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A fictional character or creature that is just a head (as opposed to a Waddling Head or someone who's recently lost their head) that can also fly, hover, or just get around under its own power.
Comes in a few artistically styles
- Flying skull or Robot: usually some form of Attack Drone but occasionally more powerful than a similar character with a full body.
- Floating Mask: sometimes causes Demonic Possession.
- Skull or Core with a less real body: Such as a ghost or slime with an ectoplasmic body and a bony skull or a robot with a core and a bunch of wires.
Sometimes these Flying Faces are nice, sometimes noisy Cloudcuckoolanders, often intelligent, and sometimes they don't talk.
See Also: Cephalothorax, Oracular Head, and Oculothorax.
Examples:
Anime and Manga[]
- Yuurei Shoujo of Gate Keepers 21 with her "pretty" skull-in-a-ball.
- In Black Rock Shooter, Dead Master fights using flying skulls.
- Mazinger Z villain Count Broken is a flying head with a headless android body... that just follows it around. He never attaches the head to his body; in fact sometimes he carries the head under his arm.
- Hell Teacher Nube - One of the Obake the titular Nube runs into is a human head with bat wings.
Film[]
- The Bowler, In Mystery Men, has her father's skull embedded in her weapon, a bowling ball. She talks to it, and it, apparently, to her. It saves the day.
- Zardoz: The title character which is actually a vehicle
Literature[]
- Dinotopia: Fritz the robot.
Live Action Television[]
- Zelda from the old TV Horror Host Svengoolie, and Tombstone from his successor Son of Svengoolie (which is now just called Svengoolie).
- Lokar/Dai Satan.
Music[]
- Overkill's winged skull mascot Chaly
- Avenged Sevenfold's mascot, the Deathbat, is a skull with bat wings.
Tabletop Games[]
- Dungeons and Dragons:
- Demiliches.
- Basic D&D: the sacrol and druj monsters.
- Dungeons and Dragons adventure OA6 Ronin Challenge. The last manifestation of General Goyat is a 50 foot tall floating head. Once the PCs do enough damage to it the flesh flakes away, leaving a giant flying skull.
- The Forgotten Realms setting has Skullport, an underground city ruled by flying, spellcasting skulls that order the inhabitants to perform bizarre actions (and punish them if they don't).
- Warhammer 40000: Skull probes.
- One of the monsters in the Munchkin card game has a Mortal Kom Bat: a flaming skull with bat wings.
Video Games[]
- Morte from Planescape: Torment and the mimirs.
- Several games from The Legend of Zelda series have flying skulls as enemies.
- In The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games, the second part of Seasons' next-to-last's dungeon boss is against his giant flying skull, which spits fireballs at you.
- There's a floating ghostly skull available as a non-combat pet in World of Warcraft. Floating ghostly skulls also appear during the fight against Yog-Saron. Looking at them makes you lose sanity.
- Doom has Lost Souls (flying flaming skulls which home in on you like missiles), Cacodemons (big red faces that belch ball-lightning), and Pain Elementals (giant brown faces with stubby arms that would cough up a potentially endless crowd of the aforementioned Lost Souls).
- Skelly, one of the many optional party members in Chrono Cross, starts out as this. You have to find and assemble the rest of him to recruit him.
- Great Dungeon in the Sky has Loads and Loads of Characters to choose from, including several varieties of floating skull.
- Ghosts in Septerra Core are huge, ghostly floating skulls. Their damage reduction and magic attacks make them Demonic Spiders
- The Sargassoes of Devil May Cry, appearing in the first two games as recurring enemies.
- In the Castlevania series, recurring villainess Carmilla's One-Winged Angel form is that of a gigantic, naked woman riding an equally oversized skull that cries bloody tears (as a Visual Pun for her theme, "Bloody Tears"). Other examples periodically show up in this series, such as Death's OWA in the third game.
- Also the Medusa Heads.
- The ever-annoying flying heads in Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame.
- Some Pokémon, like Glalie (which is even classified as the "Face Pokémon") and Cryogonal.
- Face Raiders, an augmented reality game built into the 3DS involves being attacked by a number of flying heads with the faces of anyone you've photographed.
Web Comics[]
- Schlock Mercenary: Ennesby the robot.
Web Original[]
- Cat Face is essentially a giant floating cat head. He has a body but it is extremely small and atrophied and just hangs underneath limply
Western Animation[]
- Tom and Jerry: Shiver Me Whiskers the pirate skull(and crossbones) with Offscreen Teleportation.
- Metalocalypse: Dethklok's mascot, Facebones.
- Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: One episode had the smuggling of Warhead Attack Drones.
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Somewhere between this and Floating Mask is a Flying Pizza monster.
- Phineas and Ferb: The Giant Floating Baby Head, which is more of a recurring phenomenon than a character.
- Megatron spends most of the second season of Beast Machines as an absolutely enormous airborne head-fortress.