The Best Cartoon Episodes For Traumatizing Kids

[Torgo]

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.

[Kooshmeister]

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.







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.

[inframan]

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.

STOP AIRING OUT YOUR STINKY GUMHOLES!

[Inyarear]

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.

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?"

[Sister Grace]

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

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

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

[ZombieGangster]

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.

[Flu-Bird]

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?

[WingedSerpent]

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

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. 

[retrorussell]

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!

[AndyC]

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

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.

[Flu-Bird]

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

[Jim H]

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.

[AndyC]

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." 

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 ) 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.

[JaseSF]

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.