10 Best Movie Character Introductions Of All Time

Technically speaking, audiences were already acquainted with Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 when he returned to cinema in all of his deadpan glory in 1992's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but this was a new and improved version for the sequel, and his re-introduction remains one of the greatest scenes in movie history.

Arnie shows off his sculpted physique while walking into a dingy bar butt naked following his arrival from a post-apocalyptic future. A few of the biker chick patrons and female members of staff look particularly impressed while everyone else is like WTF? Things get even more random when he famously asks a cigar-chomping biker for his clothes, boots and motorcycle.

When the guy doesn't take too kindly to his request, Arnie breaks his wrist and tosses him onto a hot kitchen grille before pinning one of his mates to to the pool table with a knife and hurling another through a window. If all of this stuff wan't permanently ingrained in our collective consciousness, it would be dismissed as ridiculous.

To cap it all off, Arnie leaves the bar in style, taking not just his hapless victim's motorcycle, but a shotgun and sun shades from the guy who tries to stop him, while George Thorogood and the Destroyers' classic Bad to the Bone rings out.

This sequence sets the tone of the movie and the new and improved Arnie perfectly. The old T-800 would have killed everyone in the establishment, but the reprogrammed Terminator merely takes what he came for in businesslike fashion. Moreover, the brutality interspersed with subtle humour shows Judgement Day at its best.