Your Head A Splode / Western Animation

Heads blowing up in Western Animation.

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• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius:
  • In "Sheen's Brain", Jimmy gives Sheen a brain gain helmet in order to boost his IQ. It backfires when it not only causes his brain to keep growing until it would eventually explode, he also develops psychic powers and a god complex.
  • In "Win, Lose, and Kaboom!", in which Jimmy and his friends are taken into an intergalactic game show, the gang faces against the Needleheads in the Fear Factor-style game "Can You Eat This?". For the Needleheads' turn, one is challenged to eat a banana cream pie, which causes his head to explode.
• Darwin's head pops like a balloon on three occasions on The Amazing World of Gumball.
• American Dad!:
  • In "Dope & Faith", Stan makes a new friend only to be told that he's an atheist, which heavily conflicts with Stan's ultra-Christian worldview (at the time). He calls the CIA to ask if the machine they're working on that projects an image of the Christian God into a person's brain is ready yet; clearly, it isn't, as the last test subject is shown to be sans head.
  • A pretty spectacularly gory one in the climax of "Cops & Roger" when Roger drops his elbow onto the head of the bad guy as he falls from the ceiling of a warehouse, shown four times with increasingly gruesome close-ups. The episode ends a scene later with Roger asking Stan if that guy was okay. He even says what everyone watching was thinking: "That was unexpected."
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
  • In "Kidney Car", after a particularly inane rant from Master Shake near the end of the episode, involving Carl's new car being sucked into a jet engine Shake had affixed on his car (which happened to be Carl's old car), Carl's head explodes.
    Meatwad: Why'd he do that?
    Master Shake: Why wouldn't he?
  • In "Gee Whiz", Carl is hit with a flaming arrow fired by Ted Nugent. Ted tells him "Don't move!", but Carl is distracted by the prospect of getting an autograph from "The Nooge" and does so anyway, leading to his head exploding. Then a rainbow comes out.
• In Avatar The Last Air Bender, having one's chi blocked at the wrong moment appears to be an (explosive) Achilles' Heel for combustionbenders.
  • First, there was the fate of Combustion Man in Avatar: The Last Airbender, after Sokka hit him in the light chakra with a boomerang.
  • Later, in the penultimate episode of Season 3 of The Legend of Korra, Suyin Beifong wraps her metal armor around P'Li's head just as the sniper is about to shoot Lin. Cut to Gory Discretion Shot...and then, cut back to the smoking crater where there'd been a 6'8" firebender moments before.
• A Running Gag in Big Mouth involves characters' heads exploding whenever they hear a surprising fact. Of course, this being a cartoon, their heads are back to normal in the next shot.
• This happens from time to time on Celebrity Deathmatch. They include Jim Carrey, George W. Bush, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Mark Hamill, Peter Mayhew, Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, and Paul Reiser.
• In Central Park, Season 1 "Garbage Ballet", because of her disastrous kiss with Brendan, Molly drew in her comic Fista-Puffs kissing Kite Boy and his face melting. She rewinds time to wipe her lips and kiss him again, only for his face to melt again, then she rewinds time again to blow him a kiss, only for his head to explode as she screams in terror.
• In the DC Animated Universe, robot heads tend to get exploded one way or another. In Justice League, Luthor reveals he has a kill switch for AMAZO—excuse me, "the android", and uses it in this fashion... but by this point, a simple head asplosion just makes him mad.
• Tex Avery often used exploding heads—always resulting in Bloodless Carnage as a form of Laser-Guided Karma—as a common gag in his MGM shorts. Some examples:
  • Spike's head explodes twice in the Droopy shorts Wags to Riches and Millionaire Droopy—the same two scenes in each.
    • Spike's head first explodes after masquerading as a press photographer. After rigging a camera with a mortar shell in place of film, he points it in Droopy's direction. The camera immediately swivels around in Spike's direction, then gets fired straight into his melon. After the photo is taken, Spike leaves with a blanket hovering over an empty space where his head used to be.
    • The second time comes up when Spike sets up a shotgun to fire when a bathroom door opens. Droopy enters and immediately leaves the bathroom, but nothing happens each time. When Spike opens it... yeah. The carnage is initially hidden by the bathroom wall, then is further obfuscated by a card conveniently located on an easily accessible table.
  • In The Chump Champ, Gorgeous Gorillawitz attempts to rig a potato-sack race by depositing a Cartoon Bomb into Droopy's sack. The bomb promptly defuses before Droopy enters the scene. After the race ends, which Droopy wins easily, the bomb detonates as soon as Gorillawitz peeks into the sack, and we see nothing but air as he looks toward the audience.
• Family Guy: A cutaway gag shows Peter's head exploding after he eats half a fudgsicle in one bite.
  • In another episode, a cutaway gag has customers' heads exploding after eating cupcakes that were baked by Peter. It also makes Peter a literal Lethal Chef.
  • In "Chap Stewie" Stewie puts a box containing Peter's Porn Stash out on the curb to be picked up by Goodwill. Chris opens it, then screams in joy and his head explodes. He's perfectly fine later, where he announces that it took him three years to look at all of it.
• Done in an episode of Fish Hooks, specifically it was Clamantha, after finding out that the girls knew about the party crashers. However, she is just a head so she blew herself up.
• Futurama:
  • "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" introduces Malfunctioning Eddie, a neurotic robot used-car salesman whose head would explode when startled or excited. He shows up later in "Insane in the Mainframe" as a robot asylum inmate, where his condition is brought under control with medication (he only experiences a tiny explosion on his shoulder).
  • In "A Tale of Two Santas", Leela manages to make Robot Santa's head explode via Logic Bomb, but another one pops right up, and he claims that he was built with "paradox-absorbing crumple zones".
  • In "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", Bender's head explodes after George Takei accidentally activates his Self-Destruct Mechanism.
  • In "The Farnsworth Parabox", one of the alternate universes that appears is one where the normally organic characters are robots. When Robot Fry asks Leela if she'll go out with him, she tells him "Access denied" and his head explodes.
• In the Gravity Falls episode "Scary-oke", Dipper, Mabel and Stan defeat a horde of zombies by singing a three-part karaoke chorus, causing the zombies' heads to explode.
• Variation on Jimmy Two-Shoes: Lucius gets so angry at Beezy that his head rockets off his shoulders and flies around.
• Invader Zim is once trapped in the fast food restaurant to which he was exiled prior to the first episode, and all exits are programmed to make him swell up and explode if he tries to leave. Every time he even thought about escaping, a small child would shout, "He's gonna 'splode, momma!"
  • Also happens to Gir in "Bad, Bad, Rubber Piggy", after spotting a flaw in Zim's plot to assassinate Dib via Time Travel.
    Gir: Wait... if you destroy Dib in the past, then he won't ever be your enemy. Then you wouldn't have to send the robot back to destroy him, and then he WILL be your enemy, so then you WILL have to send a robot BACK... *head explodes*
• In the Kaeloo episode "Let's Play Spies", Bad Kaeloo gives a Bear Hug to Stumpy, Quack Quack and Mr. Cat. She squeezes too hard and their heads explode, which is somehow fixed by bandages.
  • In another episode, Mr. Cat has an allergic reaction, and as a result, his head swells up and explodes offscreen.
• At least in one episode of Pepper Ann, the main character's head explodes briefly into a mushroom cloud.
• In an episode of Men in Black: The Series, some tiny aliens give one of their frisbee-sized ships to pawnshop owner Jack Jeebs in exchange for the location of MIB headquarters. When the ship accidentally ends up Jeebs' mouth, Agent K threatens to activate its self-destruct mechanism if he doesn't reveal the location of the aliens. When Jeebs refuses to comply, K activates the mechanism, invoking for trope. This is more of an Amusing Injury for Jeebs, as he's an alien with the ability to regrow his entire head, and is outraged that K destroyed his recently obtained merchandise.
  Jeebs: You broke it, you bought it!
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Summer Belongs to You", Isabella tries to get Phineas to notice her for most of the time they're in Paris. After he makes a statement about Candace and Jeremy being together, Isabella's head explodes in frustration (which turns out to be a Daydream Surprise).
• In the Regular Show episode "The Last LaserDisc Player", when the LaserDisc guardian reveals its true form, it creates a high-decibel noise that causes one of the members of the VHS society to have his head explode while he's entranced by LaserDisc's 44.1 kilohertz sample rate.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show episode "Ren's Brain" ends with every single person's head exploding, blowing up Earth in the process. "And thus endeth the Republican Party as we know it," says the narrator.
• Robot Chicken:
  • In the episode "Maurice Was Caught", little orphan Annie is given Mars for her sweet sixteen party, and upon visiting it, trips and loses her spacesuit helmet. Cue Explosive Decompression of her head.
  • During another episode, several math students' heads exploded after being taught that the imaginary number i was the square root of -1.
    "I don't get it! ... Oh, now I—(boom)"
  • In one sketch, Batman sentences The Joker to death row and he's executed via electric chair. When his face has been burnt away and he appears to be dead, his body suddenly spasms and his head explodes.
  • In a Harry Potter sketch, Ron Weasley mixes a potion wrongly and drinks it. After a brief Oh, Crap!, his teeth quadruple in size and shoot out like bullets and his head explodes.
• One early episode of Rocko's Modern Life involves Rocko buying groceries at a very deep discount. The only shopping cart available for him is missing some wheels. The grinding sound it makes is so annoying, one shopper pulls his ears so hard in frustration that his head pops like a balloon.
• In Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, human psychic Carl goes up against an alien "brain bug" and, in the battle of minds, the brain bug follows this trope quite messily, as it is essentially a large mobile brain. Carl later has the obligatory Psychic Nosebleed.
• The Simpsons:
  • A THX sound test in one episode makes one unlucky moviegoer's head pop.
  • In "And Maggie Makes Three", when Homer is telling the story of Maggie, Bart takes over and Homer's head explodes after being told he was going to have another child.
  • According to "Lisa's Wedding", aired in 1995, by 2010 there will be robots that look completely human with one notable flaw; when they cry, their heads spark, explode and melt.
  • In "Treehouse of Horror X", Homer and Bart toss themselves out of the airlock from a spaceship filled with C-list actors, comedians, and has-been celebrities (it was already headed for the Sun, but staying even one more minute was so much worse). While in the vacuum of space, their heads swell up, they sigh in their few last moments of blissful silence, and their heads go "pop!" off-screen.
  • In "Thank God it's Doomsday", when Homer is the only one on Earth to make it into heaven after correctly predicting the apocalypse, an angel tells him that he can have anything he wants, instantly. Homer, being Homer, silently wishes for the angel's head to explode. It does and (Homer) laughs hysterically while it grows back. The angel then punishes Homer by making him live next to the kiddie pool for all eternity.
• Samurai Jack: The robot Scaramouche ended up having his head blown off by Aku, after Aku was misinformed by Scaramouche with an outdated piece of information that Jack had lost his sword.
• Towards the end of the Sonic Boom episode "Let's Play Musical Friends", when Orbot and Cubot confront Nominatus, the episode's Big Bad, they play a game of Rock, Donut, Thursday to determine who gets to fight him. Nominatus is baffled at the stupidity of the game, and further observation confuses him to the point where his head explodes from logical errors.
• South Park:
  • Kenny's death at the Plane'arium in "Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods".
  • A juror's head explodes after hearing a complement to the Chewbacca Defense in "Chef Aid".
  • The future guns in "Go God Go" fire a dart into the target that, after a few seconds, causes their head to explode.
  • Tay Zonday's head explodes after the "Dramatic Chipmunk" stares him down in "Canada on Strike". Complete with dramatic music and everything. He manages to blow the critter's head off with his gun before he croaks.
  • Happens to Glenn in "Night of the Living Homeless" thanks to Randy's animosity towards destitute people.
  • Cartman's head explodes in "Medicinal Fried Chicken" after he finds out that KFC has been banned from Colorado. (He gets better, though.)
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Fools in April", Squidward's head explodes while trying to say sorry to SpongeBob.
  • A variant in "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy II": when the Atomic Flounder is offended by SpongeBob suggesting that he could go back to villainy at any time, he unintentionally breathes radiation on Barnacle Boy's face. Barnacle Boy's head glows red before exploding into a miniature mushroom cloud, leaving it a burnt husk.
  • In "Pranks a Lot", Patrick falls victim to the exploding gum prank. Of course, only Patrick could fall for a prank while knowing he just entered a store that sells prank items.
  • In "Sing a Song of Patrick", a guy's head explodes from listening to Patrick's horrible song being played off the radio station's antenna. Another guy nearby who didn't suffer the same fate calls him lucky.
• In Teen Titans (2003), Plasmus is pretty much a giant head on legs when Raven makes him explode, so while it's not technically bloody it's still messy, graphic and complete with gunky splatters right back in Raven's face.
• In one Tom and Jerry cartoon, Jerry sticks an air hose in Tom's mouth and it swells to massive size, then the duckling Little Quacker pops his head with a pin. Tom recovers.
• In one episode of Unikitty!, Dr. Fox uses a shuttle to train Unikitty and Puppycorn for space travel, during which Unikitty and Puppycorn's heads inflate and explode.
• At the end of the Wander over Yonder episode "The Good Bad Guy", Hater's head explodes when Major Threat makes a remark heavily implying that Tumbleweed, the guy who inspired his Heel–Face Turn, really is the same person as Wander.

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