History Main / RedShirt

* In the podcast series CroganAdventures episode IslandLostToTime a background character volunteers to go with the leads on an expedition to find dinosaurs. The captain scathingly points out that he's new, they don't know anything about him except his name and while in her experience it has been useful the way guys like that get killed right off to tell the others how dangerous things are she'd rather skip that step and just assume this will be dangerous from the start.

* The amateur PC AdventureGame ''Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment'', which is pretty much what it sounds like, takes the trope to its logical extreme by making redshirts into a commodity cloned and sold in 5-packs. They die in a great number of interesting ways. In fact it's actually impossible for an away mission to end any way ''but'' the death of the redshirt.

* Agents of {{SHIELD}} who are not major characters could just as easily be called Blue Shirts with the number of times SHIELD agents are killed en masse.

*** In fact, this trope was {{defied}} in this film, when Kirk ordered two nameless crewmen to take off their red shirts and change into casual gear for their mission to apprehend John Harrison on Qo'noS.

* ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' has both the fairy maids of Koumakan and the rabbits of Eientei, alternating between Red Shirts and Mooks depending on perspective, whose sole purpose is to get slaughtered by vastly more powerful characters, with ''Silent Sinner in Blue'' in particular not being kind to them. Fortunately for them, in Gensoukyou {{Non Lethal KO}}s are the law.

* Lampshaded in ''WormsTrek Rhapsody''. One gets hit by a Klingon missile (Scotty's line "Hit by Klingon missiles, no!"), another gets fired out of a torpedo bay ("Photon torpedooooooos!").

** According to [[http://www.sitelogicmarketing.com/blog/02-analytics-according-to-captain-kirk this]] article about analytics, red shirts do, in fact, suffer the highest mortality rate on TOS (74% of all Enterprise crew deaths.) It also shows that if you want to survive an away mission when beaming down with Kirk, hope like hell he get's his rocks off with an alien babe. Mortality rates drop to a (mostly) survivable 12% in these cases. Moral of this: Be Kirk's wingman whenever possible and DO NOT cock block or it could be your ass.

* In the 2009 ''Film/StarTrek'' movie, Kirk (in blue) and Sulu (in gold) are accompanied on a drop mission to take out a planetary drill by gung-ho Olson (in red). Guess which one of the trio dies? At first it seems to be a subversion, as he survives [[spoiler:what seems to be the obvious fate of missing the platform and falling to his death from the upper atmosphere of a planet]]. Unfortunately for the poor guy, it's a DoubleSubversion; his final fate actually manages to be fairly spectacular. [[spoiler:His parachute catches on the platform, and he gets vaporized by the drill.]]\\

* ''Series/TheVampireDiaries'' introduces many characters only for them to be killed off by vampires. Often overlaps with BlackDudeDiesFirst, especially in the case of the black boy introduced to Bonnie as a crush, who is promptly killed off. His murderer seems to think 'it's not like I meant to kill him!' excuses the death.

* In ''{{FTL}}'', there is an achievement called "No Redshirts Here", which is unlocked if the player reaches the final sector without losing a crew member.

** Bungie is not new to Red shirts. They had them first introduced in [[Marathon]]. Marathon introduced the first AI controlled allies in video games, which were defense drones with machine pistols. It also introduced people who ran around in random directions screaming "They're everywhere!" during an alien attack. Guess which one you'll be seeing more of. There are even some of these people, known as [=BoBs=], dressed in red, and they are the [[ColorCodedForYourConvenience weakest color aside from yellow]]. In the sequel, however, all BoBs carry handguns, and the red ones are [[MauveShirt security guards, and are stronger than the other BoBs]].

* ''FinalFantasy'':
** In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'', the blue-clad Shinra Army can often be cut down by the weakest of hits. It's worse in ''CrisisCore'', where 1000 Shinra infantryman are unable to defeat Zack in an optional mission. In DirgeOfCerberus, the white-shirted WRO serves this purpose.

** VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII has the Galbaldian soldiers, who in a funny way look like Shinra Army, who are also easily cut down. This really shines bright in the [=SeeD=] final exam part of the game when the anxious Galbaldians who attempt to ambush your party try to fight at obviously unwinnable odds. Their are even soldiers in Red uniforms as well as the blue.

* The Gallian army in ''VideoGame/ValkyriaChronicles''. If the raw deal a Redshirt normally gets is a sushi platter, the one these guys get is still flopping on the deck with its eyes bugging out. For starters, their only representative is an asshole and none of them have faces, defining traits, or redeeming value (when their enemy counterparts get two cutscenes to show how human they are). Then the vast majority gets burnt alive in an explosion, which is par for the Redshirt course, except the explosion was a [[TheWoobie ''woobiefying'']] moment for the person who blew them up, and [[AMillionIsAStatistic no one cares that they're all dead afterward.]] And as if that wasn't enough, if the player somehow manages to kill off all the distinct personalities of Squad 7, they'll start filling slots in the militia, and still have no faces or final words, fully prepared to die in thankless, anonymous droves (and if the player didn't care about Squad 7, they probably won't mind killing off what amounts to ordinary, faceless PlayerMooks). Apparently the difference between the militia and the army is that the army can train soldiers to be more disposable than toilet paper.

* ''Film/StarTrekTheMotionPicture'': Two crew members die in a teleporter accident, although they aren't seen to be wearing red shirts (in fact, no-one is).
** This is an odd case, in that one of the victims of the transporter was Lt. Sonak, who would have been a main character in the aborted ''Star Trek: Phase II''. [[SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute Mr. Sonak]] was to replace Cdr. Spock, as LeonardNimoy would not reprise his role for the series. When Nimoy agreed to return for the feature, which was based on elements of ''Phase II'', Xon was killed so that there would be a vacancy for Spock to fill.

** It gets lamshaded/parodied like crazy later on, with the methods of killing Phelous [[SerialEscalation getting more and more ridiculous]].

[[caption-width-right:255:A Red Shirt in his natural state.]]

** Parodied in "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", in which the entire ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' cast is threatened by a jealous energy being, but only Welshy (a parody of a SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute for Scotty), who's dressed in the classic red shirt, gets killed. [[RuleOfThree Three times over.]]

** The sequel, ''Film/StarTrekIntoDarkness'' has Chekov moved to the position of chief engineer of the Enterprise due to Scotty's resignation prior to their mission. [[OhCrap The look on his face]] and dramatic music when Kirk tells him to put on a red shirt is a ''priceless'' example of LeaningOnTheFourthWall. [[spoiler: He doesn't die, but still]].

* In a recent {{Taskmaster}} mini-series, the main villian is former mook turned leader how actually CALLS himself Red Shirt. He's the only one that doesn't get the joke.

* Parodied by JohnScalzi in his book ''Redshirts,'' told from the point of view of an ensign on a space exploration vessel:

** The sequel, ''Film/StarTrekIntoDarkness'' has Chekov moved to the position of chief engineer of the Enterprise due to Scotty's resignation prior to their mission. [[OhCrap The look on his face]] when Kirk tells him to put on a red shirt is a ''priceless'' example of LeaningOnTheFourthWall. [[spoiler: He doesn't die, but still]].

The color of shirt worn by the nameless security personnel on the original ''Series/{{Star Trek|The Original Series}}'' series. Their only job was to get eaten, shot, stabbed, disrupted, temporally-shifted, frozen, desalinated, or crushed into a cube. Their death would give Creator/WilliamShatner and Creator/DeForestKelley a corpse to emote over, and Creator/LeonardNimoy a corpse to, well, [[TheStoic not emote over]]. (Creator/GeneRoddenberry [[InvertedTrope inverted this trope]] in ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' when he had all officers of command rank wear red shirts while the security and engineering departments wear gold.) In a series where TheMainCharactersDoEverything, if you suddenly see someone else involved, they are probably a Redshirt.

** Also, Drakken's rank-and-file henchmen wear red uniforms. They don't get killed because [[NonLethalWarfare it's not that kind of show]], but they are generally easy to defeat.

* In ''Anime/MobileSuitGundam'', the mass-produced federation {{mooks}} were called RGM-79 [=GMs=], which exploded by the dozens any time they were shown in a fight. BonusPoints because their standard armor was colored like a [[http://www.mahq.net/mecha/gundam/msgundam/rgm-79.jpg red T-shirt]].
* Occurs in ''GundamSeed'', in which Athurn's buddy Rusty (who never shows his face or has any dialog) is killed. He's wearing red, which ironically is supposed to be the uniform of ZAFT's elite. Nicol and Heine (In Gundam SEED Destiny) get the same treatment.

* The ''GraveRobbersFromOuterSpace'' series of B-movie games has a character in at least two whose special function is that other players have to kill them before anyone else, acting as a kind of MeatShield.

* The ''GraveRobbersFromOuterSpace'' series of B-movie games has a character in at least two whose function is that he has to die before anyone else.