"If God is Dead, he was probably screwing with Arconite"
— Breach grenade description, Heat Signature
It is a well-known fact that Everything Is Better With Explosions and many authors would also agree that Bigger Is Better. After all, the bigger the explosion, the more powerful your devices and the bigger the Spectacle! Thus, logically, Everything is Even Better With Bigger Explosions, right?
Just one problem; the explosion you're now displaying is far too big to be caused by the explosive you say is causing it — or, in the case of fictional explosives, too big for any known real-world explosive of equivalent size and type; it's literally providing too much bang for its buck. To create the explosion from that small a package would require a Ridiculously Potent Explosive. The Jabootu glossary
calls this trope the "Atomic Grenade".
Some authors realize this and create their explosives out of Unobtainium, Magic, or their local Green Rocks or Minovsky Physics in an attempt to justify the explosive power, but even that is not a guarantee that you won't end up with creating an unjustified Ridiculously Potent Explosive if, for instance, your explosion is chemical yet rivals nuclear, or antimatter, devices in potency. *
Subtrope of Artistic License – Explosives, and often a case of Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale in terms of energy, or it might occur because Writers Cannot Do Math. May be used to create Earth Shattering Kabooms.
Compare with Made of Explodium, for things which really shouldn't be exploding in the first place, and Everything Makes a Mushroom, where the mushroom cloud itself is usually Played for Laughs. Contrast with both the Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke for when the explosion underperforms for what is producing it, and the Big, Bulky Bomb, another similar (but reversed) misconception where a huge-looking bomb may have a bigger yield compared to a smaller one (disregarding the bomb's active elements).
Examples might be subjected to Science Marches On should we manage to create more potent explosives of the same category in the future.
No Real Life Examples, Please! This trope is about those explosives whose explosive portrayal would be impossible to replicate with real world equivalents, not merely really powerful explosives.*
When a real-life explosive emerges that breaks the laws of physics, then it can be added… and may God help us.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Aura Battler Dunbine: The world of Byston Well uses special materials to create what appear to be regular missiles and grenades for its Aura Machines, which run on the spirit energy (Aura) of the pilot. They are only normal in Byston Well. One of the two creators of Aura Machines later learns that the environment of Byston Well suppresses chemical reactions, and Aura power in modern (Upper) Earth is ten times more potent. Standard Aura chemical-based missiles and grenades fired in Upper Earth have the power of nuclear weapons and entire cities are destroyed as a result.
- The second OAV adaptation of Crusher Joe, "The Ultimate Weapon, Ash" has the titular MacGuffin, a bomb capable of performing an Earth-Shattering Kaboom that is small enough for one person to carry it inside of an attaché case and it does not even uses all of the space inside of it (roughly it is the size of a small Walkman).
- Hunter × Hunter: An example whose disproportionate potency is actively Played for Drama — the Chimera Ant arc introduces a Fantastic Nuke called the Poor Man's Rose, so named for the gigantic rose-shaped mushroom cloud it produces. If the massive explosion doesn't kill you, the radiation it spreads out for miles certainly will, and the bomb itself is cheap, easily-produced, and compact enough to store inside a person's heart. In keeping with the Chimera Ant arc's themes, the fact that something so destructive and cruel could also be made so portable and accessible is treated as a testament to humanity's capacity for evil.
- My Deer Friend Nokotan: In Episode-5 of the manga, Koshi-tan is challenged to a fight by rival gang behind the school's gymnasium, and Shikonoko tags along. As the others overpower Koshi-tan due to them carrying weapons, while she went unarmed, Shikonoko tosses her one of her antlers, Koshi-tan becomes annoyed, thinking that it's useless, she throws it away, and it lands on the roof of the gymnasium. Soon after it lands, the antler's grenade function activates and goes off and completely demolishes the building, turning it into rubble and sending everyone flying.
- In One Piece, one of Buggy's signature weapons is the Buggy Ball, a cannonball with enough explosive power to level a city block. While that still skirts the line on this trope, what undeniably crosses the line into it is when Luffy meets Buggy again in Impel Down, by which point Buggy has created upgraded versions of the Buggy Balls that he calls Muggy Balls. They have similar destructive power... but have been reduced to the size of mothballs, allowing Buggy to easily carry them on and launch them from his person.
- In Rurouni Kenshin, the bomblets Sanosuke obtains before heading for Kyoto are small enough to fit in a palm. Yet, when he throws them at the Rengoku, Shishio's personal armored battleship, the explosion is powerful enough to bust open the hull, sinking it before it can return to the shore it just left.
Audio Plays
- Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures: A character in "Eyes of Darkness", the two-part finale of Dark Eyes 4, is so desperate for revenge against the Daleks, she has a bomb implanted in her lungs. It's the size of a thumb, and it has the power to destroy a weapons facility. When it instead explodes inside the nascent Eminence, and is combined with the retro-genitor particles of Molly O'Sullivan, the Eminence is sent to the edge of the universe.
Comic Books
- Archie Comics: Double subverted in a late 50s story in which Jughead concocts a new nail polish in the school chemistry lab that he calls "TNT" (for "Terrific Nail Tint"). Believing Jughead is making actual explosives, Mr. Weatherby bursts into the lab in a panic and hurls the test tube Jughead is using out the window, though it barely contains a drop of liquid. To both his and Jughead's horror, the test tube does appear to violently explode, blasting a gaping hole in the school's lawn, and even rupturing the school's water main. Mr. Weatherby excitedly contacts the U.S. military, who take Jughead and a jug of his nail polish to the Pentagon. Soon after, Mr. Weatherby learns that the water main actually burst due to overpressure, and he and Jughead are subsequently ejected from the Pentagon in disgrace. During the drive home, Mr. Weatherby makes Jughead pitch his troublesome nail polish out of the car, and neither of them notice when it really does explode behind them.
- Several instances in both Marvel and DC comics have implied or directly shown nuclear bombs to be capable of completely destroying the Earth — not just wiping out civilization or rendering the surface uninhabitable, but completely shattering the entire planet.
- Hellboy: The story The Vampire of Prague features Hellboy using an incredibly overpowered hand grenade known as the Vulcan 50 in an attempt to kill the eponymous vampire, only to blow away a significant chunk of the eponymous city, having mistaken it for the smaller Vulcan 40.
BPRD Armorer: "Don't use it near people. Don't use it near buildings. Don't get them mixed up."
Hellboy: "No problem." - Lobo: Lobo once detonated a nuke not much bigger than himself which blew a giant hole in a planet (although that could partially be attributed to the cartoonish style of that particular comic).
Fan Works
- Legendary Tinker: Pyro-gel is a magical equivalent of blasting jelly — but rather more potent. A fingernail's worth of it is enough to take out a house. Andy makes five-pound blocks of it, each of which contains "enough firepower to turn most brutes into a Rorschach test."
Or, if I was being honest, a city block.
Film — Animated
- Inside Out 2: While everyone is trapped in the vault, Bloofy gathers everyone together to call Pouchy and pick one of the objects inside him to use to get out of the vault. Among the options, there’s a stick of dynamite, so Anger just takes the dynamite and uses it to get them out. The explosion from that one simple stick of dynamite was powerful enough to blast the vault door off its hinges.
- The Incredibles 1: Syndrome drops a tiny little explosive about the size of a teaspoon down a decent-sized waterfall, and the blast that it produces is powerful enough to send a wall of spray almost all the way back up to him. Even just the residual shockwave was enough to bodily hurl Mr. Incredible several meters out of the water and into the air.
- "The Missing Mouse" revolves around an escaped lab mouse that had swallowed some experimental high-powered liquid explosive — powerful enough that the amount that fills the stomach of a mouse maybe two inches tall at the most turns a very large house, its (very large) garden, and an unknown amount of the surrounding neighborhood into a very deep crater.
Film — Live-Action
- The Avengers (2012) shows one of Hawkeye's trick arrows, which can't be more than grenade-sized, blow up with a fireball larger than one of the four propeller engines that keep the Airborne Aircraft Carrier aloft.
- The Alpha-Omega Bomb of Beneath the Planet of the Apes is a cobalt-boosted nuclear warhead mounted on what looks like a golden Minuteman missile shell (the bomb's appearances in both this film and Battle for the Planet of the Apes inconsistently imply either it's a warhead on a missile or that the entire visible shell is the bomb) capable of annihilating the whole planet.
- Deep Blue Sea: The ploy to kill the final Mako shark involves improvising a pipe bomb with the gunpowder in a handful of signal flares, a bomb that is explicitly mentioned will have the potency of two sticks of dynamite. When it goes off, the shockwave it sends out looks more like it had been made by half a ton of C-4.
- Desperado's big money shot is of a pair of frag grenades (functionally, just a bigass M-80 firecracker designed to fling shrapnel) that create a fiery explosion so massive that it sends a wall of flame shooting up past the roof that El Mariachi is standing on.
- In Die Hard with a Vengeance, two volatile liquids mixed creates a binary explosive known as PLX, which is energetic enough to flip a chair using only a paperclip-tip's worth. PLX actually exists in the real world but neither looks like it does in the movie nor is it — or any known chemical explosive — that energetic.
- Eagle Eye has the Hex crystal, a crystal small enough to fit in a man's hand that is said to be able to take out a football field. A much smaller sliver of the crystal — small enough to pass as part of a diamond necklace — is calculated by the Big Bad Evil A.I. of the film to have enough potency to successfully perform "Operation Guillotine"; a.k.a. eliminate the President and his yes-man cabinet by vaporizing a significant chunk of the House of Representatives.
- GoldenEye showcases this with its signature exploding pen, taking the top half of a test dummy clean off. The MythBusters would later show that this is an impossible feat for a pen-sized explosive to do, even with modern explosives.
- In Invention for Destruction, Prof. Roche is kidnapped by Count Artigas because he is working on 'positive matter': an explosive so powerful that a single hell can level an entire city.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Hammer "Ex-Wife" mini-missile that appears in Iron Man 2 is supposed to be an example of this trope, a bunker-buster in a handy marker-sized package, and Justin Hammer spends way too long singing its praises. But while the Ex-Wife fizzles out and does not explode when War Machine tries to use it in the final act, he uses another one in the comics connecting Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3 and that one definitely was not a dud, as it vaporizes a mountainside bunker (not to mention a good chunk of said mountain) when it hits.
- In The Mouse That Roared, the MacGuffin that is central to the plot (and provides the Duchy of Grand Fezziwig with the victory it doesn't want) is the "Q-Bomb", an experimental nuclear device with the capacity to take out an entire continent that just also happens to be so compact that it's shaped, has the same weight, is as easy to carry as (and is portrayed by) an American football.
- A New Hope: By the numbers, the Earth-Shattering Kaboom that wipes out the planet Alderaan would require more energy than the sun produces in two years and is definitely more than the relatively puny laser shown should be capable of outputting. Supplemental materials Hand Wave this by explaining that the Death Star's "hypermatter reactor" uses exotic particles from hyperspace to cheat the laws of physics and Rogue One makes great emphasis on the Kyber Crystals that are used to boost the laser's power (and were originally used for lightsaber construction — it's all but flat out stated in canon that the superlaser just runs on space magic by now).
- In Star Trek Into Darkness, John Harrison invents a binary explosive so powerful that mixing the pill-sized solid tablet into a drinking glass of liquid blows an entire building sky-high.
- In Super Mario Bros. (1993), the Bob-Omb is a teeny-tiny wind-up bomb roughly the size of a cherry bomb and which, realistically, should explode with just as much force. When Mario pulls it out, all passerby on the other side of a street run away in terror and when it goes off, it tosses Koopa (who is halfway into devolving into a Tyrannosaurus rex and either still weighs as much as Dennis Hopper, or halfway between that and the total weight of a Rex) about a dozen feet straight into the air.
- In Van Helsing, Carl demonstrates the effect of a single drop of "Nitroglycerin No. 48" — it blows up like a grenade, scaring the bejeezus out of all the other weapons researchers in the room. Their collective anger heavily implies this is not unusual for him.
Researchers: STOP IT, CARL!
Literature
- The Butter Battle Book features the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo", a bean-sized explosive that's supposed to have enough force to blow up an entire city. The book ends with the Yooks and the Zooks in a stalemate, threatening to use their bomb on the others.
- Deathworld (1960): In the first book, Jason promises one person several grenades made from "solid ultranite", powerful enough to blast open a large warehouse. He also promises the pocket lighter in which they are kept.
- The Doctor Who New Adventures see Ace develop Nitro-9 in candy form. Ten times more powerful and easier to carry than the original, it's fortunate that human stomach acid neutralizes it.
- Halo: Ghosts of Onyx combines this with Chekhov's Gun when a human superbomb known as a NOVA bomb is discovered by the Covenant and brought to a planet. The NOVA Bomb, as (quite proudly) described by one of the admirals that oversaw its construction, is nine nuclear fusion warheads encased in futuristic armor. When detonated, it compresses the force of the explosion to the density of a neutron star, which boosts its yield a hundredfold. When detonated in a planet's orbit, it scorches a fourth of the planet, blows up the planet's moon, and causes massive storms across the rest of the world, wrecking it. When actually detonated on a planet, Earth-Shattering Kaboom results. Fittingly, the bomb was designed to be snuck aboard the Covenant's home base, High Charity, and detonated there, so the UNSC wasn't taking any chances.
- The Jenkinsverse: The Gao have gigaton-yield bombs as part of their arsenal, powerful enough to annihilate a continent while wiping out all life on the rest of the planet or take a large bite out of a small moon. Since they're small enough to be carried by one man (even if the man in question is a Super-Soldier,) this gives them a higher yield-to-payload ratio than even converting the matter directly to energy. The only explanation ever given for how they work is "The universe gets really mad when you fuck with it the wrong way."
- In The Last Hero, a barrel of Agatean Thunder Clay compact enough to fit on Mad Hamish's wheelchair is powerful enough to destroy Dunmanifestin, producing an explosion that would be visible across the Disc and an Anti-Magic EMP that would wipe out the Disc's entire Background Magic Field, and all life on the Disc shortly after. This seems to be enhanced by its location at the Hub however, when it actually detonates on the way down the mountain, the results aren't quite as impressive.
- In the Lensman series, the standard go-to explosive is "duodec" ("duodecaplylatomate"). Large stores can crack the crust of a planet, and "small" pellets are used to destroy a mansion (and outbuildings) without damaging nearby residences. However, duodec does quickly become obsolete for anti-spaceship work as the setting is the Trope Namer for the Lensman Arms Race trope.
- "Let's Get Together": Total Conversion, or TC, implies that 100% of some Unobtainium changes from matter into energy.
- Project Hail Mary: The Astrophage are microorganisms that somehow convert energy to matter and vice versa. This allows them to contain enough energy to fuel interstellar travel, but also to cause a catastrophic explosion if it all discharges at once. One research base gets vaporized when a test is mistakenly performed on a milligram sample instead of a nanogram.
- A Tall Tail by Charles Stross concerns the creation and single, disastrous test of a Ridiculously Potent Rocket Propellant.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Justified at the end of the Ciaphas Cain novel Caves of Ice. While the bombs planted were only intended to create a crater in the ice to trap an enemy vehicle, they blow up in a gigantic fireball because the caves below were flooded with fuel, effectively creating a giant fuel/air bomb, to the delight of the resident Mad Bomber chief sapper. The resulting explosion is so large that a ship in orbit is hit by the shockwave. Although the prometheium facility is totaled, it's a win overall since it means the Necrons won't be able to dig themselves out for a while.
- Dark Heresy's take on promethium (an all-purpose chemical fuel used in everything from flamethrowers to tanks to Titans) is that 500 million liters of the stuff (the carrying capacity of between 1 and 2 modern supertankers) results in an explosion more than ten times the size of the Sun.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: Invoked and Defied in the third season episode Convictions. Mad Bomber Richard Carlson claims to have created a bomb that would cause an explosion "as bright as the sun," but security chief Garibaldi knows that the explosive he's using can't cause that much damage. That's the clue he needs to figure that Carlson must have wired his latest bomb to the station's fusion power generator.
- Doctor Who:
- The Seventh Doctor's companion "Ace" became (in)famous because she was a teenage Demolitions Expert who brewed her own variation of nitroglycerine, "Nitro-9". The "9" in the name was because the amount that could fit inside of a shaving cream can could create a small earthquake rated 9.0 in the Richter Scale if set off.
- The Death Particle is a tiny little thing which wrecks the Citadel on Gallifrey when it explodes. The Citadel's not a small building.
- Fallout (2024): The cold fusion diode is smaller than a pill, but somehow contains functionally infinite energy. It's stated that, hypothetically, should the diode be broken, the resulting blast would likely reach other planets.
- Repeatedly defied in MythBusters. They've tested many, many explosive myths, and the real-life blast is almost never as impressive as the original myth states. The closest they came to this trope was their testing of particle matter fireballs from a YouTube video, where they made a dairy creamer aircannon — most would barely consider dairy creamer an explosive, yet the cannon belched out a fireball big enough to make a mushroom cloud and sent the build team running for the hills.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds blows up a planet with a baking soda bomb.
- NCIS: "Left for Dead", the tenth episode of Season 1, features one of these at the climax: a pouch the size of a hackysack so potent that dropping it from waist level will cause it to explode with enough force to destabilize a skyscraper. The Victim of the Week who created it uses it to commit Murder-Suicide on her boss and lover.
- Special Unit 2: In one episode, Detective O'Malley uses a round of "Red Ammo" to take out a nest of hostile Links. The round of Red Ammo is fired from O'Malley's service pistol which is a highly modified .357 or .44 Magnum revolver and explodes with enough force to wipe out a building the size of half a city block.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series: In "Whom God's Destroy" Captain Garth somehow manages to create bombs which resemble tiny crystals in canister which he can easily carry. He describes them as the most powerful explosives in existence (making them greater than Photon Torpedoes and other weapons that utilise antimatter), claiming the whole canister is enough to destroy the whole planet. Whilst Garth is insane, all the evidence suggests he was right as blowing up a single crystal creates an explosion that shakes the Enterprise whilst it's in Orbit.
- In "Obsession", the Dikironium Cloud Creature is ultimately destroyed by one ounce of antimatter from the Enterprise's warp core, detonated on a planet's surface. The problem is, the explosion it creates is so massive that it makes a crater that covers almost one half of the entire planet, which would be impossible with such a small mass of antimatter. (In reality, one ounce of antimatter, even if it annihilated with 100% efficiency with an equal amount of matter, would create a blast of less than 2 megatons in yield).
- Star Trek: Voyager: No matter what's in an Omega Molecule, its energy is by definition stored in chemical bonds. The notion that it could destroy whole sectors of space—let alone subspace—is ludicrous.
- On the other hand, the franchise frequently inverts this as well, especially when it comes to photon torpedoes. Their warheads use 1.5 kg each of matter and anti-matter, yet their explosions are often less powerful than they should be.
- In the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Musical Episode "Subspace Rhapsody", a few subatomic particles from the episode's Negative Space Wedgie rock the entire ship when detonated in a controlled environment, with it being calculated that blowing up the entire NSW at once would blow the entire Federation and half of the Klingon Empire to Kingdom Come — and unfortunately, the Klingons are on their way to do just that because they don't know this fact.
Radio
- The Goon Show: In "The Greatest Mountain in the World", a single stick of dynamite demolishes an entire mountain.
Video Games
- Ace Combat: Assault Horizon features Trinity, a weapon that is functionally identical to a tactical nuke and small enough to be launched from a multi-role combat aircraft like an SU-35 or F-15. However, it is explicitly not nuclear in nature. A small nod to realism is that Trinity is far more unstable than would normally be acceptable for a military-grade explosive, but it is still way more potent than it has any right to be.
- Baldur's Gate III has Runepowder, a rediscovered alchemical secret of the Deep Gnomes, of which one barrel is said to be potent enough to destroy a city. In-game, runepowder explosives vary from about 1.5-4 times as powerful as conventional smokepowder.
- In Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, Liquid Tiberium is made out to be enormously explosive, with a warhead sized bomb said to provide a yield '10 times greater than a 200 megaton thermonuke', on top of chain reactions if detonated correctly — and it does live up to that claim In-Universe by creating an explosive cloud stretching more than a thousand kilometers into spacenote while the chain reactions set off a quarter-World-Wrecking Wave.
- Dawn of War: Dark Crusade: The Necron stronghold involves the invading commander planting a single bomb in a central location to collapse the Necron catacombs. The ork one is an IED mostly made of handheld explosives including stikkbomm grenades, yet explodes with the same devastating effect as the others.
- Divinity: Original Sin II has the Homemade Explosives, a unique grenade that can only be stolen from Higba when you encounter him at Driftwood. The explosive is the size of a wine bottle that, when thrown, covers the entire screen with fire and does roughly 10x the damage from a regular Firestorm Grenade, which scales based on the Intelligence stat of the character who threw it. Its explosion is strong enough to kill anything in the game.
- Double Subverted in the penultimate level of Eternal Darkness. Michael Edwards, a Canadian firefighter who has some C4 explosives he's been using to control fires in the Gulf War is prompted to use it to destroy the pillar of flesh by a mysterious voice. However, he realises it's nowhere near powerful enough to do the job. Luckily, the same enchantment spell that's been used on weapons the entire game turns out to work just as well on modern weaponry and bombs; the resulting explosion takes out the entire underground city.
- In Heat Signature, Arconite is the explosive used to make breach grenades, which, despite being small enough be thrown by hand or launched out of a standard grenade launcher, have the same destructive power as a ship to ship-missile, capable of not just killing absolutely anything, but also completely destroying the section of spaceship they're used in, causing nearby enemies to be sucked into space and giving you an instant escape route.
- Mewgenics: For the final quest line of the story, you're tasked with getting the ingredients for one of these for Dr. Beanies, mixing a "jar of radiation" with ingredients from the previous acts bosses, specifically, blood from The Throbbing King and flesh from soahC. The result is a nuke that is small enough to be carried by a cat but potent enough to blow up God. Though, in a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation, using it before its intended target instead just causes 50 points of damage to everything in the field, similar to the Tinkerer ability "Split the Atom".
- Metroid: Samus' Power Bombs are hardly any bigger than her standard Morph Ball bombs, but they create an explosion that easily clears a room of anything that is not extremely heavily-armored and one is capable of obliterating a Metroid Queen into a gooey mess when detonated inside it.
- Several Mortal Kombat fatalities utilize in-game explosives, only multiplied by a factor of 10 to 20, which apparently upgrades their explosive potential to Earth-Shattering Kaboom levels.
- Resident Evil Village: The N2 Explosive planted to the Megamycete is just as small as one soda can, but as lampshaded by Chris, is powerful enough to blow the village sky-high.
- Suzuki Bakuhatsu has some hilarious instances:
- The orange-sized bomb can destroy the whole part of Eastern Japan.
- In the iced coffee stage, a microscopic bomb is able to explode as large as a handheld bomb, and killing a human in an instant.
- The car engine bomb is able to destroy the Earth completely.
- A microscopic bomb inside a piece of rice in the bento box is able to destroy a hospital building.
- A submarine bomb is able to evaporate the entire ocean.
- In XCOM 2, some missions involve blowing up alien facilities. In order to do this, the player must have one of their units plant an "X4 Charge" before clearing out. The charge is a fist sized bomb that's planted somewhere inside the building, but the ending cutscene of the missions always show the entire structure exploding in a fireball worthy of Hollywood and being levelled to the ground. Word of God is that this even includes an unseen underground section of the buildings (to justify needing the X4 even if the fighting has leveled the aboveground parts).
Webcomics
- Stand Still, Stay Silent: Emil's would-be breaching charge, which fits into the palm of his hand, is filled with some sort of liquid explosive. It blows the door off its hinges... And part of the house into the stratosphere. It's worth noting that Emil is typically carrying around enough of the stuff to blow up half a town — so it's no wonder he wasn't allowed to bring his kit inside Mora at the start of the comic. It makes sense in some way for it to be this powerful though, given that the job of the Cleansers is to raze Old World buildings to the ground to clear out any trolls which might be nesting in them.
- True Villains: Thanks to Alchemy Is Magic, one rare flower can be distilled into a tiny vial with enough explosive power to incinerate an entire city.
Web Videos
- Mr. Gibbs: In "Don't Nuke Yourself Challenge", one of the "bombs" is titled as "A Simple Soda Can" and looks like an ordinary soda can. It's the worst bomb out of all of them.
Ledger: Okay, so the Soda Can is not to be.. fucked with. Let's remember that.
Western Animation
- Looney Tunes:
- In "Haredevil Hare", Marvin the Martian's Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator looks like an ordinary stick of dynamite but is powerful enough to blow up most of the Moon (or, if channeled through a telescope, the Earth), and Bugs Bunny's rocket is propelled by what looks like an ordinary firecracker.
- In "Hare-Way to the Stars", Marvin the Martian tries to blow up the Earth with an explosive device which is no bigger than a moderately-sized firework. It eventually blows up his own base.
- Rick and Morty: In “M. Night Shyam-Aliens!”, Rick tricks the Zigerion scammers into blowing themselves up by 'letting slip' his 'concentrated dark matter recipe' - dissolving a mixture of cesium and 'plutonic quartz' in water. The mixing vessel the aliens use is about the size of a fishbowl, but the explosion reduces their entire ship to small fragments of scrap metal. Notably, it can be assumed that 'plutonic quartz' is the primary explosive in the mix, with the cesium serving as the detonator and the addition of the water as a crude trigger, since cesium really does react explosively when mixed with water.
- South Park: In "Marjorine", the bomb that the kids use to destroy the fortune-teller (which is a piece of paper) consists of several cans of gasoline poured onto the thing before being wired to a detonator. The resulting explosion is so massive that it levels the whole forest the kids were in and could be seen from space.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: Played for Laughs, in "Dying for Pie" when the bomb disguised as a pie finally goes off at the end of episode, the explosion is so great we see stock footage of an underwater A-bomb going off and the blast was large enough to destroy the entire city.
- "Promethium-X" from the symbiote arc of Spider-Man: The Animated Series — a tiny chip, when sufficiently heated, produces an enormous explosion. The catch is that its half-life is measured in days, after which it becomes lead (which also means it's very radioactive, but not physics-defyingly so).
- Total Drama loves to play these for laughs.
- In Total Drama Island, the first challenge all the contestants had to go through was high dive off a cliff into the water below. When Owen finally takes the plunge, he hits the water with enough force that the water explodes halfway up the cliffside and creates a tidal wave that wrecks the contestant watching on the beach.
- Izzy is a pyromaniac who loves causing explosions when put anywhere near a detonator. When her team was tasked with building a bonfire, Izzy scrounges together some natural materials (mostly tree sap) into the shape and size of a basketball. As soon as she tosses it into the smoldering embers of her team's bonfire, the flames shoot up into the sky with enough force to gently push away Chris' helicopter. This also attracts the attention of the Royal Mounted Canadian Police, who were tracking her down for going AWOL.
- In Total Drama Action, one of the challenges for the war film episode involved using controlled explosives to decorate a base. Duncan managed to use the right amounts to create an intimidating giant skull with the paint. Izzy goes overboard and creates a giant green paint explosion that can be seen from the sky. Chris and everyone else around the explosion was left covered in green paint, their hair blown back and locked in the direction of the explosion.