
— Halo 2
At the end of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War dark comedy Dr Strangelove, B-52 pilot Maj. "King" Kong — a straight-shootin' Texan played by cowboy character actor Slim Pickens — goes to the bomb bay to manually release the stuck bay doors on his damaged aircraft, thus enabling him to complete his nuclear attack run on a Soviet target. He succeeds, but just as he celebrates his accomplishment with a bit of hootin' and hollerin', the bomb on which he was seated is dropped. He rides the device all the way in to the target, wildly whipping his Stetson hat around as he plummets to a thermonuclear death and a blaze of glory.
It's also a phallic symbol.
The image is much more famous than the film, at this point. It symbolically associates zealotry, jingoism, nuclear war, and cowboy diplomacy. Mostly, it just gets used whenever air-dropped weapons appear in comedy, which is surprisingly frequent. For reasons which may be obvious to some, it also gets associated with wartime politicians quite a bit these days - for example, Jib Jab used it with Bush in the "This Land" video.
See Also: Action Bomb, Rocket Ride
Examples
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- Sonic X has this with Knuckles riding a missile in an episode and is shown in the title sequence as well.
- The Sonic Anime OVA did this too with Sonic being onboard instead.
- Dr Strangelove: Trope Namer
- In the movie Armageddon, when they're trying to lower the bomb into the core of the asteroid, Steve Buscemi duplicates this scene, and everyone yells at him.
- How could this not have been mentioned? Mushu, but with a firecracker in Mulan.
- A scene in The Mummy Returns has a log bridge being blown up to allow the heroes to escape from frenzied mummified pygmies at Am-Shere. The pygmies that were on the log at the time plummet to their eventual doom; one of the pygmies, seeing the utter futility of it all, rides a large piece of the broken log.
- One of the many tall tales about Baron von Münchausen claimed he once rode a cannonball. The Terry Gilliam and animated movies based on the Baron had him perform this feat as well.
- In the movie version of Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets when the pixies are destroying the classroom, one of the pixies steals a wand and makes a huge dinosaur skeleton drop to the floor. A few pixies are then seen riding it to the ground like the bomb in Dr Strangelove complete with cries of yee-hah.
- Played straight and horribly in Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines (where entire cities are put on giant tracks and try to eat each other - this is not played for comedy, by the way). The extremist Green Storm faction regularly use "Tumblers", a low-tech version of guided bombs. They're bombs with pilots on them that guide their fall and ensure they land on target.
- Truth In Television to a extent - the Japanese did this during the ending days of WWII in Real Life, with their Ohka rocket-propelled flying bomb, which was piloted into its target by a human pilot, riding in a cockpit inside the bomb itself. It wasn't nuclear - which didn't matter much to those targets that got hit.
- And 9/11 of course, where the hijackers used fuel-loaded jetliners as the bomb.
- The Isaac Asimov short story The Feeling of Power takes place in a society where computers can make more computers, and those computers can do all the calculations people need, so even basic mathematics has been lost. One fellow reinvents addition and subtraction, and discovers to his horror that this allows for the "manned missile," since people can now guide the missiles based on a coordinate system and a human life is much less valuable than a computer guidance system.
- Weird Science: In the ending shot of an episode involving some flying basketball shoes Lisa created and a close call with FBI agents "Scolder" and "Molly", the gang is almost shot down by an Air Force surface-to-air missile. In the closing shot, all are seen barebacking on the device, complete with cowboy hats.
- Doctor Who: Used with rather different symbolism, as Captain Jack teleports himself on top of a Nazi bomb he's immobilized with a tractor beam to shout a goodbye to the Doctor and Rose, in "The Doctor Dances".
- Subverted by the Farscape mini-series. Over the course of the television series. the protagonist, Crichton, had an AI construct implanted in his mind. Causing a vivid hallucination, this "Harvey" finally dies off at the end as his purpose is fullfilled. Crichton has been dropping sci-fi and pop-culture references throughout the series, and Harvey with him. As such, he shows himself dying in lieu of the (rather obscure) ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but concedes he found Riding The Bomb an attractive way to go as well.
- Parodied in the MST3K episode Moon Zero Two. The bad guys have been left stranded on a meteor which is karmically racing towards the moon's surface. As they're about to hit, Joel and the bots start whooping it up cowboy-style like Slim Pickens.
- The climax of the third season The Man From UNCLE episode "The Super-Colossal Affair" found Illya Kuryakin riding and defusing a 10 ton stink bomb which was part of a crime syndicate plot to render Las Vegas uninhabitable.
- A sketch on SNL featured an interview with then-Vice President Richard "Dick" Cheney, who was riding a missile at the time. And eating a Lunchables snack-pack.
- The video of "Boom" from System of a Down shows Bush, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Tony Blair riding each one a bomb, dressed like the Riders of the Apocalypse.
- In Warhammer 40000 the orks have grot-guided bombs, which are are based on the above-mentioned manned bombs. A gretchin (small orkoid subspecie, similar to goblins in the fantasy setting) will steer to bomb to it's target, increasing it's accuarracy. Ofcourse the mekboys tend to forget to tell the pilot that it's a one-way flight.
- Warhammer Fantasy avoids it; in their case, the rider is the bomb. And has volunteered, because being used as Abnormal Ammo is a better damn way of dying than being knifed and eaten by your own side.
- In Halo 2, Master Chief Rides the Bomb
 .
- An even older computer game example appears in the intro scene to the original Nuclear War
- Dante surfs on a missile in Devil May Cry 3.
- Contra games regularly involve heroes hanging from and steering missles as a mode of transportation.
- Mischief Makers has Marina riding missiles quite a few times. As well as riding on a cat that is itself riding on a missile.
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has a different take on this - after chasing the Space Pirates away from the Spire Pod and commencing the engines' shutdown sequence, Samus has five minutes to repair the escape pod and blast off in it before she literally rides the bomb into the Leviathan. If this happens, or the Space Pirates successfully shoot down the Spire Pod, you get a scene of the pod falling before Game Over-induced sudden blackout - if the fall and storms don't kill Samus, the bomb certainly will.
- The custom Strangelove mutator for the Unreal Tournament series (which is obviously a giant Shout Out to Dr. Strangelove as its name implies) is a superweapon similiar in functionality to the Redeemer (A nuclear warhead launcher) except for its secondary fire, which allows you to... take a wild guess.
- There's a couple of quests in World Of Warcraft where the player has to ride on a Goblin-made rocket. It's also possible to get a similar rocket as a mount via a code that can be gotten from a pack of Warcraft TCG cards.
- Then there is also one which after you defeat the Vry'kul air raid and destroying some of their building using their own ballista, you return to your encampment by riding on one of the said flaming ballista bolt.
- For his most powerful special move, Laharl rides a meteor. Laughing maniacally the whole way.
- A mission in Jak 3 has Daxter ride a missle.
- One half of a stage in Mega Man Zero 3 takes place inside the biggest missile ever as Zero tries to prevent it from reaching its target. He fails.
- Exterminatus Now at one point has a crude chalkboard-style stick-figure sketch of what Exterminatus actually does (complete with a sketch of Cthulhu labelled "A Bad Thing"). The warhead plummeting from space onto the planet? It has a stick-figure cowboy wavin' his hat.
- The Simpsons: When Homer becomes leader of a group of vigilantes, he goes to the local army surplus store to stock up on implements of destruction. One of the things the proprietor shows him is a miniature nuke designed to be used against beatnicks in the sixties. Cut to an Imagine Spot of Homer, with cowboy hat, trying to drop the bomb, and ending up riding it in. Cut back, he's straddling the device, and the shopkeeper points out a nearby sign reading "Do not ride the bomb". The imagery was also used as a Couch Gag in another episode.◊
- Sealab 2021: In "Red Dawn", when Quinn learns Debbie slept with the President, he bombs Washington, DC in a fit of jealousy, shouting "Nobody shucks her corn but meeeeeee!" as he rides the bomb. (Inexplicably enough, however, the cityscape he's dropping into is clearly San Diego, CA.)
- Blossom does it in one episode of The Powerpuff Girls
- Transformers: Beast Wars has Rattrap Riding The Bomb attached to former Decepticon Ravage's stealth ship after forcing it to crash. The twist: the bomb remained unexploded until after the crash, and Rattrap was blown clear into the arms of his comrades, nice and safe.
- In the Swat Kats episode "The Wrath of Dark Kat", Razor rides a bomb while trying to disarm it, leading to a Wire Dilemma.
- Real Life example, sort of: The Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka.
- Obligatory Nazi example: There was a manned version of the V-1 Flying Bomb.
- Supposedly the Reichenbergs (manned V-1s) were not suicide weapons, the pilot would eject before impact. Considering how much trouble pilots had getting the canopy open when the thing was parked on the ground, odds are that had the Reichenberg ever seen active service it would have been purely this trope.
- The US tried to build one, too. It was designed to be flown by a trained pigeon.
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