Disney Villain Death - TV Tropes and Idioms 

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"Looks like the Duke... has fallen from grace."

It appears that villains in the Disney Animated Canon have an especially curious tendency to exit the film by falling off or out of things. Unfortunately for them, even though they

animated characters, they cannot defy gravity.

The varied list of things to fall from includes cliffs, over waterfalls, out of trees, and off the tops of buildings. There is at least one case of a Disney villain meeting his end by falling

(off a space ship and into space), once sideways (off the Chinese Imperial Palace by aid of a rocket), and another where a villain falls "out" by being dragged to his doom by demons. Wait, actually that\'s two cases of a villain being dragged to his doom by demons. Or maybe even three. Perhaps four. And a fifth example if you count the live-action films (with a *big* shot of Family-Unfriendly Death making it even worse!)

Note that none of these cases have to involve a Climbing Climax, though it may involve a One-Winged Angel transformation beforehand (which is by far the second-favorite trope of Disney villains).

Sometimes, a fatal wound will be inflicted upon the villain just before taking the plunge (whether caused by the hero or by the villain\'s own actions) just to ensure that he or she is definitely dead. Or, they could have a boulder or similar heavy object falling down with them, which will surely crush them when they land, or fall into a deadly environment like lava or molten metal, a pit of savage beasts, fire, Hell itself, or even flesh-eating green acid, as water alone won\'t always do it.

As with other Karmic Deaths, this is often invoked to conveniently relieve the hero of dispatching the villain himself. Heck, they may even cry "Take My Hand!" as they fail to Save the Villain. Their hands left bloodless, the hero and heroine can get married and live happily ever after and whatnot.

This is usually invoked in order to dispatch the villain without resorting to a messier and more visible end which might upset the kids (or the Moral Guardians). Please ignore the uncomfortable realization that having the villain meet his or her end as an unquestionably ghastly mess on the floor isn\'t any less violent than any of the alternatives.

Keep in mind that you don\'t have to be a Disney villain to meet your end this way — many villains and other characters in action movies, cartoons, books and other works have also met with this fate, although it\'s fair to say that most heroes have ways to survive taking the long fall.

Extremely apparent in Disney\'s "Bronze Age" (the string of late-80\'s-90\'s hits). Not to be confused with Disney Death. It seems only good guys get to have those (there is a villainous variant, but Disney doesn\'t use it often).

There is also the non-villainous, non-conflict related variation of the trope, where a character decides to jump off a high ledge due to some stupid idea they have (eg, thinking they\'d fly).

See Also: High-Altitude Interrogation and Unhand Them, Villain!, as well as Death by Falling Over. When Recycled In Space, it\'s Thrown Out the Airlock.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

No Real Life Examples, Please! We don\'t judge real life people as "villains", and while it is Truth in Television that people sometimes fall to their deaths, that\'s covered under Not the Fall That Kills You.

Here\'s an obscure early one. An old Sunday comic serial had a giant

gets the ground she\'s standing on struck by lightning

the huge boulder she was trying to use to kill the Dwarfs instead falls down the cliff after her

where Ronno actually survives being pushed off a cliff and into a river by Bambi while they are both fighting over Faline.

, Willy the Giant falls to his death, just like in the original story. However, in its theatrical release (as part of

) and at least one television rebroadcast, Willy is shown to have survived... and made it to Los Angeles somehow...

In the 1948 Carl Barks Donald Duck comic "The Golden Christmas Tree", Donald and the nephews encounter an evil, shape-shifting witch. Donald manages to trap her in the form of a gas can, and later kicks the witch/can off a cliff during one of his trademark tantrums. It\'s a pretty bizarre story.

. Lady Tremaine and Cinderella\'s step sisters don\'t really get punished at all ( in the film anyway; all three are punished in Birth By Sleep, and Drizella and Lady Tremaine are implied to have been forced into servitude in the second sequel, while Anastasia is redeemed by love). But their Right-Hand Cat Lucifer, who is mean even by Disney cat standards, terrorizing the mice and doing horrible things when Lady Tremaine isn\'t available, falls from the window of Cinderella\'s tower. (The comics and sequels, however, show him still alive, minus one life). It\'s best to take the sequel\'s word for it. Cats (a) can right themselves in midair, and (b) go limp upon reaching terminal velocity, at which point their legs splay out and their skin stretches into a makeshift parachute. This means that they can actually survive very long falls.

, the wolf actually ends up being bumped off a cliff by the titular lion. However, it\'s then revealed that the wolf actually survived the fall since he immediately grabbed onto a nearby branch with berries growing on it.

; Captain Hook does fall, directly into the jaws of a crocodile, but he bursts out and runs away yelling. He makes it into the sequel, too. Played straight with one of his henchmen, however, after he messes up Hook\'s song at one point.

pulls her One-Winged Angel act, is killed by Prince Philip with a thrown sword (but it\'s okay because she\'s a dragon), and falls off a cliff that also is burning at the bottom. The burning cliff was rather clearly set ablaze by Maleficent\'s own dragonfire.

: Cruella de Vil crashes her Cool Car into her goons\' truck, sending them both plummeting off the cliff they were on. Oddly, despite the fact that the cars are totaled at the bottom of the ravine, all three are alive and Cruella is in good enough shape to throw a hissy-fit. She survives in the book as well.

(the 1961 film) is stabbed by Tom during their swordfight, sending him falling over the edge of a stack of boxes (acting as a cliff) and into an empty toybox below, from which he never emerges and is presumed dead. The only reason this was even debated was because pubilicity stills show him being forced into and imprisoned in a birdcage at the fight\'s end in place of the stabbing, which really is an alternate ending and therefore means nothing to the plot of the film itself.

, Shere Khan falls into a volcanic crack below the entrance to an ancient temple, but lands on a small island. Then a giant stone tiger head falls directly on him, subverting this trope. Seemingly subverting, that is. The stone head was hollow. And then the vultures show up to mock the inevitability of his doom (the rock was melting under his feet).

A very cool variation happens to the Horned King in

the very same magical cauldron that he intended to use to conquer the world. Once inside, he disappears forever. Hey, no fuss, no muss. Of course, in the book, he

Ratigan — oh, Ratigan. Of course, considering his direct inspiration, Professor Moriarty, also got taken out by a fall, it\'s not much of a surprise.

Also happens to his sidekick Fidget, who is ironically a bat (with a crippled wing). That didn\'t stop

from doing a comic story where he had apparently survived and also did a Heel-Face Turn, though.

Exceptions to this in the Disney movies tend to be very extreme. In one year, we got the Family Unfriendly Deaths of both Judge Doom in

(just saying he\'s run over by a subway train doesn\'t even cover it.) Sykes\' henchdogs also get freakin\' electrocuted on a third rail. That\'s not even going into how Ursula checked out.

. It\'s played straight in the sequel, though — Ursula\'s sister is frozen in a block of ice and sinks into a watery abyss.

with Merlock as a result of him losing his talisman... while in low earth orbit. Though he did wish to live forever and he would have hit the ground long before the genie was freed and all his wishes were undone.

escapes a group of crocodiles only to prove no match for the Inevitable Waterfall that is the death of him. This is followed immediately by a fakeout when the heroes face the

. (It helps to have a whacking great eagle on your side).

Beast initially goes out of his way to spare Gaston from this in

... then Gaston goes and brings it on himself anyway, after pulling a phony surrender on the Beast. Some fans actually questioned whether he actually died, citing how there was a river at the bottom of the ravine, and citing how LeFou managed to survive much worse, such as being stuck in the snow for what was implied to be several months and being crushed by a chair/bench, and his voice actor expressed doubts about Gaston\'s death. It actually necessitated the Disney company to make it clear in the commentary that he died. It was originally intended in the earliest drafts to be subverted: Similar to Scar\'s death in The Lion King,

As a matter of fact, Scar\'s death was actually reused from that concept he was to have survived the fall from a cliff after being knocked off by Belle with a rock, albeit with a broken leg, only to encounter the wolves from earlier in the film, and is implied to have been finished off by them. Apparently it was revoked because it would have been far too gruesome even for a character like him.

Forte, on the other hand, is smashed into bits in the midquel. And while he

a huge freaking organ at the time, he was also a transformed human. One shudders to think what he looked like when the curse was broken...

: Neville Sinclair, a Nazi agent, voluntarily flies out of the zeppelin with the rocket pack, but its fuel leak causes it to burst into a massive fireball in which he becomes engulfed, causing Neville to crash into the Hollywoodland sign and explode spectacularly.

Drinking Game" instructed players to take a shot for every trope common to

(i.e. every time Xanatos admitted to the failure of the plan being part of the plan or every time Elisa\'s Cool Car is seen). Disney Villain Death was

included because the sheer number would cause people to succumb to alcohol poisoning. Specific examples, for the curious:

The Captain and Hakon, in the Middle Ages part of "Awakening". Demona, at the end of "Awakening", though she turned out to have survived. The Archmage, in "Long Way to Morning", who also later turned out to be alive because David Warner is just

awesome. Subverted in "The Journey" with John Castaway, who had a helicopter ready.

In the "City of Stone" arc: In part one, a villain killed the hero\'s father by falling off a castle. In part two, the villain

was killed by falling off the same castle. That could be justified as poetic justice, but the creators didn\'t want to have to do it again in part three for the other villain. So, Macbeth gets a magical ball of... something that causes the villain to be electrocuted. And after he\'s burned through, his body... falls off a cliff. Oh, well.

And the modern Hunter\'s vendetta against Demona specifically? A fight between their father and the Gargoyle led to the Hunter falling off Notre Dame cathedral. To his death.

(from Disney\'s Hollywood Pictures), evil revenge-obsessed babysitter Peyton is shoved out of the attic window by Claire, and lands on the house\'s picket fence which Solomon had built earlier.

, when he attempts to crush Mowgli with a rock, but loses his balance and falls off a huge cliff near a waterfall.

Jafar\'s defeat in the original plays with this a bit, since he technically

, who seems to die after losing his footing and falling off a cliff, but he\'s still alive (even taking out a friggin\'

in the process). Later, he dies by being turned into solid gold, because he inadvertently touched the Hand of Midas without any protection.

his fall off Pride Rock. He meets Shenzi\'s Hyena pack down there, and they\'re not too happy about being blamed for all his wrongdoings. Let\'s just say that Scar would probably have preferred the falling death... It is heavily suggested by shadowing that they maul him to death. In the novelization, it is worse, describing Scar as a \'king fit for a meal\' and judging by the hyenas\' ravenous appetites throughout, it is highly possible he was Eaten Alive. The sequel further implies that he burned to death as well.

Also inverted: The actual "death by falling" went to Mufasa, the hero\'s father... a secret Scar just couldn\'t resist telling Simba before it was too late...

falls off a cliff into rapids and drowns. Note that, in the original Darker and Edgier ending, she was intended to be seen

(some argue that this is still the case in the release. It\'s a bit ambiguous), and laughing on the way down.

Her son Nuka suffers a similar death, but it\'s not just the fall that kills him: the logs that fall after him are definitely a factor as well.

Since he\'s one of the most downright evil Disney villains of all (although he wasn\'t too bad in the book), Judge Claude Frollo\'s demise in

is particularly spectacular. He stands atop a gargoyle and is about to kill Quasimodo and Esmeralda — but the gargoyle\'s head cracks, causing him to lose his balance. As he grabs onto the gargoyle for dear life, it starts glowing and snarling at him, as if Satan himself was saying he deserved it. It finally breaks off and he plummets to his doom, landing in

him off). Mere seconds before the gargoyle cracked, as he was about to slay Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Frollo gave some dramatic last words:

Frollo: And He shall smite the wicked and plunge them into the fiery pit!!

, sorta. As a god, he can\'t die, but he was defeated by being punched into the river Styx, where the souls of the dead dogpiled him. He couldn\'t fall to his death, so he fell

Panic: He\'s not gonna be happy when he gets outta there...

Pain: You mean "if" he gets outta there.

, the writers shot Shan Yu with a giant firework (in a kid-friendly way) specifically because they didn\'t want to have

may be the most violent of all Disney Villain Deaths. Falling out of a tree and accidentally hanging oneself with jungle vines. We even get to hear his neck snap...The storm makes it possible to see the shadow of his dangling body for a second, just to drive the point home that yes, he died and the corpse is there if they want to check.

An alternate ending averts the trope. In this ending, Tarzan confronts Clayton on Clayton\'s junk. A small fire breaks out when Tarzan frees all the gorillas that the hunter had captured. Tarzan then pins Clayton\'s shirt sleeve to an oil barrel with a knife (after choosing not to simply cut out his heart) and leaves him there as the oil from the barrel seeps towards the flames. The last shot is of the ship exploding. (This ending was cut as the filmmakers felt it went against Tarzan telling Clayton "I\'m not a man like you").

Emperor Zurg falls down an elevator shaft in

, yet somehow survives to play catch with his son. It\'s a long story...

has Aladar ram one of the Carnotaurs off a cliff. Under circumstances that are

Guard: For the last time, we did not order a giant trampoline!

Delivery Man: You know, pal, you could have told me that before I set it up!

The Evil Jack-In-The-Box from the "Steadfast Tin Soldier" segment of

is a half-example. He charges the soldier, and is flipped over by him off the table, falling into a hot stove.

: The main villain\'s death is surprisingly fall-free, especially given that the final struggle takes place on an airship. He crystallizes and

. It\'s played straight with Helga, although unlike most examples, we actually see her afterwards, and she lives long enough to deliver the coup de grace shot on the airship. It\'s also heavily implied that, since Helga lay at the bottom of the chimney when the airship blew up, she would have been crushed by the flaming debris whether she had survived the fall or not.

Cookie: Weeeeeell, we lost her after a flamin\' zeppelin come down on her — *WHACK* Uh, missin\'.

when the ship\'s Artificial Gravity gets turned off. This is obvious payoff for his murdering the kindly-though-gruff First Mate Mr. Arrow (one of the few

who dies by falling — into a black hole, no less) through similar means.

A bunch of other unnamed pirate mooks die by falling as well, a number when Doppler breaks the catwalk they\'re on and they fall to the planet below. More when the planet\'s core is being sliced up by jets of plasma during its self-destruct and some pirates fall into one of the firey chasms.

subverts this by getting sucked into a jet engine. Note that Mr. Incredible

... just not in that particular way. This is actually made somewhat humorous when one remembers earlier in the movie when Edna Mode was giving her reasons for refusing to give Mr. Incredible\'s new outfit a cape — one super died when her cape got her pulled into a jet engine.

, where Kim kicks Shego into a building, where she gets electrically shocked and the entire thing falls on top of her. She survives, and is perfectly fine, though.

And fitting an Affectionate Parody of other Disney movies. In

, Queen Narissa falls off New York City\'s Woolworth Building... after, yes, going One-Winged Angel. Into a dragon. She explodes into glitter on impact.

series, while there are a few falling villains (which Captain Hook subverts by being thrown off into the ocean with the crocodile chasing him... only to survive the ordeal and return in the interquel

), most Disney Villain Deaths are replaced with "Beaten to death with a giant key". Amusingly, of all the Disney villains in the series, the three who did not fall off something in their source material (and they still don\'t in the games) technically originate from

of the Disney Animated Canon: Oogie Boogie (gets his skin ripped off and crumbles in the movie, beaten to death and crumbles in

), Barbossa (shot as his curse of immortality is lifted), and the MCP (it\'s an AI represented as a giant red cylinder with a face in Cyberspace. Go figure). This might be telling you something.

Sympathetic villain Davy Jones dies after his heart is stabbed, and he falls into the Maelstrom in

. Averted with Cutler Beckett, who is blown up with the ship, and has his remains on the water.

character to die in the entire movie by plummeting through an ancient staircase.

, we see three examples of this trope. D\'Artagnan fights one of the Cardinal\'s men on top of some ruins, and knocks him off to his death. Lady De Winter, the femme fatale, chooses to fling herself off a cliff rather than suffer a beheading. Later in the film, D\'Artagnan surprises the King\'s assassin on the palace roof, and the fight ends with the assassin getting a crossbow bolt to the heart and falling to the ground below.

Averted with Rochefort\'s death; he is clearly stabbed and dies in full view of the audience.

Cardinal Richelieu is only a partial example, as he could conceivably have survived falling into the waterway (and, indeed, must\'ve if both history and the original story is taken into account).

actually has this happen with Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Of course, since he\'s the main villain, he subverts this by landing on a mattress (which then folds up).

Played straighter in "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted", when this happens to the Drill Sergeant. However, it was All Just a Dream (Within A Dream).

. Those balloons tangled to his feet don\'t seem to have helped him any.

. Dr. Facilier is very creepily dragged by the ankle of his shadow into the open mouth of a giant mask before it is closed to reveal his screaming and terrified face sealed up in a tombstone.

gently plays with this trope. While Mother Gothel did fall from the tower, she was already dead from Rapid Aging and turned to dust by the time she (or rather, her cloak) hit the ground. Also, she didn\'t just cause her own fall, she was actually intentionally tripped by

. Clu 2 does not lose grip and fall to his deresolution. Rather, his creator Kevin Flynn reabsorbs his program and blows up as Sam and Quorra make it to Flynn\'s Arcade in the real world. A tragic inversion with Tron himself, who falls into the abyss after remembering who he is and his purpose. His Heroic Sacrifice only managed to buy the party a little extra time.

In one album of the Italian Paperinik New Adventures comic series, Ethan dies this way by falling from the top of a dam. The man who is the closest thing he had to a father tries to extend his hand to him, but Ethan declines and says "Sorry pa, not this time."

A blink-and-you\'ll-miss-it example actually happens during the first fight scene between Finn McMissile and the Lemons at the very beginning of

: As McMissile is attempting to escape the Lemons\' oil rig, a Gremlin can be seen being thrown off a balcony and into the ocean beneath.

when King Candy/Turbo and the Cy-Bugs are killed by a geyser of boiling hot Diet Cola.

Ralph himself is subject to this trope, being flung off a building\'s roof at the end of each level of the game he\'s a villain in.

: "Red" has one of these after refusing to be rescued by Mike Chilton. Subverted in that he survives.

Mike himself has this happen in the finale when he\'s dropped off KaneCo Tower, though he survives.

averts this; Mor\'du gets crushed to death by one of the monoliths.

, Tonto leaves Latham Cole to fall to his death along with all the silver his plan revolved around mining.

In "Frozen" Prince Hans is punched off of a ship\'s deck. However, he is not killed, but instead thrown into prision.

featured an awesome variant in an early episode when Lady Une dumps the last surviving Alliance general from the bottom of an airborne transport plane

Septem had just broadcast his condemnation of the Gundam pilots\' assassination of the rest of the Alliance leadership which had decided to sue for peace and total disarmament, but since OZ was simultaneously staging a coup of the Alliance, Septem had outlived his usefulness.

, Presea Testarossa falls off a crumbling floor into the extradimensional void. It\'s left ambiguous whether she survived and managed to teleport somewhere else with the Jewel Seeds that fell with her.

gets rammed by the Dai-Gurren and ends up having not only his ship fall, but a large amount of his minions with him.

when Wrath is defeated in Episode 58 of Brotherhood. He manages to swim to safety, although he remains weak enough for Scar to quickly kill him a little while afterwards.

when he falls into a lake of lava under his castle.

The Dragon from the second DBZ movie subverts this trope, as he falls from a great height but explodes on the way down.

, some villains get this fate. The most famous was Amiba who was dropped from his tower after Kenshiro strikes his power points then blows up in midair.

, during the Doma arc, when Rex Raptor is defeated by Joey\'s Gearfried the Swordmaster, he falls screaming into a black void that symbolises his own despair before the Orichalcos takes his soul.

This was the fate of Professor Cobra in the original although in the dub he kind of...exploded or something.

Prof. Satou/Stein also fell to his death. While on fire.

, falls from a great height in both the anime and manga, but it\'s subverted in the anime, where he survives to endure a Humiliation Conga. In the manga, however, Zoroark chases him off the top of the stadium wall (a much greater height) with illusionary vines, sending him falling to his death.

Subverted with The Iron Masked Marauder from

, who falls from thousands of feet in the air when Pikachu shocks him while he tries to fly away with Celebi on his jet pack, but he lands in a tree and survives.

Always averted with Team Rocket, whose Joker Immunity enables them to survive virtually anything. Some of their "blasting off" scenes involve them falling into a gorge, and at least two falls were ones that they themselves thought would kill them (once in

, and again in the second movie). But the one that takes the cake for inverting this trope in the name of Joker Immunity is in the episode

, in which a boulder (which would have killed Ash and the gang) is thrown off a cliff by the Machoke, sending James falling into the gorge WITH THE BOULDER STILL ON TOP OF HIM (the same kind of fall that killed the Big Bad of Disney\'s first animated film), yet he turns up unharmed in his next scene.

, Mook Crown gets this death by plummeting into Earth\'s gravity while piloting his Zaku. Ramba Ral also suffers this fate as he falls with a grenade in his hand onto the Gundam\'s hand.

. One of the antagonists appears to die from falling from several stories; however, it\'s a Disney Death, and he\'s just severely wounded and taken to a hospital.

is defeated by Mocchi, hanging onto the edge of his castle. Despite the Searchers\' attempt to save him, he lets go and falls to his death.

(or "Kirby: Right Back at Ya!" as the dub was called), Yokozuna Demon Beast Blocky carelessly breaks off a piece of the cliff that Stone Kirby is standing on to trick him and use his weight against him, causing them both to plunge into the sea. Kirby, of course, swims back up to the surface and everybody other than Dedede and Escargoon cheers for him. Blocky, on the other hand, is too heavy to swim and thus is stuck sinking to the bottom of the sea.

Subverted with fellow Demon Beast Masher. In later episode

, Masher walked off the ramparts and fell into the ground below. He survived the fall, of course, and got out of the pothole he made when he landed. He was still destroyed later by Fighter Kirby and Knuckle Joe later, of course.

Also subverted with Demon Bonkers in much later episode

. After Hammer Kirby lands one last whack from his hammer onto Bonkers\' head, he falls off the tower of Dedede\'s castle that he was holding on to, and upon hitting the ground and making another pothole, he reverts back to his normal self, still alive and well.

Wheelie, the transformed form of Beat / Fang, suffers this near the end of the two-parter

, falling as the Dedede Speedway racing stadium crumbles and getting buried in the rubble.

, gets this by getting burned by Fire Kirby\'s Burning Attack and Fireball Spin moves and falling as he suffers from the flaming burns given by the pink spud himself.

Tulip the giant in Jack to Mame no Ki, being an adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk and all if you\'re familiar with the story you expect this to happen.

gets this when her jealous co-worker Mimete sabotages her car, causing it to go off a cliff.

Oh, and said Mimete? Probably wishes her fall into the void inside the TV she teleported into had killed her...

And before that, Esmeraude from the previous season fell down a dark void. Subverted, however, as she was already dead at the time.

falls to his death in the anime when Ben takes him down the cliff with him. He dies in the anime, but he survives in the Sequel Series

, Kaibutsu falls off a cliff after Weed headbutts him down. But it wasn\'t the fall that killed him; it was a tree branch.

, the Big Bad, Leonard Dawson, commits suicide by falling out of his office window to his death. Golgo shoots him in the head before he hits the ground.

ends with this happening to the Big Bad Moriarty, who it had already happened to before. Hmmm. Like the

. In addition, after the book proper is over, there\'s a small splash page featuring the silhouette of his corpse continually floating, presumably in space.

, during a trip through space, Mina comes across his corpse, still clutching the cavorite.

The Captain America villain Baron Zemo has gone this way about five times in his various incarnations. He is also known as "Gravity\'s Bitch".

In the early Batman comics, the Joker did this at least four times, but always survived.

In "Mad Love", he even says, "Not agaaaaaain--!" as he falls in a smokestack (a reference to his origin story falling in a vat of chemicals after a fight with Bats).

Lampshaded in the Paul Dini-written issue of Detective Comics 826, where Robin kicks the Joker out of a moving car off of a bridge. Neither he nor Batman think it likely that he\'s dead, but at least he\'ll be out of commission for a good couple of weeks, which is really the best you could\'ve hoped for.

comics, Herman von Klempt falls off a cliff, his jar exploding.

, when The Comedian falls to his death, and we see the body wrecked and the blood spilled. The movie in particular treats it with much spectacle.

slips and falls from the roof of a New York skyscraper. If he hadn\'t suspended Strange\'s ability to use magic three minutes earlier, he would have lived.

Allfather D\'Aronique. Realizing that Starr had rigged the entire base of Masada with explosives, the human wrecking ball tried to escape via his personal chopper. Sadly for him, Starr managed to intercept and hijack the helicopter in midair. During the struggle, Starr pushed the massive leader of the Grail to his death.

Eisenstein. The bureaucratic soul of the Grail knew that Starr had a hand - or rather a whole arm - in the demise of the Allfather. And Starr knew that as long as there was any kind of lead, Eisenstein would be able to track him to the ends of the Earth. After trying everything to dispose of him, from car bombs to snipers and ninjas, Starr was able to corner Eisenstein in a building in San Francisco and successfully threw the little man off the rooftop.

comic had Ratchet and the Dinobots defeat Megatron in this style. Ratchet manages to knock Megatron over a cliffside they\'re fighting on, sending Megatron tumbling down the cliff to his apparent demise. Subverted, however, as it later turns out he survived.

had Pharma meet this fate in issue 5. It\'s played with, though, as one of the heroes purposefully causes it to happen, something this trope was implicitly designed to avoid.

, Whosemoralsareelastix is defeated this way - he disarms Asterix in a sword fight, is about to go in for the killing blow, and the cliff edge collapses under him along with all of his money. Asterix decides to help him up, though, saying the loss of his money was enough of a punishment.

This is how most Mooks meet their ends in the

series, if not offed by Neck Snap or other methods. After being knocked out of the sky by the heroes, their injuries render them unable to recover flight, and they fall to their dooms.

, Mtumwa attempts to knock Nala from a cliff, but ends up sailing past her and falling himself.

, Simba battles Hila and kicks him from a cliff.

, the clones of the cubs are killed when Clone Nala finally accepts that she\'s not real, crosses the Despair Event Horizon, and tackles the other clones off of a cliff.

The Interceptor throws Shocker into boiling lava in

Virusi falls into the lava pit surrounding Pride Rock in

, Simba ends the Final Battle with The Writer by grabbing him and jumping off of Pride Rock, mortally wounding them both. The Writer dies first, allowing the universe to reboot, healing Simba in the process.

In A Pikachu in Love, this is how Pichi defeats the Ursaring that attacked her and Pikachu. Her attacks being too weak to do any real damage, she instead uses her thunder attack to cause a landslide on the hill it\'s on, sending it plummeting to the ground below. It\'s ambiguous as to whether the Ursaring survived or not.

has the Disc One Final Bosses, Boss Kaze and Empress Tyrania, go out this way. Boss Kaze falls off the side of a mountain after his fight with Pyrus and Delilah and Tyrania falls out of the sky after her heart is destroyed by the heroes (so it technically wasn\'t what killed her). Delilah promptly lampshades all the ways Kaze\'s death could\'ve killed him, grossing Pyrus out.

: During the Battle of Canterlot, many of Nightmare\'s Diamond Dog Mooks end up getting thrown off the side of the mountain.

: Velociripper meets his end, complete with a Big "NO!", by being dropped by Adam and Violet off the edge of the harbor pier... directly into King Krok\'s waiting maw.

: Celestia cuts off Queen Metamorpha\'s wings, then drops her off the citadel in Fillydelphia.

has this happen to the de facto Big Bad of Clover\'s story: the Diamond Dog Fluffy the Terrible (yes, really) is about to kill her in a shack atop the Canterhorn, when the dragon Bahamut happens to land directly atop of them, sending the whole shack, and Fluffy, tumbling off the side of the mountain. Clover later finds what\'s implied to be his remains at the bottom of the mountain.

According to Loose Canon, the G1 villain Somnambula ultimately met her end this way when G1 Shady accidentally knocked her off of a opera theater balcony, sending her falling to her death.

As shown in the flashback episode about the G1 era\'s Final Battle, this was the end of Ashley, one of Hydia\'s family members, when Katrina and Rep knocked her off her mount with a Fastball Special while she was in mid-flight.

uses this with two of the main villains: Archer and Cyrus.

: not only is he hurled upward, not down (courtesy of Po\'s massive belly), but his death (if it even happens) occurs due to the Wuxi Finger Hold, not a fall or any other type of very final, Deader Than Dead denouement. You know what this means...

The director\'s commentary during this scene is particularly cagey: though they claim they had to \'get rid of\' their villain and that he was \'wuxi-ed into oblivion\', they also point out what happened to Tai Lung is never really explained and is \'one of the mysteries of the movie.\' Covering their ass in case they want to bring him back, or just trying to be magical and mystical? You decide.

The holiday special opens with a dream sequence where a

Tai Lung shows up, prompting Po to say "I thought you were d-" before getting cut off. That only points to what Po

, General Mandible tackles Z, and they both have a huge fall. Z falls into water, and after being rescued, survives. Mandible falls into a branch and isn\'t so lucky.

, when Korso seems to plunge to his death (and did in the original script), only to survive, have a last minute change of heart, and then nobly sacrifice himself to save the heroes he was just trying to kill ten minutes earlier.

, Steele falls off the side of a cliff while trying to kill Balto, hitting cliffs on the way down. However, he manages to survive and continue to cause Balto trouble.

has a non-villainous, non-conflict related variation. One of the animals is asking where Fred (presumably a member of their herd) is, to which another states that he isn\'t coming along as he had an "evolutionary breakthrough." It then shows an animal of the same species (implied to be Fred) running full steam towards a cliff and he starts yelling "I\'m FLYING!!" as he\'s falling before he lands and is implied to be killed, to which one of the herd says "Some breakthrough."

, Rudy is shoved off a cliff by Momma. Rudy survives to see the end credits, however.

, two of the villain\'s underlings die by falling down an underground chasm

being drowned by a flood of water, being the only bad guys in any of the

movies that die. The three main villains of the movie, however, are the only villains in

Don Bluth is fond of these. This isn\'t surprising, actually, given that he worked for Disney for a while and that classic Disney films had a

The Giant Mouse of Minsk chases Warren T. Rat\'s gang off a pier in

. They don\'t die, but they\'re stranded clinging to the anchor of a boat bound all the way from New York City to Hong Kong. Ouch.

For anyone who hasn\'t gotten the problems with this, unless they could find a way to climb up the anchor onto the deck of the ship, they would have to resort to cannibalism to avoid starvation, and would very easily die of exposure. And that\'s assuming they don\'t have to drop anchor out at sea.

is actually quite an alarming variation (especially if the viewer is only familiar with the Lighter and Softer sequels): Littlefoot and his herd

toss him off a cliff into a lake and drop a rock on him, causing him to drown. And then, just to make the audience really weirded out, Petrie gets a Disney Death. Dude.

In the MANY sequels, tossing the film\'s resident sharpteeth (Sharthoots?) down cliffs or pushing something to fall on their head (sometimes both) is a common way to dispatch them. It\'s almost a once-a-movie thing.

, where psychotic penguin Drake managed to escape his fall, but is then crushed by his own giant boulder and the entire tower. So he both fell and dropped a rock on \'\'himself\'\'.

. Carface survives his considerably high fall into water below him. Unfortunately for him, this puts him right in King Gator\'s sights. All things considered, he would\'ve been better off dying from the fall...*

where as a result of her being tricked by the titular bat into becoming a dragon, actually goes on a rampage and is lured to the top of a water tower, which then collapses because of her weight, causing her to fall to her doom.

, the Magnificent Bastard Mok, an aging rock star with dark magical power, summons a demon with an evil song sung by the captive Cat Girl Angel (this is another very kind of movie). Angel\'s repentant boyfriend shows up just in the nick of time and they banish both the demon and Mok down an interdimensional pit with a good song.

, the psychotic, baker-hating serial killer Piella Bakewell meets her end by trying to escape in a hot-air balloon only to find out too late she\'s too heavy, and ends up

...who\'s a bird. They do show that he\'s gotten very tired and his wings are covered with snow, but he falls/glides

about twenty feet, lands in snow, and the sound effect when he hits is a gentle "puff". Um... I guess he\'s dead?

fits the bill as he was struggling to almost kill Clara, but he loses strength and falls from the balcony into his watery doom in the waters below Gingerbread Castle. After a splash, his crown is seen floating before it sinks back into the waters.

, where the villainess is defeated by falling off an airplane. She survives the fall itself, but is (possibly) killed by the effects of it; the fall triggers a massive explosion, which destroys a barn, which causes the door of said barn to fall on top of her.

: King Haggard falls to his death from the balcony when the unicorns destroy his castle.

: And not a Karmic one either; while trying to stop an Egyptian guard cruelly whipping a Hebrew slave, Moses accidentally pushes the guard off the scaffolding of the temple, and the guard falls to his death. This causes him to exile himself out of guilt and shame.

, Clayton and Smith are last seen plunging to their deaths in an out of control helicopter.

In the 1986 animated adaption of Ivanhoe, this is Front-De-Bouef\'s fate, as he plunges to his death in the burning inferno of his castle.

In the Miramax cut of The Thief and the Cobbler, Mighty One-Eye dies falling to his death from atop the cliff overlooking his warmachine.

, Darth Vader throws Emperor Palpatine down into a reactor pit to prevent him from electrocuting his son, Luke. And then Palpatine

It\'s hard to count the number of guys who fall/are knocked into the Sarlaac Pit.

, Darth Maul is sliced in half and thrown down a handy pit.

Star Wars special, which turns this trend into a Running Gag. Robot Chicken is also a subversion of the trope, in that we actually see the result of the fall (let\'s just say that it gets a janitor irritated at having to clean up).

, the 1989 movie starring Hulk Hogan that became better known for being parlayed into a "real-life" feud between Hogan (as a wrestler named Rip) and his co-star Tiny Lister, in character as his movie character, Zeus, an Unstoppable Monster. In the movie\'s climatic scene, Rip and Zeus are brawling on a high balcony above the arena floor when Zeus shoves Rip down a stairwell, apparently defeating him. However, Rip recovers and finally wears down Zeus enough to knock him off the balcony; Zeus tumbles from the balcony, presumably falling to his death when he lands in the wrestling ring below with such force that the ring collapses.

, the titular monster King Ghidorah kills the assassin Malmess this way when one of his random gravity beams destroys a cliff, causing Malmess to fall to his death (while hilariously catching a rock before falling).

A particularly jarring example occurs in Michael Jackson\'s short film "Ghosts". A transcript of the film (which, sadly, has since evaporated along with Geocities) even called the mayor\'s demise a "presumably very messy Disney Villain Death".

. Russel Crowe\'s sadistic villain (who happens to be a video game villain who has come to life through the magic of Applied Phlebotinum) knocks Denzel Washington\'s hero off a roof. Denzel gets to have a very graphic Disney Villain Death

a Disney Death immediately afterward! Of course, both Russel and Denzel fall through a glass rooftop earlier. Russel gets to fall through a

Happens to one of the Joker\'s goons during the battle in the top floor of Gotham Cathedral. Batman bangs his head against a giant bell and sends him hurtling to his death down a shaft.

Subverted with the Joker. He takes a fall from Gotham Cathedral to his death after being pulled off the ladder to his chopper by a stone gargoyle tied to his foot by Batman\'s grappling cable. Why is that a subversion? We actually

. There\'s even cracks around the corpse on the concrete and everything.

, but it\'s ambiguous enough that there\'s the possibility he survived. Alas, Word of God says he\'s dead; Aaron Eckhart actually asked Christopher Nolan about this!

This is a very popular move in the Batman films. In Burton\'s

, Catwoman falls more than once, though she survives each fall (due to having nine lives). The Penguin also falls through a window during his final fight with Batman. In

, Edward Nygma throws his boss to his death. Finally, in

, all three villains jump off the Arkham tower, yet miraculously survive.

, where Freder Frederson chases Dr. Rotwang up into the cathedral and knocks him off the roof.

, the Zod Gang gets this death. Superman throws General Zod into an icy abyss in a crevice, Lois punches Ursa into another crevice, and Non, while trying to fly, falls into another crevice, as the Zod Gang\'s powers have just been taken away. Although there is a deleted scene where they are arrested by Arctic police, it doesn\'t explain how they could have survived, so it could be taken as an alternate ending.

, after Superman neutralises Nuclear Man\'s powers, he drops Nuclear Man, where he falls to his doom into the core of a power plant.

, sadistic head deputy Art Galt, ignoring Chief Teasle\'s orders to capture Rambo alive, tried to shoot him from a helicopter. After being cornered in a cliff, Rambo threw a rock at it, causing the helicopter to pitch heavily and drop Galt to his death into the gorge. Unlike Disney, we are shown proof-positive that Galt ain\'t coming back when Rambo picks him up to steal his gear and sees his face smashed into bloody hamburger.

This also happens to the equally sadistic torturer Sergeant Yushin in

Live-Action Adaptation, the villain is killed by falling off a cliff. Although, this being a movie about ghosts, that\'s not the last we see of her. In a twisted (uh) twist, Kat\'s dad is also killed by falling down a manhole, and comes Back from the Dead in one of the most downright awkward ways imaginable immediately afterward.

The Angry Video Game Nerd commented on this when discussing Walker\'s death in

"Now, how many times have you seen this shot in a movie? TOO MANY FUCKING TIMES! This was one of the biggest cliches of the time. What happens at the end of

What makes this death even worse is that when he hits the water, there is no splash effect; he just "implodes".

Actually, he just sort of "disappears" before ever actually hitting the water. Apparently he fell into the blue screen instead....

film, where he falls off a building after trying to kill Splinter, and lands in a garbage truck parked at the bottom by Casey. Casey then pulls the lever to activate the smasher. Yick.

And yet, Shredder somehow miraculously survived to appear in the second film.....

. However, as he is being arrested by the police, Shredder\'s hand briefly moves and touches some of the mutagen before hiding it in his fist.

, it first appears as though this trope is going to be subverted. The hero corners the villain and gleefully describes how he\'s going to murder him. The villain then accidentally backs into and falls out of a nearby window to his death, fulfilling the trope.

was blown out his office window onto his head by Mila Kunis\' character.

: Chev Chelios and Verona die after falling out of a helicopter. Subverted for both: Chev breaks Verona\'s neck while in freefall, and not to spoil whether Chev makes it or anything, but there is a

suffers a spectacularly gruesome version of this. Bond

drops Alec Trevelyan from a giant satellite antenna, and we see him hit the ground and break every bone in his body. But he doesn\'t die until the antenna explodes and comes crashing down in flames right on top of him...

, a mook is almost falling, if not for holding Bond\'s tie. After 007 gets useful info outta him, he causes the henchman to fall to his death. Who\'d have thought the Roger Moore era would have one of the nastiest bits of cold-blooded murder committed by Bond in the series?

, Bond throws Chang (the first henchman) through a glass window and he falls to his death, by

At the beginning of the movie, Bond is in a helicopter with a villain sitting in a wheelchair dangling from one of the copter\'s skids. Bond dumps him down a tall industrial chimney to his death ("Mr. Bonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd!").

The hitman Locque is in his car dangling over the side of a cliff. Bond tells him "You forgot this" (he had just killed the Bond girl) and tosses him his own calling card, an ironic Dove of Peace pin. Locque breathes a sigh of relief when the expected Last Straw reaction doesn\'t occur. Bond then KICKS the car hard, sending it tumbling off the cliff.

Eric Kriegler is a better example, as he falls down, and we

. Kisch, who was thrown over a railing to his doom inside the Fort Knox gold vault by Oddjob to prevent him from turning off the nuclear device.

has Max Zorin falling off the Golden Gate Bridge after fighting with 007.

has an assassin cut an MI6 agent\'s rock-climbing rope at the start. There\'s another toward the end, when Bond tosses Necros, another assassin, out of a plane.

. Bond tries a High-Altitude Interrogation on Patrice; he refuses to talk and falls, seemingly voluntarily, to his death.

series of movies, though usually with a bit more proof they didn\'t survive the impact than at Disney. Lampshaded during the blooper reel of

Both Gandalf and the Balrog fall off the Bridge of Khazad-d�m, though it\'s revealed in

that they both survive the fall. However, the Balrog actually takes a second tumble off the mountain tower.

, Denethor hurls himself off the top of Minas Tirith. While on fire.

In the extended edition, Saruman is stabbed in the back by Gr��ma Wormtongue and falls backwards off the top of Orthanc and is impaled on a spiked wheel. Then, the machine begins to turn, sliding the body of Saruman down into the watery depths.

Gollum actually gets this treatment twice. The first time, he slips and falls off the cliff outside Shelob\'s Lair. It\'s revealed he survived, and shows up for the final battle. He grapples with Frodo in Mount Doom, but then falls. The odd thing is that the fall isn\'t really what kills him. Instead, we get to see Gollum sink into the lava with the Ring.

Originally Peter Jackson was going to have Frodo "come to his senses" and

Gollum over the edge, which would have messed with the story considerably since Gollum wasn\'t really the villain, and hard-core villains don\'t usually get

cliffs in adventure stories. However, this is actually closer to what Tolkien envisaged for an alternate ending if Gollum hadn\'t tripped, and what would have happened to Frodo if Gollum hadn\'t taken the Ring off him.

, the title character (Ian McKellen) jumps off a building just before Henry Tudor can shoot him. Into a fire. While grinning maniacally. And Al Jolson plays.

features an example of this; the Dominican monk and inquisitor Bernardo Gui is chased by a peasant mob while trying to burn a girl as a witch at the end of the film. Gui attempts to escape in a cart, gets stuck, and is pushed over the edge of a cliff by the mob. It\'s not clear why the producers felt the need to include the scene, particularly since the real historical Bernardo Gui lived quite happily to a ripe old age before dying of natural causes.

Also, a monk throws himself out of a high tower.

Gui was tossed cliffside and impaled on spikes the same reason the girl was spared: the producers believed an American audience couldn\'t handle a tragic ending.

Gobler goes over a cliff in a car full of Nazi soldiers

Slight subversion, we do see that he is eaten by crocodiles instead of just leaving it at the fall.

Colonel Vogel goes over a cliff in a tank in

Subverted, actually. One can see Vogel\'s body (or rather a stunt dummy) getting crushed under the tank repeatedly as it tumbles down the mountain.

Dr. Elsa Schneider plummets into a smoky abyss when she tries reaching for the grail at the end of

The two non-mook examples at least show what happens when they hit the bottom.

film ends with the Corrupt Corporate Executive Dick Jones falling to his death —

Robocop\'s shot him around half a dozen times. The edited for television version just has him getting blown out the window by Robocop with one burst after getting fired by the Old Man, which works equally as well.

, the Klingon commander Kruge gets a Disney villain death when he is kicked off by Admiral Kirk.

The Reman Viceroy gets a similar death when he is kicked by Commander Riker in

, although in her case, she falls into a cloud of corrosive gas that dissolves her organic flesh.

Though this doesn\'t kill her; Picard snapping her spine afterward does.

. It\'s made chilling when you take into account that the character was a

played by Macaulay Culkin of Home Alone fame. Additionally, his mother

dropped him rather than just falling off. She could only keep hold of one of them, though (she was also holding onto his cousin with her other hand), and Henry honestly had it coming.

, Hans Gruber is shot in the chest and then falls out of a 30 story building. The Disney Villain Death itself, NOT THE MOVIE AS A WHOLE, won an award for having the best special effects of its time.

while fighting them in an elevator shaft. And again in

; Jack kills Komorov by throwing him off a building, before getting sliced by a chopper rotor.

not only falls (after a Take My Hand exhortation from the heroine), but lands upon a lit-up sign for her company and is apparently, though not graphically, electrocuted as well.

, Dredd is hanging from an edge over a long fall with Rico about to kill him. Dredd turns the tables on Rico and throws him over the edge to his doom.

In the 2012 version, the villain suffers this from the top of a building taller than any that exist today (200 stories!). She, along with the audience, experiences this in slo-mo.

(1990). While fighting Quaid, The Dragon Richter has his arms ripped off by an elevator and falls to his death. His fall might be considered a good thing, given your opinion on bleeding to death.

. When interrogating a major mook (name of Sully), John Matrix holds him over a cliff. When he finishes, he just lets go.

Cindy: "What did you do with Sully?" Matrix: "I let him go!"

, the villain, Lo Fong, is killed when a bell falls from a tower and its rope gets wrapped around his neck. The pulley effect drags Fong upward, in a sort of inverse hanging.

, the Big Bad of the movie lures the heroes into a clock tower, where he and Chon Wang engage in a spectacular sword fight. Close to defeat, Wang cuts the support of a catwalk, sending both combatants hurling out of the clock tower window. Wang is saved by Roy, but the villain falls to his death, complete with a Wile E. Coyote puff of smoke when he hits the ground. Damn.

Well, the Witch with White Hair does. The Jade Warlord gets stabbed in the heart with the jade dart (thus removing his immortality and causing him to begin aging very rapidly), then falls into a stony well. Full of lava.

, Doc Ock sinks into the water as well, as part of a Heroic Sacrifice to save New York from his own creation.

Sabretooth fell off the Statue of Liberty, though he may or may not have survived.

although he survived because the end credits shows him in a full body cast and he impales a fly on a syringe.

was thrown down a well after getting impaled.

actually had three villains fall to their deaths, with two Dragons falling off a rooftop and the Big Bad suffering a fall into a fire (which she starts herself thanks to her falling through the floor and firing her guns up at the Angels while in the midst of a lot of escaping gas). If you listen closely, you can hear her scream even after she\'s hit the bottom.

, Storm Shadow is stabbed in the chest by Snake Eyes and falls off the weird, electrical tower thingy... well, he falls off a platform and into the frosty waters. Rumor has it, though, that the sequels have him returning.

Though already dead, Albus Dumbledore falls from the Astronomy Tower in

, Scabior falls to his death when Neville destroys the wooden bridge, Greyback is blasted over a cliff by Hermione, and Goyle falls into the Fiendfyre while trying to climb away from it.

Nero\'s dragon, Ayel, is shot and falls to his death in the recent

(2009 film) has the main villain, Lord Blackwood, start falling to his death via a piece of construction debris, before seemingly being saved by Sherlock, till another piece of debris knocks him off and into the chains where he is hung. It\'s like a mix between Gaston\'s death and Clayton\'s death.

(the sequel to the 2009 film), Moriarty is about to kill Holmes, who realizes that he can\'t take Moriarty in a fist fight. So he grabs Moriarty and throws himself off a ledge overlooking the Reichenbach Falls, taking Moriarty with him. Holmes is revealed to be Faking the Dead; Moriarty isn\'t.

Falling is the most common way for villains in Sherlock Holmes films to go out, as Moriarty himself fell three different times in the Rathbone-Bruce films (thrown off a tower, fell 60 feet into the sewers, and plummeted off a high rise after the pipe he was hanging on to broke). However, in 1985\'s

, Rathe falls into a frozen river only to survive, after which it was revealed that he was Moriarty the whole time.

, this occurs all over the place, and it varies between who it\'s most effective against. The final villain to fall is Igor, who also has the longest and most dramatic plummet.

film, Harvey stumbles over a cliff to his death, possibly caused by the deceased protagonist.

. In Dan Brown\'s book, the Hassassin is thrown off a balcony in the Castel Sant\'Angelo by being overpowered by non-combat scholar hero Robert Langdon and Yoga Fu empowered Vittoria Vetra. In the movie, the Hassassin (now "Mr. Gray") makes a "you\'re not armed, and I wasn\'t paid to kill you, but don\'t follow me" speech. Free to leave, he locates his getaway car and final payment and is promptly killed by a car bomb.

, the villain Memnon gets his Disney Villain Death only after getting shot in the chest with an arrow, falling backwards off a really high building, THEN getting engulfed in the flames of an explosion, and then finally crashing into the ground. Interesting to note that he\'s still alive and screaming up until he splats on the ground. Talk about overkill.

, though he falls into the seemingly endless pit of Hell (or Duat if you\'d rather).

, the Snow Queen falls into the lava. Her body is still intact afterwards, but is turned to stone and presumably doomed, but apparently not quite dead yet, as her eyes glow before the credits roll. If she survived but remained a statue for eternity, then this fits more under And I Must Scream. Also of note, her staff was turned to stone as well, and she is still holding it in her hand; her staff being in her hand released her from her imprisonment at the beginning of this movie, while all she can do while turned to stone is make her eyes glow (much like when she was frozen). The eyes might be also a hint at her return in a sequel, but none has yet been made, and after 14 years without a third film, it is unlikely it will be made.

. Played for laughs when Chocolate Mousse throws a soldier off the top of a tower and he

when she tries to push Sister Clodagh off the cliff. Martin Scorsese even calls it a "Disney Death" in his DVD commentary appreciation of the film.

, the main villain, Casanova Frankenstein, meets his end when Mr. Furious throws him off a ledge into his own Doomsday Device. It\'s not the fall itself that kills him but the machine, and in a rather graphic way.

, Rasputin (Yes, THAT Rasputin) is sucked through a portal into another dimension (so a sideways version of this), the collapsing portal happens to be smaller than his body... Ouch.

Then again, this being Rasputin here...

. While fighting two Galaxy security guards, Flint knocks them off a catwalk to their deaths on the ground below.

. Graboids are sensitive to loud noise and stampede away from them. Valentine detonates a bomb and sends the last Graboid over the edge of a cliff to its death.

, Big Boy is thrown down an oddly deep pit in a drawbridge machine room.

shows a man attempting to gun down the titular dogs, but is then kicked off a cliff by a fox that was helping said dogs. The two dogs then proceed to eat the man\'s corpse.

, Kamen Riders Ketaros gets a rather spectacular one. During his fight with Kabuto on a spacestation, they both fall off. While Kabuto survives, Ketaros falls all the way to earth, dying on impact.

series, Dr. Vincent Ludwig is shot in the neck with a tranquilizer dart and he falls off a balcony into the pavement below, where he is then run over by a steamroller, a truck, and a marching band.

The sequel has Quentin Hapsburg knocked out a window, and he falls off the balcony, but his fall is stopped by an awning; he gets up and brushes himself off, only to get killed by a random lion that escaped from the zoo.

, after a long struggle, David (played by Mark Wahlberg) is eventually pushed out a window by Nicole\'s father, causing him to fall from the balcony, where he lands on the rocks below and his spine shatters upon impact.

, ultimately meets his end when he falls over the railing of the top floor of Roger\'s apartment building. We actually do see him hit the ground, and it\'s pretty dang messy.

, Milady de Winter seemingly jumps off an airship to her death upon realizing that Athos will not spare her life anyway. She\'s later revealed to be Not Quite Dead, as Buckingham\'s men rescued her before she drowned in the English Channel.

. As screaming in the presence of Mary Shaw\'s ghost results in a painful, gruesome death, it isn\'t the

that kills Detective James Lipton — just the fact that he can\'t help but scream on the way down, resulting in him dying before he hits the ground.

, Pinkie suffers death by gravity from the Seven Sisters cliffs. He stumbles over the edge after acid is splashed onto his face and eyes, causing horrific burns. All this is true to the book - although the entirely un-Disney-death-detail of a shot of his broken body and mutilated face lying in the wash at the bottom of the cliff is a new addition.

Sgt. Pepper\'s Lonely Hearts Club Band

is choking Billy Shears, the latter\'s sweetheart Strawberry Fields manages to pull him off — resulting in the villain falling to his death from the multi-level stage. His body is seen on the ground. (Strawberry herself undergoes a Disney Death as a result of the struggle.)

is kicked through a window of the Burj Khalifa. For those not in the know, that\'s the tallest building in the entire world.

Kurt Hendricks does this intentionally in the final battle, when he jumps off high platforms of the car factory that Ethan and Hendricks are fighting in to ensure the nuclear missile hits its target.

. It\'s Claudia who sends one of the heroes falling to his death.

. At the end of their fight, the mutant throws the Skeleton over a cliff. When it hits the ground, it breaks up into its component bones.

. Marco (Vinnie Jones) falls out of the bus when it is hanging vertically under the transport helicopter carrying it, along with a hostage. They fall to their deaths, but halfway down, the bomb that was strapped to the hostage suddenly explodes, killing them both before they can hit the ground.

when Eric fills Top Dollar\'s head with "Thirty hours of pain!", causing him to reel backwards and fall off the roof of the cathedral they were fighting on — only to be impaled on the huge curved horns of a gargoyle half-way down.

, the giant with the helmet suffers this. Though we do get to see the result of the giant\'s fall.

, although other similar B-list stars like Rihanna and Aziz Ansari fail precipitously in the first reel. The very act of submitting to a Disney Villain Death is what saves him.

. After Blunder grabs the unicorn horn and challenges Darkness, a mummy (?) grabs him and drops them both into a pit. The last we hear is Blunder screaming "Aaaaaaah!" as he falls, presumably to his death. However, he later reappears unharmed as a prisoner in Darkness\' dungeon.

. While Kruger falls to his death in his final fight with Max, it\'s not the fall that kills him; It\'s the grenade that he intended to blow up himself and Max with.

, Ryback closes the helicopter doors which ends up shredding the fingers of Travis Dane, causing him to fall to his death in the explosion below.

. Darren McCord shoots the helicopter Foss is in, killing the pilot and causing the helicopter to fall into the hockey arena and explode, all while Foss lets out a LONG scream.

At the end of the climactic rooftop shootout between Eliot Ness and Frank Nitti in

, Nitti surrenders himself to Ness and as he is being arrested, he tells him that his friend died like a stuck Irish pig, and that he\'ll beat the rap. This causes Ness to throw Nitti off the rooftop to his death as Ness says, "Did he sound anything like that?"

is defeated by being Thrown Out the Airlock and falling through space.

, Max falls off a high-rise balcony to his death shortly before the turn of the millennium.

. The eponymous monster is seemingly finished when one of its wings is crippled and it is tricked to fall from the roof of a skyscraper, but soon it is shown climbing back up for a last stab at the protagonists.

, Ramon Cota, falls to his death when the rope of the helicopter carrying him snaps.

, Rane is defeated when Cutter kicks him out of the plane to his death after a fistfight.

Ichirō, Somewhat. Logan throws him off the building and he crashes below, but he was probably already dead even before hitting the ground.

Wolverine also tried doing this to Noburo, but luckily for him, there was a swimming pool beneath the window Wolverine threw him out of.

, Savoy falls to his death out of a Hong Kong apartment building window after Cade throws a football at him.

Koba dies this way via Caesar releasing his grip on a ledge above a collapsing tower in

In the previous film, Koba is on the giving end of this trope when he kills Jacobs by casually pushing the helicopter that he\'s trapped inside off the side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

. The fight between Gamora and her villainous adopted sister Nebula ends with Nebula hanging out of a spaceship by her cybernetic arm. Gamora tries a Take My Hand, but Nebula deliberately chops off her artificial hand and falls... to land on another passing spaceship and make her escape.

has the T-1000. The Terminator blows up the T-1000 with a grenade, which causes the T-1000 to topple into the steel below. Although it\'s not that fall that kills it, as it slowly melts in what appears to be the closest thing to agony a robot can experience.

, Big Bad Colin Evans, the psycho who enters the main character\'s home, is killed at the end after she shoots him and he falls out of a window to his death.

. Paddington tries to distract Millicent by sending a flock of birds to swarm her, and she loses her balance but did not fall. As she tries to approach Paddington, she is knocked off the roof by a door but manages to catch a flagpole.

, Mick gets shot several times by Harry with his .44 Auto Mag, causing the rapist to fall from the hill of a roller coaster into the glass roof of a merry-go-round, where he is impaled on a carved unicorn horn.

: Gustave is hanging off of a cliff face, with Jopling trying to kick him off, when Zero rushes up behind him and shoves him off the edge. While undoubtably a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Zero, the suddenness of the incident also makes it a Crowning Moment of Funny.

, Captain Jaggery falls to his death off of the bowsprit after cornering Charlotte up there in an attempt to kill her.

essential part of the eucatastrophe ending, as the accident also takes the One Ring into the Cracks of Doom, destroying it.

, and for no particularly valid reason curses his son Maeglin to die the same way.

Glorfindel and the Balrog fought and fell off a cliff together in

years before J. R. R. Tolkien decided to have Gandalf and another Balrog do the same (some 7,000 years before, in-universe).

, this is the fate of anyone thrown out of the Moon Door at The Eyrie (which is a castle situated on a high mountain cliff: the moon door is an opening in the throne room leading to a drop of at least a thousand feet). In the third book

Littlefinger kills Lysa Arryn using the moon door, shoving her out and showing his true villainous nature openly for the first time.

, the evil king, Bregant, slips and falls from his tower as he tries to run.

link goes to the E-book), Professor Moriarty falls off a cliff — but he takes Sherlock Holmes down with him! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle intended for this to be the final Sherlock Holmes story until the fans pressured him to bring the detective back, inadvertently creating an early example of a Disney Death in the process.

. Interestingly, in the movie version, Chingachgook will not dignify Magua\'s body with a Disney Villain Death, since the heroes are the ones who fall heroically off the cliff.

to play a dark lord for groups of people from another world (possibly our world) who get to act out the typical High Fantasy story. However, he runs out of time to come up with a interesting "death", so he simply creates a pit made to look bottomless and pretends to have a Disney Villain Death. Multiple times a day.

, a school inspector is tortured by Miss Windergast\'s black voodoo magic (namely a Voodoo Doll) in an attempt to prevent him from discovering the truth about the school and he ultimately falls off a cliff to his death. This example of the trope is a subversion as the school inspector was not a villain.

, after Duke Felmet has gone over the edge and started believing himself to be a ghost, he goes over the edge of a parapet while dramatically ranting to Death about how he plans to haunt Lancre Castle.

, the Night Watch has the bad guy cornered, and Captain Vimes orders Constable Carrot to "throw the book at him". Carrot, who was raised by dwarves and has trouble with metaphors, hurls his copy of "The Laws and Ordinances of the Cities of Ankh and Morpork" at the villain, knocking him over a ledge.

, Teatime\'s first death comes about from a fall. However, it\'s one he suffered when hanging on to Susan\'s leg, who asked herself "Is this guy crazy enough to kill the person holding him?" and based on the obvious answer, kicked him.

Redwall has a variation. So far, in 21 books, The Sword of Martin the Warrior has only been used

to directly kill the Big Bad, and once in the most recent book,

. They still can get crushed under giant bells (Cluny,

using a Skimming gateway and this tactic. Bonus points for the fact that the emptiness inside a Skimming gateway is believed to be infinite. The victim should starve to death, assuming it

to feed on the blood of its victim, we could assume it can starve to death

, we have Inspector Javert, who jumps off a bridge. The 2012 film adaptation upped it by including a sickening

where Raamo accidentally falls over a cliff into the Bottomless Lake trying to destroy a weapon. Subverted in the Canon video game sequel.

, a sorcerer whose personal gravity is abnormal, dies by falling from the Earth\'s surface to the Moon.

, Luke and Leia hide in a great bottomless-seeming well from a monstrous wormlike wandrella, which finds them and tries to follow, but ends up falling down the well. At the end of the book, Darth Vader ends up falling into another well, but Luke is immediately certain that while he\'s out of the fight, he\'s still alive.

has a deep ventilation shaft whose bottom none of the local treasure hunters have seen. The titular ghost says there\'s a bottom, but it\'s a long, long way down. A shapeshifting villain, trying many forms but too wounded to be able to use them properly, falls down it, and Tash actually says No One Could Survive That. He does.

, George Smiley kills Dieter by knocking him off a bridge. A combination of

My God, What Have I Done? and Heroic BSOD ensues.

, since DomDaniel actually survives his jump from the Wizard Tower.

, minor character Smokepaw falls to his death when a ledge crumbles beneath him (that didn\'t stop him from accidentally showing up in future books). Ancient cat Dark Whiskers also got blown off a cliff by the wind in the same mountains. Two ShadowClan cats get killed falling into the quarry where ThunderClan lives, and nearly knock Leafpool off with them, until Crowfeather pulls her to safety.

: Mendelson Shape falls from a great height to his apparent death when he kidnaps Candy Quackenbush with a magically created giant moth and hostile hunters in air balloons fire at them. In the second book, it is revealed that he survived his fall, and his true death happens when he is forced to enter the territory of the Sacbrood.

, Edie\'s stepfather falls to his doom when he tries to kill Edie and she retaliates by hitting him hard with a pebble, knocking him into a chasm.

, Brand falls into the Abyss. In the second series, several members of Chaos royalty also "fall" off the edge.

, Mrs. Deverill falls to her doom when she is pushed by Richard off a railing into a tank of acid.

Noah falls through a hole in the floor that Matt made by loosening nails and covered with a rug, where he lands on his sickle and dies.

: Bertha commits suicide by throwing herself off the roof of Thornfield Hall—falling to her death—after setting the place on fire.

, Cain manages to get Chaos Warmaster Varan to fight him

near a cliff. Cain outmaneuvers Varan and kicks him over it.

, Ishiguro throws himself off a 46-story balcony rather than be shunned for the rest of his life back in Japan.

, one of the Co-Dragons, Sir Guy, falls to his death after a fight with Kate on some ceiling support beams.

, Doctor Armstrong is pushed off a cliff into a still-choppy sea.

when she falls off of a building and onto the street below.

In the William Gibson short story "Johnny Mnemonic", the one that the movie was based on, the villainous Yakuza assassin who is pursuing Johnny and Molly meets his end like this, but instead of reaching for his hand, Molly tricks him into chopping it off with his own molecular wire, which also opens a hole in the platform he was standing on with a very long plummet to the city below.

series, Jack Frost falls from his candy tower into a milkshake moat, and has to be saved by Rachel and Kirsty.

tries to make Bond and Dr. Kendall jump off from a cliff of a mountain since it\'s "much more fun" than just shooting them, but after a brief struggle, ends up going over it himself.

is shot in the novel\'s climactic six seconds, and falls screaming through a window to the street below.

A particularly chilling example with Wicked Stepmother Stella Crawford in

. She utters "Watch me daddy" before leaping from a very high roof to her death.

Dr. Yusef Khan is trapped in a burning house when the floor collapses beneath him and he falls into the flames.

Sadistic pimp Rob gets a Sherlock Holmes style death when he fights Ryan, the big brother of Whitney, whom Rob had tried to force into prostitution. Ryan throws himself at Rob and they fall from a pier into the ocean. Ryan lives, Rob doesn\'t.

Queen Bansheera in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue is karate kicked through a portal into Hell, where she is set upon by her own minions.

, Habib Marwan, main baddie on Day 4, decides to go out this way, plummeting off a parking garage.

, Jack Bauer kills Margot Al-Harazi and her son Ian by throwing them out a window to their deaths.

, Sydney faces off against her mother, Irina Derevko, in the series finale. After a rather brutal showdown, the fight ends on a rooftop, where Irina ends up falling through a skylight to her death. Mmmm, closure.

In an earlier episode, Sydney throws a foe out a plane. He doesn\'t get to hit the ground, however, as he is sucked into the wing turbine.

, "Smack In The Middle," the Riddler\'s moll and Girl of the Week Molly tries to shoot the Caped Crusader in the Batcave, but winds up falling into the atomic reactor to her death ("What a way to go-go") - the

, Howard Epps hangs off a balcony and Booth grabs his hand and tries to stop Epps from falling the 50 ft. to his death. It fails, however, and Bones and Booth watch Epps fall and hit the pavement, ridding them of a major antagonist.

, Buffy has a two second fight with Doc that ends this way.

gets this treatment at the end of the episode, as her Disney Death doesn\'t take place until the following season.

writing staff has this as the preferred method of killing off the Victim of the Week.

, the title character\'s half-brother threw himself from a third story window into the Charleston River when cornered by the police, taking all his secrets about their mother\'s murder with him. Though his body was never recovered, he never appeared on the show again, so it\'s a pretty safe assumption he\'s good and gone.

, Mac is chasing a serial killer across a rooftop. The killer feigns surrender, then attacks Mac, steals his handcuffs, cuffs himself, and tosses himself off the building onto a police car below. Disney Villain Suicide?

In "The Hand of Fear", the villain falls down a deep black pit after being tripped up with the fourth Doctor\'s scarf. Being a being of stone, the Doctor suggests he may have survived.

In "The Age of Steel"\' Dr Lumic falls to his doom after Pete Tyler cuts the ladder he was climbing. The place he\'s seen falling towards happens to be on fire.

Yet strangely averted in "The Idiot\'s Lantern", despite the finale taking place on Alexandra Palace Radio Tower. Then again, the villain wasn\'t exactly physical to begin with.

A heroic version in "The Daleks" when a character brings it on himself as a Heroic Sacrifice, as he\'s dangling over a ravine attached to a rope that\'s pulling his comrades over the edge too. The sight of him disappearing into blackness, coupled with the thunderous noise as he hits the bottom, is quite shocking for a young viewer.

The Master suffers something similar in the TV Movie, when he falls into the Eye of Harmony. The Doctor\'s partly responsible, since he shines a light in the Master\'s face as he leaps at him and causes him to overshoot, but does offer him a hand. (Of course, he\'s revived to fight again in the Time War, which he also survives.)

The earliest villain example (or at least Dragon example) comes in Season One\'s "The Aztecs", when Ixta gets kicked off the top of a temple whilst trying to kill Ian.

First main villain example comes in Season Two\'s "The Rescue", where Bennett is so shocked by the appearance of the people he thought he\'d killed that he backs away over a cliff edge.

The Sycorax Leader from "The Christmas Invasion" tries to underhandedly kill the Tenth Doctor, but he throws a satsuma at a button on the Sycorax ship, which causes a part of the ship to open up. This part of the ship just

to be right underneath where the Leader was standing, and so he falls to his epic fail death.

"Goodbye, General Lee": It almost is for the show\'s signature (and heroic) car, when Boss Hogg, tired of the Duke boys constantly foiling his schemes (and perceiving the General Lee\'s "sheer power" in always playing a key role), picks up on Luke\'s off-handed remark that the General Lee isn\'t what it used to be. At one point, the trope kicks into effect when Rosco,having earlier locked up the Dukes on a minor traffic charge, and having impounded the General Lee has the car driven out to the country, places the car\'s transmission in neutral, and pushes it down the hill ... toward a cliff. Cooter is conveniently nearby, sees what\'s going on, and manages to stop the General Lee (by using his tow truck as a "brake") but then Cooter has his own hands full when he has trouble stopping the truck. (Not to worry, Cooter got his tow truck to stop just at the very edge of the cliff!)

In "The Great Insurance Fraud," a pair of con artists out to take advantage of Boss Hogg\'s insurance scam stage an accident by having one of the accomplices drive his car over a cliff, after getting "fake Duke" Coy to engage him in a chase. Coy is led to believe that the other driver failed to escape his car before falling over the cliff, leading to his crushing (and fiery) death.

"Sitting Dukes": Uncle Jesse and Daisy are forced to drive a stolen vehicle (a laundry truck, taken by two escaped convicts that were that week\'s villains of the week) to try to divert attention of authorities who are pursuing the criminals and the Duke boys; the authorities are unaware (or, in Sheriff Little\'s case, uncaring) that Bo and Luke have been taken hostage and made at gunpoint to cooperate. Jesse and Daisy eventually decide to drive the truck to a winding road and jump out before the vehicle plummets into a ravine and bursts into flames, in their own attempt to get the authorities off their trail. (It didn\'t work, as Sheriff Little still takes them in for questioning.) Meanwhile, Bo and Luke are told — at gunpoint by their desperate captors — to drive the General Lee through a raging forest fire to get the authorities off their trail, putting everyone\'s life in extreme danger.

"When You Wish Upon a Hogg" begins with Hughie tricking Boss into believing in the power of an oil lamp ... and ends with Bo and Luke having their hands full trying to save Hughie from tumbling (in his van) over a cliff; Hughie initially balks, afraid of what he thinks the Duke boys will do to him and wanting to save all his ill-gotten money. In the end Bo is able to pull Hughie from the van, just as it begins to topple from the cliff. (BTW, the beautiful "genie" that was "in the lamp" – the shockingly beautiful Trixie, was not harmed; she was already being held in jail as Hughie\'s accomplice.)

Also from Joss Whedon, the torturer from the

falls into the abyss after being shot to death.

, Nathan falls off a rooftop in his final appearance on the show.

Kaito Nakamura is tossed to his death off of the Deveaux rooftop by Adam Monroe.

, Raylan has to confront Coover in Brother\'s Keeper, leading to Coover\'s plunge down the mine shaft.

. Gets tossed off a cliff by Rider 1 (all while EEEEEEIIIIIII\'ing) then, when he recovers from the fall, he immediately explodes.

Colonel Zol in his Gold Werewolf form is punched off a cliff by Kamen Rider 2 and explodes on impact.

villain of a Tyrant Takes the Helm story arc stands on the rooftop of the Montecito in season three and rants about how, one day, she will own the entire Las Vegas strip. Then, in a bizarre twist, a huge gust of wind catches her ridiculous outfit and she flies off the roof and into a shoe store.

And in the season five premiere, Sam\'s kidnapper falls out of his airplane to his death.

: Ruthless investor Latimer and the team\'s first client/target fall off a ledge while fighting over a gun, which goes off before a splash is heard. Unlike the above, their bodies aren\'t seen but it\'s highly unlikely they survived... probably.

... but not in the book or, ironically, the Disney version where she gets mauled to death by Aslan (although we\'re spared the details). Apparently that was considered a bit strong for Sunday tea time viewing, so Aslan simply roars at her, causing her, either through magic or simple fear, to fall to her death.

Another good guy (technically) example: in the season five finale of

(technically by Disney too), Juliet bows out in a way very similar to Helga Sinclair. She falls down a deep pit — and survives. In a final Heroic Sacrifice, she triggers a bomb that was tossed in the pit earlier and then there\'s a fade to white... though she dies in the following episode from her fall-related injuries.

In the Series Finale, this is how The Man in Black goes out, when he is shot by Kate and kicked off the cliff by Jack.

without mentioning what Locke\'s father did to him, can we? Although it doesn\'t qualify as "Death", it broke his spine.

gets at least three of these: fell down a mountain, fell down a mine shaft, fell off a cliff. Naturally, they Never Found the Body, and he survived all three times.

, Ozul and Maska follow Circus Brat Garland out onto the high wire rather than waiting at either end to trap her there. The result is rather predictable.

- Aredian the Witchfinder dies by falling out a window rather than being killed by Merlin like most of the villains.

, this is how Nikita and Percy\'s final confrontation ends. As Percy\'s about to make his grand escape, he attempts to kill Nikita, and in their struggle, he falls over the edge of Division\'s missile silo. Nikita grabs him, but ultimately lets him drop. Ironically, when he hits the bottom, he crashes into the glass prison cell he spent the first half of the season locked up in.

: After being revealed as A, Mona Vanderwaal falls off a ledge during a struggle with Spencer. Spencer even reaches out to try and pull her back, but isn\'t able to. In a subversion, Mona lives through the fall and is eventually found criminally insane and confined to an insane asylum for treatment.

, also an example of Klingon Promotion and Dying to Be Replaced.

, Michael returns in the final season to kidnap Teyla\'s son. Mama Bear instincts kick in, and she ultimately throws him off the top of Atlantis\' central spire. And that is NOT a short drop by any stretch of the imagination.

- Michael Jonas falls to plasma in engineering and dies in his attempt to kill Neelix.

, the Meg Masters demon is thrown out a seven story window. Being a demon, she survives. However, after the demon is purged from Meg\'s body, the girl dies from the wounds given to her from the fall that happened a few episodes ago.

: Though drug kingpin Donald Mann (played by Gene Simmons) went down in a pool after being shot three times, right before the confrontation that leads to his death, he chucks a subordinate off the building roof, and we see the sod embedded into the roof of a car on the street below as Yokas and Cruz arrive on scene.

has a double-villain death. Helen Cutter is pounced on by a Velociraptor while standing near the edge of a very high cliff, pushing her off and resulting in the deaths of both her and the raptor.

episode "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road", the villain Moonface meets his end after the heroine knocks him out of his mountain cabin and he falls into a ravine.

, Big Bad serial killer Damien Fontleroy is finally pushed off a roof and onto the hood of a car. Considering that the show was cancelled after that season, it made for a pretty spectacular ending.

Muhammad Hassan fell victim to this trope after his match with The Undertaker at The Great American Bash. After the match, Undertaker tore off several of the panels covering the stage and giving him a Last Ride through the hole, complete with a rather disturbing sounding crash a few seconds later. While other wrestlers have taken falls from high heights as part of their match, sometimes being put out of action, this was meant in storyline to kill off the character, as UPN forced the WWE to remove him from the air.

A tragic non-villain example happened to Owen Hart, who during his entrance when he rappelled in from the rafters, fell 78 feet to his death. It was only by luck that this didn\'t happen on national television, who saw only a backstage promo instead.

Narrowly averted in the infamous "Hell in a Cell" match at the 1998 "King of the Ring" pay-per-view, where Mick Foley — playing his Mankind gimmick — not once but twice took severe falls. The first was the now-legendary one, where his opponent, The Undertaker, threw him off the top of the cage, with Foley crashing through the Spanish Announcers Table and onto the arena floor. Foley, it was said, was knocked unconscious after taking the fall, and even Jim Ross exclaimed, "Good God almighty! Good God almighty! That killed him! As God as my witness, he is broken in half!" Miraculously, Foley recovered, rallied to beat down Undertaker before Undertaker came back to give Mankind his second bump of the night — being chokeslammed through the top of the Hell in a Cell structure and onto a pile of thumbtacks on the mat below; this fall also knocked Foley unconscious, leading the Undertaker to believe at first that Foley had been fatally injured.

. At the climax of the adventure the evil Creature and the Alchemist Strahd topple over the edge of a cliff and fall to their deaths below.

, written by Henrik Ibsen. The main character, Hallvard Solness, falls from a high tower at the end of the play, promptly losing his life when he cracks his skull against a rock. Doubles with Family-Unfriendly Death. And as main characters go, he is not of the heroic type.

, Cladwell is killed by being thrown off the roof of the UGC headquarters building, as revenge for Bobby being killed in the exact same way.

, one of the security trolls for Gringotts loses its balance while attempting to attack the riders and plummets down off a cliff.

is sent falling off a building after being fatally wounded by the Allspark shard. Before the vehicles pull back into the station, you see that he\'s almost literally become a part of the pavement.

series plays with this. The first game plays it straight with Bill falling into a large pit in a cavern, but the sequel subverts it by having Richard save Ryan from his suicide attempt.

Disney\'s own Toontown Online has a boss fight that ends with the Cog VP being pushed off the roof of his HQ building.

Two more Disney games, the Epic Mickey series, both get their chance to indulge in this in some surprisingly disturbing examples for Mickey Mouse games; the first game has the villain, the Blot, implode from the inside after having fireworks shot at him from the towers of a castle, while the second game\'s Mad Doctor is dragged to his death in a pit of acid by a load of green spirits after his evil robot vehicle topples over the edge of a platform. Oh, and then all this causes a huge acid geyser to blast everyone out of the cave and into the sky, where the robot promptly explodes, taking the Doc with it (while Mickey and Oswald casually glide to safety, no less.) Wow. Also ventures into Tear Jerker territory in that Oswald ACTUALLY TRIES TO SAVE HIM (despite the fact that he\'d been playing them all for suckers and tried to kill them) but ultimately fails. The Blot\'s death can be seen here: [1]

The Mad Doctor\'s death is optional; there is an alternate version of the ending where Oswald actually

save the Doctor and he makes a genuine Heel-Face Turn.

, Gruntilda falls from a great height and a large rock falls on her. The extent to which this counts as a "death" is unclear, though. She immediately starts talking and trying unsuccessfully to move the rock, and she\'s back in action as a skeleton when it\'s removed in the sequel.

Fatalities which allow you to finish your opponent with one of these. Usually upon a whole mess of Spikes Of Doom.

involves a bridge, a lake of lava, some carefully-timed jumps, and an axe on the other side of the bridge that you can grab to destroy the bridge and send him into the lava. Same for

, where you have to resort to avoiding his stomps and fireballs long enough to make him stomp a hole all the way through the floor without taking you with him.

: Trying to just push Bowser of the cliff makes him jump back up and create a shockwave in the process. You need to throw him into a bomb (or three, in the case of the final battle) to actually defeat him. You can\'t defeat King Bob-Omb by throwing him off the mountain, either, or he will react pretty similarly to Bowser.

Arcade uses this. Mario removes the rivets holding the platform Donkey Kong is on, causing him to fall down, and hit his head. Its sequel,

has a similar set up. After freeing Donkey Kong, the floor disappears, both Donkey Kong and Mario end up falling, but the former is caught by Jr. In a subversion of the trope, Mario immediately recovers from the fall, and runs away. Also subverted in the Game Boy

, where DK falls off the tower after being defeated by Mario, only to return powered up as a giant for the definite final battle. A similar thing happens in Mario vs. Donkey Kong, but DK ends up crashing onto a truck full of Mini-Marios. He survives and steals the Mini-Marios, again. "Here We Go Again!"

, and par to the last few examples, he comes back up, eats the Grand Star, becomes massive, and starts the true final battle.

after defeating Bowser, in a pretty awesome cutscene, Bowser falls towards the pit of lava below in slow-motion. Then a rock hits him and Bowser falls to his doom at regular speed. He\'s back for the credits sequence.

. Bowser jumps off a cliff, then reappears as Giant Bowser.

, Boomer cuts the chandelier he is standing on and falls to his death after he is defeated.

. All of them fall over the edge once defeated, but are shown to survive - right before being crushed by Bowser\'s falling castle.

: The seventh stage is in an elevator, and you can (and will) throw one mook after another to their doom (It\'s harder not to do!) So it\'s very commonplace in Two Player games to compete "Which one can throw away the most mooks.

, Billy Holme falls to his doom after Chayton shoots him and he backs into a mine shaft. And he takes several barrels of TNT down with him.

, Kamos dies after being pushed out of a cliff.

: General Kim throws himself off of a skyscraper in the bad ending. This can also happen to Nick Kang, if you lose to Kim.

, as supposed Big Bad Emperor Gestahl is betrayed by his dragon Kefka, by being struck by lightning, before being kicked off a floating continent. This is given a Shout-Out in

, where Kuja kicks his creator Garland off the Very Definitely Final Dungeon to steal the position of Big Bad back to himself.

Played straight with Dyne. After Barret wins their duel, Dyne jumps off a cliff and mostly likely gets impaled on one of the large spikes in the background.

If you do the Wutai sidequest, Don Corneo will fall to his doom coutesy of Reno.

. Ends up being subverted, though. Ba\'Gamnan is alive and well in the sequel, Revenant Wings, and in that game he also doesn\'t get anything worse than several bad beatings courtesy of the heroes.

, many of the Mooks can be forced off their platforms if you keep parrying their thrusts and advancing as they are knocked back. This will kill them if the drop at the platform\'s end is high enough or is over a spiked pit. It\'s even possible to kill the Final Boss in this manner.

, the Dramatic Finish for Dio\'s Castle, DIO\'s Mansion, and Kennedy Space Center involve the defeated combatant falling to their demise. The former two are fairly straightforward except for DIO\'s Mansion if the loser is vampiric or Pillar Men, in which case, the light from the sun reduces them to ash. In the case of the Space Center, the fact that gravity is altered so the "floor" is the wall of a building means that the loser if forced to fall forever.

does this, in a way; the last boss is fought atop the Palace of Westminster\'s Clock Tower, with a hostage handcuffed to him. After managing to shoot the boss (and not his hostage) enough times, he drops off the side, with the hostage barely hanging on at the top. Your last bullet has to hit the handcuff chain, thus saving the hostage\'s life. If you manage the shot, the game goes eerily silent as the Big Bad drops... and the last thing you hear before credits roll is a dull thud, and the scattering of birds.

also does this in the end of the second mission. Egregious since it is achieved by a headshot. This being a Sega game...

during the mission "High Dive", where Ahmed falls off the spine of the Rotterdam Tower to his death after being cornered by Luis.

in the Kill Michael ending. Three guesses as to who takes the plunge. Also, in the Good Ending where everyone comes together, they push a car with Devin Weston, part of the Big Bad Ensemble, in the trunk off a cliff.

. After a fight with Knuckles over the Master Emerald, she loses her footing and falls towards a pit of lava. Knuckles grabs her hand at the last minute, "saving her life", even though, as a bat, she could have just flown back up... She still could have used the updrafts to glide back up or glided to one of the girders. Most likely, she was exhausted from her fight with Knuckles. Another subversion occurs in

, with Dr. Eggman himself. Sonic falls with him, but is saved by Tails. Eggman survives, though.

, Shadow himself falls to Earth and is presumed dead. It is revealed in

, however, that he survived, and if the fight with Devil Doom in

goes on long enough, it\'s revealed Eggman had one of his robots save him from the fall, although he lost his memory in the process.

, this is subverted not once but twice with Eggman. The first, Zazz and Zomom send him, Orbot, and Cubot falling toward a lava pool miles below them, but the three later turn up, Eggman having faked his death and used a jet pack to survive. After his defeat, when Sonic takes a piece of his jet pack, Eggman falls off a cliff. Somehow he survives (presumably because he happened to land in a soft spot of dirt), but he loses half his mustache.

, two of the main villains, Zor and the Zeti leader Zavok, actually do take a fall into lava, although Zavok\'s fall is considerably higher. Zor\'s final words suggest that Zeti are not immune to lava, thus Disney Villain Death is actually played straight this time.

, primary villain Alex meets his end when he falls into the crack in the earth that destroyed Mt. Aleph after The Wise One paralyzes him. However, because Alex absorbed most of the Golden Sun\'s power, he was able to survive and shows up 30 years later to, once again, pull some strings behind the scenes. The main villains from the first game met a similar fate when they fell into the well of the Venus Lighthouse, though unlike Alex, they don\'t survive.

games have a tendency to end this way. In fact, the endboss\' AI (at least in

, and the first, probably in the third as well) is set so that when he is at critically low health, he suddenly jumps to and stubbornly insists on staying on the side of the screen with the obvious window (complete with a special otherwise-unseen form of ass kicking if you attempt to get behind him — you are

so that he can go flying through the window when you strike the final blow.

\'s last boss stubbonly stands next to a power switch on the roof of city hall. He is electrocuted when you land the final blow, and your character escapes off the roof as it explodes. But he doesn\'t fall.

, complete with a rejection of Terry\'s outstretched hand and evil laughter as he plummets toward the ground. Geese also gets this at the end of Fatal Fury. Assuming you beat him. Otherwise, he sends YOUR character to a Disney Villain Death.

for Jax\'s ending, he drops Jarek to give him this fate. In the continuity, Jarek manages to indeed survive the fall with injuries.

In one ending of Clock Tower, the villain dies a Karmic Death attempting to make you fall off a ladder when you shake free. This happens to Bobby in all of the good endings, and to his mother Mary in three of the good endings.

Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction

, Tachyon falls into a black hole after he is defeated in a boss battle.

Also, in Crack in Time, Cassiopeia is sent falling to her death after Ratchet defeats her in a Boss Battle.

, Albert Wesker had this during the flashback when Jill Valentine grabbed him when they jumped out of a window. However, Albert Wesker survives. And so does Jill Valentine, who then became the host for Wesker\'s new mind-control parasite.

, Derek C. Simmons is killed when he falls and gets impaled on a large pole, his blood forming the Umbrella logo.

Joker attempts to give HIMSELF a Disney Villain Death at the end of the

videogame. You, as Batman, must save him, or face a Non-Standard Game Over as the game informs you that death is not the same thing as justice.

, the easiest way to defeat the Big Bad Crow is to slam him against his office windows until they shatter and he goes flying through them. You get a trophy for pulling it off. You also have to watch out because he\'ll try to do the same to you, and he\'s one of the fastest fighters in the game and often beats you to the punch.

, Spider-Man and Venom have an aerial battle that ends after an Action Command sequence allows you to save yourself and allow Venom to plummet to the bottom of the construction site, getting impaled on at least twelve giant steel bars.

Also through an Action Command, Kratos rips the wings off Icarus midfall and uses them to fly to his destination. Icarus? Not so lucky...

can use this trope for Symbolism, depending on whether or not you\'re into viewing it that way. Whoever Yuri kills appears to have the symbolic fall from power...Ragou and Cumore were both politically powerful, and both fell off of a bridge after Yuri killed them and into a dry sandpit (respectively), Barbos had a powerful blastia under his control and fell off of the gear tower, and Zagi had a powerful blastia fused onto his body and fell off of a tower.

Alexei meanwhile...wasn\'t entirely killed by Yuri. (His ambitions technically crushed him.) And you\'d assume that after

, that Duke would fall to his death or be crushed by his ambitions, right? Well... you wouldn\'t be further from the truth. He actually

; Rosso the Crimson cuts away the chunk of masonry she\'s standing on and falls to her death rather than admit defeat, and Azul the Cerulean falls into an elevator shaft after having a double-barrelled cannon thrown through his stomach.

, but it was a willing leap from the villain (which then summons the Big Bad.

, is pushed out of a balcony by statues with laser beams. Despite the shockwave of the explosion he creates when reaching the bottom, you know he will be back.

The whole fight against Meta-Ridley at the start of Metroid Prime 3 is played entirely in free fall. As such, when you deliver the final blow, you\'re saved by a fellow bounty hunter, but Ridley isn\'t so lucky, plummeting to his death, though he eventually returns thanks to Phazon corruption.

. Despite being from LucasArts\' beautifully cartoon-shaded era, there\'s nothing Disney about the tone of it.

calls it "Long fall" and gives you extra forcepoints for throwing mooks into pits.

Rahm Kota gets this honor but returns later on. Also, Starkiller throws Shaak Ti in the Sarlacc and thinks he is done, but she\'s back out very fast.

. After insisting to Ezio that no man could kill him, Ezio decides to drop him off a castle wall and "leave him in the hands of fate."

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist

Averted with Dutch van der Linde in Red Dead Redemption. When you finally confront him, he gives a Breaking Speech to Marston and falls off a very large cliff. The next scene is Marston and Ross catching up with his corpse. Ross shoots him in the head - dispelling any notion that Dutch wasn\'t dead - and attributes it to John, saying "it looks better on paper".

. He staggers back after being defeated in the boss battle and falls over the side of the ship to his death.

, the heroine\'s final confrontation with the Big Bad takes place on a log above a canyon. Do nothing, and he\'ll push you off. However, a profile you read much earlier in the game said that he was allergic to flowers, and there\'s one in your inventory. Use it on him and he\'ll start sneezing, lose his balance, and fall.

. When you finally track down and face Lockhart, commander of the CELL mercenaries who\'s been out for your blood the entire game, the \'fight\' with him is really a cutscene. Your character grabs him by the throat and tosses him out of a third-story window. The subversion comes in that the fall doesn\'t instantly kill him; he spends a minute pathetically whimpering and trying to crawl across the ground. You can put him out of his misery...or let him suffer for everything he\'s done to you and your allies.

. After Deathevan forces Ryu to watch as he kills his friends, Ryu snaps, charges through a gauntlet of powerful explosive spells, and disembowels the would-be god in a single slash. Deathevan is stunned that a mortal could defeat him and falls into the abyss. Seconds later, he

from said abyss as an enormous demonic monstrosity.

: The devs thought killing Wheatley was too harsh, but letting him go would be anti-climatic. Spacing him, they explained, was the best compromise.

, Hagatha is blinded by sun in her eyes and plunges out the crystal tower\'s window. However, Graham and Valanice never hear her land or see her corpse.

dies this way, stumbling off a tower. A Thief player hits him with a thrown dagger, which makes him lose balance. A Wizard will bounce a force bolt off a pillar, hitting the brazier next to him, causing him to recoil from it (in the AGD Interactive, it ignites his robes) and fall to his death. A Fighter will do a slide and knock the brazier into him with his shield. The fall does kill him; however, as we learn in the 4th game, Ad Avis was the servant of a vampire who fed him some of her own blood. When the fall killed him, he turned into a vampire himself and fled.

is similarly thrown into the closing demon gate. This is after he was stabbed with the spear of death (If by a fighter or paladin), a paladin\'s sword (Paladin hero), or a grapple hook (thief hero) - none of which kill him outright. If confronted by a wizard, he is first exploded (after stealing the Wizard hero\'s staff, which the wizard can detonate at will), and his (still living) head is kicked into the portal.

commits suicide that way when cornered by the Hero and his allies, carrying the tablet of the prophecy with him as he knows his blood will constitute the final sacrifice that will release the dragon who will then burn Silmaria down. If he can\'t rule it, no one will.

Kirk Dierker falls of the Eiffel tower after being shot by Sean in

. The camera makes a point to show him hitting the first floor of the tower.

has a rare heroic example: Riordan, an Orlesian Grey Warden rescued by the heroes late in the game, falls to his death after leaping from a tower onto the Archdemon\'s back to fight it in midair, then hanging onto nothing but his sword as he gouges its wing. It is, however, a Dying Moment of Awesome.

expansion "Mark of the Assassin" ends with this - except the bad guy bounces rather painfully off a rock on his way down. It also plays out slightly differently depending on the Dialogue Tree - diplomatic Hawke tries to save him, but he takes a swing with a knife and loses his grip. Snarky Hawke listens to him make threats while hanging by his fingers, points out begging for mercy might have been a better idea, and just walks away (with a Quip to Black after the fall). Aggressive Hawke? Stamps on his fingers.

Aveline: Well, I don\'t think he\'ll survive that.

. Averted with Dreadfuse, its equal from the final dungeon, as it explodes in midair during the fall.

, an Eclipse mercenary can meet this fate on Thane\'s recruitment mission.

If Miranda Lawson is still alive she does this to her father, Henry Lawson, after he releases her sister, Oriana, biotically throwing him through a glass window and down about two stories.

In the Citadel DLC, Shepard\'s clone meets this fate after a furious battle on board the Normandy itself.

has this happen to the fourth boss of the game, Goriath, after he is defeated by Kirby and his party. Goriath attempts to strike a pose, but then looks down and realizes he\'s not on solid ground anymore thanks to Kirby and friends having knocked him off the platform, then he gets an Oh, Crap and plummets to his doom below in a cartoony style, and as soon as he hits the ground, he explodes into many stars just like many other KRTDL bosses do after the end of their death animations.

Piggsy\'s death in Man Hunt; after defeating him, he retreats and steps on a heating vent that starts to collapse under his weight, dropping his chainsaw in the process. You take it from him and saw his arms off; he then falls from the staircase of the mansion and hits the pavement below.

. Also Jake Hernandez in the Rescue Mission mode of the latter game.

, Derrick Lynch, is killed when the STF forces open fire on him, causing him to fall to his death.

, a grave robber and a murderer, falls to his death offscreen when trying to cross a dangerous improvised bridge while injured and carrying a cursed emerald.

, when he vows to Jonathan that no one will take him out, all while laughing as he falls to his death.

, Price gives Makarov a vicious No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, ties a steel cord around his neck, then breaks the glass roof, causing both Price and Makarov to fall. As Makarov falls, he is hanged and killed instantly by the cord.

, at the end of the Odysseus level, either Harper or the player character kick a stowaway mercenary out of their VTOL as it takes off from a battle on an aircraft carrier, depending on if Harper is still alive. If the player does it, you get to see them fall towards the deck below in first person, and, in true Disney Villain Death fashion, you look away before they hit the ground.

, Big Bad Jonathan Irons dangles from player-character Mitchell\'s prosthetic arm during the finale, the very arm he had engineered to get Mitchell back in the fight after his injury at the start of the game. Mitchell then

, during the "Comrades" level, a QTE fight ends with the enemy soldier getting thrown down a stairwell.

gets a subversion. Hanging off a cliff, Nate shoots him from below as he preparing to crush }Sully\'s head with a rock. This mortally wounds him, and he stumbles over the edge and plunges to his death.

The fate off two big henchmen in the same game as well. One falls out the back of an airplane after Nate deploys a parachute crate that knocks them out the back. The second gets one of these when Nate fights them on the back of a truck and jumps off before it goes over a cliff, taking the Mook with it.

dies after Nate tricks him into stepping an unstable, rickety bridge. It promptly collapses under his weight and sends him falling into the gorge.

Not to mention that pushing/pulling people off of cliffs and buildings is a common mechanic through the

, your character\'s target gets shot and falls from a high-rise nightclub balcony to the city below.

, the Lee brothers knock Skullmageddon off a cliff, and he continues to fall while the credits roll. At the bottom, Marian delivers the coup de grace punch.

, after sustaining enough damage, the Venusian Queen falls to her death and goes off in a massive explosion.

. Doc hurls him off a cliff, and assumes No One Could Survive That. Rayner manages to survive, in a highly non-Disneyesque fashion, by rearranging his vital organs so they wouldn\'t be in the parts of his body that were about to be impaled on pointy rocks.

, Helen Narbon (the original) winds up falling off a ledge into a thousand-foot waterfall.

She\'s not really dead - the other cast members never saw the body.

The author cops to just liking this trope; near the end of the strip, Helen Narbon the second is knocked off a floating island

. She\'s not dead either, but in an alternate timeline she was injured so badly she was reduced to a Brain in a Jar. Foreshadowed beautifully here

after Spyro\'s daughter Nina enters her Super Mode and blasts him into a pit. Unlike most examples, we actually

, the title character entertains this idea but fails to follow through on it. What happens to Perducci is actually kind of unclear, but he survives to menace Dangeresque again in

Dangeresque: Once we get to the top of this high-scraper, we\'ll hopefully be able to throw some people off. Maybe even Perducci.

, falls from a cliff while running from his former partner.

After a long battle at the very end of Red Vs. Blue: Revelations, the Meta is dragged off a cliff by the Warthog\'s tow cable.

. The heroes knock the villain Lord Talbot out a window on purpose. They did find the body, but the very next day, they learn that the villain\'s body was stolen while they slept.

Like in the original film, Gaston met his end in this manner in the Kingdom Hearts fangame. Unlike the original film, however, the fangame also makes it especially clear that he\'s dead by Sora, in a manner very similar to Darth Maul in

Mary Sues and Marty Stus are sometimes subjected to this by the Protectors of the Plot Continuum.

The fate of Jeremy in Season Two of Where The Bears Are.

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: Countless animated shorts have featured the villains suffering their last defeat by tumbling over a cliff, crashing over a waterfall, getting mauled by lions, and an endless number of other indignities. The most famous victim: Wile E. Coyote, of course!

"The Otto Show," where — due to Otto\'s reckless driving of the school bus, he runs a tour bus with the members of Spinal Tap off the road and over the side of a cliff, where it crashes into flames.

Hans Moleman has also been involved in several accidents with cars he has driven going over the side of a cliff.

One of the Comi Color Cartoons, Balloon Land, features an almost proto-example for animation, as the villain of the picture, the Pincushion Man, is trapped in a ball of tree sap and is sent rolling to his doom, falling off a cliff into the lands tens of thousands of feet below...

"Monster in the Monastery". Jonny bursts some bags of oil with a bow and arrows. A villain wearing a yeti costume slips on the oil, rolls down some stairs, and then over the edge of a cliff to his death.

"Dragons of Ashida". One of the dragons chases Race Bannon out of a cave mouth. Race jumps up and grabs a tree branch and the dragon falls to its death at the base of a cliff.

. During the episode "In the Realm of the Condor", the villain of the episode battles Johnny on a bridge and they

fall off. Johnny grabs onto the ledge and the villain grabs onto Jonny. As you would expect, she loses her hold and falls down into the gorge. However, we actually see her, screaming all the way down, as she is seconds away from being splattered onto the sharp rocks below. (At least they didn\'t show the actual landing...)

Another example. "Ndovu\'s Last Journey" had a fight in an elephant graveyard. A villain falls and we see (from his point of view, no less) him fall towards the business end of an elephant skeleton tusk. The view cuts away before impact, but we do hear a rather nasty sound effect and see other characters flinch.

In the episode with the Philosopher\'s stone, the bad guy is attacked by a magical hawk (really) and is trapped inside the building with his two henchmen as his equipment is destroyed and the building explodes. Jonny, Jessie, and Hadji, meanwhile, escape just in time.

this way. The last we see of them is Terrorsaur\'s outstretched hand sinking into lava. This death was originally intended for Waspinator, whose popularity saved him at the last minute.

, where after the rest of the Decepticons fell into the magma, Megatron went out the same way. (For a minute, anyway).

Megatron when he takes the spark of G1 Megatron. Tarantulas and Quickstrike rebel against him and throw him into the lava and his apparent death, though he comes back, even better than before.

And then in the sequel series Beast Machines, both Optimus Primal and Megatron are destroyed when they fall down a shaft in a slightly similar fashion to the main reactor of the Death Star.

, Garnac meets his demise by being Force Pushed by Ahsoka Tano out a door and falling off a ledge and onto the deck of his floating fortress.

: While stopping Chin the Conqueror and creating Kyoshi Island, Avatar Kyoshi causes Chin to fall to such a death when he stands on the newly-formed cliff, refusing to accept his defeat, and the rock crumbles. However, Kyoshi makes it very clear that she doesn\'t see the difference between a Disney Villain Death and killing him herself; the end result was that she was responsible for Chin\'s death.

Azula looks like she is going to get one when she is knocked off her airship, complete with helpless rag doll flailing involved. So naturally, the Gaang is upset when she rockets to the nearby cliff by way of firebending, in a Crowning Moment of Awesome way no less.

The final battle against Ozai could count as an aversion as well, given that it takes place upon a series of massive pillars that seem perfectly designed for Ozai to fall to his doom after attempting to backstab Aang. He does indeed attempt to backstab Aang after Aang spares his life... but Aang finds another way to stop him.

had a nifty variation. The episode introduced a muckraking journalist who could control his tangibility; he could sneak into locked rooms and spy on people unseen. Sadly, he lost the ability to control his powers and fell through the building! The sequence is brilliantly animated, though there\'s a bit of uncomfortable Fridge Logic when Bruce wonders aloud if the poor guy is doomed to fall to the Earth\'s core; kind of a harsh punishment for a relatively minor baddie.

has this happen to the title villain, who, in the only dialogue in the episode that isn\'t sung, makes a final speech on the way down.

episode "Power-Noia" had Him battling the girls in Dream Land, where he was defeated and thrown over a ledge into a bottomless abyss by Buttercup. Being a recurring villain who can exist As Long as There Is Evil, he survived, but that did defeat him for the time being.

Also in "Insect Inside", after the girls destroy his cockroach army, Roach Coach falls off a building into the streets below. Blossom is horrified and when the girls examine his body, they discover that he was a robot controlled by a super intelligent cockroach, which

, the last we see of the Delightful Children is them falling from a broken roller coaster and into a giant broken toilet, sure victims of this trope. Incidentally, Father seemingly meets his demise by also falling into a giant pit earlier in the same episode (but not before transforming into The Dragon), but in his case it is subverted by showing him to be alive and well in the framing story.

pulled this on part of Courage\'s rogues\' gallery at the end of a Villain Team-Up episode. Just as they have Courage cornered, Courage, at Muriel\'s urging, screams so loudly that the floor gives way and the affected villains (Katz, Cajun Fox, The Clutching Foot, and the Queen of the Black Puddle) all plummet into a chasm.

episode "Mad Love", The Joker mock-subverts this trope. He jumps from one rooftop to another, but falls off and lets out a horrified scream as the camera cuts away. Cut back to him standing on the roof of a train that had been passing under him and yelling: "MADE YOU LOOK!" After a fist-fight with the dark knight atop the train, he does, however, fall into a normal false death.

The Joker actually gets this a lot. He has fallen off trains, rooftops, roller coasters, and everything else that is more than ten feet off the ground. Besides him, most of the other Batman villains have suffered this fate at least once. Bane fell off a boat, Freeze fell in SubZero, and Two-Face nearly fell off a building to save his coin (but was saved by Batman). However, these villains were shown to have survived every single time.

Inverted in "Over the Edge". Scarecrow knocks Batgirl off a building to her death, but we see her injuries and she has time to say her Final Speech. Fortunately, it was All Just a Dream.

Speaking of which, Harley seemingly gets this in

as both Batgirl and she are thrown over a cliff during their fight. Batgirl tries to save her but is holding her by the cuffs on her costume with tear and send Harley plummeting into the abyss. It\'s mentioned they did search for her, but Never Found the Body. Subverted later on in the movie as we see an elderly Harely alive and well berating her nieces, the Dee Dees.

, the Evil Superman drops Toyman to his death. In front of the whole city.

episode "North by North Quahog", Mel Gibson suffers this fate after falling off of George Washington\'s nose on Mount Rushmore, because Christians don\'t believe in gravity.

In another episode, Michael Eisner is thrown to his death, parodying

An android version of Hannah Montana is taken out in the same manner as

Diane Simmons in "And Then There Were Fewer". Just as Lois is about to be shot, Diane is shot herself as she kneels, at first glance about to fall to the ground, but then falls off the cliff and screams, splashing into the waters below.

. But being a Jason Voorhees Expy, it doesn\'t stop him from reappearing in the finale.

, the Winx fairies and the warrior fairy Nebula use coverage to freeze the three remaining fairy hunters in the Omega dimension. After being frozen, the three evil wizards fall into a hole as the cave starts collapsing.

. Terra throws Slade off a cliff and into a river of lava, but he catches himself on the rock, pulls himself back over the edge, and grabs her by the throat, at which point she

him over the edge with her full powers unleashed, and just so we know he\'s dead, we then see his mask dissolving in the lava. He comes back from that too, courtesy of the show\'s Satan-Expy, but that\'s not for another season. He outright said he would\'ve been dead if Trigon hadn\'t intervened though.

, Anakin\'s fight with Asajj Ventress ends with Anakin pummeling on Ventress with a lightsaber

a scene quite reminiscent of a pummeling Anakin would later receive from his own son, but instead of Ventress getting cut to ribbons, the cliff she\'s standing on breaks, sending her into the abyss below. The other Clone Wars cartoon,

makes it clear she survived. It takes place after the the previous one, and she is a main villain in it.

, this happens to Susan in "Benson Be Gone". After she goes One-Winged Angel, a one shot character named Utopia performs a Heroic Sacrifice to send her falling into a pit back into Hell.

, Count Geoffrey is accidentally knocked out the tallest window in Camelhot by Sir Loungelot. Although it is debatable whether the fall kills him, we never see him again for the rest of the series.

, a tyrannosaurus rex falls off a cliff while trying to eat another dinosaur.

episode "Old Friends" where heroic Old Soldier Panthro flashes back to the battle where the Big Bad and The Dragon presumed him dead. Panthro\'s power-hungry friend Grune, offered a position as Sorcerous Overlord Mumm-Ra\'s right hand, begins to fight when Panthro declines his We Can Rule Together. Grune knocks Panthro off the edge of a platform in Mumm-Ra\'s lair, sending him falling into a dark pit. Later, when pursuing his Evil Former Friend, Panthro sourly rants about how difficult it was to climb out.

, Queen Chrysalis and her changelings are hit with a powerful magic spell and are sent flying over the edge into the distance. This seems fairly Team Rocket style, but the distance they must have fallen exceeds both distances Twilight nearly fell in the second and fifteenth episodes put together. Judging by the fact they don\'t bother putting the shield back up, it\'s fair to assume the heroes at least believe it took her out for now. While nothing in the show has confirmed whether or not she survives, the Expanded Universe IDW comics do depict her return (and explicitly show her surviving her fall).

, the sheen number of times Dick Dastardly ends up plummeting vertically downwards from substantial heights after the critical failure of yet another improbable aircraft - sometimes saved by Muttley, sometimes not.

, the Joker once again falls off something tall, this time a bridge. He survives and returns years later, even lampshading his ludicrous survival rate, but the fall left him crippled and reduced to using a hover-chair to get around.

: The traitor during the invasion of Galaluna is stabbed through the gut by Lance and topples over the edge of a bridge to his death.

, Mace Windu is sent falling from a tall building by Palpatine after Anakin turns to the dark side in

, during his performance of "Aunty\'s Wooden Leg" the Mad Hatter trips on the table while dancing and appears to fall to his death in an unseen deep hole, only to pop his head up from under the table, unharmed.

, some of the ways Ripley can die involve falling out of sight after trying to trust a method of crossing a chasm or climbing a wall that aren\'t reliable.

. It appears that Gangrel attempts to invoke this, and in fact Emmeryn falls off the cliff. Subverted in that Emmeryn actually

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time

, Ratchet falls off a platform after being shot in the chest by Alistar.

People can be thrown out of Dio\'s hideouts and the Kennedy Space Center in

Tali dies this way, too, if you fail to establish peace between the geth and quarians, and side with the geth in the resulting battle - the quarian fleet is wiped out and Tali commits suicide by throwing herself from a nearby cliff.

, this is a given since the villain of the chapter is Humpty Dumpty. He falls to his death from a windmill after being sprayed in the face with a noxious perfume when a cat appears out of nowhere and blinds him with its claws.

Sakutaro Morishige goes mad from realizing that he has accidentally been fetishizing Mayu\'s remains. He screams horribly then jumps out of the window. He is never seen again.

, Rarity, in a Shout-Out to Icarus, flies too close to the sun, burns her wings, and falls, inadvertently taking the Wonderbolts with her. Thanks to Rainbow Dash and her Sonic Rainboom, however, this ends a bit differently than the tale of Icarus.

, Rarity once again nearly falls to her doom, this time along with Spike after he, in his giant form capturing Rarity with his tail, returns to his original form. They are saved by Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy.

, Lightning Dust\'s tornado nearly sends Twilight, Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Rarity falling to their doom, but other pegasi save them.

There\'s also two lesser instances of Twilight nearly falling to her doom. One has Nightmare Moon send her falling off a cliff, but Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy catch her; the other has her jump off a cliff from a violent Hydra, and would have been killed if a bog bubble didn\'t appear under her to bounce her up to the other side of the cliff.

Unexplained Recovery Death Tropes Disposable Intern

Disney Death Climactic Tropes Down to the Last Play

Destination Defenestration Dangerous Heights Falling into His Arms

Digital Piracy Is Evil Evil Tropes Divine Chessboard

Dinosaur Doggie Bone Older than Television Dramedy

Detail-Hogging Cover ImageSource/Animated Films Finger-Forced Smile

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