Do Not Do This Cool Thing / Western Animation

• American Dad! parodies this in "She Swill Survive", where a plot point in the episode involves Stan and Hayley getting drunk to numb themselves from pain before doing dangerous things like crashing cars and jumping from tall buildings. The episode ends with a PSA from Stan and Hayley's "actors" to warn viewers... not against crashing cars or jumping off of buildings, but against doing so while drunk.
• Parodied on Archer with marijuana:
  Archer: And I advocate its use. As a potential role model, I advocate it.
• Arthur tends to run into this a lot, typically courtesy of Arthur's parents.
  • In "Arthur Makes A Movie", we're shown that Arthur is banned from seeing PG-13 movies, and this is portrayed as a reasonable decision by his parents, except the PG-13 movie he wants to see looks like a fun, exciting movie.
  • In "Arthur Rides the Bandwagon", the "Woogles" are meant to be just a fad and not worth buying, but they look like very fun toys.
• Beavis and Butt-Head: Spoofed in the Season 4 episode "Safe Driving". The boys watch a grisly driver's-ed film featuring two guys who seem to be grown-up versions of themselves (albeit handsomer). Naturally, they think it's cool and get into the same accident seconds after taking the wheel.
• Hilariously used during an episode of Bob's Burgers, when an anti-smoking assembly has the exact opposite effect on Bob and Linda because of the juggling.
  Linda: I really want a cigarette.
  Bob: I really wanna juggle.
• The Boondocks lampshades this in the episode "The Trial Of R. Kelly" where R. Kelly is on trial for urinating on a 14-year-old girl on video, and a news reporter mentions that said video is "widely available" on the internet, even specifically naming the website it's hosted on. Of course, Riley Freeman immediately tries to sneak off and download it.
• Parodied heavily in Clone High, where an anti-drug speaker comes to the school and talks about his experiences, advising the kids to not do drugs and recounting a particular bender. However, he notes that during said bender, he wrote a song that turned out to be hugely successful. He tries to justify this by saying he mostly spent the money on more drugs, but he also had enough left for a house for his mom, a motorboat, and a charity donation. He also muses that he smoked so many types of drugs (all of which are actually just synonyms for marijuana) that he'd have probably smoked raisins, which, naturally, convinces the student body that smoking raisins can get you high and has them immediately try it out. (It later turns out he was doing it on purpose to make teenagers buy raisins.)
• DuckTales (2017) has an In-Universe example in the episode "The Outlaw Scrooge McDuck!" Uncle Scrooge is trying to teach Louie the value of hard work by telling a story from his past that juxtaposes Scrooge's resourcefulness and grit with John D. Rockerduck, a self-important Corrupt Corporate Executive, and Goldie O'Gilt, an underhanded swindler. In the end, Louie asks Goldie to mentor him behind Scrooge's back.
• Family Guy spoofs the trope in one episode where all the students at James Woods High are lectured on why having sex before marriage is a sinful act. Instead of taking the lesson to heart, the kids decide to have ear sex because it doesn't count and thus they still remain pure in God's eyes.
  You know the saying: once you go black, you go deaf.
• Futurama dedicated an entire episode to parodying this: "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV." After scamming his way onto All My Circuits, Bender starts acting like his usual Jerkass self while smoking, drinking, and being a general nuisance. The network and public love it, and children start emulating Bender's self-destructive actions, much to the annoyance of their parents (who also repeatedly remark on how cool Bender's thievery and use of violence are).
  Bender (on TV, while lighting himself on fire): Try this, kids at home!
  (on-screen subtitles): Don't try this, kids at home.
  • Later, during his speech against himself, Bender gives the following golden lines:
    Bender: Do smoking and drinking on TV make me look cool? Of course! What about committing crimes and violence? Again, the answer is yes. But do we really want to teach our children these things?
  • At one point in the episode, Dwight, Cubert, and Tinny Tim, all of whom love Bender, try smoking, drinking, and cursing to emulate him, but just end up getting sick and in trouble. Tinny Tim suggests that they commit a robbery instead—specifically, stealing from Bender himself. The conversation that follows:
    Dwight: TV gave us the idea!
    Sudden cut to the Futurama logo
    Bender: You're watching Futurama, the show that does NOT advocate the cool crime of robbery!
  • The writers even managed to sneak An Aesop into the episode. Professor Farnsworth and Hermes decide to form a protest group against Bender, who takes issue with the idea. Both Fry and Leela point out that Bender does make a good argument by saying that his bad behavior isn't solely to blame for kids acting poorly (as Fry puts it, "Give a little credit to our public schools!"). Later, after making the speech mentioned above, Bender reminds both the in-universe audience and the actual viewers that it's ultimately a parent's responsibility to monitor their children's TV watching and set a good example.
    Bender: (looking directly at the viewers) Have you tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children...and hitting them?
  • Bender also does this in the episode "The Problem With Popplers", where he tries to convince a crowd outside of a restaurant to not eat the titular aliens by listing all of the different sauces and snack deals available.
  • A deleted plot point in "Free Will Hunting" explains that Bender wrote the song "DE¢I$IONZ I MADE" (which was kept in the episode as an end credits gag) to warn children not to make the bad choices he did. The lyrics:
    Decisions I made! Thought I was a thug!
    Dropped outta school and smoked stuff that's like a drug!
    A broke-down dirty homeless substance abuser,
    And now I'm richer than all y'all losers!
• Home Movies: Parodied in an episode where Brendon makes an educational video telling kids not to put marbles up their noses. The kids think the idea is cool, so...
  • Made even funnier because everybody who saw the film immediately tried to put marbles up their nose. Even the teacher and Brendon's mom.
  • There's a similar situation in Little Men where Jo tells the children a story about a mother who warned her children not stick beans up their noses, prompting them to do just that. Jo says she stuck pebbles up her nose after hearing the story.
• The Incredible Crash Dummies franchise started life as a set of public service announcements telling kids to buckle their seatbelts. This was conveyed by the dummies getting into spectacular car accidents and exploding in cool ways, before putting themselves back together in moments, and pretty much all the toys were focused around using these car accidents as a play feature, which undermined the message just a wee bit.
• Kaeloo parodies this. In-universe, Stumpy and Quack Quack get addicted to carrots that have the same effect on their bodies as tobacco, and Mr. Cat tells Kaeloo that he can show them a PSA that is "terribly dissuasive" against carrots. The PSA in question has a doctor start to discuss the dangers of carrots, only to be shot by a cool cowboy with a gun who says that even though carrots are bad, they're "super cool". Stumpy and Quack Quack decide that carrots are actually cool because of the PSA, and immediately buy some... from Mr. Cat himself.
• Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure: Tramp tries to convince Scamp of how good he has it as a house puppy, concealing Tramp's own rakish past as a street dog.
• One of the most common criticisms of Nina Needs to Go! was that the moral was meant to be to go to the bathroom before leaving the house, except whenever Nina didn't go to the bathroom before leaving the house, she always went on a cool adventure with her ninja grandmother.
• The Owl House: A fairly lighthearted example. In "King's Tide," Belos puts on a witch hunter uniform, reflecting his ambitions to become the human world's most famous witch hunter. Luz mocks him for this and the show tries to portray him as outdated and unfashionable— the issue is that, thanks to Belos' fairly handsome appearance (Complete with him healing his Facial Horror while wearing it), it's generally agreed that he absolutely rocks the outfit, and it's become very popular with fans and cosplayers.
• The Powerpuff Girls parodied this in the episode of "Mojo Jonesin'," where the mad genius chimp Mojo tempts a group of children with bootleg Chemical X which grants them superpowers. The first dose was free but to continue their addiction, they have to follow his orders. It's an obvious send-up of a don't-do-drugs episode complete with an ending when the kids decide to give up Chemical X and warn their classmates against "X abuse." Then another kid asks what it was like. "It was AWESOME!" This is further shown when you realize that the girls (and Mojo Jojo) are partly made of this chemical.
• Rick and Morty attempts to depict Rick's many vices, unstable nature, and Broken Ace characteristics in a negative light, as a kind of deconstruction of the idea of the Insufferable Genius power fantasy. But in the vast majority of episodes, Rick's flaws don't prevent him from being right or saving the day (in fact, many plots happen because of a character not doing what Rick would do), the series operates in a Crapsack World, meaning many of the victims of his actions seemingly deserve it, and while it's often shown that Rick's hedonistic lifestyle is leaving him an empty and miserable shell of a person, we also see all the incredibly fun and exciting bits of it where he's enjoying every minute—and top of all that, he gets all the best lines. Altogether, he's meant to be a satire of the hypercompetent Escapist Character, but most of the time, the audience is along for the ride—and when they're not, he's still usually somewhat sympathetic.
  • The most prominent example is almost certainly "Pickle Rick," which ends with a competent, sympathetic therapist voiced by Susan Sarandon giving Rick an eloquent speech explaining the necessity of doing the boring but important work of maintaining and improving family relationships. Unfortunately, it comes at the end of an entire episode where Rick turns himself into a pickle, then uses his intellect and sheer willpower to turn himself into a killing machine. What the fanbase mostly took from the episode was "I'm Pickle Rick!"
• Sabrina: The Animated Series: Gem's life is shown to be empty and lonely, as well as having very high standards to live up to. Except she lives in a Big Fancy House that even has its own bowling alley, and she mentions plans for an amusement park! Her house looks like it would be lots of fun to live in.
• The Simpsons:
  • Directly spoofed: Lisa is shown a short film where rap stars in costume represent tooth decay: they stylishly and violently set about some giant teeth, rapping all the while. Lisa comments that while the film is against tooth decay it also kinda glamorises it.
  • Also parodied in "Bart's Friend Falls In Love", when Bart's class is shown a sex-ed video. "So now that we've shown you how it's done...don't do it."
  • At the end of "Bart the Murderer", Bart decides to leave the Mafia: "Sorry, Fat Tony, I've learned that crime doesn't pay". Fat Tony replies "Yeah, maybe you're right," and then leaves in an expensive limo filled with women. His henchmen have their own limos.
  • in "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood" "Don't Do What Donny Don't Does", an entire book meant as a Goofus and Gallant-esque "what not to do" method. Most of these involve showing Donny Don't using his knife in all kinds of ways that most people would never consider, like shooting it out of a slingshot. Bart grumbles that they never let you have any fun.
  • In "Jaws Wired Shut, Bart and Milhouse see a stunt on Jackass they want to copy. Milhouse adds "All those disclaimers makes me want to do it more!"
  • In "Weekend At Burnsie's", when Homer is prescribed medical marijuana, he immediately gets hooked and Lisa asks him why he suddenly loves her saxophone music.
    Homer: Now, daddy's special medicine, which you must never use because it will ruin your life, lets daddy see into magical places that you will never experience. Ever.
  • In "Bart The Daredevil", Bart still wants to jump the Springfield Gorge despite being confronted with the painful sight of many daredevils in the hospital.
• South Park:
  • An in-universe example: In the episode "Pinkeye," when Mrs. Cartman sends her son to school dressed as Hitler, the principal shows him an educational film to scare him straight. However, the film consists solely of the message "Adolf Hitler was a very, very naughty man", followed by (untranslated) clips of his speeches and goose-stepping, saluting Nazis. There's no mention of anything evil he actually did. Cartman thinks the movie is "cool", to the point of seeing himself in place of Hitler in the video, and asks to see it again. However, given Cartman's stated anti-Semitism, he'd probably have thought it was even cooler had it been translated.
  • "Major Boobage": "Schoolchildren are often experimenting with dangerous ways to get high, like sniffing glue, or huffing paint, but they're all bad, m'kay...male cats, when they're marking their territory spray a concentrated urine to fend off other male cats, and that can get you really high...like really, really, high...probably shouldn't have told you that just now, m'kay? That was probably bad."
  • "Butt Out'' also parodied this but in the opposite way. An overly upbeat anti-smoking group called Butt Out, which incorporates elements of terrible dance and hip-hop into its routine, performs at the school. All the students think it's really lame and disturbing. At the end, Butt Out enthusiastically calls out, "If you don't smoke, you can grow up to be just like us!" Directly after they say this, the boys start frantically smoking.
  • In "Sexual Healing," some of the kids ask what autoerotic asphyxiation is. The man they ask says he doesn't want to give them any ideas...but then describes it in detail, adding that it supposedly feels "really, really awesome". Three guesses how Kenny died in that episode.
  • "Kick A Ginger Day" is not something that should ever have been defictionalized!
  • Invoked in-universe when Cartman gets a fat scooter and Token and Kyle hatch a plan to make a documentary series about him. Kyle intends to warn people away from his self-destructive, fat-enabling behavior. Token, on the other hand, correctly predicts that it will become a hit along the lines of Honey Boo Boo and inspire imitators. Averted when James Cameron (The greatest pioneer!) raises the bar and everyone loses interest.
  • "Medical Fried Chicken" has South Park legalize medical marijuana. Randy Marsh wants to smoke it, and gives himself testicular cancer so he will get a medical referral to allow him buy marijuana for medical purposes. The result is that Randy, and his friends, spend most of the episode happier by giving themselves cancer, even finding their testicles being enlarged by the cancer to be a benefit. Their only issue comes from when they can't enter the building to actually get any of the marijuana. And then, while the show does frame them being in the wrong for giving themselves cancer for such a short-sighted reason, Status Quo Is God means that the Reset Button is hit in the end and none of them suffer any long term consequences from it.
  • Another In-Universe example occurs in "The Death Camp of Tolerance." Some of the boys and their parents visit a Tolerance Museum to learn about prejudice and stereotyping. The first exhibit is the "Tunnel of Prejudice," wherein the kids ride a conveyor belt and hear various slurs to experience how it feels to be verbally abused; Cartman naturally thinks it's a cool amusement park attraction that's teaching him words he didn't know and immediately says "I wanna ride again, I wanna ride again!" when he exits. Later, the tour guide takes the group into the "Tolerance Discovery Lab" to learn about not discriminating against people for their shape or size. She says that the boys have likely teased Cartman with demeaning nicknames "like 'Tubby' or 'Lard-Butt' or 'Fat Tits.'" Stan and Kyle immediately note that "Fat Tits"" is a great insult: "We'll have to remember that."
• An episode of Transformers: Animated has Prowl picking up a suit of powerful samurai armor that upgrades his strength and gave him new abilities, but also makes him reckless and causes him to rely more on his new upgrades than his actual skills. At the end of the episode, he destroys the armor, proving that he's grown past the need for it. The problem was that "Samurai Prowl" looked incredibly cool and people fell in love with the idea—so much so that Hasbro quickly got to work in turning it into a toy. Ultimately, Prowl even gets the armor back as a late-season powerboost, with the writers rather hastily having to explain why the armor is okay now.
• VeggieTales ran into this problem with the episode "Rack, Shack, and Benny", where corrupt chocolate factory owner Mr. Nezzar has a Villain Song demanding his workers worship a giant chocolate bunny and reject morality (an adaptation of the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refusing to worship King Nebuchadnezzar as a god). "The Bunny Song" is meant to be blasphemous—the three heroes are horrified at what Mr. Nezzar is singing—but its melody was a little too catchy, resulting in little kids singing "I won't go to church, and I won't go to school/ That stuff is for sissies, but bunnies are cool!" Parents naturally complained, so the animators had rerelease the episode with different song lyrics to downplay the blasphemy and reinforce the episode's actual message.

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