• In 2008, Discovery Channel ran an ad featuring their shows to the tune of the campfire tune "I Love the World". During the refrain ("boom-de-yah-da, boom-de-yah-da"), the guy from Future Weapons blows up a building with a grenade launcher on cue with the first syllable.
• Awesome Barbeque. BOOM Awesome pool. BOOM
• Old Spice's devastatingexplosions.com in which The Man Your Man Could Smell Like presses a button and.... well, take a guess.
• Segata Sanshiro is so awesome that when he needs to advertise Bomberman, he just judo flips this guy so hard that he explodes. Twice.
• Johnsonville Brats had this ad that begins with a crew member talking about his ad which begins with a car chase and ends with a bang.
  I don't know how it ends. Maybe an explosion. (boom)
• In 1999, the stock trading company E*TRADE had a TV commercial featuring a trailer for the upcoming ("this Christmas") non-existent film Blow'd Up, which is exactly what it sounds like. Features Don LaFontaine narrating the trailer, Anna Nicole Smith as the protagonist, and George Takei as the villain (and who easily qualifies for Ham and Cheese given the rest of the scenes we see). As the trailer ends, the commercial cuts to a guy selling all his stock in TriMount Studios (evidently an informed decision, given that the movie's touted as being a Michael Harbor film with a $200 million budget).
• In 1980, Jack in the Box retired the company mascot Jack by blowing him up in a commercial. The character returned in 1994 in the "Jack's Back" ad, in which he "took over" the company by blowing up the boardroom.

• 86 -EIGHTY SIX- has a bunch of explosions ragging from a city-wide explosion to a barrage of missiles pouring down the sky.
• Ah! My Goddess: Gadgeteer Genius that she is, Skuld can probably drum up a flamethrower from old engine parts, or a disintegrator ray from a disassembled TV set, but instead, she relies on bombs.
• AKIRA: Akira begins with the mother of all kabooms that completely obliterates Tokyo. And there's more, too.
• Armored Trooper VOTOMS loves blowing stuff up, especially Scopedogs, but anything is fair game.
• Baccano!: Naturally, this trope is Nice Holystone's one true love. As a girl, she accidentally blew out an eye tinkering with explosives. She even has explosives stored in her eye socket.
• Black Lagoon, being essentially the anime equivalent of a Hollywood action film, has explosions that can get to ridiculous levels at points, especially when it comes to the cars.
• Bleach: This is the specialty of Bambietta Basterbine, Sternritter E. The E stands for Explode, and enables her to make anything into a bomb — and the way it works, it's nearly impossible to block her explosions by any means (but they can be reflected).
• Blood+: The preferred method of dealing with genetic engineering mishaps is 'Option D', which means dropping missiles on the affected area. On a smaller scale, Kai uses special bullets which ultimately cause parts of Chiropterans to explode.
• Btooom!: The title is supposed to be that of the sound a bomb makes when exploding. The story's whole premise is a Deadly Game where the only weapons given are bombs, so there are plenty of explosions.
• City Hunter Grenades, and bazookas are a common form of explosive devices in the series.
• Cowboy Bebop: "Cowboy Funk" involves the crazed Teddy Bomber, who blows up buildings throughout the episode (the last one nearly taking Spike and the cowboy Andy with it). Jet even states that the reason why no one goes after Teddy Bomber is because they don't want to get blown up.
• Delicious in Dungeon: Marcille's standard offensive spell is to conjure a localized explosion. She can also use stronger versions of it with some cast time.
• Darker than Black: One Contractor is a little boy who can blow up anything he leaves handprints on. This is impressive enough when the results are seen from a distance or when he's just using gravel as cherry bombs, but when he marks everything in the room with handprints? Yeesh.
• Dragon Ball Z: Planets are often threatened with destruction, but only two (three, if you count King Kai's Baby Planet) are seen to explode. Of course, when you add filler, movies, and later continuations such as Dragon Ball Super, that number increases significantly. Not that there weren't plenty of other things exploding in the manga, of course.
• Excel♡Saga: The final episode features Nabeshin espousing the philosophy that "Explosions fix everything!", then giving a graphic demonstration: a fused Excel and Hyatt are returned to their original bodies when he dynamites the room they're standing in.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Solf J. Kimblee is an alchemist whose power is to turn things into bombs. He thoroughly enjoys himself doing so.
  • Roy Mustang. Things go boom when he snaps his fingers. He enjoys it less than Kimblee though.
• Giant Gorg: You’ll see a bunch of vehicles exploding across the series raging from tanks to aircrafts and a giant indestructible robot.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers: One of Hong Kong's hobbies is to detonate firecrackers, according to his profile. More than one fanwork goes further and depicts him as a full-blown explosives expert.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Diamond is Unbreakable: Yoshikage Kira's Stand, Killer Queen, runs on this trope, with its primary ability turning anything it touches into a detonated bomb (but only one at a time), its secondary ability, Sheer Heart Attack, releasing an autonomous heat-seeking RC-car sized tank that won't stop until its targets are dead, and later on, Bites The Dust, a bomb that creates a time loop by blowing up anyone who tries to inquire Bites The Dust's host about Kira's secrets.
  • Golden Wind:
    • Narancia Ghirga has the Stand, Aerosmith, which takes the form of a RC fighter plane. It has all the capabilities of an actual fighter place, including being able to drop bombs. And because Narancia is Hot-Blooded and has a Hair-Trigger Temper, it's to be expected that fights involving him tend to turn their locations into war-zones.
    • A rather nasty side effect of Cioccolata's Stand, Green Day, is that if the mold it produces germinates fast enough on its victim, it will cause them to explode.
  • Steel Ball Run: Oyecomova's Stand, Boku no Rhythm wo Kiitekure, is basically Killer Queen up to eleven. Anything Oyecomova touches can have grenade pins attached to it, which when separated from the object, which can happen with even with just the slightest bit of force, will cause the pin to explode. And this does mean anything.
  • JoJolion: Like his Original Universe counterpart, Yoshikage Kira has the Stand Killer Queen. While its abilities are still explosion based, their are a few differences: instead of turning anything it touches into bombs, it instead produces explosive soap bubbles, it can create multiple bombs at once rather than one at a time, and it can release multiple Sheer Heart Attacks at once rather than just one.
• KonoSuba: Megumin only ever chose to learn how to use Explosion magic, and dumped all of her skill points into making bigger and faster explosions. However, she regularly exhausts herself after casting the spell once a day, since she never put any skill points into increasing her mana pool.
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes For having major space battle scenes it’s typical to see the Imperial and Allied forces blowing each up one by one.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: This is Nanoha's solution to practically everything. Need to make friends? Blow them up. Humongous Mecha Eldritch Abomination on a rampage? Blow it up. Student not following orders? Blow her up. Need to save daughter? Blow her up. Some people forgot to equip brakes? Active Guard with Holding Net. There are some things Full Power Total Destruction can't solve, but for everything else, there's Starlight Breaker.
• Naruto:
  • Deidara is an awesomely insane Mad Bomber who enjoys blowing things up with clay. In fact, he met his demise by self-detonation.
  • And in the first Naruto film the Big Bad, Doto, blows up his own fortress for no apparent reason.
  • When Tailed Beasts aren't flattening mountains and crushing villages with their tails/feet, they are blowing stuff up on the gargantuan scale with the Tailed Beast Bomb.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has a particularly awesome explosion in End of Evangelion when Asuka in Unit 02 throws a battleship at a bunch of tanks.
• Pokémon the Series: There is a good chance those cutting leaves are Made of Explodium. The anime is in love with explosions. Especially when Team Rocket is on the receiving end.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: This is how Homura planned on defeating Walpurgisnacht. Using her Hammerspace, or stuff she just put there ahead of time, she attacks with hundreds of rocket launchers, mortars, mobile artilleries, and a building covered wall-to-wall with explosives. Too bad none of it helped. This was her original shtick in previous timelines, she relied exclusively on homemade explosives until one of her teammates complained about stuff blowing up in front of them. So she started stealing guns from the local Yakuza.
• Ranma ½: Akane tries to get some hard-boiled eggs by popping a tray of about a dozen or so in the microwave. It explodes spectacularly, blasting its own door off its hinges with such force, the shockwave knocks Ranma (a powerful martial artist) off his feet and the door itself breaks through the plumbing, flooding the kitchen.
  • This could be Truth in Television, as when you put eggs in microwaves, they do actually explode. Violently. Seriously kids, Don't Try This at Home.
  • Earlier, in the OAV version of the same story, Kasumi reminisces about her childhood and how she couldn't cook anything either —up to, and including, setting a pot of boiling water ablaze.
• REDLINE explodes enough stuff to rival Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann for sheer explodyness. This includes JP, but he's Made of Iron so he lives.
• The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World: Everything behind Tougo will explode as part of his Transformation Sequence, and his Burning Kizuna Punch will also make things explode even if nothing inside them is prone to detonating.
• Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles: Ariel has a vision of Space station Liberty being blown up Space station Liberty really is blown up, with blast radius of hundreds of kilometers — wiping out the Haydonite Fleet.
• Slayers plays with this a lot. To the point that by the beginning of the second season, as soon as hot-tempered ultra-powerful sorceress Lina Inverse starts chanting one f her most powerful spells (which usually results in mile wide craters, at least), the other characters are running for the hills and trying to evacuate civilians.
• Space Runaway Ideon: At the end of The Movie, the Ideon explodes so hard it takes down a galaxy with it.
• Speed Grapher: Tatsumi Saiga acquires the power to make anything blow up by taking a picture of it. He then decides to save the girl who gave said power to him, Kagura Tennouzou.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and a few of its sequels): The first part of the Daedalus Attack consists of the title mecha punching into an enemy ship. The second part consists of deploying lots and lots of Humongous Mecha from the "fist" to deliver a Macross Missile Massacre within the ship's interior, causing it to explode spectacularly.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is particularly fond of filling the screen with explosions. Namely, if something is pierced with a drill, it explodes. The first Big Bad is defeated by getting a hole detonated on his torso, and the second one explodes seven times. It opened with a zooming space-galaxy-thing shot... which then blew up. Then there were lots more explosions. Really, with a start like that you should've expected this sort of thing.
  • And then we have the volcano that spontaneously explodes when Kamina and Simon combine for the last time. The movies had the Chouginga Dai-Gurren-Dan create a Galaxy-sized volcano, for the sole purpose of making it explode seconds later, due to their own pure awesomeness that summoned it in the first place.
  • When the Dai-Gun Doten Kaizan was destroyed, it was done in parts. First Guame's part, due to the thousands of beams pulled after Gurren-Lagann, then Cytomander's, then Adiane's and finally Viral's part, by a Giga Drill Breaker... all from the inside. Safe to say, the recurring explosion looked fucking awesome, and somehow missed Viral, despite the Giga Drill also hitting him in the head. From below. And he survived being inside a giant mecha that blew up several times.
• Zeorymer's Dimensional Coupler Cannon warps space to blow stuff up directly. Its Meioh attack creates a Sphere of Destruction visible from space.

• North America: Portrait of a Continent: Yucca Flat, Nevada, being the site of the most nuclear tests in the world, is depicted with a billowing mushroom cloud.

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

• All Fall Down: Count Von Deadly goes out this way, when he loses the ability to control his magic powers.
• The Dandy (1937): The entire premise of Bing Bang Benny, drawn by the brilliant Ken Reid, was that it was set in The Wild West and the main character loved using explosives.
• Deadpool: In a one-shot, he wants to hire a filmmaker to shoot a movie on his life (by the way, unusually for Deadpool, this is a pretty serious story, where the fourth wall remains intact). When he attends the premiere, he's utterly disappointed that the story of his life was essentially turned into this trope.
  Deadpool: Aww, c'mon! Was it explosion discount week in Hollywood?
• Hellboy: In Wake the Devil, the vampire Count Giurescu and the cavalry horse he's riding explode into skeletal parts when Hellboy hits them with the post that he's been tied to. Naturally, though, that isn't the end of it.
  Hellboy: That's interesting. No matter how hard you hit them, horses don't usually explode... vampires either, for that matter.
• Sin City features a grenade-thrower whose grenades emit massive explosions that are strong enough to send cars flying... despite the fact that grenades don't work that way.
• Tex Willer: Tex and his pards love blowing up stuff, and are so good at it that if it was a college course they could teach it (their words, not ours). Their crowning achievements are using a dynamite stick to open a door^note in their defence, it was an armoured door and they didn't have the time to just search and find the key and using a few dozens to drain a reservoir and annihilate a gold mine^note the latter being an accident: they were trying to just drain the reservoir and thus deprive the mine of the water for their mining-purpose water cannons, but the reservoir was so huge that, once the guys blew open a hole, the water pressure enlarged it and made a flood. Thankfully no victims, as the miners heard it coming and ran away..
• Werner: Often at the climax of the story.
• The Wicked + The Divine: In the prologue, the Pantheon of 1923 blow themselves up to end that Recurrence.
• X-Men: This is the main power of at least two characters: Remy "Gambit" LeBeau, and Tabitha "Boom-Boom" Smith. Gambit charges objects (usually normal playing cards) with explosive energy, while Boom-Boom creates hand-held balls of similar power. Gambit is actually one of the most devastatingly powerful examples of this trope in fiction, or at least he would be if he didn't have surgery specifically to weaken his powers. One alternate universe Gambit who didn't have that surgery blew up the Earth.

• Little Nemo in Slumberland always had fireworks being set off in some way on the Fourth of July.

• Child of the Storm:
  • Gambit, as per canon, has the power of charging up objects and making them explode, turning a pack of cards into a pack of grenades.
  • Harry Potter, like his namesake, has got a knack for Playing with Fire and his default strategy in combat tends to be "blow everything up, then blow up the rubble to make sure". It gets to the point where Carol, one of his best friends and as of chapter 46 of the sequel, his girlfriend, notes that him and explosions go together "like peanut butter and jelly" and if they aren't, something is very wrong with the universe.
• The Infinite Loops: Some characters caught up in the Loops will express their distaste with canon events... rather dramatically. The Looping version of Trixie Lulamoon, on the other hand, just plain has a an ongoing love affair with explosives, and has crashed many Loops by messing around with massive amounts of explosives.
• Move Aside, Make Way for Ultra Despair (Danganronpa and Fireman Sam): Tom attempts to survive his execution by grabbing onto a Monokuma clone with a parachute. The clone explodes when it detects his body heat, killing him before he even hits the ground.
• A Peaceful Afterlife (Hazbin Hotel & JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable): Kira is the main protagonist after all. The fact that his bombs can kill demons by completely destroying them makes him one of the most dangerous beings in hell.

Dragon Ball

• The Forgotten Past of The Earthling Saiyan: During the final battle against Chille, Kakarot kills Chille by impaling Chille with his power pole and using its "Destroy" ability to make him explode. This destroys Chille's heart, making him dead for real this time.

Godzilla

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): There's Viv and San's escape attempt, during which Alan Jonah's mercenaries use anti-tank weaponry against them; there's fights involving Rodan, and the Final Battle against Keizer Ghidorah features a ton of manmade and Titan-made explosions and destruction all over the place.

Mortal Kombat

• Happens all the damn time in Mortal Kombat: Reconciliation, especially with the more powerful characters or the more powerful attacks. Jax even comments on this phenomenon after witnessing Scorpion summon a Spirit Bomb-style ball of fire to blow everything up.
  Jax: I'm gettin' sick of these big ass explosions!

My Little Pony

• My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic:
  • To the point that every time something blows up, the author uses onomatopoeia like Kabloom and Bang.
  • Dyno and Mite like causing this.
• The Witch of the Everfree: Sunset's combat strategy tends to be pretty heavy on explosions. Special credit goes to her fight with Nightmare Moon, which ends up leveling the upper half of Ponyville's town hall.

Unsorted

• All Guardsmen Party: This is the usual stock in trade of Twitch, the squad's demo specialist. The Guardsmen are very fond of this as a means of solving problems, including up to the occasional orbital strike.
  While the nerds babbled about how this was the greatest scientific advancement in centuries Twitch and Nubby went to find a place to plant the Nuke and blow it all up. There's probably something deep and philosophical you could say about that, but we were guardsmen. We had a really big bomb, and damned if we weren't going to use it.
• A New Dawn Short Story: Robin Garrett is a serial killer teen whose power involves touching things and alchemically creating bombs. He mostly uses this to take revenge on bullies, right wing politicians, and many others.
• A.A. Pessimal: The Guild of Assassins teaches a module in Applied Exothermic Alchemy. Unlike the Guild of Alchemists, whose explosions are usually random, unexpected and uncontrolled, the Assassins know a little more about crucial components like fuses and reliable chemical reactions. The modern guild even does bomb disposal and controlled detonations.
• Dreaming of Sunshine: It's a running gag that Shikako is extremely fond of explosives.
  I nodded to myself and finished the tag I was drawing. Then stared at the huge pile that had materialised while I had been thinking.
  "Got a little carried away?" Shikamaru asked dryly.
  "Don't be silly," I said airily. "There's no such thing as too much explosives." Granted, explosive tags were usually fairly expensive and most ninja never used more than one or two per fight. But since I made my own, that didn't matter to me.
  "Just what are you planning to blow up?" he asked. "Because I need to know when to make sure I have an alibi."
• Point of Succession: When Light and Matt invade Beyond Birthday's villain lair. As expected, it's booby trapped... with explosives. A lot of explosives.
• Things I Am Not Allowed to Do at the PPC: Rule 457 bans pranking newcomers with blocks of cesium disguised as things likely to come into contact with water, as cesium reacts violently and explosively with the stuff.
• Tom Swift and His War Tank: In one of the host segments for the MST treatment, Crow destroys Tom's airfield as revenge for ditching him in a biplane over the no-fly zone in southern Iraq.

• Anastasia loves this trope, mostly for the effects animators to show off (such as the Runaway Train violently exploding in a large, stereotypical Hollywood explosion with sparks flying upward).
• In The Incredibles 1, the big robot apparently self-destructs so completely it's reduced to something finer than powder. But wait, there's more. On the "special features" DVD, there is an easter-egg self-parody video that makes homage to the amount of times that things explode in the movie, as well as the buttons that are pressed and the doors that are opened and shut, by stringing them all together to the tune of "The Anvil Chorus" from Verdi's opera Il Trovatore. The sequence ends with this quote: "The Incredibles — no sequence unexploded."
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: What does a military do when a skeleton is trying to be Santa Claus, scaring the crap out of the kids? Blow him up with missiles, apparently.

• Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion: The climax involves Bud accidentally blowing up Fort Apar (which had been rigged to blow by the Al-minyas), with several of the Al-minya tribe and the treacherous Sergeant Axmann inside.
• Abbott and Costello in Hollywood: During the climax, Abercrombie and LeMaise are running around on a set rigged to blow after a musical number is finished. Abercrombie ends up setting it off at just the right time, right as LeMaise is attacking him.
• Amityville 3-D concludes with the eponymous house getting blown up by multiple explosions. However, it’s somehow intact in future movies.
• Attack of the Killer Donuts: At the film's climax, John and Michelle decide that the only way to end the threat of the killer donuts once and for all is to blow up Dandy Donuts.
• Der Clown's love for spectacular explosions is continued in the movie Payday which features an Autobahn being blown up over its entire width with hand grenades, sending police cars flying, and an aircraft bombed with gold bars so it turns into one big giant fireball.
• In The Dark Knight, the Joker really likes explosions:
  Joker: See, I'm a man of simple tastes. I like dynamite... and gunpowder... and gasoline! Do you know what all of these things have in common? They're cheap!
• The Day After is a powerful Deconstruction, thanks to multiple nuclear missiles fired at Kansas City and Whiteman Air Force Base, resulting in a huge monstrous fireball that vaporizes all living things within its reach, and knocks over every building (the latter done via stock footage of the 1950s of real nuclear bomb tests).
• The Die Hard film series has bigger and bigger explosions in each installment. Summing it up: the 1st has a floor of a building. The 4th has a building.
• Doctor in Trouble: When Dr. Burke slips down an air pipe while trying to hide from the Master-at-Arms, a fiery explosion erupts from it.
• The climax of the movie version of Stephen King's Firestarter fits this trope quite well.
• In Frankenhooker, a Mad Scientist invents a Fantastic Drug called "supercrack," which causes prostitutes who smoke it explode. A whole room full of them do.
• Glass Onion: In the denouement the entire estate on the island loudly and flashily explodes as a result of the unstable fuel source Klear being thrown into a fire. Blanc kicks back and watches it happen, extremely satisfied.
• Godzilla, unsurprisingly, is a franchise that is fond of explosions caused by the Big G and other kaiju.
• Help!: The cultists fire away and eventually do manage to take out the tank the Beatles were riding in. Luckily, the Beatles were no longer in it when it was hit.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)'s trailer, framed as a Hitchhiker's Guide entry on movie trailers, notes "the goal is to create a piece of advertising that is original and exciting, yet intelligent and provocative. In other words: lots of things blowing up, [cue montage of movie explosions] occasionally interrupted by a girl in a bikini."
• In Independence Day, the aliens apparently have firestorm cannons that blow up famous landmarks.
• The Italian Job (1969): "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" As well as the van, the film heavily features three minis among its vehicles. The gang dispose of them by letting them fall off cliffs, whereupon the third mini blows up before hitting the ground.
• James Bond has the usual exploding vehicles, villain lairs and general buildings of any action movie. And Q usually arms him with mines or some sort of exploding gadget (such as exploding toothpaste and a pen-grenade).
  • The video game, Golden Eye: 007, where—shot enough times—everything explodes.
  • At the climax of Live and Let Die, the villain — rapidly pumped full of high-pressure CO₂ — explodes.
• Jaws 1 has Brody shoot a compressed air tank in the shark's mouth, reducing the shark's head to a raining cloud of fish meat.
• This scene from the Mockbuster Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws is possibly the most contrived and WTF-enducing way to slip an explosion into a film ever.
• Johnny Dangerously: "Knock down THAT wall, knock down THAT wall, and knock down THAT farging wall!" BOOM! "Now, I'm really mad. This is farging war!"
• Koyaanisqatsi has sequences of quarry blasting, nuclear bomb tests, air-to-ground ordnance tests, vacant buildings being demolished, consumer durables fitted with explosives and an unmanned rocket being destroyed in flight with an extended take of the flaming pieces descending. All set to the Philip Glass soundtrack. And it's awesome in a sad sort of way.
• Inverted in Last Action Hero, when Jack Slater is in the real world and the taxi he shoots doesn't blow up, he checks the gun he is using.
• In Mad Max: Fury Road, the most spectacular explosion by far is that of the People Eater's "Limo"/mobile refinery (since it's full of gas to resupply Immortan Joe's army on the move) when chasing the War Rig at the end.
• It's easier to list the things that aren't blown up, impaled by flying objects or crushed in Man of Steel than the things that are.
• About half of The Marine is made of Stuff Blowing Up. Lots of it.
• Mongolian Death Worm: At the end, everyone decides the only way to kill the worms is to blow up the oil facility, and their nest below it.
• Tim from Monty Python and the Holy Grail introduces himself with various explosions. Perhaps that's why they used coconuts instead of horses.
• The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!: Parodied, with the luckless suspect whom Drebin is chasing ends up straddling an army missile on a trailer as it plows in through the front door of a fireworks factory.
• The Mafia bombs The North Avenue Irregulars' church when they start getting too close to The Mafia's bank.
• In O'Dessa, O'Dessa setting her guitar on fire and smashing the plazma-powered Eye in the Sky causes Plutonovich's studio and entire island to go up in flames and explosions.
• On the Buses films:
  • On the Buses:
    • When trying to remove bits of melted saucepan from the canteen's stovetop, Blakey sticks a metal scraper down the side and causes the fuse box to explode.
    • When blaming Olive's pregnancy on Stan, Arthur mentions a night four months ago when Stan blew up the telly trying to fix the plug which left Arthur and Olive with nothing else to do.
  • During the darts tournament in Mutiny on the Buses, Blakey throws a dart at the light above the dartboard, which causes a small explosion.
  • Holiday on the Buses: After Arthur uses petrol to clean some hardened paintbrushes, Olive disposes of it down the toilet in the chalet. This causes an issue when Stan throws a lit cigarette in the toilet and blows it up, which causes explosions to fire out of drains all around Pontins.
• In Poseidon, one of the main characters pushes a cannister into the bow thruster, so that they can escape through it. Somehow, despite only damaging the thruster motor, a huge fireball is thrown out of both ends of the thruster. (Also, when the bow thruster was pushing starboard, the air was being pushed into the room. It was being sucked out when it started pushing to port. Since in either situation, air should just be sucked in one end of the thruster and blown out the other, there seems to be no reason for this. Air pressure in the thruster room should remain neutral, though there would be draughts.)
• The Producers (1967): ZE KVICK FUSE!?! (To a massive amount of kaboom.)
• In Shredder Orpheus, Axel, Scratch, and Razoreus rig explosive charges to one of EBN's satellite dishes and set them off, destroying it.
• Speed has two buses (the second being the one most of the movie takes place on) go up in fiery explosions as well as a house and an airliner. At the end of of the sequel, a supertanker explosion takes out the Big Bad.
• Speed Racer (2008) has loads and loads of gratuitous explosions, but the whole movie is built on rule of cool and Car Fu, so no one really cares.
• Star Trek (2009) features things exploding. Many things exploding. Explodily. Which were produced by Industrial Light & Magic. And it was awesome.
• Star Wars and the Death Stars, baby (in this case, the stations themselves, not their targets). You'd think a reactor would have fail-safes so that if containment was breached or the reaction controls were destroyed it would automatically shut down, rendering the station lifeless, but no, it goes kablooie. And it is sweet.
  • The first Death Star has an excuse - it was seconds away from firing a full-power, planet-destroying blast. Do you have any idea just how much energy would have been built up in the reactor at that point? It has to go somewhere. The second Death Star has less of an excuse, but the superlaser was in use, albeit only as an anti-ship weapon.
    • In addition, the guy who was shanghaied into designing the first Death Star deliberately engineered a tiny flaw and sent a message to the rebels to help them exploit it.
    • The second Death Star was unfinished at the time.
    • The novel Death Star explained the colossal explosion: hypermatter reactors of a size large enough to power the Death Star superlaser are experimental technology. The Battle Lance hypermatter testbed ship, with an unusually large one as a trial run for the Death Star's weapon, had an unknown screwup with its reactor, and suddenly and permanently ceased existing.
  • The X-Wing Star Wars Expanded Universe books like to describe exactly how each TIE fighter that's shot down explodes, in exquisite detail. Other stuff blows up quite frequently also. Lampshaded by this quote:
    Donos: Pretty. What do we blow up first?
    Wedge: Write that down. That ought to be the Wraith Squadron motto.
  • Many of the X-Wing books are written by Michael Stackpole, who loves this trope so much that his novels set in the BattleTech universe gave rise to the term "stackpoling" to refer to a fusion reactor exploding. He gets away with it because it's cool.
  • For that matter, Every TIE Is A Pinto. Witness tiny ships like TIE fighters exploding into fireballs, most noticeably when Han takes out the last one in Episode IV, resulting in a massive multi-stage explosion from something that carries very little fuel and no exploding weapons. In the Expanded Universe it's explained they don't even have any internal life support (it's built into the pilots' suits), so there's no atmosphere to burn.
  • In The Last Jedi, Poe Dameron makes it clear that his favorite way of solving problems is to jump into his X-Wing and blow something up. Exhibit A: Starkiller Base. Exhibit B: The Fulminatrix.
• The finale of Suspiria (1977) has the whole Academy blowing up bit by bit, starting with a ceramic panther and then ending up with a classic explosion with fire.
• Swordfish begins In Medias Res with a bank full of booby-trapped hostages. The police, being Too Dumb to Live, attempt to "rescue" one, despite her terrified resistance. The resulting explosion takes out dozens of cars and cops in Bullet Time.
• Tremors:
  • The first film: "It's gonna be big!!!" "Is it gonna be today?!?"
  • The Aftershocks ends with a literal truckload of high-explosives (2.5 tons, to be exact) blowing up, along with the oil refinery where it was parked. It leaves a huge crater.
  • The Back to perfection involves Burt's truck and house blowing up.
• Played for laughs in UHF during the Rambo parody scene, when air-to-air missiles fired from a helicopter cause giant structures such as the Eiffle Tower to explode, and the main character uses a bow-and-arrow to cause an enemy soldier to explode.
• Pink Floyd's The Wall. It definitely does not get torn down at the end.
• About half of xXx is made of Stuff Blowing Up. Lots of it.
• At the end of Michaelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, a luxury designer house, built way out in the desert, explodes for no discernible reason whatsoever. Since this is a late-60s art film, with psychedelic dream sequences and a Pink Floyd soundtrack, it is probably an Angst Nuke played out in the head of the young woman protagonist watching it. This was once voted "Best Cinematic Explosion Ever". Just in case you miss it, the explosion is shown several times, and topped off with a trippy slo-mo montage of various domestic items being blown sky-high, all set to "Careful with that Axe, Eugene."
• The whole premise of Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979).
• Played with 21 Jump Street (2012). First subverted and lampshaded when neither propane nor oil cause an explosion after the vehicles in which they were transported have been hit, despite the main characters expecting them too, however, in the next scene, a chicken transporter explodes after being hit.
• Michael Bay demands things to be awesome. And by 'awesome', he means 'stuff blowing up'.
  • In his work on the Transformers movies, he's strived to outdo himself: the rendering of a giant robot caused a computer to overheat and catch fire! Although it didn't explode. Yet.
  • Surprisingly downplayed in Pain & Gain (2013), as there is only one explosion in the whole movie.
• Toho are the masters of this, showcased not only in their Kaiju films (especially Godzilla), but several of their disaster films as well.
• Up Pompeii! films:
  • During Ludicrus Sextus' orgy in Up Pompeii!, Scrubba has to get some more wine ready for the attendants, so she puts three full flagons over the hot coals. Although Lurcio realises her mistake, he is unable to get them off in time before the first one explodes.
  • In Up the Front, the safe holding the Germans' master plan is blown up by Captain Nigel so the plan can be stolen.
• The 1976 documentary short Universe uses this trope not for the purpose of spectacle, but simply to illustrate the facts. In addition to the creation of the universe in the Big Bang and a star going supernova, solar flares are said by the narrator (William Shatner) to be the largest explosions in the solar system.
• In Willy's Wonderland, Siren Sara blows up the car Tex and Jed are in by pouring gasoline and igniting it with a lighter, killing them both as well as herself.
  Siren Sara: Thanks for visiting Willy's Wonderland! Hope you had a fantabulous time!
• A lot of films involving black powder-age warfare tend to treat 15th-to-19th century cannons as if they were equivalent to modern artillery and fired shells filled with dynamite or other modern explosives. In nearly all depictions of battles from that era all artillery projectiles seem to be explosive, while in reality even by the early 19th century at most one-fifth of an army's pieces were howitzers (i. e. pieces able to fire shells, at a distinctly slower rate of fire) while the rest alternated between firing roundshot (solid cannonballs) and canister (at short range). Few films make the effort to try to imitate the effect of a cannonball ploughing through a unit, preferring the more spectacular, often exaggerated explosion of a shell. Thus in Cromwell the first battle of Edgehill (which happened at a time when field artillery was still in its infancy and played only a minor role on the battlefield) is opened by a barrage worthy of Paesschendaele with spectacular explosions all around, and at the end of Amistad a slavers' base on the West African coast is shelled and spectacularly destroyed by the Royal Navy (with only some very small cannons in evidence) at a time when naval artillery was practically solid shot only.
• What happens in every action movie ever made to the point where it's a genre defining characteristic.
• Watch Your Stern:
  • The Fox testing the Creeper Mark I torpedo ends with it homing back in on the Fox and sinking it.
  • Blissworth's attempts to mend Captain Foster's bell end with an explosion firing out from a hole in the cabin wall.
  • When the HMS Terrier tests the Creeper Mark II, it does the same as the Mark I had and sinks the Terrier.

• A Brother's Price: A particularly tragic incident; two girls standing in front of a theatre, the one was told to go out because her crying at the sad scene in the play annoyed their husband Keifer. The other one came after her to comfort her. One of them says "I wish he was dead" - and a moment later, the theatre explodes. With their sisters in it. Well, at least Keifer did die, too.
• The Beyonders has orantium, an extremely volatile substance that explodes on contact with air or water. In the first book, the protagonists carry a single (rare) specimen of the stuff to serve as an Emergency Weapon, and its singular use is devastating enough to end a skirmish (with most of the combatants in pieces). In later books, the heroes find an entire arsenal of the stuff, and at one point, trick a shapeshifter into turning its entire body into orantium. The resulting blast leaves a mushroom cloud. Interestingly, nearly all of orantium's portrayal points to being an alkali metal, just on fantasy steroid.
• Cat Girls Have Four Ears: The finale has a rocket-launcher duel, utilizing surface-to-target rocket launchers.
• Darkness Visible: In the finale, Marsh throws a bottle of pyroglycerine from the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, with predictably messy results for the crowd of bad guys below.
• Discworld:
  • Soul Music: There's a dramatic scene near the beginning when a wooden carriage is speeding along a narrow mountain road. The carriage misses a turn and crashes far below in the canyon, exploding on impact. (With the mandatory wheel rolling away from the wreckage, which is, in accordance with ancient narrative tradition, on fire.)
  • Blowing anything (especially themselves) up is very much a staple of the Ankh-Morpork Alchemists' Guild. Well, that and trying to turn lead into gold (and usually just turning gold into less gold). When Cheery Littlebottom joined the Watch as a Forensic Alchemist, Sam Vimes asks her how she left the Guild, and she answers, "Through the roof, sir."
  • Hogfather: The wizards of Unseen University make the ultimate hangover cure by tossing together every normal hangover cure they can think of, and three magic spells. The final ingredient, provided by Munstrum Ridcully, is Wow-Wow Sauce, a condiment that contains two-thirds of the making of gunpowder. The other wizards, seeing this trope coming, hide behind the furniture. When Ridcully upends the entire bottle, nothing happens. It's only as Ridcully is chiding his colleagues' lack of backbone that the fireball erupts.
  • Because swamp dragons have such volatile internal chemistry, they have a tendency to blow themselves up. This was weaponized in Men at Arms by a power-hungry Assassin.
• Dragonlance: Each of the Draconian races die in... inconvenient ways, including one breed that explodes on death.
• Doom Valley Prep School: During a safety lecture in Potions class, there is a passing reference explaining why blowing stuff up for fun is a bad thing. We'd spent the first part of the class going over safety procedures. It was all pretty standard stuff. What to do if you got poisoned. Knowing when to grab the extinguisher stone, duck, run away, or bend over and start praying to the deity of your choice. The difference between various types of mercury. And how trying to make a bigger boom nearly drove Gnomes to extinction.
• The Dresden Files: It's not a proper day in the life of Harry Dresden if something hasn't exploded. Also, the premise of one of the best Batman Cold Open beginnings ever.
  "The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."
  • Much later on, when he's told that his duel has to stay within the confines of the arena, his response is, "Well, I have this thing with buildings..."
  • "Ah. The Bolshevik Muppet solution...." (Incidentally, that discussion allowed for an on-the-spot creation of a code phrase later... when Harry planned on blowing something up. Go figure.)
  • During a heated argument with Murphy, Harry grounded some pent-up magical energy. It ended up messing up the trigger to an already planted bomb nearby, leading to the destruction of a car. It just looked at first like something randomly detonating from simple proximity to Harry.
• Fleet of the Damned by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch: Subverted at one point when an interstellar PT boat crashes and the safety mechanisms work:
  Sten's hand was poised over the emergency power cutoff breaker when the ship's computer decided that it might be dying but preferred something less Wagnerian than what would happen, and beat Sten to it.
• Harry Potter:
  • This is the result if the Killing Curse (Avada Kedavra) hits an inanimate object instead of its intended target, it will explode.
  • This is also the intended effect of the Reductor Curse.
  • Played for laughs in the sports sections. Making fun at the fact that Americans Hate Soccer, they have an alternate sport to the popular wizard-esque football Quidditch: Quodpot, in which the players try to catch an explosive quaffle and not let it fall down.
  • Becomes a Running Gag in the film series with Seamus Finnegan and what Professor McGonagall describes as his "particular proclivity for pyrotechnics". The payoff comes near the end when McGonagall sends Neville to blow up a bridge and tells him to enlist Seamus' help.
• Havemercy: Royston's Talent is making things explode. He manages to state this in the wordiest way possible.
• Hungry as a Wolf: Wolf manages to bury the Wendigo with a well-placed dynamite charge that takes out a tunnel, the remaining screamers, and almost Wolf himself. He survives mainly due to his Healing Factor.
• Joan of the Sword Hand: Theresa uses gunpowder to assassinate Prince Ivan.
• Last Sacrifice: Rose's escape includes giant statues and stone walls blowing up.
• The Lord of the Rings: "Then there was a crash and a flash of flame and smoke. The waters of the Deeping-stream poured out hissing and foaming: they were choked no longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall."
• Matthew Reilly: This is his signature style. By the 3rd book of his Shane Schofield Trilogy this was being lampshaded all over the place.
• Project NRI: Louise and Juuri attempt to break everyone out by blowing up a window. It fails.
• Stephanie Plum: It's a rare book that doesn't have something (usually Stephanie's current Alleged Car) getting blown up or set on fire.
• Uller Uprising: While he was generally on the side of huge explosions being a bad thing, H. Beam Piper not only nuked a major city, Space Viking (one of the most badass names in literature) featured three uses of the Bethe-cycle bomb, commonly known as the "hellburner." What does this do, you ask? This creates a miniature sun that lasts at least several hours in the target area, destroying everything within about a thousand miles. Anyone pack the marshmallows? The craters are still smoking roughly two weeks later. Later in the same book, during a space battle an enemy cruiser survives several hits from antiship missiles. Frustrated beyond endurance, the ship's gunner smacks it with a planetbuster bomb. The resulting explosion lit up the sky for a hemisphere of the planet they were orbiting at the time.
• Universal Monsters:
  • In book 1, when lightning strikes Nina's house and overpowers the electrical systems, it also causes the experimental holographic movie projector to explode.
  • In book 6, Goldstadt Mansion gets rigged with C-4 by Detective Turner. When it blows up, it and all the monsters get sucked back into their movies once and for all.
• These Words Are True and Faithful: In-universe. Ernie says that his favorite movies include those in which stuff blows up.
  "I don’t know that I want to spend too many more evenings watching Stuff Blowing Up VII: Even More Stuff Blows Up, the stuff-blowing-up-iest sequel ever."
• Wizard and Glass: The fourth book in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, Roland et al. blow up an entire oil field. It is impressive.

• Older Than They Think example: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, a bombastic orchestral piece celebrating Russia's victory against Napoleon in the titular year. Authentic performances are known to use actual cannons firing.
• The Plasmatics: They enjoyed blowing up cars during their stage shows.
• Fatboy Slim "Gangster Tripping". In fact, the final version of the script is a single line: "Blow stuff up."
• The end of Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet"
• Keith Moon's raison d'être.
• "7 and 7 Is" by Love — the only way to cap the blistering tone of the song is with a thermonuclear explosion.
• The music video for "Hero" by Skillet consists almost entirely of the band performing in front of this non-stop. In the rain.
• The absolute ending of the clip for remake of Ronnie Hawkins' "Mary Lou" (the same clip that had an Eat the Camera near the beginning).
• The Wise Guys song "Hier fliegt gleich alles in die Luft" is discussing this exact trope.
• This is pretty much the entire story of Lemon Demon's song "Action Movie Hero Boy". Kid sees action movie, wants to recreate it himself, finds dynamite and explosives, and then... kaboom.
• Noah: Just before the last chorus, the car which has been the focus of "Walau Habis Terang" video suddenly explodes into a fireball for no apparent reason (except for possible symbolism).

• Explosions are in abundance in Attack from Mars and its sequel Revenge from Mars.
• The Empire Strikes Back (Hankin): Cartoonish explosions liberally pepper the playfield as a way of making the various battle scenes it depicts more exciting.
• Not only does F-14 Tomcat feature lots of explosions throughout the game, but the player can press the flipper buttons before launching a ball to generate more.
• In the KISS pinball tables (both the Bally original and the Stern update), nearly everything is either on fire or exploding.
• Operation: Thunder is all about using a squadron of F-15s and Stealth Fighters to blow up enemy targets all over the place.
• No Good Gofers includes dynamite and gopher-seeking missiles... on a golf course.
• Red & Ted's Road Show: Anything that Red and Ted can't run over with their bulldozer gets blasted instead.
• Stern Pinball's Star Trek has the Vengeance, which shakes during battles; on the Premium and Limited Edition tables, destroying it causes to list forward and "crash" into the playfield.
• There's no shortage of explosions in Last Action Hero (Data East).
• The Mandalorian (Stern): The center of the playfield features a massive explosion in the background primarily for the Rule of Cool. (The game's lead artist noted that the main goals were situated within it specifically to "highlight the excitement of all the conflicts throughout the series.")
• Pokémon (2026): Team Rocket Multiball ends with the Meowth Balloon exploding, freeing Pikachu and sending Team Rocket blasting off again.

• Kimmi from the Firefly game of Cool Kids Table has an affinity for explosives, and the rest of the crew has to regularly discourage her from using them to solve all her problems.

• Atsushi Onita got the idea to use landmines triggered by barbed wire, and later, plastic explosives concentrated in specific parts of the ring after founding Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling. This eventually led up to matches wrestled on a timer that counted down to the moment the ring itself would explode. Even in the Lighter and Softer "World Entertainment Wrestling" era, Mr. Gannosuke stuck a cherry bomb in H's ass.
• During its short run, Wrestling Society X more than once saw a championship match decided via pin fall in an exploding coffin.
• When FMW was revived, Atushi Onita was willing to go to New Jersey to work a match for CZW to promote it, vowing to bring explosives with him. CZW officials managed to convince him to keep explosions down to Wrestling Society X levels out of fear for Matt Tremont, who had stepped up to the challenge, but there were explosions in No Budget CZW nonetheless.
• This is what AEW wanted to go for in the climax of their "Exploding Ring Barbed Wire Death Match" from Revolution 2021 in the vein of the above-mentioned Atsushi Onita (and, in fairness, the smaller explosions throughout the match worked) but...uhh...maybe that was a bit too ambitious.

• Notably an airliner crashing on takeoff in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (properly dusty and smoky, not much of a fireball, but a visible shockwave. Nice).
• Fraggle Rock has an episode where Junior Gorg is grudgingly helping his parents with the spring cleaning. Meanwhile, Boober is braving the Gorgs' garden to dispose of a soup that makes things invisible but also causes rockquakes. Junior stops him, grabs the soup, and throws it over his shoulder, causing an explosion that blows up all the junk in the yard. The Gorgs and their castle are fine, though.
  Junior: Well, Ma, that's one way of getting rid of the trash!
• The Muppet Show
  • Crazy Harry, who would show up whenever someone would say "dynamite". Or "explosion". Or, once, "fish". He would then press down on a plunger trigger, and things would go boom. Presumably, the entire stage was always wired, just in case.
  • Different Muppets would explode, sometimes precluded by a declaration to "Blow their tops", sometimes without warning. Kermit even admitted to explosions being one of the show's trademarks.
  • The writers of The Muppet Show had three rules as to how to end a sketch quickly: Blow something up, eat something, or throw penguins around.
• The Thunderbirds titles end with a spectacular set of explosions to tell you that it's made with Supermarionation. Most Gerry Anderson shows seem to have something exploding in their titles, but Thunderbirds is definitely the most spectacular. Most episodes of Gerry Anderson shows usually involve large amounts of pyrotechnics at some point as well.
  • The only thing Gerry Anderson loved more than building models was blowing them sky high.
• Stingray opened with a shot of a still ocean followed by the words "STAND BY FOR ACTION!" followed by the ocean exploding for no adequately explained reason.

• The Goon Show: "You rotten swine, you! You have deaded me again with the dreaded dynamite!"
  • The exploding taxis...
    "Drop that explosion!" [BOOM]
  • Or how to break the world altitude record for pianos.
  • Or Major Bloodnok, who was a walking, talking series of explosive sound effects.

• A given in Destroy the Godmodder. Almost every vehicle blows up spectacularly upon defeat, with the Mech's self-destructions taking the cake. Many player alchemies and attacks also cause this trope. Lothyra and the Planet Express Crew were particularly infamous for this due to their frequent use of Antimatter-based weaponry, culminating with the former completely destroying the player spawn point and almost destroying the Godmodder's tower when her space station that contained her main antimatter store was accidentally deorbited.

• In the FATE adaptation of Atomic Robo, the GM advice notes recommend using the "Big Damn Explosion" tactic to restore interest - if things are stalling, or the players can't reach a conclusion on what to do, or everyone is running low on Fate points, have something blow up - a car, a rocket-propelled grenade, a car hit by a rocket-propelled grenade - and then proceed from there. Explosions have the pleasant trait of being hard to miss, even for the most clueless player character.
• The various editions of Dungeons & Dragons include numerous options for the discerning mage, but the most iconic spell of all time is the classic Fireball.
• If something doesn't go kaboom at some point in Feng Shui, you're doing things wrong. The Jammers even have it as their battle cry: "BLOW THINGS UP! BLOW THINGS UP!"
• Similarly, the Death Leopard society in Paranoia has "blow shit up and have fun" as its entire policy. Also tends to happen when: the Troubleshooters use grenades, the Troubleshooters have grenades used on them, something overloads, something that's intentionally explosive explodes, a can of Bouncy Bubble Beverage gets shaken too hard^note useful if you don't have clearance for real grenades, someone Logic Bombs Friend Computer and causes a reactor overload, a T-Shooter pyrokinetically sets off a grenade in someone else's bag while both are in a small room^note true story, someone fires too many shots before changing laser barrels, or the GM is getting bored and wants to get the session over with.
• Orks in Warhammer 40,000 love explosions as much as they do loud guns, fast vehicles and a good fight. So much that for them, a troop transport detonating in midair killing every boy inside and resulting in a catastrophic explosion is just as good a result as if it had successfully landed.

• In the West End musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Violet Beauregarde explodes. She gets better... maybe.
• In The Music Man, the town bad boy Tommy puts a firecracker in Mrs. Shinn's costume.

• Happens quite often at Disney Theme Parks, most notably in The Studio Backlot Tour.
• At the Universal Studios parks:
  • The Hobgoblin makes several buildings blow up with his pumpkin bombs on The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man.
  • This occurred in the former Earthquake: The Big One attraction, when a propane truck crashed down and hit a subway column.
  • Subverted in The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, when Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera think that their computer is about to blow, but it doesn't.
  • Several explosions occur on the Jaws ride due to the skipper's grenade launcher, the biggest one occurring when the skipper accidentally shoots a gas dock.
  • The former Kongfrontation had several buildings partially blowing up, due to the damage from King Kong's rampage.

• BIONICLE has Exploding Fishtanks, Exploding Fruit, an (apparently) Exploding Rahi, and, most recently, an exploding Eldritch Abomination.

• asdfmovie: Common, especially since the Mine Turtle was introduced.
• Battle for Dream Island: When Bomby got accepted to join, this was bound to happen. And it did. Heck, even before he started competing and was only a cameo, he blew stuff up (unintentionally, of course). In the pre-split fourth season, his team (mostly Gelatin) exploited this to win challenges, until they agreed to stop.
• Garry's Mod: In the "action film" Billy Mays Vs. Vince, Vince's favorite way of taunting Billy is blowing his stuff up. Mighty Putty? Blows up a wall. The Ding King? Blows up a car door. Orange Clean? Blows up a dresser. Kaboom? Drops a lamp on Billy's head. Then blows Billy up.
• The Demented Cartoon Movie!: Nearly every scene ends with at least one explosion. The planet Earth gets blown up a total of ten times, and over 40 "nuclear explosions" happen, many of them thanks to the words "Zeeky Boogy Doog." *BOOM*
• Garry's Mod videos tend to involve lots of explosions, simply because they're so ridiculously easy to set up and film. A good example is RubberFruit's videos, which typically feature some perfectly comedy-timed explosions. This is probably the finest example there is (0:50 onwards).
• At the very end of Ghost Burger, the burger bar which the protagonist Ritchie's father operates explodes as a result of the ghosts avenging themselves on the customers, causing objects to come to life as a result of their influence, and the fact that there's a bomb under the floorboards. Thankfully, deuteragonist John survives, but the burger bar is permanently destroyed, and Ritchie's father loses business as a result — not that he minds.
• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "hremail3184", Strong Bad talks about all different kinds of explosions, such as "those ones with the blast-wavy Saturn-rings that are so popular lately." The email ends with Strong Bad blowing up his own computer.
• Niji ENchanted: Vetruvius has a spell that is aptly named "Fuck Off", which causes the target to blow up in an enormous explosion of rainbow fireworks. When he demonstrated this spell in front of the others, he took out half of an entire mountain. Even the God of the server was gobsmacked by this.
• The Reapers Series: In Carla Catastrophe!, Shadow uses a bomb that he has had the whole time before they were arrested in Episode 1.
  • Shadow does this again by throwing dynamite surrounded by his demonic powers at a group of police officers and blowing up their police cruiser in the process.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • Parodied in the Season 3 DVD in which the intro features nothing but explosions from the first three seasons, then cutting to Grif who's excited about how cool it is.
  • Reconstruction plays this fairly straight. One particular sequence is where Agent Washington disposes of Agent South's body by piling a bunch of exploding crates next to it and shooting at them.
• YouTube Poop videos tend to involve things (especially characters) exploding, even if it didn't happen in the source material. Hoffy1138 even brings up the usage of explosions in his YTPs in channel description.

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: The standard method used to dispose of anything the author finds inconvenient to draw, like airships.
• El Goonish Shive: The destruction of the first Goo ends this way and Abraham's awakening from his stone slumber begins this way.
• Girl Genius: "Hee hee...Death ray go BOOM!" Anything made by Sparks tend to explode for any or no reason. One example was Agatha causing a massive explosion while fixing a coffee maker and is later Lampshaded by Vole with his report to Gil.
• Heartcore: Salamander demons are capable of making making highly explosive bombs out of their blood. As such, Carval and his parent demon Volaster invoke this trope (and Carval absolutely revels in it). Volaster, being one of the most powerful ones, is capable of turning himself into a fiery nuke, able to take entire cities down with him.
• Mario & Luigi: Cleanup Crew: Mario is introduced fighting a Piranha Plant that has somehow found its way to his toilet. Piranha Plants breathe fire. Do you know just how many flammable materials are in a bathroom?
• The Order of the Stick: So says Vaarsuvius: "as the size of the explosion increases, the number of situations it is incapable of solving reaches zero".
• Schlock Mercenary, constantly.
  • So often from an in-universe perspective that we get Maxim 3: "A demolition expert at a dead run outranks everyone."
  • Speaking of demolition "expert"... Lieutenant Pibald was on a ship captured by the UNS, so (semi-reasonably) decided to avoid capture by trying to blow up the UNS battleplate. It didn't work, but the resultant hole necessitated a comment on "filing an environmental impact statement." And for comparison, the first time impact statements were referenced? It was about the need for more paperwork after someone accidentally destroyed a moon. It took ten years to pull off. Piebald's attempt took 15 minutes and was in the middle of empty space....
• Sluggy Freelance: The Mad Scientist Riff is convinced that explosives can solve anything.
• Terror Island, Theorem 193 deserves mention.
  The Green Grocer: What would you say the opposite of being banned from shopping is? Being forced to shop? Being banned from selling? Banning someone else from shopping?
  Bizarro-Aorist: Exploding.
• Twisted Tropes: Right after talking to Violet, Isobel Grey walks away and explodes suddenly and for no reason.

• Destroy the Godmodder:
  • There are plenty, some of them described quite impressively. From the death star to tanks to whatever the godmodder feels like blowing up.
  • The UOSS did this... and took out half the battlefield in the process. The fireworks were so impressive none of the entities did anything that round.
• Old Spice | Devastating Explosions, at the Touch of a Button.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum:
  • Overloaded Canon Analysis Devices are a Running Gag. One exploding CAD was even used as an impromptu grenade against a Marty Stu.
  • Sun Crushers enable the elimination of urple star systems, and can also be loaded with other ammo.
  • One Pyro (member of the Department of Geographical Aberrations) got reamed out "for taking unnecessary risks with ... mithril diazide." That's probably a formula of MiN6, "nitrogen-stuffed detonation bait" as quoted below.
• Rock, Paper, Anything: Explosives are used frequently, from dynamites to TNT to a Tsar Bomba.
• Part of the reason The Slow Mo Guys exists is because Gavin and Dan like seeing stuff blown up and replayed in slow motion. Stuff includes: globes, statues, cars, cooling towers...
• A common theme in the chemistry blog Things I Won't Work With. If it's not an entry about something hideously poisonous, corrosive, or stinky, it's probably this trope.
  Azides have featured several times in the Things I Won't Work With series, starting with simple little things like, say, fluorine azide and going up to all kinds of ridiculous, gibbering, nitrogen-stuffed detonation bait.
  
  "Easy to handle" compared to what? Cocaine-soaked cobras?
• Try to repeat after me: *BOOM* Brass section, go: *BOOM* Now the winds: *BOOM* Now the drums: *BOOM*
• Pick a microwave show, any microwave show.
• One scene in We Are All Pokémon Trainers has Milagros (in Pangoro form) accidentally launching Bastion across a room after an attempted high-five.
• The Call of Warr: The first scene of "Undercover Soldier" ends with the soldier blowing up criminals on a train and on the tracks...with an explosive lemon muffin.
• The Yogscast Minecraft Series, being set in Minecraft and all, has this happen a lot, for various reasons:
  • Particularly in adventure maps, even if Simon doesn't produce TNT on his own, something always seems to blow up eventually. On one occasion, what blew up was the entire map they were playing through over the course of fifteen seconds of continuous explosions
  • Creepers. Made worse by Simon Lane's ineptitude at keeping an eye out for them.
  • The wizard Fumblemore, whose spells frequently cause explosions, and who has a tendency to trot out the TNT frequently when they bring him along on other maps.
  • TNT in general, especially when Lewis Brindley and Simon are impatient and one or the other spawn in TNT to "solve" puzzles.
  • Creeper_Boss, an "NPC" with a Creeper skin whose attack is to spam TNT.
  • This tends to happen a lot during a series finale, such as in Hole Diggers or JaffaQuest.
  • Sjin set Duncan Jones' nuclear reactor to overload, killing him and almost everyone else there and ending the first series of Tekkit (since everyone was migrating to a new server, they chose to Trash the Set).
• j0rts: One common gag involves editing explosions into any somewhat dangerous scenario, such as a video game car collision or an approaching Bullet Bill.
• Basically every single episode in Unstable SMP, regardless of the creator, has at least one instance of someone or something being exploded, mostly through TNT traps, TNT minecarts, and (especially in Wemmbu’s videos) the orbital strike cannon.

• Use of this in the most absurd ways possible is a major Running Gag on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. A specific example is that anything Master Shake throws will make a mini-explosion when it hits the ground (one has to wonder if it's a superpower or something). The episode "Kidney Car" ends with Carl's head exploding after he has his car destroyed by Shake twice.
  Meatwad: Why'd he do that?
  Shake: Why wouldn't he?
  • In the golf videogame, Zombie Ninja Pro-Am, not only do most opponents explode when you hit them with a chainsaw or guitar chord them to death, but the golf ball you hit occasionally in between killing people Carl, robotic turkeys from the future, and machine-gun packing tulips? That golf ball will explode if it goes out of bounds, and detonate spectacularly when you finally get it in the hole, presumably a) because the shape of the hole focuses the blast or something but more likely b) Rule of Cool.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Azula manages this. With a volleyball. They do know Kung Fu, and they use it to it's full extent of "What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?".
  • Avatar has also blown up a dam, Zuko's ship on multiple occasions, an abandoned Earth Kingdom city, anything with Combustion Man, anything involving the Day of Black Sun, and Zuko himself (when he practiced lightning bending). All of which just goes to show that you CAN, in fact, combine Stuff Blowing Up and a good plot in the same cartoon.
• Beast Wars, along with most of the Transformers cartoons, has a lot of explosions. At least one of the Transformers will be blown up in every episode.
  • Not counting Waspinator, who gets blown to bits in nearly every episode regardless.
  • Rather hilariously, there is actually a Transformer called Landmine. That's right. An alien robot with the name of an explosive.
  • Lugnut has perfected the art of making things explode. Behold! The P.O.K.E!
• Lotsa explosions on Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines, usually invoked on the Vulture Squadron through their own machinations and ineptness.
• The vast majority of episodes set within the DC Animated Universe end with the villain's hideout exploding, for reasons ranging from self-destruct devices to joy buzzers falling into loose wiring. On one of the Batman Beyond commentaries, the creators admitted that whenever they couldn't figure out how to end an episode, they'd just have a building blow up.
  • One example took place nearing the end of Bruce's reunion with Ra's al Ghul, who at this point was smart enough to install automated fire extingishers into his lair. Unfortunately, once the fires are put out, Ra makes the critical mistake of pronouncing, "It's safe." Sure enough, one loose electrical wire strikes the Lazarus pit, resulting in... well, you know.
  • Mad Stan from Batman Beyond embodies this, and became an Internet meme involving him popping out of somewhere, followed by everything blowing up.
    Mad Stan: You think this is a joke? Look around, Batman! Society's crumbling! And do you know why? Information overload, man! As a society we're drowning in a quagmire of vid-clips, e-mail, and sound bytes! We can't absorb it all! There's only one sane solution: BLOW IT UP!
  • From Justice League: in the episode "Flash And Substance", Flash rogue and Cloud Cuckoolander The Trickster (voiced by Mark Hamill) comes up with a ridiculous plan to grease the bottom of fake vomit and get the Flash to run over it so he slides into a wall of spikes. "And then... Everything explodes!"
  • Another example is in the Superman: The Animated Series episode "My Girl" which involves Lex Luthor selling a terrorist a gun that makes things blow up like they're been strapped to dynamite.
• An episode of The Fairly OddParents! opens with a displaced rooster crowing to signal the beginning of a new day. After Timmy wishes his life were like an action movie to get rid of the boredom, we reset the episode to the rooster, which explodes.
• Family Guy loves to blow stuff up. One episode had Meg racing against an Amish guy on a horse and the pair falls off a cliff. The wagon explodes, then, after a moment of looking nervous, the horse explodes, despite having no signs of injury.
  • In another episode, Brian and Stewie blow up a house. The explosion is shown from multiple angles.
  • Peter sticks dynamite in a watermelon to give to Meg, calls it a "thanks for being such a sweetie" watermelon, then runs out the room.
• As the creators of the show have pointed out in commentaries, every episode of Futurama ends either with something blowing up or a courtroom scene. Occasionally both (That's not actually true by the way).
  • One episode has a scene where they're being chased by giant space wasps. One collides with the hive wall and bursts into a powerful explosion for no reason whatsoever.
  • The character Malfunctioning Eddie, a robot car salesman who has a habit of exploding when he gets excited. This has happened several times, even in the same episode.
• An early episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had several robot clowns destroying Miseryville with several explosions. Heloise, watching from a distance, laments on the fact that she's not there to enjoy it.
• Kaeloo: Given the fact that the characters have bazookas, missiles and bombs, this trope happens at least Once an Episode.
• Whenever the supervillain Drakken's hideout doesn't get blown up, Kim Possible almost always remarks how unusual that is.
  • Well, it's tough to make cheese blow up. Even if it's the World's Biggest Block Of Cheese. That one just melted.
• Looney Tunes just loves to repeat that same explosion animation whenever the opportunity calls for it. However, the most unique use of that animation is Three Little Bops, where the Big Bad Wolf attempts to blow up (rather than down) the brick house with a large stick of dynamite. To do this, he lights it up from afar (one of the pigs blew out his match when he tries lighting it on the doorstep), but as he rushes back to the brick house, the fuse runs out. Cue the oft-used explosion animation, but rather than move on to the black smoke phase, the animation remains in the red smoke, playing the beginning blast at different points of the screen to the beat of the music, until it finally moves on to the black smoke and the usual fade back to the main animation of the short.
• In Milo Murphy's Law, anything is liable to burst into flames when Milo is around. Lampshaded once, when a chicken coop suddenly blows up just because Milo is standing in front of it:
  Zack: You know, Murphy's Law used to be a lot more nuanced and complex. Now stuff just explodes!
• The second act of the Mr. Bogus episode "Meet Mr. Bogus" had an example of this, where Bogus has to deal with a rogue vacuum cleaner that is running amok throughout the house, which leads to Bogus swinging all around the vacuum as it chases after him. This results in the vacuum tying itself up before exploding after a few seconds.
• All over the place in OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, including very often with things that should not be explosive. Occasionally someone will just casually toss something aside just to have it explode in midair in the background. Usually played for Rule of Funny.
• After having his apartment/lair blown up, again, Doofenshmirtz of Phineas and Ferb wonders "Why does everything explode so easily?"
  • Also played with in the Dr. Ninja Baljeet and Doof'n'Puss Shows Within a Show, where during fight scenes, it would cut to footage of utterly random things exploding (including a speed boat, a cruise ship, and a bowl of fruit).
    • Slightly justifiable as the shows were parodying old action shows.
• At the end of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Twisted Sister", fourth Powerpuff Girl Bunny exploded because of the unstable ingredients the other Powerpuff Girls used to make her.
• Raw Toonage parodied in one of the trailers here.
• Parodied in a Robot Chicken sketch which features a fake trailer for "Michael Bay Presents: Explosions!" in which all sorts of things explode, including a seagull and a baby carriage.
  • MA BA SPLOOM!
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated absolutely loves this trope. There is only a minimal amount of episodes where nothing explodes. Roughly half of Crystal Cove has probably been destroyed by explosions by near the end of the second season! (Many buildings have blown up, propane gas has been ignited, a diesel locomotive explodes in a violent train wreck (caused by the villain blowing up a railroad bridge that sends the track line out of service), even the Mystery Machine although in the final episode, the Evil Entity being destroyed undoes all the damage and mayhem that had occurred during the series.)
• Sealab 2021 features the Sealab blowing up in every episode.
• The Simpsons loves to blow things up in ridiculous ways. One of the best occurs when Homer tries to cook Mr. Burns breakfast and everything he tries ends up bursting into flames, even a bowl of cereal.
• Skysurfer Strike Force villain Grenader's whole attack plan involves him blowing himself up.
• Occurs in a similar and almost as frequent manner on South Park. One of the openings even boasts "MORE EXPLOSIONS!".
  • In the episode "Cartoon Wars" Kyle's big wheel goes flying off a cliff after a chase with Cartman. The toy bike breaks like a toy bike should until it hits the ground, when it promptly explodes for no reason.
• The Tick: "'Cause I'm the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight! Boom, baby, BOOM!"
• Butch Hartman's "Pfish and Chip" cartoons on the What A Cartoon! Show were loaded with explosions, since they were about two Funny Animals who worked on the bomb squad of the Big City Police Department.
• In an early episode of X-Men: Evolution, the team has just gotten their hands on a device that needs to be destroyed. Cyclops prepares to blow it up with his eye lasers, when Shadowcat suggests that she can just ruin the device by phasing through it. Everyone else looks at her like she's crazy.
  • Then there's Gambit and Boom-Boom...

• Someone at the Chinese space program didn't get the memo that reusable rockets are meant to be launched in places where the boosters can be recovered safely. At first, this was due to geopolitical concerns - launching rockets in the East where they'd fly over South Korea and Japan isn't exactly a good idea - as tensions have slightly relieved themselves, construction work on new spaceports is still slow going. This ultimately means that the Chinese administration has adopted an 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality to rocket launches, even if that means a village in the Chinese countryside gets flattened in a huge explosion in the process.
• One of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in history was created by an Soviet N1 rocket, the launch vehicle for the Soviet equivalent of the Apollo Program. During its second launch, a fuel pump ingested a loose bolt and exploded inside the rocket. This set off a chain reaction that caused the rocket's engines to shut down, dropping it back onto the launchpad. The entire vehicle blew up on impact, destroying the launch tower along with it. The Soviets never did get an N1 into orbit.
• Watch any documentary about the early days of NASA and you'll probably see a montage of several Vanguard and Atlas rockets blowing up, usually right after they're launched (fortunately, these were unmanned test flights). Reporters jokingly referred to such rockets as "Kaputnik" or "Stayputnik," plays on the Russian satellite Sputnik.
• The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was caused by an explosion of the main fuel tank. It happened because a rubber O-ring in the right solid rocket booster lost its flexibility due to the unusually cold Florida weather, allowing pressurized gas to escape from the joint.
• The SpaceX Starship has exploded numerous times, the most notable of which were in 2025 during flight tests 7 and 8 when debris fell on the Turks and Caicos Islands. Later that year, an attempted static fire^note test of the Raptor engines without launching of Ship 36 resulted in a ground-level explosion when the liquid nitrogen tank ruptured prior to the test. Ships and boosters have exploded upon soft splashdowns in bodies of water; however, these ones are expected during the testing phase.
• In 2026, Blue Origin joined the club when a fully-stacked New Glenn rocket exploded upon ignition of a static fire, destroying LC-36 at Cape Canaveral.

Warfare

• Above-ground nuclear weapons tests were mostly this, especially later on. After a point, they weren't testing to see if it worked, or what it could do, they were just blowing stuff up for the sake of blowing stuff up. The higher-ups usually justified it as intimidating the filthy communists/capitalist pigs.
  • Tsar Bomba being a 50 megaton atomic bomb that the Russians let off during the Cold War, the largest ever tested. Could have been 100 megatons on paper, but the Russians were concerned about fallout and the fact that the plane dropping it wouldn't have escaped the blast radius even with parachute retardation, so it was scaled down for the one that was made and detonated. ^note Most early airdropped atomic weapons had parachutes so that the drop plane could get out of the blast zone of the weapon. Since this affected the aim of the bomb a lot and generally let them drift off target, the bombs had to have massive yields to ensure that even being off-target by a few miles wouldn't matter too much due to the massive blast radius. The invention of ICBMs and reasonably accurate delivery of warheads allowed for nuke yields to scale back to less overkill
• Before the term went to describe the use of anti-personnel and anti-vehicle explosive devices, mine warfare was the practice of digging a gallery under an enemy fortification or trench line, make a chamber, fill it with explosives and blow up the whole thing. This kind of mine warfare reached the apex on the Italian front of World War I, where the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians, having to deal with otherwise unconquerable positions on the top of mountains, started blowing them up this way, ultimately resulting in the 34th explosion literally blowing up the top of an Italian-held mountain and making both sides stop before things got really out of hands-especially as the Italians were putting together a bigger bomb when they stopped.
• The largest deliberate artificial non-nuclear explosions were the "Minor Scale" and "Misty Picture" ordnance tests, conducted by the United States government to gather data and test the resilience of military hardware against the sorts of blast and heat effects that could be caused by nuclear attacks.

Other

• Ultimate example: The Big Bang.
  • Properly described, the Big Bang wasn't really an explosion at all, but more like a balloon swelling up at a steady rate. The phrase "Big Bang" was concocted by an advocate of the rival "steady state" cosmological theory, and was intended to poke fun at the notion that the universe arose from a single point's expansion. But the idea of all creation bursting forth from the mother-of-all-Bangs was so captivating that this trope supplanted the swelling-balloon image in popular culture.
  • With that said, it wasn't exactly a slow process either. Under the Cosmic inflation model, in just a very tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang (assuming cosmic inflation was not the Big Bang itself) the Universe expanded at least^note And likely even much more a factor of 10ˆ26 times.
• A supernova is a star that blows up to kingdom come. One way this happens is a Type Ia supernova, where the star accretes too much matter from a companion, inducing runaway nuclear fusion. Another way is when the fusion in the center of a star creates an iron core. Because the iron core does not give off energy by fusion, the star collapses due to gravity. The collapse creates a massive explosion outward. To give a sense of scale, a star going supernova can briefly outshine the entire galaxy it's in (consisting of hundreds of thousands to hundreds of billions of stars or more.)
• BLEVEs, Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosions, sometimes backronymed as 'Blast Levelling Everything Very Effectively'. Essentially caused when liquid reaches its boiling point and builds pressure inside the containing vessel until it explodes.
  • For an example of how powerful one of these are, here is a well known example that occurred in Murdock, Illinoisafter a train derailment.
• Grain elevator dust explosion, triggered by sparks from seized bearing. Dust explosions in general. It may be fun when MythBusters do it on small scale, but larger ones have been known to level the entire neighbourhood.
• The Halifax Explosion earns the distinction of being the most devastating accidental, non-nuclear explosion in history, leveling an entire neighborhood and was powerful enough to generate a deadly tsunami.
• The San Bruno pipeline explosion was caused when a major Pacific Gas & Electric gas pipeline in San Bruno, California ruptured due to overpressurization. While not as big as the Halifax explosion, it still led to a good portion of the neighborhood being leveled and caused eight deaths.
• Another gas-related explosion occurred in San Bernardino, California in 1989 due to improper cleanup of a train derailment right on top of a gas pipeline. An excavator dug too deep and struck the pipe, but the explosion occurred almost two weeks later. After this, all houses on that part of Duffy Street were demolished due to the risk of future train- and gas-related incidents.
• In his book Project Orion, George Dyson says of his father who worked on Project Orion, Freeman Dyson, that physicists love explosions. He shares an anecdote about how when he was cooking breakfast on a gas oven, he accidentally turned the gas valve up too high, causing a flash of flame to burst out as his father was entering the room. Freeman's reaction was to say, "Oh good, an explosion!"
• Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phablet smartphone was notorious for defective batteries combusting; one user had his phone blow up on him while he was sleeping in a hotel room and another phone-splosion destroyed a car, to name a couple of examples. Airlines started banning the very presence of the device (even powered off, even with the batteries taken out) out of safety concerns, and Samsung recalled it at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
• A microwave stuffed with oil and tin foil can explode thanks to overheating by microwave reflection as well as air pressure.
• Just four years after suffering from the sixth-largest artificial non-nuclear explosion in history by improperly stored seized fertilizer, Lebanon got hit by exploding pagers and walkie talkies.
• Whales, of all animals, have the capacity of blowing up due to a build up of methane gases in their body that follow after their death. There have been several recorded cases, and while a few instances were blown up with actual TNT as the trigger, the results were no less spectacular.
• While rare, human death via combustion occurs when the torso area explodes and burns but at least some of the limbs remain. Most cases involve a heat source such as a cigarette/lighter, heater, or fireplace being found nearby, but some cases were ruled spontaneous because no possible source was found.
• Deaths from electrocution inflicted by particularly extreme amounts of current causes parts of the unfortunate to downright explode from their internal fluids have flash boiled and created a internal gas buildup.