Trash the Set

"You have the Bridge... what's left of it."

— Star Trek: Voyager, "Year of Hell"

Want a big spectacular finale? Want to build a new set? Why not solve both your problems at the same time and trash the set?

Even animators are tempted to do this if the background is elaborate enough. May lead to a Rebuilt Set.

Not to be confused with Die, Chair, Die! or Tantrum Throwing. Related to Proscenium Reveal and On a Soundstage All Along (please make sure your examples relating to breaking the fourth wall in this way are on those trope pages). Sometimes it's an indication that Nothing Is the Same Anymore. For action shows, it can be caused by a case of All Your Base Are Belong to Us or Storming the Castle. If this is used in terms of driving up the production/story value, then it may be a case of a Finale Production Upgrade. A justified case of this trope happens in the initial stages of a Home and Garden show, because of the renovations.

As this is an Ending Trope, beware of spoilers.

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Examples:

• Live-Action TV

Advertising

• The Energizer Bunny has a habit of doing this every now and again as he marches through commercials, often shown as knocking down props, or in one instance, dragging an entire tablecloth full of food and wine underneath him.
  • One comercial parodying long-distance services has a guy talking to his family like "They're in the next room". Cue the bunny marching in to show that it is very much the case.
• In the FACT Anti-Piracy PIF "The Pirates are out to get you," a creepy-looking blacksmith destroys several videotapes, compact discs, and several other items such as discs, and other media with his branding iron while the narrator explains how piracy affects media.
• Jasper is shown to do this in the Steven Universe Dove Self-Esteem commercial.
• The heroin version of the "This Is Your Brain On Drugs" Public Service Announcement.

Anime & Manga

• Ah! My Goddess's "Lord of Terror" arc was put right at the end of the anime's first season, probably just so it could use this trope.
• Blood-C ended with the entire town destroyed and all of the inhabitants with the exception of Fumito, Yuka and Saya slaughtered.
• Cowboy Bebop ended with the Bebop sustaining heavy damage.
• Digimon Adventure pulls this off in the finale of season 01. With the entire Digital World taking the role of the "set".
• Dragon Ball saw the World Tournament arena's ring (and a decent amount of the ground underneath) neatly (as in nothing else was touched) destroyed by Tien's kikouhen during the second Tournament arc (this was intentional; he was trying to force a conclusion by leaving no safe haven). The World Tournament arena (and most of Papaya Island) was destroyed by the end of the Piccolo Jr. arc. The Buu arc saw Kami's lookout get demolished during Gotenks and Super Buu's fight, but that was quickly restored along with the rest of the Earth not long after.
  • At the end of the Cell Saga, King Kai's planet is blown up after being a regular fixture in the series since the Saiyan Saga. Although it's somehow back in Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods.
• GaoGaiGar's second half kicked off with the Bay Tower Base being utterly totaled, allowing them to move up to the Orbit Base. The finale of FINAL cheerfully deals outrageous property damage damage to copies of various Earth landmarks, as well as sacrificing the three Cool Ships to the Goldion Crusher.
• In the final story arc of Gintama known as the Silver Soul Arc, it begins with the Terminal blown up by the Altana Liberation Army and then the destruction of the Yorozuya's home.
• Of all of the major Gundam battleships, only White Base, Mother Vanguard, Reinforce Jr. and the Ptolemious are actively destroyed.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, The Hammerhead goes up in flames after the first barrage of rail gun fire, before Naze takes it on a suicide run and crashes the whole ship into an Arianrod battleship.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, Asticassia School of Technology is completely wrecked when Norea goes on a rampage upon learning of the riots caused by Prospecta's False Flag Operation, followed by Elon #5 going on one once Norea is killed.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom, after surviving two wars, the Archangel is finally shot down, its bridge destroyed and its hull nuked when the Foundation reveals its true colors
• After Yoshimori spends most of Kekkaishi protecting his high school/the Karasumori site his mother arrives to move Lord Karasumori to another location, resulting in the school collapsing.
• Kill la Kill: Honnouji Academy is routinely smashed whenever major characters do battle there, but never more so than Episode 12.
  • The same happens to Osaka in Episode 14, carried even further in Episode 15 when Satsuki and Ryuko fight it out.
    • In the last two episodes, The Nudist Sun is beached, and Honnouji Academy takes a hell of a beating in the final battle with Ragyo. And then finally, the WHOLE island (Honnouji Academy and the Nudist Sun included) is completely cut in half and sinks beneath the sea not too long after.
• In the Grand Finale of The Littl' Bits, the Bits' village is destroyed by an earthquake.
• Lucky Star: Minoru's endless abuse from his partner led to him trashing the Show Within a Show's set.
• My Hero Academia: The "Final War" Arc sees the UA campus completely torn apart by a superhero battle against All For One. And only by All For One.
• In Naruto's Pain Arc, just before the hero arrives to fight Pain, Pain uses his gravity powers to flatten the Hidden Leaf Village and turn it into a crater.
• One Piece: The Going Merry, which had been the Straw Hats ship for a good chunk of the series is rendered unfit to sail when they reach Water 7. After sitting out most of the arc, it comes back into play one more time to save its beloved crew before the damaged keel splits it in half. Forcing Luffy and the crew to give it a Viking Funeral in one of the series saddest moments.
• Ranma ½ ended with the characters trying to prevent the destruction (via draining) of Jusenkyo. They failed. Then they destroyed it worse by flooding it (i.e., mixing up all the curses.)
• Shiki ended with the whole village burned down while the survivors escape after defeating the Shiki.
• Tenchi's old house in Tenchi Muyo! is destroyed at the end of the seventh OVA episode. The OVA series gets a brand new setting while it's spinoffs, Tenchi Universe and Tenchi in Tokyo, end up reusing it.

Comic Books

• Superman had a storyline called "The Battle For Metropolis" which concluded with Action Comics #700, kicking off "The Fall of Metropolis" by leveling the entire city by missiles. It stayed destroyed for a few months until after Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!.
• Batman kicked off the massive Batman: No Man's Land storyline by leveling Gotham City by an earthquake. Nothing was spared, not even Wayne Manor and the Batcave.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
  • The Endgame storyline (#47 to 50) had Robotnik fire a Doomsday Device over Knothole Village, seemingly erasing it and everyone there. Subverted when it was revealed that Snively hacked the weapon so it only transports the village into a pocket dimension.
  • Played straight in #175, when Eggman launches an all-out assault over Knothole Kingdom while he fights (and defeats) Sonic. After Sonic and his friends fight back, everyone was located to a new home in the form of New Mobotropolis.
  • In between those times, Mobotropolis/Robotropolis was the home to both the Freedom Fighters and Robotnik/Eggman depending on the plot. It was finally destroyed by the G.U.N's nuclear missile strike and its radioactive contents were trapped in an active shield. Up until #175, Knothole became the new set for the heroes.
• Justice League of America has the Watchtower get destroyed regularly every time the team disbands.
• Hal Jordan's home town, Coast City, was destroyed during the Death And Return Of Superman story arc. This in turn resulted in Hal getting possessed by Parallax and destroying the Green Lantern Corps. Both were eventually restored down the line.
• King Smurf's castle in The Smurfs comic book story "King Smurf" gets destroyed near the end of the story by a bomb. In the Animated Adaptation, because of the addition of the Big Dam Plot, it was destroyed by a deluge of water from the dam.
  • The Smurf Village getaway resort is completely trashed by beavers at the end of "Bathing Smurfs".
  • The Smurf Forest nearly gets destroyed by a fire in "The Wild Smurf", which exposes the way to the Smurf Village to Gargamel, requiring the Smurfs to keep themselves hidden until the forest fully regrows.
• Scooby Apocalypse: In Issue #34, the Henry Hudson Mall — which had served as the main setting of the back half of the series, as the gang set up a safe haven for survivors of the monster apocalypse there — is attacked by a monster horde led by the Nanite King. This assault eventually causes enough damage that the entire building ends up collapsing.
• The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip Ground Zero has the Seventh Doctor's TARDIS control room exploding violently and partially disintegrating as the Doctor attempts to break through into the otherworldly realm of the Lobri, making way for the redesigned interior that would appear in the Doctor Who TV movie.
• Locke & Key: During the climax of the final arc, the fight with Dodge's shadow minions causes the Keyhouse to catch on fire, eventually causing the whole thing to burn down.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW):
  • In Issue #23, Restoration HQ is compromised by the Zombot horde. Later on, after the Metal Virus is cured, we see that the facility was completely wrecked, causing the Restoration to abandon it and build a new one.
  • In Issue #42, the new Restoration HQ is attacked by the Deadly Six, who wreck everything in their path.
  • Eggperial City, Eggman's home base after the Metal Virus Saga, is gradually destroyed by a combination of Sonic's team attacking it, Shadow's Chaos Control reacting with the fake Chaos Emeralds that cause them to grow to out of control giant sizes, and Eggman going with his backup plan, turning the city's control tower into battle mode. After the heroes take out the tower, Shadow uses Chaos Control again and warps what's left of the city into space, where it explodes into oblivion.

Fan Works

• In "Defense" from The Reluctant Father Universe, Roxas utterly annihilates the outdoor courtroom in Wonderland in defense of Xion.
• In "How Things Smurf" from Raven Child's The Smurfette Village series, Hefty and Toughette wreck everything in Gargamel's house as payback for unleashing the deadly "Blue Plague" on their fellow Smurfs and Smurfettes. The surviving Smurfs also set fire to the entire Smurf Village to prevent the disease from spreading.
• The Immortal Game, being a War Fic, sees a lot of this. Ponyville is smashed up during two separate battles over the course of the story (first against Nihilus near the beginning, and then Terra close to the end), Cloudsdale is heavily damaged by Nihilus's duel with Luna, Nihilus's Ominous Floating Castle ends up disintegrating after her defeat, and during the Final Battle, much of the Everfree is burned down, while Canterlot is utterly and completely demolished by Twilight's duel with Titan.
• Book 5: Legends, features the destruction of Air Temple Island in the finale, a casualty of a very intense Avatar duel.
• In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf novel, Empath wrecks his entire house in anger toward his fellow Smurfs, then sets it on fire to distract the Smurfs from finding out until later on that he is running away and taking Baby Smurf with him.
• Code Prime:
  • This happens to Ashford Academy in R1 when the campus is damaged during the Black Rebellion in a fight between Insecticons and the Autobots and their allies.
  • In R2, the Akito arc ends with the total destruction of Castle Weisswolf after the Autobots and Black Knights evacuate it and then blow it up to destroy the invading Decepticon and Euro-Britannian soldiers.
• In Tales of Karmic Lies Aftermath, Nooroo trashes Gabriel Agreste's old office.
• Manehattan's Lone Guardian sees the Diarchs Zoological Institute, where Leviathan was carrying out an investigation, utterly torched by Trifecta in his attempt to kill her. While the locals are able to keep the blaze from going out of control, enough damage is done that the facility is afterwards slated for demolition.

Films — Animation

• Calling All Engines: The original Tidmouth Sheds seen up to now in Thomas & Friends is demolished, and rebuilt at the end with an extra berth for Emily.
• In Kung Fu Panda 3, as part of his rampage/campaign against Oogway's memory, Kai destroys the Jade Palace, which had served throughout the trilogy as both the home for Po and the Furious Five and the center for all Kung Fu knowledge. To deliberately add some irony to it, Kai did it using the memorial statue of Oogway as a bolo.
• Subverted in The Simpsons Movie. The Simpsons' house, as well as most of the town, are destroyed but they start to rebuild them at the end and everything's back to normal in the season premiere. Except for the next season's premiere, all the town scenes of Springfield in the opening show the townspeople rebuilding and the couch gag shows the family sitting in a not-yet-finished house.
• In The Little Mermaid (1989), Triton destroys Ariel's grotto of human treasures after finding out about her rescue of Eric. Had he known what events would follow, he would not have done so.
• In My Little Pony: The Movie (2017)'s climactic battle, Canterlot Castle gets wrecked by the Storm King's out-of-control weather magic. Luckily, the damage is repaired afterwards.
• Teen Titans Go! To the Movies: Shortly after Slade reveals himself, he blows up Titans Tower to prove he's not messing around. The episode "Tower Renovation" is dedicated to the Titans rebuilding the Tower... and then destroying it again.

Films — Live-Action

• "You Give A little Love" at the end of Bugsy Malone is 100% the kids splurging the set. It was done in one take and at the very end of production.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek: Generations, the Enterprise-D was destroyed for the benefit of a newer, more cinematic version, better fitted for Hollywood action and widescreen format. While the destroyed model was custom-built, the original bridge set did get blown up for real.
  • A more subtle example from the last episode of the series. The final scene is the crew playing poker, joined by Picard for the first time ever, which features an overhead shot accomplished by cutting the ceiling out of the set.
  • Most of Star Trek: The Motion Picture's bridge set was trashed in the second movie and then blown up in the third. A part of it that was relatively undamaged was repaired and repainted for a single scene in the fourth movie before an all-new set was built for the fifth. Then that set got largely blown up in the sixth movie. However, expecting much else from the first series that comes to mind when people think of Explosive Instrumentation would be somewhat naive.
    • The TMP bridge got trashed a lot over the years. First, it was trashed heavily as both the Enterprise and Reliant bridges in The Wrath of Khan, then it served as the already-trashed bridges of the Stargazer, Hathaway, and Enterprise-C in various TNG episodes. In between, it served as the more pristine bridges of the Grissom (third film), Saratoga and Yorktown (fourth film), and the Bozeman (TNG: "Cause and Effect"), as well as the Enterprise-D's battle bridge, a courtroom, a surgical suite, Data's cybernetics lab, and various other locales (which were sometimes trashed). The set got trashed once more for Generations as the Amargosa Observatory's control room.
    • The then-new Enterprise-A set suffered from an accidental trashing when after filming the bridge scenes for The Final Frontier was completed, the set was stored outside (as the sound stage was needed for other sets for the film), and was damaged by the elements. As a result, the bridge had to be extensively rebuilt for The Undiscovered Country (and then be modified to serve as the Excelsior bridge for that film).
  • The corridor sets underwent several changes in their lifetime. Originally built for TMP, the curved corridors were rebuilt for TNG to remove the angled bulkheads, though the straight corridors remained intact; they were significantly rebuilt for Voyager immediately after Generations; and they were finally obliterated after Voyager wrapped to build the new NX-01 sets from scratch for Enterprise.
• During the temple scene in Jesus Christ Superstar, Ted Neeley was so thorough in breaking the props on set that they could only shoot one take.
• Played for Laughs as part of one of cinema's greatest fourth wall breaks in Blazing Saddles, where the entire town of Rock Ridge trashes a set replica of itself in a massive brawl, (literally) breaks into another set, trashes the Commissarry in a pie fight, then spills out of the Warner Bros. film lot into the streets of Hollywood, still trashing the set.
  HEDLEY Lamarr: Get me out of this picture!
• In Conan the Barbarian (1982), Conan torches the temple that had housed Thulsa Doom's cult after killing Thulsa Doom. This was very much for real; they actually did burn down the set, though the flaming brazier that Arnold used didn't land in the throne room, but instead bounced off the balcony and into the rest of the set.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had the wooden bridge during the epic Civil War battle scene. It was built with the intent of it being blown up in a climax of a scene, so director Sergio Leone knew they had to do it in one take. Thanks to meticulous planning, the filming went beautifully, providing one of the most climactic scenes in the film.
• The chalet in the ending of Killers on Wheels, due to being the target of a band of ruthless biker punks. For the entire duration of the film, the vacation villa gets planks ripped off from it's walls, have all it's windows smashed, set on fire via flung torches through it's sides, all the doors broken down, and in the finale it gets a tractor driven through it's front doors. The film ends with a lingering shot of the wrecked villa's interiors, filled with a dozen corpses including those of the two villains, with the protagonist and his shell-shocked wife in the middle of all that mess.
• During the filming of Titanic, they built a ship in a large tank of water... and then sank it. There's a reason it was among the most expensive movies ever made.
• In Batman Forever, the Riddler sneaks into the Wayne Manor, bombs the Batcave, and destroys most of Bruce's arsenal, then trashes the Batmobile. The following sequel introduces a remodeled Batcave and newer Batmobile.
• Wayne Manor burns down in Batman Begins. Though the mansion used for outside shots was not burnt, as it was an actual home of royalty. The film crew did, however, blow up Gotham General Hospital for real in The Dark Knight (or, rather, the exterior, which was an abandoned candy factory).
• In John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), the Norwegian camp scenes were actually the charred remains of the American site from the end of the film. Rather than go to the expense of building and burning down another camp, Carpenter re-used the destroyed American camp.
• Gone with the Wind will likely never be topped for this trope. Nowadays, a burning Atlanta would be CGI, but Golden Age Hollywood torched sets for real. They were scheduled for demolition anyway. One of the burning walls (the one that almost collapses on Rhett and Scarlett's wagon driving by) was the paper-mache wall from the original 1933 King Kong film.
• The EPIC set trashing in the gas station scene in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
• Hard Boiled: The entire movie is a series of Trash The Sets. First the tea house, then the warehouse, then a goddamn hospital explodes. The teahouse in the opening was slated for demolition around the time the movie was made, and John Woo got permission to use the teahouse for the shootout in question.
• The same thing with the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead (1968). The cast and crew were given permission to do whatever they wanted to the house since it was marked for demolition. After the film wrapped, the house was indeed torn down.
• The White house in Carrie (1976) was also marked for demolition, and the shots of the house falling apart at the end are real. However, the exterior scene of the house being stoned was cut because the stones looked like raindrops on film.
• Dead Snow does this to the cabin. The scene where it burns down was supposed to be in the film but had to be cut due to being too bright and unclear. The charred remains of the building remain used, however.
• The Decline: The final fight between the remaining characters thoroughly trashes the survivalist camp set, including burning the prop greenhouse.
• Happens in Alice Cooper's Good to See You Again Alice Cooper, when he gets sick of pretending to be Frank Sinatra. The rest of the band was already sick of it, and they joined in.
• Gangs of New York did this for the Draft Riot scene, which was a pity if you think about it, they don't often make such detailed and elaborate sets for movies these days.
• Godzilla vs. Hedorah has plenty of sequences in which sets (both miniatures and interiors) are flooded by Hedorah's chemicals, thoroughly trashing them. This culminates in a sequence where the Godzilla stunt suit for the film, specifically the one that had made its debut in Invasion of Astro-Monster as the main suit, was completely doused in the mixture for a sequence in which Hedorah tries to drown Godzilla in a pit. The suit was hauled out once the scene was done and hosed down, but by then years of use and abuse had finally taken its toll, and so the suit was given a well-deserved retirement.
• The forest in which George Lucas filmed the Endor sequences for Return of the Jedi was doomed anyway because the government wanted to build a new highway or a mall or something like that in its place. So the film crew used real explosives for the pyro-effects in the final battle which burned and shredded real wood.
• Harry Potter:
  • The Ministry of Magic gets trashed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - led to a Rebuilt Set after the seventh book came out and more scenes at the Ministry were needed.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hogwarts itself takes major battle damage from Voldemort and the Death Eaters and parts of the castle (the set of which had been standing for a decade) are nothing more than a ruin at the end. The difficult part was that destroying the sets outright would only reveal that the "stone" walls are really plywood with a plaster skin. Therefore, the damage to Hogwarts had to be pre-designed by the art department, which they did by using ruined masonry from World War II as reference.
• The climax of Lethal Weapon 3 takes place at an actual failed real estate development, which the producers had permission to basically demolish.
• The climax of Buster Keaton's The General features an actual train attempting to cross an actual burning bridge and subsequently falling into an actual river. The resulting wreckage became a minor tourist attraction until World War II when the train was salvaged for scrap metal.
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie makes good use of the command center set, destroying it "early" and running the same footage backwards to "fix" it for the final scenes.
• Good Burger makes good use of Mondo Burger in the climax as Ed uses some sort of explosive chemical in the burgers, making them big and explosive destroying the joint.
• Early in the John Frankenheimer film The Train, a French rail yard is attacked in an Allied air raid. The yard was a real SNCF (French State Railways) facility which was to be closed down, so the production was able to fill it with scrappable rolling stock and engines, bury dynamite all over the site, and blast buildings and all in one long unrepeatable sequence.
• Rock 'n' Roll High School was filmed at the defunct Mount Carmel High School, which had closed a few years before. This gave them the latitude to trash the school building and blow it up at the end.
• The reason the 1960 movie The Last Voyage has such realistic effects of the cruise ship sinking is simple: the producers really did sink a ship.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai: the directors spent months and hundreds of man-hours engineering and building the eponymous bridge. Needless to say, the final scene required perfect acting and camera work...
• At the end of RoboCop 3, the OCP building in Detroit is blown up via a massive explosion, as a way to symbolize the end of the film trilogy (and the corporation's rule).
• In Apocalypse Now, footage of the destruction of Kurtz's jungle outpost via pyrotechnics is shown at the end of the director's cut of the movie. Some have interpreted this as the aerial bombing Willard ordered in earlier.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • In Iron Man, Tony's Malibu house suffered some damage from his suit testing. In Iron Man 2, it's destructively remodeled during his fight with Rhodes, and subsequently repurposed into housing a prismatic accelerator. It's really not much of a house anymore. Probably why he's living in New York in The Avengers. Iron Man 3 opens with Tony's "trophy room" of old suits exploding, and his entire Big Fancy House getting blasted into the sea as a warning from Extremus. Turns out he has more suits stored in a safe room which he uses in the finale... and he blows up all of them too.
  • During a featurette about Avengers: Age of Ultron, one of the effects people states the scene where Ultron awakens at Stark Tower and attacks the Avengers was done because "if you build a set this big and don't destroy it, you're doing something wrong!"
  • At the climax of Avengers: Endgame, Thanos from 2014 launches an attack on the New Avengers facility, the initial strike of which completely obliterates it.
• The climax of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York involves Kevin and burglars Harry and Marv completely wrecking Kevin's uncle's house.
• The Cyberdyne Systems building in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was an office building that was scheduled for demolition, allowing the crew to use plenty of real explosives in it.
• In the Laurel and Hardy film Big Business, the Christmas tree-selling duo trash a grumpy customer's house while he destroys their truck in return.
• In Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey II destroys every single prop in the flower shop one at a time until the whole place is completely wrecked, before collapsing the ceiling and destroying it all.
• Fyodor in The Saddest Music in the World trashes his studio towards the end out of frustration of being a Cuckold.
• This isn't always an ending trope. Any number of Lifetime Movies of the Week^note And other movies with similar production values, for that matter. can (but not always) have the main female character wreck everything in her house out of frustration, anger, or sadness (or even all of the above) over whatever situation is at the center of the movie, whether it's the entire plot or just one part of it.
• Team America: World Police ended practically every scene this way, blowing up nearly every location in the film. Paris, most of what remains of Ancient Egypt, the Panama Canal, Mount Rushmore, and North Korea all get destroyed over the course of the film, all with practical effects.
• In Anne Of Green Gables The Continuing Story, the eponymous house is damaged by a fire, which occurred at the real Green Gables in 1997.
• The elaborate library set built for The Name of the Rose was burnt for the final scenes. Four cameras had been set to shoot the fire, but only one started, much to the director's discontent, resulting in less spectacular shots than planned.
• One of the first things that happens in A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong is Jacob Marley's coffin shattering. The set only gets more wrecked from there.
• Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS was filmed on the former set of Hogan's Heroes, which got destroyed in the final act. Apparently, the film crew was allowed to do this as the set was supposed to be destroyed anyway; it was discovered to be cheaper just to do it this way rather than hiring actual demolitionists.
• Into the Forest: The forest home that serves as the set for almost the entire film is set ablaze in the end.
• A Ghost Story: Most of the film takes place in a small suburban house, which is destroyed toward the end of the film. The production was allowed to film in the house because it was about to be torn down, and they simply filmed the demolition.
• Gorilla, Interrupted: This no-budget amateur film was shot in a cast member's deceased grandmother's house shortly before it was to be put on the market. In a late scene, the cast trashes virtually every object in the house because it all had to be cleared out anyway. Even still, the actor got in trouble with his family for leaving the mess behind.
• The Blues Brothers: The mall car chase sequence was shot at the then-recently closed Dixie Square Mall, which was made up with fake storefronts for filming. The mall stood abandoned and thoroughly trashed until 2012.
• The X-Men Film Series had a few, even if not always at the end of the movie. The Grey house and Alcatraz in X-Men: The Last Stand, the Team X headquarters in X-Men: First Class, the outside of the White House (which gets a whole stadium surrounding it!) in X-Men: Days of Future Past, the X-Mansion in X-Men: Apocalypse...
• Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood: One of the two houses that this film is set in explodes during the climax, with the actual set being blown up during the filming.
• The last film in the original trilogy (the series would see a spinoff, Bad Grandpa, in 2013, but the series itself would ultimately be in Development Hell for 12 years), Jackass 3D ends with Johnny Knoxville setting off explosives that destroy the entire set they're on before flooding everyone out of it with a massive tidal wave rushing through the set.
• The climax of Leo the Last has Leo's poor neighbours firing rocket launchers into his mansion, with his approval. The mansion burns for a while and then dramatically collapses, leaving only a heap of smouldering wreckage, which Leo contemplates during the end credits.
• Getting Straight ends with student protestors storming the school and ripping the rooms apart, throwing paper and furniture everywhere.
• John Wick: Chapter 4: Near the beginning of the movie, the Marquis punishes Winston for his aid of Wick in the previous movies by blowing up the New York Continental, which has been a mainstay of the series since the first entry.
• Part of the filming for Crime Story was done in Kowloon Walled City after it was evacuated, just before its demolition. Some of the explosions in the movie are from that demolition. This technically makes that demolition one of the biggest movie-related demolitions of all time, though the filming only took advantage of an event that was happening anyway.

Literature

• The Belgariad: Castle of Wizardry: When Polgara finds out that Garion, Belgarath, and Silk had up and left in the night, leaving her behind to handle things in Riva, she is so enraged that she takes out her sorcery-enhanced frustration on the luxurious suite set aside for her thousands of years ago. Her fury was loud but very meticulous: blowing up teacups one at a time, then the saucers they sat on, then the table they sat on. When Ce'Nedra came to try to calm her down, Polgara gave her the letter Garion (recently betrothed to Ce'Nedra) wrote explaining what he was doing.^Why?He was actually heading off to fight Torak. She read the note and, believing everyone will take this as a thinly-veiled jilting, strode to her room and decided to trash it, too, "screaming all the while like a Camaar fishwife."
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe: The final Eighth Doctor novel, Lance Parkin's The Gallifrey Chronicles, had the "steampunk" TARDIS console room destroyed by a nuclear bomb that the Doctor materialised the TARDIS around to save other people, so that the spin-off readers had an explanation of why the set would look different in the revived TV show.
• The Dresden Files: As part of the "Holy Shit!" Quotient of Wham Episode Changes, this happens twice — first, the Red Court blows up Harry's office, and then later they burn down his apartment building.
• In Desecration in the Left Behind series, the Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia fulfills the Scriptural prophecy of setting up "the abomination of desolation" when he sacrifices a pig in the Jewish temple during the midway point of the Tribulation. In Kingdom Come, God destroys the desecrated temple with a lightning bolt at the beginning of the Millennium and builds a new one resembling its description in the book of Ezekiel in its place.
  • And on a more global scale, the entire earth at the end of Kingdom Come is destroyed and then replaced by a whole new earth on which the New Jerusalem that comes down from heaven is placed.
• The Scholomance: Not only does the end of The Last Graduate involve sundering the titular Wizarding School's only real connection with Earth and casting it off into the Void Between the Worlds, but when the artificers run low on material for thier part of the project to bait enough malefectra into the Boarding School of Horrors that the simultanious evacuation of students is not a death sentence for the underclassmen the student body guts large sections of the building for scrap with absolute glee.
• The climax of Sophie's World, as the Major grows tired/annoyed at the novel he's writing — which happens to be the world the main characters live in — and starts making stuff up and breaking the world down while Sophie and Alberto attempt to escape from it. They both find his edits to be in extremely poor taste.
• In-Universe example in Moving Pictures, when Silverfish suggests that they can recoup the money they're spending on the huge Blown Away set over three or four pictures, and Dibbler says he obviously hasn't read the ending.

Music

• Many Music Videos end with the band trashing their instruments and/or the set. So do many concerts.
  • The end of the literal video version of The Beatles' "Penny Lane" lampshades this with the line "Trash the set and end the video."
  • Reportedly, the set-trashing of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" happened due to the (volunteer) cast getting a bit sick of filming, as opposed to being scripted.
• The video for Billy Joel's "She's Right On Time" ends with Billy and his date watching as the festively-decorated apartment turns into carnage around them. (There may or may not be some Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex after the video ends.)
  • Joel did this again several years later in the video for "We Didn't Start The Fire". The video starts as a family home circa 1949 and advances in a montage through the late 1980s; interleaved with shots of Joel sitting on the set as it and its surroundings burn in a fire.
• Nearly the entire video of Family Force 5's BZRK. Nothing in the room stands a chance.
• Overlaps with Film and Theater in the case of Pink Floyd's The Wall, in which Pink trashes the hotel room on the album. This is reproduced in the 1982 movie, when Bob Geldof trashes a hotel-room set, and in the 1990 Berlin Wall event, where Roger Waters breaks windows in a specially-built hotel room set in the upper-left-hand corner of the wall.
  • Not to mention the end of the show, where the gigantic Wall set itself is torn down!
• In the music video for Quarterflash's Harden My Heart, the set is driven through by a bulldozer and the crushed ruins ignited by a person with a flamethrower.
• Twisted Sister was the last attraction in a club about to be closed down in 1980, and once the audience heard it from the musicians, they started to tear the place down. Twisted Sister subsequently were hired for three more of those "demolition concerts", including in the 2001 Odyssey club where Saturday Night Fever was filmed.

Mythology and Religion

• In The Bible, the Babylonians sack Jerusalem and destroy the Temple after the reign of King Zedekiah of Judah, and it is left in ruins until the time of the Medo-Persian Empire, when King Cyrus allows the Jewish people to return home and rebuild the Temple. Later on, Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple that existed during His first coming, which in extra-biblical accounts took place around 70 AD.

Professional Wrestling

• In the 1980s and 1990s, this happened several times with Talk Show with Fists segments:
  • Piper's Pit, hosted by "Rowdy" Roddy Piper:
    • During one of the most famous segments of the show's run, one featuring Piper mocking Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka before smashing him in the head with a coconut, the set partition fell over as Piper began whipping Snuka.
    • In 1986, when Piper returned as a face and began dueling with former buddy "Adorable" Adrian Adonis, an overweight wrestler with an effeminate gimmick who had gotten his own talk segment, "The Flower Shop." On an installment of WWF Superstars of Wrestling, Piper and Adonis began debating on their respective sets before Adonis began initiating a gang-style attack on Piper, destroying everything. A week later, in retaliation, Piper hobbled onto the set of The Flower Shop, with a baseball bat in his hands and began smashing the set apart before screaming bloody revenge.
  • The Brother Love Show, hosted by Bruce Prichard as the title character (a smarmy, red-faced "preacher" inspired by the televangelists of the 1980s). On Brother Love's last segment, the Ultimate Warrior tore apart the set (knocking apart the podium in which Love sat "The Book of Love," ripping apart the curtain surrounding the set and tearing the pages of "The Book of Love") before chasing Love to the ring to give him a brutal beating.
  • The Barber Shop, hosted by Brutus "the Barber" Beefcake, a popular wrestler who (with a barber gimmick) was still recuperating from a near-fatal parasailing accident a couple of years earlier. His last segment saw bully wrestler Sid Justice damage everything on the set — throwing the barber chair, smashing the plate-glass window (and this was just weeks after Shawn Michaels threw Marty Jannetty through it) and pushing over the set partitions.
• This happens in WWE when the TitanTron (OvalTron on Smackdown) gets destroyed to make way for a new model:
  • In early 1999, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin tore up the TitanTron (after The Big Show brought it down). The motive was that if anyone put the image of his Custom WWE Championship belt on it, he'd tear it apart. Shane McMahon decided to put it up there following Austin’s match that night, so Austin made good on his threat.
  • In 2001, Rhyno gored Chris Jericho through the OvalTron, resulting in the "big fist" set.
  • In January 2008, Triple H destroyed the TitanTron with his sledgehammer after Vince McMahon tried to calm him down, which made way for the current TitanTron HD stage, which is used on all shows from then on. It also marked the WWE's transition to HDTV the following week.
• At the beginning of the last episode of WCW Worldwide (a Recap Series) they showed a sped-up video of stagehands building the set. At the end of the episode, when they admitted it was the last show and there was no more WCW they showed it again over the credits but forward, revealing that (1) the version shown at the start of the show was broadcast in reverse and (2) they were actually tearing down the set.
• At one point during the Ring of Honor vs CZW feud, CZW wrestlers destroyed ROH's ring mat.
• In 2008, Vince McMahon started to do a skit called "Million Dollar Mania", where he would give away his money to random fans. It was ended when the stage suddenly collapsed on him, and he was taken off television to "recover from his injuries".
• Jessicka Havok went on a rampage that cost WSU $4500 in property damages to protest a bad call that led to her losing one of her title belts to Mercedes Martinez. She'd have done more but was eventually restrained.
• In 2010, the WWE stable The Nexus made its debut when its seven members came to ringside to beat John Cena, before turning their attention on everyone (the commentators, ring announcer, referee, and cameramen) and destroying both the ring and the announcer's table.
• Defied by Paul London in the finals of PWA Quest For The Cup 7. After a garbage can got knocked over during a brawl between himself, Brian Kendrick and the Flatliners, London stopped to stand it back up and return the can's contents.
• On WWE, the ring has collapsed no less than four times, the first three of which were caused by superplexing Big Show. First in on an episode of Smackdown in 2003 by Brock Lesnar, then at Vengeance in 2011 by Mark Henry, and finally on an episode of Raw in 2017 by Braun Strowman. The latter did the most damage to the ring, causing three of the posts to become dislodged, the ropes to collapse, and, amusingly, the referee to fall out of the ring. The fourth time the ring broke was at Payback in 2020, which was caused by Braun getting superplexed by Bray Wyatt.
• During the invasion of IPW:UK to Defiant Wrestling, at Defiant #3, the IPW invaders tore up the entire set á la Nexus, even tearing in two a Defiant flag.
• Suggested during the Emi Sakura vs. Jamie Hayter match at Pro Wrestling EVE Bigger Than Shesus. Sakura hits a crossbody on Hayter who is on the apron against the wall. The commentator says that someday Sakura will go right through the wall into the building next door and she will be the happiest woman on Earth.
• An accidental example from 1998 WWE: Golga once ran into the ropes and they broke off the ringpost.
• Once in ECW in 1995, The Public Enemy invited the fans into the ring to dance with them...and the ring collapsed.
• Incoherence (Hallowicked and Delirious) won the CHIKARA Campeonatos de Parejas at CHIKARA Bruised. After the match, they cut a promo while repeatedly hitting the big CHIKARA banner on the wall, causing part of it to come down onto Hallowicked.
• WCW Starrcade 1997, December 28, 1997, was supposed to have featured a match between The Giant and Kevin Nash, but Nash no-showed. This led to a storyline where Nash had to put up a performance bond but the Giant would forfeit it if he made contact with Nash prior to WCW/NWO Souled Out 1998 on January 24th. The main event of the January 22nd WCW Thunder was The Giant vs. Scott Hall, which Giant won by disqualification when Nash interfered. Since The Giant couldn't attack Nash, he decided to tear down the ring, with Hall still in it.
• George "The Animal" Steele crossed with a literal case of Chewing the Scenery, since he regularly ate turnbuckles.
• During the debut of the anarchistic faction RETRIBUTION on Smackdown, one member took apart the ring ropes while another used a chainsaw to cut them.
• In one 2011 WWE event, audio technician Jeremy Diaz played Big Show's music, distracting Mark Henry and causing him to lose his World Heavyweight Championship match. A enraged Henry stormed Diaz’s audio station, destroyed his equipment, and then threw Diaz over some crates, injuring him. As an aside, the entrance themes did not play for the remainder of the night due to Henry's actions.

Theatre

• Bertolt Brecht's very early play Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit (The Petite Bourgeoisie Wedding) is all about this: the man getting married is a carpenter and has built all of his furniture single-handedly. It breaks down over the course of the play and ends with the (very drunken) characters falling through the floor and bashing each other over the head with chair legs.
• God's Favorite by Neil Simon uses this. During the first act, more and more pieces of furniture and finery are removed from the mansion onstage. When the curtain rises on the second act, the mansion has been burnt to the ground.
• Has been known to happen in a lot of plays - often unintentional and with sometimes humorous responses.
  • Actors have been known to be a little more careless on the final performance, which sometimes leads to this - and some hilarious improv.
• This is invoked in Noises Off. During the final scene, the actors (In-Universe) are more reckless and thus, it includes several times where the actors accidentally break the setpieces.
• Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung ends with Valhalla (and possibly the entire world) destroyed by fire. Wagner's instructions for the premiere of the show would have had them set the actual stage ablaze to signify the end of the story. However, the owners of the venue chickened out.
• One of the biggest jokes of The Play That Goes Wrong is that the set begins to collapse, piece by piece, as the play continues to go on. At first it’s only the decorations, but then the pillar supporting an elevated portion of the set is knocked loose as well. The climax of the destruction sees the entire set walls fall down, thankfully avoiding hitting any of the actors.
• Vaclav Havel's Temptation ends like this via a Dance Party Ending. Everyone starts dancing in a frenzied manner to resemble the chaos of a witches' sabbath as Newhirth lights up the bower in the middle This ignites Foustka's cape and he immediately starts running around the stage in a panic, setting everything else on fire (at least according to Havel's stage directions). The curtain comes down and a firefighter comes out to reassure anyone left watching that the fire has been put out and they are safe.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: In the final boss fight, the top of The Consortium's base gets wrecked during Ann's battle with C's Nidhogg form.
• It's practically series tradition in Castlevania to show Dracula's castle crumbling into the ground while the hero(es) look over it from a distance as the sun rises in the ending.
• Danganronpa:
  • Invoked in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. Makoto briefly mentions the Load-Bearing Boss trope in his thoughts, noting that stopping the mastermind only opened the exit and turned off the air purifier instead of triggering the destruction of Hope's Peak Academy.
  • At the end of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, K1-B0 shoots down the Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles before self-destructing himself, destroying the entire place. Thankfully, this only kills K1-B0 himself and Tsumugi, sparing Shuichi, Maki and Himiko.
• In Tomb Raider: Underworld, Croft Manor gets totally burnt and destroyed.
• ICO: The castle crumbles and sinks beneath the waves after the final battle.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect 2: The SSV Normandy SR-1 is destroyed within the first ten minutes and you later visit the crash site. But not to worry, you get a new, similar far more awesome replacement, the Normandy SR-2.
  • In Mass Effect 3, this is combined with Apocalypse How class 0 (at least) on Earth. Among the mayhem is a hapless Alliance cruiser in the background hovering over the besieged city, getting hammered by and futilely shooting at a landing Reaper, which then promptly blows up in a thermonuclear fireball and knocks Shepard over in the blast.
  • Don't forget the final boss fight with Kai Leng, which takes place in the Illusive Man's "office". It gets completely trashed, with Leng's shockwave attacks tearing off the floor panels that created the field-of-stars illusion.
  • The ending in general. Regardless of which option the player chooses, the galaxy is changed forever.
  • For that matter, the ending of the original game saw the game's Hub Level of the Citadel get completely demolished by Saren and Sovereign during the climax. It gradually was going through repairs in 2, which was why Shepard and crew were restricted mainly to the Wards section in that game, and the newly revamped version of it was back in time for 3, but then the ending happens and it's destroyed again.
• Azeroth got this treatment in the aptly-named World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm. Interesting because, as an MMO, the set will be lost for good. Examined here.
• Similar to the WoW example, albeit on a smaller scale, Guild Wars 2 destroyed its central hub town of Lion's Arch at the climax of the first season of the Living World when Scarlet Briar attacked it with her army. It remained in an utterly trashed state, strewn with rubble and littered with refugees, for the better part of a year before finally being rebuilt better and shinier than before.
• In Banjo-Tooie, Spiral Mountain, Banjo's home in the first game, is smashed up. Eight years later, in Nuts & Bolts, it is still in this state.
• This is the objective of Stage Battles in Brütal Legend.
  • Or rather, trash your opponent's set.
• Two of the playable characters in Daraku Tenshi: The Fallen Angels are Half-Identical Twins Yuiren and Yuiran. Yuiran's stage is a completely trashed up variant of Yuiren's.
• The Might and Magic series does this whenever it's looking for a plot reboot.
• At the end of Half-Life: Opposing Force the Black Mesa complex is destroyed by detonating a nuclear warhead in the underground facility. While overall the expansion has a Loose Canon status due to not being developed by Valve, they have confirmed the nuclear destruction as canon and were reportedly quite pleased at that plot point at the time because it conclusively would prevent them from rehashing the same location for sequels.
• Halo:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved starts the game in a still-functional and inhabited Pillar of Autumn. The last level takes place in the same ship, albeit crashed, burned out, and otherwise not going anywhere. The object of said level is to detonate the ship's reactor and destroy the entire ring.
  • Halo 2 does this in Cairo Station's main control center. In the first level, it is populated and is well-lit. In the game's last few moments, Lord Hood is seen alone in the darkened, sparking room. On Earth, the Prophet of Regret's in-atmosphere hyperspace jump takes out a large chunk of New Mombasa, along with setting the stage for the collapse of the Space Elevator, whose pieces are strewn about Tsavo Highway in the third game, and whose actual collapse is seen in the spinoff game Halo 3: ODST.
  • Halo 3 does this with High Charity, which has been completely overtaken by the Gravemind since the previous game.
  • Halo: Reach: The first time you visit Sword Base, it's still in pretty good shape. The last time you do so, it's been wrecked by the Covenant. In between, the capital city of New Alexandria, where a mission of the same name takes place, is completely destroyed by orbital bombardment.
• The gameplay and setpieces of Final Fantasy XIV was considered busted by 2010 standards to the point that the development team working on it was fired or reassigned to other projects, and a new development leader was hired. His response to being told to fix the mess? Smash it all with a giant meteor and literally reboot the world.
• Mother 3 ends with the entire Nowhere Islands being destroyed as a dragon as large as the islands themselves rises. Footage of this destruction can be seen at the end of the game, though the dragon is never seen for some reason.
• Final Fantasy VI does this when the entire world is destroyed halfway through the game, rearranging the map and drastically changing all the game's locations.
• Final Fantasy VII ends with a collision between Meteor and a Lifestream-assisted Holy. As revealed in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the collision flattened the city of Midgar.
• Star Trek Online has the Federation's Hub World, the Earth Spacedock, ravaged by the Undine/Species 8472 to explain the setting change between Season 8 and 9
• One of The 11th Hour's endings has Stauf Mansion destroyed by fire.
• At the end of Riven, the eponymous age disintegrates upon the re-opening of the Star Fissure.
• Obsidian does this with both of its endings.
  • If you choose to side with Max and crash Ceres for good, the AI and its entire world blow up bit by bit, along with the Conductor and the Obsidian structure itself, thus saving Earth and returning both you and Max to reality.
  • Or you let Ceres finish its job and watch Earth become rebooted by Ceres' nanobots so that no humans sans Max and Lilah are allowed to ever exist, and thus never pollute Earth.
• The Labyrinth of Time: At the end, destroying the eponymous' Labyrinth's keystone causes the entire complex to disintegrate, stranding you in the void outside of space and time, without any assistance from Daedalus. There was a sequel advertised to explain what was to come next, but it never came out.
• The Batman: Arkham Series does this fantastically. The farther you go into each game, the more the city gets ripped to pieces: blown-up buildings and crashed elevators, gaping holes where enormous tentacles burst through the ground, dead bodies and riot-induced destruction littering the ground, your suit progressively getting torn to shreds, the spectacular wreckage of Gotham Pioneer Crossing bridge after you tussle with Firefly in Origins. By the end of each game, you will really and truly feel like you're the only thing stopping the city from crumbling.
  • The biggest example will still be the The Knightfall Protocol from Batman: Arkham Knight where both the Batsignal and Wayne Manor are blown up. Nightwing even Lampshades this in the GCPD Lockdown DLC where he asks why Lucius never questioned the request for a Self-Destruct Mechanism in the Batsignal.
• Fallout 3:
  • Early on, the player is given the option of detonating the nuclear bomb at the center of Megaton in exchange for a penthouse suite in Tenpenny Tower. Conversely, they can also inflict this trope on Tenpenny Tower by destroying the power generator and releasing a horde of Feral Ghouls from the basement.
  • When the Lone Wanderer returns to Vault 101 for the quest "Trouble on the Homefront", it's in shambles due to the worsening Radroach infestation and the residents' mutiny against the Overseer. The Wanderer can finish it off by sabotaging the water purification chip, forcing the residents to evacuate.
  • At the end of Broken Steel, you choose between firing the Enclave's Kill Sat on either their own Base on Wheels or the Brotherhood of Steel's Citadel.
  • In Point Lookout, Desmond self-destructs the Calvert Mansion at the end of the penultimate story quest.
• At the end of Fallout 4, if you've made enemies with the Brotherhood of Steel, you get to blow up their Airborne Aircraft Carrier, the Prydwen, with Liberty Prime if you sided with the Institute. If siding against them, the Institute's Elaborate Underground Base meets this fate.
• The Old Bailey courtroom is left rather worse for wear by the end of the final case of The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve. First, Judge Jigoku slams his fists into the witness stand hard enough to destroy it and send wooden splinters flying into the air. Later, Lord Stronghart falls out of the judge's seat and onto the jurors' bench, which triggers a guilty verdict with sufficient force as to cause the Scales of Justice to tip too far and fall off their axis, engulfing the courtroom and Stronghart himself in flames.
• Monteriggioni serves as the player's base in Assassin's Creed II. However, it is attacked and severely damaged in the sequel, forcing Ezio to abandon it. However, Desmond and his friends are able to visit it five hundred years later, where it then serves as their base instead.
• City of Heroes destroyed the Galaxy City zone as part of a new issue release. The destruction was actually shown in the tutorial level, and the hero would choose to become a hero or villain based on how he reacted to a downed hero. It was largely done to allow for the hero classes to be made as villains and vice-versa and streamline the tutorial level better.
• Most Resident Evil games end with the enemy base and/or laboratory self-destructing, but Resident Evil 3: Nemesis shows Raccoon City being wiped off the map by a nuclear missile strike.
• Metroid Prime begins on the Space Pirate Frigate Orpheon, which has suffered a laboratory specimen breakout but is mostly intact. The defeat of the Load-Bearing Boss causes a reactor meltdown and the ship crashes into a lake on Tallon IV, where you later revisit its wreckage.
• In Max Payne 3, midway through Chapter 6, the Fabricas Branco HQ is firebombed by the Cracha Preto, and you have to fight through the burning wreckage.
• A literal one happens in Cuphead. In the final phase of the battle with Sally Stageplay, the stage is pretty much a mess as she sends her umbrella after you.
• In the Director's Cut edition of Scratches, the bonus chapter "The Last Visit" takes place some time after the events of the main game, and a reporter is sent to investigate Blackwood Manor before it's demolished. Visiting the mansion reveals that burglars had ransacked the place since Micheal Arthate left, leaving nothing but piles of garbage, broken furniture, and graffiti behind.
• In Time Crisis, Wild Dog blows up the Clock Tower prior to the Final Boss fight, then sets the rooftop shrubbery ablaze for the battle's final phase. In the second game, destroying Diaz's prototype satellite causes the whole launch facility to go kablooey, but the heroes and the Damsel in Distress inexplicably survive.
• Early on in X-Men Legends II: Rise of the Apocalypse, the X-Mansion is destroyed in an attack after it served as the Hub Level during the first game. The team later briefly uses the damaged mansion as their home base when they temporarily return to New York for the fourth section.
• Near the end of the Dark Brotherhood questline in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary is attacked by Penitus Oculatus agents and is destroyed. Most of the members of the group are killed as well- only Nazir and Babette survive. The group eventually relocates to another sanctuary in Dawnstar that Cicero had fled to, and sure enough, he’s there to greet you if you spared him in that quest.
• Near the end of Chapter 6 of Red Dead Redemption II, the Pinkertons attack the Van der Linde gang and force them to evacuate their camp at Beaver Hollow. If you choose to go for the loot, when Arthur returns to the camp, he finds it being engulfed in flames, with the Pinkertons being the reason for the destruction.
• The Season X event "The End" in Fortnite goes completely nuts with this trope as the Visitor succeeds in penetrating the Zero-Point Barrier with a flurry of missiles and a comet, creating a black hole that sucks up the arena, the player, the universe and even the log in screen. The world was then restored a few weeks later, starting the Chapter 2 series of seasons.
• Sakura Wars:
  • At the end of chapter 6 of Sakura Wars (1996), the Imperial Theater gets trashed after the Imperial Combat Revue's battle with Miroku. It gets rebuilt shortly after their battle with Tenkai.
  • By the end of Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shalt Not Die, the Musashi collapses after Ichiro Ogami destroys Shinno, killing the Big Bad Keigo Kyogoku as a result.
  • In Sakura Wars 4: Fall in Love, Maidens, the Mikasa gets trashed at the end of the game thanks to Ogami and the top girl foiling Okubo Nagayasu's plans.
• At the beginning of Haven (2020), the ship that serves as the Player Headquarters gets wrecked by an earthquake, and the bulk of the rest of the story focuses on finding spare parts to repair it. In the bad ending, it gets destroyed again, by the Apiary's Hornets.
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker: Near the end of the game, as part of a Union protests together with everyone in your sector, you're ordered to trash a vessel rather than salvage it in order to show LYNX you're the ones bringing profits, and just what happens when you decide otherwise. You're given the Shippy Rodgers, a Gecko Stargazer, for this purpose: A very large and very expensive ship full of valuable bits you get to slice apart, detonate and incinerate, and complete with Class II Reactor if you always wanted to watch one of those melt down and go completely nuclear.
• In the final case of Criminal Case: The Conspiracy, DreamLife's dome, a plot-important and recurring location throughout the story, is half-destroyed by a bomb during the fight between Ad Astra and Denise Daniel's neohumans, and its crumbling ruins serve as a crime scene until an additional gas leak-induced explosion finishes wrecking the rest of the site.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue Revelation. For the Recollections Trilogy, Valhalla has been the main setting (basically the Halo 3 version of Blood Gulch). But with Halo Reach coming out the same year and their fancy new CGI scenes, Valhalla has been on the receiving end of what could be some permanent damage.
• RWBY:
  • At the end of Volume 3, Beacon Academy gets seriously damaged by the creatures of Grimm. The main characters are scattered throughout the world, with Ruby going with what's left of team JNPR on a trip to Haven.
  • At the end of Volume 8, the entire Floating Continent of Atlas crashes to the ground, destroying it and the lower city of Mantle, and killing Watts and Ironwood. For good measure, Cinder had set Atlas on fire and both cities are flooded upon crashing.
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers:
  • At the end of the Anime Arc, Anime Island is destroyed due to an explosion caused by Super Saiyan God Goku resulting in the deaths of the remaining Anime Cartel and Francis.
  • At the end of the fourth Big Damn Movie "It's Gotta Be Perfect" after over 10 years of adventures that happened there throughout the series ever since the start, Peach's castle ends up being destroyed by the heroes and sunk into an Eldritch pit in order to stop the creature spawning from the castle. Unlike all of the other times in the series where the castle is destroyed and fixed in later appearances, this time the castle is destroyed in a way that it can't ever be rebuilt and forces everyone to build a brand new castle.

Web Comics

• The cast of Sluggy Freelance has lost two homes over the years. The first was their original apartment complex, which was taken over by an evil corporation and eventually blown up. The second was the Kesandru house, which lasted several years before being destroyed when Aylee assumed her 50-foot tall form inside it.
• "Happy 3rd anniversary, Dr. McNinja! You don't have an office anymore."
• When the creator of Dandy and Company wanted to yank Mistake's owners from the cast, he just had the Villain of the Week burn their house down, forcing them to move away.
• After the destruction of Gobwin Knob in Erfworld, the new Gobwin Knob was created in a different architectural style suited to its new role as potentially world-conquering imperial capital.

Web Original

• Dino Attack RPG: So, after seven and a half years, we're finally at the Final Battle? Let's trash Dino Attack Headquarters!
• On the Dream SMP, this happens on multiple occasions.
  • The nation of L'Manburg has seen a lot of damage.
    • During the L'Manburg Revolution, Dream planted TNT under both the area in front of Tommy's base and L'Manburg itself, blowing both to smithereens. Both of those were eventually rebuilt, but the Camarvan stayed in ruins for a long time, and Tommy only patched up the crater by his house by putting a single layer of dirt over it. Tubbo's house was also burnt down as a show of force, but was not rebuilt until more than half a year later.
    • At the end of the Manburg-Pogtopia War, Wilbur pushed the button and blew L'Manburg to smithereens again, helped by Dream — who placed even more TNT — and Techno — who unleashed two Withers onto his former allies. The crater remained, and New L'Manburg was built on top of it, with the crater itself eventually being turned into a lake.
    • The Doomsday War was a massive event in which L'Manburg was destroyed again, this time by fifteen Withers from Technoblade and Philza, and many TNT-droppers from Dream. By the end of it, L'Manburg and the surrounding area more closely resemble the surface of the moon than an active city. Its inhabitants solemnly agree that there is no rebuilding this, and the nation of L'Manburg is disbanded entirely.
  • During Tommy's exile, he and Ghostbur built an encampment which they named Logstedshire. When Dream found out Tommy had been hiding items from him, he blew Logstedshire up as punishment, prompting Tommy to run away and ally himself with Technoblade.
• The Spoony Experiment: The reason Spoony ended his Final Fantasy VIII on such an explosive note was that he was moving and wanted to justify a change of scenery.
• Survival of the Fittest has had a number of moments in each version where a particular location was destroyed through explosions of fire: v1 had the bamboo coppice burn to the ground from Jacob Starr's Molotovs, v2's school building suffered a destructive boiler explosion, v3 lost the field hospital to a grenade, and v4's lumber mill was destroyed by dynamite. These are only SOME of the examples of map-changing incinerations.
• Usually after UberHaxorNova and Seamus finish a Minecraft adventure map together, they will celebrate the completion by spawning stacks of TNT and blowing the map up.
• The Yogscast have done this a few times over the years:
  • This happens a few times in Shadow of Israphel: So far an unknown force destroyed the Yogcave, while Jock Fireblast burned down Mistral City and (most of) BBQ Bay.
  • This is how the first Tekkit server was destroyed, as Sjin and Duncan Jones ended up waging war on one another. In their efforts to kill each other, they burned down the homes of Strippin (plus business partner Benji), Rythian and Zoey Proasheck, among others, then Sjin blew up Duncan's nuclear reactor, totalling the area.
  • The Jaffa Factory that Lewis Brindley, Simon Lane, and Duncan worked on was blown up during episode 105 of JaffaQuest. Their space station "Dwarf Star" was also destroyed in the sequel series Hole Diggers.
  • The end of the Yogscast Complete server was marked by a war between Hat Films and the Flux Buddies, in which they effectively nuked each other's bases off the map.
• Parodied on Atop the Fourth Wall in its 100th episode. Linkara had just moved into a new apartment, and since his old house was a bit of a Weirdness Magnet, he set up a little trap at his old place. Cue Phelous walking into his old house and triggering the trap, resulting in an explosion and Phelous dying. Again.
  • Parodied over 500 episodes later where it turned out that he accidentally set the self-destruct mechanism on that home, forcing him and Viga out. However, Viga had to buy the new house and insurance and she’s upset over it, threatening to shove My Little Pony dolls up his anus.
• Rooster Teeth has, for their "Let's Play Minecraft", "Plan G", a bunch of dynamite buried underneath the courtyard of Achievement City. It's been used at least three times: once out of curiosity, once to stop one of their own from winning their match and once completely by accident when a Creeper detonated on the courtyard.
  • Their nearly-year-long "Sky Factory" saga ended with their sun-powered nuclear reactor going critical and leveling the entire place.
• The Half in the Bag review of Man of Steel ends with most of the furniture on the "Mr. Plinkett's house" set getting wrecked (although most of it was already in shoddy condition).
• The Smosh video, "Magic Wipes", was written largely as an excuse to destroy the carpet of the Smosh house as their landlord was supposed to replace it with tiling. However, the landlord never switched the carpet, but their props manager had spare carpet for the duo to use.
• Parodied in House to Astonish's final show before the hiatus, where occasional references to a smell of burning turn out to be foreshadowing a Cliffhanger that the House is on fire. The first post-hiatus episode has them exploring the wreckage, discovering the recording equipment is still going ... and then never mentioning it again. (It didn't help that the idea that the House to Astonish was an actual location had never really caught on in the first place.)

Western Animation

• In the first half of the Grand Finale for Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Gummi Glen is destroyed courtesy of Duke Igthorn unleashing a termite on the Gummis. In the second half, they return the favor by destroying Duke Igthorn's castle.
• Adventure Time:
  • After being ousted by the King of Ooo as the ruler of the Candy Kingdom, Princess Bubblegum (now just going by Bonnibel) moves into an old shack that her uncle once built near the end of the sixth season. It ends up being totally blown up in the season seven episode "The Dark Cloud" when the Vampire King's essence is accidentally released and comes to life as a giant monster. Fortunately, the King of Ooo is overthrown in a coup in the next episode, so she is able to go back to her castle afterwards. The cabin was also destroyed in the animation short "Have You Seen the Muffin Mess" when it was turned into muffins by rogue nanobots, although the canonicity of the shorts is debatable.
  • In the series finale, Finn and Jake's treehouse home is completely destroyed by one of GOLB's monsters. They plant Fern's seed in its place and a new sapling sprouts where it once stood, although Finn and Jake still end up being basically homeless afterwards (Adventure Time: Distant Lands seems to indicate they went on to live in a truck camper afterwards).
• Parodied in Animaniacs for its first episode that aired on Kids' WB after the show's Channel Hop. It features a fake recap of the previous season which concludes with the Warner siblings' water tower being destroyed. Yakko states that they'll build a new one that's better, stronger, and otherwise exactly like the original one.
• Bestia: Ingrid Olderöck, a brutal torturer with Chilean State Sec goes back to the torture house and is refused admittance. Instead, she is given an envelope telling her she's been reassigned to a desk job. She goes home and in a fit of rage wrecks her house, sweeping pictures off of shelves and smashing things and in the end, she breaks the entire house in half, leaving her floating against a black void.
• Carmen Sandiego: Near the end of Season 2, V.I.L.E. come to believe that the secrecy of their island headquarters/academy has been compromised due to Carmen and Shadow-san's defections. So they abandon the facility, blowing it up as they leave in order to destroy any trace of evidence left behind.
• The inevitable destruction of the Galaxy One in the Season 1 finale of Final Space was marked with laser fire tearing apart all of the familiar set pieces we've seen all along and directly hitting the most iconic parts, such as the cookie dispenser and Beth.
• Happened more than once to the Planet Express building during the run of Futurama. In at least one episode, the rest of New New York gets trashed as well.
• During the three-part second season finale "Hunter's Moon", Gargoyles had the clock tower home of the heroes destroyed by a missile. This forced them to relocate back to the skyscraper-top castle they had previously abandoned due to the villain owning it.
• Hailey's On It!: In "The Show Must Go Wrong", Becker is a fan of smashing stage plays with a sledgehammer after the performance. She laters does it despite Kristine's proclaim they still had several songs left.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: Section 13 is destroyed by the Ice Crew in the Grand Finale.
• The pre-retool Justice League ended by dropping the Watchtower on the Thanagarian Doomsday Device, allowing for a shiny new satellite in JLU. In the Grand Finale of Unlimited (and, by extension, the entire DCAU), Darkseid lifts up the huge globe on top of the Daily Planet and smashes Superman with it, causing it to crash through the rest of building.
• In Justice League Action, the series starts with the Hall of Justice being reduced to rubble by an invading djinn wreaking havoc in an attempt to destroy the League. They build the Watchtower to replace it.
• In the (second) finale of Kim Possible, Kim's house gets completely obliterated, along with most of her school and her boyfriend's favorite fast food joint.
• In The Legend of Korra's Grand Finale, most of downtown Republic City is blown to pieces during the climactic battle: the Colossus blasts streets and skyscrapers into rubble with its Wave-Motion Gun, even more buildings are crushed or leveled in an effort to bring it down, and finally, the vines of the spirit wilds go supercritical, blasting a massive crater into the middle of the city. Thankfully, the place had been evacuated beforehand.
• The Bakshi Mighty Mouse episode "Mighty's Wedlock Whimsy" was a cautionary tale of Mighty Mouse's pending wedding to Pearl Pureheart. Towards the end, it cuts to live-action of the animator crapping out, then to the cartoon's final scene: everyone laughing as the chapel in which they're holding the service is up in flames.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Applejack's barn goes through this with astounding regularity.
  Raze this barn, raze this barn, one, two, three, four!
  • In "Twilight's Kingdom Part 2", the Golden Oak Library - home and base for all of Twilight's adventures since arriving in Ponyville - is blown up by Tirek. Recovering from this is a minor theme of the next season.
  • In "The Beginning of the End Part 1", the Tree of Harmony is destroyed by Sombra, along with the Elements.
  • In "The Ending of the End Part 1", a decent portion of Canterlot Castle is destroyed by the villains.
• The Owl House is shown to have been ransacked by the Emperor's Coven after the cliffhanger at the end of "Edge of the World", though thankfully, not destroyed outright. Eda and Lilith took all the weapons, but everything else was confiscated, though later recovered and transferred to the resistance base at Latissa.
• The Real Ghostbusters plays with the idea in "Citizen Ghost". A flashback shows the boys having to return to and rebuild the Firehouse, which had been all but gutted when the Containment Unit blew up.
• ReBoot completely destroyed the ruined Mainframe at the end of season 3. This paved the way for a backup copy of the city to be loaded by the User to replace it.
• Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles's 4-part finale involves The Shredder destroying the Grand Nexus Hotel and the Turtles' lair. Doubly bad in the case of the former, since the Yokai residents were still inside the building at the time, and all too aware of his rampage.
• The third season finale of Rocko's Modern Life, "Fatal Contraption", has Rocko's house blow up as part of a sentient food processor wreaking havoc.
• Increasing numbers of Crystal Cove landmarks get trashed, blown up, and/or demolished by rampaging monsters as Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated builds to its Grand Finale in season two, where most of it comes undone after the Cosmic Retcon at the end of that episode.
• The episode "Kamp Krusty" of The Simpsons starts with a last day of school that culminates with Principal Skinner requesting everyone bring in their "implements of destruction" so they can "trash this dump!" to the tune of the Alice Cooper hit "School's Out". While various out-of-character bits quickly reveal this to be All Just a Dream, rebellious school kids are likely to have enjoyed and imagined similar themselves.
• The Smurf Village in The Smurfs goes through a trashing every now and then, but one really devastating example is in "Revenge Of The Smurfs," where the Smurfs contemplate revenge on the humans that inadvertently trashed the village without knowing it.
  • In "Skyscraper Smurfs", the smurfominium that Handy and Architect built is destroyed by a fire and ends up becoming a treehouse for birds at the end.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: The Season 1 finale ended with Ludo's castle getting blown up.
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch: The season one finale features Tipoca City, which is where the Republic clones have been produced for years, destroyed by the Empire, who have discontinued using clone soldiers for their military.
• Steven Universe:
  • In "Reunited", Lapis drops the barn where she and Peridot used to live on top of Blue Diamond. The location where it used to be is trashed when the Cluster smashes a hole through that area in order to form a giant arm to fight Yellow Diamond's spaceship with. Then Steven's house is severely damaged when Blue's spaceship crashes into it during the fighting. Two years later, Steven Universe: The Movie shows Steven's house was rebuilt and a small town for gems was built where the barn once was.
  • The climax of said movie involves all of Beach City except the Crystal Temple and Steven's house getting severely wrecked when Spinel has her giant injector dump its remaining bio-poison onto the town. A Time-Passes Montage at the end shows the town being rebuilt, but with a few remaining scars.
• In the Season 4 episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) "Scion of the Shredder", this happens to the Turtles' underground lair when it's destroyed by a vengeful Karai, along with most of the Turtles vehicles. They move into an abandoned pump station under the Central Park lake for the remainder of the series, which itself is destroyed in the crossover special Turtles Forever.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): The 8th season premiere "Get Shredder!", saw the Shredder blow up the Channel 6 news building.
• Total Drama: In the Grand Finale of All-Stars, the island of Wawanakwa is sunk, destroying the set that's been used for most of the series and setting the stage for the next season, which is supposed to take place on a new island. It inexplicably returns in the reboot without any explanation.
  • Also, halfway through that season, Duncan, fearing he's losing his bad boy image, blows up Playa de Losers, which Chris converted into an opulent mansion. Chris, furious at this, has Duncan arrested and removed from the game.
• At the end of the first season of Ultimate Spider-Man the Hellicarrier gets smashed inside out by Green Goblin and Venom, so the team moves in with Peter till the new Tricarrier is built.
• Partway through the first season of X-Men: The Animated Series, the X-Men return from a mission on Genoshia to find the mansion completely and utterly wrecked. The next episode has them aiding Colossus against the Juggernaut (the one who caused the damage) and the episode after that has the team rebuild the mansion.
• At the end of the second season of X-Men: Evolution, the mansion is destroyed by a Self-Destruct Mechanism.
  Nightcrawler: Ah, home sweet hole in the ground.

Real Life

• After a sports venue's lifespan is over, it more often than not is destroyed in spectacular fashion. Some fans, however, don't wait until the official demolition process to begin to start destroying it after the last event.
  • Fans tore up Cleveland Municipal Stadium after the final Browns game played there in 1995; the remains of the stadium were eventually dumped in Lake Erie.
  • Also happened after the last Minnesota Vikings game played at Metropolitan Stadium in 1981.
  • Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, former home of the Pittsburgh Pirates and occasional home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, had its last game in late June 1970^note it was supposed to have been closed the previous October but delays in the construction of its successor, Three Rivers Stadium, forced the Pirates to play half a season at the old stadium, after which a short ceremony was held in which certain items were raffled off. Afterwards, several fans stormed the field to take just about everything that wasn't auctioned off, including seats, pieces of the manual scoreboard, and bits of ivy from the outfield walls.
  • Similarly, fans of the second Washington Senators baseball franchise (the original had moved to Minnesota) tore apart pieces of Robert F. Kennedy Stadium on the eve of that team's relocation to Texas. Anything not nailed down (and some things that were) was ripped up and carted off by unruly fans. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to wait until after the final home game against the New York Yankees to trash the place, forcing the umpires to declare the Yankees the winner by forfeit. And then the stadium had to be repaired in time for the Washington, D.C. football team's home opener (they didn't move out of RFK until after the 1996 season).
• Rampant Fans burnt down Cumberland Oval after the Parramatta Eels triumphantly won the 1981 NSWRL Premiership in Australia.
• As an unfortunately discredited rumor would have it, this was Subverted (yes) by the Monsanto House of the Future, the old Disneyland attraction. The House was scheduled to be demolished and replaced, but its sturdy plastic construction caused the wrecking ball to bounce off, leaving the building completely unharmed. It eventually had to be taken apart manually, via a whole bunch of workers with a whole bunch of hacksaws. Truth time: According to the House's own introductory video, it was built modularly, meant to be easily assembled and disassembled. Neither hacksaws nor wrecking balls would have been necessary or practical. The rumor probably arose from the fact that the attraction's concrete base proved to be indestructible; wrecking crews gave up on trying to remove all the pilings and they can still be seen today.
• One thing that Las Vegas is famous for besides casinos and showgirls is its numerous building implosions and the celebrations associated with them. Since the early 1990s, the ever-growing city has been building bigger and more lavish (or gaudy) resorts and because of the lack of space: these new resorts have been replacing older ones. Many classic casino resorts that were established in the 1950s were closed down by their owners and were torn down. Some of the bigger hotel towers were imploded with dynamite. Some doomed resorts received a lot of attention and usually had fireworks displays prior to the building's implosion as a final tribute to the resort. Probably the greatest example is the implosion of the Dunes Hotel and Casino in 1993: The 24 story hotel tower was set ablaze by thousands of gallons of aviation fuel after a spectacular fireworks display, the tower collapsed moments after. The demolition of the Dunes is considered a turning point in the history of Vegas: the end of an era in which the city was closely associated with The Mafia and the beginning of a newer, glitzier Vegas this time run by mainstream media; the luxurious Bellagio rose from the rubble of the Dunes. The demolition of the Landmark Hotel and Casino was even filmed for use in Mars Attacks!
• A part of all theater productions is the 'striking of the set' in which sets used in the show are dismantled. Some parts will be saved for future use (or in the case of travelling productions the whole thing will be saved), while other parts will be destroyed.
• This often becomes a celebration (of sorts) for the cast and crew of long-running Live-Action TV shows following the completion of the final episode.
• Vanilla Ice was offered the chance to destroy the master tape of the video for "Ice Ice Baby" by MTV on the 25 Lame special and did so but began trashing the set with a baseball bat.
• Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard shoot up the House sets with paintballs during the "Swan Song" special that aired just before the series finale.
• In 2000, the Kingdome, Seattle's closed-roof multipurpose sports stadium, was due to be demolished to make way for a football stadium. So they planted explosives strategically throughout the building and the entire city gathered (with cameras rolling) to watch it blow. It was the first-ever live event covered by ESPN Classic. Several clips are also viewable on YouTube.

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Alright Tropers, trash the page. We need to make room for these Video Examples!

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