Please note that this page and all Accidental Nightmarefuel pages are intended for examples that WHERE NOT meant to be scarey by the maker of the media form. If it was intended to be scary that is High Octane Nightmare FuelAnime doesn't have a complete monopoly on scary cartoons...
Western animation, even if it is for kids, can be very scary as these will prove. Disney has its own page. For some reason, it has become a popular fad in the 2000s.
Stunt Dawgs had some weird thing where the Stunt Scabs (the villains) were placed in a simulated hell or something. The whole show is a hazy, feverish memory, so it all kind of qualifies anyway.
HBO's Brain Games featured a lot of surreal animation but the truly scary part was the end with the disembodied voice saying "Brain Games is now over," with sniffling...I always changed the channel beforehand.
Galaxy Goof-Ups: a late-70s sack of Hanna-Barbera crap where Yogi, Huckleberry Hound, and some awful new characters were incompetent space cops. That was bad, but not scarring. However, almost every episode, sometimes more than once, the characters would visit a nightmarish, anti-gravity space disco. Alien panty shots, characters dancing on the ceiling, a duck dancing in a giant energy-woman's hand, shape shifting aliens whose faces changed constantly as they danced... All set to awful Hanna-Barberra children's novelty music. The worst part was that it was gorgeously animated. Granted, repeated animation sequences are always better done, but the disco was really going the extra mile to expose children to the most vivid physics-warping hedonistic space nightmare they possibly could. Good going, guys!
There was a short on the Ice Age DVD called Bunny that terrified me as a kid. I was 8 at the time and I was paranoid for weeks after watching it because she CRAWLS INTO THE STOVE.
The Mighty Heroes. Directed by Ralph Bakshi, this series had a penchant for extremely effective openings with genuinely frightening supervillains, such as the Monsterizer, who turns people into mindless monsters, or the Raven, with his plastic blaster that entombs people in a sheath of greenish plastic. Only when the over the top fireworks call for the Mighty Heroes to action starts with a brassy anthem is the tension relieved as powerful opposition to the villain reveals itself.
Also in the 1970s, there was an episode of Dynomutt Dog Wonder in which some supervillain's Weird Science ray gun made Blue Falcon — who was a human being, not a robot — melt into a blue puddle. That Dynomutt restored him a couple of scenes later did not do much to mitigate the big whopping nausea-inducing dose of Body Horror, nor did the Laugh Track.
The one where the villain used TV signals to turn humans into blimps wasn't pretty, either. Especially when, after Blue Falcon figures out what's causing it, Dynomutt decides to see what the TV news says about it...
You're forgetting one where Dynomutt and Blue Falcon make their appearance in Dexter's Laboratory where while Dynomutt was talking to Blue Falcon about how he made sure the diamond was safe, the villain they were facing, Vultor I believe, stabbed Dynomutt right through him with his claws. Believe this troper that when the scene is replayed, it can be horrifying at most, despite the robot dog's falling with Vultor's claw holding the diamond being silhouetted.
Many, many of the Harvey Studios cartoons contained prime nightmare fuel. 1 series concerned a cat who was always trying to catch and eat a community of mice, only to be foiled by a particular mouse named Herman. All well and good, cats do chase mice. But in one cartoon, the cat catches several mice, ties them to a stick, and starts roasting them alive; to make it worse, the cat and the mice were Talking Animals of the most human-like sort. This was not atypical for Harvey's output. They bypassed Cats Are Mean and went straight for Cats Are Sadistic.
Indeed, any and all Cats Are Mean cartoons or films can be fairly upsetting to cat-lovers.
Plus the horrible 'danger close' music they play when he's just implied to be lurking in the area.
What scared me the most when I say it as a kid about the Bumble Monster was that horrible roar it makes.
He becomes Nightmare Retardant once you figure out that he is implied to only be evil because of a tooth ache. Once he's defanged, he's ,"A humble BUMBLE".
Because of a toothache? they pulled out all of his teeth! And then Yukon pushes him off a cliff. Now that is nightmare fuel.
This troper's mother just said she didn't quite understand what Accidental Nightmare Fuel was—then we watched one of the obscure sequels to Rudolph. The Big Bad is a monster made of ice—specifically, a giant, fanged face with fiery green eyes and huge, jagged fangs, not unlike the Nome King from Return to Oz, rendered in eerily off-timed stop motion. Mom understands now.
Speaking of Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town. The Winter Warlock (before He Got Better). Aside from his evil face being evil, there's a moment when the Fred Astaire-narrator is first talking about "the strange hermit of the north" and you see the silhouetted Warlock...then lightning flashes and you can SEE THAT FACE FOR A SPLIT SECOND. Even as an adult, that bit is unnerving...
For those not in the know Will Vinton (and his self named animation production studios) was the creator for the legendary 1980's AD Campaign The California Raisins and many other well received short films and TV Specials in the still commonly known animation medium of Claymation. Unfortunately for many children of the "ME Generation" the man was a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant who to them was nothing more then a modern day Geppetto who created borderline demonic puppets to (eat or harvest) childs souls. While his (only mind you) feature film The Adventures of Mark Twain is seen as his "Crowning Moment of Nightmare" many other more kid friendly projects he produced also appeared to have some odd nightmare elements in them. Below is a short list. (Although if other tropers can remember more about mr. Vintons work please feel free to add)
While most of Vinton's projects involving The California Raisins were pretty much ok to family standards his main special about the raisins fictional rise to stardom however seems to take a...360° Turn to the bizarre. The supporting characters in the special appear to slowly become more and more sinister and Break The Fourth Wall eerie as their stories progress.
This mostly includes a now bitter and destitute orange that wanted to become a member of the raisins original band but wasn't allowed not because he wasn't a raisin but he was a bad singer and not a very good songwriter either. At first it paints the Orange as The Woobie then it gets...just weird. Somehow the orange gets angrier and manages to become a reality warping stalker and popping up everywhere..literally he appears in the other "interviews" with other characters (mostly in the background as he disturbingly peeks and leers through windows the characters are facing back of) he even just suddenly appears in some the shows bumps between commercials practically desperate for a second chance at fame. At times he appears like a disturbing animated Twilight Zone character that got out of control of even his own creators/animators.
In fact most of the secondary characters appear like this throughout most of the show as they appeared belligerent, angry and for some unknown reason...profusely sweating (especially the orange). This all gave the appearance that the characters were being interrogated instead of interviewed by the police who were on to them and wanted to know where the bodies of the Real Life human children they had already killed earlier in the show were buried.
Finally not just in this special but in many of Vinton's animated films there always is this Creepy Monotonesemi melodic eerie tune/note that always appears in horror films as a Quiet Before The Storm melody just before the actual BAM Moment that always somehow but for no real reason creeps up in all of his films even if there is clearly no need for that Even his Christmas special..His...Christmas Special.
Another good example would be his Dinosaurus! special which (if this troper remembers correctly) included a animated short featuring a dino duo consisting of a T-Rex and Triceratops as Siskel and Ebert Expys (whom coincidently were featured on the above mentioned Christmas special). In behind the scenes features on the short Vinton himself talks about the duo and many other of his stop motion creations (excluding the Raisins) as if they were all genuinely wonderful characters and would become memorable parts of any childs memory. However Vinton seems to forget that the "wonderful" dinos by the shorts end let their primal urges take over and in a mass of Carnivore Confusion try to at first eat each other then eat the audience.
In fact Will Vinton's work has so many of these moments they can take up their own Accidental Nightmare Fuel page.
One editor was terrified of this "Cosmic Clock" segment from 3-2-1 Contact which combined bizarre music with the disturbing sight of a constantly mutating landscape and a city that just disappears. While it's true that the sequence is chiefly concerned with showing changes in geography, our science textbooks usually avoided illustrating the impact on living things so graphically.
Especially creepy to think that shortly after they screened away from that kid, he would've become a rotting corpse....
The Groke from the Finnish-Japanese The Moomins animated series was to many children horribly, horribly traumatizing.
Another Moomins example is the lead character's transformation into a hideous ghoul by a wizard's magical hat.
This troper found the silent, menacing, barometer worshipping Hattifatteners far, far more creepy than the Groke.
In Poland little kids have been running away from the room every time Groke appeared in Moomins for the last twenty years. Currently first generations of kids traumatized by Groke (including this troper who only recently dealt with fear this monster caused in him for years) are now adults and Groke has gained Memetic Badass status, being considered as the most scary monster ever.
The Time Squad season one episode "Every Poe Has a Silver Lining." Where do I start? The fact that Poe is shown as an insanely cheerful manchild that would make Pee Wee Herman look normal (at least until the end where he goes insane and succumbs to depression after the Time Squad criticize his cake), the eerie "ice cream truck from hell" music playing when Poe decorates the burned-down forest (though there was some Nightmare Retardant when Poe gives a party hat to a moose and says, "There you go, crispy moose! It's party time!" — not enough to dilute the rest of the Accidental Nightmare Fuel, in my opinion), Larry the robot's morbid description of the cemetery, or the creepy monologue near the end as the camera pan shows that Poe's once cheerful living room is a wreck and Poe has become the disturbed, depressed man we all know from high school English lit class?
It wasn't just the Scare 'Em Straight safety films that were prime purveyors of Accidental Nightmare Fuel in schools; even the "kiddie entertainment" films were a rich source of it from time to time. This editor remembers having to watch a stop-motion adaptation of "Frau Holle", which featured an evil stepsister being sucked into a magical realm. She passes by an oven filled with animal-shaped cookies that want to be let out. The stepsister refuses to do so, and the animals then burn to death while screaming in agony.
The Walrus from an episode of Pingu. Compared to the cartoony look of the penguin hero, the Walrus looked disturbingly realistic. The white of its eyes, its deep whispery voice, and its smile only served to burn its horrible face into the mind of unsuspecting viewers. Luckily, it was all just a dream. It ends with Pingu crying in his mother's arms. Apparently, this episode has been banned in some countries, and the Walrus is sometimes even redubbed (Warning: turn down your speakers, the opening is loud).
Honestly, that's still just about the scariest thing I've ever seen. According to The Other Wiki, it isn't shown on TV anywhere except Japan anymore.
You're behind the times, according to The Other Wiki it's been banned there as well. It's been given a global ban.
I remember ht ebed from that episode, but The walrus was blocked out somehow. I re-watched it on Youtube and, oh god, the horror.
Oh gosh, the bed. The fact that it turned into some sort of lovable four-legged creature and then WAS EATEN ALIVE BY THE WALRUS doesn't help. At all.
Another episode that qualifies but is somewhat underappreciated compared to the Walrus one ("Pingu's Dream") is "Pingu Runs Away". In it, Pingu runs off into the night and imagines that he sees scary faces in the snowdrifts, and one of them moves! I was terrified of the episode and had nightmares about it as a child, and I still am/do. To this day, no other piece of film has fazed this troper even slightly; not Antichrist, not Cannibal Holocaust, not I Spit on Your Grave, not Irreversible, not Pink Flamingos, not Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, not Vase de Noces, not Urotsukidouji, not La Blue Girl, not Cool Devices, not Night Shift Nurses; but I'm still unable to watch that episode. Children's television shows can be powerful...
That episode's been banned in most places too.
Square One TV featured a creepy series of claymation segments about an army of orange "positive" warriors facing off against an army of blue "negative" warriors. First, there was the fact that each soldier was just a cone of clay with an Uncanny Valley face and a disconcerting flag jutting out of their head. Secondly, the fights consisted of the cones crashing into each other, then swirling screaming into claymation non-existence. Thirdly, and perhaps the kicker, the shorts would always pause right before the battle started, thus freezing the horrified faces of the outnumbered side, just before the destruction began... quite a macabre way of teaching -9 + 4 = -5.
Don't forget his repetition of "Mathman!" became panicked and frantic as he was chased by Mr. Glitch. And the "GAME OVER" at the end...
Sesame Street's animated shorts were occasionally very memorable. If you want to know why this troper had so many nightmares about cars when she was little, it's because you DON'T cross the street...ALOOOONE.
This troper used to be terrified of the "Baker" skits. These were the ones that opened with big brightly colored animated numbers zooming out of black backgrounds at a hundred miles an hour as grating, hyperactive pseudo-psychedelic rock played and a chorus of kids basically just screamed numbers at you. Most of the skits themselves were pretty whimsical, but the music and much of the animation was just too freaky.
And while we're talking about counting-related weirdness: how about this rubberband-faced horrorshow. The primitive computer animation/sound effects and the fact that the disembodied face's voice sounded like a stoned Rod Serling didn't help matters.
And who could forget the infamous "Yo-Yo Man"? [1]
Wanton city destruction, there's no way that preschoolers could ever find that unsettling. Admittedly sometimes scare tactics are necessary, but come on! This troper feels that this went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over the top.
The animated Fingerprint Farm segment of British children's show Playdays used to freak this troper out frequently. It was literally made with someone's fingerprints and there was the disembodied hand called Farmer Hand. The scary thing about it was not just the themesong but also the cow and owl characters. At the end of the ending song the owl would hoot "Twit too toodleloo" in a spooky ghost-like manner - but it was the cow who starred in his worst nightmares and made him afraid of cows.
The Fairly OddParents Halloween special is quite full of this stuff. Also that sadistic dentist and that equally as creepy son. And then there's the episode "Timmy's 2D House Of Terror" where Timmy wished that everything was like a horror movie so that it would scare Vicky and her family out of his house.
In the episode "Dream Goat", Timmy starts having surreal nightmares as a result of his guilt.
Also that one shot of the emaciated, skeletal-looking gerbil corpse in the episode "That's Life", accompanied by a Scare Chord. This troper refused to watch that episode when she was little. * shudder*
The Live-Action Adaptation features the Right-Hand Cat (actually a rabbit) of Hugh J. Magnate. It lures Tootie into a trap and while it is in Magnate's hands, it begins smiling evilly and then giggling. That's just wrong!
The 1960-ish Woody Woodpecker Show is presented by Walter Lantz himself who interact directly with Woody from time to time. The Nightmare Fuel comes due to the fact than Walter have a forced smile stuck in the face during all the show, even when he reprimanded Woody. The cherry in the nightmarish sunday is that at the end of the show Mr Lantz concluded by saying Bye Now WHILE POINTING TO THE DOOR like he chased off the audience. How rude of him.
This troper recalls being completely freaked out, as a child, by the classic The Electric Company skit Silent E, to the point where she would routinely scream and hide behind the couch on sight of the little git. The best she can figure now is that it had something to do with the 'silent' thing.
This troper is glad she's not alone in this. She thinks it has more to do with the fact that he turns a man into a mane and a cub into a cube. Think about it...
Almost every single one of the Purple and Brown shorts on Nickelodeon including the Halloween special where the 2 of them become zombified. And the christmas special where they get sucked into a christmas present box at the end.
Brett's transformations into a car in Turbo Teen were somewhat creepy and painful. The guy's hands and feet turning into wheels and his face stretching and becoming the gril of the car.
New Zealand tv channel Maori TV has a cartoon titled The Monkey King which features almost quite a lot of this stuff- there's a part before the end credit which is sort of a music video-like song sequence done in maori language and features such scenes as a cute little puppy turning into a monster dog and a spooky "dragon spirit" floating around.
The kid's series Rolie Polie Olie. Seems like a cute, innocuous series about a world of robots with a 50's sitcom flair...until you realise that every object in their house - including the headboards of their beds - has a life of its own, and has eerily silent, watchful eyes.
The I Am Weasel episode "Who Rubbed Out Cow and Chicken," which featured the teacher after having the left half of her body erased from existence.
In another, a time travelling Weasel and Baboon accidentally alter the history of Onion Rings so that the preferred cooking method is now to cover one's face with onions and dip your head in boiling oil. The rings are then peeled off the scalded face with a "schriiiip" sound effect.
Cow and Chicken featured an episode where Chicken caught cooties by kissing a girl. The symptoms of cooties were described to him in bone-chilling detail, to his obvious distress, and he was eventually thrown into the "cooties room", a blackened pit containing cootie victims exhibiting the disease in varying stages. Most were severely atrophied, several had lost their eyes, all were groaning in agony. As a sensitive child, this troper was horrified.
Then there's the episode where Cow gets a dream catcher in which we later see a ghostly milkman milking Chicken, Flem and Earl.
When they showed that Cow and Chicken's parents were just lower bodies.
The laughing puddle episode.
There's the episode where the titular characters go to a video game arcade, where Cow only plays the game Squirt the Daisies while antagonist the Red Guy invites Chicken to play some virtual reality games. The games prove to affect Chicken in the real world if he does them wrong, but that's not the worst part. No, the worst part is where Chicken finds himself in Squirt the Daisies, and said daisies turn into monsters and start attacking him, complete with a demented version of the normal, cheerful game music. Though Chicken gains a means to fight them and Cow helps, they are soon overpowered and cornered, only saved by the fact The Red Guy has run out of quarters to keep the game going. Having watched it and been horrified as a child, this troper saw the ep again in a recent April Fools Day marathon only to find it still makes her reach for a night light.
The Camp Lazlo Halloween episode "Meatman." This has this Let's Meet the Meat trope personified literally in the form of Meatman (originally a clump of meat that Lazlo, Clam and Raj made into the shape of a person) but becomes very monstrous half way through the middle. It also didn't help that Meatman could transform himself into anything, including both Lazlo and Raj at one point; also making him the embodiment of Paranoia Fuel.
To begin with he was just a lump of mystery meat giving to Lazlo and Co by Chef McMuesli as revenge for the time they unleashed locusts into his garden. Meatman started out with a happy face but then got slightlier stinkier and had a slightly sad expression on his face, he's at his worst when he's really really stinky and when he has that creepy almost Jack Nicholson-like smile on his face.
Don't forget the ending. Shudder
Oh, you mean the ending where the whole thing is just a story, one of the fellow campers points out there's something wrong with Lazlo's nose. So Lazlo attempts to pick it off....and his Entire nose comes off in a large chunk of raw meat. The other campers start to laugh uncomfortably....but Raj, Clam and Lazlo...just laugh...'Maniacally....'
This troper can remember a stop-motion cartoon she saw years ago. It was set in a somewhat Holland-like landscape (it was flat and had a windmill, anyway) inhabited by people who looked kind of like the puppets from Camberwick Green, and started off creepy enough simply by being stop-motion. What pushed it into Nightmare Fuel territory was these sort of... robotic creatures with nuts-and-bolts for heads, that marched around very jerkily destroying everything (including the windmill). They were defeated when it rained, causing them to rust. It was a very, very long time ago, so she apologises for her vaguely remembered description, but it gave her nightmares for years. The fact that the cartoon of Animal Farm came on afterwards probably didn't help.
You're thinking of George Pal's "Tulips Shall Grow".
George Pal's Puppetoons were pure, undiluted terror. For over ten years this troper thought the aforementioned short was an awful nightmare, along with what she could remember from John Henry and the Inky-Poo: the machine slowly pounding down the tracks, firmly but inexplicably associated with death in her mind, and the graveyard scene. It was finding that these nightmares were real that got her into the Nightmare Fuel business to begin with. Just as bad, but (thankfully?) banned are the Jasper shorts.
One episode of ReBoot when an unstoppable virus that turned everything to stone swept over the show's setting had this troper paranoid for weeks, to the extent that he actually started planning what to do if it happened, and worried it was occurring if the radio so much as went staticky. Admittedly, he was about ten at the time.
In another one Enzo got rebooted as a zombie that had an eyeball hanging out of the socket.
Hexadecimal in general was pretty creepy, what with the instant switches to masks which don't move when she speaks.
How about the bit in the episode "Painted Windows", where Bob wound up pulling off Hexadecimal's mask? Hex wound up clutching whatever was behind it, screaming in horror as she tried to contain whatever energies were trying to escape. Then the mask starts talking to Bob, taunting him for removing Hexadecimal's Power Limiter and dooming Mainframe to be caught in a massive explosion.
From the same episode, the nulls with Bob's face crudely copied and pasted on; there's just something about thier movements that's unnerving.
"Game Over". Two words that changed the show forever: USER WINS.
Jesus H. Christ on a bike, how could you people forget the effing WEB CREATURE?!?! That thing is the reason that This now much older Troperstill has problems with dark places and things hanging from the ceiling. If you'll excuse me, I'll be hugging my pillow...
No mention of Megabyte? Kinda comes with being the main Big Bad, but the guy has some pretty creepy moments, including:
Back in The Nineties on Cartoon Network, there was a segment in the commercial break called "Cartoons That Never Made It", which were fictional examples of, well, Exactly What It Says on the Tin. One of these was Frothy Dawg, a cartoon about a cute little rabid dog and his cute little rabid friends. Sounds funny, huh? Well, this troper was enough of a geek to have actually read science textbooks, and she knew how horrible rabies really is. She found this segment disturbing, and frankly Dude, Not Funny!.
And this goes for any cartoon that has used a rabid dog (or a fake one) for humor, really.
This troper has always been quite disturbed at the thing where the heart pumps out of a character's body to describe when a character has been smitten or something. Y'know, that whole thing from Tex Avery to the Jim Carrey version of The Mask.
This troper used to be scared of the company endings (showing who made the show) for Muppet Babies. It was for Marvel Productions where a different colored Spider-Man would come on screen. I used to always hide when it was just about to come on, since I used to think that Spider-Man would come out of the screen and try to kill me. I was just a kid when I used to watch it, so I was pretty scared of it for a while.
Well, I've never heard of that particular Vanity Plate, but I always used to be scared of Spider-Man and Batman too. Mostly because I was absolutely terrified of spiders as a young child and nobody ever bothered to explain to me that Spidey and Bats were the good guys...
Now that you mention it, there's a Turkish movie where Captain America and Santo have to fight a homicidal Spider-Man and his gang of bikers. Really.
In the 1970s, there was a children's program on U.S. public television called Zoom. It was mostly inoffensive, but one episode featured some amateur animated films by child filmmakers. The one that still sticks in this Troper's head 30 years later was something to do with nutrition; it featured jittery, terrified talking paper collage vegetables in a garbage disposal, complaining bitterly that a child's refusal to eat them had brought them to this ghastly fate through no fault of their own, waiting and waiting for the horrific moment when the memorably nasty-looking blades would start spinning and puree them all.
The Flumps terrified this troper as a child. There was that creepy tuba music, and then they'd just appear over the top of that wall... I can't remember anything that actually happened in the show, because the title sequence freaked me out so much that I had to leave the room.
My 3-year-old son is terrified of Numberjacks in which computer animated numerals are problem solving superheroes.
The Puzzler, one of the villains from the above show, is pretty terrifying from sheer wrongness. His glasses blink instead of his eyes, just for starters. Worse, his face comes apart occasionally, revealing that each of his eyeballs has two pupils and irises, one at the front and one at the back.
Some episode of the Alf cartoon feature some sort of Wicker Man-esque agriculturally driven human (well, in this case, alien) sacrifice involving people being pounded into the ground with giant flails while farmers chanted "Touch bottom soil!" at the top of their lungs.
For some reason or another, one plot in Stunt Dawgs required convincing someone else that were witnessing a vision of Hell. It was a long time ago, but I vaguely remember this plan may have actually been executed by the good guys.
Some of Terry Gilliam's cartoons for Monty Python's Flying Circus can be quite jarring with their grotesquely doughy people and almost marionette-like animation. Conrad Poohs (and his Dancing Teeth) is definitely an example of Nightmare Fuel.
This troper thought it was funny, but it scared her Norwegian Elkhound (the Tsundere one) because it probably looked like biting, bared teeth to the dog.
The otherwise cheesy and non-threatening animated series Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi featured short live action skits at the beginning. During one such episode, Ami and Yumi are in a sushi bar, ordering something, until all of the sudden a fat man jumps out, rips off his clothes and starts dancing around in a red loincloth. It's brief but disturbing none the less. Since these segments are shot in Japan, I'm guessing that such my considered "amusing" over there. I also suspect that the US Producers may not have had input on these skits, simply editing preexisting footage of the duo. Not to mention that by this point, near the end of season 2, ratings were record low. The scene may not have been censored as they thought very few people would actually see it.
This troper has always been somewhat disturbed by the cavalier treatment of cybernetic implants in Western animated series, especially Merchandise Driven ones. While a shinymechanical arm screams "buy me" to an impressionable 7-year-old, the rather squicky subtext that is inevitably glossed over is either that the character suffered a horrendous injury that resulted in an amputation - or simply had their limb torn off - or the character willingly had their own flesh mutilated to install all those sparkly (and painful, as Ed Elric can attest) upgrades. Ewww. Bonus squick points if the part in question happens to be an eye.
This is actually addressed in the Star Wars prequels, where the trauma of having his limbs replaced with cybernetic implants (combined with his already existing Padme-related trauma) is enough to turn the wisecracking teen Anakin Skywalker into the sinister Darth Vader.
Not too sure about that... by that point he was already pretty dark and evil. He was Darth Vader before the transplants, and before Padme died. He was Darth Vader while he was slicing up all the Ex-Seperatists who had surrendered.
Also, this point is what causes mild-mannered John Corben to become the evil villain Metallo in Superman: The Animated Series.
In the two parted special episode of CatDog where they go on a quest to find their missing parents, there's this one part where they come across a desert with a bunch of people gathered there. The reason? To reclaim their abducted family members from aliens ! And the way it was done was downright disturbing even for a cartoon where the protagonists are a two headed animal of completely opposed species. The probed and mutilated corpses of the unfortunate victims are loaded onto a conveyer belt and are reclaimed like baggage in an airport. One scene shows a little kid claiming his grandma's lifeless body like nothing was wrong!
This troper was more disturbed by the halloween special where Dog is turned into a vampire.
And what about the episode in which Cat crawls down into himself via Dog's open mouth looking for something? If not Nightmare Fuel, that was definitely a Mindfuck (made no less so by the bit where Cat inexplicably comes out of his own mouth).
No one's mentioned "The End" yet? The whole episode was mildly creepy, but it was the very end of the episode that scarred me. First, let's go over the backstory of the episode. Cat and Dog are convinced that the end of the world is coming after reading a certain book that tells them of an omen: a skull-and-crossbones-shaped cloud. It also offers advice: They must warn everyone. At the end of the episode They find that the end isn't really coming; That book they read was just a bunch of bull. They think that everything's fine...And all the sudden, the camera looks up into the sky. That's when the skull shaped cloud morphs into a twisted, evil, version of the book's author!
Whether you know it from Shadow Raiders or War Planets, the Beast Planet's mere concept is terrifying- an Implacable ManPlanet Eater. It cannot be stopped, destroyed or turned aside. You can only delay the inevitable by running. Even at the end of the series: Planet Reptizar. Doomsday.
"Lao-Tzu said, you must find the way... I found it. I can help you find it, too... All I have to do is to... cut off your head. Don't be afraid... It's a very sharp blade."
The creepy, logic defying, eerie sounding ex-host of Nick Jr known as Face.
This troper absolutely loved Face when she was younger, but just remembered him again... Oh God WHYYYYY would you put something like that on after EVERY little kids' show?!?!
This troper sometimes thinks of him at night, and quickly has to find something else to think about. It's an effect that has only been matched by one character- Gel-arshie.
This troper recently discovered Super Jail!, a little piece of [adult swim]. It's gorgeously animated, it's pretty funny, and the main character, the Warden, is the most adorable megalomaniac sadistic bastard ever. Only one teeny tiny little problem. Adding to the show's bizarre humor, it has a 30-60 second long fight scene near the end of every episode. Now, this troper appreciates a good fight scene, but dangit man, with all the organs, eyeballs, and other gore spilling everywhere combined with the bizarre circumstances of the fight make it a nightmare fuel party on drugs.
And then the creators truly outdid themselves with the acid trip fight scenes in the Season 1 finale. Words cannot describe the sheer amount of chaos and "WTF-ness" that happens in just a few short minutes.
This troper is a HUGE fan of The Warden, but she has to admit that the scene in the pilot episode where The Warden's petting a dead corpse of a fluffy, pink bunny (singing to it and "comforting" it no less) then starts having a psychotic breakdown (his voice becoming more insane and the petting more like mauling), finally ripping the skin clean off the dead bunny which he then proceeds to wear as a hat for the rest of the episode and goes back to his cheery naturea little TOO much. Oh, and David Wain (the voice of The Warden) happens to be a comedian.
When Jared starts taking D.L. Diamond's hallucinogenic drugs and the cheerful acid trip landscape turns into a series of horrors, such as a man whose long hair turn into snakes that eat his face. Also, in another episode, one of the Doctor's creations, some kind of giant scorpion/human/whatever hybrid that kills itself with its stinger, used to tear its own skeleton out of its skin!!!
Don't forget in "Superbar", where we first meet The Doctor. In an very short, completely terrifying sequence that has absolutely no relevance to the rest of the episode, we see Jailbot chasing a bug, trying to squish it, causing chaos along the way. Eventually he goes through a door and flies straight through the doctor's horrible, furnace-like laboratory. There, the sadistic doctor (FIRST APPEARANCE) tortures a random prisoner while cackling madly. Then, this being Super Jail, they cut away to follow The Warden and his antics. The animation is what does it. It just looks.. unsettling. And this sequence is probably all of ten seconds long!
The episode "Chocolate Chips" of Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers has a lengthy sequence of a panicked Dale being chased by a swarm of giant mosquitoes whose sting will turn him into a mindless zombie. And there's no aid coming from his friends—because the mosquitoes already got them all.
This troper remembers a short-lived Disney animated series called Nightmare Ned, in which the majority of the episode was the nightmare that the titular character was having this week. HOW did this make it on a kids' channel?!
I remember that too! Except I just saw commercials for the video game, and it still freaked the heck out of me.
That cartoon holds the position of being one of the few (and possibly first) things that actually did give this troper nightmares.
This troper's best friend often liked to play the video game version. The one level he seemed to have trouble on was the operating room level where the beaver-like mutants take out Ned's internal organs.
This episode of Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog. For the faint of heart, it involves a Batman Gambit placed by Dr. Robotnik's Mad Scientist cousin Warpnik in an effort to free him from the Warp of Confusion, a surreal world full of fish that fly around without water, a robotic jaw as the entrance, and other horrors. The madness begins at 1:20 in.
The fact that Warpnik looks like a Dr. Seuss character on even more acid also adds to the creepiness.
What disturbed this troper about the Super Mario World cartoon: an episode where Koopa uses "chickadactyl" eggs in a fast food restaurant, and everyone who eats them begins to transform into a chicken - one part at a time, gradually losing sentience. Bad enough on its own, but his ultimate plan is to eat them after they've transformed. This is the sort of thing one might expect from a horror movie, not a dumb cartoon based on Mario.
My Gym Partner's a Monkey has this in a few episodes. One episode is the one where Adam gets his "special protected title" removed and we get to see what the animals in the school look like when this happens.
The incredibly disturbing Canadian short "To Be" from the cartoon network show "O Canada" about a scientist who invents a teleporter that worked by creating a new copy of someone then destroying the original. A girl in the audience begins to question the scientist on how it works, first getting him to show the destruction of the person who is teleporting, the scientist himself. Eventually she gets him to delay the destruction of the original by 5 minutes, effectively cloning the scientist, needless to say when the five minutes were up, neither one claimed to be the original. So, instead of living and let living, they decide their fate by game of chess. This troper can barely watch it today, which is truly mind boggling when you consider that "O Canada" was a kids cartoon.
The Mighty B!. The titular character is trying to avoid a shot at the doc's office. The doc and nurse believe she might be hiding in the waiting room. So they flip up a trapdoor to show ten or so wailing, frightening children. No WONDER she doesn't want a shot.
Speaking of ATHF... the end of "Fry Legs". That is all.
The evil TV in "The Cloning" always freaked me out. Imagine if you were in Shake's position: You're watching TV, when the screen suddenly shows a weird, static-y video of you. Walking around aimlessly, with a distant, distorted laugh track playing in the background. Then your counterpart turns, makes eye contact with you and in a creepy, eager voice says "I'M IN YOUR HOUSE!"
Was anyone else disturbed by Eels bursting out of Master Shake's back in the Christmas Episode? Or how he just kinda...deflated afterwards? Anyone? ...Anyone?
I remember being deathly afraid of the Universal Remonster episode, mainly the strange puppet horror movie it kept cutting to.
The ending of "The Shaving" had me screaming for Master Shake to LOCK THE DOOR AND BURN THE HOUSE DOWN. The worst part is that the characters have the exact same reaction.
The Ed, Edd n' Eddy episode "Rock A Bye Ed" had this as its central theme. To start off there's Ed's nightmare about Johnny. Ed is in his happy place, which unfortunately does not share the same grid co-ordinates or plot location as his sister's. Sarah just wants to quietly watch TV while Ed wants to play. Something has to give, and soon does for unable to stand the noise of her brother's persistent bat and ball any longer Sarah uses her ultimate weapon - she tells mom. Now telling Mom would be bad enough but can you imagine Ed's shock when she turns around from her dishes to punish him and he's confronted not with her familiar face but that of little Jonny 2X4 perched on top of her body! Surely it's the last word in freakiness! However even that's not enough as Ed finds himself quickly made victim of a Kangaroo Court where the jury consists entirely of his heavily biased little sister, his uncaring Jonny-faced mom is the judge and his punishment is to be thrown into the horror that is the Kanker Pit. Its definitely looking bad for Ed. All this is enough to make anyone scream which is just what Ed's doing as he wakes up in bed seconds later to realise it was all a horrible dream.
You forgot to mention that Ed's mouth is removed, and later, when faced with the "Kanker Pit" he RIPS HIS FACE OPEN to scream like on {The Matrix}!
There's also the episode where Ed dons a monster suit and believes that he IS a monster and starts acting out a scene from a horror/sci fi film he's seen.
"Evil Tim has beckoned you all!"
Ed may be lovable but he ain't so lovable when he's in a bad mood as demonstrated in the episode Little Ed Blue.
One particularly charming example from Rolf:
Rolf (after singing particularly happy lyrics to a song from his country): But if your chores be never done, your feeble arms too weak to toil. Yeshmiyek will surely come and throw you in her pot to boil. (he then continues the cheerful singing as if he didn't even say the above)
In one episode of Henry's Amazing Animals, The titular Henry (a gecko) looks at a mirror and walks past it, but the reflection stays there, and then gains purple/red coloring and says "CREATURES OF THE NIGHT!" in a deep, almost satanic sounding voice. This Troper hated passing mirrors after seeing this.
Glad I'm not the only one who was disturbed by that.
Ditto for this troper, who really enjoyed that show when she was younger (And would still like to see it again).
The above video is ten times more terrifying with the manic laughter of the uploader, and that gets doubled when you learn, SHE IS A SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER!
Something tells me that this 'teacher' shouldn't be anywhere near children if she laughs at bloody deaths.
Jay Jay The Jet Plane would be just another Tastes Like Diabetes preschooler show of dubious intelligence if not for the Uncanny Valley faces on all the animated members of the cast. The eyes, the soulless eyes... excuse me, I'm going to curl up in a corner and cry now.
No kidding. While this troper was an adult by the time Jay Jay premiered, and as such wasn't scared, if I were a kid and saw that...Goddamn. You look at faces that seem human, except they're devoid of expression, and see they're on the heads of planes, and you can almost imagine that some demented evil genius/Sid Phillips transplanted them violently.
This troper wonders why is it that those creators are shoehorning faces onto trains, planes, etc. It falls into Uncanny Valley and scares the s** t out of people. Jay Jay, Thomas, Chuggington, that Budgie the Little Helicopter coin-operated ride... This has got to stop!
This may be Squick (and feel free to correct me if it is), but the episode of American Dad! where they repeatedly administer various chemicals to Steve by violently jamming a needle into the side of his head. The last one actually gets stuck in there and they have to wiggle it around to get it out. Not fun for people who don't like needles.
Seriously Stan and Francine, rational people stick needle gently in people's arm.
Francine gets acid poured on her face and take my word for it I also throw up. Seriously how does Seth MacFarlane and his people keep getting with putting this kind of stuff on TV? It should be at least rated MA!
The Animals of Farthing Wood, on several occasions. Most notably for This Troper was the shooting of Mrs Pheasant (including a glimpse of her dead body being held by the farmer). In the next episode, Mr Pheasant sees his dead wife plucked, cooked and plated, cooling on a windowsill. Shocked by this sight, he does not see the farmer return to shoot him as well. Adder bitchily reports to Tawny Owl that Mr Pheasant has also been cooked for the farmer's dinner. Gah!
Don't forget the butcherbird's larder. * shudders* It's pretty damn gruesome for a U-rated cartoon, what with all the blood dripping down the thorns, and the total aversion of Infant Immortality...
There's an episode of Back at the Barnyard where Otis upsets the grave of a bunny to set up a funhouse. The bunny's ghost is understandably pissed and proceeds to make the barnyard animals' lives hell, including possessing Pig and making him attack the other animals.
This troper saw this at age 15, and it's still pretty damn creepy. Those shrieking trains shall haunt my dreams for eternity.
The "Messages From Outer Space" segment of Cartoon Planet freaked this troper out as a kid.
Not to mention this opening, which always scared this troper as a kid.
The opening credits of Thundarr the Barbarian had the moon getting ripped in half and an entire city being wiped out by a giant tsunami.
The Arthur imagination/dream sequences (you know what I'm talking about), while probably innocuous enough, both scare and scar me to this day. They were probably designed to demonstrate the horrible and overactive imaginations of young children. And they worked. Really, really well.
The episode where Arthur and Francine get stuck in the library never fails to give me nightmares, even to this day.
The loads of Furry Confusion can also be scary if you look at it.
The episode where D.W.'s parakeet dies. The dead bird just looks so... DISGUSTING. I shudder to think of it even to this day.
The one where DW insults Arthur and he melts (in a dream) scared my brother so bad he couldn't watch that episode for years.
Jekyll Jekyll Hyde used to scare the HELL out of me. Specifically, their portrail of Hyde.
The episode dealing with D.W.'s fear of octopi. Most cephalopods in cartoons are abstracted/cute enough that even people who find real ones scary/icky are okay with watching. The ones in that episode were not.
This Troper has very vague, yet haunting recollections of a Russian (Soviet?) children's cartoon wherein the bad guy's arms and legs were chopped off at the climax of a chase scene (?). He survived, but was then wrapped up in a sheet of some sorts, fell into a nest and was "adopted" by a large bird as a "baby".
That sounds like Radiohead's music video for Paranoid Android, five minutes of some of the worst Accidental Nightmare Fuel I have ever seen in my life. shudder
An episode of some claymation show featured a variation of "The Frog Prince". The princess kissed the frog and he turned into a prince. She kissed him again and he fell apart into chunks of clay. She pieces him back together very badly as in piles the chunks together and kisses him...it again and it turns into something else. Of course, given that this troper lives in an Asian country that plays Japanese shows more than half the time on the television, this could be in the wrong section.
The new Green Lantern: First Flight film features a surprising amount of nightmare fuel for an hour-long movie. Spoiler tagged since it just got out. First there's Sinestrotorturing an alien woman by repeatedly forcing her to use some sort of drug orb. Then there's the chase through hyperspace where several Green Lanterns are vaporized when they hit the edges of the tunnel. Next an alien gets sucked into space through a hole in his ship the size of a basketball (they show it, too, and it isn't pretty). Then Kanjar Ro has his midsection blown out by Sinestro, and if that weren't bad enough they make a point of showing the hole in more detail later. After Sinestro predictably turns evil, he vaporizes a ton of Green Lanterns. They almost avert the nightmare fuel when the Guardians save the airborne and suddenly powerless Lanterns from a sudden meeting with the ground, only to blindside you when it starts raining rings from all the Green Lanterns caught in space without life support (Sinestro makes this perfectly clear). For a superhero movie, they managed to stuff a lot of disturbing stuff in.
For some reason he could never understand, this troper was terrified of the coin-operated robot in the Wallace & Gromit short "A Grand Day Out". By the end, when the robot is pounding on the duo's spaceship, trying to get in, he screamed and ran from the room. Nowadays, he finds the robot (and its wish to go skiing) hilarious, but still...
Was no one else seriously creeped out by Feathers McGraw? The music and atmosphere throughout "The Wrong Trousers" made for some very chilling scenes with him.
Also the climax of "A Close Shave". Specifically, Preston getting the titular treatment from Wallace's machine, only for huge dents to appear from the inside, the shears to all come out wrecked, and his bare cyberdog arm bursting through the metal door. Wendolene's dialog doesn't help.
The episode of The Magic School Bus where the kids think Ms. Frizzle is a vampire and she wants to eat/convert their parents, particularly the ending segment when a creepy shadow that turns out to be Liz is stalking the Producer through the castle. Also, the sound episode, because the "music" itself is rather scary-sounding and the kids are getting separated from each other inside of a very strange house.
Also on The Magic School Bus, Arnold takes off his space helmet on Pluto and his head freezes solid. Although he escapes the very bad scenario with a cold, I knew what would really happen...
Another episode that frightened this troper is the one about the immune system, particularly when the Bus is attacked by antibodies. Also the microorganisms themselves are a little creepy-looking...
At the end of the haunted house episode, when the Producer is doing his usual "What you saw in this episode vs reality" bit, the last complaint the caller has is "There's no such thing as a ghost.", to which the Producer responds "I wouldn't be so sure about that..." and then his swivel chair spins around to reveal that THERE IS NOBODY THERE. This troper couldn't stand to watch that episode at night.
And don't forget the episode where everyone is at Wanda's house, and they got shrunk and have to escape only to find that Wanda's mother put an alligator in the bathtub! When Wanda almost falls into the tub... * Shudders*
The "The Dawn Is Your Enemy" card at the end of [adult swim]. The creepy music makes it even worse.
This troper remembers one complaining how "it's so hot we want to kill ourselves" or something like that... followed by a gunshot and silence. Jesus Christ...
As a series with a base in monster-fuelled horror, Mighty Max had lots of nightmare fuel to go around. Many of the episodes opened with some poor person dying at the hands (or whatever) of the episode's monster- for example, the very third episode, the first to use this, opens with some nameless, terrified kid, struggling against his bonds on a sacrificial altar as Faceless Mooks, revealed later to be giant snakes in cloaks, bow and dance all around him, before a Gory Discretion Shot pulls to an opening in the roof through which the moonlight is shining as the kid gives an agonized scream, accompanied by a horrific sizzling sound. The monsters themselves could be rather frightening, such as a Hive Mind of grotesque parasites that took over human bodies and multiplied faster the more victims were around, or the undead eyeball of the Cyclops.
One of the most memorable was "Spike", an evil, hulking, Implacable Man of a Blood Knight with Super Strength who scared Norman (a goodBlood Knight who was himself Made of Iron and possessed of Super Strength) spitless. We were shown that this was because Spike attacked Norman's village when Norman was a kid, murdered his father, and would have killed Norman himself if he hadn't tripped and fallen off the cliff. He survived ten thousand years frozen in ice, then broke free and came after Norman again. Oh, and his face was stuck full of branches from when he was knocked off his feet and fell face-first onto a tangle of upraised branches- not only did this not slow him down, he snapped one branch in half and drove the loosened half up his nose until it was wedged there to prove his point that it didn't hurt. Watch his episode here.
Let's not forget the Body Horror Corpus (which, literally, means "Body"), a giant chemical blob that assimilated human beings. While the episode thankfully showed it from afar most of the time, whenever the camera went in close, you could see it was actually comprised of dozens of human beings melting into one grotesque whole.
For those with coulrophobia, "Clown Without Pity" must have been the scariest episode of all. Not only is Freako the Clown a bornMonster Clown, his Circus of Fear is staffed with hideous mutants and freaks... all of which were children changed into their grotesque new forms by his magic.
This troper is arachnophobic, so you can imagine her joy when the Series Finale implied Norman, of all people, was horribly killed by a Giant Spider. If even he couldn't deal with such a monster, how would a little girl be able to hold up...?
Don't forget about the episode with the vampire/fly lady who shot acid out of her tongue and her basement was filled with bloodsucking maggots.
British puppet show The Magic House was another strange mixture of this trope and Tastes Like Diabetes sweetness. While the show was generally tooth-rottingly saccharine, the characters, living household objects like a teapot and a kettle, looked quite unnerving, with their rubbery faces, large unblinking eyes and permanent smiles.
'Don't Let The Bed Bugs Bite' had a Nightmare Sequence, where protagonist Berk had to go down the titular trap door to rescue his friend Boni. Berk ends up surrounded by an array of monsters, while Boni moans helplessly for his friend in the distance.
In 'Nasty Stuff', Berk created a potion that kept turning him and his friends into frightening beasts. Boni's form at the end is especially creepy.
In 'Boo!', Berk ended up being haunted by several multicolour ghouls who rose from the walls and screamed at Berk, all to stop him dumping rubbish down the trap door.
What list of Trap Door Accidental Nightmare Fuel would be complete without mentioning the Splund from the episode of the same name? This creature is what this trope is made of, with a voice that sounds like that of Satan himself, his habit of licking the air like a lizard, and one of the most fucked up laughs ever. Fortuneately, the way he was defeated was a Crowning Moment of Funny.
'The Big Red Thing' ends with the titular monster about to attack Berk and friends, with its roar echoing over the end titles. The fact this was the last episode almost made you worry about the poor blue blob.
Oh yeah, he's really scary. Just don't say his name, you know what happens if you do.
The first episode this troper saw with that character was the one where it had subtitles telling the audience when to scream. Funny joke, except the first time he showed up on screen this Troper screamed without being prompted.
''The Killing Of An Egg'', an animated short that was occasionally aired between shows on Nickelodeon. A fat bald man sits down to eat an egg, and as he taps on it with a spoon, a tiny voice keeps shouting "hey-a who is it?". Then he eventually crushes the top of the egg, as the little voice screams. However the man himself starts hearing knocking sounds outside, as someone is destroying his house from the outside in presumably the same manner. It's really the animation style that edges it from "darkly comic" to nightmare fuel.
The episode of Captain N The Game Master that took place in Kevin's body. My god, that was nasty. First off, Kevin is dying of some disease that exists only in Videoland, not the real world, so his body can't fight it. That's pretty disturbing in itself to someone who doesn't like Medical Horror, not to mention the fact that Kevin could easily die from a simple everyday (to Videoland citizens) virus, but now his friends have to shrink down and enter his body. Not surprisingly, his organs are portrayed as grotesquely as possible. Inside Kevin's stomach, his stomach acid proves to be a threat to everyone, and they have to escape. Oh yeah, and did I mention the villain, who is inside his body intentionally causing him to slowly die, who rides around in a vehicle that itself resembles organs? Or the "spirit" of Kevin, strapped to a table inside his heart, slowly dying? Seriously, this is some messed-up stuff to show a little kid! My 9 year old self wants revenge on whoever wrote this episode.
Here you go, watch this and experience the terror for yourself.
What about that green CG... thing that appeared in the opening of every episode? Something about that thing was just unnerving.
Sid The Science Kid definitely belongs here. Why? Well, even with all his technicolor goodness, Sid's mouth just seems...inhuman. It flops open and shut a la Muppets, which I suppose is fitting considering it's the Henson company that made it, but his mouth's range of expression is expanded drastically thanks to CGI while still maintaining that simple open-and-shut flap. The combination is unsettling, especially in close-up
Not to mention that Sid, as well as the other characters, are given retractable teeth later on in the episodes.
Sally Cruikshank's cartoons often qualify for this trope, together with Mind Screw. "Don't Go In the Basement" isn't quite as bad as it sounds, but "Quasi at the Quackadero" is deeply unsettling, especially when a cow, pig and chicken look into a mirror that shows the future and shows them as hamburgers and hot dogs. Not to mention the title character's And I Must Scream fate.
The Garfield episode where he goes on an eating binge and gets so big he crashes through the roof of the house. Also that episode where Garfield and John swap bodies.
The Perils of Penelope Pitstop has plenty of dangerous situations, as the title suggests (specifically, Death Trap after Death Trap). It's always Played for Laughs, which sufficiently defuses things most of the time. But in the show's animation style, the titular character's eyes are illustrated as smallish black ovals with huge whites, making her seem not quite like a living human. Eep.
The episode "DW's Name Game" from Arthur features a scene where the title character MELTS after hearing the ultimate insult. Never mind the fact that it was All Just a Dream, this troper's then-4-year-old brother was so frightened that he refused to watch any episode of Arthur for months.
The King of the Hill episode The Man Who Shot Cane Skretteberg has Hank experience a very disturbing Nightmare Sequence where he, Dale, Bill and Boomhauer are, one by one, getting hunted down by giant versions of the antagonists for the episode. Nighmare fuel by it's self, but it gets worse when we see a giant crowd of people, including Bobby, with their faces getting all freaky like.
Avenger Penguins featured an in-universe example of Nightmare Fuel when the villain Caractacus P Doom created a machine that turned the penguins' dreams into nightmares. Some of these nightmares were quite unnerving too, like when Bluey's innocent Star Trek inspired dream gets invaded by 'Bad Shapes', warped aliens that make people look as deranged as they are.
Then there's 'Surprise Fate', where Doom springs an insane woman called 'Annabel the Animal', who eats anything black and white. He not only wanted her to eat the titular penguins, but to videotape it so he can watch the penguins get devoured over and over again. The fact that the latter part of the episode spoofs Psycho doesn't help matters either.
Gumby is the nightmare fuel of my childhood... starting with the dark backgrounds and how they can just chop up their bodies at random.
This troper used to be scared of the chalk world in Blue's Clues when she was little. Especially in the scene where Steve erases the waves when they're in a boat, and the eraser marks looked like a huge dark green monster. Oh Yeah! Cartoons premiered around the time, and this troper had to wait two months to finaly watch the ChalkZone shorts.
The two Looney Tunes shorts where Porky and Sylvester spend the night somewhere with psychotic mice trying to kill an oblivious Porky. The big moment comes when Sylvester sees the mice in executioner garb dragging off the previous cat of the house to beheaded.
Jimmy Two-Shoes has a lot of unsettling things played for laughs, but special mention has to go to The Big Date, where Heloiserips off a waiter's skin and wears it as a disguise!
In another episode, Beezy gets turned inside out. And seems to just walk it off. Very unsettling.
If there's one thing The Hooded Chicken proved, it's that Everything's Better with Chickens is a lie. Jimmy and Beezy weren't the only ones freaked out.
In the 'Brothers in Farms' episode of Spliced, Entrče and Peri end up defrosting Aperitif, an Entrče look-alike except he has a moustache and goatee, and turns out to be evil. He then eats everyone on the island, and their method of escaping involves somehow turning him inside out, with his skin literally exploding off. We're then treated to a horridly detailed view of Aperitif, with his veins, muscles, and organs showing.
This troper is embarrassed to say, that she shares a fear of monkeys, just like Ron Stoppable, so naturally...Monkey Fist-or anytime monkeys (that aren't cute and friendly)-that appear in the show-totally freaks me out!
Anything associated with Camp Wannaweap is this trope; lake that mutates you, evil monkeys, bugs everywhere, zombie snowmen. The camp itself is Nightmare Fuel.
Considering, she's the heroine of the story...seeing an EVIL smile◊ on our favorite cheeraleader-world saving teen, is creepy.
Since we're on the subject of "So The Drama" movie...I have to say, those little Diablos were creepy!
The fact that Mr. Warmonga was gonna have Kim as a STUFFED trophy for his battle mate-Warmonga...ACK!
This troper liked the idea of Kim as a stuffed trophy!
Eric melting in "So The Drama" just creeped me out!
That? That's nothing...this troper would like to present to you exhibit A!◊ Have fun sleeping on that one!
Too bad it's not what she really looks like. It's a nice improvement.
Who could forget Mrs. Dr. P's creepily realistic-looking meatloaf brain? Even Kim came close to making girl hurl over that one. Also, she has no less than three spit takes over the course of the series, the last right in Ron's face...and depending on your proclivity, her swallowing the nachos without chewing in "Steel Wheels" and the bulge in her throat could be hot or not.
Not. Just Not.
The entire Johnny Test episode "Party Monster" is one whole oil-tanker full of Nightmare Fuel. Not to mention the High Octane Nightmare Fuel ending of his sisters...
The Pendamonium cartoons from Discovery Education. They have some really creepy animation. A kid in my class even said that it will give them nightmares.
I can't be the ONLY ONE who finds the song 'Figure Eight' from Schoolhouse Rock creepy.
As goofy as it was, Street Sharks was pretty freaky when it came to the whole mutations thing. So the Mad Scientist can turn animals into evil henchmen. Okay, that's standard fare for those sorts of shows. And the Mad Scientist also kidnaps and mutates humans, to make them his henchmen. Which leads to them screaming and turning into fish-human hybrids. Oh, and the protagonists seemingly die when it's done to them.
Let's not forget Dr. Piranoid's creepy face.
Gigawatt from My Life as a Teenage Robot is certainly creepy... mostly because he's one of the few villains that could effortlessy curbstomp Jenny time and time again.
Not exactly part of the show, but in The Penguins of Madagascar, the character Maurice is a cute big-eyed cuddly-looking lemur. According to the official info, he's an aye-aye. So, you innocently Google it to see what a real aye-aye looks like ... AAAARGH!◊ (To be fair, that's a baby one - adults have more fur and are less disturbingly scrawny. But they're still pretty creepy.)
The episode "Date with Destiny" has what's got to be this kind of Nightmare Fuel!
Forget the other villains in that episode, Kitten is totally creepy. Not to mention the various smiles, yes, few go along the lines of Slasher Smile. Check this one out! [2]◊
The moment where she's trying to kiss Robin. OH GOD, the giant red lips slowly covering the screen. Doesn't help that she had a Slasher Smile beforehand.
A moment later, she has this really creepy face, where she has this Shoop da Whoop mouth, big eyes and NO... NOSE!!! Got to be part of the reason Robin had that agonized look on his face.
The horror begins here, around 2:14 here, and that even creepier moment at 2:25 [3].
This troper prays that she wasn't the only one to be upset by Robin's Rapid Aging in 'Revolution'.
Many scenes from Danger Rangers can be just downright scary for a kids' show. Particularly one where a cute little raccoon child is on a stretcher at a hospital from poisoning.
When I was kid and watched Little Robots, I would always hide when Scary would show up. Just the way that it looked like he had teeth and the way he talked... brr...
This isn't from an actual TV show, but rather an animated segment about fake cartoons that never made it which used to be played during the commericals on Cartoon Network during the 90's, here is the horror that is Frothy Dog.
If you think for one second that The Berenstain Bears couldn't possibly have Nightmare Fuel just because it's a franchise about a lovable bear family, think again.
The Berenstain Bears' Christmas Tree deserves a mention here, because it's chock full of Deranged Animation. Sure, the plot seems more like Green Aesop than something filled with Accidental Nightmare Fuel, which involves Brother and Sister trying to tell Papa there is more to Christmas than just the tree. But it shows a musical number about catching trees, which I'll classify as a combination of Disney Acid Sequence and Big Lipped Alligator Moment, that contains dancing trees, an eagle that literally chases Papa, Sister and Brother with Papa's ax, a growling wolf whose mouth, containing More Teeth than the Osmond Family, takes up one third of the screen, and finally Papa, Brother and Sister ski down a snowy hill to their hometown using makeshift skis.
Actually, the final example is mentioned because as they ski, things get weird as they roll down a hill into snowballs bounce and tilt to the side on top of each other making a snowman as it bounces about, even slowly going into the screen as if it wants to steal your soul.
Some children may no doubt have been frightened by Mama's demeanour in "The Messy Room". Throughout most of the episode, she goes into a fit of manic, anger-induced insanity. Imagine that one of the most lovable cartoon characters, or one you love, has finally gone mad.
This troper sees it as a Personality Swap. Here, Mama's short-tempered and mean while Papa acts as the voice of reason.
There is one short that gave this troper a bit of nightmares. It's from the short from Shorts HD called "Dreckmonster" or "Dirtmonsters" in English. The tale is simple: It's about a group of invisible dirt making creatures and later, they are kicked out by a dirt making machine, despite the narrator named Willy's determination to fight it off. But when it comes to the epilogue, as it showed what became of Willy's crew members, it then starts making this troper nauseous when she saw the pictures Willy showed of him making some new bacteria, but instead of the cute cuddly kind we saw earlier (since all were dead), these were more evil and dark looking. And the cruel look on Willy's gas masked face in the final picture with the creepy bacteria in hand as he narrated near the end made her nervous. What really gets her is...during the credits, Willy finally states the following:
Willy: "Oh by the way, have you noticed a slight scratching sensation on your throat? What do you think you'd been inhaling for the past 5 minutes? *cues evil laugh*"
