Badmovies.org Forum

Not too long ago, Cracked.com ran an article (http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=2399) about animated movies actually meant for kids (as opposed to, for example, Japanese echhi and hentai obviously targeted at an older audience) that were--in some ways--actually rather potentially traumatizing. Some examples they gave which I've seen, and can therefore vouch for personally, are Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (in which the hero fails to stop a series of brutal murders), The Incredibles (in which the superhero kids gleefully kill off several of the supervillain's henchmen), and Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame (with its forcibly happy ending still being rather sucky for the heroic hunchback). Personally, I would have disqualified Watership Down from their lineup if I were calling the shots, as I don't think that movie was really made for children any more than The Last Unicorn was. (The latter is not as potentially traumatic as the former, but the mature themes in it would probably put most kids to sleep.) Still, the list given covers plenty of ground.

What occurs to me, though, is that this list dealt entirely with animated movies. What about the cartoons on TV? I'm not just talking about anime, which can often have some disturbing stuff in it even when it is supposedly aimed at kids (Detective Conan, a.k.a. Case Closed, for instance), but domestically produced stuff here in America and everything else we generally hold to a more kid-friendly standard. Some of the cartoons I've noticed are being shown to kids in our time (and some that were shown when I was a kid) have some rather disturbing elements, even when held to these rules. Have any of you guys ever seen stuff like this that made you wonder "Can they DO that on TV?" or "How did that ever get past the censors?"

While I've seen several examples, I'd like to kick off this open listing with one of my recent viewings, an episode of Superman TAS called "Unity" in which Supergirl and Superman take on a cult that has taken control of Smallville (including Ma and Pa Kent, of course) which centers around a huge, nightmarish extraterrestrial monster.


This monster apparently brainwashes people with its tentacles, which infect them with some kind of wormy parasite that causes them to sprout tentacles of their own out of their own mouths.


Most of this episode focuses on Supergirl, who manages to avoid being brainwashed herself, but still gets into some amazingly sticky situations, if you'll pardon the expression.


Now granted, kids not yet at the age of understanding will probably have no conscious trauma from most of the perverse erotic subtext in this imagery, but at the subconscious level, I can easily see how this stuff could give them some serious nightmares. The whole episode's like a tentacle rape hentai, even though everyone's clothes stay on and none of these stringy, squishy, off-white strands of mucous-like material ever go probing into private areas. The monstrous creature referred to as "Unity" and the alien cult leader evangelizing for it both look a lot like hentai demons in their true forms too. (Let's not even go into the implications of how, when the alien parasites were vanquished, they left their former victims lying on the floor with a puddle of off-white slime oozing out of their mouths.)

Superman TAS is, of course, made by the same people who made the Batman TAS episodes, which were usually much darker stories, being set in the noirish and vaguely dystopian Gotham as they were, whereas Superman's Metropolis is a clean, bright, and vaguely utopian futuristic-looking city. There were several Japanese animators in this group; one of them, Shin-Ichi Tsuji, directed this particular episode, and you can tell he must have been bringing a few ideas from back home with him when he did. I can only wonder, if the censors allowed this much stuff past them, what scenes (if any) they might have had pitched to them and rejected as unsuitable for the children at whom this cartoon series is directed. Oy! If I had any kids, I'd certainly think twice before showing this to them, maybe wait until they're getting into their preteens at least.

This is one cartoon episode that seriously creeps me out. Can you guys think of any others?

Some of the episodes of Rocko's Modern Life I think could be disturbing.  I mean It's a funny show, but some of the jokes kids wouldn't get.  I would also say the Animaniacs.  The sexual innuendo's in that show are wrong for kids.

The Superman and Batman animated series did have some pretty strong stuff, but the ones that stand out for me are some of the Batman Beyond episodes, especially the ones with obvious lessons. The one with athletes slapping on Venom patches to boost performance had its moments, like seeing the emaciated Bane.

The biggie for me was Disappearing Inque, that has some infatuated dork helping the villainess to escape and restore her powers in exchange for getting the same shape-shifting power (and some lovin', he hopes). She double-crosses him, of course, and he's transformed into this weirdly deformed, semi-solid, severely disabled version of himself. If I remember correctly, he ends up in the same institution while Inque disappears. Reminded me a little bit of the ending of The Fly II, except that this was some poor lovestruck schmuck who didn't deserve it. Very disturbing.

I found the original Johnny Quest very frightening when I was a kid, particularly that mummy episode. The average body count per epside is probably higher than many recent action films.

For feature-length animated traumatic childhood viewing you can't beat Takahata's 1988 kiddie komedy klassic GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES.

(http://www.danielthomas.org/Assets/film%20reviews%20pix/fireflies.jpg)
"You know... for kids!"

 Disneys Fantasia- Night on Bald Mountain sequence-

     [youtube=425,350]http://youtube.com/watch?v=SDImmkjomzQ

   They actually showed us THIS cartoon in English class when I was in the fourth grade! Not as scary as those drug scare films with the deformed LSD babies...but uh! Creepy!

                     The Tell Tale Heart....

      [youtube=425,350]http://youtube.com/watch?v=AJb150JRqpQ

I would sy that is anything but komedy klassic, but it's a good film for giving kids nightmares for years.

Some episodes of Invader Zim, particularly Dark Harvest and Bestest Friend, could traumatize children.

Dark Harvest has Zim using some kind of vacuum pump to suck out children's organs, which he stuffs into himself.  He ends up a bloated bag of organs.  Bestest Friend has Zim pulling out a kid's eyes and replacing them with implants.  The episode ends with the kid falling off a roof and exploding.

The episode Abducted has an arguably more traumatic scene.  Zim is abducted by (other) aliens who want to splice him with random objects.  During his escape, he finds a misshapen, blob-like thing -- that in all probability used to be a human, given that the aliens said they wanted to abduct lots of Earth creatures -- who has been spliced with, among other things, a squeaky moose.  It begs Zim for help, but Zim just leaves the poor thing there, and the episode ends with one of the aliens going to splice it with some junk he found on the floor.

I choose the episode of Batman: The Animated Series, where Harvey Dent first became Two-Face.  As soon as he stumbles out of his hospital room, twist his head to the right just a little towards his fiance showing the rest of his face with lightning in the background.  I know it got me a little bit.

Ever seen the suicide episode of Tom and Jerry? I need to search you tube for that, saw it once in the early 80's on WPWR Channel 60 in Chicago.

EDIT found the link :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LO84r8Qgnw

Absolutely brilliant post. +Karma for you.

Hmmm... Grave of the Fireflies I would tend to disqualify from this listing; as the Japanese know, even if some folks here in America haven't figured it out yet, not all cartoons are for kids. Besides, that's one movie the censors would never show uncut and uncensored on regular TV channels.

That bit from Disney's Fantasia, on the other hand, definitely qualifies. Note, in addition to the intense scenery with Satan arousing the damned and whipping them into an unholy frenzy, the shots of bare-breasted harpies flying right into the viewer's face. That's not the only frontal nudity in Fantasia, incidentally: in the mythological pieces they set to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, there were a number of shots of some young centaur ladies bathing topless. For all of this, the movie's rating was... a G.

You've got to hand it to Walt; he's the only guy I ever heard of who could get something like that past the censors. Satan's leering stare at the burning temptresses in that one scene would surely have called into question the socially redeeming value of the imagery there, but I guess Walt must have had such an impeccable reputation with the censors that they assumed this was all done in good taste and for a good reason. All the same, when Disney reissued Fantasia in the theaters for one of its anniversaries, I recall seeing some of the parents of small children around me taking them out during that Night On Bald Mountain sequence. It was really quite intense!

That Tell Tale Heart short's another rather unique entry, being a school film. I guess it passes muster with the teachers and principal mainly because it's classic literature, it's not really likely to be any scarier than your average R.L. Stine horror novel, and it's done more or less the way horror is supposed to be done, with the most terrible stuff being implied rather than shown outright as it would be in a slasher flick.

Schools do get some leeway in deciding what to show the kids and when to show it, and they do sometimes cross the line too: I've heard of kids in the benighted state of Massachusetts being shown out-and-out pornography in the classroom and of seventh-graders being instructed on fisting. Leaving aside such obvious abuses of authority, however, I do remember being shown some brief public service film in third grade that basically went to rather laughable lengths to inform us that boys and girls are physically different (well, duh!) and to explain what some of these differences are. Near the end, it showed us some brief footage of a naked little baby boy lying on his back, with the camera prominently focusing on his penis. This elicited more wisecracking and crude remarks than anything else from the guys around me. While I don't recall that day too well, I think the girls had all been sent to another room to see a similar film directed at them. (The significance of this arrangement escaped me at the time.)

In any case, a school will sometimes show kids stuff that isn't allowed on TV. A lot of those instructional films can be seen on www.archive.org, and some of them are even fun to show to your friends. (Your girlfriend, on the other hand, if you try screening one of these public service films for a romantic dinner-and-a-movie kind of date, will probably never quite look at you the same way again. I particularly recommend steering clear of the ones on STDs, especially if the guy playing the "herpes boy" happens to look anything like you.) Ironically, those pieces are more likely to creep out your fellow adults than to traumatize any children. ("Dude, why are you watching this stuff?")

That suicidal episode of Tom and Jerry was definitely a powerful example of pushing the envelope on a children's cartoon; it's not even very funny. Oy vey, what a bad day someone must have been having! Then he decides to go taking it out on all the poor little innocent kiddies who just wanted to see a little cartoonish cat-and-mouse mayhem. It honestly couldn't have been any more traumatic if they'd shown Mickey Mouse playing Russian Roulette.

Those Invader Zim bits do sound pretty traumatic in their own way, though I'll bet the writers found some way to pass it all off lightly with some darkly humorous gag or other. A number of the various Batman episodes, while not usually very scary, did often strike me as being awfully melancholy and tragic for kids' fare. While that first shot of Harvey Dent's new twisted face didn't "get" me quite the way it got you when I first saw it (possibly because I was a teenager by then), one scene of him that really sticks with me is at the end of the episode "Judgement Day" in which we're given a wide shot of Arkham Asylum, and hear the voice of the Judge, Two-Face's new extra personality, accusing him of various crimes and asking him how he pleads. Then, as the camera zooms down the halls and in on Two-Face, we see him in a straight jacket, his wild and forlorn eyes staring right into the camera, saying "Guilty... Guilty... Guilty!" My heart really went out to him there.

What's interesting about cartoons with body counts in them is how the deaths are arranged to suit the censors. As far as I can tell, there are basically three ways to get a character's death past them:

1. Tell, but don't show: that is, never actually portray the death at all, but have someone bring it up in conversation after the fact, as in the case of Batman learning from his computer access to the police files that a "John Doe" corpse that washed up in Gotham's harbors has been tentatively identified as Tim Drake's father "Shifty" Drake.

2. Do a comic book death: as everyone knows, when the bad guy falls into a well-nigh-bottomless pit or an airplane apparently blows up with him in it (as happened to the Joker in the Batman/Superman crossover "World's Finest"), he's probably dead. On the other hand, as everyone who reads comics tends to figure out sooner or later, such "deaths" are rarely permanent, and there can always be some sequel to the story in which we learn that the bad guy somehow managed to escape after all. Therefore, as long as there's some entirely reasonable doubt that he's dead, you can show him getting "killed" in this way.

3. Make it a once-in-the-whole-series climactic event, as in the Superman episode in which Darkseid flash-fries the heroic police chief Dan "Terrible" Turpin with his zig-zagging Omega Effect. If the kids are supposed to be traumatized, if they're supposed to feel Superman's shock and anguish right along with him and mourn the poor guy the way a whole bunch of people do at his funeral, then it's fine to kill one guy as long as it's quick and clean. You also get bonus points if the guy's death is particularly meaningful beyond the show, as in Turpin's case, where he was something of an avatar for the recently deceased Jack Kirby, the world's most famous comic book creator and a big hero to his fellow artists and writers.

There's also a kind of cheat you can employ known as metaphysical elimination; when the Sailor Moon episodes first arrived in America, heavily cut and censored, one thing the censors did apparently decide was all right was the regular deaths of the monsters at the hands of Sailor Moon and her friends. Since the monsters, invariably revealed not to be entirely human, would usually crumble into dust, melt, and/or evaporate, none of these eliminations "counted" as a death. The Batman episode "Growing Pains" played the ultimate counterpoint to this cheat, however, in having Robin's new girlfriend getting reabsorbed into her "father" Clayface. Robin identifies this as a murder, and I don't think anyone can really deny he's right.

These are all excellent examples. Anybody got any more?

That episode of the Powerpuff Girls with the devil character that has the high pitched voice was mighty creepy.

Yeah, I thought that character was pretty creepy too. The lobster claws didn't help, either.

The episode: 'Jack And The Haunted House' of Samurai Jack was pretty eerie but in all honesty it would probably just bore kids (SJ's not really a kids cartoon, methinks).

Every episode of the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy

If you have a little kid that refuses to brush his teeth, just show him/her the Ren and Stimpy episode "Ren's Toothache" and tell them that will actually happen to them in real life if they don't start brushing.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7b/Ren's_Toothache_screenshot.png/256px-Ren's_Toothache_screenshot.png)

The episode "The Giant Bacteria" from SWAT Kats is one that scared the p**s out of me when I was a kid. It's fairly tame by today's standards, but at the time, watching a guy get mutated into a foaming purple germ monster (while screaming in agony, no less) was pretty intense stuff. The fact that said monster goes on to rather obviously devour, and therefore kill, a whole cow and a trainload of innocent commuters before dying a painful death by electrocution is just icing on the cake.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v609/Kooshmeister/SWAT%20Kats/The%20Giant%20Bacteria/tgb041.jpg)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v609/Kooshmeister/SWAT%20Kats/The%20Giant%20Bacteria/tgb043.jpg)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v609/Kooshmeister/SWAT%20Kats/The%20Giant%20Bacteria/tgb082.jpg)

The fact the monsters (yeah there's more than one, since it divides into more of itself when hit hard enough) resemble the Smooze from My Little Pony: The Movie doesn't do a heck of a lot to make the entire episode any less disturbing.

STOP AIRING OUT YOUR STINKY GUMHOLES!

I'll bet the sight of that episode tainted the other series, too. "Look, Jenny, it's your favorite, My Little Pony. Hey, wait a minute! Why are you running away?"

I have to agree that disney does alot of disturbing stuff...such as the hitler episode...Der Fuehrer's Face

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZiRiIpZVF4

I couldn't find a clip, but I think the one where Porky Pig dreams he is strapped into chair (in hell I think)and is forced to eat everything.  Its an old Merrie Melodies and the Simpsons spoofed it. 

This is not for the kiddies, but Jack Mack and Rad Boy screwed up my 11 year old psyche.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMP9njfyX6U



-Ed

Yeah, there was a lot of crap on the older cartoons that I watched that, when I watch them now, I'm like, "They would never get that crap OK'd now."  *haha*  Can you imagine a Bugs Bunny / Elmer Fudd cartoon if there were no guns allowed??

One thing I did notice was an episode of Fairly Odd Parents, where Timmy's dad was totally in love with Chip Skylark.  It was pretty funny - he had this mad crush on Chip, and was talking about how beautiful he was, and everything.

I guess for kids who don't understand gay couples, it might be a little confusing.

The JOHNNY QUEST episode THE INVISIBLE MONSTER where the people would disolve that creature would CONSUME THEM, THE SEA HUANT with the creature stalaking through that cargo ship could you sleep on a ship with a monster in it?

There's another Tom and Jerry epsidoe that's disturbing.  Tom, Jerry and that little gray mouse were musketeers.  Tom is trying to stop them from getting the king's dinner   It ends with Tom getting sent to the gulitone (which you see in siloute) and Jerry and the Gray mouse just shrugging it off. 

There was an episode of Looney Tunes that didn't have any regulars.  The story was about a turtle that wanted to learn how to fly.  He gets picked on and ridiculed by his brothers but he is determined to do it.  At the end he falls off a cliff and dies.  He then flies up towards heaven, proclaiming happily, "I can fly!"  Damn, if that was intended to make me happy for the turtle when he finally achieved his goal, it failed.  Creepy/sad!

For some reason, I recently got to thinking how many classic cartoon characters have attempted suicide. I think it was because I saw something similarly inappropriate in a kids' show a short while ago. I can remember a whole lot of times when characters have been standing on bridges or ledges, often giving the "Goodbye, cruel world" line, or even putting guns to their heads.

For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_mr9zU99oU
Russian Roulette. There's something for the kiddies. And this was because they both lost an election for mayor of a small town.

How about the episode of BRAVESTAR titled THE PRICE where this boy dies after taking a drug called SPIN kind of disturbing

It's a little hard for me to judge these things, since I was exposed to adult stuff so early I'm bad at judging what is traumatizing..  But, one cartoon ep that comes to mind is the Gargoyle's episode where Elisa, the human lead, is accidentally shot by one of the other lead characters, Broadway.  Yeah, it's one of those "very special" episodes.  This time on the stupidity of playing with loaded guns.  I gave them credit for showing it appropriately, blood and all.

I also find it interesting to note, when talking about cartoon character deaths, that Gargoyles actually had quite a few of them.  Probably the most out of any child-intended recent western cartoon that I can name. 

Another creepy bit on the show that'd probably go over the heads of the kiddies is all the innuendo with the sibling villains, Jackal & Hyena.  The fact that they didn't stop with the innuendo even after the two characters became cyborgs readily capable of detaching their limbs at will just made it worse.

The mention of western cartoons got me thinking of how funny it is to see anime hastily cleaned up for North American audiences.

Star Blazers was a great one. I suppose they couldn't hide the fact that billions were killed by constant nuclear bombardment before the series even began, but the folks at Griffin-Bacal managed to sanitize most of the other violence while leaving most of it in. Amazing how you can get away with blowing away dozens of very human-looking troops as long as somebody identifies them as "robots." You can also destroy an entire enemy base, along with the continent it's sitting on, just by recycling a couple of seconds of a plane flying and dubbing in one of the actors saying "We made it out in time." And it's OK to throw a grenade down the hatch of a tank if one of the villains expressly refers to it as a remote-controlled drone. Doesn't matter if it's the only one in a battalion of identical manned tanks, or that the hero would have no way of knowing it's "unmanned." It's not violent.

It eased up a bit with the second series, probably because you can't destroy entire fleets in deep space and expect people to believe anyone got away.

Dragonball Z used to make me laugh for the same reasons. The Saiyans announced their arrival by blasting a huge urban area, which was miraculously uninhabited at the time. And nobody is killed on that show - merely sent to another dimension once they have been sufficiently beaten up. Doesn't matter if a character explodes and you see little bits of him raining down. He's in another dimension, which is clearly NOT the afterlife. And Goku did not go to Hell at one point, the demonic characters trying to torment him were clearly wearing shirts that said HFI L, for "Home for Infinite Losers."  :teddyr:

Sure is a lot more fun to watch than American shows that build in the same strategies from the beginning. GI Joe has demonstrated that you can shoot down as many planes as you want, as long as an equal number of parachutes appear. And since you can't have people shooting bullets at each other in a kids' show, the assault rifles shoot laser beams, which are apparently stored in a clip and shot down the barrel of something that looks a lot like an M-16. This was still going on years later, when Beast Wars (retitled Beasties in Canada :lookingup:) had characters firing missiles at each other because bullets were unacceptable.

Doesn't seem to matter what's actually in the cartoon, as long as you're not honest about it.

In Batman: The Animated Series, they rarely showed handguns either, and of course an handgun did play a major part in "Batman"'s origin story, yet machine guns were fine apparently.  :buggedout:

There are a few exceptions.  Batman did have realistic handguns on some occasions.  As did Gargoyles.  But the 80s-90s was a major shift in PC stuff - they didn't like it if guns even LOOKED real in toons. 

I suspect the dislike of handguns is because a lot of American homes would have handguns in them similar to the ones in the shows, and they didn't want any kids to try to play with them.  Whereas machine guns are a lot less likely to appear.

I think we all know we're unlikely to see a toy like this again.

(http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2007/06/megatron2a.jpg)

This show was totally wrong, but I loved it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2MlMyrcUjY

How about that two-parter on Reboot with the clown-themed game (complete with a freaky-ass clown)? Man, with all the scary clowns I was exposed to as a kid it's a miracle that I never developed a fear of them.

Old thread I know but since Jonny Quest mentioned, I wanted to first second The Invisible Monster (although the title critter looked like a Pac Man ghost when rendered visible) and The Sea Haunt and say the following episodes of the various shows spooked me:

Creeping Unknown - An episode from the 1980's series. The Quests investigate disappearances in the Louisiana bayou caused by a kudzu monster. It sounds silly, but the actual creature is pretty freaking creepy, emits a very unnerving "oozing" sound, and engulfs victims whole like the blob. Later we find out that they are unharmed by this, which doesn't make it any better as they're put in big tubes and mutated into more plant monsters! And the part where the plant monster's human ally removes his gloves and he has green leafy branches instead of hands was just disturbing to me as a kid.

The Mummies of Malenque - Venturing into the Real Adventures here. In South America the Quests are looking for the Malenque, a tribe of Aztec-like Native Americans who died out mysteriously. It turns out a plague killed them and some loony scientist guy is harvesting the bacteria from their mummified remains to create a biological weapon. I was too old for this to scare me, but back when I was a kid, it would've, especially when the scientist tests the disease by spraying it into the face of one of his henchmen, and the guy turns into a living mummy and shrivels up. (A similar thing happened to victims of a succubus in another episode whose title escapes me.)

Undersea Urgency - Another Real Adventures episode. While Dr. Quest is investigating the progress of an underwater research center being built an earthquake unleashes a bunch of flesh-eating, coelacanth-like sea monsters. Nothing terribly disturbing in this like plant hands or people turning into shriveled mummies, but the wanton killing of unnamed extras - and some named ones, including the guy assigned to take the kids on a tour - is pretty unnerving. The monsters themselves are also walking, breathing nightmare fuel.

More Than Zero - Leave it to Jonny Quest to take the basic concept of a haunted house and take it to the next level, and the Real Adventures did love itself some nightmare fuel. The Quests become trapped in a famous haunted mansion in Italy after some other scientists' ghost-detecting whatever technology allows an evil spirit passage into the mortal realm. The most disturbing scene is the one where the guys who invented the whatever-machine are crushed inside a room with a lowering ceiling. It happens offscreen but just the claustrophobic horror of the idea is pretty frightening. Also the physical manifestation of the ghost at the end is all sorts of icky.

Also the ultimate fate of the bad guy in Nuclear Netherworld....

WATERSHIP DOWN when these bunnies get shot or what ever their not getting up again,PINNOCIO the tranformation sceine should be used by parents into getting their kids to behave by telling them if they to that they to will turn into donkeysSNOW WHITE AND THE 7 DAWARVES the part where she flees throgh the forests and the trees and fallen logs turn into monsters and the close-up of the box where her heart is to be placed,

Those are all films, not episodes of TV shows (although Watership Down did get a TV series in 1999).

How about the final episode of G.I. JOE when COBRA COMMANDER turns into a snake while ROADBLOCK is carrying him around,Or the episode of CHALLANGE OF THE SUPERFRIENDS episode SUPERFREINDS R.I.P. where their holding BATMANS funeral,Or the episode where that old witch summons that evil entity that appeared to be satan himself