Cruel And Unusual Death / Western Animation

• This trope frequently happens to Master Shake and Carl in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, especially Carl. Some of Carl's deaths include getting his arms sawed off, his skin ripped off, shot by lasers, shredded alive by an electric toilet bowl, squeezed until his head pops off, and mauled by vampire bats.
• In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, The Spectre takes minor criminal Professor Achilles Milo, turns him into cheese, and releases the group of rats he had mind-controlled. Do the math.
• Many of the deaths on Celebrity Deathmatch count as such. Having your entire skeleton pulled out through your mouth, being sliced to pieces by a giant bladed rotary fan, being burst open like a pinata, being cut up into paper dolls, having your nipples ripped off before having your internal organs squeezed out through the holes that were once occupied by them, having your eye stabbed out by someone's erect penis... the list goes on. They can get away with the level of violence by always pointing out in the disclaimer at the beginning of the show, "It's just clay!"
• In The Cuphead Show!'s episode "The Devil and Ms. Chalice", the Devil gives Chalice a preview of what would happen if she can't return the favor of their deal by getting the cup brothers' souls: He shoots a dark ghastly spirit out of his pitchfork to consume her a la Raiders of the Lost Ark; then she goes through an agonizing form of Rapid Aging with her still conscious as her body starts to become brittle, decompose, and fall apart from her bones, screaming as her face and hands and whole self melt away and crumble into dust in a manner similar to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (before the Devil pulls out an Alas, Poor Yorick on her skull and brings her back to life). Even Henchman lampshades this terrifying nature while he and Stickler are watching:
  Henchman: Uh, jeez. This seems unnecessarily graphic.
• In the Family Guy episode "Mr. and Mrs. Stewie'', Stewie's new Affably Evil friend Penelope kills a kid that pushed Stewie by giving him a piece of taffy laced with superglue, which glues his throat shut and make him choke to death. Once he's dead, Stewie chimes in with simply "Don't push".
• Invincible (2021)
  • Omni-Man's first victim is his teammate Red Rush, who he kills by crushing his head with his bare hands. Unfortunately for Rush, his powers work by slowing his perception of time to a crawl, meaning what was already a horrible way to go out was made even worse as he could feel his skull slowly collapsing around his brain and his eyes bursting out of his face as his futile attempt to escape resulted in his hands being shattered into a broken mess against Omni-Man's torso.
• Though there were quite a few different deaths in the One-Episode Wonder Korgoth of Barbaria, nothing matches the death of a Giant Mook named Scrotus, who gets interrupted in the middle of a wonderful To the Pain/Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon speech. After the title character is unimpressed by the overly long speech, he proceeds to dish out a brutal murdering by ripping half of the mook's skin off from the ponytail straight down, tossing a full glass of alcohol into the godawful wound, then setting the alcohol on fire.
• The Legend of Korra: Season 3 really ramps up the disturbing deaths.
  • The Earth Queen's is breathtaking: Zaheer murders her by pulling the air out of her lungs, essentially suffocating her. Viewers are even given the lovely imagery of the Queen's eyes bulging and going bloodshot from lack of oxygen while she gasps for breath.
  • P'li's death is mind-blowing: While Lin distracts her, Su metalbends a piece of armor around her head, just as P'li's about to use her combustionbending. Effectively, Your Head Asplode, but given a Gory Discretion Shot. At least she went quickly, unlike the Earth Queen.
  • Ming-hua's is positively shocking: Mako electrocutes her to death with lightningbending when it becomes clear he has no choice but to use lethal force.
  • Ghazan's really brings the house down: After he realises that he can't beat Mako and Bolin together, he elects to collapse the entire cave they're in rather than go back to prison, being crushed by boulders and/or melted by his own lavabending.
• Ninjago has two of these in Season 9.
  • Mr. E, a member of the Sons of Garmadon, gets slowly torn apart by Garmadon until he's reduced to nothing but a pile of limbs, wires and bolts, all while being conscious but unable to stop Garmadon from killing him.
  • The leader of the Dragon Hunters, the Iron Baron, is burned alive by Firstbourne, the very dragon he sought to control. Even after it's done, he can still be heard yelling from inside the molten magma that has encased him, which means getting burned alive didn't kill him straight away, instead he was trapped inside with no food or water, meaning his death will be a slow one.
• Ōban Star-Racers:
  • Canaletto quickly demonstrates how horrible he is to the defiant Avatar Satis, namely by blasting Satis with lightning Palpatine-style, crushing his ribs with psionic force, and finally punting the old Avatar off a ledge. He lives long enough to warn Aikka of the danger, likely only because he's not a vanilla mortal.
  • O, the Floating Cyclops alien racer later takes on his full massive form to fight two of Canaletto's Golems. The monsters rip into O and puncture him repeatably like a giant parade float, bringing him to his knees as his body is ripped apart, and he uses his last moment to detonate his remaining energy, destroying the Golems as well.
  • Canaletto himself gets a nasty but very well-earned end when he's blindsided by Jordan diving into the Pyramid of Power. The "Lord of Purity", who sought to wipe out everything imperfect, is hit by the energy wave that heals Oban, screaming in agony and rage as the light burns his flesh and reduces him to particles.
• Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: Too many instances to count, particularly for Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester the Cat.
  • Perhaps Wile E.'s most famous death making this trope comes in the final segment of the extended (infamous) catapult gag in "To Beep or Not to Beep." After trying in vain to unjam a stuck, loaded catapult (this after he has already been crushed five times by the boulder), which he hopes to use against his longtime nemesis the Road Runner, Wile E. finally does get it freed, but doesn't realize it until he sees himself fast approaching a large rock formation. After an Oh, Crap!, Wile E. and the boulder smash through the formation, crushing the still conscious Coyote; the boulder eventually hits a network of high-voltage power lines and, while he somehow avoids electrocution, Wile E. and the rock are slung all the way back on top of the catapult's arm, which then plops him to the ground, and the boulder finally smashes him.
  • The death that most fits this trope is probably for that bad ol' puddy tat, Sylvester in "Satan's Waitin'," where a satanic version of Hector the Bulldog, exploiting the notion that Cats Have Nine Lives, goads the cat into chasing Tweety into the most violent of situations. He falls from a tall building, is crushed beneath a steamroller, gets scared to death in a fun house, is shot multiple times in a shooting gallery, and slams into a low-clearance entrance of a roller-coaster tunnel. With just one life left, Sylvester decides that chasing Tweety isn't worth it and initially avoids the trope-fulfilling death. Unfortunately, he decides to move into a double-enforced bank safe on the day two crooks use nitroglycerin to blow open the safe and rob it of its contents. After the explosion, Sylvester and the crooks are seen going to Hell. One of the crooks tells his partner that he used too much nitro. "Now he tells him!" mutters a battered and disgusted Sylvester.
    • Other cartoons have Sylvester being beaten to death by an army of bulldogs and mauled to death by lions.
  • The fate that Bugs Bunny humorously faces if he fails his mission in Knighty Knight Bugs. The King threatens to have him "put to the rack, burned at the stake, and beheaded." Bugs laughs at first, but then starts crying when he realizes the king is serious.
  • Other characters — both the regular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies gang, and one-off characters have also suffered cruel deaths. One example of the one-time character suffering this fate was the villain taking a (presumed) Karmic Death in the 1951 short "Chow Hound." Here, a cruel, merciless bulldog uses a cat and a mouse as unwilling patsies in a scheme to obtain dinner from various masters. After holding the cat and mouse hostage for weeks to elicit large rewards for their return to various "masters", the dog purchases a butcher shop and proceeds to eat everything in sight until he is severely bloated and unable to move. At a veterinarian clinic, after two doctors diagnose the case as "a distinct case of overeating", the cat and mouse march in to begin enacting the trope. The cat speaking for the only time in the film menacingly says, "This time, we didn't forget the gravy!" (referring to all the times the cat was forced to obtain dinner only to get smacked because it didn't include gravy); the mouse places a large funnel into the dog's mouth and smiles as the cat begins to pour the contents of an institutional-sized canister of gravy into the funnel. The nervously perspiring dog mutters "no" several times but is helpless to stop them as the picture irises out over the sound of the dog gurgling. It is presumed that sometime after the iris out, the dog slowly suffocates to death. Or pops, this is a cartoon after all.
• Mega Babies: In the episode Ice Ice Baby, the antagonist Tanna Hardly (who was turned into an ugly mutant with ice breath and ice-like physique at the begin of the episode) is executed by the babies in a rather crude, delayed, and humiliating manner; with the level of crudity increasing from begin to end: First, Tanna is beaten up by Meg and Derrick with makeshift ice hockey sticks. Then they knock out the last teeth that remained in her upper jaw after her transformation with a projectile (Buck, whom Tanna had previously frozen). (Nurse Lazlo, who fights her way to the babies, notes that this may not be legal, but it's still fun to watch.) Then all her limbs are shattered one by one. Each time she cries out in pain and screams out of despair that she wanted to win the ice skating championship, but her opponents only mock her. Before they can finish off Tanna (who unsuccessfully tries to crawl away), Meg and Derrick remember that they should first free Buck from his prison. After they succeed, Tanna watches in horror as the remains of her limbs crumble away as well, screaming, "What's happening to me?" Now Buck, who has just been freed, hugs her with a malicious grin, whereupon her upper body also shatters. Tanna's still-living head is eventually dissolved by hot cocoa, which Lazlo accidentally spills on it. Buck, who previously pushed Lazlo from behind, now slides around on Tanna's melted remains, laughing. Compared to her ridiculously low level of wickedness and the low severity of her deeds, this is a pretty cruel and disgusting punishment.
• This was averted in Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero but it's hard to overlook the fact that Professor Evil Professor intended to have the heroes dropped in acid, disintegrated by a disintegration ray, reintegrated by a reintegration ray and pressed into decorative cubes.
• The Perils of Penelope Pitstop in general is a very lighthearted show, but it’s premise The Hooded Claw trying to kill Penelope in very juicy, gruesome ways. Among them are: feeding her to crocodiles, mummifying her alive and impaling her on a harpoon. Of course these attempts always fail and the worst that comes from them are Amusing Injuries.
• Played for Laughs quite frequently in Rick and Morty:
  • Vance attempts an Air Vent Escape in Season 3, but is cut in half by booby traps and the corpse continues to rattle around inside the vent until someone else stops it.
  • The Season 1 episode Meeseeks and Destroy begins with alternate versions of the Smith family dying as the skin melts off of their faces.
• The Simpsons: Part and parcel of the Show Within a Show Itchy and Scratchy, almost always the former inflicting it on the latter. Some of the nastier ways Scratchy's died include being chopped from the inside by an army of tiny Itchies until he crumbles to dust, being sliced in half by a planet's rings and having his head popped by Explosive Decompression, being turned into hundred-dollar bills with one of them being burned by a millionaire dog to light his cigar, being stabbed in the chest by a broken bottle and bleeding to death, and being spun around so quick, he's Stripped to the Bone.
• South Park: Chef's death, from the episode "The Return of Chef" is solid terror and fits firmly into this trope: first burned by fire, then falling onto some rocks, then being impaled on a stick, then a bear and a cougar begin to dismember his face and body, ripping an arm and a leg off. Worse, in an attempt to save him, the Super Adventure Club members shoot him accidentally. Plus Chef craps himself.
  • Kenny. Oh man, where to begin... He gets eaten from the inside out by rats while he's still alive, swells up and explodes due to a chemical reaction caused by antacid tablets, and has died slowly and painfully from chickenpox, syphilis, the plague AND muscular dystrophy. But the worst has to be his death in the movie. He gets lit on fire, salt is literally poured on his wounds, is disemboweled by the very doctors who were trying to save him, and his entire chest explodes due to his heart being replaced by a baked potato. The fact that it's unpleasant for the audience to watch on top of that makes it even more cruel and unusual.
  • Just to make things worse, the Mysterion arc reveals that his Born-Again Immortality ability means that he remembers every single one of his deaths so far. Ouch.
  • In "Reverse Cowgirl", Clyde's mom falls ass-first into a toilet as it's flushing and the suction rips the organs out of her body.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Riff Tamson dies when Lee-Char shoots an explosive knife stabbed in his shoulder, blowing him to pieces before we see his bleeding body parts float down. Seriously, the only plausible reason they got away with putting this on kids’ television is because he’s technically a fish.
• Superjail! is all about this trope. Just watch any episode for really horrible, cruel and unexpected deaths.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), Spy Roach gets hit by an energy drill, causing him to expand until he explodes.
• Blurr's death in Transformers: Animated. He was crushed into a cube for crying out loud! And that was after he found out that his "boss" so-to-speak, was a double agent. Worse, concept art showed the cube with a still-glowing Spark.
• Also averted in Wander over Yonder albeit nearly played straight. The finale really drives Dominator's sadism home by having her plan (and very nearly execute onscreen) a horrific death for Sylvia: namely impaling her with the massive drill she uses to destroy planets.

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