There was a recent episode of 9-1-1 that had that exact thing and it wasn’t a parody.
Although it wasn’t Bond who stopped the bomb in Goldfinger, it was some CIA rando.
Look for Amazon to give that unsung hero his own spinoff in their newly acquired Bondiverse.
There’s going to be a series about Felix Leitner? 
I really want to see it, even though I’ve pretty much given up on new scripted dramas.
You’re replying to what I said? The guy with glasses who stopped the countdown wasn’t Felix, that was some CIA or government scientist extra.
Felix is the next guy without glasses running in to enter the scene after that saying, “You okay, James? Where’s your butler friend?”
And a pair of wire cutters just happens to be nearby.
Every time I read the thread title, I hear Billy Crystal saying “This trope is only mostly dead.”
There’s another category on TV Tropes called Undead Horse Trope, but those are tropes that storytellers continue to play straight even when “everyone” knows they’re ridiculous unrealistic clichés.
A few years back there was a show on TBS called “Wrecked” which was sort of a spoof of LOST. There’s a scene where one character steps on a landmine and needs one of the other characters to disarm it before he steps off. The guy on the landmine, who has seen every action movie ever made, tells the other guy “You have to cut the red wire! Its always the red wire!” The other guy carefully removes a panel off the side of the mine, only to reveal a tangle of red wires inside. 
I remember Wrecked- funny show!
Yeah, the very idea that all explosive devices would be wired exactly the same, as if every mad bomber got their bombs from ‘Acme Bomb and Anvil Supply’ is pretty silly.
I almost mentioned the “…b-b-but, it’s all red wires!” parody version. Also ‘“cut the green wire, NOT the red wire!” “b-b-but…I’m colorblind!”’. Or, it’s two people who don’t get along (maybe a bickering couple): '“cut the blue wire, not the red wire!” Wire cut, everything’s fine. “you never get anything right, so I cut the red wire”.
Heh, I just remembered a funny takeoff on this trope- the movie “Honeymoon in Vegas” in which Nicolas Cage’s character finds himself on a plane with a bunch of skydiving Elvises (Elvi?). For plot reasons, he has to jump out of the plane with them, but he’s never skydived before. He’s asking the other Elvi how he does it: “It’s VERY important that you pull the yellow cord first, then if the chute doesn’t open, you pull the red cord for the backup chute. If you pull the wrong cord first, you plummet to your death. Haha, just kidding, it’s the red cord first, then the yellow. Or wait, which is it?” They keep f-ing with him and he never gets a straight answer before he has to jump.
Oh. That is disappointing. 
Does that mean the series is going to be about the guy with glasses? 
Here’s what I’ve always wondered about that bomb-wire-cutting trope. In the real world, where you have a bomb built by a bad guy whose level of bomb-building expertise is probably unknown (and really, who knows how he decided what color wire to put where), would it matter which wire you cut? That is to say, would it be wired up in such a way that if you cut the wrong one, you’d go ka-blooie? Or could you, with complete impunity, go snipping wires like a drunk barber and be confident of success simply because of the damage you’re doing?
I wish I could think of where I’ve seen it, but isn’t there another trope where the hero disarms a bomb by ignoring the experts and just physically ripping all of the wires out with his bare hands?
There was another trope thread a few years back where the bomb-wire-cutting trope was discussed at some length. I believe one poster said that anybody who had the most rudimentary electrical wiring schematic knowledge could pretty easily determine which wires came from the battery that powered the ignition source and cut the wire to it.
But I don’t know, I think it’s probably possible to make something complex enough, with a few decoy dummy batteries, and a setup where you cut the wire to one of the dummies, it would complete a circuit and…ka-boom.
But, in my very limited knowledge of IEDs (seriously, I only know what I’ve heard in the news) I think modern IEDs are usually triggered with a cheap burner cellphone that gets called to trigger the blast- not a timer. So the bomber can observe from a distance, and as soon as somebody tried to disarm the bomb, the bomber would set it off.
Just thought of a good one: the “ugly duckling” who removes her glasses and becomes very attractive.
Off the top of my head I’ve seen it in “Gomer Pyle, USMC”, “The Andy Griffith Show”, and, of course, “Rocky”.
mmm
I also seem to remember a scene from something where one person is reading the disarm instructions to someone else over the phone.
“To disarm the bomb, cut the blue wire.”
“OK” (cuts wire)
“But first…”
That one was popular at least up to the 90s-- the “ugly duckling” who removes her glasses and suddenly, She’s All That.
Probably MASH. (YouTube link)
Yep, that’s it!
Unless someone is deliberately fucking with the bomb disposal men (like in the Richard Harris film Juggernaut), yes.
There are two key elements in bomb design: you want it to go off when you want it to, and not go off when you don’t want it to. Putting overly complex mechanisms in your bombs lessens the success of both criteria.
The new trope I hate is complex bomb makers that rig the bomb so that if the knowledgeable bomb dsiposal expert cuts the “correct” wire, the bomb either speeds up the clock, or jumps ahead several minutes. Who would do that! What good does that do?
Saw a use of that in Elementary. Sherlock and Joan come home to find a bomb rigged to blow in their living room. Cue suspenseful music, roll credits. Next episode, scene continues, Joan is near panic, and Sherlock merely rips the cell phone trigger from the mechanism. She’s like “don’t you need to cut the wire or something?” and he’s like, “it’s a cell phone trigger.”
Something similar was done in an episode of Buffy