Bizarro Episode / Western Animation

Go to sleep, Aang.

The strangest episodes of western animation TV shows.

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• The 2 Stupid Dogs short "Cartoon Canines" sees Big Dog and Little Dog getting drafted into some sort of training camp for cartoon characters, complete with a feline Funny Animal Drill Sergeant Nasty ordering them into stereotypical cartoon personae and then into a series of training scenarios. Little Dog (AKA "Hammy") is pestered by a giant cat, and eventually defeats him by going Incredible Hulk on him and throwing him onto a working toaster. Big Dog (AKA "Loafy") finds himself tormented by a feline Abhorrent Admirer, and after some slapstick he tricks her into kissing her own butt. The woman goes into a rage, then suddenly splits in half to reveal...some kind of energy being shaped like an atom, and a monkey in a dress named Sasha who is apparently the energy being's girlfriend. Mission Control and the dogs are presumably just as confused as the audience as the energy being flies away with Sasha, shouting "We're free! Free!"
• The 101 Dalmatians: The Series episode "DeVil-Age Elder", where the Dearlys, the main pups, and Cruella stumble upon "DeVil Ville", a Renaissance-era town cursed centuries ago by a witch (who resembles Nanny), to make the town only appear every 100 years a la Brigadoon.

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius:
  • While it's justified given that the majority of the episode is taking place in a dream Carl is having, "I Dream of Jimmy" is nonetheless a pretty insane episode by the standards of the series, having all manner of crazy dream-induced goings-on.
    Libby: Sorry I'm late. My paddle broke so I had to row my desk to school with a plastic leg.
  • "Who's Your Mommy" is another very odd episode: The premise is that during a visit to an alien colony with Jimmy and Sheen, Carl gets attacked by a hostile alien that lays an egg in Carl, which for some reason ends up in Carl's butt and causes it to grow enormous. For some reason, no one in town is fazed by this at all (even Cindy and Libby, normally two of the sanest characters on the show, hold a baby shower for Carl), leaving Jimmy the Only Sane Man of the entire situation as he desperately tries to figure out a solution to the strange situation as pregnancy and butt gags fly left and right.
  • "Vanishing Act", one of the later episodes, involves Jimmy holding a magic show using a magic set created by him to impress Betty Quinlin, only for a mishap to get her along with Carl, Cindy, and Sheen lost in a crazy magic dimension that suddenly appears when Cindy attempts to sabotage the magic show. Physics are warped and borderline non-existent, everyone except Jimmy's heads get separated from their bodies and a chunk of the episode is spent finding them (after which Sheen's head ends up backwards), Jimmy is flushed down a giant toilet, and other strange things happen. What's especially funny is that this episode actually has bearing on the rest of the show as the on-going Jimmy/Cindy/Betty Love Triangle subplot is resolved here.
  • "Sleepless in Retroville" has to be the strangest of them all. Jimmy builds a machine to give his friends the ultimate sleepover experience, but a malfunction produces a pizza monster that attacks them, and pillow monsters that attack his parents. The gang thinks they've finally defeated the pizza, only for it to reanimate, causing Jimmy to wake up. Except, the pillow monsters are still there. So begins a rapid-fire sequence of various characters waking up from a pizza and pillow monster nightmare. This concludes with the pizza monster waking up and being comforted by his pizza wife, who tells him there's no such thing as children.
• Adventure Time:
  • "Rainy Day Daydream". Finn and Jake stay in their tree house during a knife storm. Jake suggests they use their imagination to pass the time, but his imagination proves so powerful he inexplicably becomes a Reality Warper, conjuring up all sorts of bizarre imaginary threats that only he can see.
  • "BMO Noire". BMO tries to find Finn's missing sock by imagining himself as a hard-boiled detective "interrogating" such suspects as a mouse, a remote control, and a chicken. And there's a mind-screwy sequence that suggests BMO isn't entirely aware it's all in his imagination.
  • "King Worm" is even worse. It's a dream episode, and it can be compared to Inception... but weirder. Much, much weirder.
  • And then they are both topped by "A Glitch is a Glitch", an episode made by guest animator David O'Reilly where the Ice King's latest attempt to win over Princess Bubblegum causes a CGI version of Ooo to glitch out and fall apart.
  • "Puhoy". Finn climbs into Jake's pillow fort, and it's a portal to a whole new world made of pillows and blankets. While struggling to get back to his world, he gets married and starts a family. Finn eventually decides to live out the rest of his life in the pillow world, and eventually dies and is on his way to the pillow afterlife when he's intercepted by some big red monster and wakes up back in the tree-house. It may or may not have been All Just a Dream, but the monster Finn saw does come back in a big way.
  • "Food Chain" is made by another guest animator, Masaaki Yuasa. It is perhaps the most Bizarro of all of Adventure Time's Bizarro Episodes. It's about Magic Man turning Finn and Jake into various parts of a plant-caterpillar-bird-cycle after they express a disinterest in a museum exhibit on the food chain. Normally, this wouldn't be that out of place for this show — Magic Man's debut did involve turning Finn into a giant foot after all — except for the more deranged and minimalistic art style, the fact that it's a Musical Episode, and Finn and Jake being way-too able to roll with being transformed into animals/plants/bacteria. And Finn falls in love with a caterpillar. It's also the only episode without the snail.
• The Amazing World of Gumball is already a weird show, but these episodes stick out as being too weird, even by its usual standards:
  • "The Job." Richard gets a job and is actually good at it, which is so unlike him that the fabric of the universe begins to fall apart.
  • "The Sweaters." While showing a new student (who had appeared in previous episodes) around the school, Gumball and Darwin encounter a pair of humans from said student's old school who think that they want to challenge them to a fight (actually a tennis match). The humans and the entire court the "fight" takes place look like Filmation-era cartoons, and it should be noted that the only appearance of humans on the show prior (not counting Santa Claus) was as live-action people on television. Gumball and Darwin are also the only sane men — this is saying a lot — as just about everyone else seems to play directly into the same type of cliches that the episode spoofs.
  • "The World." It's been said on official sources and according to the show creator that Elmore is where everything has a chance to come to life. This episode takes that idea and runs with it in the form of a big sketch collection of objects, video game characters, food, and the planets in the solar system coming to life.
  • "The Joy": An homage to zombie horror and found footage horror films in which Richard's hug to cheer up a miserable Gumball and Darwin becomes a virus that turns people into mindlessly happy zombies that drool rainbow slime. Miss Simian tries to stop it with a recording of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but ends up infected...then the tape cuts off and reveals that she tried to tape over Principal Brown practicing Jedi moves with a broom a la The Star Wars kid viral video.
  • "The Extras": After Gumball and Darwin casually comment that today is a slow day, a bunch of background characters launch into a musical number about how the episode will be about them. The rest of the episode is a rehash of "The World," except it focuses on the very minor and one-shot characters that act as background extras and living props having adventures of their own.
  • "The Countdown" is about Gumball and Darwin racing to school before they're late to avoid expulsion. What makes this bizarro is the object that gives the episode its name: A timer appears throughout most of it counting down the minutes and seconds they have left, and they notice it. Which also seems to be going by the show's time and not what they've done offscreen (such as them leaving the house only taking a second according to the timer). Then they interact with it by accidentally stopping time. Trying to start it again, they accidentally travel forwards to the end of the world, backwards to the big bang, and rewrite history several times, making alternate timelines until they finally settle for one where everybody blinks sideways.
  • "The Signal": The entire episode is shown as scrambled and distorted due to satellite interruptions, often cutting to stock footage and clips from fake TV shows and commercials. The story (what little of it there is) sees Darwin upset that Gumball has a stutter that makes him say offensive things to him, only to learn that the satellite interruptions are real and plaguing Elmore. Just as the two come to the conclusion that Elmore may not be real, the episode ends with an extremely tacked-on happy ending where Richard and the family are sitting around the table and Richard tells the family that Gumball and Darwin resolved their problems and everything is back to normal (and Gumball and Darwin are noticeably frightened and confused about what just happened).
  • “The Night” is about what the people of Elmore are dreaming about. As one might expect, some of these dreams are rather bizarre, but it’s really shocking just how these dreams can get. The Robinsons have a Dragon Ball-style fight on their lawn, Banana Joe dreams about chasing his end, which ends up splitting in two, Anais dreams about Daisy the Donkey creepily battering around an Anias doll (or was it Daisy’s dream?), Alan’s dream is just one incomprehensible Mind Screw, and it just keeps going like this. Special mentions go to Sussie’s dream, where her actress wakes up and ends up on the show’s studio. Still in character, Sussie thinks that she turned into a monster, and frantically runs around, and Richard’s dream, where he dreams about being a piece of dough, and even sings about it.
  • "The Test": After a BuzzFeed-style quiz calls Gumball a loser, he decides to try to get people to like him by not insulting them. Not only does this start to literally poison his body, it causes the show itself to warp into a Stylistic Suck sitcom with Tobias in the lead, a Laugh Track, lame jokes, and an incoherent plot. Eventually, Tobias starts to take over Gumball's life, and his place in the Watterson family, then Gumball concedes to being the loser and the amount of bile stored in his body burns off Tobias' face.
• American Dad! loves employing oddball or outright experimental storytelling methods, and plays fast and loose with continuity to boot. As such, it shouldn't come as too much of a shock that there's quite a lot of these:
  • "Tear Jerker" and "For Black Eyes Only" (James Bond parodies)
  • "Hot Water", a Musical Episode where a murderous hot tub kills off everyone in the cast. The episode's nature can be attributed to it being a planned series finale because the writers were afraid FOX was going to cancel the show. When they discovered that FOX wasn't going to cancel American Dad, the episode was put on as a season seven premiere and the deaths were written off as non-canon.
  • "Blood Crieth Unto Heaven", an American Dad! episode set up like a stage play, featuring Patrick Stewart in live-action. This one is also non-canon.
  • "Lost in Space" is this crossed with A Day in the Limelight: Stan, Francine, and Steve don't appear at all, Hayley appears in a flashback and has no lines, and the only major character to appear is Roger (and even then, it's in another character's mind). The episode focuses mostly on Jeff (Hayley's stoner husband) and is more of a sci-fi adventure with some comedic overtones.
  • "Blagsnarst: A Love Story": The final episode on FOX, where the whole story (and possibly the series) turns out to be a story told by Stan about how Kim Kardashian was born (which, in the American Dad! world, depicts Kardashian as a furry, pink alien being whose hair burned off in a car accident after Roger tried to get rid of her).
  • "American Fung": The show begins with a live-action Cold Opening depicting Asian billionaire Fung Wah saying that Seth MacFarlane sold American Dad! to him, and the episode features several moments depicting him in animated form and shilling himself and his products, culminating in him taking over the B-plot, doing the voices of Steve, Hayley and Roger, and hastily making up an ending for the A-plot. The ending involves Fung selling the show to another Asian billionaire who transplants the show to China, and the new American Chinese Dad! show has the family meeting Mickey Mouse and dancing Snoopy-style. Yeah.
  • "Top of the Steve": Steve and Roger run away from home and join an all-girls boarding school on a technicality. After Roger starts Spotting the Thread and noticing how everything thus far seems off - including being able to enroll in the prestigious academy in just twenty minutes, two lesbians known only as "Spitz & The Babe" who are obviously set up for a Will They or Won't They? scenario, the fact nobody ever explains what the "technicality" that got Steve in is, and them suddenly having to win some kind of contest to stay in the school - Roger realises that they're trapped in a Poorly Disguised Pilot for a Spin-Off show, and escape after deliberately getting themselves kicked out for blowing the show's budget on singing "Hey Jude" by The Beatles. A trailer then plays for "Top of the Spitz", where Steve apparently masturbated himself to death and got replaced by Spitz. The B-plot of the episode also plays into the No Fourth Wall nature of the plot by having a confused and upset Stan be visited by obvious Replacement Scrappy characters "Spunky Rooster" and his "long-lost, never before mentioned cousin".
• Amphibia: "The Shut-In" is very clearly not in continuity even in its framing story, with Polly turning into a monster at the end.
• The Angry Beavers: The show is already pretty...out there, but the tip of the iceberg would likely be "Brothers...To The End?", which has the premise of the universe suddenly coming to an end right at the turn of the millennium, and Norbert and Daggett are instructed to recreate it all over again. Words cannot describe the insanity that follows. In the end, it turns out the incident was just a mass hallucination of many of the main characters, brought on by punch that Daggett made with too much lime...or was it? It's not especially made clear.
• The Animaniacs episode "Animaniacs Stew" has the Warners mixing up all the characters and putting them together in different ways (e.g. switching Dot with Slappy Squirrel), throwing off many familiar premises.
• Arthur:
  • Much of "Just Desserts" takes place in Acid Reflux Nightmares being had by Arthur after eating too much cake for dessert, featuring such strange goings-on as a cake version of Grandma Thora forcing herself down Arthur's throat, malls made out of candy, D.W. getting abducted by seven Tibble twins who claim she is "Dough White", and Arthur in a parody of Jack and the Beanstalk where the giant is made of all the foods Arthur has ever eaten. Even among episodes of the show that are primarily taken up by the kids' Imagine Spots, it's an especially strange one.
  • Some of the Pal and Baby Kate episodes (where Pal and Kate can talk to each other and other animals) can get a little...out there. They can range from just Mundane Fantastic to things just outlandish for the mostly realistic setting of the show. "The Great Sock Mystery", for example, involves Pal and Kate searching for a missing sock...and come across an underground building where dogs and babies play the "sock market" and literally exchange socks. The crazy thing is that this isn't even the strangest of the Pal/Kate episodes.
  • "To Eat or Not to Eat" is simultaneously heavier and goofier than most episodes, in that Buster does an investigation that ends with a reveal that someone had been conning children into taking drugs... but on the other hand, the drugs were in the form of candy bars that made sparkles come out of the kids' mouths, and the addictive ingredient was called "zorn jelly".
• The episode "Party All the Time" from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Frylock contracts melanoma (a form of cancer), which causes him to slowly decay and become sick (which leads to all the fries disappearing from his head, and him dressing in a hat to conceal the fry loss). Shake and Meatwad try a number of tricks to cheer him up (including a performance from Andrew W.K.), but they find out that it's no use. Suddenly, at the end, Frylock goes to a doctor, who tells him that the melanoma is reversing and that he will eventually get better... and the episode ends, and nothing in it is ever referenced or mentioned again. Of course, since Negative Continuity is in full effect for this series, that's to be expected. What wasn't to be expected was the more serious tone, or the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment where Frylock inexplicably dreams up a scenario in the same doctor's office where the doctor starts jabbering about aliens, who then abduct him.
• There is a version of the Archer pilot where Archer is a velociraptor. The pilot is otherwise identical. No reason is given.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender has several episodes that seem disconnected from the rest of the story ("The Great Divide," "The Fortuneteller," "The Painted Lady"), but a few really stand out as Bizarro Episodes by virtue of being...well...bizarre. It should be noted, though, that all these episodes stay true to the characters and to the Avatar universe.
  • "Avatar Day" has the heroes visiting a really weird village whose inhabitants hate the Avatar because a previous Avatar (Kyoshi) allegedly killed their leader Chin the Great several centuries ago. They arrest Aang for his predecessor's supposed crime, but Aang refuses to escape because he wants to clear the Avatar's name. Katara and Sokka gather evidence that could prove Kyoshi's innocence, but Aang botches his testimony and subsequently tries to give a last-ditch testimony while disguised unconvincingly as Kyoshi. This somehow summons the spirit of Avatar Kyoshi herself, who admits that she did kill Chin (but merely by refusing to save him after he shot first, so to speak). This cements the Avatar's guilt, and the villagers choose Aang's punishment by spinning a carnival wheel of various Cruel and Unusual Deaths with "community service" randomly thrown in. The Wheel of Punishment lands on "boiled in oil," but at that moment a gang of Fire Nation goons randomly shows up, and Aang forces the villagers to commute his sentence to "community service" (read: saving their sorry asses from the Fire Nation). After Aang and company defeat the Fire Nation goons, the villagers change their Avatar Day tradition from burning giant effigies of the Avatar to eating raw dough replicas of Aang.
    Unfried dough! May we eat it and be reminded of how on this day the Avatar was not boiled in oil!
  • "Nightmares and Daydreams" has Aang undergoing a Mushroom Samba due to sleep deprivation. And that's the least weird way to put it. The only normal parts of this episode are the unrelated scenes of Zuko preparing for his coronation.
  • "The Ember Island Players" has the main characters watching a Show Within a Show detailing their adventures up until that point. The show turns out to be Fire Nation propaganda, with Aang and friends depicted in an unflattering manner, and it ends with Ozai defeating the Avatar and leading the Fire Nation to conquer the world.
• The New Batman Adventures has always been a little more lighthearted than its predecessor. However, the episode "Critters" was just plain out there. A farmer and his daughter genetically engineer farm animals so they can become bigger. After a cow runs amok at an agricultural expo, they're ordered to cease their growth hormone experiments. So they send giant praying mantises, demonic chickens, and a talking goat to attack Gotham City. The Agony Booth said it best "I wish I was making all this up, believe me. It’s like David Lynch made a Batman cartoon and forced the networks to air it." In point of fact, it was written by Steve Gerber (the guy who gave the world Howard the Duck and other strangeness) and horror novelist Joe Lansdale. For the record, the commentary for the episode on the DVD collections reveals that the creators absolutely loved the insanity of the episode (despite acknowledging that many fans hated it), to the point that they regretted not having Farmer Brown later fight the entire Justice League.
• For nearly its entire run, Beetlejuice had fairly straightforward adventures. Then came "Poe Pourri", a tribute to the macabre stylings of Edgar Allan Poe, which had none of the series' trademark cornball humor. What it did have: The poet himself, reduced to eternal wailing laments over his lost Lenore, a gravelly-voiced rapping (both meanings of the word) raven who appears out of nowhere and spouts cryptic verses, a 15-foot-tall wall-crushing human heart, a menacing pendulum scythe which ends up cutting the entire cartoon in half, massive pits appearing out of nowhere, a giant red mask which gives Beetlejuice an incurable disease, and a ferocious green gorilla. On top of that, the whole thing is shown to be a dream, then a dream within a dream, then a dream within a dream within a dream, until the episode ends...at exactly the same point it began.
• Ben 10 has two "comic book episodes", which are non-canon What If? stories that have zero baring on the plot. Of the two, the second season's "Gwen 10" is an example of this trope, as it begins with Ben inexplicably waking up in an alternate timeline where it's the first day of summer, with it going unexplained how this happened. When Ben realizes that he's gone back in time somehow and tries set the original events back in motion, a curious Gwen ends up becoming wielder of the Omnitrix instead, and her greater competence with the device puts her on the Big Bad's radar far faster than Ben did. But it also results in the Tennyson family swiftly killing him by the episode's end, and Max becoming the alien device's owner instead, much to Ben's chagrin. That last part ends up becoming Hilarious in Hindsight when it's revealed in a later canon episode that the person who sent the Omnitrix to Earth expected Max to have it in the first place.
• Big City Greens: "Cheap Show", a Bottle Episode, is obviously the most random episode yet, where the kids want to go to a fair, but Bill wants to save cash and they spend the whole show in the living room. As a matter of fact, the episode is a complete jab at low-budget animation, complete with loads of Lampshade Hanging, the use of very little backgrounds, the fact that the Greens are the only ones present outside of the flashbacks, an entire scene shot in the dark, and Cricket literally Breaking the Fourth Wall. To add it all up, we never actually see the street fair, as all we get is a focus of the living room while we hear the Greens outside. Apparently, the episode ends with the Greens going on an adventure with Tom Hanks.
• Bob's Burgers:
  • The season seven premiere "Flu-ouise" is a Musical Fever Dream Episode where Louise, sick with a bad case of the flu, dreams of her toys trying to convince her to forgive her family for wrecking her prized Kuchi Kopi night light.
  • The season eight premiere "Brunchsquatch" is unique in that the actual plot is no more "out there" than any other episode, but every single scene of the episode has a different artstyle based on over 60 submissions from a fan art contest, ranging from black-and-white to even animesque, with the show's usual artstyle being completely absent even during the opening and credits sequences.
• Bojack Horseman: Season 5's "INT. SUB" is an episode whose Framing Device is a conversation between Diane's therapist, Dr. Indira, and her wife, corporate mediator Mary-Beth, talking about a situation their clients are going through, because they can't disclose their identities, the show becomes bizarre as all characters assume new identities: Bojack becomes Bobo, the Angsty Zebra, Diane becomes Princess Diana of Wales, Mr. Peanutbutter becomes Mr. Chocolate Hazelnut Spread, Todd becomes Emperor Fingerface (a man with a hand instead of a head) and Princess Carolyn becomes A Tangled Fog of Pulsating Yearning In The Shape Of A Woman, as well as Priscilla Crustacean. Even secondary characters such as Flip, who becomes a dolphin called Flipper, are affected. Meanwhile, the plot has to do with Bojack becoming close with Indira while Diane tries to get some space from him while they try to figure out what they're meant to do with the giant submarine on set.
• The Grand Finale of Camp Lazlo. The episode starts fairly "normally" with Lumpus deciding to replace clothing with body paint and becoming famous because of it, but the end is where the weirdness ensues. Two men from the future tell Lumpus of the utopia created as a result and show the scoutmaster a statue of himself that contains the world's last dirty laundry. Then it rains and everyone ends up naked with their paint washed off. This causes the statue to revert to a pile of dirty laundry and the time travellers to become thin from starvation, before deciding to go back home. Suddenly, as everyone mobs Lumpus, wearing dirty clothes, a police car comes in and a cop steps out accompanied by...an older Heffer! Heffer tells everyone that Lumpus is actually a psycho impersonating the real scoutmaster (Heffer) and Lumpus is dragged away. Cut to the Bean Scouts standing around baffled. Samson then sums up why it's the last episode.
  Samson: I think we've reached the point where things can't get any weirder.
• The Casagrandes episode "Bunstoppable" counts as this as it involves Sid and Adelaide Chang's ancestors being warped into the current world from their book after Breakfast Bot's electrical bolts hit it which opened a rift between time and space.
• The Catscratch episode "Core-Uption". When Kimberly gets an 'F' on her science project for saying that the earth's core is made of unicorns and rainbows, Gordon drills to the core and stuffs the project inside it, causing the world to turn into a Sugar Bowl. In the process, Gordon becomes a Pikachu expy, Mr. Blik becomes a mouse pull-string doll, Waffle becomes a potted plant and Hovis becomes a gingerbread man.
• ChalkZone:
  • "The White Board" starts with Rudy on the phone with Penny after he comes down with the flu on the hottest day of the summer. Things begin to look strange when Penny then comes out of the top of Rudy's endtable while on the phone with him (and even then, more attentive viewers can point out that his room looks strange as well, such as him having a normal bed instead of a bunk bed with the top bunk only with his desk at the bottom). While he was sick, his mom bought him a portable white board, and he and Penny take it into ChalkZone with them. Once they get there, Rudy, Penny, Snap, and Blocky end up falling into the white board into a "White Board Zone". When they can't get out of it, they end up falling into "Pencil Zone", and eventually end up back in Rudy's room...only the gang are transparent and they can see Rudy already in the room, but asleep. Turns out that the entire episode was All Just a Dream Rudy had after leaving his electric blanket on too high when he went to sleep.
  • "Chip of Fools" involves Snap being abducted by cookie aliens and being punished for eating their cookie brethren by being turned into a cookie himself at the hands of his own friends. Like "The White Board" this episode was All Just a Dream that Snap was having after eating too many cookies, though it ends on an ambiguous note.
• Clarence:
  • "Rough Riders Elementary" starts off innocently enough, with Clarence's school getting a sponsorship from the In-Universe fast-food joint Rough Riders Chicken, but then things suddenly take a turn for the bizarre when it turns out the restaurant is a cult that manages to brainwash everyone with their cinnamon ranch dressing except Clarence ^note who hates the dressing and Sumo ^note who was rescued by Clarence at the last minute. Chaos ensues, and it ends with the school exploding. Fortunately, it was just a crazy story written by Clarence.
  • "Tuckered Boys" starts out innocuous enough with Clarence, Sumo, and Jeff wandering Aberdale late at night as they try to stay up long enough to see a comet pass by in the sky, but as the episode goes on and the boys get more tired, things get progressively stranger and stranger until it escalates into a mass sleep-deprivation-induced freak-out that lasts almost the rest of the episode.
  • "Goldfish Follies" would be like any other episode of the series if not for the one-time Art Shift to a Inkblot Cartoon Style with surreal Fleischer-esque gags aplenty, such as Clarence floating around in the air and Aberdale being filled with Animate Inanimate Objects. It's also implied that this rubberhose cartoon Art Shift represents how Clarence sees the world around him.
• Episode 10 of Clone High focuses around the death of Ponce De Leon, a character who never appears in any other episode. In spite of this, the episode is filled with constant reminders that everyone looks up to Ponce and that he and JFK were inseparable best friends.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • Operation: R.E.P.O.R.T., set entirely in the characters' parody-rich imaginations. Numbuh 4 turns into a Super Saiyan.
  • Operation: W.H.I.T.E.H.O.U.S.E., which was also All Just a Dream, did make self-contained sense until the very end when Numbuh 1 turned into an expy of the Hulk for no explained reason.
• Daria was generally based on reality, except with its eccentricities exaggerated. The plot of "Depth Takes a Holiday", however, begins when Daria randomly meets the Anthropomorphic Personifications of St. Patrick's Day and Valentine's Day, who need her help to get Christmas, Halloween and Guy Fawkes' Day back to "Holiday Island". An uncharacteristically whimsical plot, to say the least, but Daria manages it the same way she does everything else: through sarcasm.
  "I'm obviously having some kind of nervous breakdown. I'll just ride it out and see where it takes me, Zelda Fitzgerald-style."
• The final two or three episodes of the Darkstalkers cartoon. It seems the writers knew ahead of time the show had been cancelled and decided to just go wild, because these episodes violently shift from the fairly straitlaced, Urban Fantasy action cartoon it had been to an absurd, screwball comedy that lampshades and mocks everything about the show. The result is things like Pyron and Ship turning into a bickering married couple, Dmitri and Morrigan going on a daytime talk show, Lord Raptor trying to become an actor, a dragon with a posh British accent saving the day, a ridiculous Piss-Take Rap scene, a wacky sitcom-esque plot involving the heroes and villains pretending to like each other, and Pyron being "defeated" by sheer accidental coincidence. Doubles as a Gainax Ending. In an amusing twist on this trope, many fans consider these utterly bizarre episodes the best part of the series. The rest of the show is mediocre and forgettable at best, but these episodes are found to be utterly hilarious and fun to watch.
• Darkwing Duck has had a few, such as "Darkwing Doubloon" which re-imagines the entire cast as swashbucklers chasing after Negaduck's band of pirates and "The Secret Origins of Darkwing Duck," which uses the future as its framing device and reveals that Darkwing was sent to Earth as a baby from a dying planet.
• Dexter's Laboratory could be a bit weird even in its "normal" episodes. But a few ones deserve a special mention:
  • "Monstory" is about Dexter trying to avoid one of Dee Dee's rambling stories... accidentally turning her and himself into monsters in the process. The two grow to giant size and have an epic kaiju battle... and then it turns out Dee Dee's story really is a set up for "one of [her] dumb knock-knock jokes" as Dexter feared. Then some kind of giant telescope, like the one Dexter was using at the start of the episode to observe a miniature civilization, zooms in on them from outer space.
  • "Dexter and Computress Get Mandark" was written by a 6-year-old, and is psycho-freaking-loco, with Dexter teaming up with Mandark's robot brother Computress and accidentally inflating Mandark's head until it explodes.
  • "The Continuum Of Cartoon Fools" plays out like a typical The Cat Came Back plot, except it opens with Dexter working on an experiment that involves him making goofy faces and going "BWAAAT!" at differing intervals^note really a bizarre meta-joke about how weird timing out an animation storyboard can look to an outside observer, and it ends with Dexter giving an epic melodramatic rant that goes on for roughly a minute about how he foolishly locked himself out of his own laboratory.
  • "Dee-Dee's Tail" has Dee Dee getting Dexter to turn her into a horse. She then flees her friends and her brother, who keep bugging her to let them ride her, and gets an inspiring vision of the main character from Pony Puffs to fight for her freedom.
• The Donald Duck short "Duck Pimples". Donald listens to scary stuff on the radio, causing his overactive imagination to bring a bunch of shady characters to life. Then a creepy yet silly salesman drops a lot of horror novels on Don's sofa, then vanishes into thin air. As he starts reading one, more weirdos emerge from the book, such as a petty crook and a gruff police officer who accuses Don of stealing a dame's pearls, accompanied by the lady herself. After some Big Lipped Alligator-y gags, both are about to murder Donald because he hasn't "confessed" yet. Just before they cut his throat in half, the author himself exits the book and reveals the officer to be guilty. The cop confesses it was indeed him, but he ain't amused, and as he steps back to go back into the book's pages, he "shoots" Donald with a "Bang!" Flag Gun; Don reacts just as if had been shot for real. Terrified, the dame and the author go back to the novel as well. Donald regains consciousness and immediately shakes the book to confirm it all ended, as some voices from the radio tell him it was all his imagination. He's not convinced, and the cartoon ends with him trembling in fear, slowly muttering to himself "Yeah... Imagination"... Just in time for the pearls to appear on his neck before the iris out.
• The Dreamstone:
  • Most episodes that focus on the actual dreams produced by the title device end up rather trippy. "The Daydream Bubble" and "The Dream Beam Invasion" for example downplay the usual formula of the Urpneys trying to steal the stone in favour of the two sides warring inside some particularly psychedelic dreams. "Hod" is an especially odd case involving the two sides getting caught inside the spaceship of an amateur dream maker that scoops up the left over bits of other's dreams.
• While Toon Physics are practically nonexistent as a rule to begin with, Duck Amuck shatters any conception of the fourth wall by having Daffy Duck arguing with and being screwed around with by the animator who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. Bugs later got a taste of his own medicine in Rabbit Rampage, with the animator being Elmer Fudd.
• DuckTales (2017):
  • "The 87 Cent Solution!" is certainly one of the weirdest - and as an effect, most hilarious - episodes of the show. Scrooge realizes that 87 cents have been stolen from his money bin, flips out and makes the kids count all the coins in his bin to make sure they're all there. Huey finds a page in his Junior Woodchuck Guidebook about "gold fever", a disease caused by exposure to gold that causes strange behavior. He is certain Scrooge has it, and the book says it can result in death. Scrooge broadcasts a message talking about his missing coins like they're his kidnapped children, and promises two million dollars to whoever finds them. He tells the kids that an interdimensional imp named Chester is bothering him, and orders Gizmoduck to shoot where he thinks he saw Chester, which almost kills Dewey. Everyone now believes that Scrooge has gold fever, but he insists he doesn't and tries to jump in his money bin. We then cut to the revelation that Scrooge has died of gold fever, and cut to his funeral. Glomgold crashes it to gloat, and reveals that he found a time-stopping watch, and after having a staring contest with a time-frozen baby for an entire year, he realized he can use it to mess with Scrooge. He even admits that gold fever isn't real, but a fake disease he put in Huey's guidebook. Scrooge takes off his disguise and reveals that he didn't really die, but it was a ruse to make Glomgold reveal his plan. Everyone in the funeral was on it, except Donald.
  • The show would later blow the above episode out of the water with the absolutely bonkers "Quack Pack!" from Season 3. The family is preparing for a photoshoot, which seems awfully normal for this show, but we quickly realize that something is wrong: Everyone is dressed either like their 80s counterparts or in typical 90s sitcom clothing and acts a lot wackier, Donald's voice is intelligible, and there's a Laugh Track and a lot more jokes. Huey realizes they are in a TV show and seems to be the only one who notices it, and starts freaking out. Eventually he makes the others realize this by showing that there aren't any pipes in the walls, his Junior Woodchuck Guidebook has no text and their house is actually a set. By having a flashback, they find out that on their last adventure, Donald wished to have "Normal family problems" while accidentally touching a Genie's lamp which granted his wish by putting everyone in this alternate reality. When the ducks try to find the lamp to undo the wish, it results in the whole world falling apart, and even the studio audience (consisting of humans) comes to attack them. Donald eventually wishes things back to normal, but Goofy, who showed up as a guest star in the show, stays, because "Magic's got nothing on a big name guest star".
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • "1 + 1 = Ed" starts reasonably enough, with Ed asking Eddy a bunch of questions, which become increasingly philosophical. To answer some of the less philosophical questions, the Eds start taking things apart to see how they work... which somehow leads to them taking apart the cartoon they're in, with increasingly strange results. The damage they're doing to their reality causes everything to become more and more nonsensical. Ultimately, they accidentally break the entire universe - reality and imagination begin to melt into each other, existential crisis manifests itself into abstract surrealism, and everyone and everything around them becomes horribly deformed and absurd. In the end, everything very suddenly goes back to normal.
    Rolf: Hello, Ed-Boys! Many doors, yes?
    Rolf's Second Head: Too much for...
    Rolf's Third Head: ...Couch-potato Ed-Boys like yourselves?
    Eddy: A three-headed Rolf. Yawn.

The aforementioned Unusually Uninteresting Sight is after Ed created a Portable Hole (which Eddy promptly fell through in a Portal-esque fashion) and after Eddy ate the sun.

• Also the episode "They Call Him Mr. Ed", an episode with a barely-existent plot that's spoken almost entirely in "up" puns. It ends with the Eds taking an elevator into space.
• "Hand Me Down Ed" is about a boomerang of an unknown origin that has the power to completely change a person's personality. Jimmy becomes muscular, Sarah acts nicer, Rolf breaks out singing, Ed becomes intelligent, Eddy acts motherly towards a suitcase, and Edd starts complaining about the "heat" and begins stripping. None of this is ever explained or mentioned again, save for a small cameo of the boomerang itself in a later episode.
• The Valentine's Day special sees Sarah and Jimmy as cupids who are Invisible to Normals and have the power to make people fall in love. They are defeated by Rolf, after he squirts lemon juice in his eyes and can see them. It still ended up being the episode that introduced the school setting seen in Season 5.

• The Fairly OddParents! episode "Crock Talk", where Timmy wishes up a bunch of monsters for no apparent reason, which repeatedly beat up Crocker.
• The episode "Da Boom" in Family Guy, which is the episode with the nuclear explosion due to the Millennium Bug. The Griffins try to find a lost Twinkie factory, and decide to form a new town, with Stewie turning into an octopus. (It all makes sense in context.) It ends by revealing the whole thing was All Just a Dream of Pamela Ewing of all people, who wakes up and tells Bobby about this weird episode. Bobby doesn't understand what Family Guy is, which freaks her out even more. And it was the first episode to feature Ernie the Giant Chicken and his fights with Peter.
• F is for Family has season 4's "R Is For Rosie," an entire episode told from the point of view of Frank's Black coworker at Mohican Airlines, Rosie, recently elected alderman of his district. The episode features Rosie trying to juggle work and family life (much like we see Frank do regularly) as well as do the best he can for his community at City Hall without sacrificing his principles. The opening credits even feature Rosie, and are set to Earth, Wind & Fire's "Shining Star" instead of the usual "Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone.
• The Flintstones:
  • The episode "Ten Little Flintstones" is about an evil alien leader (which we only see his shadow) planning to invade Earth, and makes ten clones of Fred Flintstone (whom the alien chose because he was the first human he found) in order to infiltrate and examinate the Stone Age society. When Fred realizes something is wrong after being mis-blamed for many things that the clones did, he sees them on a street, chases them into a flying saucer, in which the alien leader declares his subterfuge thwarted and exposed by the formidable Earthlings and aborts the planetary conquest plan, expelling Fred from the flying saucer before it launches into space. What makes this episode even weirder is that it came out two seasons before the Great Gazoo's debut.
  • "The Long, Long, Long Weekend", where the Great Gazoo takes the Flintstone and Rubble couples to a Zeerust Future.
• Futurama has its fair share of examples:
  • The "Anthology of Interest" episodes are two sets of three What If? shorts.
  • "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular" is a pastiche of holiday specials.
  • "Reincarnation" imagines the cast of the show in three different animation styles: old-time "rubber hose" cartoons from The '30s, early 1980s video game pixel art, and badly-dubbed, stiffly-animated Japanimation from the 1970s.
  • "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" is one big Take That! against Saturday morning cartoons (the popular American ones like Scooby-Doo, Strawberry Shortcake, and G.I. Joe) wrapped in a Three Shorts package with a framing device of Richard Nixon's head trying to deal with angry Moral Guardian protesters.
  • "Naturama" reimagines the characters as wildlife and is structured like an episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
  • "The Prince and the Product" starts as a seemingly normal episode about Leela falling in love with the Prince of Space (no, not that one) but is constantly interrupted by toy commercials that segue into alternate versions of Futurama with the characters reimagined as wind-up-dolls, toy cars, and rubber ducks/wobbly eggs respectively. Then the episode ends with the Planet Express Ship transforming into Bender and crashing into the Earth. It doesn't make sense in context.
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero had "Once Upon A Joe," featuring a rather bizarre fairy tale (full of Joes and Cobras of course) being told by Shipwreck to an orphan. The animation style for the tale was totally different. Even the MAIN plot was weird, with the episode's MacGuffin actually being called a MacGuffin and Zandar beating up on other Dreadknocks with an alligator.
• Goof Troop:
  • The episodes in which Goofy reads to Max the history of various ancestors. Aside from the framing device, there is nothing to tie these into the series continuity and they play more like Classic Disney Shorts than Goof Troop episodes, up to and including putting Pete in the role of a traditional villain in four of them. Peg and Pistol are also used in the stories but multiple times are given roles counter to their canonical characterization, Pistol's character is never related to Pete's, and PJ is not seen once in any of these episodes, story or framing device.
  • As far as episodes not about the Goofs' ancestors go, "Dr. Horatio's Magic Orchestra" is pretty out there. The episode has a borderline-nonsensical plot about a trunk of animate music instruments (the eponymous magic orchestra, whose animate nature is never explained nor seen as strange by anybody expect Pete) that Goofy bought at an auction constantly playing "When The Saints Go Marching In". This triggers Pete's (never-before-seen) traumatic childhood memory and recurring nightmares about getting stage fright when he tried to play said song with his middle school band as a kid and he tries desperately to get rid of the orchestra, only for them to keep coming back no matter what he does. In the end, the Goofs and Pete's family help Pete overcome his trauma and Pete goes triumphantly marching through Spoonerville playing "When The Saints Go Marching In" with the magic orchestra, at which point the episode is revealed to have been the recurring nightmare of a sentient tuba.
• The Gravity Falls episode "Little Gift Shop of Horrors" is a collection of three stories openly admitted to be made up by Stan, who is speaking directly to the viewer in an extremely out-of-place example of Fake Interactivity. Soos inexplicably turns into clay near the end of the last story, the plots are odd even by the show's standards (and compared to fellow three-shorts episode "Bottomless Pit!"), and it ends with Stan drugging the viewer and making them into an exhibit of the Mystery Shack, which is pretty cold even for him and Dipper and Mabel don't seem to care about saving them. To clear some things up, the "key" for this episode^note All episodes of season 2 had a message in the credits that can be decoded by a method involving a key word. This word is hidden in the episode, and can be recognized by a symbol by it shaped like a key. is "NONCANON," implying that the whole thing didn't happen.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • This was always a bizarro show, but "Complete and Utter Chaos" was a little out of the ordinary. The title card begins as "Billy gets Dumber" before Eris shows up and tears it away to reveal the actual one and proceeds to whistle the title card tune in the normal one's place.
  • "My Fair Mandy". The episode follows Mandy being goaded into entering a beauty pageant just to get back at her rival Mindy, so Grim brings a pageant coach from the underworld to help them. While it's on the weird side, what really makes this trope work for that episode, aside a random anthropomorphic crow narrating the story, is the Gainax Ending. Mandy is coaxed into finally smiling, as part of her presentation, which breaks the laws of the universe and forces it to be re-written in a cosmic acid sequence that transforms the universe of the show into The Powerpuff Girls, with Grim, Billy and Mandy as Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles, respectively, as well as turning Irwin into Mojo Jojo. Once they realize their new reality, everyone agrees to just roll with it and never talk about it again.
• Skeletor, a classic two-dimensional villain with no previous redeeming qualities whatsoever, abruptly turns good for no apparent reason other than "the Spirit of Christmas" in the He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special. This had no bearing on later evil; it was just something the Eighties did, apparently.
• Horrid Henry:
  • "Horrid Henry's Dinosaur Day", the episode where Henry turns into a dinosaur for the whole of the episode.
  • "Who's Who?", where Henry switches all the kids' nicknames and this somehow causes them to switch their personality traits too.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes:
  • "Going Green". Okay, so Lucius tells the people of Miseryville to deliver their suggestions of how to run Miseryville to Jimmy's house. Jimmy gets a ton of suggestions from a guy named Thorn, who is all about the environment. When Jimmy and Beezy meet Thorn, they notice he looks like a green Beezy. Thorn then splashes himself with tomato juice, impersonates Beezy, and tells the people of Miseryville to be more green, but Lucius tries to cover up the environmentalism by telling the people it was a new TV show. Then Thorn's dad appears and he's a green Lucius with a mustache and drags Thorn away.
  • "My So-Called Loaf" which aired alongside "Going Green" is just as weird. When Jimmy makes the perfect sandwich, an anthropomorphic sandwich cowboy (bizarre for a setting populated by demons and monsters) named Cowboy Stackhouse wants to take it out for a date and eventually marry. For some reason, the bow tie that Jimmy put on the sandwich like one does with a present is the only reason why Stackhouse doesn't see an inanimate object. Heloise is also mistaken for a boy by Stackhouse and the episode ends with Stackhouse being attacked by birds that Heloise sent for the spite while Beezy tries to eat Stackhouse's bride. In a nutshell Episode 220 is strange even for the show's standards.
• Kaeloo is already a weird show, but Episode 66 is really, really weird: it's basically about Quack Quack, Olaf and a bunch of talking yogurts waging war against each other.
• The Looney Tunes Show has "Casa De Calma", which is completely unlike every other episode of the series in that it is in a more classical style Looney Tunes format (as opposed to more like a sitcom as the rest of the series is). It's about Bugs and Daffy fighting over a girl at a resort, with almost exclusively slapstick comedy, brighter colors to its artstyle, and an ending where Daffy gets turned into a baby, then adopted by an old hillbilly duck as his son. This is because it is actually using a script from the cancelled series that The Looney Tunes Show was retooled into by Executive Meddling, Looney Tunes Laff Riot.
• The Loud House: In "The Butterfly Effect", Lincoln accidentally breaks Lisa's science equipment with a yo-yo. He decides to not tell her, which results in the family slowly tearing apart. This includes, but not limited to, Leni suddenly becoming a genius, Luna leaving the family to go on world tour with a rock star, Luan becoming an activist, Lucy becoming a vampire and Lori breaking up with Bobby to start dating Clyde, Lincoln's best friend. Fortunately, the episode is revealed to be a hallucination due to Lisa's spilled chemicals.
• The Mask: The Animated Series is already a bizarre series, but "Flight as a Feather" was very weird, even by the show's cartoony standards. Stanley didn't appear in the episode (making it seem as if The Mask is his own character), there's no villain (unless you count Cookie BaBoom and Walter), it had a Random Events Plot, and, of course, the Cookie BaBoom sequence is the most risque scene ever committed to 1990s animation.
• Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) had more than its share of camp, but by far the most bizarre and memorable example is "Curse of the Lion Men" — a passing comet awakens a group of ancient mummified lion-men who aim to conquer the world by turning every non-robotic human on the planet into lion creatures using Eye Beams. No, it doesn't make any more sense in context.
• Mickey Mouse (2013):
  • The episodes that take place in Ludwig Von Drake's lab tend to be very strange episodes in a show that's already a rather Denser and Wackier take on Mickey Mouse and friends, but Season 5's "Outta Time" really takes the cake: After Mickey sends Goofy in a random direction toward the restroom while trying to listen to Von Drake, Goofy mistakes a time machine for the restroom and is sent back in time, causing everyone to gradually start morphing into Goofy clones due to the butterfly effect. Mickey and Donald then take another time machine to get Goofy back before time is irreversibly "goof"ed up, where they find Goofy in prehistoric times having become king over a bunch of neanderthals. The fracas ends with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy safely returning to the present and even preventing Goofy from needing the restroom in the first place so the mess isn't doomed to repeat itself...but then it turns out that they accidentally left Donald's butt (which was constantly falling off after an accident with a sandwich-slicing laser in Von Drake's lab) in the past, and the short ends with everyone's heads morphing into duck butts.
  • "Gone to Pieces" involves Goofy shattering into scattered Goofy bits and pieces after an accident with some roller skates and Mickey and Donald trying all manner of methods to put Goofy back together again with little success (such as inadvertently turning him into a pogo stick, a tower, and then a go-kart) until they solve the problem by having Goofy's accident happen again, but in reverse so Goofy instead turns into one whole Goof instead of breaking to pieces. Unfortunately for Donald and Mickey, the same thing happens to the two of them after Goofy hugs them too hard.
• My Gym Partner's a Monkey had "Robo Frog 3000". The plot has the school board replacing Principal Pixiefrog and the rest of the teachers at Charles Darwin with robots and plan on replacing the students with robots, the teachers and Pixiefrog bringing out a wizard in their trunk to fight them, the school board bringing out a robot wizard that defeats the other wizard, and the robots eventually exploding due to running out of love. Adam and Jake lampshade this while the robots are exploding.
  Jake: Adam?
  Adam: Yeah, Jake?
  Jake: Remember when this show used to be about a human kid going to an animal school?
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • When the show became so unexpectedly popular, there were worries that the show would change to please their new demographic. It therefore comes off as Hilarious in Hindsight that the third episode of season 2 was the truly nuts "Lesson Zero," which dials up the zany to 11, features some staggeringly violent scenes (Fluttershy appears to kill a bear by breaking its neck!^note though it turns out she's just giving it a massage), and gives Twilight Sparkle one of the scariest mental breakdowns on the show.
  • "Power Ponies" is about the Mane Six and Spike becoming superheroes after becoming trapped in Spike's comic book. For one thing, we never heard about comic books in the show's universe before the episode and the superhero aspect is out there considering how the Mane Six have defeated villains in the past.
  • "Slice of Life", the 100th episode, amounts to a completely awesome batshit-insane Fandom Nod-Riddled Fanon Ascending Ship Teasing wild ride... for the Periphery Demographic. As even members of the show's crew have pointed out, the intended audience who aren't familiar with the brony fanbase were probably confused and terrified, though admittedly still entertained. Best part: It was Hasbro themselves who demanded this amount of fan-pandering.
  • "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" is about the Mane Six and Princess Luna fighting Tantabus, a monster who turns dreams into nightmares. The first half of the episode doesn't do much to advance the plot since it digs into the worst nightmares of the Mane Six. The second half is all-out weirdness with all of Ponyville controlling their own dreams to stop Tantabus. In contrast, "Sleepless in Ponyville", "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils" and "Bloom & Gloom" are nightmare-themed, but they're less surreal and the featured characters learn a lesson from Princess Luna in each.
  • "The Saddle Row Review". The setup is very unusual compared to normal episodes with a flashback in another flashback where the Mane Six recall giving interviews to a newspony in a diner, where they retell the event of the episode.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has a surprising amount of these kind of episodes for a show based on something as chill as Winnie-the-Pooh:
  • Arguably the show's strangest episode (and quite possibly the strangest Pooh story ever told, period) is "The Piglet Who Would Be King". After Piglet receives a friendship gift (a box spring) from Pooh, Tigger and Rabbit insist that Piglet return the favor by getting Pooh a gift in return and whisk him away on a surreal journey to a place known as "The Land of Milk and Honey" to find such a gift. The Land of Milk and Honey turns out to be populated by a bunch of mini-Piglets who believe Piglet to be their long-lost king who will restart the flow of honey in the kingdom by sticking the spring Pooh gave Piglet back onto a giant Piglet statue, and the land is thrown into peril when Rabbit and Tigger carelessly remove the "sacred tail" from the statue and cause a volcanic eruption of honey-lava. Making the episode even stranger is the heavy amount of Big-Lipped-Alligator Moments involving bizarre characters and elements that never appear in the episode again and stick-in-the-mud Rabbit acting just as wacky as everyone else (except Piglet and, to an extent, Pooh) for most of the episode.
  • "Cleanliness is Next to Impossible" is an oddly dark adventure, where Christopher Robin, Pooh and the others encounter a fantasy world beneath Christopher Robin's bed. The majority of the plot involves them trying to take down the villain Crud. While it's unusual for a Pooh work to involve a proper villain at all, Crud and his minions, while still goofy, are actually rather menacing and other worldly, making a rather weird Genre Shift against most other laid back Pooh stories.
• The Oggy and the Cockroaches episode "Back to the Past". Instead of the standard Road Runner vs. Coyote plot, it's a double episode supernatural-based Fountain of Youth episode, with the rivalry between the two main groups never coming into play whatsoever.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes is usually wacky, but some episodes stand out from the rest.
  • "We've Got Fleas" features the gang going up against a new, animalistic foe and, after being utterly thrashed in battle, asking Dendy what to do. They feel that they need animal powers too in order to win. So far so normal. Then she informs them that they could gain such powers by being bitten by a were-animal, which would cause them to become were-animals themselves, so they get a nearby elderly fox man to bite them (and are horrified to learn that he enjoys doing so). Their new forms seem useful and fun, and they enjoy being were-animals up until they discover that they now have fleas. In order to solve their new flea problem, they ask Dendy how to reverse the transformation, and she informs them that it's permanent. Seeing how unhappy they are to be animals, Potato invites them to what can only be described as a reverse furry convention where animals (including their new enemy) pretend to be humans in order to have fun and express themselves. They then put on costumes that look like their original appearances (including Rad, who was never human in the first place), having apparently forgotten about the fleas entirely. This episode is completely canon, complete with their new foe (Mikayla) becoming a recurring character, and later episodes referencing the rest of the episode's events; "KO's Video Channel" even shows KO, in his were-puppy form, putting on his human suit.
  • "Let's Watch the Pilot" involve the main three, depicted as Animated Actors, riffing on 'Lakewood Plaza Turbo'. Weird enough, but then it escalates into drama with them acting like total divas.
  • "Let's Not Be Skeletons" is a surreal Very Special Episode about gun control. With no guns. Instead, remotes which can transform people into powerless living skeletons are used as an allegory. Even though one recurring side character is already a skeleton. Once transformed, all of the skeletal characters are identical, except for a few who are still recognizable for some unexplained reason. Many of the characters act at least slightly off, most notably in that practically everyone is extremely trigger-happy, constantly shooting at each other with their, er, remotes. In the end, just as a crying KO shoots Mr. Gar in self-defense, KO wakes up, revealing that it was All Just a Dream. The remotes, however, were real... but KO calls a congresswoman who immediately bans the remotes before they can be sold.
  • "Your World is an Illusion" is about a girl named Holo-Jane opening up K.O.'s eyes to the fact that he's in a cartoon, such as noticing things like the Hit Flash, a Conspicuously Light Patch, Four-Fingered Hands, and such. It leads to K.O. having an existential crisis, but Holo-Jane brings him back down when she realizes that even though his world isn't real, the experiences everyone has in the world are.
  • "Plaza Alone" is an Ageless Birthday Episode... where nearly everyone has disappeared to prepare a surprise party for KO, causing him, Rad, and Enid to get increasingly lonely as they wander the mysteriously empty plaza together. This culminates in their loneliness being represented by having the characters appear in an odd black void, around which time the characters apparently start hallucinating wildly, with the episode devolving into creepy psychedelic imagery in which Rad turns into a hot dog and KO turns into a horse. This is cut off by the revelation that the party is being held in the exact place they'd been in during that sequence, and the others saw them freaking out.
• Peanuts specials:
  • It's Magic, Charlie Brown is definitely something completely different. The plot involves Charlie Brown being inadvertently turned completely invisible after a magic trick performed by Snoopy at a magic show is interrupted, leaving Chuck and Snoopy to have to figure out how to turn him visible again. There is a fantastical energy to the entire plot, as most of Snoopy's magic tricks are shown to actually work (there is nothing that indicates that it's all just a fantasy or dream that Snoopy or someone else is having), and it notably has Charlie Brown getting one over on Lucy by taking advantage of his invisibility to kick that football (though Lucy does get one over on Charlie Brown in turn when the spell wears off just as he's going for another kick, allowing her to pull the football away like she always does). The special is still considered to be just as good as the other specials, but it definitely makes for a noticeably different Peanuts experience that no special/movie before or afterward has tried since (not outside of an Imagine Spot or dream, anyway).
  • It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown. Despite its name, neither Charlie Brown, Snoopy, or any Peanuts characters are in it besides Snoopy's relative, Spike. The plot follows a girl named Jenny who wants to be a dancer, and it's a mix of both live-action and animation (Jenny and the settings are live-action, while Spike is animated). It's obscure and completely out of place for Peanuts.
  • What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown! has Charlie Brown fed up with Snoopy being an "overly civilized, underly dog-ified dog." This leads Snoopy to have a nightmare where he's in a Yukon wolf pack, abused by bigger dogs and his cruel owner. He goes feral and is eventually killed by sinking into an icy lake. Thankfully, it's All Just a Dream, but much Darker and Edgier than you'd expect from Peanuts.
  • Peanuts takes on the 80s breakdancing craze in It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown. It's mostly a Whole-Plot Reference to films such as Flashdance and Saturday Night Fever, but it doesn't have a plot, either. Snoopy takes up disco dancing, and between that is scenes of Lucy and Peppermint Patty singing, until it climaxes in Snoopy having a party with everyone in Sally's class. Peanuts specials are hardly topical, so this one sticks out.
  • It's the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown is noticably Art Shifted, throwing out series tradition with adults who have their faces shown on-screen and even talk. Charlie Brown and friends don't do much in the story, so it couldn't have less to do with Peanuts.
  • What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown? is a memorial for those who died in D-Day, and premiered on Memorial Day. It uses archive news footage and historical recordings. It's a nice, respectful gesture by Schulz, but doesn't feel like it has a place within the series.
• "Woke Up Drunk" from Perfect Hair Forever, which throws out what little continuity the show had in favor of a number of sketches with the characters. This includes having Gerald live in an ordinary house with a bear as his dad, and has Coiffio being the teacher to a class.
• The Pet Alien episode "Planet of the Granvilles", being a Whole-Plot Reference to Planet of the Apes (1968), is bizarre even by the show's usual standards. The plot revolves around Tommy, Dinko, and Gumpers becoming stranded (via malfunctioning toaster) in a strange dimension populated by tiny primitive versions of Granville and a giant, monstrous Melba, which is eventually revealed to be an alternate version of Earth with Tommy's lighthouse being destroyed.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • "Rollercoaster: The Musical". It's essentially a Musical Episode version of the pilot. But there's random stuff going on, and most of the songs and scenes are never mentioned after they occur, and the barrage of cameos in the final song, which itself is a BLAM. It's very self-aware about its Bizarro Episode status. The episode constantly lampshades its repeating of the original episode, as well as the fact that it's incredibly weird even by the standards of the show.
  • "Ferb TV" blows it completely out of the water though. The entire episode just consists of random fictional TV show clips which make little-to-no sense overall.
  • "The Remains of the Platypus" opens with Perry running on a hamster wheel surrounded by artificial lightning, a box filled with a bunch of Buckingham guards and a midget dressed up as an alien dancing to techno music landing on Doofenshmirtz's apartment building saying "joy located", Carl in a cage dressed up as a squirrel, a swelled-up Major Monogram running saying "gimme a high-five! Don't leave me hanging!" It gradually drives its own screw though. And that episode ran backwards like the Seinfeld episode.
  • "Lost in Danville" didn't seem to be one at first, but the ending revealed that everything happened in an alternate dimension, being observed by our Phineas and Ferb. Observant viewers might have noted the subtle clue^note Phineas's shirt has a single extra white stripe in the episode that points that out, and is lampshaded at the end of the episode.
  • All of the Time Shift Weekend episodes ^note "Tri-Stone Area", "Doof Dynasty", "Excaliferb", and "Phineas and Ferb and the Temple of Juatchadoon" as well as "Steampunx", "The Monster of Phineas and Ferbenstein", and "Phineas and Ferb Star Wars" all count as this for starring alternate dimensions and/or time periods of Phineas and Ferb. But bonus points go to "Tri-Stone Area" for having no discernible dialogue, and having stop motion of Dan and Swampy explaining/critiquing the episode.
  • "Mission Marvel" establishes them as being part of one of the Marvelverses. Like any true bizarro episode, this is never mentioned again.
  • "Doof 101" is set in school, abandons all of the show's Once an Episode gags and Catch Phrases, Phineas and Ferb only get a quick cameo, and Doofenshmirtz and Perry take over the A-Plot with the B-Plot now going to a trio of talking bugs who want to make contact with humankind.^note Up to this point, talking animals are reserved for Or Was It a Dream? moments like Candace's zebra, a bit of Nightmare Fuel in the Halloween Episode, or an unremarked-on gag during musical numbers.
  • "Moon Farm" has a plot that's just flat-out random even by the show's standards: Phineas and Ferb discover a missing verse from "Hey Diddle Diddle" in the Dead Sea that states that the milk from the cow that jumped over the moon made the best ice cream ever, and so they take a herd of cows to the moon and plant grass for the cows to graze on there to milk them to make their special moon ice cream. It also features one of the show's trippiest musical sequences.
• Pinky and the Brain has "Plan Brain from Outer Space", where Brain has a pen-pal named Zalgar, who turns out to be a badly dubbed space-man who chases Pinky and the Brain through Area 51 so he can eat their brains. It's exactly as bizarre as it sounds^note The character actually originated from an entirely different show; when it was scrapped, some animation was re-used, explaining the (intentionally?) bad dubbing.
• Early Bob Clampett masterpiece Porky in Wackyland abandons any precept of cartoon rules or logic in favor of random creatures and nonsensical gags.
• While the Popeye cartoons have always had a surreal element to them, there are a few shorts that, while still good in most cases, got flat-out odd by the series' standards:
  • "Popeye Meets William Tell" puts Popeye in the Middle Ages without any of his usual castmates in a very fractured and over the top version of William Tell with a Daffy Duck-esque Tell and surreal gags aplenty.
  • "Popeye Meets Rip Van Winkle" involves Popeye trying to keep a bunch of rowdy elf bowlers from waking up Rip Van Winkle and has little relation to the actual Rip Van Winkle story.
  • "It's The Natural Thing To Do" completely dispenses with both the shorts' usual formula and the fourth wall and involves Popeye, Bluto, and Olive reacting to a complaint from the Popeye Fan Club that there is too much cartoony violence in their cartoons. This leads to the three of them acting comically polite and posh with each other while reiterating that "it's the natural thing to do" throughout before all three of them finally snap and have a full-on brawl in the middle of the house.
  • "Wotta Nitemare" throws back to the wildly surreal early days of Fleischer Studios via a bad dream Popeye is having, wherein all manner of strange and nonsensical things happen.
  • "The Hungry Goat" involves Popeye trying in vain to keep a talking wise-cracking goat from eating his entire battleship.
  • While the plots of the Al Brodax-produced shorts could be all over the place, there are no words to describe "Popeye and the Giant" and the sheer absurdity of its plot. See it for yourself.

• Most Primal (2019) episodes are about the adventures of a neanderthal named Spear and a T-Rex named Fang in a prehistoric world. "The Primal Theory", on the other hand, is about a British historical society in 1890 being attacked by an escaped convict. This episode comes out of nowhere and is only related to the others thematically.
• Quack Pack has the episode "All Hands on Duck", which was about Donald Duck being recruited back into the Navy and later fighting a giant bomber drone. Everyone in this episode besides Donald and Daisy is for some reason a Dogface.
• The Real Ghostbusters has "Chicken, He Clucked". Not only it is one of the few episodes with no ghosts at all, the series' premise is also reversed since it is the supernatural creature of the week (a demon) who asks for the Ghostbusters' help, to get out of a pact he made with a weird (and possibly genuinely insane) man. Basically the man summoned the demon and sold his soul in exchange for the power to get rid of all the chickens in the world, and because of that the demon became the laughingstock of the Netherworld, so he thought the 'Busters could help him somehow. On top of that the weird man is also drawn to look creepier than many of the ghosts and creatures that appeared in the series (lampshaded when Egon uses the PKE Meter to determine he's not a supernatural threat).
• Recess:
  • The episode "Big Ol' Mikey", where after Gretchen uses her Galileo PDA to predict what the gang's future heights are going to be as adults, Mikey thinks he's going to grow up to be fifty feet tall, and a majority of the episode consists of Imagine Spots where the gang are imagining the advantages of Mikey growing huge, and then Mikey having a bad dream about being a giant and destroying a city.
  • "Recess Is Cancelled", in which recess is canceled as part of a government experiment but no one brings it up.^note Not even in Recess: School's Out
  • "Schoolworld" is the only episode with a Sci-Fi feel to it.
• Rick and Morty: Season 4's "Never Ricking Morty". Even for how odd the show usually is, this episode manages to be absolutely off the wall. Rick and Morty are stuck on a train that is a literal Framing Device that forces them to go through anecdotal anthology stories by meeting people who constantly talk about Rick. The episode is almost extremely meta including references to what the fans and the executives are expecting of the show, and how the show refuses to do it.
  • There's also Season 3's "The Ricklantis Mixup", which features almost nothing of the main universe Rick and Morty or their family and peers and focuses instead on the inhabitants of the Citadel of Ricks.
• Rocko's Modern Life:
  • In "Rinse and Spit", Rocko's attempts to help Filbert pass a dental school exam lead to a giant molar rampaging through O-Town.
  • In "Uniform Behavior", Heffer gets a job as a security guard, which results in power going to his head and him harassing his friends. Eventually, during a night patrol of the building, he experiences frightening hallucinations in the style of The Shining.
  • In "Boob Tubed", after Heffer literally gets his brain sucked out by Rocko's new TV, Rocko and Filbert journey into the world beyond the TV snow to retrieve it.
  • The second act of "Cruisin'", where Rocko and Heffer get stuck on a senior's cruise that accidentally travels into The Bermuda Triangle, which turns them old and all the seniors young.
  • The final season has "Fly Burgers", an episode that strays very far from the original concept about "Modern Life", and is just the writers saying "let's throw in as many surreal plot lines as possible". For example, Rocko getting sued by con artist fly Flecko for fake injuries, and when deemed guilty, has to live 30 days as a fly. This shows a rather odd usage of Rocko's catchphrase, "Fly Day is a very dangerous day."
• Rugrats:
  • "In the Dreamtime". We see Chuckie wake from each dream, and supposedly enter the real world, only to discover slowly that he is still dreaming; with strange settings and weird stuff like Spike talking.
  • "Visitors From Outer Space". Tommy and the other babies are abducted by aliens that resemble Stu and Didi, Angelica goes around blowing up planets with a remote for the heck of it before getting stranded on a sand covered planet by an alien fish, the slapstick and physics are more cartoonish than usual (Phil and Lil split the alien's spaceship in two and then back together at one point), and the mess ends with everyone panicking as they fly into the Sun. The episode then turns out to be a dream Tommy was having after Grandpa Lou was raving about alien invasions right before bed...only to show that Angelica is inexplicably still stranded on the desert planet.
• Samurai Jack:
  • "Chicken Jack." The episode is more or less a remake of the previous season's "Jack and the Smackback", but this time, Jack is a chicken instead of a samurai.
  • And "Jack Is Naked". Oh, so much. The Big-Lipped Alligator Moment with the randomly-appearing elephant-headed fairy is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • The Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated episode "Mystery Solvers Club State Finals." It's a bit of a throwback to the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and also features several other Hanna-Barbera characters such as Speed Buggy, Jabberjaw, The Funky Phantom and Captain Caveman. It also features an Art Shift and is a bit goofier in this Darker and Edgier series. Granted, the episode is All Just a Dream, but even during the beginning and ending, it doesn't seem to connect to the show's main storyline (Velma is notably nicer to Scooby).
  • "The Punk Rock Scooby" short from the second Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo series. It starts out normally enough, with Scooby, Shaggy and Scrappy auditioning in a Battle of the Bands contest. Then an alien spaceship comes out of nowhere full of aliens that inexplicably look and act exactly like Scrappy and assume that he is one of their own and has been kidnapped by Scooby and Shaggy. And that's only the beginning.
    Alien: Ta-ta-ta-ta! Plutonian Power.
  • While The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo can be considered a bizarro series, the episode with Time Slime takes the cake. It starts normally with the gang combatting Time Slime, only to go south when Scooby gets sent into a time vortex where he witnesses his own birth. Things get kinda bizarre from there.
• Sealab 2021 had a couple that were strange even by that show's standards. "Waking Quinn" involved Dr. Quinn getting repeatedly electrocuted into unconsciousness, leading to really bizarre dreams. Another episode is actually titled "Bizarro" and involves the crew being kidnapped by Bizarro versions of themselves (which is where the previous page image came from), but that's par for the course on Sealab. And still another subverts the trope by being a line-for-line remake of one of the original Sealab 2020 shows, with all the melodrama that implies. Until the very end, when the Aquarius runs into Sealab, blowing both up.
• The Secret Show is already a weird show, but even by its standards, "Catch The Birdman" is pretty weird. The episode deals with Victor and Anita having to swap roles with Professor Professor and Changed Daily after the latter two accidentally get demoted following a training exercise. Meanwhile, they also have to deal with a bit-part actor called Birdman who's threatening to leak their training film to the public.
• Sheep in the Big City was already a comedic and bizarre show, but managed to outdo itself in the field of zaniness in the season one finale "To Sheep, Perchance to Dream". The episode starts with various unusual events (such as General Specific suddenly turning into a sheep as well as Sheep and Swanky getting married against the wishes of Swanky's owner Lady Richington) being explained away as actually being dreams the characters are having, much to the annoyance of the show's narrator Ben Plotz. It eventually leads to a Gainax Ending where Sheep turns out to be evil, is actually able to talk, and starts using Ben Plotz in his narrator-powered ray gun. Ben Plotz is left pleading that everything is just a dream, but he wakes up to find to his horror that his status as the fuel source for an evil sheep's ray gun is all too real. Quite tellingly, the second season acted as if the events of this episode never happened.
• A short episode of Sid the Science Kid, called "Where Did I Come From?" involves Sid asking his parents the eponymous question, suggesting that Sid wants to find out where babies come from. But then Sid's parents direct Sid to walk through the kitchen wall if he wants to find out. Sid does so, and ends up clipping through the wall into the real world at the Jim Henson Company studio in LA, where he learns about how his own TV show is made and how he and the rest of the show's cast are animated using mo-cap and puppeteers. Afterwards, Sid phases back into his own world, completely freaked out and declaring to his parents he never wants to think about what he just saw again. His parents then pull out an honest-to-goodness neuralyzer and erase their son's memory of what he saw, restoring the show's status quo as Sid, no longer remembering the experience, happily goes out to find his friends. The episode was (rather logically) never shown on television.
• The Simpsons has quite a few. What's weird is that they began as somewhat ordinary episodes and quickly went into weirdness.
  • "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes": Homer starts a website that reveals peoples' secrets, but when nobody wants to get near him when they find out who he is, he makes up lies. However, one of those lies turns out to be true and he gets sent to a Prisoner-esque island for it. He escapes and fights with a German lookalike of him, but he ends up back on the island, this time with his family accompanying him.
  • "Missionary: Impossible": Homer gets chased by PBS personalities for lying about making a donation to a telethon, so Reverend Lovejoy makes him a missionary and he is sent to a South Pacific island. His antics end up putting him in danger and right when the climax hits its peak, the show stops and it turns out to be a part of a FOX telethon.
  • "Saddlesore Galatica": Homer and Bart train a horse to become a racer with Bart as its jockey. However, the other jockeys turn out to be elves (complete with underground kingdom) and force Homer to throw the race (through a musical number). The episode even calls itself out on being a weird, derivative episode (in the form of Comic Book Guy being an audience surrogate), which led to a lot of real fans branding the episode as the worst ever and some claiming that it's a brilliant work of surrealism and post-modernism.
  • "Moe Goes From Rags To Riches": The main plot revolves around a talking rag voiced by Jeremy Irons telling its story. The rag's sentience is given no explanation, the episode hops time periods with almost no connectivity between segments, and some of the plot points have no basis in reality, but were played perfectly straight. Much like "Saddlesore Galactica", the episode has been panned by critics.
  • "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner": This episode starts out with the Simpsons visiting a Captain Ersatz of Disneyland, but as soon as they visit the "Journey to Your Doom" attraction, a Genre Shift to Science Fiction occurs and the family ends up in an adventure on Rigel 7, the home planet of Kang and Kodos. At the end of the episode, the Simpsons were sent home, but they have second thoughts about returning to Earth, so they instead decide to explore the galaxy in a parody of Star Trek.
  • "The Serfsons" reimagines the show taking place in a fantasy medieval version of Springfield. Unlike "Brick Like Me" (the LEGO episode), it doesn't turn out to be All Just a Dream.
  • "Lisa the Boy Scout" starts off unassuming enough, with a plot revolving around Lisa joining the Boy Explorers and getting into tensions with Bart as per usual. But soon, the episode keeps getting hijacked by "Psuedo-nonymous", who threaten to devalue the franchise by leaking the lowest-quality content created for the show until they're paid a ransom. Such content includes, but not limited to, Martin Prince actually being an adult undercover cop, Professor Frink marooned on Mars, Principal Skinner hiring a prostitute to act as his ideal mother, yet another Clip Show episode (the show had stopped doing those since Season 13), and a handful of Fandom Nods for good measure (including an alternate ending for "Bart the Daredevil" in which Homer wakes up two days after falling into the gorge and learning he dreamt up the later episodes).
  • There are also various episodes - for instance, "Simpsons Bible Stories", "Simpsons Tall Tales", and "Simpsons Christmas Stories", among others - which consist of three classic tales (either fiction or non-fiction) apiece with substantial artistic liberties taken and starring the Simpsons and friends. Usually these episode start fairly normally, only to move on to the Simpson family either imagining or telling stories which comprise the majority of the episode.
  • More typical examples of bizarro episodes (i.e. ones that don't start out as "normal" episodes but deliberately break the fourth wall) are "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase."
  • And, obviously, the Treehouse of Horror episodes.
• South Park:
  • "Not Without My Anus." Purposeful bizarro episode on the part of the writers as an April Fools' Day joke, delaying the conclusion of "Cartman's Mom is a Dirty Slut" in favor of a ridiculous Terrance and Phillip story.
  • "Pip" is based off the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations with only one recurring character (who was disappearing from the show at this point) as the focus. It becomes even more bizarre when the Genesis Device is introduced and throws off the source material. Everyone working on the episode save for Matt Stone hated it, and the episode has been rerun on Comedy Central once in a blue moon.
  • "Woodland Critter Christmas" is also off of the board. Justified because it's actually just a bizarre story made up by Cartman. This is brought up in the Imaginationland trilogy.
    Jason: Man, I do not want to meet the kid that dreamt THOSE things up.
  • "Goth Kids 3: Dawn Of The Posers" is a satire of Emo, Dark and Goth subcultures that came out about five years too late. It is centered on the Goth Kids, features no appearance from the four boys or other main characters, has the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe acting like a stereotypical whiny Emo teen, and the whole episode turns out to be a prank TV show gag at the end. Also, it was the first time in 17 years that South Park missed the schedule, so many viewers were disappointed to wait a week for such a weird, pointless episode.
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast is already an absurd show with quite a few moments of Negative Continuity, but then there's episodes like "Brilliant Number One" that don't even pretend to make any sense (Space Ghost acts like even more of a Cloudcuckoolander than usual, the entire episode, bar the first 10 seconds or so, are presented in black-and-white with Letterboxing, a humming sound plays in the background throughout the whole thing, accompanied by incomprehensible subtitles, the theme song is replaced with a number from Rammstein, and characters occasionally undergo brief Art Shifts like being presented in Squiggle Vision.) And then there's "Brilliant Number Two", which is literally "Brilliant Number One" with different subtitles and altered sound mixing.
• SpongeBob SquarePants has a few examples:
  • Season 1 has "SB-129", where Squidward accidentally gets locked up in the freezer, and he ends up freezing in there for 2,000 years. The episode is then about him navigating through time, as he ends up in a future where everything is chrome, teaching prehistoric versions of SpongeBob and Patrick how to jellyfish, and even ending up at the end of time. Squidward does make it back home, but he’s greeted to SpongeBob and Patrick annoying him as usual.
  • Season 3's "I Had An Accident", the episode where SpongeBob breaks his butt and becomes a recluse, gets especially weird at the end, where a plot by Patrick and Sandy to get SpongeBob out of his house ends with a gorilla who beats up SpongeBob and rides away on a pantomime horse. The episode ends with a live-action family seeing the end of the episode looking quizzically at the camera.
  • Season 5's "Spongehenge" is an all-around odd episode in terms of plot and tone; it starts out with SpongeBob discovering that his holes make music that attracts jellyfish when the "wind" blows through them, which annoys the entire town. In response, SpongeBob leaves Bikini Bottom and creates a number of large obelisks shaped like himself so the jellyfish will be drawn to them instead of himself. Much like "I Had An Accident", it also has an extremely bizarre conclusion where SpongeBob returns to Bikini Bottom...only to discover that it has been been destroyed in the time that he has been gone, to his horror. The scene then skips several thousand years later as aliens tour SpongeBob's statues of himself and wonder what their purpose is.
  • Season 10's "Whirly Brains" has an especially bizarre plot by the show's standards, as it involves SpongeBob and Patrick flying their own brains out of their heads and sending them zipping around Bikini Bottom using the eponymous novelty, whereupon they get captured by an old man catching all of the brains of those using Whirly Brains and necessitating a rescue by Sandy.
  • Most fans will agree that even the oddest of episodes of the show pale in comparison to Season 7's "Squidward in Clarinetland". It starts off innocently enough up until Squidward climbs into SpongeBob's locker at the Krusty Krab while looking for his missing clarinet. Upon doing so, Squidward enters an incredibly surreal alternate dimension seemingly contained within the locker, seeing and being accosted by such things as a giant eagle head that eats him alive, malicious doppelgangers of himself, a pinball machine being used by a giant Patrick that Squidward gets trapped in, among other crazy things and landscapes. The entire sequence is considered to be a Mind Screw of the highest order, especially since "Clarinetland" and its existence isn't given much explanation within the episode at all.
  • Season 12's "FarmerBob" could rival "Squidward in Clarinetland" in terms of weirdness. SpongeBob and Patrick milk a cow-jellyfish, raise Old Man Jenkins' barn after they accidentally destroy it (as in, they take care of the barn until it grows into an adult barn), and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The weirdest part is unarguably when alien farmers suddenly drop by and throw a party, and the episode ends with Mr. Krabs, SpongeBob, and Patrick getting abducted. Yeah...
  • The episode immediately before "FarmerBob", Season 11's "The String", is also quite weird. The premise is simple enough, SpongeBob finds a loose thread on Squidward's shirt and starts pulling it. But the pulling of the thread leads to more than just unravelling Squidward's shirt, it unravels the clothes of everyone else in the Krusty Krab, then it starts unravelling decidedly non-thread-based objects, like the vehicles, buildings, Bikini Bottom, a fisherman, Bikini Atoll, and ultimately, the universe. Then Patrick appears and pulls at a loose thread in SpongeBob's shirt, unravelling him and then using him as floss.
  • "SpongeBob In RandomLand" (also from Season 12) takes this to another level of Surrealism. In it, SpongeBob and Squidward are sent to deliver a Krabby Patty to the titular location. How do they get there? By just walking randomly. Then suddenly, they are teleported to the dimension where everything doesn't follow the rules of real life and anything could happen.
  • Season 11 episode "Cuddle E. Hugs" has another plot that's odd even by the show's usual standards, involving SpongeBob and later almost everyone in Bikini Bottom all hallucinating a giant hamster that starts out friendly but then tries to eat everybody after they all eat from the same rotten Krabby Patty, and ends on one of the most confusing Gainax Endings this side of "Doin' Time" to boot.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: "Spider With a Top Hat" takes place mostly within some kind of pocket dimension where all the creatures Star summons with her wand (like the narwhals from her "Mega Narwhal Blast") live. The eponymous Spider With a Top Hat makes his living entertaining the other creatures, but dreams of being able to help Star in combat as well. Just when it seems his hopes are in vain, Star summons the Spider into battle against a foe that's beaten every other spell Star could throw at it, some kind of monstrous wolf that has her and Marco pinned down in a one-room cabin. The Spider's hat turns into a Gatling gun seemingly out of nowhere (apart from a joke where a fellow monster told him he had "the hat of a warrior" when he meant to say "the heart of a warrior"), which he uses to fight off the wolf monster and save the day. Suddenly, the room they're in goes back to normal, with no sight of the fierce battle that had just taken place aside from Star and Marco looking rather beat up. Fans were debating for days whether it was All Just a Dream, a ploy on Star's part to cheer up the Spider With a Top Hat, some kind of Holodeck Malfunction, or what.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • Season 3 has the Mortis trilogy of episodes. The basic plot is that Obi-Wan, Anakin and Ahsoka get stranded on a surreal planet whose only three inhabitants — Father, Son and Daughter — are the living embodiments/avatars/personifications of the Balance of the Force, the Dark Side and the Light Side, respectively. During the course of the episodes, Anakin learns more about his apparent role as the Chosen One, and the Son seeks to escape Mortis, which would have potentially disastrous consequences for the rest of the universe. The events and characters of this story arc are seldom referenced again, although it does come up in a much later episode, when Yoda asks Anakin about his encounter with Qui-Gon Jinn on Mortis after he himself has been hearing Qui-Gon's voice.
  • In Season 4 there's "Mercy Mission" and "Nomad Droids" — episodes that focus on R2-D2 and C-3PO in their own misadventures when they get separated from the army. The episodes pay homage to various works like Alice in Wonderland, The Lord of the Rings, Gulliver's Travels, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Real Steel. Also possibly an homage to the 1980s Star Wars: Droids cartoon, which contained many BLAMs if not entire episodes (C-3PO blinking and sprinting, R2-D2's hammerspace gadgets and breakdancing).
• Steven Universe:
  • "Garnet's Universe", where Steven has an extended Imagine Spot depicted in a mix of various Shonen anime and retro gaming animation styles that features Garnet and her talking frog and bunny friends going on a Cliché Storm of an adventure to fight an evil fox man who has the same voice actor as Lars. It's about as far from the main style of the show as possible, but some fans love it for exactly those reasons.
  • The April Fools' Day crossover with Uncle Grandpa, "Say Uncle", is this (at least for the former show, this kind of stuff is mostly normal for the latter). It breaks the fourth wall, has lots of Zany Cartoon gags, and is non-canon (Uncle Grandpa even tells Steven, and by proxy the audience, "Don't worry, bro, none of this is canon"). The episode includes Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet all getting stuck in a Void Between the Worlds, with Steven going to Uncle Grandpa's world. It ends with Uncle Grandpa reading a check-list of classic Cartoon Network characters (such as those from The Powerpuff Girls and Ed, Edd n Eddy) he has visited, with the only one unchecked being Clarence, possibly foreshadowing to another bizarro crossover. And to add more weirdness into the mix, UG's checklist contains one show that predates everything else on the list and nobody expected would show up — SWAT Kats.
  • "Know Your Fusion", where Steven and Amethyst introduce Pearl and Garnet to their fusion Smoky Quartz, resulting in the other two forming Sardonyx and taking the conversation to her own room in the temple, which she treats like a talk show. There's fourth wall breaking jokes aplenty, and unlike the previous two, this one is fully canon.
• Steven Universe: Future: "A Very Special Episode" turns into this at the end when it's revealed that the entire episode has apparently been part of a Show Within a Show hosted by Sunstone. It is ultimately left ambiguous how much of the episode actually happened, and none of it might have been real.
• In Stickin' Around, every day is a day at the bizarro considering that most of an episode happens in the main character and her friends' imaginations.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) has the three-part season 5 (and, effectively, the series) finale, "Mutant Apocalypse". Essentially a Mad Max parody, it was set several decades in the future, had a very different tone from the rest of the series, included no established characters besides the turtles and their pets (except a brief appearance of Casey's skull), didn't address April's fate at all, and tied up none of the dangling plot threads.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • As funny and clever as it may be, the episode "Fractured" feels like this. We learn that there's a whole dimension that exists just for Robin and then the Robin from that dimension (Larry) breaks his finger and everything becomes chaotic. It's hard to believe that no one talks about that ever again. It's possible that he's supposed to be from the 5th dimension, like other DC characters such as Mister Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite. Apparently, that episode was called back to in Teen Titans Go!, and there was an issue where Larry brings along the Larry versions of the rest of the Titans.
  • Teen Titans had at least one completely insane episode per season, and the tone of the average episode wasn't much less wacky. If anything the episodes which focused on continuity and drama were the ones out of place. "Fractured", "Mad Mod"^* Mod traps the Titans in a deranged school made of trippy backgrounds and Bizarrchitecture. There's also an extended Scooby-Dooby Doors scene set to Puffy AmiYumi. It all turns out to be holograms. Somehow., "Bunny Raven/How To Make a Titanimal Disappear"^* The Titans end up in Mumbo's hat, where he's an all-powerful Reality Warper and turns them into Funny Animals (and Beast Boy into a lamp)., "Mother Mae Eye"^* The titular villain hypnotizes the team into thinking she's their mother, and uses that to ruin their crime fighting and eventually try to eat them. The audience isn't told any of this until about halfway through the episode, either., and "Episode 257-494"^* Control Freak causes the Titans to become Trapped in TV Land. Fourth wall breaks and general insanity ensue. Well, the last one was referenced in the big finale, when Control Freak was using the lightsabers he got from TV Land. Oddly enough, most Bizarro Episodes are right before the season finale. Going from a deranged Hansel and Gretel Whole-Plot Reference to Raven fulfilling her destiny and ending the world, or from the aforementioned Larry episode to Terra picking off the team one by one led to some absolutely beautiful Mood Whiplash and gave the show its signature schizophrenic tone.
  • A good rule of thumb was this: if the opening Theme Tune was in Japanese, as opposed to the usual English, you were about to see some weird shit. Especially when the one singing in Japanese is Larry. Except "Nevermore"- though that one is weird for a solid chunk in the middle, it's less "crazy and funny" weird and more "Mind Screw with a side dose of horror" weird, and the central plot about Raven fighting her Enemy Within is serious.
  • "Fear Itself" can function as a fairly good bait-and-switch in terms of this. The episode starts out silly, the first part being the debut of Control Freak, where the Titans fight him in a video store and he brings things like candy to life and turns them evil. Then things get dark.
  • "Employee of the Month" where Beast Boy gets a job at a fast-food restaurant. But once inside, he discovers that the restaurant is both a facade and the place of origin of the UFOs: an alien conqueror made of living tofu, aka The Source, and his creations, the Bobs, are trying to catch as many cows as they can to provide power for their technology and blow up the Earth upon completion of the operation, just out of spite. Beast Boy interrogates the Source how he can defeat the Bobs and shut down the self-destruction device, the tofu alien refuses to talk so Beast Boy threatened to eat him for lunch. After The Source was smothered with BBQ sauce, it confesses. With the information the Source has given him on their weakness, which just turns out to be water, Beast Boy is able to single-handedly defeat the Bobs. Then a whole herd of cows suddenly appears out of thin air around the other Titans (Robin asks "Can this day get any weirder?"). Then as Beast Boy explains to the others all the weird events that occurred, Cyborg then gobbles up the Source.
    Robin: So, what happened to the alien leader?
    Beast Boy: Oh, he's in the fridge.
    (Everyone turns and looks dumbfounded as Cyborg has gobbled up the Source)
    Cyborg: What?
    (Episode ends)
• Teen Titans Go!:
  • "Puppets, Whaaaaat?": Robin gets so mad at the other Titans he turns them into puppets... and things just get weirder after that.
  • "Mouth Hole": After Robin's inability to whistle messes up the Titan's latest mission, they try to teach him how to do it. Simple enough, but after their attempts fail Raven sends Robin to an ancient fortress to find the "Master Of Whistles", who turns out to be, of all things, an Expy of Mrs. Potts. She then teaches him to whistle- using hot sauce.
  • "Smile Bones": Cyborg and Beast Boy eat so much that their over-sized stomachs come to life and wreak havoc on the city.
  • "Kicking a Ball and Pretending to Be Hurt": The Titans discover that all the soccer balls in the world are, in fact, inhabited by soccer trolls that use their magic to make the game of soccer interesting, because nobody would care about it otherwise. At the end of the show, it's revealed that bowling balls contain magical turkeys for the same reason.
  • "Cartoon Feud": Control Freak sucks the Titans into their TV and forces them to play Family Feud in order to prevent their show from being cancelled. Yes, actual Family Feud, not a parody of the show. And who are their opponents on Family Feud? Mystery Inc.. It's basically as close to a canon Crack Fic as you can get.
  • "Curse of the Booty Scooty": Robin's butt falls off, and he has to go retrieve it in a secret cavern full of disembodied butts. It's even weirder in context.
• Thomas & Friends: "Rusty and the Boulder." Rusty and the other engines are threatened, stalked, and eventually chased by an apparently sentient boulder that has a human face. Despite the seemingly supernatural activities that Boulder performs, none of it is ever explained in detail. This episode is widely considered to be weirdly terrifying.
• Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Mr. Popular's Rules of Cool" isn't this in its entirety, but the short "Slugfest" contained within it is a rather bizarre one by the standards of the show. The nearly plot-less episode involves Plucky and Hamton being obsessed with a TMNT-Expy called Immature Radioactive Samurai Slugs and going around dressed as said slugs, whereupon they get in one odd situation after another (only being tied together by the boys being stuck in their costumes) with things getting increasingly weirder and weirder all the while until it gets to the point where the boys are now being chased by the show's salt-themed Big Bad (who inexplicably turns out to be Real After All) into a literal Elk's Lodge in the middle of a desert whose members end up abducting said Big Bad. To top things off, the episode ends with Plucky melted by salt even though his and Hamton's costumes were clearly shown to just be costumes up to that point. It all adds up to a rather odd and borderline nonsensical experience.
• The Tom and Jerry cartoon Blue Cat Blues is notable in how un-T&J-like it is. In an otherwise Slapstick Gag Series, this cartoon stands out because it's entirely Played for Drama, heavy on plot, Tom and Jerry are friends and are both portrayed as entirely sympathetic, the short is narrated by Jerry (who is voiced by Paul Frees here), and it has a tragic Downer Ending where Tom and Jerry are Spurned into Suicide together.
• Events of the Total Drama Island episode "Camp Castaways" are never mentioned outside of the episode's recap, and the real twist is that there was no challenge in that episode.
• Total DramaRama:
  • DramaRama was always wackier than its predecessor, but "Tiger Fail" may take the cake. In particular, the ending where Gwen and Cody spend 78 years playing the quiet game just to settle what flavor ice cream they will get. Gwen ends up winning after Cody dies, when she's rewarded with her tiger tail ice cream that she and several of the other kids spent nearly eight decades waiting on, she is disappointed claiming that chocolate is actually better. This obviously won't stick.
  • The episode "Invasion of the Booger Snatchers" counts as well since it involves Harold trying to defeat a hostile alien worm from taking over the minds of his friends and Chef. While the show has dabbled with the concept of aliens in World Tour, having them become a major plotline can be seen as weirder than normal.
• The Transformers:
  • Two episodes ("Sea Change" and "A Decepticon Raider in King Arthur's Court") randomly feature fantasy concepts like magic and dragons in what is otherwise an exclusively sci-fi cartoon. "Sea Change" counts especially, given its bizarre plot involving Seaspray falling in love with a shapeshifting mermaid. The events in both episodes are never referenced or alluded to ever again, in the show itself or in any supplementary material.
  • "Prime Target", in which Optimus gets hunted by an outlandish billionaire Great White Hunter who inexplicably has access to technology beyond anything anyone else on Earth had at the time, including the Autobots. Highlights include a giant lizard and robot spider, the Autobots watching a soap opera on TV, Astrotrain and Blitzwing turning into a pair of bumbling goofballs, and Optimus Prime saying boobies in what is possibly the greatest moment in television history.
  • Less extreme than the previous examples is "The Girl Who Loved Powerglide", in which Powerglide falls in love with a human woman, the Decepticons' evil scheme is foiled by jewelry, and a bizarre ending shows Powerglide with an LED heart in his chest. Not only is it never mentioned again, but if taken as canon the episode accidentally turns Powerglide into a borderline adulterer, as a previous episode had established him as being in a committed relationship with Moonracer.
• Ultimate Spider-Man episode "Halloween Night at the Museum" would be just another episode of the show if not for the fact that it is randomly a crossover with Jessie (a live-action Disney Channel sitcom), featuring Spider-Man teaming up with Jessie and the Ross kids to prevent Morgana La Fey from returning to wreak havoc on New York. Much like with Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel above, the fact that Jessie (and by extent the Disney Channel Live-Action Universe) is canon to the greater Marvel universe (and that Mrs. Kipling was briefly a dragon instead of a water monitor) is not brought up again on either show.
• VeggieTales: "The Wonderful World of Auto-Tainment" has been called one of the weirdest VeggieTales videos yet. Bob and Larry travel to the future, where they learn entertainment will rely entirely on making characters perform songs and jokes related to subjects picked at random. Some might also find the Aesop randomly tacked on ("Even if your day doesn't go as planned, at least God still loves you!"). The episode started out as a compilation of music videos for songs from VeggieTales-themed soundtracks, though one could easily mistake it for an Ashcan Copy that was released in desperation due to its nonsensical narrative, random crossover with 3-2-1 Penguins! (Big Idea's other animated show), and the inclusion of a completely-unrelated animated short that doesn't feature any of the VeggieTales cast.
• The Venture Bros. has this in the form of "Escape to the House of Mummies! Part II". Doctor Venture and Orpheus have an argument over whether science or magic is better and fill out Mad Libs to pass the time. Meanwhile, Brock and the boys are trapped in Egypt with Edgar Allan Poe, Sigmund Freud, and an alternate timeline Brock in scuba gear. The episode ends in the Arctic as one Brock slices open Poe's carcass and puts the freezing Dean inside for warmth. Also, Caligula was there too. And no, none of that makes even the slightest bit of sense. Yes, that title is right. There was no "Escape to the House of Mummies! Part I", and just a preview for "Escape to the House of Mummies! Part III". The point of the episode was to parody instances of one multi-part episode being aired independently as a rerun, leaving viewers with little idea of what is going on.
• Wander over Yonder has "The Void", in which Wander and Sylvia visit a white space (think Michael Crichton's Sphere) where anything either of them dream up comes immediately true, and the rules of logic and common sense do not apply. It's non-stop insanity from start to finish.
• We Bare Bears: "Icy Nights" features Ice Bear going out at night to get some snacks on his souped-up Roomba, which is then stolen by a gang of tech bros running an underground robot fighting ring. Ice Bear infiltrates it with the help of his previously-unmentioned love interest, a Russian barista named Yana. The episode features references to John Wick, Drive (2011), and Kill Bill, and is played almost totally for drama.
• Wunschpunsch has "Let's break a deal". Not only is it the only episode in the series where no Wunschpunsch is brewed, but it also ends with Tyranha being trapped in the Realm of Magic and Bubonic being completely incapable of rescuing her.
• Young Justice (2010): Season 3 episode 12, "Nigtmare Monkeys". Beast Boy wears a pair of VR Goggles that put him in a trip. Said trip involves his various traumas manifesting themselves as tv shows. He goes through a Star Trek parody full of heroes who had died as crew members on the ship, a version of the show his Former Child Star mom was on as a teen, and finally an Affectionate Parody of Teen Titans Go!, complete with an Art Shift to the style of TTG. The parody is Doom Patrol (one of DC's trippiest properties) with the TTG cast voicing the members of the Doom Patrol. Elasta-girl tells Beast Boy that she's sad his mom (her best friend) died and that she'll try to be the best mom she can be to him but then she says they have to go on a mission where they will all die. They all sing a version of the TTG theme about them dying as Beast Boy tries to save them. The song, in particular, must really be seen to be believed.
• Zig & Sharko: "Bottom's Bottom" has the titular characters falling down a pit and finding a city of weird-looking creatures.

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