Stuff Blowing Up - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Everything Is Better With Explosions

"Awesome barbecue!" [Boom!] "Awesome pool!" [Boom!]

— Michael Bay, TV commercial for Verizon Fios

JOKER unleashes an all-out barrage of missiles, like the biggest fucking missiles you will ever see. BATMAN shoots his own back, and they all collide together in the middle of a violent explosion, and then, an explosion within that explosion. Afterward: one last explosion, this time in slow motion, with tanks flying out of it.

— Michael Bay's rejected "The Dark Knight" Script.

Everything's better with explosions. A good shot of Stuff Blowing Up will save having to write many pages of character development and inventive language. Television scripts are short. Shortcuts are taken.

There is pretty good chance the audience has already seen something blow up at least once during a typical day of television.

Note, however, that while we mere mortals react to explosions with some combination of shock and awe, if the folks on-screen are not so close to the blast they're surfing the shock wave away from the epicenter, they'll probably be strolling coolly off in slow motion, not even deigning to turn their heads to acknowledge things going to Hades behind them. Video of "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions".

(From this, we can also infer that if one does not grant an explosion power by looking at it, it cannot strike you down with a piece of shrapnel.) If they foolishly glance at an explosion, they may still survive by running from it and jumping, but are much more likely to get killed.

A Super Trope involving:

Compare Kill It With Fire.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Three key phrases can be used to succinctly sum up Blame!: Walking The Earth, Amazing Architecture and Stuff Blowing Up.
The final episode of Excel Saga features Nabeshin espousing the philosophy that "Explosions fix everything!", then giving a graphic demonstration: a fused Excel and Hyatt are returned to their original bodies when he dynamites the room they're standing in.
In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, this is Nanoha's solution to practically everything. Humongous Mecha Cosmic Horror on a rampage? Blow it up. Student not following orders? Blow her up. Need to make friends? Blow them up. Need to save daughter? Blow her up. Some people forgot to equip brakes? Active Guard with Holding Net. There are some things random destruction can't solve, but for everything else, there's Starlight Breaker.
In Speed Grapher, main character Tatsumi Saiga adquires the power to make anything blow up by taking a picture of it. He then decides to save the girl who gave said power to him, Kagura Tennouzou.
Armored Trooper VOTOMS loves blowing stuff up, especially Scopedogs, but just about anything is fair game.
In Ranma 1/2, Akane tries to get some hard-boiled eggs by popping a tray of about a dozen or so in the microwave. It explodes spectacularly, blasting its own door off its hinges with such force, the shockwave knocks Ranma (a powerful martial artist) off his feet and the door itself breaks through the plumbing, flooding the kitchen.
- Earlier, in the OAV version of the same story, Kasumi reminisces about her childhood and how she couldn't cook anything either —up to, and including, setting a pot of boiling water ablaze.
At the end of The Movie of Space Runaway Ideon, the Ideon explodes so hard it takes down a galaxy with it.
In Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and a few of its sequels,) the first part of the Daedalus Attack consists of the titular mecha punching into an enemy ship. The second part consists of deploying lots and lots of Humongous Mecha from the "fist" to deliver a Macross Missile Massacre within the ship's interior, causing it to explode spectacularly.
In Robotech The Shadow Chronicles Ariel has a vision of Space station Liberty being blown up Space station Liberty really is blown up, with blast radius of hundreds of kilometers - wiping out the Haydonite Fleet.
Naturally, this trope is Nice Holystone's one true love. She even has explosives stored in her eye socket.
This is the standard response of Louise (of Zero No Tsukaima) after she gets magic. And even slightly before...
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is particularly fond of filling the screen with explosions. Namely, if something is pierced with a drill, it explodes. The first Big Bad is defeated by getting a hole DETONATED on his torso, and the second one EXPLODES SEVEN TIMES.
Neon Genesis Evangelion has a particularly awesome explosion in End of Evangelion when Asuka in Unit 02 throws a battleship at a bunch of tanks.
In Axis Powers Hetalia, one of Hong Kong's hobbies is to detonate firecrackers, according to his profile. More than one fanwork goes further and depicts him as a full-blown explosives expert.
The "Cowboy Funk" episode of Cowboy Bebop involves the crazed Teddy Bomber; who blows up buildings throughout the episode (the last one nearly taking Spike and the cowboy Andy with it). Jet even states that the reason why no one goes after Teddy Bomber is because they don't want to get blown up.
Slayers plays with this a lot. To the point that by the beginning of the second season, as soon as hot-tempered ultra-powerful sorceress Lina Inverse starts chanting her most powerful spell (which usually results in mile wide craters, at least), the other characters are running for the hills and trying to evacuate civilians.
- Second or third most powerful. The most powerful one, if mishandled, results in Earth Shattering Kaboom.
Deidara is an awesomely insane pyromaniac who enjoys blowing things up with clay. In fact, he met his demise by self-detonation.

Comedy

Humor columnist Dave Barry described his interest in Exploding Things in a note in Dave Barry Talks Back:
"I don't wish to toot my own horn, but I definitely deserve to win several Nobel Prizes for the ground-breaking scientific work I've done in the field of exploding things. Since I wrote my first report, several years ago, about a snail that exploded in a restaurant in Syracuse New York, I have received literally thousands of letters from alert readers sending me newspaper clippings about exploding ants, pigs, trees, yogurt containers, potatoes, television sets, finches, whales, municipal toilets, human stomachs, and of course cows."
- Dave Barry was rather disappointed to find out that the medical discovery of "exploding head syndrome" did not mean "the actual explosion of a person's head, ideally Barry Manilow's in concert."
- He also, in what has to be one of his best-ever articles, popularized the exploding whale incident in Oregon. This took place in 1970, long before Barry wrote about it, but it's through his article that most people know about it.

Comic Books

This is pretty much the job description of the Nextwave squad, and they love it.
Elsa Bloodstone:"They explode! My life has taken on new meaning!"
- This is pretty much exactly the author's description of the comic, too.
  Warren Ellis: "It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode."
In the Hellboy story Wake the Devil, the vampire Count Giurescu and the cavalry horse he's riding explode into skeletal parts when Hellboy hits them with the post that he's been tied to. Naturally, though, that isn't the end of it.
Hellboy: That's interesting. No matter how hard you hit them, horses don't usually explode... vampires either, for that matter.
Tinus Trotyl was all about this trope and Nonfatal Explosions.
A depressingly less awesome use of this is the Transformers 12-issue series All Hail Megatron, in which the Decepticons blow things up and terrorize humans for several issues with no real resistance. It eventually gets to the point where the characters are complaining about how little is actually happening.

Film

Star Wars and the Death Stars, baby (in this case, the stations themselves, not their targets). You'd think a reactor would have failsafes so that if containment was breached or the reaction controls were destroyed it would automatically shut down, rendering the station lifeless, but no, it goes kablooie. And it is sweet.
- The first Death Star has an excuse - it was seconds away from firing a full-power, planet-destroying blast. Do you have any idea just how much energy would have been built up in the reactor at that point? It has to go somewhere. The second Death Star has less of an excuse, but the superlaser was in use, albeit only as an anti-ship weapon.
  - Not to mention the whole business of being unfinished at the time of exploding.
  - The novel Death Star explained the colossal explosion: hypermatter reactors of a size large enough to power the Death Star superlaser are experimental technology. The Battle Lance hypermatter testbed ship, with an unusually large one as a trial run for the Death Star's weapon, had an unknown screwup with its reactor, and suddenly and permanently ceased existing.
- The X-Wing Expanded Universe books like to describe exactly how each TIE fighter that's shot down explodes, in exquisite detail. Other stuff blows up quite frequently also. Lampshaded by this quote:
  Donos: "Pretty. What do we blow up first?"
  Wedge: "Write that down. That ought to be the Wraith Squadron motto."
  - Many of the X-Wing books are written by Michael Stackpole, who loves this trope so much that his novels set in the Battle Tech universe gave rise to the term "stackpoling" to refer to a fusion reactor exploding. He gets away with it because it's cool.
- For that matter, tiny ships like TIE fighters exploding into fireballs, most noticeably when Han takes out the last one in Episode IV, resulting in a massive multi-stage explosion from something that carries very little fuel and no exploding weapons. In the Expanded Universe it's explained they don't even have any internal life support (it's built into the pilots' suits), so there's no atmosphere to burn.
Michael Bay demands things to be awesome. And by 'awesome', he means 'stuff blowing up'.
- It's a shame he didn't blow up the tiger.
  - There is a version where he blows up the Awesome Verizon Guy. Is that enough?
  - Apparently he saves the tiger-splosions for his attack tigers.
- In his work on the Transformers Film Series, he's strived to outdo himself, with so many explosions that the rendering computers blew up. That's right people, his explosion caused an explosion.
  - Well, actually it was the rendering of Devastator that caused the computers to overheat and catch fire. But knowing which director we're talking about, the other explanation wouldn't at all be surprising.
James Bond has the usual exploding vehicles, villain lairs and general buildings of any action movie. And Q usually arms him with mines or some sort of exploding gadget (such as exploding toothpaste and a pen-grenade).
- Don't forget the video game, "Golden Eye: 007", where—shot enough times—everything explodes.
- At the climax of Live And Let Die, the villain — rapidly pumped full of high-pressure CO2 — explodes.
  - If James Bond ever gets a Dethroning Moment Of Suck page, that will surely be in the Top 007.
What happens in every action movie ever made to the point where it's a genre defining characteristic.
In Independence Day, the aliens apparently have firestorm cannons that blow up famous landmarks.
The climax of the movie version of Stephen King's Firestarter fits this trope quite well.
At the end of Michaelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, a luxury designer house, built way out in the desert, explodes for no discernible reason whatsoever. Since this is a late-60s art film, with psychedelic dream sequences and a Pink Floyd soundtrack, it is probably all in the head of the young woman watching it, caused by angst on her part. It is worthy of note that this was once voted "Best Cinematic Explosion Ever."
The Joker in The Dark Knight really likes explosions:
Joker: See, I'm a man of simple tastes. I like dynamite... and gunpowder... and gasoline! Do you know what all of these things have in common? They're cheap!
The Day After had this, and LOTS of it, thanks to two nuclear missiles fired at Kansas City, resulting in a huge monstrous fireball that vaporizes people ''and a HORSE'' and knocks over every building (the latter done via stock footage of the 1950s of real nuclear bomb tests).
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy trailer, framed as a Hitchhiker's Guide entry on movie trailers, featured "the requisite montage of explosions, followed by a woman in a bikini."
"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" As well as the van, the film heavily features three minis among its vehicles. The gang dispose of them by letting them fall off cliffs, whereupon the third mini blows up before hitting the ground.
Speed Racer has loads and loads of gratuitous explosions, but the whole movie is built on rule of cool and car-fu so no one really cares.
ZE KVICK FUSE!?!
"Knock down THAT wall, knock down THAT wall, and knock down THAT farging wall!" BOOM! "Now, I'm really mad. This is farging war!"
"It's gonna be big!!!" "Is it gonna be today?!?"
Der Clown's love for spectacular explosions is continued in the movie Payday which features an Autobahn being blown up over its entire width with hand grenades, sending police cars flying, and an aircraft bombed with gold bars so it turns into one big giant fireball.
Swordfish begins In Medias Res with a bank full of booby-trapped hostages. The police, being Too Dumb To Live, attempt to "rescue" one, despite her terrified resistance. The resulting explosion takes out dozens of cars and cops in Bullet Time.
About half of xXx is made of Stuff Blowing Up. Lots of it.
The whole premise of Steven Spielberg's 1941.

Literature

In Havemercy, Royston's Talent is making things explode. He manages to state this in the wordiest way possible.
While he was generally on the side of huge explosions being a bad thing, H. Beam Piper not only nuked a major city in Uller Uprising, Space Viking (one of the most Bad Ass names in literature) featured three uses of the Bethe-cycle bomb, commonly known as the "hellburner." What does this do, you ask? This creates A MINIATURE SUN WHICH LASTS SEVERAL HOURS in the target area, destroying everything within about a thousand miles. Anyone pack the marshmallows? The craters are still smoking roughly two weeks later.
- Later in the same book, during a space battle an enemy cruiser survives several hits from antiship missiles. Frustrated beyond endurance, the ship's gunner smacks it with a planetbuster bomb. The resulting explosion lit up the sky for an entire hemisphere of the planet they were orbiting at the time.
In Soul Music by Terry Pratchett, there's a dramatic scene near the beginning when a wooden carriage is speeding along a narrow mountain road. The carriage misses a turn and crashes far below in the canyon; exploding on impact.
- With the mandatory wheel rolling away from the wreckage.
  - Which is, in accordance with ancient narrative tradition, on fire.
Subverted at one point in Fleet of the Damned by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch, when an interstellar PT boat crashes and the safety mechanisms work:
Sten's hand was poised over the emergency power cutoff breaker when the ship's computer decided that it might be dying but preferred something less Wagnerian than what would happen, and beat Sten to it.
"Then there was a crash and a flash of flame and smoke. The waters of the Deeping-stream poured out hissing and foaming: they were choked no longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall."

Live Action TV

Monty Python's Flying Circus blew lots of things up just for the fun of it. "The Exploding Version of the 'Blue Danube'" speaks for itself. No less explosive is the ever-popular "How Not To Be Seen" sketch, which ends in an orgy of Stock Footage explosions. Episode 16 has a Running Gag of random exploding animals, including That Poor Cat (offscreen). Other exploding things in the series include a penguin on a television set and Mrs. Niggerbaiter.
- Also, Tim from Monty Python And The Holy Grail introduces himself with various explosions. Perhaps that's why they used coconuts instead of horses.
The Mythbusters usually go out of their way to make sure something gets blown up, set on fire, or otherwise destroyed at least once an episode. Routinely Lampshaded to the point where, for one season, host Jamie Hyneman's introductory credit clip was of him declaring "Jamie want big boom!"
- Possibly the most extreme example is when they blew up a spare, nearly unsalvageable cement mixer with a ridiculous amount of explosives, which required the FBI's assistance, and that everything within a mile of the blast zone be shut down (including a portion of a nearby highway). They openly admitted it had nothing to do with the myth they were testing (whether you could use dynamite to clean the slag from the interior of a cement mixer), and was just a big boom.
  - They recently topped that explosion while testing the myth that you could use the pressure generated by an explosion to create a diamond. Vaporizing the cement truck used 800 pounds of explosives. This time they used 5000 pounds, and it left a crater. Too bad it didn't actually make the diamond.
  - It made diamonds all right, but the kind used for industrial processes, not gemstone-quality ones.
  - At the time they spoke at this Troper's school, that was also the scariest explosion they'd ever done. They were standing more than a mile away, but realized they may have miscalculated when pieces of the truck were still landing behind them.
- One spectacular explosion was not expected, or wanted. Unfortunately, the attempt to redo the JATO car myth in "Supersized Myths" ended prematurely when the rockets malfunctioned.
- And of course they produced a montage of explosions in the series that was set to Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture".
  Jamie: "That's what we do on Mythbusters, we blow [Sound Effect Bleep] up."
Power Rangers is a great offender in the SPD-and-beyond group of series. For example, Operation Overdrive has two villains point their weapons at each other. Point. Then the scenery explodes for no apparent reason.
- There has also been a disturbing tendency to have every team's arsenal blow up or otherwise be destroyed at the end of the show, starting with the weapons and Zords and finishing with the powers themselves.
- Power Rangers had explosions since forever! This troper watched an old feature length with his brother, and joked that the Rangers deliberately sewed pyrotechnics into their costumes just so there could be more explosions. Monsters blow up, zords spark and hiss - it's a psychopath's dream!
- Power Rangers has always had them, but never so gratuitously - to the point of robbing them of meaning or coolness through pointlessness and desensitization factor - until Bruce Kalish came along. Once, something (an attack, an object, even a cardboard box) had to be exploding, but now... someone jumps, random explosion in the background. Someone kicks, random explosion before kick lands... or doesn't land, if the opponent dodges it. Even ice and water attacks caused big fiery explosions in Overdrive.
- Power Rangers should be in a trope for this sort of thing specifically. I suggest "All Attacks Cause Explosions" To point, was watching OO episode "Once a Ranger", The 6th Ranger guy does what looks like an obvious cutting/slicing attack. It sets off a line of explosions —-BEHIND—- the targetted enemy. Who of course, does the Hammy, slow-motion jump-in-the-air "Oh-noes,-I've-been-hit!" cliche.
- This came under some incredibly heavy Lampshade Hanging in RPM's episode "Ranger Blue". When given the opportunity to ask questions about the ranger tech, Ziggy asks:
Ziggy: Sometimes when I morph, I can't help but notice this gigantic explosion right behind me for no apparent reason.
- Note that this later provides a plot point for Ranger Blue. When his suit malfunctions, he stands with a group of enemies behind him and morphs, causing a huge explosion to take them out. Yeah. That's right. They used a Kalishplosion as a plot point!
Every time a caravan is used on Top Gear, the presenters make a point to blow it up at the end. Of course, when they went on a full-blown caravan holiday this was taken to an absolute extreme. It ended with them towing the burnt-out shell of the caravan back to London.
British show Brainiac ended most episodes with an "explosive of the week" segment, where three scantily clad women set up an explosive, detonated it, and gave the explosion a score. Other seasons had similar gags, such as a golf pro putting into a hole to cause a trailer to blow up, and various No Celebrities Were Harmed style setups like "Tina Turner and her Bunsen Burner," all of which ended with something blowing up. The show also seemed to try and throw thermite in at any excuse they could come up with.
- One of the show's stated goals is to destroy as many caravans as possible. (Until recently, it shared a presenter with Top Gear.)
Farscape delivers many explosions, probably the most impressive being when they ignited an inhabited moon's atmosphere. Inverted in one two-parter, where their plan is to cause Scorpius' Commander Carrier to slowly implode by Talyn sacrificing himself by Starbursting inside. They opt for this instead of the explody route because this means that most of the Command Carrier's crew will have a chance to escape. But this still causes a lot of burst pipes and other Stuff Blowing Up, which leads to some Nightmare Fuel when something explodes in a character's face, instantly burning off most of their skin and hair. Oof.
Lost has blown up, to date: some of the airplane wreckage, Danielle's cabin, Arzt, the Swan station, Michael's raft, the Flame station, the submarine, a bunch of Others, one of the mercenaries, and an entire freighter. Good thing there's so much dynamite and C-4 on the island!
- Also, Eko tried to blow up the Swan's blast doors, but they call them blast doors for a reason! There was still a big explosion, though.
- Used to be a meme at Television Without Pity that John Locke blows things up.
The Thunderbirds titles end with a spectatcular set of explosions to tell you that it's made with Supermarionation. Most Gerry Anderson shows seem to have something exploding in their titles, but Thunderbirds' is definitely the most spectacular. Of course most episodes of Gerry Anderson shows usually involve large amounts of pyrotechnics at some point as well.
- A couple of favourites to watch out for: Thunderbirds; the Australian atomic reactor (vast magnesium flash and white mushroom cloud) and an airliner crashing on takeoff in Captain Scarlet (properly dusty and smoky, not much of a fireball, but a visible shockwave. nice).
The Muppet Show had Crazy Harry, who would show up whenever someone would say "dynamite." Or "explosion." Or, once, "fish." He would then press down on a plunger trigger, and things would go boom. Presumably, the entire stage was always wired, just in case.
- It wasn't just Harry. Different Muppets would explode, sometimes precluded by a declaration to 'Blow their tops', sometimes without warning. Kermit even admitted to explosions being one of the shows trademarks.
  - The writers of the Muppet Show had three rules as to how to end a sketch quickly: Blow something up, eat something, or throw penguins around.
Stargate Atlantis features an episode where characters get infected with explosive tumors, turning them into unwitting suicide bombers. The awesomeness of the episode is of course reduced by the fact that people die, and is completely pooched when Beckett dies at the end thanks to gratuitous Idiot Ball.
- In fairness, he was warned, the other characters tried to stop him, and he wanted to prove he was a bad-ass doctor who could solve any medical issue.
- SG-1 also blows things up quite frequently, generally alien ships. Teal'c once commented about a show-within-a-show:
Teal'c: I do not understand why everything in this script must inevitably explode.
It's a rare episode of BurnNotice that doesn't feature something blowing up.
Reno 911 is known to feature gratuitous explosions in unlikely circumstances. For example, in one episode, Deputy Junior gingerly disposed of the feces of a police dog that had accidentally consumed a large amount of C4 explosive. Lieutenant Dangle then unknowingly tossed something into the garbage can, causing a massive, fiery explosion.
In the SCTV recurring sketch Farm Film Report, its hick critics preferred films with this trope ("Blowed up real good!"). They loved Scanners and were awfully disappointed with Antonioni's Blowup for not actually having stuff blowing up in it (they did like Zabriskie Point though). They also had every celebrity interview end with the celebrity essentially willing themselves to blow up, and would end their show with the catchphrase "May the Good Lord take a likin' to ya and blow ya up real soon!" And they would themselves explode.
An honorary spot for this trope goes to the German action TV series Alarm für Cobra 11. A series about a team of highway cops in which cars explode on the slightest impact with other vehicles walls, trees or anything that touches something else than their wheels. (Examples here.) Even a car just scraping a tunnel wall would explode just giving the driver enough time to bail out of the vehicle and run away. In later seasons of the show the directors cut down on the vehicle explosion rate.
- You sure about that?
On The Daily Show, voting is so awesome, it explodes.
"[...] Their songs are, on the whole, very simple and usually follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason."
Years before Spike TV came out, Saturday Night Live featured a sketch called "The Man Channel" which contained nothing but clips of Stuff Blowing Up (mostly cars driving off cliffs) in Slo Mo.
The opening scene of the season 2 premiere of Shark ended with a bus containing a witness to a mob hit exploding just outside of the courthouse. It wasn't hugely relevant to the plot, but it was lovingly replayed in slow motion several times throughout the episode, both before and after commercial breaks. Well, it was quite a lovely explosion.
Even low action quotient teen mystery drama Veronica Mars managed to have a plane blow up.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles absolutely loves explosions. But being a Terminator series, that's just sensible.
The Discovery Channel TV show Destroyed In Seconds is all about this Trope.
One Comedy Channel ad for "Super Sitcoms" featured at least two cars exploding. All it needs now is footage of a giant robot, and we have the new Awesome Channel.
Torchwood blew up bits of Cardiff, the Elaborate Underground Base and... Jack Harkness himself.

Machinima

Parodied in the Red Vs Blue Season 3 DVD in which the intro features nothing but explosions from the first three seasons, then cutting to Grif who's excited about how cool it is.
- Reconstruction plays this fairly straight. One particular sequence of note is where Agent Washington disposes of Agent South's body by piling a bunch of exploding crates next to it and shooting at them.

Music

Fatboy Slim "Gangster Tripping"
The end of Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet"

Radio

The Goon Show: "You rotten swine, you! You have deaded me again with the dreaded dynamite!"
- Not to mention the exploding taxis...
  - "Drop that explosion!" [BOOM]
  - Or how to break the world altitude record for pianos.

Tabletop Games

If something doesn't go kaboom at some point in Feng Shui, you're doing things wrong. The Jammers even have it as their battle cry: "BLOW THINGS UP! BLOW THINGS UP!"

Video Games

This seems to be pretty much the motivation of the character Haggard of Battlefield: Bad Company for joining the US Army.
- This is also a good reason to play the actual game, as most of the original environment is destructible, as advertised. It even gives you Cosmetic Awards for destroying enough walls and trees.
With the name Blast Corps, you can't go wrong with the title.
The Bomberman franchise is all about Stuff Blowing Up. It's even in the name.
Anything and everything explodes in Worms, up to and including the titular protagonists themselves.
- And their graves, too, if you pummel them enough.
The Command And Conquer series of course, everything explodes there, sometimes even infantry! from simple grenade explosion and RPG attacks to continental conflagrations capable to send energy signatures to alien civilizations and global altering missiles, trust me, you will enjoy it, in fact, is rated the reason number 1 in the TOP TEN of the series according to this video.
- Don't forget in Generals: Zero Hour, where there is a general dedicated to everything in his army blowing up in one way or another. To illustrate: This general can get an upgrade where all of his buildings and units explode on command.
Half the appeal of Ratchet And Clank is getting to blow up hordes of enemies with progressively larger and more explosion-inducing BFGs. On top of that, practically every enemy in the game explodes when defeated. Even if you just beat them up with a wrench.
Supreme Commander and to a lesser extent its spiritual source Total Annihilation, have all units and buildings explode on death, many of which do little damage, though some late game resources generators explode like a Nuke, and all air units do damage when crashing.
Lemmings. There's just something therapeutic about clicking the Nuke button after you fouled up a stage and watching your green-haired critters cutely explode en masse.
World of Warcraft: Goblin Engineering. Honestly, there is only one thing there that this troper can recall offhand that doesn't blow up (Goblin Jumper Cables XL), and even that can kill the user.
- "Nothing says engineering like a 20% failure rate!"
Goldeneye and Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64 feature consoles, chairs, tables, plants — basically anything you can find from Office Depot — that blow up real good. In PD, a floating crate that explodes is an important plot element. Fortunately, if it is lost, you can use one of the EXPLODING GUNS to make it through the important point. Yes, one of the guns explodes.
The Demoman and the Soldier from Team Fortress 2. The former is armed with a grenade launcher and a sticky grenade launcher. The latter is armed with what can only be described as a semi-automatic rocket launcher.
- There's also all Payload maps, where Blue Team winning triggers a massive explosion. But that's nothing compared to TFC, in which everybody had grenades. And they loved spamming them everywhere.
Many, many older video games. Even when explosions aren't appropriate. Usually when boss dies, they send out numerous small explosions. Most bizarre examples include:
- Moon Crystal where bosses, no matter if pirate captain or fake count.
- Dinosaur Bosses in some versions of Joe & Mac.
Crypto, the main protagonist of Destroy All Humans! makes it very clear that he likes to blow stuff. (Up! Blow stuff up!) So much so, that the DAH! games have more explosions in them than an action movie. "WHEN DO I GET TO BLOW STUFF UP?!" "Pox handles all the technical stuff, I just... blow stuff up." "They look so cool when they go boom and fall down!"
In My Sims Kingdom, Dr. F's profile says that he wants to either send a rocket into space, or blow it up; he's not choosy. Indeed, as you arrive, the rocket they're trying to launch blows up. Later, Alexa practically has to restrain him from pressing the self-destruct button while it and its pilot (a human, this time) are in space.
In Sonic Adventure 2, Prison Island explodes as the player characters are leaving it.
In The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a bug you smoke out sets a fire in a bomb storage building. The results are... predictable.
- In The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, you could use your fire item inside a house filled with bombs too. The results were a little different though.
- Actually, if you had good enough timing, you could escape that fate. And it's hilarious.
One of the main features of most Vehicular Combat games, e.g. the Twisted Metal series.
Despite being a fantasy world, Dwarf Fortress. One of the most tragically wasteful traps in the game is the Booze Bomb, which is essentially a huge heap of barrels, a lever, and a caged fire monster. When goblins reach the barrels, you pull the lever (which should be located in another room, preferably a long way away from the bomb) and the cage releases the fire monster, which hurls a fireball at a goblin. The barrels ignite, and the goblins vanish in the fireball. This can also happen accidentally, say when a burning dwarf decides he needs a beer.
The ending of Deadly Creatures. Redneck gas station owner George Striggs is trying to kill one of the protagonists, a scorpion which has repeatedly stung his crotch at this point, with a shotgun. He chases it outside the building and ends up getting spooked by a rattlesnake on top of one of the gas pumps (which is burning at this point). His first reaction is to shoot the snake, and hits the pump in the process. The whole station goes BOOM. You can hear fire engine and ambulance sirens during the credits.
The Super Smash Bros games naturally love stuff going boom, with many character attacks using explosions (Snake's whole repetoire of moves is made up of C4, rocket launchers, landmines, and grenades. ), and several items that create pretty big bangs as well, such as Bomb-Ombs, Smart Bombs, motion-detecting mines, Voltorbs, and exploding crates and barrels.
Touhou has this in spades, for good reason, considering the genre. Marisa, in particular, uses her Love Sign: Master Spark to solve all her problems, whether it be finding new spellbooks from other magic users, making new friends, or finding the real path through an illusionary maze.
Segata Sanshiro is so awesome that when he needs to advertise Bomberman he just judo flips this guy so hard that he explodes.
A homebrew game for the Nintendo DS called Brix DS features sticks of dynamite grouped together as a single stick, set atop several grey and black bricks. The object of the game is to remove the grey bricks and to not let the dynamite fall onto the ground; the player must land it on the black bricks. The physics of the game are programmed well, and they become a huge factor after the first two level sets. Where does Stuff Blowing Up come in, then? If the dynamite touches the ground, it explodes, sending any remaining bricks flying off the screen. This can result in some amazingly laugh-out-loud losses - this troper (Strife89) doesn't even mind losing at all, because he always gets a good laugh from the results. After level set five, bricks that explode on removal show up, which only ups the ante for the humor in losses, despite the increased difficulty. I have failed several levels almost 20 times before solving them, and yet I never grew frustrated, largely because of Stuff Blowing Up. :)
The Bomb Ball in Backyard Soccer.

Web Animation

Nearly every scene in the aptly named Flash cartoon The Demented Cartoon Movie ends with Stuff Blowing Up. The planet Earth gets blown up a total of ten times.
You CAN'T sing in the Charlie the Unicorn toons. Kinda lampshaded in the second video.
"Curse you, random explosions!"
In the G-Mod "action film" Billy Mays Vs. Vince, Vince's favorite way of taunting Billy is blowing his stuff up. Mighty Putty? Blows up a wall. The Ding King? Blows up a car door. Orange Clean? Blows up a dresser. Kaboom!? Drops a lamp on Billy's head. Then blows Billy up.

Web Comics

In Sluggy Freelance, Mad Scientist Riff is convinced that explosives can solve anything.
- They can't?
Terror Island, Theorem 193 deserves mention.
The Green Grocer: What would you say the opposite of being banned from shopping is? Being forced to shop? Being banned from selling? Banning someone else from shopping?
Bizarro-Aorist: Exploding.
Girl Genius: "Hee hee...Death ray go BOOM!"
- Just about anything made by Sparks tend to explode for any or no reason. One example was Agatha causing a massive explosion while fixing a coffee maker and is later Lampshaded by Vole with his report to Gil.
The official sound effect of Adventurers is "Foom!"
Schlock Mercenary, constantly.
Unwinder discusses its (over)use in film here.
"I prepared Explosive Runes this morning."

Western Animation

The vast majority of episodes set within the DCAU end with the villain's hideout exploding, for reasons ranging from self-destruct devices to joy buzzers falling into loose wiring. On one of the Batman Beyond commentaries, the creators admitted that whenever they couldn't figure out how to end an episode, they'd just have a building blow up.
- One noteable example took place nearing the end of Bruce's reunion with Ra's al Ghul, who at this point should have racked up quite a bit of Genre Savvy and was smart enough to install automated fire extingishers into his lair. Unfortunately, once the fires are put out, Ra makes the critical mistake of pronouncing, "It's safe." Sure enough, one loose electrical wire strikes the Lazarus pit, resulting in... well, you know.
- Mad Stan from Batman Beyond embodies this, and became an internet meme where people take gif. files and have him popping out of somewhere, followed by everything blowing up.
Mad Stan: You think this is a joke? Look around, Batman! Society's crumbling! And do you know why? Information overload, man! As a society we're drowning in a quagmire of vid-clips, e-mail, and sound bytes! We can't absorb it all! There's only one sane solution: BLOW IT UP!
- Another example is in the Superman The Animated Series episode "My Girl" which involves Lex Luthor selling terrorist a gun that makes things blow up like they're been strapped to dynamite.
Use of this in the most absurd ways possible is a major Running Gag on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. A specific example is that anything Master Shake throws will make a mini-explosion when it hits the ground (one has to wonder if it's a Super Power or something). The episode "Kidney Car" ends with Carl's head exploding after he has his car destroyed by Shake twice.
Meatwad: Why'd he do that?
Shake: Why wouldn't he?
- In the golf videogame, Zombie Ninja Pro-Am, not only do most opponents explode when you hit them with a chainsaw or guitar chord them to death, but the golf ball you hit occasionally in between killing ~~people~~ Carl, robotic turkeys from the future, and machine-gun packing tulips? That golf ball will explode if it goes out of bounds, and detonate spectacularly when you finally get it in the hole, presumably a) because the shape of the hole focuses the blast or something but more likely b) Rule Of Cool.
In Avatar The Last Airbender, Magnificent Bastard Azula manages this. With a volleyball. They do know Kung Fu, and they use it to it's full extent of What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome.
- Avatar has also blown up a dam, Zuko's ship on multiple occasions, an abandoned Earth Kingdom city, anything with Combustion Man, anything involving the Day of Black Sun, and Zuko himself, (When he practiced lighting bending).
Beast Wars [along with most of the Transformers cartoons] has a lot of explosions. At least one of the Transformers will be blown up in every episode.
- Not counting Waspinator, of course, who gets blown to bits in nearly every episode regardless.
- Rather hilariously, there is actually a Transformer called Landmine. That's right. An alien robot with the name of an explosive.
Whenever the supervillain Drakken's hideout doesn't get blown up, Kim Possible almost always remarks how unusual that is.
- Well, it's tough to make cheese blow up. Even if it's the World's Biggest Block Of Cheese. That one just melted.
Family Guy loves to blow stuff up. One episode had Meg racing against an Amish guy on a horse and the pair falls off a cliff. The wagon explodes, then, after a moment of looking nervous, the horse explodes, despite having no signs of injury.
- In an another episode, Brian and Stewie blow up a house. The explosion is shown from thirty seven different angles.
As the creators of the show have pointed out in commentaries, just about every episode of Futurama ends either with something blowing up or a courtroom scene. Occasionally both.
In The Incredibles, the big robot apparently self-destructs so completely it's reduced to something finer than powder.
- But wait, there's more. On the "special features" DVD, there is an easter-egg self-parody video that makes homage to the amount of times that things explode in the movie, as well as the buttons that are pressed and the doors that are opened and shut, by stringing them all together to the tune of "The Anvil Chorus" from Verdi's opera Il Trovatore. The sequence ends with this quote- "The Incredibles- no sequence unexploded."
Looney Tunes just loves to repeat that same explosion animation whenever the opportunity calls for it. However, the most unique use of that animation is Three Little Bops, where the Big Bad Wolf attempts to blow up (rather than down) the brick house with a large stick of dynamite. To do this, he lights it up from afar (one of the pigs blew out his match when he tries lighting it on the doorstep), but as he rushes back to the brick house, the fuse runs out. Cue the oft-used explosion animation, but rather than move on to the black smoke phase, the animation remains in the red smoke, playing the beginning blast at different points of the screen to the beat of the music, until it finally moves on to the black smoke and the usual fade back to the main animation of the short.
At the end of Powerpuff Girls episode "Twisted Sister", fourth Powerpuff Girl Bunny exploded because of the unstable ingredients the other Powerpuff Girls used to make her.
- Sadly, not played for laughs.
Parodied in a Robot Chicken sketch which features a fake trailer for "Michael Bay Presents: Explosions!"
Sealab 2021 features the titular station blowing up in pretty much every episode.
The Simpsons loves to blow things up in ridiculous ways. One of the best occurs when Homer tries to cook Mr. Burns breakfast and everything he tries ends up bursting into flames, even a bowl of cereal.
- The exploding cereal bit is taken up in The Fairly Oddparents to illustrate Timmy's Mom's bad cooking.
  - There was also the episode "Action Packed!" where a chicken calls in the day and explodes, Timmy's dad balls up the newspaper and throws it backwards, where it explodes, and then passes Timmy an audio tape asking him to pass the butter, which then self-destructs.
- And don't forget the Flying Nun. "This isn't funny!"
- The Simpsons episode with the monorail also had a tree falling on a log cabin, which promptly exploded.
- Also the truck prominently labelled "Milk" swerving off the road and exploding.
- And also Hans Moleman's car, which careens off the road towards a tree, halts safely just in front of the tree without as much as a scratch, and then explodes anyway.
Occurs in a similar and almost as frequent manner on South Park. One of the openings even boasts "MORE EXPLOSIONS!".
- In the episode "Cartoon Wars" Kyle's big wheel goes flying off a cliff after a chase with Cartman. The toy bike breaks like a toy bike should until it hits the ground, when it promptly explodes for no reason.
Raw Toonage parodied in one of the trailers here.
Explosions are cool!