I like the cut of your gib, phouka. We’ll just add the ellipses…
*… Death by Gravity!!: Impalement
… Death by Gravity!!: Hot Lava*
Ta da! Officially done.
The corollary to … Death By Gravity!! in either variation seems to be this: if the hero and villain end up in hand-to-hand combat and the villain is punched, slips and falls to his messy death, he dies. If at anytime during the same movie the hero is forced to jump from a simliar height, he will somehow miraculously survive. MAIN CITES: The Harrison Ford Fugitive, Gruber in Die Hard, Jackie Chan in Rush Hour.
Death by gravity into hot lava, a familiar plot device in Hollywood it would seem.
But what about Death by Gravity!!: Burning in the atmosphere?? (given that you would certainly end up a greasy smear on the planets surface if there was nowt but vacuum)
I’m thinking of that bloke in Darkstar, not a film I’ve seen all the way through but I remember that part. And there surely must be more, can we count the death of the Starship Enterprise?
Frank Poole from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (unless I have a false memory of the manner of his death).
A nameless US astronaut in “You Only Live Twice”, who dies when his spacecraft is swallowed whole by Blofeld’s spacecraft. The closing up of the latter’s nose snips his lifeline, causing him to spin off into space. [Special mention must go to this death, since it is being watched by people on Earth via live video feed. Where the heck was that camera supposed to be located?]
Has anyone seen “A Kiss Before Dying”? Robert Wagner’s character gets Woodward’s character pregnant. As such, she’s an obstacle to his plans. He takes her to the top of a building, sits her on a ledge and kisses her, and then shoves her backwards off the building. Very, very cold.
Actually, you missed the grandaddy of all these – a Robert Heinlein story called "The Long Fall’ or “The Long Drop” or something like that It’s in his collection the Past Through Tomorrow, and concerns an aastronaut clinging to the outside of a rotating ship. The spin gives you artificial gravity inside, but when you’re on the outside it makes you feel as if you’re suspended over a literally bottomless pit.
I think The Little Mermaid was the only recent Disney movie where death was not by gravity, but impalement. Gotta keep the rating at “G”, y’know, and I guess whats-her-face being a giant octopus/squid creature makes being skewered okay.
Anyway, some other examples:
*A short story by Ray Bradbury, where an entire team of astronauts die via gravity. The last guy eats it as he’s burning up in the atmosphere. (The last few lines of the story go something like: “Look, ma, a shooting star!” “Make a wish, dear.”)
*Asuka of Neon Genesis Evangelion dies indirectly as a result of gravity: the Lance of Longinus lands on Unit 02, spearing it through the head, and the Mass Production Evas eat her alive as she’s immobilized by the resultant agony.
*A bunch of nameless colonists and earthlings in one of the Gundam series. (I believe that the plot to drop all of the colonies on Earth succeeded at least once.)
And some counter examples:
*Excel, of Excel Saga, who repeatedly falls down the Pit of Doom (occasionally filled with killer alligators, snakes, and puchuus) and comes back without the need for a Will-chan reset.
*Spike, Cowboy Bebop, falls out of the stained glass window of a church, in slow motion, and only ends up with a few lacerations and broken bones. (Of course, he was on Mars at the time, but still.)
*Shinji of NGE, who while piloting Unit 01 falls down the extremely long shaft (insert tasteless joke here) of the Geofront, fighting a Kaworu-possessed Unit 02, and lands without any problems. Of course, he was in a metric ton of LCL at the time, but at every other point in the series he was being tossed like a rag doll.
*Onizuka of Great Teacher Onizuka, who survives several falls off the roof of the school (which has at least 4~5 stories), as well as the students who try to commit suicide jumping off said roof.
*The male lead of the original Rear Window, who drops out of a second (?) story building and merely breaks his other leg.
*The various characters in series like Ranma 1/2, Love Hina, Pokemon etc., who get launched into Lower Earth Orbit on a regular basis and don’t seem to suffer anything worse than some comically-looking bandages.
The stuntman Dar Robinson had some dramatic on screen deaths by gravity. In the Burt Reynolds flick “Sharkey’s Machine” he goes out a plate glass window backwards and falls to the street below. In another Reynolds flick “Stick” he did a similar stunt, falling from a balcony to his death. In that one I think he kept firing his gun on the way down.
Probably his most famous death by gravity was doubling for Christopher Plummer in “Highpoint” where he fell of the CN Tower in Toronto with a concealed parachute. It was the highest amount of money ever paid for a single stunt.
Twenty, actually, barring injury or disease. See Falling Toward Apotheosis (4.04) and Sleeping in Light (5.22), for the reveal of the length/conditions of Sheridan’s extension and his ultimate end, respectively.
YES. Finally! I started this thread, in part, to see how long it would be before SHARKEY’S MACHINE came up. It finally came on the top of the second page! Nice work, Telemark!
Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt) in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY. Granted, I think he’s been shot by Sukarno’s goons by then, but he does fall out a window.
Here’s a Twofer: Dr. Frank N. Furter and his creation, Rocky Horror.
Yes, Frank was shot by a laser ‘capable of emitting a beam of pure antimatter’ but falling into the pool couldn’t have helped any. After all, Rocky never got hit. So it must have been gravity that got him.
Ah yes, I remember now the episode where he admires the sunrise. I liked too the episode at the end where they look forward years after all the events of B5.
Series featuring detectives always have them investigating a number of deaths by gravity. Here’s a few I remember off the top of my head from Meitante Conan, a manga that I’m collecting:
a man who caused the death of the murderer’s boyfriend (drugged and pushed off the porch of a hotel building onto a statue)
the son of a wealthy man who was trying to frame his dead brother (pushed off by the dead brother’s supposedly in-cahoots girlfriend)
a new and upcoming artist (although it turns out that her sponsor murdered her and then faked her suicide because she was blackmailing him)
