Improvised Weapon / Western Animation

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• Any character with some sort of telekinetic powers will use this trope to hurtle stuff at the bad guy.
  • Raven's preferred method of combat in Teen Titans (2003).
  • In Static Shock, Static will often use his electric powers to hurl any metallic objects he can find.
  • Used by Cosmic Boy during his guest spot on Superman: The Animated Series.
  • Jean Grey uses it a lot, especially in X-Men: Evolution.
  • This sums up the "Propel" attack in City Of Heroes. Extra hilarity because the projectile looks like a different stock object to each player, due to a programming quirk.
    • The object is fully random, but occasionally funny events occur like a vampire being KO'd by a speeding coffin.
• In American Dad!, Stan and Francine go on an unauthorized publicity tour to market Mr. Pibb (they just really like the soda). When representatives from the company show up to tell them to stop, Stan discusses things reasonably... as a distraction, so Francine can fill her purse with cans of soda and use it to beat the tar out of them.
• Arcane: Jayce built (among other things) a pair of large mechanical fists that miners could use, and a smith's hammer with some interesting kinetic absorption properties. It didn't take much tweaking to turn them into powerful weapons for Vi and himself, and they use them to slaughter a group of Turbo Chemtanks.
• Archer and Lana once lost their duffle bag full of ammo in a swamp with a very pissed-off, wounded gator. All they had was a cooler full of beer, bottled water, and dry ice (to keep the beer extra-cold!). Lana thought they were stuck with no weapons, until Archer pointed out that dry ice combined with undiluted water in a sealed container (like a closed beer bottle) causes a pressure buildup until it explodes and essentially makes a glass-based frag grenade. Archer is actually correct in his chemistry here, and after some measuring trials, they are ready for the gator, but they never get to use one on it as they run out of bottles by the time the figure out a combination that will be destructive enough but still safe enough to deal with.
• Batman Beyond: In "Payback", the eponymous vigilante's signature weapon, a combination Laser Blade and energy whip is actually a laser cutter used by a local artist for making his sculptures.
• Any of the handful of "real world" battles in Code Lyoko apply, since the characters are Middle School students, and swords aren't exactly commonplace. However, Odd and Jim gain a special commendation for shooting monsters with a nailgun in the last episode of Season 1.
  • See also the Season 3 episode "The Pretender", where Ulrich, after losing his katana to a swarm of Frelions, still manages to destroy three of them and a Manta with a shard of virtual stone.
• In The Crumpets episode "Game lover", when Cordless' video game girlfriend (whom he hasn't met in person yet) is confronted by his cousin Caprice for being enticed by Marylin, Cordless arrives and attacks Caprice by throwing hamburgers and torching them mid-air into flaming projectiles. This is a homage to his video game character's fiery hamburger attack.
• On Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines, Klunk must use resources at hand to create aircraft for the Vulture Squadron in "Have Plane, Will Travel." He also turns crashed airplanes into a flying dump truck in "A Plain Shortage of Planes."
• In the DuckTales (1987) episode "Where No Duck has Gone Before", Launchpad appropriates a custard-maker from the Kronks' robot and uses it as a non-lethal weapon against them. (It probably helps that it looks like a gun.)
• Spoofed in the Futurama episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", in which their improvised weapons (including a bow with a bowstring made of caterpillars) all fail in practice, so William Shatner has to resort to making out with his opponent. Shatner recalls using his shoe as a weapon in one episode and throws one of his, hitting George Takei in the face. "My foot's cold."
• Gravity Falls uses this trope a lot, but Mabel is the undisputable queen among the cast. Leaf blowers, karaoke machines, confetti cannons, fake candles, nerf guns, doors, tickling and even Wax Coolio's head have all been in her arsenal.
• The show Jackie Chan Adventures pays obvious homage to Jackie Chan's movies, as the hero can and will use whatever is at his disposal. The first of many examples of this has Jackie defeating three mooks armed with high-tech weaponry, with a pair of wind-shield wipers.
  • "Diiid we mention he had windshield wipers?"
  • That's barely the tip of the iceberg. He once trounced a guy with a soup spoon and a toothbrush
  • Heck, he once used a secret agent that had been knocked out as a weapon!
• In the Justice League Unlimited episode "The Great Brain Robbery", Flash and Lex Luthor swap minds. While trying to fend off his pursuers at the Watchtower, Luthor, in Flash's body, runs to the cafeteria and starts throwing food at them. At first it seems useless, since Green Lantern has created a shield around his teammates to avoid being hit. Just then, he picks up a dish filled with yellow pudding and throws it at him... And the pudding easily goes through the shield and splats GL squarely in the face! This is due to the one great limitation of GL's power ring: it doesn't work on anything that's yellow (since it symbolizes fear, which is the essential opposite to willpower, whose token color is green).
  • Also in JLU ("Divided We Fall"), Wonder Woman uses a Javelin — as in the League's standard transport/fighter/spaceship — to stop the fused Brainiac/Luthor from completing his plan to assimilate all of Earth's knowledge. How? By throwing it at him.
  Brainilex: having disposed of the rest of the League without slowing down his data transfer "...now where is Wonder Woman?"
  cut to Javelin toss. Explosion ensues.
  • This trope is taken to the extreme when Batman uses the Justice League Space Station to take out a gigantic thanagarian wormhole-generator by destabilizing its orbit and then manually steering it to its target.
    • Which is similar to him steering a giant toy robot into a kryptonite Asteroid in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies.
  • The Question does this a couple of times. In 'Question Authority', he throws a computer at a mook who was sneaking up on Huntress. In 'Flashpoint', once again to defend Huntress from someone sneaking up on her, he uses a bedpan, of all things, to knock out an enemy clone. Between both incidents he was also perfectly ready to kill Lex Luthor with his own tie. He also has a moment of Car Fu in the final episode. This seems to be a tendency of his, as there's also a neat moment in the comics which plays into both this and Question's paranoid nature. He has rigged a filing cabinet to explode if anyone other than him tries to open it. When he is seemingly attacked by Martian Manhunter, Question recalls the Martian weakness to fire. Then he throws the filing cabinet at J'onn.
• The Legend of Vox Machina has Vax (cornered, injured and left without his weapons) attempt to use a shard of broken glass as a makeshift shiv against Sylas Briarwood. It doesn't work.
• In Lilo & Stitch, Stitch uses many household objects in a fight, and makes a rag doll (Scrump) into an IED.
• In the first S-Force episode of Megas XLR, Coop is surprisingly able to take down two of the members of the group without his mech. His weapon of choice is a novelty talking fish.
• My Little Pony 'n Friends: In "Baby, It's Cold Outside, Part 2", an abominable snowman attacks the ponies by snapping icicles from the maze's ceiling and throwing them like javelins.
• Parodied in the The Powerpuff Girls episode, Supper Villain. The Powerpuff Girls' jealous and very ordinary neighbor who wants to be a supervillain, Harold Smith, takes Professor Utonium hostage with his raygun, which is actually a blowdryer with a bubble wand taped to it...
• In Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends, Nick Logan was trained to fight using anything he could get his hands on. He was unknowingly being trained to fight the various aliens that have taken up on Earth.
• Thanks to his training the titular Samurai Jack is a master of using anything as a weapon. If he can pick it up and swing it, it's a staff. Break it in half and he'll just wield the two halves with just as much mastery.
• Parodied in The Simpsons. Bart is pinned down in a scuffle with Milhouse, and starts groping around behind him for something to use as a weapon. His hand passes over a brick, a broken bottle and possibly various other suitable objects, and settles instead on a Magic 8-Ball.
  • Also, a recently fired Chief Wiggum attempts to rob Homer at gunpoint, but it's revealed that the gun has no firing mechanism. He continues to threaten Homer anyway: "I can throw this pretty hard."
• Skull Island (2023): Like in the live-action film which this series serves as a sequel to, Kong makes use of his surroundings in combat, such as using giant ribs as makeshift stabbing tools and javelins, using giant boulders as blunt-force weapons, and stabbing the Big Bad's eyes out with half a sunken shipwreck.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • "Envoys": Ensign Sam Rutherford tears off a section of the metal railing and uses it as a lance against two holographic Borg drones.
  • "Temporal Edict": When a group of alien warriors boards the Cerritos, some of the crewmembers resort to using their PADDs as bludgeoning weapons.
  • "Terminal Provocations":
    • The Drookmani reverse their tractor beam and use it to chuck wreckage at the Cerritos, since their ship doesn't have any weapons.
    • During the Holodeck Malfunction, Badgey grabs a nearby icicle and stabs Rutherford in the shoulder with it.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars, "Bombad Jedi": After accidentally activating an electromagnet in the hangar, Jar Jar maneuvers it into attacking battle droids.
• SWAT Kats has some examples of this trope.
  • In "Bride of the Pastmaster", the SWAT Kats are Trapped in the Past without regular ammo, so they trick out their Cool Plane the Turbokat with whatever's at hand, including pepper stew.
  • The SWAT Kats' civilian ally, Deputy Mayor Callie Briggs, may not carry a weapon, but she's been known to attack supervillains with a money bag ("The Wrath of Dark Kat") or her briefcase ("The Ci-Kat-A") to defend herself or her friends.
• In one episode of the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the turtles are imprisoned and stripped of their weapons, and therefore have to resort to fighting with cleaning supplies. They manage to take down a whole squad of alien triceratops guards this way, with Raph, of all turtles, getting in a Shout-Out to The Tick: SPOOOON!
• In Thunder Cats 2011, when Grune and Pantro were once cornered by a Giant Spider, Grune ripped his own fang out of his mouth and stabbed the spider to death with it.
• The Tick: The Tick himself went up against super-strong Baron Violent, who threw a car he crushed with his bare hands, and then threw a big slab of pavement. It landed on The Tick's "dog" Speak, leaving him untouched but prompting The Tick to run him to the vet, hysterically shouting "BAD-MAN-HIT-DOG-WITH-STREET!!!"
• Tom and Jerry has the the eponymous cat and mouse making constant use of this trope.
• Transformers:
  • Dinobot from Beast Wars manages to smack the MacGuffin out of Megatron with a makeshift stone hammer. One of the proto-humans winds up using this as a weapon/tool.
  Megatron: Face it, Dinobot! You're old technology, obsolete. What could you possibly do?
  Dinobot: Improvise.
  • Prowl of Transformers: Animated occasionally improvises; in his first fight against Lockdown, he came at the bounty hunter with a metal pole he picked up from a pile of scrap, and his toy comes with a traffic light he can use as a mace.
    • Parodied in this Insecticomics strip.
    • Most of the Autobots in Animated were part of a repair crew, and as such have power tools instead of dedicated weapons. Even Optimus Prime's axe goes with his fireman theme rather than being presented as a straightforward implement of harm.
  • Predaking of Transformers: Prime didn't really need to use an improvised weapon due to his massive strength but at one point he starts beating Megatron with one of his own Vehicon troopers.
• In The Venture Brothers, Brock, the tough bodyguard character, often uses anything to kill people (often nearly anyone). Once he is pinned under a man with a samurai sword in a hotel room, but then Hank opens the hotel room's end table drawer. Brock remembers what a pastor told him earlier that day... "The only weapon you'll ever need is The Bible." He reaches in, taking the hotel bible and bludgeoning his attacker over the head.
  • One episode has Brock kill a group of The Monarch's guys with a lawnmower.
  • One episode has Brock kill a guy by swinging around a guy whose hand was inside Brock's rectum.

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