Toilet-related Injuries and Deaths - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

Injuries and deaths related to toilets have been portrayed in film and other media on many occasions. These appear across many genres, from comedy to action movies:

• Slim Newton's comic 1972 country song "Redback on the Toilet Seat" tells the story of a man who gets bitten by a venomous redback spider while using the toilet, and ends up in hospital, "a sad and sorry plight."
• In the 1985 film Back to the Future, Doc Brown comes up with the idea of the flux capacitor (which is what makes time travel possible) after slipping from his toilet while attempting to hang his clock and then bumping his head. The idea comes to him in a vision he has after being knocked out.
• In Alan Moore's 1986-1987 graphic novel Watchmen, Rorschach kills a prison attacker by breaking his cell's toilet and electrifying the pool of water once his assailant steps into it.
• In the 1991 film Nothing But Trouble, the character of Miss Purdah dies while sitting on the toilet in the outhouse, which falls into a fiery hole caused by an underground coal fire.
• In the 1992 film Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Harry Lyme (Joe Pesci) has his head lit on fire, then attempts to put out the flames by sticking his head in a toilet bowl, unaware that it is filled with paint thinner.
• In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) is eaten by a T-rex whilst sitting on a toilet in a collapsed bathroom block: "When you gotta go, you gotta go".
• In the 1994 Kevin Smith film Clerks, a man dies from a heart attack while masturbating on the toilet in a convenience store.
• In the 1994 film Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino, bathroom breaks punctuate chapters of the film: Mia Marcellus (Uma Thurman) overdoses on heroin, a diner is robbed, and, in his final ill-fated trip to the toilet, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) is shot with his own gun which Vincent left carelessly on a kitchen counter while waiting in the home of a man he was sent to kill (Bruce Willis).
• In the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, James Bond attacks a Soviet Soldier on a toilet after saying, "Beg your pardon; forgot to knock" while infiltrating a chemical weapons facility.
• In the 1998 BBC comedy series Big Train, an intergalactic tyrant (who looks like Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon) suffers the indignity of being in a British public hospital after slipping on the mat around the toilet. A "get well card" from the people of the planet Zordon is not enough to raise his spirits.
• In the 2000 novel A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin, Tyrion Lannister kills his father Tywin Lannister with a crossbow while Tywin is sitting on a privy.
• In the pilot episode of the 2000-2005 comedy-drama series Dead Like Me, the main protagonist Georgia's life is cut short when a toilet seat from the Mir space station drives her into the pavement.
• In the 2001 Sopranos episode "He is Risen", the character Gigi Cestone, a young man, has a heart attack on the toilet of his social club while straining himself to defecate after a particularly large Thanksgiving dinner.
• In the 2003 film The Italian Job, the character Left Ear (Mos Def)'s nickname is attributed to a childhood prank involving cherry bombs in a toilet at his middle school.
• In the 2004 film Soul Plane, a character sues the airline after being sucked into the toilet during a flight.
• In the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode "The Weatherman", Larry David urinates sitting down in order not to turn the light on when he gets up to use the toilet at night. However, he injures himself one night after his wife, Cheryl David (played by Cheryl Hines), forgets to put the seat down.
• In This is England '86, the character of Meggy (played by Perry Benson), had a heart attack while on the toilet. The character survived, but later died off screen in '87 and did not appear in This Is England '88.
• In a 2012 episode of South Park called "Reverse Cowgirl", a character named Clyde Donovan left the toilet seat up and his mother was killed after falling in and flushing the toilet, which sucked out all her organs.