Its A Wonderful Plot / Western Animation

• The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo: "It's A Wonderful Scoob" has Scooby traumatized once too often by spooks (namely the episode's villain Time Slime) and he leaves to return home. Vincent Van Ghoul shows him what would happen to his friends and the world in general without his intervention. Basically, Time Slime lets the thirteen demons free to rule the world; Scrappy, Flim-Flam, and Daphne become Time Slime's slaves and Shaggy goes bananas.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks has an episode where Dave has to tell Alvin, Simon and Theodore he can't afford to send them to summer camp. When he overhears them grumbling about this, he wonders if they would have been better off if he never existed. That night, he has a dream in which the Chipmunks remind him of times when he helped them through problems and show him how things would have gone without his help. Alvin's lemonade stand is a failure, Simon loses his school spelling bee, and Theodore never gains the confidence he needs to become Class President. All three end up being losers because Dave wasn't there for them when they needed him. When Dave wakes up, he resolves to make it up to the Chipmunks for letting them down.
• American Dad!: This is featured as the sixth Christmas Episode, "Dreaming of a White Porsche Christmas," but gets subverted. Stan wishes to trade lives with Principal Lewis but in the process, he loses Francine and the kids and tries to undo his wish. When it looks like Stan has learned to truly appreciate his family, an angel arrives to inform Stan the lesson is over. Stan returns home and discovers a completely different family more akin to how Stan always wanted things to be: he has a devoted wife, a doting daughter, and an athletic son. Also, Klaus is a normal fish, and Roger's existence as an alien is hidden by his disguise as a mall optometrist renting Stan's attic. Stan is then informed that the entire series before this episode was this trope. This new family is Stan's actual family, and because he didn't appreciate them, he was given Francine, Steve, Hayley, Klaus, and Roger as punishment. But the angel who was in charge of Stan's case apparently passed away, Stan completely forgot about his old family, and the case fell through the cracks. Now, however, Stan actually wants Francine and their kids back and tries to switch.
• Arthur:
  • Used in a 13th season episode called "Silent Treatment." George feels that his friends are ignoring him and decides to stop speaking. His dummy, Wally, then shows him a world without him in a fantasy sequence (After a brief visit to a fairly mundane world where Wally doesn't exist). Without George, the woodworking class never kicks off since there's no George to be an example. Arthur and Buster don't have a third friend to play catch with. A family of birds is cold because George never builds a birdhouse for them. And finally, because George never exists, Wally never exists, and George reacts in horror as his father chops down the block of wood that would have been crafted into his dummy. George even Lampshades it, noting that there's a movie like it.
  • Earlier than that in the 7th season episode "D.W.'s Time Trouble", D.W. has a dream that she was the one born first making her the older sibling. She has a pet kitten and her artwork in preschool is fully appreciated by her teacher. Feeling sorry for Arthur not being born, she forces the dream version of her parents to adopt him, but he grows up to be an unknowing tattletale. Then D.W. finds herself in the same situation her real-life younger self got into with Arthur and realizes she doesn't know what to do. She wakes up to realize that being a younger sibling is nice since the older one knows more and is able to teach her.
  • The Season 20 premiere, "Buster's Second Chance," did this as well, when Buster dreams of what it'd be like if he passed a simple test at a special gifted preschool interview. He would have never met Arthur, and Arthur would have become one of the Tough Customers.
• Episode "A Charmed Life" of Babar has the elephant king overwhelmed by work wishing never to be king while carrying a gypsy amulet. The result is a Villain World with Rataxes ruling Celesteville and having all elephants and rhinos living in misery.
• Batman: The Animated Series
  • "Over the Edge": because of a Scarecrow-induced nightmare, Batgirl dreams she gets killed during costumed adventuring. Commissioner Gordon discovers then that Batgirl was his daughter Barbara, and orders a manhunt on Batman. Things go downhill from there. Gordon goes so far as to enlist Bane to help him hunt Batman.
  • Another is "Perchance to Dream", in which Bruce wakes up to discover his parents are alive, he's engaged to Selina Kyle, and there's even a Batman to fight crime. Sounds like a perfect life, huh? Like it says in the title, it's All Just a Dream and he's been put in a Lotus-Eater Machine by the Mad Hatter.
• Beavis And Butthead did a twisted reversal of the plot of It's a Wonderful Life, with an angel coming to Earth on Christmas to encourage Butt-head to commit suicide by showing how much better the world would be if he had never been born. Neighbors, classmates, teachers, and even Beavis (left with only Stewart to influence him) are shown to be happier and more successful without him. Naturally, Butt-head fails to grasp the lesson.
  • Daria was one of the neighbors who was happier. This proves that without Butt-head's intervention, her show would not have been as interesting as it was.
• Beetlejuice has the episode "It's a Wonderful Afterlife," which is a rare example of the trope being both played straight and averted. Beetlejuice, after a series of incidents, grows depressed and wishes himself out of existence. A guide comes to show him what the Neitherworld would be like without him, and much to their surprise, the subversion comes when his fellow ghosts are remarkably successful in their respective fields; they've just become self-absorbed jerks because their success has gone to their heads without him around to keep them humble. The trope gets played straight, though, when he checks on Lydia in the mortal world and discovers that she's completely miserable without him. When his guide says he's allowed no contact with her on account of the wish, meaning he can't make her happy again, he immediately demands to have everything put back the way it was.
• Camp Lakebottom has an episode called "It's a Horrible Life," which features McGee wishing he never existed after ruining a party dedicated to one of his friends. The wish is granted by his Fairy Goblin, Torus, and McGee is shown an alternate timeline where Camp Lakebottom has been taken over by Buttsquat and Suzi, renamed Camp Sunnybottom, and all of McGee's friends have either been enslaved or driven wild.
• Here's an odd one: Captain Planet and the Planeteers — "Two Futures" two-part episode, which takes place on New Year's Eve, Dr. Blight and Wheeler end up trapped in a cave with a limited air supply and the time portal she came to use. Upset, he voices a wish that he'd never gotten his Fire Ring, which Dr. Blight happily grants by shoving him into the portal. Gaia then shows him the future of each area, including a Hope Island in bad shape, so he goes back in time to undo his changes and return things to normal. The eco-villains escape into the timeline, but end up in a better future thanks to the (now middle-aged) Planeteers.
• In the CatDog episode "It's a Wonderful Half-Life", the titular twins are fed up with each other, and at night dream (In the Style of an old-timey black-and-white cartoon) about what their lives would be if neither one had the other: Cat is a wealthy and successful businessman, but completely friendless as nobody can stand him; meanwhile, Dog lives a life free of rules but is without a home.
• The series finale of Chowder has an odd variation (which doesn't involve travelling to an alternate reality) when Mung Daal shows Chowder what happened to the rest of the cast thanks to his refusal to grow up. Mung and Truffles are still working at their catering company, despite the fact that they should have retired and handed over the business to Chowder. Schnitzel married Endive because she was willing to put up with his complaints about Chowder. Panini is still waiting to marry Chowder and raise a family together. As a result, she vents her longing on her apprentice, Ambrosia, by dressing and treating her like a baby. Gorgonzola, now the CEO of a candle company, sees his accomplishment as a hollow victory because he lacks an adversary (particularly Chowder) to gloat about it to. Like Panini, he forces his apprentice, Kabob, to dress up as Chowder and venting his frustrations to him. Gazpacho has permanently shut down his fruit stand, left a recorded message about his successful future (which is a lie), and fled to the Shmahara desert.
• Happens to Miss Malone in "Crate Expectations," an episode of The Completely Mental Misadventures Of Ed Grimley.
• In the hour-long Christmas special of the Curious George TV adaptation, Ted, Man with the Yellow Hat, who is unable to interpret George's Christmas wish list, has a dream where he sees George under the care of other humans on the show. Under the care of Professor Wiseman, he is understood but is not allowed to play around and have fun. Under the Doorman, he can have fun cleaning but is not very well understood. Under Chef Pisghetti he seems to be understood and have fun, which saddens Ted - until he sees something in the dream that gives him the clue he needs to make George happy.
• In an episode of Danny Phantom, Sam gets mad when Danny breaks a promise to go to a special movie including all her favorite horror movie villainesses, to attend Paulina’s birthday party, which he’s only invited to because she’s noticed how the “Ghost Boy” always shows up wherever he is. Sam sarcastically remarks how she wishes something would happen to Paulina to get the party cancelled, which unfortunately catches the ear of Desiree, the evil genie ghost, who grants it. When the villainesses from the movie attack Paulina and always end up saying “Sam”, Danny accuses Sam of being linked with the attacks. Hurt and unaware of her real impact on the attacks, Sam says she wishes that she never met Danny, and Desiree gladly grants that, too. This actually causes a much bigger change, as Sam was the one who pushed Danny to explore the ghost portal that his parents built, giving him his ghost powers. Since Sam and Danny were never friends, Danny never went inside, never got his powers, and never became a superhero. In this new existence, Sam finds out that not only is she responsible for it, but she is also the only one, besides Desiree of course, that remembers the old existence, and sets out to restore things to the way they were.
• In the Doc McStuffins Grand Finale "It's a Hard Doc Life!", the titular character begins to wonder if her patients would have been better off if she hadn't been there at all after making a big mistake at her Toy Hospital.
• The Donkey Kong Country cartoon had an episode with the same name in which DK gets everybody upset with him and decides to run away, but falls unconscious during his trek. He has a dream where Eddie the Yeti, as his guardian angel, shows him a Kongo Bongo Island where he doesn't exist, in which Diddy is an evil dictator with Funky and Cranky as his minions, Candy's married to Bluster, and K. Rool is protecting a papier-mache lily pad while the Crystal Coconut is used as a mere paperweight.
• In an episode of The Emperor's New School, Kuzco realizes he makes everyone miserable as he is and wishes he were never emperor in order to fit in. Without him, Yzma has taken over the empire, and everyone is even more miserable.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • The episode "It's A Wishful Life" did the "Better if Not Born" Plot, where everyone's shown as being better off without Timmy Turner. When Timmy does all sorts of good things for his friends and family only to get complete ingratitude, he angrily wishes he was never born just to see how tough things would be without him... only to discover that everyone actually have much better lives without him: his parents have a daughter and are rich; his friends are also successful and happy; Mr. Crocker is a normal teacher; Vicky has found a more positive outlet for her sadism; and the Chicago Cubs finally won a World Series. At the end, the whole thing turns out to have been a Secret Test of Character given to Timmy by Jorgen Von Strangle. It ended up being one of the most disliked episodes of the show, with creator Butch Hartman regarding it as an Old Shame due to just how cruel the comedy was.
  • In an earlier episode "Father Time", Timmy causes his father to lose the racing trophy that he winds up melting due to wishing for heat vision. This resulted in Mr. Turner getting booted off to Dictator School and he went mad with denial and took over the world. Because of this, he never met Mrs. Turner which means Timmy was never born which means Cosmo and Wanda were never assigned to him.
  • In another episode "Timmy Turnip", Timmy (due to going insane from Ustinkistan customs) wishes that his maternal grandparents never left Ustinkistan, resulting in the family staying in perhaps one of the worst countries in the world (from bleak and barren landscapes to 11 months of darkness). And of course, his grandparents absolutely hate it as coming to America was the only way they could strike it rich and open a turnip-themed fast food chain.
  • In "Turner Back Time", Timmy, frustrated after learning about his great-great-grandfather Ebeneezer Turner picking the job of town crier (wherein the person runs around town bawling his eyes out) instead of railroad tycoon, wishes for Ebeneezer to pick the latter job. This results in Timmy's family becoming rich, at the cost of Dimmsdale becoming a destitute city and Cosmo and Wanda not being Timmy's fairy godparents. The only thing that hasn't changed is that Sparky is still Timmy's pet dog.
• Family Guy:
  • This show did an interesting take on this trope. Peter gets killed in a car crash after getting drunk at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Death then shows up to show what Peter would be like if he continues on his path of alcoholism. In this future, Peter tortures his family and has sex with his boss. Horrified by this, Peter wishes he had never taken a drop of alcohol in his life. Death then shows him what his life would be like without any alcohol. In this future, Peter is happy, educated, and cheerful, but he has uptight friends, doesn't know Joe, Cleveland, or Quagmire, and thinks they're uncouth. The Aesop is "use moderation." It becomes something of a Broken Aesop when you're talking about someone on his way home from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
  • In the episode "Chap Stewie," Stewie becomes disgusted with his family's crude, unsophisticated ways after watching Downton Abbey and decides to prevent his own conception through time travel in hopes of being born into an upper-class British family. He finds that his new parents are completely cold, leaving him to be raised entirely by staff and both his brothers are both resentful because he's an obstacle in their inheritance and far smarter than him, being much more cutting in their verbal abuse than he can ever be.
  • One episode has Brian and Stewie going back in time to the first episode of the show, which the former takes advantage of to warn his past self about 9/11. despite Stweie's warnings that this won't end well, everything seems mostly unchanged, save for Brian being hailed as a hero, they soon learn that, without the opportunity for fearmongering 9/11 gave him, George W. Bush lost the 2001 presidential election, lead Texas to secede from the United States, and declared a second American Civil War. When Brian remains optimistic that this'll blow over, he and Stewie travel 5 years into the future. At first, things seem mostly normal, save that everything's CGI, the writing for the show's gotten incredibly lazy, and Cleveland has moved back to Quahog, but they swiftly discover that the world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, owing to the Second Civil War going nuclear.
• Futurama: Exaggerated in the first "Anthology of Interest", in which one of the shorts explores what would happen if Fry wasn't sent into the future. The universe implodes. As it turns out, Fry is part of a sort of Stable Time Loop where he is his own grandfather, and was sent to the future specifically to counter several threats to which this odd ancestry makes him immune, such as the Brain Spawn's Stupidity-Inducing Attack, due to lacking a "delta brainwave".
• Garfield and Friends: At first, Wade Duck's take on this plot in a U.S. Acres episode looks like a standard parody, as he learns that if he hadn't existed, everyone else's life would be exactly the same. In the end, this becomes even more subverted: he comes back in time to prevent a robbery, using knowledge that he only gained because he had been a disembodied observer at the time. At the beginning of the episode, unlike many uses of this trope, Wade acknowledges the Trope Namer as "that movie they show every year at Christmas."
• The Garfield Show has "World Without Me", in which a leprechaun shows Garfield what life would be like if he was never born: Jon and Odie are rich but feel lonely without a third family member, Arlene's lonely because she can't find a lover that fits her standards (aka someone with Garfield's description), Vito's pizzeria is out of business because no one was around to save it, and the alien lasagna are preparing to invade Earth because there wasn't anyone around that they feared.
• Johnny Bravo: One episode does the obvious subversion, where an angel shows Johnny what life would be like without him, despite his insistence that he isn't interested in seeing it, and everyone is better off: Pop's Diner is replaced with an extremely chic restaurant, Carl is a martial arts master and a software millionaire (Pop claims Carl is the reason Aaron City is on the map), Bunny Bravo is the head of a spy organization, and Little Suzy... apparently became a terrorist. Even his angel confesses that his boss warned him Johnny was just a "hunk of meat with a mouth". The only reason he came back was that he had put his face in cement that morning — he believed his friends' success didn't make up for not having his beauty around. Of course, this also means his angel succeeded in his job and can earn his halo.
• Played straight with the Christmas special of Kappa Mikey, where Mikey never visited Japan and everyone's life is worse. This coincides with a Yet Another Christmas Carol subplot. Because Mikey never won the contest, someone else became the new star of Lilymu! — the overweight and past his prime Speed Racer. The ratings tanked and the show was cancelled. Guano became a chimney sweep with a stupid accent, Lily married Yoshi the cameraman and adopted several kids (becoming very cranky and ugly), Gonard, because the show was cancelled during a take and no one yelled "Cut", terrorizes the city as his Lilymu! role, and Mitsuki tried to be a serious actor, but quickly became a White-Dwarf Starlet.
• The basic plotline of the Leap Frog educational release A Tad of Christmas Cheer has Tad thinking that his family doesn't care about him anymore, so a "fairy godbug" transports him to an alternate reality in which he never existed.
• The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: In the episode "Te Xuan Me", Juniper and her classmates were captured by time wraiths. Whenever time wraiths capture anybody, they rewrite history so their captives would have never existed. In the alternative world, Ray Ray became the Te Xuan Ze; Monroe said he had never met a Te Xuan Ze who accepted the role as much as Ray Ray did; and Dennis behaves like the mainstream Ray Ray. The only people (other than the captives) to remember the original timeline were Ray Ray and the magical creature that caused the whole mess by provoking the wraiths. Ray Ray eventually learned the truth and rescued everyone, restoring the original timeline. For a while, Ray Ray believed it was All Just a Dream since even Juniper didn't remember anything, but a photograph he had with him clued him to the fact it really happened.
• In the Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode "Skip", Lilo skips ahead twenty years. In the intervening time, without her to stop him, Hamsterviel has conquered Earth and captured the experiments.
• In The Magic School Bus Christmas Episode (simply titled "Holiday Special"), Wanda wishes recycling didn't exist (long story short: she was planning to use a nutcracker to get into a production of The Nutcracker, but it fell out of her backpack and Arnold thought it was trash, so he threw it in the recycling bin), so Ms. Frizzle uses the bus to eliminate recycling from Walkerville. Chaos ensues, culminating in the bus disintegrating because it was built from recycled materials, and the class having to rebuild it so that they can put things right.
• Maryoku Yummy:
  • A variation occurs in the episode "A Day Without Maryoku," with Shika so frustrated at Maryoku not following the rules that he takes it up with Tapo Tapo, insisting that their world would be better off without her. Tapo Tapo uses magic bubbles to show him how the day went down and then how it would have gone down without Maryoku. Apparently, a lack of Maryoku not only left him watching all the wishes but kept Bob's van from starting.
  • Played straighter in the episode "It's a Yumderful Life," when Maryoku, feeling the pressure of being "the greatest wishsitter," wishes she had an easier job, and then suddenly finds herself as not a wishsitter, but Bob's official clipboard holder. There's even a direct Shout-Out to the movie with "Yuzu's pedals," a pair of lucky bike pedals Yuzu gave her earlier in the episode, disappearing, and then reappearing when she's back to her regular life.
• Mega Man (Ruby-Spears)' title character once went to the future. A future that shows him what the world will be like if he doesn't return to his own time. Without him to stop Dr. Wily, the villain took over the world.
• In Milo Murphy's Law's "World Without Milo" Elliot finds out what it feels like to have a world without Milo with time travel involved. Everyone is pretty much fine—the exception being Elliot himself, whose job is meaningless without the chaos Milo creates—but there are a few unexplained oddities (squirrels can now talk).
• In the Season 5 finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, thanks to a vengeful Starlight Glimmer going back in time to prevent the Sonic Rainboom that gave the Mane Six their cutie marks, Twilight Sparkle and Spike witness what would happen if they and their friends never met. Namely, Equestria being doomed to destruction by villainous forces (Nightmare Moon, Discord, Chrysalis, Sombra, and one villain who is never named).
• Our Friend Martin is an animated special where some kids want to prevent Martin Luther King's assassination. So they go back in time, kidnap him as a child, and bring him back to the present day... only to find segregation and racism still in full force, and many of the main character's best friends are affected. In the end, Young Martin, who guesses that the changes the others observe are Butterfly of Doom, bravely decides to return to his own time.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Phineas And Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo" involves the boys traveling through time 20 years to the future, and running into future Candace, who, after some crazy antics, goes back to the events of the very first episode of the series. The roller coaster is terminated, and the boys get busted. Future Candace returns to the future, only to find everything industrial and bleak. In this world, everyone is named "Joe", and Doofenshmirtz is the ruler. What Candace didn't learn was that, because of her interference, it was Perry, not Doof, who got harmed by the huge ball of tin foil; Doofenshmirtz became the ruler because Perry didn't recover in time to stop him.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • In an episode, the titular superheroines accidentally travel fifty years into the future after overusing their superspeed for a race home. Fifty years of a world without the Powerpuff Girls, who get to see it taken over by Him.
  • In another episode, after Professor Utonium realizes his best inventions have been accidents, has a dream where his experiments are successful: Without accidentally adding Chemical X, the Powerpuff Girls are now normal (named Bertha, Beatrice, and Betty), their lives are a tad dull, there's constant traffic because nobody does anything about the giant monsters that attack Townsville and, for some reason, the Lab where the Professor works is now a pizza place.
• The Punky Brewster cartoon episode "Allen Who?" has Allen being browbeaten by everyone for nearly spoiling a surprise party, so he wishes that nobody knew who he was. Glomer grants him that wish, but he's forced to fend for himself as everyone takes him as a stranger. In that reality, Allen's grandmother was depressed about having no grandchildren; nobody cared about the coach to start the surprise party; Margaux had a broken arm because Allen wasn't there with a wagonload of basketballs to stop her fall (showing the Mainstream Margaux was wrong about blaming him for it in the first place).
• In an episode of Rainbow Fish, the title character wishes that he was never born after having a bad day. His "guardian angelfish" soon appears and shows him what life would be like without him. In this alternate universe, Rainbow's favorite restaurant has hardly any customers, his parents are sad about not having a son, his sister is depressed due to being an only child and even the school bullies are miserable because they don't have anyone to pick on.
• In Rick and Morty, Rick creates a device that lets the family see alternate timeline versions of themselves. Summer realizes that she doesn't exist in most timelines, as Jerry impregnated Beth when they were teenagers and Summer's existence in any timeline hinges on if her parents decided to get an abortion or not. In any timeline she exists in, her parents gave up their dreams and her alternate life is pretty much identical to her current one. However, in every timeline where she doesn't exist, her parents got to enjoy their dreams with Beth becoming a skilled surgeon and Jerry becoming a famous actor. Beth and Jerry become conflicted over whether they should have stayed together while Summer becomes disheartened over the fact that her parents considered (and in most timelines succeeded in) aborting her. Though it's revealed that in at least one timeline, Beth and Jerry both come to seriously regret getting an abortion as they both grew up lonely and desperate for happiness.
• Parodied on Robot Chicken, where Wimpy (from Popeye) is shown how much better the world is without his existence. Popeye has a full head of hair, he and Bluto open up their own bank, Olive Oyl has larger breasts, Alice the Goon found a cure for cancer, there is no pollution or war and hamburgers are free. Seeing this, his guardian angel then kicks him off the bridge himself.
• The Rugrats episode "Chuckie's Wonderful Life" did this for Chuckie, where Angelica took over the town. This was actually a surprisingly dark, almost disturbing episode (yes, of a show involving talking babies). Even if you just included what happened to Chuckie's father, it's rather bleak. He ends up unemployed, sitting alone in his house, surrounded by tons of empty pizza boxes he's been hoarding, a sock-puppet his only friend. Meanwhile, Phil and Lil are making their parents' lives a living hell because Chuckie wasn't there to tell them right from wrong, and Tommy's living on the streets and going through garbage for food because Angelica enslaved his parents and threw him out of the house because Chuckie wasn't there to back him up.
• Seven Little Monsters: Inverted. In "It's a Wonder-Four Life", Four has an exceptionally bad day that leads him to wish he was an only child. His Bad Future is "Four-Town", where everything revolves around the number four. This is also a case of Exact Words - technically, his siblings still exist, he's just not related to them, and they've turned into major jerks.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Take My Life, Please" used a variation, where Homer looked into magic sauce to see what life would've been like if he had won class president or more accurately if he hadn't been sabotaged, as the principal overheard two popular kids encouraging the student body to vote for Homer as a prank to humiliate him. The principal got Carl and Lenny to get rid of the real ballot box, which had Homer win. While he is initially laughed at, Carl and Lenny say that Homer is a loser like them, and thus you don't have to be popular to succeed, resulting in them chanting his name and leading the student body to approve of him. Homer becomes confident and self-assured of himself, able to make decisions on the go and he ends up asking the top cheerleader to prom...only to dump her there and go for Marge. After a successful night (with Patty and Selma voicing their approval on seeing Marge return home), Homer is spotted by Mr. Burns. Impressed by the young man's stance and his position, he is offered a job at the plant, Section 6F (his current one in OTL is 7G, so a step-up). He takes it and we see that he would live in a luxurious mansion where the Flanders' house would be (the original Simpsons house is a guest house of his, occupied by Abe, who never complains about anything). While he and Marge are happily married, it's revealed that since Homer used protection, they never had kids.
  • "Bart the Lover" parodied the use of this trope in A Case of Spring Fever (see the MST3K entry) with an educational film about a world without zinc. At one point, the protagonist attempts to shoot himself because the world is so terrible.
    Jimmy's Dad: Think again, Jimmy. You see, the firing pin in your gun was made out of... yep, zinc.
    Jimmy: Come back, zinc! COME BAAAACK!
  • Also, in "Grift of the Magi", Moe sees what the world would have been like had he never been born (offscreen) and stops his suicide attempt.
  • "Bartless" introduce us to a world where Homer and Marge never were Bart's parents. As a result, they only have two daughters, live in a fancy house, and make some extra jobs, as Marge is veterinarian and Homer a mediator in stadium. Then, they take care of an amnesiac Bart they met after they almost run of him. Though Bart is mischievous, it also shows how good he impacted on their lives. Without him, Marge can't find any respect, Maggie is miserable, Lisa is unable to enjoy the existence and Homer can't make a perfect record at his job. In fact, the only one who is very happy is Skinner, who dates a miss and drives a Porsche.
  • "The Last Temptation of Homer" has Homer's Guardian Angel attempt this to convince Homer to stay faithful to Marge instead of acting on his infatuation with Mindy by showing him a vision of what his life would be like if he married Mindy. It backfires since Homer and Mindy are Happily Married and wealthy in the vision. The angel then shows him what Marge's life would be like without Homer. In this vision Marge is doing so well that she's the President of the USA with soaring approval ratings. The angel immediately stops the vision realizing it's not sending the intended message.
• The Smurfs episode "It's A Smurfy Life" has Handy see what life in the Smurf Village would be like if he never existed. Gargamel at one point even says, "It's a wonderful life" when one of Handy's inventions was modified by the evil wizard to capture Smurfs.
• In the Sofia the First episode "The Baker King", King Roland wishes he had a simpler life while standing in front of an (unbeknownst to him) Magic Mirror, and wakes up the next morning to find he and his family have become the village bakers. Unlike in most examples of this trope, Roland's previous existence isn't erased; no one knows he's the king, but no one knows where the actual king is, and it's seeing all the improvements to the town that he authorized that convinces him to go back to being the king.
• Parodied in an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, where after a tribute episode to Zorak gone horribly wrong, Zorak wishes he was never born, prompting his nephew Raymond from the episode "Hungry" to appear as a wingless angel to show what life would be like without Zorak: Diff'rent Strokes would still be on the air, Lokar would be the bandleader of SGC2C, and Space Ghost himself would find huge success on his show, going on to become governor of California, then president of the universe. Upon this revelation, Zorak wants to live to make Space Ghost miserable, and Raymond gets his wings.
• Played with in an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, in which Plankton uses a machine that switches his life with Mr. Krabs's. Despite initially enjoying being the owner of the Krusty Krab, dealing with his employees Squidward and SpongeBob, his daughter Pearl, and Krabs himself now in Plankton's role teaches him to cherish what he has.
• There was a pretty good episode of Superfriends called "The Krypton Syndrome" where Superman falls through a portal, winds up on Krypton, and manages to save it. He returns to the present, but finds Earth a burning ruin, with Robin one of the only survivors. After realizing what happened, he goes back and ensures Krypton's destruction.
  Superman: When Krypton was saved, my father never sent me to Earth. So, to this world, there never was a Superman.
• In the Teen Titans (2003) episode "How Long Is Forever?", Starfire is thrown into a dark future where the Titans have split, becoming embittered with each other, which just goes to show how important she is as The Heart of the Titans.
• One episode of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series follows this trope: the Turtles wonder what the world would be like without them, and then they wake up in a world in which they never existed and Shredder succeeded in his plans to take over the world. It's a mess, and not even Shredder is happy. In the end, it turns out to be All Just a Dream.
• The 4kids version Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) has an episode where Donatello goes into an alternate future where Shredder has taken over the world because he never returned from the future. Perhaps more accurately, the Turtles' brotherhood falls apart without Donatello acting as the "level head" and peacemaker. Shredder would very likely have taken over the world anyway. This leads to something of a missed opportunity when various later events in the series echo aspects of that Bad Future, and Donatello never even bats an eye.
• Tiny Toon Adventures did this for their Christmas Episode "It's A Wonderful Tiny Toons Christmas Special", with Buster wishing he didn't exist after a loss of confidence. He's shown an alternate Acme Acres (in a clever Jimmy Stewart double whammy, his guardian angel is a while rabbit called Harvey (who's actually Bugs in disguise)), where Plucky is the star of the show and using his position to make life miserable for Babs. Meanwhile, Monty has taken over the school and uses it for his own purposes. It's a particularly memorable version of the trope because the special is littered with clever allusions to the real It's a Wonderful Life — among others, Porky lassos the moon for his girlfriend Petunia, Pepe Le Pew uses a perfume called "ZuZu's Petals," and when Buster gets back to his own reality, he runs around wishing Merry Christmas to various local landmarks.
  • Another allusion to It's a Wonderful Life was Monty being wheelchair-bound like his counterpart from the original story. He claimed it was an accident he suffered while skiing. And his alternative self, while not wheelchair-bound, was about to go in the same skiing trip that got the mainstream Monty.
• A late season 1 episode of Transformers Earthspark has Mo angrily wishing she’d never touched the Emberstone, after doing so resulted in her brother Robby dying from a space disease. She then gets shown a holographic simulation of that, in which things get much worse as a result.
• In the Trollhunters episode "Unbecoming", Jim makes an impulsive wish and gets to see what the world would be like if he'd never picked up the amulet. Draal dies, the surface gets invaded by Gunmar and his army, and most of the cast is MIA. He comes back to the real world with his vigor restored and determines that he will face anything that comes his way as the Trollhunter.
• Nightmare does this to Spider-Man in a dream in the Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) episode "Nightmare before Christmas". After making Spidey relive his first fight with the Enforcers when he was starting out and a battle with Shocker earlier at the start of the episode. After showing Spidey a glimpse of a public who didn't appreciate him, Spidey decided to quit, which resulted in a Bad Future where he's rich, but the Green Goblin became the Goblin King and killed most of Spidey's allies, as well at much of S.H.I.E.L.D. and most of the Avengers, with only Nova and Hawkeye surviving. When Spider-Man figures this out, he fights his way out to get out of the nightmare.
• Part 2 of the Uncle Grandpa Christmas Special revolves around Uncle Grandpa seeing a reality where he never existed, thanks to a guardian lobster named Lawrence.
• VeggieTales
  • An Easter Carol combines this with the Yet Another Christmas Carol, where Hope shows Ebeneezer what would happen if he tries to remove the true meaning of Easter. This includes orphans being left out on the street, policemen and firemen lacking the confidence to help others, and Edmund dying from an illness. Thankfully, this is all a dream, and the main character is able to set things right.
  • The main plot of their take on the film "It's a Meaningful Life" has the main protagonist Stewart Green wishing to see what would've happened if he had caught the football he missed 15 years ago. Gabe showed him what would've happened, and this includes him being a snobby rich man who turned his hometown into an apocalyptic world. He's also not married to Donna and doesn't have any kids, which also means his daughter Emma is still in an orphanage.
• Wacky Races (2017): In "It's a Wacky Life", Dick Dastardly gets so hurt testing new cheating devices he gets out of his body and, after showing him how he wasted his life, an angel who looks like I.Q. Ickley shows how the other wacky racers' lives would be if he never existed. Muttley became the President and added his face to Mount Rushmore; Penelope Pitstop became an astronaut; Bela and Tiny are talk show celebrities; and Peter Perfect won more races than he did in the mainstream timeline. The last part drives Dick furious enough to want to live again.
• WordGirl: After her superhero duties prevent her from enjoying her birthday, WordGirl wishes that she was simply Becky Botsford and that WordGirl didn't exist. She finds herself in a world where Chuck rules the city and forces his sandwich obsession on people.
• The X-Men: The Animated Series episode "One Man's Worth" is a variant: someone goes back in time and kills Xavier before he becomes famous. As a result, not only did the X-men never form but a full-on war has broken out between the humans and mutants, with Magneto acting as the mutant resistance's Big Good.

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