Damsel In Distress / Western Animation

Fireman Sam has its own page.

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• Classic Disney Shorts, Looney Tunes, Popeye, and other vintage theatrical cartoons used this trope to death.
  • Popeye saves Olive from Bluto/Brutus...
    • Subverted at least once in an old cartoon - Bluto enters Olive's room, and a scuffle breaks out, Olive is crying for help - when Popeye enters, Olive is still yelling while clubbing an unconscious Bluto with a skillet.
  • Buddy saves Cookie from a Bluto-like character...
  • Mighty Mouse saves Pearl Pureheart from Oil Can Harry...
  • Bimbo or Koko saves Betty Boop from various baddies...
  • Bosko saves Honey from more various baddies...
  • The pre-Mighty Mouse Terrytoons mouse lead saves his girlfriend from more various baddies...
  • Toby the Pup saves Tessie from more various baddies...
  • Flip the Frog saves Flap, Kitty, and Fifi from even more various baddies...
  • Julius saves Alice from Pegleg Pete...
  • Oswald saves Sadie from Pegleg Pete....
  • Mickey Mouse saves Minnie from Pegleg Pete (Disney only had one recurring villain... pass it on).
    • Subverted in Pioneer Days and Building a Building, where Mickey tries to rescue Minnie but is captured himself, whereupon Minnie breaks free on her own and rescues Mickey.
    • But played straight as recently as Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers.
    • Even his dog, Pluto, gets in on the trope, saving love interests Dinah and Fifi a few odd times.
  • Subverted along with everything else in Chuck Jones' melodrama parody The Dover Boys as their fiancée, Dora Standpipe, is abducted by villain Dan Backslide - she doesn't break the pace of her cries for help even as she demolishes Dan.
• Princess Aruzia for the first part of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin. She is an Action Girl for the rest of the series.
• Arcane: Caitlyn spent a lot of time being shot at, kidnapped or knocked out in Act 3, partly due to losing her rifle in episode 6 and being wounded in episode 7. Her being threatened usually acts as the impetus for her "good friend" Vi to get involved.
• Subverted in the movie Batman & Mr. Freeze - Subzero. Yes, Plucky Girl Barbara a.k.a. Batgirl gets kidnapped, but she's so competent that she kicks the asses of her captors (Mr. Freeze being one of them) multiple times, and would have escaped on her own just fine if it wasn't for the fact that she was in the middle of the friggin' ocean. In fact, she is probably more useful in the movie than even Batman and Robin.
• The entire episode of "Beauty Marked" in Danny Phantom was made in order to subvert this as much as possible. While Danny and Tucker are under the mindset that the kidnapped Sam needs rescuing, she managed to figure a way out just fine. It is their meddling that gets her captured again/still.
• Gosalyn Waddlemeyer-Mallard in the first pilot, and of course, some certain occasions from the Classic Disney 90s animated series Darkwing Duck.
• In Doug's Quailman comics, his Love Interest Patti sometimes ends up as this so she has one more reason to swoon over Quailman. This ends in Brand Spanking New Doug when Patti becomes a School Newspaper News Hound, and her new Quailman counterpart is the reporter Miss Mayo. It's ultimately subverted when Patti outdoes Doug in so many things that he fails to impress her. His reaction is to turn her a super-heroine of her own, the complete and utter Mary Sue Supersport, who ends up single-handedly not only saving Megalopolis, but also rescuing Quailman and making the city's previous number-one superhero look like an amateurish buffoon in comparison.
• Xandir P Whifflebottom in Drawn Together is a video game character "on a neverending quest to save my girlfriend". When she discovers he's gay she refuses to be rescued by him. Shortly afterwards his boyfriend is kidnapped and he remarks "Dare I say it? I, Xandir, am on a never ending quest to save my boyfriend!"
• Nell Fenwick on Dudley Do-Right is a parodic composite of the woman tied to train tracks in the gothic genre.
• In Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, poor Susan Richards, the Invisible Woman, would be hit with this trope, especially in the first season. An episode in the second season would have Sue admonish Doctor Doom for using this trope. He apologizes for doing so, but explains that this is the quickest, most effective way to get what he wants.
• Fireman Sam: While it's usually the male characters getting into trouble, Dilys Price is no stranger to danger either. For specific examples:
  • "Bentley the Robot": Penny gets trapped in the burning fire station, and even goes unconscious due to smoke inhalation. Sarah and James use a cassette to direct the titular robot into the station to save her.
  • "Rich and Famous": Dilys gets stuck on her roof and Sam has to get her down.
  • "A Real Live Wire": While trying to save a squirrel from a burning building, Mandy gets stuck inside, and Sam has to rescue her.
• Subverted in the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends special, "Destination: Imagination"; the plot was to save Frankie after she was kidnapped by an imaginary friend who controls a trippy world inside a toy box, but near the end it's revealed that she wasn't kidnapped at all, and that she willingly stayed with the imaginary friend to keep him company. But at the climax, when the imaginary friend has a Villainous Breakdown and becomes a monster (thanks to a verbal lashing by Mr. Herriman), the characters fight him to protect Frankie from being trapped in the imaginary world forever. However, the gang are roundly defeated by the monster, and ultimately it's Frankie who becomes the hero of the story: not only does she distract the monster so that the gang can escape the toybox — she briefly stays behind but soon escapes on her own, thus completing the subversion — but she chooses to free the lonely friend as well, having offered to bring him to Foster's, where he can have all the friends in the world.
• The Herculoids. Tara. When she wasn't getting threatened or captured by the Monster of the Week, she was being kidnapped by the lizard-snake people to be their brainwashed queen. Mitigated by her usually trying to run from danger when she isn't being ambushed. Zandor and the Herculoids always managed to rescue her -and Tara's so nice and generally sensible it's understandable why they keep doing it.
• The Cartoon Network Groovies short for Jabberjaw has Shelly being kidnapped by mutant eels and robots. She is rescued by Jabberjaw but, much to his disappointment, she isn't interested in a Rescue Romance because he's a shark who smells of bait.
• Kim Possible: Every main character (and some of the villains) have been in this situation. Kim. Ron. The Cheerleaders. Bonnie. Kim's Dad. Kim's Grandmother. The Tweebs. Ron's Dad. Shego. Drakken. Shego's little brothers. It's a requirement of this show that you get captured at least once.
• Let's Go Luna!: Honey takes up this role in "Good Knight", referring to herself as a "hamster in distress" and going into the Neuschwanstein Castle so that Carmen, who wants to be a knight, can have somebody to rescue.
• The Perils of Penelope Pitstop is a parody of this genre, since often Penny is more capable than the guys supposed to rescue her.
• Like in the film, Wendy often needs rescuing in Peter Pan & the Pirates, as does Tinkerbell.
  • Wendy and Tinkerbell are also abducted a lot in The New Adventures of Peter Pan, which Jake Sorrow, one of Hook's pirates, mentions in "Peter's Choice" when Hook orders for both girls to be captured for his latest scheme.
  Jake Sorrow: Capture Wendy and Tinkerbell. As if we haven't tried that one about a hundred million times already.
• In one episode of Phineas and Ferb, the boys decide to host a medieval jousting tournament. Their sister Candace is cast in this role with her Guy of the Week as the Knight in Shining Armor. Naturally, being Candace, she actually does wind up locked in the tower and once she breaks out, a series of Contrived Coincidences send her bouncing all over the English countryside.
  • Isabella finds herself in this role to Phineas a handful of times (and vice versa), part of the constant ship teasing between the two over the course of the show's run. Examples include playing the superhero to her Lois Lane-style Intrepid Reporter in "The Beak", rescuing her from a mechanical bug in "Hide and Seek", and building a haunted house to break her "curse" of hiccups in "One Good Sacre Ought to Do It".
    • Two of Isabella's Elseworld equivalents also fall into this category. Princess Isabella of feudal China is abducted by Doofus Khan, and Phineas and Ferb learn the Way of the Platypus to mount a rescue mission. Lampshaded In 1914 Panama, where she literally carries around business cards designating herself as a fully certified damsel, as well as an Ingenue, Femme Fatale, and tile and grout installer. Later on, she hands them another: "Dirty Double Crosser", as it's revealed she's in league with the Doofenshmirtz counterpart to keep him from hurting her mother.
• There were a few episodes of The Powerpuff Girls in which the girls themselves needed to be rescued (e.g., "Buttercrush", "Twisted Sister", "Stray Bullet").
• Subverted on ReBoot. One game sets up this plot with Bob as the rescuing knight and implies Dot is the distressed damsel. The subversion is that Enzo is the distressed damsel and Dot is another rescuing knight.
  Enzo: I don't want to be a damsel in this dress!
• Ashi from Samurai Jack Season 5 is an interesting case; normally a straight brawler, she discovers in the penultimate episode that she is Aku's biological daughter. Aku takes full advantage of this, mutating her into a demon while her good self remains trapped and fully aware for Jack to try and save.
• Daphne Blake from Scooby-Doo is often kidnapped by the villain of the week in most incarnations, and earned the In-Series Nickname "Danger-Prone Daphne". This is even lampshaded in Scooby-Doo! and the Loch Ness Monster by Daphne's cousin, Shannon. Later incarnations such as the live action movies have her saving herself or fighting off her attackers. Many of the later animated movies and series have followed suit in terms of upgrading Daphne's combat competency.
  Shannon: [referring to the Blake family] Ours is a rich history of falling through trap doors, finding dangerous secret passageways, and getting caught in overly complicated booby traps of our own design. The one thing we Blakes are known for is being... how should I put this... danger-prone.
  Daphne: [everyone glances at her] What?
  • There are, however, some occasions where Velma Dinkley fills this role, such as being placed on a sawmill conveyor belt and nearly being dismembered by the titular ghost in the Where Are You! episode "That's Snow Ghost!".
• The Smurfs: When is Smurfette never in need of being rescued by somebody? Only in the live-action movie, where she is finally promoted to Action Girl status.
• In a episode of Sonic Boom called "Fortress of Squallitude", Amy is captured by Eggman and Amy is forced to make Eggman's fortress beautiful. Sonic and co. have to save Amy.
  • In the episode "Sleeping Giant", after Rocky takes a liking to Sticks' singing, Sticks is captured by Rocky and she is forced to sing for Rocky. Sonic and co. have to save Sticks.
  • In the episode "Closed Door Policy", Sticks is captured by the frog warriors, leaving Sonic and co. to rescue Sticks.
• Talking of the Sonic series, Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), Sally also becomes this in a few episodes, most notable in "Sonic and Sally" where she had a robot take her place and where she was almost turned into a robot herself, but was rescued by Sonic Just in Time. The second season tried harder to make her Sonic's equal so this didn't happen.
• This is lampshaded in The Spectacular Spider-Man, when Spider-Man cheerily points out to an ungrateful Norman Osborn that he is Spidey's very first rescue of this type. It's played straight in regards to Love Interest Liz Allan, an Innocent Bystander who gets used as part of a Hostage for MacGuffin scenario.
  • Also with Gwen when she is kidnapped by Venom in the season 1 finale.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Padmé was captured three times in the first season alone. She's usually well on her way to escaping on her own by the time the cavalry shows up.
• Super 4:
  • This is the whole job of Princess Léonore, Alex's sister. She has dozen of stories to tell her friends about former kidnappings.
  • Now, don't try to put Ruby in this role: she really hates it, and will violently express her disapproval as soon as freed.
  • The pirates once attract the team into a trap by luring them with a "damsel" in distress... in fact a pirate Disguised in Drag.
• Lois Lane from Superman: The Animated Series as usual. Lampshaded in-universe.
  Terrorist: Let's make an example of this hero. A very tragic example, I'm afraid, Miss...?
  Lois: Lane.
  Terrorist: Lane? Lois Lane? The one Superman always saves?!
  Lois: 'Fraid so.
• April O'Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, at least in the first animated series. To the point that they can recognize her "mumbles" when she's gagged, without seeing her.
  • Eventually lampshaded by Shredder when Kraig suggests to Shredder to send the stone warriors Shredder made to grab April O'Neil. Shredder's response is this:
    Shredder: Hmm, not a bad idea. Although we've done that at least thirty times before, but hey who's counting?
  • Also lampshaded in the Turtles Forever crossover movie. The 1980s turtles stop to save April in their home dimension and explain that they save April at least once a day.
  • In the Nick series April starts out as this, but as her fighting skills have been improving she's growing out of it.
• A Thousand and One... Americas: The little girl Chris meets in the dream he has in the first episode, Alicora, gets kidnapped by an evil man named Makikomir who takes her to Cusco (Peru) with the intent to offer her to a corrupt priest (Putukai) who wants to forcibly marry her in the Sun Temple. Chris goes there and, upon meeting Alicora's older brother (Sayarrumi), plans her rescue alongside him.
• In the shows Tom & Jerry Kids and Droopy Master Detective, Miss Vavoom is always getting kidnapped by McWolf or any other villain who lusts after her.
• Total Drama: Played with by Zoey.
  • Played straight in Revenge of the Island.
    Zoey: I don't even know how many times Mike's saved my butt. Mike, if you're watching this, me and my butt thank you.
  • Mostly averted in All-Stars; however, she deliberately invokes this in "You Regatta Be Kidding Me" to test if Mike is really in control of himself.
• Elita One gets this with her love interest Optimus Prime in The Transformers. To lure Optimus to his doom, the Decepticons capture Elita. However, when Optimus arrives, he gets captured himself and Elita first has to save him before he can manage to save her. It's pretty 50/50 with them.
• Marina the mermaid from Zig & Sharko is an oblivious example. Even though the titular Zig is always trying to capture and eat her, and the titular Sharko always saves her, usually right before she's devoured, she never notices any of it, not even after she's literally BEEN IN ZIG'S MOUTH SEVERAL TIMES. Worse, she has on several occasions demonstrated being perfectly able to beat up Zig by herself if he happens to annoy her enough — for whatever OTHER reason than trying to cook and eat her.

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