Establishing Series Moment / Western Animation

• Arcane establishes the themes and fundamental conflicts within its first scene. Two young sisters cross a bridge under a blood red sky, the younger covering her eyes and singing a song about being asking a friend across the river for but a penny. Through the hazy smoke and screams, the masked and inhuman looking Enforcers mercilessly gun down their opponents with the future Jinx's mental scribbles showing how demonic as a young girl they seem. Vi and Powder are briefly frightened to see Vander in combat, but recognizing each other, Vi wordlessly asks about their parents. Vander sadly gestures to their corpses and the sisters break down crying at the sight. Vander looks at his gauntlets and drops them, choosing to take the girls away from the horror on the bridge over continuing the fight. The serious nature of the show, the conflict between the poor of the undercity and the wealthy in topside, the menacing nature of the Enforcers, and an overarching theme about choosing between children and ideals are all established in less than 4 minutes.
• Archer subverts the entire 60s spy genre within the very first scene. Archer is seemingly imprisoned in a Russian cell, near-naked and with a guard threatening to torture him. Archer just snarks at the "guard's" accent, at which point we find out it was all a simulation, which Archer's mother is creepily invested in.
• Batman Beyond opens with Batman fighting some generic mook kidnappers... until he starts suffering from a heart attack and is reduced to pulling the mooks' dropped gun to save himself and the kidnapped girl. After emergency services show up, Bruce removes the mask to show he's significantly older than previous appearances in the DCAU and utterly horrified that he's reduced himself to some punk with a gun. The scene then cuts to him hanging up the cape and vowing "Never again". To drive the point home it immediately cuts to the theme song and we hear a techno-beat accompanying a scene flying across the water towards the art deco skyline of Gotham... which is then dwarfed by massive futuristic towers behind the old waterfront. The message is clear: this ain't your father's Batman, and it ain't your father's Gotham either.
• Big Mouth has the kids all watching a sex-ed video and snarking through it out of boredom, then all of a sudden Maurice the Hormone Monster suddenly appears and goads Andrew into masturbating. From this moment onwards, the line between reality and abstraction begins to blur.
• By counter-example: in the very first scene of BoJack Horseman, BoJack defends Horsin' Around as "a show about good, likable people who love each other, where, you know, no matter what happens, at the end of 30 minutes, everything's gonna turn out okay." This show is the exact opposite, about miserable, often unsympathetic people who bicker constantly and face real consequences for their actions.
• You know what kind of show Brickleberry is when the first thing it shows the viewer a forest glen full of various Woodland Creatures... having sex. All in the exact same time and place. While the local park ranger proudly shows this to a troop of astonished boy scouts as if this were a typical "splendor of nature" scene.
• Most Christmas Specials begin with a sweeping opening to really get the viewers into the Christmas spirit. One of them, however, opens rather humbly with a chorus of children singing "Christmastime is Here", a song all about the joyousness of the season, in a sad, wistful manner. Soon after, our main character laments to his friend about his inability to enjoy what should be the most wonderful time of year. So begins A Charlie Brown Christmas.
• The pilot for Codename: Kids Next Door opens with the main characters gathering on the mission prep room of their treehouse headquarters, where Numbuh 1 delivers their very important assignment: to dive in the local swimming pool during adult swim time. The fact that he refers to the grown-ups as "their enemies" really sets the focus of the show.
• Freakazoid!:
  • When Cave Guy is described as 'powerful and dangerous, but also highly intelligent':
    Cave Guy: [in snooty posh accent] I subscribe to The New Yorker.
  • When the title character fights his first on-screen enemy, he jumps on his head and starts cat-wailing. He then calls all the hostage teenagers to 'get down low', and the fight ends when he drops a basketball hoop on the villain. This guy's prowess puts Deadpool to shame.
• The Gargoyles opening kicks off with an accurate rendition of Storming the Castle, a slow, dramatic reveal of the stone gargoyles, and Goliath's epic and spine-chilling "You are trespassing". But it isn't until the leader slashes him and actual blood flows down from the wound that we knew this show wasn't going to pull its punches for the younger crowd.
• Generator Rex has its opening scene in which Rex, Providence, and the media react to a hideous Kaiju-sized EVO attacking a city as a disaster, but nothing they haven't seen before. There's also the Wham Shot after Rex cures the EVO, revealing it was originally just a normal man.
• Gravity Falls has the climax of the pilot episode. Mabel, desperate for a summer romance, is dating a really strange guy calling himself Norman she met in the cemetery. Dipper has found a mysterious journal and realizes Norman's a zombie bent on eating her and tries to warn her, but she doesn't take him seriously (and hopes the guy really turns out to be a vampire instead). The guy brings her to a secluded wood to reveal his ultimate secret... and then takes off his trenchcoat to show he's five gnomes stacked on top of each other. Perfectly establishes that the show is not only going to be weird, but deliver that weirdness in twists and turns you don't expect.
  • The first scene of the episode as well.
    Dipper: Ah, summer break; a time for leisure, recreation, and taking 'er easy... unless you're me. [Mabel and Dipper crash through the town's "Welcome to" sign, driving fast in a golf cart away from a giant monster]
• Green Eggs and Ham: The narrator stating — "This is Dr. Seuss, I didn’t expect a n... WHY WOULD YOU CUT THE LINE?" in the first episode which reveals how off-kilter this series will be.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy sets its tone in the first episode when Grim tries without success to frighten Billy and Mandy.
  Grim: Look! Aren't you two scared?! Boo! Blah! [no reaction from either Billy or Mandy] Oh come on! I'm a walking skeleton! Isn't that scary?!
• F is for Family: The first episode begins with Frank Murphy driving home through a typical, idyllic 70's neighborhood of cars, pastel homes and beautiful front lawns, sitting down at the table with an attentive and caring family, and beginning to tell a story about work- only to fly into a rage from a single phone-call during dinner, establishing his anger problems and setting the profane tone for the rest of the series. Teenage son Kevin reacts with disgust while obviously being high, his wife Sue attempts to calm him down but fails and tries to deal with the fallout, middle son Bill shirks away in fear and youngest daughter Maureen ignores him. The last words before the title sequence are Frank yelling at Bill's friend (who came by to ask if Bill could play) "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!".
• For anyone unfamiliar with the comic book or Robert Kirkman's other work, Invincible (2021) may seem like a bright and colorful coming-of-age story about a high school student discovering his superpowers and training under his superhero father, Omni-Man, while trying to balance his two lives... And then it brutally subverts your expectations when the first episode ends with Omni-Man slaughtering the setting's version of the Justice League; the moment he slowly and graphically crushes Red Rush's skull into bloody paste is the moment you realize that this is not a Saturday morning cartoon.
• Jellystone!: The opening sequence starts as a peaceful parade of characters a la the old Hanna-Barbera crossover shows...then something causes the buildings to topple like dominoes, and the kazoos kick in as the characters run for their lives, before reaching the town square...and getting squashed by the rest of the buildings. Even the show logo gets squashed at the very end — telling you this is very much in tune with C.H. Greenblatt's previous shows and not like the H-B shows of old.
• Kaeloo: The first episode, "Let's Play Prison-Ball", gives one near the end when Mr. Cat pulls out a bazooka and starts shooting spiked prison-balls at Quack Quack.
• King of the Hill opens up with Hank and the guys just having a long conversation about his truck without anything "zany" happening, showing that while it's animated, it aims for a realistic, slice-of-life angle instead of fantastic plots. The show is prone to slapstick some times, but those moments are the exception rather than the rule.
• Men in Black: The Series: The pre-title scene of the first episode, concerns Agents J and K, having been called to chase down an undocumented shapeshifting alien, dealing with an odd-looking cat stuck in a tree. While K warns J that he doesn't know what he's dealing with — yeah, he parrots, "Nothing is as it seems" — J reaches for the cat and gets grabbed by the tree.
• The My Little Pony pilot has around 3 minutes of tooth-rotting, stomach churning cuteness with the pastel Manchild ponies... then demonic dragons come in and scoop several ponies while a storm suddenly appears. This sets the Everything Trying to Kill You tone of G1, which often revolved around the ponies saving Dream Valley from some sort of evil while also being goofy and cute on the side.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic of the show does this in the theme song, beginning with the franchise's familiar lighthearted theme song before switching to a more energetic rock version. The pilot episode itself also establishes Twilight as antisocial and irritable, flying in defiance of what one would presume from a My Little Pony protagonist.
• The first episode of The Nutshack opens with Phil and Tito Dick playing an off-brand Star Wars fighting game which Dick wins by zapping Phil's character in the crotch with lightning in a move he dubs the "Viagra-powered dong snatcher." Shortly after this, there's a shot of Dick walking in on Phil rubbing one out, and it only gets more obscene from there.
• The Legend of Vox Machina lets you know what kind of show you're in for from minute one of episode one: A group of classical fantasy heroes gears up to fight a dragon while Matthew Mercer delivers his best epic narration. When the battle starts, the dragon immediately kills the adventurers, leaving the narrator to remark "Well, that was...something." The message is clear: This isn't going to be your typical fantasy story, nor will it feature your typical heroes.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: The series begins with K.O. heading to the plaza with his mom because his babysitter is fighting the flu. We then see K.O.'s babysitter Punching Judy literally fist-fighting the Flu, establishing just what kind of world the show is.
  • And the fact that it's ultimately a setup for a pun lets you know that this is a world that runs off of the Rule of Funny as much as the Rule of Cool.
• The plot relevance of Over the Garden Wall's opening sequence is limited to some Foreshadowing, but it sets up the creepy-yet-whimsical tone of the series with visuals like a lonely bluebird, a frightened man walking in a beautiful mansion, and a prairie girl surrounded by skeletons.
• The Phineas and Ferb intro ends with Candace telling their mom that her brothers are making a title sequence, cluing you into the show's tendency for meta and self-aware humor.
  • The first episode itself, “Rollercoaster,” opens up on Phineas monologuing to the silent Ferb and Perry that he won’t put up with boredom and that he wants to be able to say that they had an eventful summer when they go back to school. This establishes the “carpe diem” theme of the series.
    • In a way, the entire episode is this, establishing the basic formula of the series that will be lampshaded, subverted, and played with five ways to Sunday: Phineas and Ferb build something fantastic, Candace attempts to tell on them to Linda, Perry defeats Doofenshmirtz and inadvertently erases any proof that Phineas and Ferb did anything special.
• Primal (2019): What you can expect from this series is established within the first minute as our caveman protagonist, Spear, impales a fish—which causes a stream of bright red blood to come from it into the surrounding water, in contrast to the mostly bloodless violence of Tartakovsky's previous series—and then is attacked by a giant crocodile. The real establishing moment, though, is when he returns to his family and sees them being attacked by a group of theropod dinosaurs which proceed to brutally kill and eat them as Spear watches, powerless to stop them, which includes one of his young sons being tossed into the air and snapped up by one of the carnivores. The series only gets more violent and gory from here on out.
• Rick and Morty gives us two. The pilot episode sets up the title characters and their dynamic in the cold open, with a drunken Rick outlining a plan to set off a Depopulation Bomb to wipe out most of humanity so that Morty and his crush can re-populate the Earth. Then when Morty is horrified at the idea, he plays it off as a Secret Test of Character and passes out with the bomb's timer still ticking down. Another episode's cold open, despite coming much later in the same season, is said by fans to neatly summarize the whole show without any plot spoilers in about 60 seconds.
• Robot Chicken starts off with a message from George W. Bush - "Tacos rule" - to underscore the utter insanity of the humor in the show.
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police uses this, by showing various insane or weird scenarios on the pretense of a faux "Previously on…" montage, as if the intro didn't convince the viewers that this is going to be one weird show.
• For the 2017 return of Samurai Jack, the first episode opens with Jack fighting an army of killer robots as he always does, but he later narrates that 50 years have passed without any sort of progress in his quest or any aging on his part, and he's pretty much lost all hope of ever getting home. There's also the fact that he's riding a motorcycle and using guns. Jack was once a poster child for the Good Old Ways, but now he's abandoned his sword, his gi, his sandals, his hat, his Samurai Ponytail...
  • The pilot dedicates 9 whole minutes of the first episode's 22 minute runtime to Jack's origin story, showing him traveling around the world and learning from nearly every culture in the world as he grows from a young boy to a man worthy of his family's magic sword. And not a single line of dialogue is spoken. This establishes the shows more visual approach of this show and foreshadows and sets up the much longer journey he'll have in Aku's Bad Future.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated opens with the gang having finished solving another mystery and celebrating... before it's revealed that doing so landed them in a dark jail cell behind bars. Combine that with a scene involving a mysterious locket that has absolutely nothing to do with the episode's mystery, but has some of the supporting characters on edge, and you quickly realize that this isn't just going to be your usual Monster of the Week Scooby-Doo show.
• Forty seconds into the pilot of The Shivering Truth, we get (in order) a lunch lady cutting a blind girl's welt into slices to use for lunch meat (and giving the camera a horrifying smile) and another segment where a man suffers Gaslighting by his roommate to convince him there's not a condom stuffed into his ear, before the roommate removes his scalp, pulls out a hot dog larger than his entire body, and cuts it open, causing hundreds of ants to pour out. It's that kind of show.
• The first thing that happens in South Park is Kyle kicking his baby brother like a football. And it all goes downhill from there.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: The first scene of the pilot is Ensign Boimler recording a faux-Captain's Log about the "second contact" missions undertaken by U.S.S. Cerritos (basically the follow-up to First Contact) — and Ensign Mariner busts in, drunk on Romulan whiskey and towing a crate full of contraband, to mock him for pretending to be a captain. She then starts wildly swinging a bat'leth around and slices him in the leg, to their mutual horror. It's immediately clear that this show is Denser and Wackier than every previous iteration of Star Trek, with characters who are not the best of the best like on the Enterprise.
• Thunder Cats 2011, pulls a neat bait-and-switch, in "Omens Part One" lovingly displaying an Epic Tracking Shot of Thundera over Jaga's Opening Monologue speaking of the place as The Good Kingdom and a Shining City… after a brief Establishing Shot, the camera tilts downward to reveal extensive slums, and a group of Catfolk muggers beating a hapless Dog. This was the exact moment that showed any fans expecting a simple remake that no, this was not the Thundera of your childhood.
• Tigtone: "The Begun of Tigtone" opens on a seemingly mellow scene of Tigtone at an inn beginning his journal entry, until he gives a sudden shout of "HU-AH!" and stabs the journal with a strike of lightning. As he launches into narrating his adventure, we get the completely out-of-nowhere and funny scene of him epically charging down a corridor and bursting out of the monsters stomach. This immediately introduces the weird art style, ridiculous dialogue, and hilarious parody of fantasy, as well as showing us Tigtone's Large Ham, Cloud Cuckoo Lander personality.
• Total Drama: The first episode of Island starts slow, introducing the sleazy host Chris, the teenage contestants and their varied personalities, and Camp Wawanakwa as a crappy Summer Campy setting. After settling down to terrible living conditions, Foul Cafeteria Food, and each other's quirks, the campers try to get ready for the reality TV challenges. Katie wonders aloud what it'll be, to which DJ reassures her that their first challenge shouldn't be too hard. Cut to everyone standing atop a 1,000 foot high cliff, with the clear implication that they'll have to dive into the water below, and setting the tone for every challenge in the series.
  DJ: Oh, s**t.
• Transformers: Prime starts off with a conversation between Cliffjumper and Arcee, then a fight with Decepticons where Cliffjumper fights them alone, doing well, then he's captured, and unceremoniously murdered by Starscream, to kickstart the Darker and Edgier tone the series is going for.
• Uncle Grandpa's very title sequence is a pretty good indication that you're about to see some weird stuff happen.
• The Venture Bros.: The first episode after the pilot shows the burly Brock Sampson having a rigged poker game with a Tijuana cartel head that naturally ends with Brock violently taking down all his goons. Where Venture Bros strays from the usual adventure formula is that the head surrenders and gives Brock what he wanted, a part for a classic car that Brock simply accepts and leaves with. Showing that the battles between heroes and villains are so transactional in this world that a lot of drama can be started and ended over pretty much nothing and even the most violent and hardened among them accept where the chips fall and leave when the deals are done.
• What's New, Scooby-Doo?: Confronted by the first episode's snow monster, Fred tries to calm the others by pointing out that it could be just another costume with a creep inside. Shaggy, standing nearer to the monster, retorts that there's something missing from Fred's theory ... and steps behind it, showing that it's completely transparent, and proclaiming in alarm that there is no creep inside. Rubber suits are so last-series; this installment's villains have gone high-tech.
• Young Justice (2010) opens with four of the world's most dangerous ice-themed villains (Mr. Freeze, Icicle Jr., Killer Frost, and Captain Cold) attacking major cities in a coordinated strike, and as they're being taken down, the focus is placed more on the sidekicks than the heroes themselves. The message is clear: this series is giving the sidekicks a place to shine, the writers are doing their homework when it comes to DC, and anybody can show up moving forwards.

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