Cutting The Knot / Western Animation

Cutting the Knot in Western Animation.

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• Action Man (2000): Here's a riddle: you're in a plane, there's a time bomb that's going to go off in less than a minute, and you're not sure what wire to cut to stop it. What do you do? Well, you can do what Grinder did, and throw the bomb off the plane to explode harmlessly in midair—hard to argue with those results!
• Adventure Time:
  • In the episode "Mystery Dungeon", Ice King, Lemongrab, Tree Trunks, Shelby and NEPTR wake up in a dungeon not knowing how they got there, each ending up solving trials related to their expertise. It turns out Ice King was behind the whole thing. He kidnapped them all to help him get through and the last trial was meant for BMO to hack into an electronic door, but Ice King accidentally kidnapped the wrong robot. NEPTR being a robot programmed to throw pies, he throws a pie at the door, shorting it out.
  • Earlier episode "Dad's Dungeon" had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it one. The last challenge to get the demon sword required Finn and Jake to slay the Eldritch Abomination to get the key off its wrist. Finn instead breaks the chains around the sword and uses it to kill the monster.
• During a story arc on Archer, Ray and Kreiger are attempting to disarm a missile filled with nerve gas. Unable to shut it off, Kreiger points out that the missile doesn't have any actual explosives in it and the only dangerous part is the nerve gas itself, so they just rip the nerve gas out and let the missile launch.
• On The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes Yellowjacket has to disarm a Kree bomb. He waits until the last moment, then he just shrinks the bomb so that all it blows up are a few molecules.
  Agent Brand: Why didn't you do that in the first place, why'd you wait?!
  Yellowjacket: (grins) I just wanted to see the look on your face.
• Avengers Assemble: During his first confrontation with the Avengers, Thanos tries to lift Mjolnir. Naturally, he fails. So he just decides to lift Thor and slam him into the hammer instead.
• Batman: The Animated Series: This is often how Riddler's complex puzzles and deathtraps are solved.
  • His debut episode involves a re-creation of a video game maze, which Batman bypasses by hacking the controls of the flying guardian; later, when faced with a robot minotaur, Bats orders the same guardian to ram it.
  • In "What is Reality?", he lures the heroes into a virtual reality simulation by trapping Commissioner Gordon's consciousness inside it. When they get to the center, they discover that their goal is inside a Baxter's box. Batman's solution? Turn his hands into hammers and break the damn thing, referencing an earlier comment by Robin:
    Robin: You're looking at the guy who solved the Baxter's box in 37 seconds. Of course this time, I don't have a hammer.
  • Another episode deals with Batman locked in a showroom while a bomb goes off in 10 seconds. Riddler is stumped as to how he survived. Simple, he hid in a nearby reinforced safe.
  • A non Riddler example in "Harley and Ivy" is initially subverted and then played straight. Harley expertly manages to bypass numerous security measures and begins to carefully cut open a glass case containing a massive diamond. However the alarm suddenly goes off and she sees Ivy running out of another room. At this point Harley says "Heck with it." and smashes the case with her gun.
• In an episode of Biker Mice from Mars Vinnie finds himself trapped in the villain's giant robot which also contains a weather control device. Finding himself in the primary control room of the robot Vinnie says "Complex city. Ha, ha, ha this requires concentration and skill." beat "Oh well." He then promptly begins smashing the entire room.
• Dragons: Race to the Edge: In "Eye of the Beholder Part 1", Hiccup and Toothless find a heavily bolted door on a deserted ship.
  Hiccup: Okay, here's the plan...(Toothless blows out the door with a plasma blast)...I like yours better.
• On Duckman, a global conspiracy wants to brainwash Duckman in an attempt to kill Cornfed. Their plan called for a group of ninjas to trick Duckman into pursuing them to their headquarters, where he would be detained and brainwashed. However, Duckman being Duckman, he was barely even aware of the ninjas, much less that he was supposed to follow them. The ninjas huddle to discuss their options, but the leader opts for the direct approach: he takes out a bat, smacks Duckman in the head, and drags him back to their headquarters.
• DuckTales:
  • In one episode, McDuck is thrown in prison with the Duck in the Iron Mask, and tells him "you have to Use Your Head to get out". Iron Mask then busts a hole in a wall with his helmet.
  • In the episode "The Magic Harp", Magica tries to open the safe where she keeps a plot-relevant scroll with a magic spell. When nothing happens, she groans, "Why do I bother?", picks up a sledgehammer, and uses that to get the scroll instead.
  • Later, in the movie Treasure of the Lost Lamp, while breaking into the money bin (now under Dijon's control), the boys fail to navigate their way through a Laser Hallway to the alarm panel. Thus unable to deactivate the alarms, they simply destroy the panel from across the room with their marbles.
• In the DuckTales (2017) episode "Nothing Can Stop Della Duck!", the giant Gilded Man automaton attempts to pull the sword from the stone to use as a weapon. However, he's unable to, because, as Beakley exclaims, "only the one true king of England can wield that sword". The Gilded Man responds by simply ripping the entire stone out of the ground, sword still embedded, and then clobbering Beakley with it.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • "They Call Him Mr. Ed" begins with Edd attempting to time how fast it takes Ed to go through a maze with a box of Chunky Puffs at the exit. Ed simply smashes through every wall in the maze to get to the cereal.
    Edd: Not that you'd understand the geometry involved in such an endeavor, but... that isn't how you go through a maze!
  • In "Ed or Tails," the Eds end up in a race around a U-shaped course to get a jawbreaker. While Eddy and Edd are busy playing tricks on each other, Ed just hops (his shoes were tied together) in a straight path from the start to the finish. He's declared the winner.
• In The Fairly OddParents! episode "Operation F.U.N." when Timmy is tricked into wishing he, Chester and AJ were at a militaristic summer reform school, they have to cross an obstacle course before a rocket destroys the shed that Cosmo and Wanda are trapped in. The last part of the obstacle course is a rock climbing wall, which AJ points out they can simply walk around.
• Futurama:
  • In "My Three Suns," Fry unwittingly drinks what turns out to be an alien emperor (his species can transform into liquid), making Fry, according to the rules of said empire, the new emperor. Unsurprisingly, the job is almost a guaranteed ticket to a rapid assassination, so Fry's friends try to save his life by getting him to cry out the old emperor. All their attempts to make him sad enough to cry fail, with Bender finally meeting with some success by telling him that Leela was brutally murdered by the palace guards, only for Leela—who's not in on the deception—to burst into the room before he's shed more than two tears' worth of liquid emperor. At this point, his friends completely give up on trying to get to him through his emotions and just beat him up until he's cried the emperor out from the pain.
  • In "Hell Is Other Robots," Leela and Fry try to rescue Bender from a Physical Hell for robots, to which the Robot Devil informs them that they can win him back on the exact terms of the fiddle contest from "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," complete with the song's prize of a solid gold fiddle. Fry points out that a solid gold violin isn't very practical as an instrument since it would "weigh hundreds of pounds and sound crummy," but it's ideal for the exact task Leela uses it for when she loses the contest, namely whacking the Robot Devil over the head with it to give them all a moment to bolt.
• Xanatos of Gargoyles attempts to do this towards the end of the City of Stone arc. In order to save the city, Xanatos and Goliath need to get a password for Demona. Demona is locked in combat with her Arch-Enemy, the Anti-Villain MacBeth. Goliath attempts to talk the two into stopping, and only succeeds in getting both of them to attack him. Out of patience, Xanatos tells Goliath "If they won't listen to reason, take them both down. We'll sort it out after", and shoots at both with a laser. It doesn't work because Xanatos somehow manages to miss them from about three feet away.
• Generator Rex: The Providence Agents attack the EVO's at Abyssus (large enemy castle), and the EVO's use the terrain to their advantage, beating all the agents and the elite units, and freeing their captured Allies. Black Knight (the leader of Providence), just has her ships air lift the castle out of the territory, gas the place, and sends in even more troops.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Gideon wants to get revenge on the Pines family by seizing control of the Mystery Shack. In "Little Dipper" he tries to trick Stan into signing away the shack with a false claim that he's won great riches and just needs to sign on the dotted line. Then when that fails, he uses a shrink ray to hold Dipper and Mabel hostage, and eventually tries to turn it on Stan. When that fails, Gideon summons a "dream demon" in "Dreamscaperers" and makes a deal with it to get the code for the safe Stan keeps the Mystery Shack's deed in from his mind. When that fails too, Gideon resorts to the much simpler plan of blowing up the safe with dynamite and stealing the deed himself, which works.
  • In "Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons", Mabel, Grenda, and Stan are on their way to save Dipper and the Author from an evil wizard. One of the wizard's ogre guards tries to distract them with a series of side-quests, but Grenda angrily clubs the guy over the head with an armchair and the party leaves him for dead.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: "The Show That Dares Not Speak Its Name", a parody of Hellraiser, had an evil Rubik's cube which summoned a monster called Pinface when scrambled. The only way to get rid of Pinface is to solve the cube. Grim complains that it took him years to solve it, but Billy's dad happens to find the cube and solves it by taking the stickers off, thus banishing Pinface.
• Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Tony's classmate Happy winds up in the armor and has to deal with a bomb about to go off. Tony doesn't know how to defuse the bomb...so Happy just snaps it in half.
• In one episode of Kaeloo, the main cast come across a barrier that allows Only the Pure of Heart to pass through it. The process of purifying bad thoughts is rather long, so Mr. Cat blasts it open with a bazooka.
• In one Ludwig Von Drake cartoon, Drake explains his method of getting rid of an annoying but probably fixable experiment; he teleports it to who-knows-where with another annoying but probably fixable experiment.
• Looney Tunes: In one short, a Bugs Bunny is being chased by a gorilla and runs across a rope. He threatens to cut it if the gorilla tries crossing...only for the gorilla to pull the entire cliff to him.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In part 1 of the second season premiere "The Return of Harmony", the new villain Discord sets out to corrupt the heroes while they find the Elements of Harmony. When he gets to Fluttershy, he tries to convinces her how her friends think she's helpless and it should make her mad. However, she openly admits her flaws and says that they try to help improve her. Frustrated at this unwanted outcome, Discord stops with the mind games and simply brainwashes her forcefully.
  • In the Daring Do story in "Read It and Weep", the eponymous Adventurer Archaeologist carefully approaches an artifact on a plinth inside an ancient tomb full of deadly traps... you know the drill. She sizes it up, apparently attempting to cleverly remove it without disturbing the plinth and triggering more traps... then just rolls her eyes, snatches the artifact and dashes out through all the newly triggered traps.
  • One episode has Cozy Glow gain access to a locked tome by simply smashing the lock with another book. A book that is about keys, no less.
• In the episode "Boone's Apprentice" of Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero, after Boone's apprentice ruins the potion meant to solve the episode's problem, Boone realizes that he should just embrace his usual Cloudcuckoolander persona. After taking a snack break, he proposes to just break the MacGuffin. Which works.
  Rippen: NO! It can't be THAT easy!
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • One of the puzzles in "We Call it Maze" is to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. The duo and Baljeet attempt to solve the problem mathematically, but Buford gets impatient and decides to just eat all the jellybeans, then type the number zero. It works.
    Baljeet: Okay, technically that was correct, but you did not show your work!
    Buford: I will in about twenty minutes.
  • Also used in "Phineas and Ferb and the Temple of Juatchadoon", when Phineas tries to figure out how to get a key out from under a glass dome, and Isabella suggests "Or, we could hit it with a rock!" Near the end of the cartoon, Phineas uses the same technique (complete with the same remark) to deactivate the magic talisman that powers the rampaging Corn Colossus.
  • Both subverted and played straight in "Knot My Problem", where the kids actually reconstruct a gigantic Gordian Knot and attempt to untie it, rather than cut it. While they do successfully untie it most of the way, the knot is dismantled when Candace, hit by Doofenshmirtz's Eat-It-All-inator, eats the ropes (the boys made them out of licorice in case they ultimately couldn't untie it in the end) used to create the knot. Another example from the same episode: Candace has spent the entire day trying to crack open Jeremy's old mini-safe. Buford opens it by slamming it against his head.
• A Popeye cartoon ending where Olive Oyl is tied to a train track. After trying for a few seconds to untie her, Popeye simply decides to punch the train, which instantly stops and falls apart. It was so famous that it was repeated several times in several different episodes. In fact, most of the Popeye cartoons follow this trope.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • In "Him Diddle Riddle", when Him gives the girls a "Train A is travelling..." problem with real trains that'll collide if they don't stop them, Blossom first tries to solve it with an abacus, then realizes, "We're superheroes! Let's just find the trains and stop them!" (Seeing as Him didn't object to them doing it that way, and was driving one of the trains, he may have expected them to do that.)
  • In The Powerpuff Girls Movie, the girls play an unintentionally destructive game of tag. Blossom and Bubbles hide on the top of a building dozens of blocks away from Buttercup. Buttercup snaps and tears through all those buildings to get to them.
  • In one episode, we get an overly long scene of Mojo Jojo meticulously bypassing all the security measures in a museum to steal an artifact. After remembering there was another artifact he needed as well, he just smashes its glass covering, grabs it, and runs away.
• In The Real Ghostbusters, the group find a locked chest. Ray asks for a hairpin to try and pick the lock. As he struggles to unlock the chest, Peter simply shoots the lock with a proton beam.
• On one episode of Samurai Jack, a divorced pair of husband/wife bounty hunters are trying to chase Jack onto a train. Zeke gets aboard by jumping the fence, shooting some security robots, jumping from a cliff, hijacking two vehicles, and leaping onto the train as it hurtles down the track. Josephine gets aboard by just standing in line and purchasing a ticket.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: In the episode "In Fear of the Phantom", the titular Monster of the Week is led into a Scooby-Dooby Doors chase by Shaggy and Scooby while inside the Hex Girls' trailer. After playing along for a little bit, the Phantom just decides to burn the trailer down with Shaggy and Scooby inside it. The duo only barely escape before the whole thing blows up.
• In one episode of She-Ra: Princess of Power, the villain traps the heroine in a maze; after wandering around for a while, she gets frustrated, and says, "That's it, from now on, I'm moving in a straight line!" and simply knocks the walls down to do so.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Duffless", Homer uses an ancient map to escape the plant so he can sneak away to a tour of the Duff brewery. He encounters a Giant Spider and consults the map, which says, "To escape the spider's curse, simply quote a Bible verse." When Homer can't think of any Bible verses, he throws a rock at it and knocks it out.
  • The "Treehouse of Horror XI" story "Scary Tales Can Come True" puts Bart and Lisa in Fairy Tale Land. When Bart comes across the Three Bears' porridge, he (of course) discovers that one is too hot and the other is too cold. He remarks "It doesn't take a genius to figure this out." and proceeds to pour the contents of one bowl into the other.
  • In "The Springfield Connection", when Marge wanted to join the police department, she took the same obstacle course as the rest of the aspirants. She starts struggling to climb over a wall...
    Wiggum: Women always have trouble with the wall... they never seem to find the door. [Pan to the other trainees going through the door in a single file]
• South Park: In one episode, when Stan and Kyle try to destroy the Wall Mart by destroying its core, they see that the core is a mirror. The Wall Mart CEO goes on about the symbolism about how it is the citizens of the town that are fueling the Wall Mart, etc. Stan shrugs and says the guy told them to destroy the core, so Kyle shatters the mirror which destroys the Wall Mart.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Clash of Triton", the lock to Triton's cage is in the form of a slider puzzle. SpongeBob is unable to figure it out, but Patrick solves it by peeling off the stickers and putting them in the right order.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "No Small Parts", Badgey rigs the virus so it will self-destruct the Pakled ship and kill Rutherford, and, since the virus is contained in Rutherford's implant, Rutherford will have to be caught in the blast if he wants to save the Cerritos. Shaxs solves the problem by ripping the entire implant off Rutherford's head, then chucking him into the shuttle to save his life.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "The Bad Batch", Tech of the titular squad attempts to hack open the back door of a Separatist base, only for the impatient Wrecker to brute-force the door open and tell him he was taking too long.
• Star Wars Resistance: In "A Quick Salvage Run", Kaz, Neeku and a few of the pirates are salvaging hyperfuel from the wreckage of a First Order dreadnought, but the fuel is inside a canister with a complex lock, and the fuel's volatility makes it dangerous to get out. When they run out of time due to the arrival of a Star Destroyer, Kragan elects to smash the container free with his bare hands despite the risk of explosion.
• Street Fighter: In the animated series, Guile disarms a bomb with a Sonic Boom.
• Tigtone: Since the series parodies Fantasy RPGs, Tigtone often encounters puzzles, but he tends to solve them not the way they are intended to be solved (and almost always with violence). Instead of freeing the captive sun by following her instructions, he simply kills the captive sun and takes the loot she drops. When he has to recover some missing tools from a forest he burns the forest down to find them more quickly.
• Transformers: Prime: In "Legacy", the Decepticons find the Star Sabre embedded in a mountain, when they can't remove the sword they use their ship to move the entire mountain. Naturally Optimus arrives before they can finish this and takes the Star Sabre himself.
• In an early episode of The Venture Bros., the boys and some fake pirates are being harassed by the ghost of a former pilot named Major Tom. The boys contact Dr. Orpheus, the team sorcerer, who tries to put Tom's soul to rest. It doesn't work. Plan B? Brock arrives and defeats the ghost by decapitating it with his fist.
  • In the past, when Colonel Lloyd Venture was studying the mysterious artifact known as the Orb, his bodyguard Eugene Sandow (who was under orders from the OSI to kill Venture should he unlock its secrets) chose to destroy the orb and explain to Col. Venture that the alternative was killing him, upon which Venture thanked the man.
• In the beginning of one episode of Xiaolin Showdown, the four monks-in-training are tasked to get a stuffed toy dog at the end of an obstacle course. Clay, the Closer to Earth (literally) cowboy, notes that the obstacle course is a circle, with the start and finish right next to each other, so he simply turns around snatches the dog off its pedestal without going through the course. This comes up several more times in the episode, where the moral is, "Simple solutions to complicated problems".

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