Disney Villain Death / Western Animation

Villain examples:

Villain Examples

• Angel Wars: The final shot of Morg is dropping off a ledge into a green abyss. Considering that this was happening inside a collapsing pocket dimension of Hell, it's clear that we're not supposed to expect to see him again.
• Subverted in the Around the World with Willy Fog episode "Below Zero". While attempting to follow Fog and his party across Niagara Falls, Transfer becomes caught in the current and goes plunging over the edge to his apparent death. He even lampshades the fact that "no-one's ever survived Niagara Falls." However, the following episode reveals that he did survive and is still out to try and stop Fog from completing his journey in time.
• In Arthur, a tyrannosaurus rex falls off a cliff while trying to eat another dinosaur.
• Played with in Avatar: The Last Airbender: While stopping Chin the Conqueror and creating Kyoshi Island, Avatar Kyoshi causes Chin to fall to such a death when he stands on the newly-formed cliff, refusing to accept his defeat, and the rock crumbles. However, Kyoshi makes it very clear that she doesn't see the difference between a Disney Villain Death and killing him herself; the end result was that she was responsible for Chin's death.
  • Azula looks like she is going to get one when she is knocked off her airship, complete with helpless rag doll flailing involved. So naturally, the Gaang is upset when she rockets to the nearby cliff by way of firebending, in a Moment of Awesome way no less.
    • The final battle against Ozai could count as an aversion as well, given that it takes place upon a series of massive pillars that seem perfectly designed for Ozai to fall to his doom after attempting to backstab Aang. He does indeed attempt to backstab Aang after Aang spares his life... but Aang finds another way to stop him.
• Avengers Assemble: Baron Zemo keeps his comic counterpart's fondness for this alive. In his first appearance, he falls over a cliff towards some sharp rocks, with Iron Man unable to find the body. He pops up alive and well in the very next episode. Much later on, in season 5, he's wrapped up in pipes by Madame Masque and thrown off the Brooklyn Bridge.
• This is how the main villain of Bandolero, Don Rodrigo, meets his fatal fate, as he was thrown by the protagonist into a cliff.
• In an alternate future episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the Joker once again falls off something tall, this time a bridge. He survives and returns years later, even lampshading his ludicrous survival rate, but the fall left him crippled and reduced to using a hover-chair to get around.
• In Blazing Dragons, Count Geoffrey is accidentally knocked out the tallest window in Camelhot by Sir Loungelot. Although it is debatable whether the fall kills him, we never see him again for the rest of the series.
• In the Grand Finale of Codename: Kids Next Door, the last we see of the Delightful Children is them falling from a broken rollercoaster and into a giant broken toilet, sure victims of this trope. Incidentally, Father seemingly meets his demise by also falling into a giant pit earlier in the same episode (but not before transforming into The Dragon), but in his case it's subverted by showing him to be alive and well in the framing story.
• One of the Comi Color Cartoons, Balloon Land, features an almost proto-example for animation, as the villain of the picture, the Pincushion Man, is trapped in a ball of tree sap and is sent rolling to his doom, falling off a cliff into the lands tens of thousands of feet below...
• Courage the Cowardly Dog pulled this on part of Courage's rogues' gallery at the end of a Villain Team-Up episode "Ball of Revenge". Just as they have Courage cornered, Courage, at Muriel's urging, screams so loudly that the floor gives way and the affected villains (Katz, Cajun Fox, The Clutching Foot, and the Queen of the Black Puddle) all plummet into a chasm.
• Curbside, an unsuccessful pilot revolving around an Animated Anthology starring revamped Terrytoons characters, hinted at this trope in the Mighty Mouse segment, where just before it cuts back to Jeckle and Dinky Duck reading the story from a book, the villain the Creeper can be seen starting to lose his balance in a way that implies he's about to fall to his doom.
• In Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines, the sheen number of times Dick Dastardly ends up plummeting vertically downwards from substantial heights after the critical failure of yet another improbable aircraft — sometimes saved by Muttley, sometimes not.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • In the New Batman Adventures episode "Mad Love", The Joker mock-subverts this trope. He jumps from one rooftop to another, but falls off and lets out a horrified scream as the camera cuts away. Cut back to him standing on the roof of a train that had been passing under him and yelling: "MADE YOU LOOK!" After a fist-fight with the dark knight atop the train, he does, however, fall into a normal false death.
  • The Joker actually gets this a lot. He has fallen off trains, rooftops, roller coasters, and everything else that is more than ten feet off the ground. Besides him, most of the other Batman villains have suffered this fate at least once. Bane fell off a boat, Freeze fell in SubZero, and Two-Face nearly fell off a building to save his coin (but was saved by Batman). However, these villains were shown to have survived every single time.
  • Speaking of which, Harley seemingly gets this in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker as both Batgirl and she are thrown over a cliff during their fight. Batgirl tries to save her but is holding her by the cuffs on her costume with tear and send Harley plummeting into the abyss. It's mentioned they did search for her, but Never Found the Body. Subverted later on in the movie as we see an elderly Harely alive and well berating her granddaughters, the Dee Dees.
  • The episode "Sneak Peek" in Batman Beyond had a nifty variation. The episode introduced a muckraking journalist who could control his tangibility; he could sneak into locked rooms and spy on people unseen. Sadly, he lost the ability to control his powers and fell through the building! The sequence is brilliantly animated, though there's a bit of uncomfortable Fridge Logic when Bruce wonders aloud if the poor guy is doomed to fall to the Earth's core; kind of a harsh punishment for a relatively minor baddie.
  • In the Justice League episode "The Enemy Below", Aquaman fights his evil brother Orm on an ice bridge dangling over a deep abyss. The bridge crumbles under Orm and leaves him dangling, and Orm then begs to be saved. Aquaman simply picks up his stolen trident and says "I believe this is mine" as the edges crumble and Orm falls down. The writers admitted they purposely left his doom ambiguous enough in case they wanted to bring him back in the future.
• The DC Nation short "Strange Days", which was one of two shorts made to celebrate Batman's 75th anniversary, ended with Professor Hugo Strange falling to his apparent death.
• The Defenders of the Earth episode "Terror in Time" has the Defenders (who have been sent back in time courtesy of Ming) team up with Prince Valiant to rescue the latter's wife from an evil magician called Warlock, who has stolen the fabled Eternity Stone. During the final confrontation, Mandrake (who was attacked by an amorphous mutant life-form developed by Ming and spends most of the episode with part of the mutant attached to his arm) gains possession of the Eternity Stone, at which point the mutant detaches itself from Mandrake's arm and attaches itself to Warlock's face. Warlock, blinded by the mutant, ends up plunging through the window and, since the confrontation takes place in the turret of a castle which stands atop a high cliff, is presumably killed in the fall.
• In the season 3 finale of The Dragon Prince, Viren is thrown off the top of the Storm Spire, a mountain that's several thousand meters tall.^note It's so tall that non-dragons will collapse from oxygen deprivation well before reaching the top unless Sky Arcanum magic is used as an oxygen supplement, implying well in excess of 6,000 meters if the atmosphere is the same as on Earth. The final scene of the episode makes it seem like a Subversion when Viren wakes up none the worse for wear and asks if he somehow survived the fall, until his daughter Claudia tells him that he didn't survive.
• Dragons: The Nine Realms: After losing her balance on a giant crystal and almost falling into the Gem Blaster's hole, recurring villain Welma Sledkin gets caught by Tom. However, she begins slipping his grasp. Despite Tom's warnings and pleas, she tries to go for the piece of Dragoncite she stole which landed a bit further away rather than pull herself up resulting in her falling to her death into a cloud of mist covering the entrance to the Gem Blasters hole with her scream slowly fading as she falls down.
• Jonny Quest TOS.
  • "Monster in the Monastery". Jonny bursts some bags of oil with a bow and arrows. A villain wearing a yeti costume slips on the oil, rolls down some stairs, and then over the edge of a cliff to his death.
  • "Dragons of Ashida". One of the dragons chases Race Bannon out of a cave mouth. Race jumps up and grabs a tree branch and the dragon falls to its death at the base of a cliff.
• Subversion in Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures. During the episode "In the Realm of the Condor", the villain of the episode battles Johnny on a bridge and they both fall off. Johnny grabs onto the ledge and the villain grabs onto Jonny. As you would expect, she loses her hold and falls down into the gorge. However, we actually see her, screaming all the way down, as she is seconds away from being splattered onto the sharp rocks below. (At least they didn't show the actual landing...)
  • Another example. "Ndovu's Last Journey" had a fight in an elephant graveyard. A villain falls and we see (from his point of view, no less) him fall towards the business end of an elephant skeleton tusk. The view cuts away before impact, but we do hear a rather nasty sound effect and see other characters flinch.
  • In the episode with the Philosopher's stone, the bad guy is attacked by a magical hawk (really) and is trapped inside the building with his two henchmen as his equipment is destroyed and the building explodes. Jonny, Jessie, and Hadji, meanwhile, escape just in time.
• Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: Countless animated shorts have featured the villains suffering their last defeat by tumbling over a cliff, crashing over a waterfall, getting mauled by lions, and an endless number of other indignities. The most famous victim: Wile E. Coyote, of course!
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony TV Specials: In Escape from Catrina, the eponymous villain very narrowly dodges this — she ends up being knocked into the very same well she threatens to throw people in throughout the short, but the ponies and Rep save her after she agrees to destroy the witchweed potion machine and thus the source of her insanity.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • At the end of the season 2 finale, Queen Chrysalis and her changelings are hit with a powerful magic spell and are sent flying over the edge into the distance. This seems fairly Team Rocket style, but the distance they must have fallen exceeds both distances Twilight nearly fell in the second and fifteenth episodes put together. Judging by the fact they don't bother putting the shield back up, it's fair to assume the heroes at least believe it took her out for now. Eventually, the Expanded Universe IDW comics and the season 6 finale do depict her return (and the comic explicitly shows her surviving her fall).
    • "The Lost Treasure of Griffonstone" had this happen in the past, showing an Aprimaspi stealing the titular lost treasure before falling into the Abysmal Abyss. In the present day, the characters find his skeleton halfway down the chasm, confirming that it did kill him.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • The Musical Episode "See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey" has this happen to the title villain, who, in the only dialogue in the episode that isn't sung, makes a final speech on the way down.
  • The episode "Power-Noia" had Him battling the girls in Dream Land, where he was defeated and thrown over a ledge into a bottomless abyss by Buttercup. Being a recurring villain who can exist As Long as There Is Evil, he survived, but that did defeat him for the time being.
  • Also in "Insect Inside", after the girls destroy his cockroach army, Roach Coach falls off a building into the streets below. Blossom is horrified and when the girls examine his body, they discover that he was a robot controlled by a super intelligent cockroach, which did survive.
• In Regular Show, this happens to Susan in "Benson Be Gone". After she goes One-Winged Angel, a one shot character named Utopia performs a Heroic Sacrifice to send her falling into a pit back into Hell.
• Sym-Bionic Titan: The traitor during the invasion of Galaluna is stabbed through the gut by Lance and topples over the edge of a bridge to his death.
• Tabaluga: This is the fate of Humsin, a living sandstorm and ruler over the desert as well as the Big Bad of Season 2. At the end of the season, he ends up falling into a river and down a waterfall. It had been previously established that being made of sand means water would dissolve and thus kill him. True enough, Tabaluga comments on his off-screen demise after failing to save him.
• This is the final fate of Dr. Victor Falco/The Rat King in the second season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), after Splinter blinds him and gets him to fall off a 1,000 foot cliff in the Undercity. His corpse's appearance in the Season 4 episode "Darkest Plight" confirms his demise.
• Double Subverted in the second season finale of Teen Titans. Terra throws Slade off a cliff and into a river of lava, but he catches himself on the rock, pulls himself back over the edge, and grabs her by the throat, at which point she blasts him over the edge with her full powers unleashed, and just so we know he's dead, we then see his mask dissolving in the lava. He comes back from that too, courtesy of the show's Satan-Expy, but that's not for another season. He outright said he would've been dead if Trigon hadn't intervened though.
• Inverted and subverted in the ThunderCats episode "Old Friends" where heroic Old Soldier Panthro flashes back to the battle where the Big Bad and The Dragon presumed him dead. Panthro's power-hungry friend Grune, offered a position as Sorcerous Overlord Mumm-Ra's right hand, begins to fight when Panthro declines his We Can Rule Together. Grune knocks Panthro off the edge of a platform in Mumm-Ra's lair, sending him falling into a dark pit. Later, when pursuing his Evil Former Friend, Panthro sourly rants about how difficult it was to climb out.
• Happens to the psychotic hitchhiker at the end of the Tiny Toon Adventures movie How I Spent My Summer Vacation. But being a Jason Voorhees Expy, it doesn't stop him from reappearing in the finale.
• Scorponok and Terrorsaur were removed from Transformers: Beast Wars this way. The last we see of them is Terrorsaur's outstretched hand sinking into lava. This death was originally intended for Waspinator, whose popularity saved him at the last minute.
  • This may be a Shout-Out to the first season finale of Transformers, where after the rest of the Decepticons fell into the magma, Megatron went out the same way. (For a minute, anyway).
  • Speaking of which, this appears to happen to Beast Wars Megatron when he takes the spark of G1 Megatron. Tarantulas and Quickstrike rebel against him and throw him into the lava and his apparent death, though he comes back, even better than before.
  • And then in the sequel series Beast Machines, both Optimus Primal and Megatron are destroyed when they fall down a shaft in a slightly similar fashion to the main reactor of the Death Star.
• Trollhunters: This is the final fate of Queen Usurna, as her own soldiers turn on her and force her off a cliff to fall into a swampy marsh and sink to her doom, after her own Evil Gloating reveals to them that she's been selling their tribe out to Gunmar for centuries.
• In Voltron: Legendary Defender, the Galra soldier Haxus falls from a high catwalk after Pidge trips him up. He tries to grab Rover for support, but Rover deactivates and they both fall to their presumed deaths.
• At the end of the fourth season of Winx Club, the Winx fairies and the warrior fairy Nebula use coverage to freeze the three remaining fairy hunters in the Omega dimension. After being frozen, the three evil wizards fall into a hole as the cave starts collapsing.

Hero/non-villain examples:

Hero/Non-Villain Examples

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has many subversions.
  • In "Sonic Rainboom", Rarity, in a Shout-Out to Icarus, flies too close to the sun, burns her wings, and falls, inadvertently taking the Wonderbolts with her. Thanks to Rainbow Dash and her Sonic Rainboom, however, this ends a bit differently than the tale of Icarus.
  • In "The Cutie Mark Chronicles", Fluttershy falls all the way from Cloudsdale (a city in the sky) and is saved because she lands on a swarm of butterflies. Not only is she fine, but it's also when she discovered her status as Friend to All Living Things and by extension got her cutie mark.
  • In "Secret of My Excess", Rarity once again nearly falls to her doom, this time along with Spike after he, in his giant form capturing Rarity with his tail, returns to his original form. They are saved by Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy.
  • In "Wonderbolts Academy", Lightning Dust's tornado nearly sends Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Rarity falling to their doom, but other pegasi save them.
  • There's also two lesser instances of Twilight Sparkle nearly falling to her doom. "Elements of Harmony" has Nightmare Moon send her falling off a cliff, but Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy catch her; "Feeling Pinkie Keen" has her jump off a cliff from a violent Hydra, and would have been killed if a bog bubble didn't appear under her to bounce her up to the other side of the cliff.
• Inverted in the The New Batman Adventures episode "Over the Edge". Scarecrow knocks Batgirl off a building to her death, but we see her injuries and she has time to say her Final Speech. Fortunately, it was All Just a Dream.
• The Loud House: In the episode "Fandom Pains", Tristan, a character from the Show Within a Show The Vampires of Melancholia, dies when he falls off a cliff.
• Subverted in the series finale of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. When Horde Prime's own clone rebels against him, the rogue throws his master off a balcony to fall to his death... and Prime just Body Surfs into said clone's mind and resumes his Evil Plan like nothing happened.
• Robot Chicken:
  • Parodied in the Star Wars special, which turns the franchise's trend of using the trope into a Running Gag.
  • The titular chicken is a subversion, in that we actually see the result of the fall (let's just say that it gets a janitor irritated at having to clean up).
• In Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Tech makes a Heroic Sacrifice this way, so his comrades can escape rather than spending time they do not have trying to rescue him.

---