Threw My Bike on the Roof

Kids: Give us our ball back! Give us our ball back!
Biff Tannen: Oh, you mean this ball? Is this your ball? You want it back?
Kids: Yeah!
[Biff throws the ball up onto a neighbor's roof, inaccessible to the kids]
Biff Tannen: Go get it!! Hahahaha!

— Back to the Future Part II

In essence, this is about destroying property just because you can... even though there is nothing to gain from it. Being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole.

A Jerkass is walking down a sidewalk when he sees a group of little kids playing with a ball, or a remote-controlled plane. He goes up to them all casual-like and feigns interest as they rave about their new favorite toy. Next thing you know though, The Bully either borrows the toy or takes it by force and then either breaks it, throws it on top of a roof or into a body of water, takes it for his own... whatever's the cruelest way he can think of to deprive the kids of their fun. After he does this, he walks away laughing at what he's done while the poor little kids cry or shout angrily at him, hopelessly unable to do anything to fix or retrieve their toy.

Of course, this can be the moment that the local badass sees this happening and makes the Jerkass regret it by beating him up to the delight of the kids and/or making him retrieve the item or compensate for the loss.

This doesn't necessarily have to be exactly like that situation though; this trope applies to all types of jerkassery committed to all kinds of helpless people regarding their items. For example, when the Jerkass's co-worker just finished his project on a computer or whatever and is about to save it, the guy goes out of his way to pull the plug of his co-worker's computer, making the co-worker lose all his hard work.

A Sub-Trope of Kick the Dog. See Keep Away for a less drastic bully tactic. Sister Trope to For the Evulz and Evil Is Petty.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Tomo from Azumanga Daioh does this with Chiyo-chan's house keys, though more out of amusement and just because she could.
• In the Grand Magic Games arc of Fairy Tail, after Raven Tail member Kurohebi defeats Lamia Scale member Toby in their match, Kurohebi points out that the lost sock that Toby's been looking for has been around Toby's neck the whole time. Toby starts to thank Kurohebi, but Kurohebi rips it to sheds in front of it, proudly declaring that he enjoys destroying things that are precious to people. This happens to be one of the least cruel things Raven Tail does in this arc.
• My Hero Academia: After learning that Izuku is also planning to apply to U.A., Katsuki corners and threatens him after class, stealing Izuku's notebook and casually exploding it with his Quirk. He follows that up by suggesting that Izuku should "take a swan dive off the roof."
• Ramen Fighter Miki: Miki accuses longtime The Rival Megumi of letting the air out of Miki's bicycle tires. Megumi denies this in public, but confesses only to Miki.
• This is how Yu-Gi-Oh! starts. Yugi is working on his puzzle when bullies Tristan and Joey start picking on him and playing Keep Away with it. Then Joey throws a piece of the puzzle into the pool.

Comic Books

• Calico (2020): In Issue #1, the first Flashback to Hector's childhood introduces a childhood bully of his named Guillermito. Guillermito is introduced in his first scene by stomping down on Hector's hand, breaking his toy car underneath it.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: One story arc had Calvin bring Hobbes to school in order to deal with Moe, who frequently stole from him. While Moe initially intended to inflict this fate upon Hobbes, he's unnerved by Calvin casually inviting him to come closer, questioning whether the teachers are watching before backing off. Naturally, Calvin assumes he was scared off by his tiger, with Hobbes shouting insults after him.

Fan Works

• Cheshire: When Marinette makes a bunch of pastries for the whole class, Chloe takes the whole batch and dumps them all over her while mocking her efforts.
• CONSEQUENCES: Lila sets her own downfall into motion in MAMA BEAR when she notices Manon playing with a Ladybug doll, learns that Marinette made it for it, and cruelly rips it apart right in front of her. This also gets witnessed by Manon's mother, Nadja, who proceeds to investigate and uncovers just how much of a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing Lila is...

Films — Animation

• Ballerina: Camille throws Félicie’s music box, an heirloom from her all but stated to be dead mother, out of her window just because she could, apparently. Victor fixes it later, but this act still cements her as a huge Jerkass like her mother until Character Development sets in, anyway. She even tries to do it a second time after it’s fixed! Thankfully, Félicie’s on guard and privy to her Tragic Keepsake destroying shenanigans and stops her the second time.
• Despicable Me: Gru's Establishing Character Moment is when he gives a young boy a balloon animal... and pops it with a pin. He sets up this trope just for fun.
• Subverted in Monster House: Old man Nebbercracker meanly confiscates any object that lands on his lawn- but this is only a ploy to keep kids away so the house doesn't eat them. After the house is destroyed, the remnant of its foundations reveals a massive pile of toys and other junk which can be safely retrieved by their owners.

Films — Live-Action

• Animal House has Bluto request to see a guitarist's instrument... so that he can shatter it against the wall before politely handing the neck back.
• Back to the Future Part II is the Trope Quoter. In this installment, Biff is leaving his grandma's house to get his car when he picks up a ball from a group of passing neighborhood kids. He dribbles the ball while he continues walking down the block even as the kids beg him to return it. Finally, Biff turns around, starts to hand the ball to them, then turns around and throws it onto the next house's roof, shouts "Go get it!", then continues on his way.
• In Dennis the Menace, the fugitive/convict/whatever comes up to a kid and asks "Whatcha eatin', sport?" The kid replies, "Uh Appul (A apple)." Then the convict stabs the apple with his knife and pulls it out of the kid's hand. Then he proceeds to eat a bite in front of the crying child.
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: The Girl bullies the Urchin and swipes his skateboard so she can use it herself.
• In Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a group of biker bullies a little klown who arrives on a mini-bicycle by destroying it and laughing to each other. Except the klown is actually a vampiric extra-terrestrial monster, so he decapitates the biker in question. The rest of the gang wisely take off after that.
• Kung Fu Hustle has it when Sing stomps a football and says his first line: "NO MORE SOCCER!" It's a reference to the director's previous film Shaolin Soccer.
• Just after he raids an apartment for drugs in The Professional, Norman Stansfield comes across a group of kids playing catch with a basketball. He grabs it out of mid-air, comments that "Kids should be in school," then gets into his car and drives off, taking the ball with him over their protestations.
• Kiefer Sutherland's character does this with the boy's baseball cap in Stand by Me.

Jokes

• There is a Dutch group of jokes that revolves around the throwing of bikes on roofs. For example:
  • Humour: throwing a bike on the roof.
  • Baby humour: throwing a kid's bike on the roof.
  • Racist humour: throwing black and brown bikes on the roof.

Literature

• In The Pigman, thieving Jerkass Norton smashes the titular Pigman's collection of ceramic pigs, looking for valuables. John beats the crap out of him for it.
• In his introduction story in Louis Sachar's Wayside School series, Terrence keeps kicking all the balls over the fence while saying things like "Shut up, Dixie cup." Eventually he complains that there's nothing left to kick, at which point Louis the yard teacher kicks him over the fence.

Live-Action TV

• In the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale of the Dark Music", a bully takes the protagonist's bike and throws it onto the street where it gets run over by a passing bus. After the protagonist feeds the bully to the monster behind the music-activated door, he finds a shiny new bike in front of said door.
• Billy Webb's Amazing Story inverted this: the bike put the bully up there.
• One scene in Grange Hill spinoff Tucker's Luck shows thug Passmore putting his bovver boot through the protagonists' ghetto blaster as a mindlessly destructive alternative to simply switching it off.
• M*A*S*H: BJ and Hawkeye were feuding with Charles - he was playing his French horn, annoying them, so they refused to shower until he stopped. Eventually the rest of the camp ganged up on BJ and Hawk and hosed them down. Charles watched this with delight... until someone took away his French horn, laid it on the ground, and ran over it with a jeep. This is a rare example of Charles being the victim rather than the snob.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes this a trait of Tom Servo and Crow, who never saw something they wouldn't smash for fun (including the satellite's escape pods that no one even knew they had). Joel in one episode almost gets the better of them by claiming that he made a toothpick sculpture of Monticello specifically for them to destroy. The bots wander off because destroying something they are supposed to is no fun... then immediately rush back in and do it anyway.
  • Mike had a little more luck in a later episode, when Crow sees a character in the movie they're watching pour beer on someone's motorcycle out of spite. He declares that he will pour (or rather have Mike pour, as he lacks working hands) beer on Mike's most precious possession... which turns out to be a beer stein. Mike then says that Crow is precious to him too, and Crow dutifully demands that beer be poured on his own head. As Mike happily leaves with a stein full of beer, Crow admits this didn't go exactly as planned.
• Sharpe has both a hero and a villain destroying each other's stuff.
  • Sharpe's Enemy: Richard Sharpe gets heartbroken because his spouse was killed by his mortal enemy and in utter frustration, he destroys a French spy's glasses. He came to demand that the British surrender. It might have been partly Percussive Therapy, but the spy was a jerk ass and had it coming. Nothing to gain from it, except it was a good way of showing the French Jerk who the alpha dog is.
  • In Sharpe's Honour, the jerkass spy plans an elaborate revenge because Sharpe's chosen men and the British army defeated the French in a battle that he thought was an easy French victory. After series of misfortunes, Sharpe ends up caught by the French. The spy smashes Sharpe's telescope that he received from Wellington himself. Nice try doing your revenge and trying to break Sharpe, jerk spy, but it was a bad idea. Sharpe used one broken piece as a weapon and it helped him to escape.
• The Young Ones: This trope could almost be called "The Vyvyan", because he has this as his MO. He routinely destroys not only his housemates' possessions, and those of anyone he comes into contact with, but also his own. All just for the fun of it. Of course, if your parents had saddled you with a name like "Vyvyan"...

Music

• The music video to PSY's "Gentleman" has him, among other douchebag acts, play soccer with kids for a little bit before punting the ball as far as he can and celebrating while the kids cry.

Mythology and Religion

• In some tales of Greek Mythology, the hero Perseus (who is normally a Nice Guy) steals the single eye that the three Graeae sisters must share to Blackmail them into getting information. When the Graeae sisters oblige him, he throws their eye into a lake.

Pro Wrestling

• Ted DiBiase pulled this in his "Million Dollar Man" gimmick, telling a young boy that if he could dribble a ball fifteen times in a row without messing up, he'd give him $500 - on the 14th bounce, DiBiase stuck his foot out to screw the kid over, telling him that "You've got to learn a hard, cruel fact of life: when you don't do the job right, you don't get paid."
• This was the basis for Raven's feud with Tommy Dreamer. Dreamer bullied Raven as a child, so Raven was going to destroy Dreamer's life as an adult. Beulah McGillicutty also bore a grudge against Dreamer for childhood bullying, but came to realize he was different as a man than as a boy and moved on.
• During their feud with Daffney's All-Star Squad, Malia Hosaka of Legendary attempted this by stealing and trampling on one Kimberly's Thing dolls. During their feud with the Lucha Sisters, Legendary also killed Mia Yim's tree.
• Yoshi Tatsu's feud with Tyson Kid on WWE Nx T was started by the later breaking one of his action figures.
• During NWA Vendetta Pro Wrestling's Zombie Walk, Eric Watts popped Ricardo Rodriguez's skeleton blowup doll Boner, mocking Rodriguez as he tried in vain to blow it back up.
• During LuFisto's reign as WSU World Champion, the new company owner DJ Hyde destroyed her manager Peegaboo.

Video Games

In General:

• This is the essence of being a Troll or Griefer in online games, particularly in games with persistant worlds and permanent progress loss, such as EVE Online or Rust.

By Series:

• Fable: In the prologue, which has you play the Hero as a young boy and introduces the Karma Meter, you find a girl's favourite teddy bear and can either return it or give it to her Big Brother Bully for destruction.
  Bully: Now, Rosie, what game shall we play? "Teddy No-Legs?" What about "Burning Fur?"
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout 2, you can break a kid's toy in a small sidequest. You even get Experience Points for teaching him that "life is cruel and unfair".
  • Much later, Fallout: New Vegas lets you rescue a little slave girl's teddy bear and hand it to her. Or tear it in half in front of her, because... because.
• As this video points out, in Paper Mario 64, if you're insane enough to max out the number of key items you have so that they overflow into your inventory, you can consume them like most other items in the field (they do nothing). Of course, this means that you can take Goombaria's dolly, refuse to give it to her, and then eat it in front of her face.
• Done somewhat literally in Tony Hawk's Underground where on the first mission, the main character has to grab the pieces of Eric's skateboard thrown on the roof of a house by the Elm Street drug dealers.

Visual Novels

• In Yuuko's chapter of ef - a fairy tale of the two., bullies do this with Yuuko's indoor shoes, hiding them on top of the lockers, which causes her to have to go around all day in her socks. Eventually subverted — Yuuko hid them up there herself to create the illusion that she was being bullied, so that she could better manipulate Yuu.

Western Animation

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Whenever Meatwad gets something, anything, Shake destroys it. Eventually, Shake is reduced to burning holes in Meatwad's carpet, the only thing he has left.
  • This backfires on him in "Video Ouija". Shake commits suicide just so he can haunt Meatwad through the titular Video Ouija game, but by this time Meatwad has grown bored of it, leaving Shake stuck as a ghost caring for a perpetually crying ghost baby.
  • In "Reedickyoulus" Shake microwaved Meatwad's kitten and then, forgetting he already killed Meatwad's kitten, microwaved his own kitten mistaking it for Meatwad's.
• In the episode of Ben 10: Alien Force In Charm’s Way, Kevin is depressed over the recent accident that left him covered in an amalgam of stone. While on the beach, some kids drop their volleyball near him, and he squishes it until it pops rather than give it back. The kids are upset, but after Kevin and the rest of the Power Trio defeat an attacking alien, one Genre Savvy kid sympathetically points out that monstrous looking heroes like him are always sad and angry.
• In Dora the Explorer, whenever Swiper actually manages to steal something, he doesn't even try to keep it for himself, but throws it as far as he can, smugly saying "You’ll never find it now!" The viewers must then play a game with Dora to recover whatever he stole.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode, "One Bad Apple" has a variant of this when Applebloom's cousin, Babs Seed, defensively joins in Diamond Tiara and Silverspoon's taunt of the CMC and tries to up the ante by kicking their float. In doing so, she inadvertently destroys it and Babs, although surprised, then feels that she has to play along and rub it in to keep her facade up.
• Invoked by Buford in Phineas and Ferb First, he inadvertently destroys the bounce house at the meatloaf festival because he was too big to jump on it and doing so caused it to pop. After the titular duo build a new and better one, he presents it to the children to atone for what he did only to produce a needle seconds afterwards and pop it on purpose.
• Several episodes of The Rabbit with the Checkered Ears in which Mozdony plays the role of The Bully involve him taking other characters' possessions simply because he can, and the title character intervening to restore them to their rightful owners.
  • "The Borrowed Stroller" involves Kriszta borrowing a doll's stroller from a friend in exchange for letting her walk her dog. Mozdony is in the same park as Kriszta, and decides to help himself to the stroller while her back is turned and use it as a go-kart.
  • At the beginning of "Whose House is This?", Kriszta and Kistöfi make a Wendy-house out of a giant cardboard box in Kriszta's front garden. Mozdony happens to walk past the front gate and decides to climb in the house himself; his sheer size means there is no room inside for the other two, and he rebuffs their attempts to get him out again.
• In the Ren and Stimpy short "Sven Hoek", Stimpy and Ren's equally moronic cousin, Sven, are seen playing their favourite board game, Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence, which indeed has an actual electric fence. When Ren comes home from work, he finds they've also, in their idiocy, destroyed his most precious belongings. In the midst of a psychotic rant outlining the terrible things he has planned for them, Ren discovers the board game, and asks tauntingly, "Do you like this game? Do you really, really like this game?" and proceeds to... well, take a whiz on it. The resulting short generates an explosion that literally blows them all straight to Hell, where the Devil cheerfully admonishes them with "So, you whizzed on the electric fence, didn't ya?"
• Rugrats: Angelica has kicked several of Tommy's balls into the other side of the yard with the bull dog in it.
  • In "The Trial", Angelica broke Tommy's clown lamp because she thought it was ugly.
• The Simpsons:
  • Bart and Nelson are with Millhouse in the park, watching him play with his remote control plane and are thoroughly bored.
    Bart: Milhouse, this is boring. Make it crash or something.
    Milhouse: Perfectly level flying is the supreme challenge of the scale model pilot.
    (Nelson takes the remote and gives a more spectacular stunt... it finally ends its trip crashing on the roof of a mysterious old house)
  • Another, though this time subverted, example from the show is when Mr. Burns does this simply out of curiosity, but he's so old and decrepit that "taking candy from a baby" is not as easy as he had thought.
• In episode 5 of Total Drama Island, Heather deliberately tanks her performance in a talent show challenge by foregoing her planned dance act in favor of reading Gwen's diary on national television. Not only was this such a pointlessly nasty action that it even shocked Chris, but this led to her team losing the challenge, which they would have definitely won if she had put forth an actual performance due to the huge lead in points they had built up after the first two rounds. The only thing that kept Heather from being voted off that night was Plot Armor.

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