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Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him
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redirected from Main.WhyDontYouJustShootHim
alt title(s): Why Dont Ya Just Shoot Him; Why Dont You Just Shoot Him
Someone who actually took the advice of this trope. See?! See how well it worked?!
Dr. Evil: Scott, I want you to meet daddy's nemesis, Austin Powers. Scott Evil: What? Are you feeding him? Why don't you just kill him? Dr. Evil: I have an even better idea. I'm going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.
An observant minion lampshades their master's Genre Blindness, and offers a pragmatic solution instead of a dramatic one. Praise is rarely given, with the villain usually exploding in a rage, allowing the audience to see their obsessiveness or outright insanity. If the minion is lucky they don't get tossed across the room, beaten to a pulp or tossed in the Shark Pool.
Several variants of this one made the Evil Overlord List.
Can be considered a variation of Lampshade Hanging.
One logical defense is " It's personal". " Where's the fun in that?" is generally a more honest answer, though. And, of course, a Card Carrying Villain who's a Slave To PR has to maintain his Contractual Genre Blindness. Minions don't understand things like that.
This trope also tends to come up when the villain is a Noble Demon or a Worthy Opponent; in that case, they will refuse to take an easy, 'quick and dirty' route to kill the heroes, opting instead for a 'fair fight', and their rage at the henchman who suggested doing otherwise is intended to underline their Worthy Opponent status. This may be a case of villainous Honor Before Reason, though.
Objective logic aside, "mundane" kills do indeed seem to annoy audiences; see Dropped A Bridge On Him.
Heroes have their own version of this encouragement. Big Bads who would just shoot him are Dangerously Genre Savvy.
Just Hit Him is the somewhat less sophisticated cousin of this. Contrast Why Didn't You Kill Him?. Man In The Iron Mask prolongs the folly, keeping the one man dangerous to your rule in prison.
Examples
Anime
- Subverted in One Piece - when the Blackbeard pirates corner Ace, an enterprising henchman does just shoot him, four times with pinpoint accuracy... only to be sternly told by his captain that Ace is a Logia user, and so is Nigh Invulnerable.
- In Gundam00 Allelujah has been caged up by the HRL during the time skip. They had every reason to just let him bleed to death considering his baby killer track record.
- In Rurouni Kenshin: Shishio and Kenshin are having their climatic duel. Both of them are severely injured and weakened, and Shishio's 15 minute-time limit for fighting has elapsed. Yumi (Shishio's lover) and Houji (Shishio's right-hand man) are watching, and Houji has a rifle. The Trope is invoked by Yumi... and Houji throws his gun away, on the grounds of his belief that Lord Shishio will win. He doesn't. Of course, both characters could probably deflect bullets, but who'd be paying attention at that point in the fight?
- Subverted in one episode of Excel Saga, where all attempts to shoot her fail. She explains that this is because she is a main character.
- Sent up in Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series. During an "evil council" of the series' villains, several of them ask why they must always play card games with Yugi instead of just killing him, to which Marik replies "Those $%&&tards would just censor it."
- Code Geass offers a non-fatal version: when Lelouch learns that his best friend is the pilot of the Humongous Mecha that's thwarted him at every turn, his partner C.C. asks why he doesn't just use his Geass to make said friend join La Resistance. She guesses that it's either pride, sentimentality, or distaste for robbing another person of their free will; Lelouch responds that it's all three.
- Consciously averted by the writing staff later in the show. While scripting out the final episode, the head writer realized that there was absolutely nothing keeping the enraged Suzaku from just shooting Lelouch. The answer, simply enough, was to give Lelouch a Dead Mans Switch bomb powerful enough to take out the room and everyone in it. Since Lelouch had previously Geassed Suzaku to "live", Suzaku was incapable of knowlingly doing something suicidal and thus couldn't simply kill Lelouch on the spot.
Comic Books
- In the non-canonical Punisher/Batman crossover, Punisher has the Joker cornered. The Joker starts laughing about going back to Arkham before realizing that Punisher fully intends to blow his head off. Naturally, Batman intervenes, and the Punisher asks him this trope's question as Joker escapes.
- Turning the trope around in League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: During the initial royale fight scene, one of the minions confronts Captain Nemo (armed) and tells him to draw his pistol. Nemo simply replies that he "walks a different path" and proceeds to swiftly draw his saber and make short work of the man without breaking his stride. That's just the film version, however; in the comic, he does just shoot people, in large numbers, with weapons ranging from spear guns to artillery.
- It's worth pointing out that he does use his pistol later in the movie, during the assault on the Phantom's base.
- On the subject of Alan Moore comics turned into movies, in V for Vendetta, sai-wielding V is cornered by a policeman with a revolver and given a short diatribe on how, in the end, fancy blades can't save you against a gun. They do, however, when the gun is unloaded because its master was too busy threatening his wife with it.
- In Neil Gaiman's rendition of Black Orchid, a villain captures the titular heroine and manages to pull off a dramatic way of "just shooting her". While she's recovering (she's Immune To Bullets), he blows up the building she's in.
- In the Ultimate Spider-Man series, one villain, Hammerhead, tries to avoid this trope by pulling out a gun and shooting a troublemaker; unfortunately said troublemaker manages to catch the bullet unharmed, much to Hammerhead's surprise.
- In the DC Universe, the new Blue Beetle has a race of evil aliens called the Reach as villains, led by the Negotiator. The Negotiator's Dragon's first line is "Why don't we just kill him?" to which the Negotiator replies "No. Not without study."
- The second Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky.
Film
- From the Trope Naming quote above: Scott Evil uses almost exactly these words to express his impatience with the means his father, Dr. Evil, uses to attempt to dispose of Austin Powers:
Dr. Evil: All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism.
*guard starts dipping mechanism*
Dr. Evil: Close the tank!
Scott Evil: Wait, aren't you even going to watch them? They could get away!
Dr. Evil: No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan. What?
Scott Evil: I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I'll get it, I'll come back down here, BOOM, I'll blow their brains out!
Dr. Evil: Scott, you just don't get it, do ya? You don't.
- Classic cinematic subversion: In Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Indiana Jones finds himself challenged by a jaunty swordsman. Indy rolls his eyes, pulls out his revolver, and shoots him dead.
 In Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom a few years later — or earlier, since it's a prequel — Indy tries the same thing, but he's lost his gun and has to fight with his bullwhip.
- The original script of Raiders called for the bullwhip fight that later went into Doom; Ford, who was suffering from dysentery at the time, got fed up with the tedious choreography of the fight scene and suggested the change. As legendary as it is, Ford has commented in interviews that he still feels some remorse for the crew, who had to suffer so much for a scene that was never used.
- Actually justified in The Last Crusade Dr Schinder points out that they would still need Indy and his father alive for questioning if they failed to retrieve the pages of the diary that Marcus had.
- However, it's subverted once again after they get the pages, when the Nazis do just shoot Indy's father to motivate him.
- This particular subversion is double-subverted in the Aeon Flux Liquid Television episode "War". In it, a Breen soldier invading a Monican base is confronted by a Monican soldier with a sword. The Monican makes some flashy, threatening moves, and the Breen watches calmly, looks at his pistol, and then fires. The Monican deflects the bullet with his sword and skewers the Breen.
- The original collection of shorts played a normal subversion, where a Breen soldier performs an impressive display of martial arts, only to be gunned down by Aeon when he attacks her.
- And two years before Raiders of the Lost Ark, little-known 1979 action film Seven had an almost identical 'shoot the swordsman' gag. One character locked himself in an office with a villainous martial arts master he wanted to test his skills against. After a prolonged martial arts battle, he kills the master by throwing him out the window. As he leaves, he is attacked by the master's katana-wielding bodyguard (who had been locked in the outer office during the fight). With nothing left to prove, the hero calmly draws a gun and shoots the swordsman.
- A character played by Harrison Ford also subverts the trope in a different way - Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back has been betrayed by Lando and walks in on a room where Darth Vader is waiting - does he just stand there gawping? No, he pulls out his blaster and starts blazing away! Of course, Vader deflects the bolts with his Force powers, but this troper thought it was an excellent piece of relative realism.
- For that matter, Han subverts this trope in the previous film, shooting Greedo under the table in the cantina. Greedo played it straight, and look where it got him.
- Subverted in the 1997 movie version of Le Bossu. After a long sword fight, the hero gets cornered by some soldiers and the Psycho For Hire. From what we have seen earlier, it will be difficult, but possible for him to escape. At this moment, the villain, exasperated by the long fight, steps up to the Psycho For Hire, draws his gun, asks why they can't do it "quick, modern and effective" and shoots the hero, who only survives because of his Character Shields.
- As redundant as it may be to go on with examples, the movie Jumper had the Paladins, who shot their targets with tangles of electric coils until they could walk up and stab them dramatically. A great deal of their frustration could be avoided if they used regular guns instead of their elaborate electric rope launchers.
- This is debatable as the electric coils were much easier to hit with (they spread out to cover a great area) and also prevented the jumper from Jumping, should the shot fail to kill. Still, this doesn't explain why they don't catch them with the electric coils, then shoot them instead of taking the time to walk over and stab them.
- The official website Hand Waves that regular bullets behave oddly around jump scars.
- Crank would have been a much shorter movie if the bad guys had just shot Jason Statham, rather than poison him with something that will kill him if he calms down. An angry Jason Statham is not a nice thing.
- Fairly blatantly employed in the Iron Man movie, where The Big Bad paralyzes the hero, takes out the life-saving reactor from his heart, gives a big speech, and walks away. Granted, he was unaware of the Chekhovs Gun that would keep Stark alive, but Stark theoretically could have done a number of things such as contacting the police before dying. I guess the pleasure of knowing that Stark was slowly dying (without actually being there to witness it mind you) was just too good to pass up. That, and he knew that Pepper had already made contact with an agent of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, so he probably didn't care what Stark did in the time he had left.
- A version appears at the end of the blaxsploitation/Kung Fu flick The Last Dragon. There are two almost co-equal villains, the black "Shogun of Harlem" and a white mobster-type. The hero finally defeats the Shogun in an epic Kung Fu fight. The mobster then sneeringly monologues about "all this Kung Fu crap!" and shoots his gun. The hero catches the bullet in his teeth.
- Near the end of Hancock, the villain pauses to give a speech to the seriously-wounded Hancock instead of giving a Coup De Grace, thus giving time for Ray to show up and beat him down.
- The good wizard Avatar totally averts this in his confrontation with his Evil Twin at the end of the movie Wizards.
- Lampshaded in the 1969 political parody Mr. Freedom. After meeting with the Russian secret agent Moujik Man and the Chinese agent Red China Man, he retreats while shouting insults at them and accidentally knocks himself out on a sign.
Red China Man: Perhaps we should put him out of his misery?
Moujik Man: We can't do that!
Red China Man: Why not?
Moujik Man: The most elementary rules of hospitality forbid it.
- Why didn't Viper just BITE Tai Lung?
- I doubt Tai Lung would have allowed that to happen. If she tried, he would have pulled off some awesome moves and maybe shatter her fangs or something like that. And maybe she's not even poisonous...
- Other possible answers: the more logical one, because Viper is too honorable a fighter to cheat in such a manner; because her moves were intended to imitate those of a human using Viper kung fu, not what an actual snake could do; or perhaps Tai Lung had built up an immunity to poison.
- Or, as is revealed in ''Secrets of the Furious Five'', Viper was born fangless. (Not precisely a Ret Con, since she wasn't ever shown to have any in the first film.)
- Arguably, the entire runtime of Sleuth.
- Subverted several times in Transformers: The Movie, such as when Megatron casually shoots the helpless Autobots on the shuttle and Megatron choosing to shoot Optimus Prime dead instead of simply escaping.
- Averted in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, where just for once the villain genuinely has an actual sensible reason for keeping the captured James Bond alive and explaining the plot to him: Bond is trusted by the authorities and familiar with Blofeld's record, so his report will help convince the UN that the threat is serious.
- Justified in the film Puma Man; the Big Bad uses Mind Control to make the hero jump to his death, then keeps a Mook from shooting the corpse "just in case" because he doesn't want any evidence of foul play. In all fairness, he had no way of knowing that The Obi Wan stopped the suicide and taught the hero how to enter a death-like trance in order to deceive the villains.
- On Song Of The South, Br'er Bear points out that Br'er Fox's plans to catch Br'er Rabbit never work and suggests that they just "knock his head clean off".
- In Attack of the Clones Count Dooku puts the heroes into an arena, to be killed by large monsters. This, of course, doesn't work, and Viceroy Gunray demands their execution by shooting. When his wish finally would be granted, the cavalry arrives.
Literature
Live Action TV
- Subverted in a couple of episodes of Firefly: in "The Train Job", when Mal kicks Crow through running engines after he promises that "the last thing you see will be my blade"; and in "Serenity," when, returning from a deal with Patience, Mal sees Dobson holding his crew at gunpoint and immediately shoots him. Well,he was in a hurry.
- In The Movie, he also shoots the Operative the moment he mentions he's unarmed.
- Which is kind of a Double Subversion, as the Operative's very next line is "I am of course wearing full body armor. I am not a moron." Followed by the Operative unleashing massive amounts of empty-handed Smackdown Fu.
- And in Those Left Behind, after shooting Dobson in the faceagain, he shoots him a second time, just to be sure.
- And another subversion, of course, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: at the end of Season 6 and after all else fails, Warren brings a gun to Buffy's house and shoots her point-blank, finally proving himself to be Dangerously Genre Savvy. Of course, Buffy survives and he only succeeds in killing Tara, proving that even genre-savvy can't always save you.
- Kirk managed to use this trope to escape in the Star Trek The Original Series episode "The Squire of Gothos". Kirk asked his captor, "Where's the sport?" in simply hanging him, as he had planned. Instead, Kirk talked his captor into staging a "royal hunt." This bought Kirk enough time for a Deus Ex Machina rescue.
- Doctor Who. Certainly, it all but invented Immune To Bullets, but the amount of technical pacifism sometimes reaches maddening levels of stupidity, up to and including Moral Dissonance and moments worthy of this trope.
- And let's not get started on Torchwood. Surrendering when holding both the bad guys at their mercy just because one of them had a gun out is a pure Wall Banger.
- However in the season two finale of Torchwood ("Exit Wounds"), there are some enemies who look like the Grim Reaper saying "You shall all perish". Ianto and Tosh just shoot them.
- That said, in season one of Torchwood, the team (especially Jack Harkness) are quite happy to shoot, a prime example being how all the team save Ianto shoot the cyberwoman, even though it's Ianto's girlfriend.
- While the Doctor himself makes a big show of not condoning guns, the entire UNIT army guns down the Sontarans in the fourth series. Somewhere the Brig is crying at having missed out...
- The various Monsters Of The Week are also rife with this trope, allowing the Doctor a ridiculous amount of freedom to run that Motor Mouth of his and fiddle with their equipment when their most reasonable course of action would be to disintegrate him. Of course, on one of the only occasions the Doctor is shot, at the end of "The Stolen Earth", it results in the creation of two more Doctors which proceed to destroy an entire empire of Daleks, so it could simply be an uncommon moment of Genre Savvy for the MOTWs in an effort not to make things worse for themselves.
- Possibly inverted in the Supernatural episode, Devil's Trap. The Big Bad inside John has just nearly tortured Dean to death but John comes out long enough to beg Sam to shoot him and end it all. Sam can't (because, y'know, it's his father and also the sounds of Dean begging him not to shoot might have had something to do with it) and the demon gets away. Later on, just before their car gets totalled, John rages on him for not doing so, saying that there's nothing more important than killing the demon.
- And again when the same demon offers another character the chance to kill him, even going so far as to put the one weapon that would do the job into his hand. And played entirely straight in its ongoing failure to kill Dean instantly despite clearly having the power to do so. It even goes so far as to tell him "I knew I kept you alive for some reason," just before that decision, or indecision, leads to its death.
- To be fair, the reason the Yellow-Eyed Demon mentioned wasn't trivial - Dean's continued survival led to Sam's resurrection and the retrieval of the demon's plans from the failure bin. Of course, it also led to Dean having another chance to kill the demon, so...
- On "Heroes" Peter Petrelli has a gun pointed at his father, the "Big Bad" of the third season, while his father is powerless, for the first time since he showed up. He has him dead to rights, and instead asks pointless and convoluted questions that don't have any impact whatsoever on anything at all, all the while hearing the Haitian declare I CAN'T HOLD HIM ANY MORE! waiting until the last possible moment to do something. Which he fails at.
Theatre
- One would think that in Wicked if the Wizard had chosen to keep a gun by his Ozhead and had shot Elphaba instead of dancing with her in act 2 of Wicked, he might have saved himself a great deal of trouble.
Video Games
- Kind-of-sort-of subverted in Metal Gear Solid 3, in which The Fear actually does shoot the protagonist with a crossbow, and then informs him that, although the crossbow shot itself wasn't fatal, he'd taken the precaution of using poisoned arrows, so the protagonist is about to die horribly anyway - but follows it up with a giggly "Nah, what would be the fun in that?". (This is then followed by a more traditional end-of-level boss fight, during which Snake must use an antidote to heal the poison.)
- In MGS 4, however, Snake is the absolute king of this trope. He got TWO golden opportunities to stop the Big Bad dead in his track. When I mean golden, I mean that the first time, Snake is something like ten meters away, holding a gun, and the villain don't know he is here yet. Second one is completely ridiculous. Snake got a M4, is five meters away. The Big Bad knows he is here, but just smokes a cigar before starting monologuing. For five minutes. Then, he calls his personnal army. Snake, despite perfectly knowing how important is it to destroy the bastard, despite holding the guy at gunpoint with a good powerful gun, despite being against an old geezer who certainly can't shrugs of bullet, doesn't do anything.
- Zone Of The Enders 2 subverts this when main character Dingo is captured a short way into the game. Big Bad Nohman asks Dingo to join him for old times sake, to which Dingo pretty much gives him the finger. So Nohman shoots him. Three times. Dingo survives, but only by the enterprising work of a disloyal henchman.
- Final Fantasy IV - No matter how close he gets to it, Golbez aka Theodor, whilst under Zemus' control, just can't kill his younger brother Cecil. Case in point...
- Siege of the Wind Crystal: Golbez orders Kain to grab the crystal, but doesn't make a move to kill off the rest. He grabbed the Villain Ball along with Rosa, though, but that was part of a Xanatos Gambit he'd utilize later.
- Assault on Zot: After Tellah suicides via Cast From Hit Points, Golbez blasts Cecil away, but his memories of Cecil's face cause Zemus' control to lapse for a moment and thus result in him hesitating for a moment. He chooses to leave after that without Kain.
- Defending the Dark Crystal: Golbez paralyzed Cecil, Rosa, and Yang (possibly Kain, too), then summoned a Shadow Dragon to kill all but Cecil. He then takes a moment to bid Cecil farewell. An EPIC FAILURE on Golbez' part, as not only did this precisely set up Rydia's triumphant return from apparently horrible doom, but said return staged the means with which Cecil finally knocked Golbez down of his own hand. He still got the crystal as a consolation prize, though.
- The Sealed Cave Offensive: Rather than have Kain eliminate Cecil and his companions (since a crystal can be as easily recovered from a corpse as it can be stolen), he has Kain simply steal the crystal. This is the last chance Golbez had to put Cecil out of commission personally, because the next time they cross faces Fusoya shatters Zemus' control over him.
- No More Heroes tries to subvert this in the true ending; As the ending starts up, Travis is on the toilet when he nearly meets his end:
(Travis's bathroom door is smashed. Enter the assassin Garcian Smith
Travis: Can't a guy get some privacy?! At least when he's taking a dump?!
Assassin: I'm afraid not. These fights don't work like that. It's time to die, Mr. 1st Ranked!
Travis: You gotta be shitting me!
- He gets saved when another assassin, Travis' brother, Henry, cuts the first guy in half.
- Lampshaded by Guybrush in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge after LeChuck captures Guybrush, ties him and Wally up into an extremely elaborate torture device, and explains his plan to have both of them killed. When Guybrush asks why Lechuck didn't shoot him as soon as he came in, he responds: "Because we had an extra disk."
- Subverted by Fable 2. you Can Shoot the Big bad halfway through his final villain monologue.
Webcomics
- In the Webcomic The Last Days Of Foxhound the protagonist Liquid Snake is in the middle of a battle between himself in the body of Decoy Octopus and Big Boss/Naked Snake possessing Liquid's actual body. At the very end of the battle Liquid gets tired of the fight and pulls out a gun. Big Boss being completely surprised by both him being outmanoeuvred as well as Liquid showing some ingenuity, says to Liquid "Come on. What happened to Guns are for sissies, real men fight with their fists." Liquid responds with "Oh no. That was the old Liquid. The dumbass Liquid. The Liquid who'd cut his arm off to prove he could get by without it". Liquid then proceeded to shoot Big Boss in the Stomach.
- This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic explains why this isn't used very often.
- To be fair, Maleficent originally wanted Aurora to die when she pricked her finger on that spindle in Sleeping Beauty. The three good fairies modified this curse with the conditions that made her rescue possible. But still, the point the comic makes stands — killing off the protagonist just like that means the story's basically over.
- See This Dueling Analogs strip.
- In the webcomic Exploitation Now, the assassin Babylon Jones reflects upon how strange it is that her target, a loan shark living in Boston, would have ninjas for bodyguards, and his reply was that it seemed trendy. She proceeds to fight them with pointy and bladed weapons until she loses a couple fingers, along with her patience, and just shoots them.
- Averted in the vampire vs. zombie webcomic Last Blood, during the final battle, the vampires are captured by zombies who chain them up with the intent to torture them. However, for the past 20 pages, there have been allusions to the idea that the leader of the vampires, Addison Payne, has a brilliant scheme to defeat the zombies at some point, even once captured. So instead of letting him live and risking utter victory just for the sake of torture, the lead zombie simply stakes him through the heart, no suggestion necessary. Despite this stroke of brilliance, he still winds up losing it all when he decides to keep one of the human women as his presumed concubine, and goes to embrace her, at which point she promptly stakes him in the heart, killing him and turning his zombies loose.
- Order Of The Stick subverted this recently. Kubota, who has been consorting with a devil and trying to overthrow and kill the heroes, is captured and insists on a fair trial. As a high-level aristocrat, he believes he can drag the trial out and make Hinjo look like a fool... until Vaarsuvius flies down out of nowhere and disintegrates him. That solves that!
Web Original
- The good guys did this in the parody flash video "Potter Puppet Pals 2". Voldemort invades the school, and Harry and his friends just gun him down with uzis.
- In the Fan Fic "Dark Heart High", a shojo-style parody of evil overlords that deliberately seeks out tropes to adopt and cherish, a class for aspiring supervillains is asked what they'd do when they had their nemesis at their mercy. After listening to the litany of death traps and tortures of her classmates' answers, protagonist Yuki fumbles for a moment, then shrugs and says, "I'd just shoot him." Her teacher is quite impressed.
Western Animation
- Batman: Gotham Knights featured a comic-based episode where Joker, poring over a variety of odd tortures to inflict on Batman, flies into a rage after Harley Quinn matter-of-factly offers this question. Irony bites Harley in the ass after her own dramatic death trap nearly succeeds and Mr. J becomes angry at her for upstaging him. Even more ironically, the Joker then goes to shoot the restrained Batman anyway after he gets Harley out of the picture. By this point, of course, Batman has freed himself. The Joker is probably the canonical example of a Big Bad who will accept nothing less than a deathtrap ending for the hero, no matter how many times it's been tried and failed. Several years later, however, in an episode of Justice League (also part of the DCAU), the Joker advocates shooting Batman as soon as he's been restrained. It seems he has learnt his lesson (though Lex Luthor has not, and stops the Joker from pulling the trigger).
- Gloriously deconstructed on both sides of the ledger in the otherwise-forgettable movie Batman Forever. Riddler talks Two-Face out of just shooting him by essentially saying taking out a cultural hero will leave him with a guilt trip, so it's better to make him die after mental and physical suffering since no one mourns a pathetic shell of a man. Meanwhile, Batman talks Robin out of wanting to kill Two-Face by saying that it's very possible his anger won't go away by having Two-Face killed off. (Ironically, when Two-Face falls to his death, it's implied that Robin gets his revenge anyway.)
- The Scarecrow in Batman The Animated Series almost, almost avoids this trope. While Batman is busy tangling with a thug, the Scarecrow pulls out a pistol and shoots Batman in the back... with a dart full of his trademark fear gas. (Which Batman eventually gets over). Had he just brought a real gun, all his plans would have succeeded.
- Ex-actor-turned-shapeshifter Clayface makes the suggestion to Gorilla Grodd in another episode of Justice League after capturing the heroes, specifically mentioning he's acted in enough movies to catch on that the heroes always think of a way out, and it would be better to just kill the subdued heroes immediately instead of trying to bring about a dramatic climax. Gorilla Grodd convinces him to go along with the dramatic approach by offering him an important center-stage role in the executions. Of course, this is subverted by "Clayface" really being the shapeshifting hero J'onn J'onzz masquerading as the villain.
- Kim Possible: Señor Senior Jr. is the living embodiment of this trope. However, his boss (actually his father, Señor Senior, Sr.) never becomes angry, only exasperated that his son "doesn't get it".
- Señor Senior, Sr. is, of course, the ultimate Card Carrying Villain, who engages in villainous activity (and tropes) not for any sort of gain (he's already so ridiculously wealthy as to make that pointless) but out of boredom. When it was pointed out that his mansion resembled a supervillain's lair, Señor Senior, Sr. decided it would be fun to become one. He doesn't care at all about whether his schemes are successful, just about whether they're carried out in the "proper" villainous mannter.
- Shego, when she's in Deadpan Snarker mode, has her moments, too. For example, in The Movie "A Sitch in Time," when Drakken reveals his plot to go back in time and "crush Kim's spirit," preventing her from growing up to become a spy hero, Shego points out a much more permanent solution would be to just kill her past self.
- Shego has often espoused her frustration with Drakken's Genre Blindness since the first season: After being ordered to tie Kim and Ron to lightning rods meant to eventually fry them by way of an oncoming electrical storm, Shego remarks: "I prefer the 'direct approach', but you know Drakken...."
- averted in Star Wars The Clone Wars: After surrounding Obi-Wan with a small army of droids, General Grievous makes his inentions clear. "Kill Him!" Luckily, Obi-Wan timed his Crowing Momentof Awesome very well.
- Subverted by Katz in Courage The Cowardly Dog. Whenever his death traps fail to kill Courage, he attempts to simply strangle him.
- Subverted in, of all places, Rocky And Bullwinkle. Boris has just described his plan to distract Bullwinkle with a moose horn until a bomb can go off.
Natasha: And what about flying squirrel?
Boris: For him, I got a gun.
Natasha: Just plain gun?
Boris: Look, I can't be tricky all the time, I got other things to think about!
- Hilariously parodied on The Simpsons when Homer's new boss has captured a James Bond lookalike and imprisoned him in a DeathTrap in classic Bond Villain Stupidity. The Bond character escapes the trap, and is about to heroically save the day...until Homer tackles him, and a dozen Mooks come up and unglamorously machine-gun Bond to death.
- Many, MANY times in Transformers. However, Transformers are rather hard to kill—and even then, they tend to come back, especially if their initials are O.P.
- Happened a lot in Beast Wars. Whenever a character was held at gunpoint, SOMETHING would prevent them from being shot, usually an interruption or them talking their way out of it, or they'd wait too long, distract them, then dodge and commence A Team Firing. It got to the point that even though everyone had big guns or missile launchers, they weren't actually fearsome because no one actually DIED from being shot.
- In The Incredibles, Lucius (Frozone) tells Mr. Incredible a story about how a villain named Baron Von Ruthless had him on the ropes, them started monologuing long enough for Frozone to recover and defeat him.
- Tom and Jerry. Don't make a sandwhich, or put him in a gift box...Why Don't Ya Just Eat Him?
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