Anvilicious - Television Tropes & Idioms

Jack Chick. Evangelical tracts are overt teaching materials by nature (as their purpose is to convert people), but Chick manages to make some of the others look almost subtle, in his merciless attempts to batter home points in a fashion a four year old would find obvious.
Pretty much every Very Special Issue written by Judd Winick.
A large portion of DC Comics have become endless crusades for the sacredness of life, preaching that it is never right to kill a villain, no matter how many innocent lives will be saved. Probably as an attempt to rationalize Joker Immunity, since "Shut up, we can't kill him if we want to keep selling comics," doesn't really have the idealistic tone you'd expect from the people who own the license to Superman.
- Let's be fair: Marvel is just as bad about this, for largely the same reasons.
A fair amount of EC Comic stories are spectacularly unsubtle; Judgement Day in particular. A robot civilization with clear different castes for robots with orange casing and robots with blue casing being evaluated for whether or not it's worthy to join The Federation falls short, the two castes mirror "Separate But Equal" very closely, and at the end we see that the evaluator is black. Of course, Some Anvils Need Dropping.
- Damn straight they do; at the time executives attempted to meddle by trying to get the evaluator changed to being white because they thought a black astronaut was unrealistic.
Marvel Civil War was supposed to be ambiguous. However, the only vague approximation of ambiguity came from how each book was anvilicious for different sides depending on what the writer thought was right. And sometimes not even then.
"What's So Funny 'Bout Truth, Justice, and the American Way", an issue of Superman that satirized comic team The Authority.
- That's not saying it wasn't awesome. He combined X-ray and laser visions to surgically turn off a guy's telekinesis!
Tarot Witch Of The Black Rose tends to do this. Sometimes there is good point well made, and other times it seems as if the writer is trying to seem more mature, despite the constant sex gags.

The "educational film" Reefer Madness is notorious for the sheer ludicrousness of the anvils it drops against marijuana - or as it spells it, "marihuana". Apparently, pot makes you a horrible driver, can drive you insane... and lets you play the piano really fast. Even worse: the movie is just so wrong on every level that advocates of pot legalization use it to promote their cause.
- The film was recently parodied with Reefer Madness: The Musical. It sends up the original by going even further (for example, claiming marijuana causes cannibalism)... but then turns around and drops its own anvils against censorship with the last number. (Yes, real subtle with the book-burning cheerleaders...)
- Amazon Women On The Moon ended with another parody of this.
Literally every movie ever made that includes drug-use, with two exceptions: stoner movies (for obvious reasons), and A Scanner Darkly, which demonizes the war on drugs more than drugs themselves.
At the end of both the book and movie versions of a A Scanner Darkly a list of all the author's friends who died or were brain damaged by drug use is included. This is also the implied fate of most of the characters in the story. The users aren't demonized but an anvil is definitely dropped about hard drugs and the user lifestyle.
The animated film Quest For Camelot. Though the film is cute, after watching it, one can't help but wonder "could they hammer home the lessons about teamwork and The Power Of Friendship any harder?"
Platoon. Just in case we didn't get the subtle subtext involved in Stone placing an evil sergeant and a good sergeant in charge of plastic-faced Charlie Sheen's raw recruit as the devil and angel on his shoulder, Stone has Sheen provide a wildly anvilicious voiceover monologue at the end of the movie. "I felt like a child born of these two fathers..."
The scene at the end of The Fifth Element where Leeloo is looking through the encyclopedia and hits the 'W'. War is bad, mmkay? Apparently she wasn't bothered by genocide, murder and torture, which she probably got to first...
The Happening. Just in case you didn't get the environmental message pervading every second of the film, there's a crazy scientist on TV at the end whose sole purpose is to drill this into the audience. Oh, and The Power Of Love can subvert nature.
- Cleolinda Jones' Movies in 15 Minutes version of the film comments on this with the line "and angry trees lob an anvil towards the audience" (yes, the link was in the original text).
The Poseidon Adventure. Christian symbolism list: Climbing a Christmas tree to salvation? Check. Religious figure in charge? Check. Other religions make a heroic sacrifice? Check. Lake of fire? Check. Crucifixion scene? Check.
- But Christmas trees have nothing to do with Christianity...
  - Precisely.
  - Actually, they do.
The "coming of age in the hood" parody Don't Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood lampshades the anvils by having the postman, played by producer Keenen Ivory Wayans, pop up whenever a character is delivering a particularly anvilicious speech to loudly exclaim "Message!" directly to the audience. In itself lampshaded when the main character gives a long-winded, confusing speech that pretty much summarizes every other anvil up to that point in the longest way possible, the Postman arrives, looks at the camera confused, and then says "The *** is he talking about?"
The film Pleasantville is guilty of this in one pivotal scene, where a shop keeper hangs a sign that reads "No Coloreds." Pleasantville as a whole is guilty of this with various anvils through pretty much the entire film.
The documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, makes some good points, and is in general for a good cause, but it does so in an incredibly anvilicious manner, including a montage of people celebrating their efforts to keep Wal-Mart out of their town being successful (not very anvilicious) combined with loud gospel music about "Victory", plus the words "Victory" flying every which way on the screen along with names of towns over people dancing and singing with joy, leading up to a title in of "VICTORY". This scene actually ends the shortened version of the film.
Carrie. Pointing out that picking on people is bad (mmmkay?) is one thing. Turning (nearly) everyone (other than the protagonist) into either an overblown Jerk Ass and/or complete whackjob to drive the point home is just plain ridiculous. On the other hand, this is exactly the way a troubled teenager might see the world, so it might just be a case of identification with the protagonist.
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Both of them. The original with its message of "the United Nations needs more power if it is to keep us safe" and the remake with its message of "the only way to save the earth from global climate change is by stopping our use of any and all electricity RIGHT NOW!"
Johnny Mnemonic. Johnny having the "cure" to an obvious AIDS reference, and that the villain is the medical companies for whom selling the treatments that don't work is more profitable than selling the cure.
Happy Feet has a couple in it. The most anvilicious is the environmental message that pervades about the last quarter of the film. Subtle...like a hand grenade.
The Day After Tomorrow has a similarly subtle suggestion that if we don't take care of the environment, the world will end will freeze up to the tropics, causing the equatorial nations to open their borders to the refugees from the US and Europe.
The Bollywood film Main Hoon Na is mostly a silly action comedy, but a key plot point involves a reconciliatory prisoner exchange between India and Pakistan that is taken extremely seriously.
The film of The Devil's Arithmetic is one long anvil, and actually includes the line "Why didn't I listen to my grandfather more!?"
The movie Crash. Apparently racism is not a good thing. But then everyone in Los Angeles is racist so it's normal.
The Iron Giant: "Guns are bad!"
- Isn't that movie's moral was to not judge someone/thing just because its different/foreign/from another world? Also that either moral wasn't really anvilicious at all.
The Iron Giant (the book): "enslaving powerful alien bats is good".
Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith. "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause." et al.
In Dead Poets Society one of the teachers says: "Think for themselves? Of course we shouldn't teach the boys to think for themselves!' It's almost as if the film-makers didn't want us to like him.
Before the contemporary Left Behind series, which is certainly Anvilicious, there was a terrible miniseries in the 1970's or so released on video title A Thief in the Night. It had a theme song by Larry Norman with the lyrics, "There's no time to change your mind, the Son has come... and you've been left behind!" The videos were about all of the horrible things that would happen to non-Christians at the end of the world. It was like having your TV grab you by the face and scream, "You're going to die horribly, and then you're going to Hell! Repent! Repent!"
D. W. Griffith. Anyone who has taken film school and been forced to watch his films, from Broken Blossoms to Birth Of A Nation, knows that the father of modern cinema was not exactly a master of subtlety.
The Bollywood film Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, loosely translated as A Pair Matched by God, takes the theme that one sees God in the face of one's beloved to extremes. There's a song called "I See God in You"; the male love interest tells the heroine that he sees God in her; the heroine prays to see God's face, and lo and behold! sees her husband walk toward her. Ultimately, she decides to stay with her husband because she realizes she sees God in him. This is good news for the husband because he sees God in her, too.
The promotional material for District 9 isn't dropping anvils as much as it is rapid-firing them from a machine-gun. The plot involves refugee aliens being separated from humans in South Africa (apartheid!), humans demanding weapons from the aliens (Humans Are Bastards!), humans saying the aliens probably eat dogs (racism!), and taglines to report non-humans (totalitarianism!). Word of god and reviews have stated the film itself is much less overbearing,though.
- The film itself is indeed Anvilicious (the anvil being dropped is the evil of forced evictions rather than Apartheid per se) but is much, much more subtle, with the authorities struggling to cope with a serious social problem and the protagonist Wikus being a kind of likeable dufus. They just do it really badly. Specific anvils do get dropped througout the film such as the stupidity of nepotism (Wikus is put in charge despite being incompetent) or later on when he casually refers to one of his black colleagues as 'boy' (although this isn't flagged at all), and he turns into a 'prawn'.
In the movie Volcano, after volcanic ash covers Los Angeles, a child mentions how everyone looked the same now (cue shot of black guy next to white guy). See also, Narm.
Surprisingly, despite looking like it totally would, the Shane Acker movie 9 doesn't hammer home the anti-war and -machine message anywhere near as hard as it could.
"Repo The Genetic Opera" fits into this trope at times, especially toward the second half of the movie. Let not your past keep you from becoming great in the future, dammit!
Charlie Wilson's War featured anvils of assorted necessity, which is unsurprising since it dealt with The Cold War and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The worst offender is at the very end, when Charlie and his friends are celebrating the Russians being run out of Afghanistan thanks to the weapons they helped smuggle in. Charlie's CIA liaison pulls him aside and warns him that religious zealots are starting to show up, just as plane roars over Charlie's apartment which happens to face the Pentagon. The next scene shows him failing to raise a few million dollars (after he had increased the defense budget by literally 500%) because normalizing relations with Russia is more important then building up Afghanistan. The real Charlie Wilson resented the idea that they had basically armed the Taliban.
While his more current movies haven't exactly been subtle, George A Romero cranked the anvils up to eleven in Diary Of The Dead, where the main character flat out asks if humanity is worth saving at all over a clip of two guys using zombies for target practice. One could almost assume Romero had a Humans Are Bastards-thing going on.
- It's not just Diary. All of the Dead movies are like this. The main characters almost invariably encounter still living people who are just as, if not more, dangerous as the walking dead. He lives on this trope.
Jigsaw's speech about the evil of insurance companies in Saw after William rejects one of his claims for coverage after he finds a potential treatment for his cancer.. TOO SUBTLE.
Every Michael Moore documentary. To be fair, his movies are supposed to be full of anvils.
The 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" is as Anvilicious as the novel it was based on. This should not come as a shock.
An American Carol. Actually, political humor in general basically amounts to dropping an anvil on your head, and saying "Get it?"
Quantum Of Solace: By the time M, Mathais and Camille get done telling Bond a.) that he's upset over Vesper's betrayal and death and b.) that he's pursuing Greene for personal rather than professional reasons, one almost expects a fifty pound lump of iron (with YOU ARE HEARTBROKEN stamped on it) to smack him on the head next.
Astro Boy (the 2009 film), while for the most part a cute, fun movie, takes its War And Warmongering Politicians Are Very Bad to absurd levels. Subtle it ain't, particularly when said politician attempts to manufacture a war with a weaker power to make himself look like a strong protector, even claiming they have weaponry they just don't have. To be fair, the Environmental Message and Love People For Who They Are Message were nicely done.
In Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground, Seagal battles the thugs of an evil oil company. In the end, he delivers a speech about how evil oil companies are. Written and directed by Seagal himself, the film is one big Author Tract.
Left alone, Gattaca is all ready a borderline case of this, but some of the cut scenes on the DVD really drive the point home.
The ending of Requiem for a Dream, drugs will ruin your life and if you do them no one around you will ever be happy.
A Day Without A Mexican. The film's only purpose is to showcase the benefits of Mexican immigration to the U.S.
Avatar to the point of Narm.
- "There's no green on our planet. We destroyed it; we killed our mother, and we'll do the same thing here." Thanks Jack, we were wondering what the point of this movie was about.
  - Of course given the technological capabilities of humanity and the backround material describing colonies throughout the solar system, it seems that humans no longer need a biosphere or even a planet to survive. So the entire aesop falls flat on its face.
"I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why, not even me." The Piano keeps laying it on, thicker and thicker, until you get to the point where the titular instrument is literally pulling the main character underwater. Only marginally redeemed by introducing us to Anna Paquin.

Charles Dicken's Hard Times: If you don't get that Dickens was against utilitarianism and rampant industrialism by the end of the book then you should probably go get an eye exam because you are not reading into those smoke and snake metaphors correctly. M'Choakumchild? Yes, he's choking kids with facts.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment: the Punishment
This occurred, unsurprisingly, in the Inheritance Cycle. In a scene in the second book, Eldest, has a discussion with a dwarven priest about religion. Arya, who is arguing against religion, is portrayed as quiet, polite, reasonable and ten times as rational in her arguments (even though she started the argument, pretty much for no reason, in the first place). The dwarven priest, who supports religion, is portrayed as wild-eyed, fanatical, and ranty. Later, it's revealed that the flawless elves are an atheist race.
The novels of Ayn Rand, such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, are truly notorious for their unrelenting anviliciousness. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand doesn't merely demonstrate an idea, she demonstrates it repeatedly, then lampshades it, then has her character give a long and detailed speech explaining the principle and its philsosophical implications. The Fountainhead is significantly less extreme in its dropping of anvils because it has significantly fewer and shorter filibusters.
The Sword Of Truth novels, by Terry Goodkind, who—yup—is an Objectivist and considers Rand the most important philosopher since Aristotle. His works tend to exhibit a similar level of anviliciousness to Atlas Shrugged.
The Phantom Tollbooth has certain Anvilicious aspects in terms of how it presents the "Learning is fun!" message, that and all the Parental Bonus content stuck in.
This is Older Than Dirt. Aesop's original tales were very straight-forward, actually just as anvilicious as the original Greek fable was. Mostly the tales don't go longer than a single paragraph before the moral. When confronted with the much subtler La Fontaine et al modern novelizations, one can surely feel the weight of the aesops.
The character Clarisse in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Actually, never mind, just count the whole book. To specify: libraries are the only good form of entertainment around and are the only thing that is keeping civilization from destroying itself.
The Mercedes Lackey School of Heavy-Handed Social Commentary.
- Of particular note: Every single one of her villains is oversexed, perverted, and/or a rapist. Every. Single. One.
Much of the work of John Ringo tends to be somewhat on the unsubtle side, to put it mildly, but one of his latest works, The Last Centurion, isn't an anvil, it's an M1 Abrams tank (about 70 tons, for the record).
In David Weber's Honor Harrington series, Haven goes through a revolution [it's first of three in the same few centuries] that sees a man named Rob S. Pierre head of the Committee for Public Safety, which is now running the whole country. "Rob S. Pierre". THE COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC SAFETY. DO YA GET IT? ROB PIERRE? [The place's capital is called Nouveau Paris in case ya didn't get it.] Also, every Liberal, Conservative, or anyone with anything but loyalist or centrist credentials except for one or two canon immigrants tends to be textbook Strawman Political with the subtlety in delivery of several bomb-pumped laser warhead anvils.
Many of the works of Hans Christian Andersen, who in addition to being severely depressed and self-doubting was also a devout Christian. Here's the end of the original The Little Mermaid, with the nameless protagonist in Purgatory:
"Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at his good conduct, for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!"
The Karen Traviss-authored Gears Of War novel Aspho Fields repeatedly drops the anvil that "weapons developers = war criminals" over and over and over again. Which seems like a very strange moral for a setting in which humans are only still alive BECAUSE they have satellite lasers, chainsaw bayonets, humongous tanks and other ultra-powerful weapons.
Many books in Africa are stories that teach kids about AIDS, predictably there's a character who wants to go be with girls so he can be a "man" and chiding his friend for not doing the same, and you can see where this goes...
Uncle Toms Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, seems to be an anvilicious condemnation of slavery with its stereotypes of Southern slave traders and even sections where the (third-person) narrator speaks about how "miserable" the slaves are or how "no good characters EVER seem to like slavery or the Southern slave traders". Bonus points go to the fact that it isn't clear Stowe ever saw much of slavery firsthand (though, she definitely Did the Research).
Virtually any major series by Harry Turtledove, particularly the Worldwar and Colonization series, where Turtledove pads his 200 page story to 500 by repeating the exact same exposition regarding certain characters every time they appear in text. (Example: Mordecai Anielewicz—-breathing in nerve gas is bad and it causes pains in your joints even twenty years after breathing it in. Repeat every time Mordecai appears in text.) This just in - Sam Carsten sunburns easily. News at 11.
Anything by Jonathan Swift, though he usually intended his messages to be Anvilicious, since he tried being diplomatic and got nowhere. Even then, some people believed his satire was serious.
The first chapter of Everlot, by Neal Shusterman. He wants to tell us to wear our seat belts...
Sheri S Tepper's books tend to have a rain of hardline eco-feminist anvils; especially The Gate to Women's Country and The Revenants. Along with the pervasive eco-feminism, some of her work, such as the Arbai trilogy, drops the occasional anti-religion — specifically, anti-Mormon — anvil.
Pretty much everything written by Robert H. Heinlein is guaranteed to be sprinkled liberally with anvils; although many critics disagree on what some of those anvils actually are. His personal philosophy is pretty well laid out in his first, but unpublished prior to his death, novel For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs; as well as the letters collected in Grumbles from the Grave. He admitted to pandering to cultural restrictions in order to get his work published, so his books are often an odd combination of Anvilicious, and GettingCrapPastTheRadar; particularly with regard to his opinions on homosexuality and sex in general.
The Redwall series says, "Vermin are bad." Mice, shrews, otters, squirrels, rabbits, watervoles, badgers and hares are good. Rats, foxes, stoats, weasels, frogs and lizards are evil. OK, a lot of fantasy has clearly distinguished good and evil races, but attention is frequently drawn to the distinction and every time the lines are flirted with in Redwall books, the character dies soon after. Note, the reason vermin are bad — they lie, steal and murder — make no sense in a real world setting.
The Anita Blake books 10-13: "It's OK to have sex outside of marriage. In fact, homosexuality, polygamy, one-night-stands and BDSM are also totally cool, as long as everyone consents. So don't spend hours worrying about your virtue when someone's life depends on you having sex in the next half hour." Anita spends three books angsting over this (and a couple more about the first bit), when the intended answer is obvious. It makes sense given her Catholic background, but is extremely irritating.
The Great Gatsby demonizes the privileged to some degree to prove its point.
In Iain Banks' novel Transition one of the characters is a stereotypical, extremely materialistic hedge fund trader. At the end of the novel he sells up and moves to the Cayman Islands (to avoid tax) where a tropical storm seriously damages his villa and he ends up, in a piece of symbolism which would be heavy handed in a short story writen by a teenager, being crushed to death by his possessions. The main problem is that Banks clearly considers this to be a karmic death but the character, despite being something of an asshole, is actually not an especially bad guy. Certainly not as bad as the designated hero (an assassin who admits he's lost count of the number of people he's been required to torture or kill over the years and who is allowed to survive) who would not have succeeded without this character's help.
There's No Such Thing as a Dragon. Saying the titular phrase only makes the dragon grow bigger. Finally, when they acknowledge its existence, it shrinks back down at the end. An "elephant in the room" Anvilicious; ie ignoring or denying a problem only makes it grow bigger.
The Twilight books are made of anvil. Don't give into those base desires or you'll die! Sex before marriage will kill you! Blood equals sex equals death equals don't do it!
- Although, since nothing bad actually ever occurs to Bella for her persistence, Your Mileage May Vary
- The clearest anvil was when Edward told Bella that her number was up, the moment they meet. Before that Bella hurt herself a lot but she didn't had so many close encounters with death. After meeting Edward she gets a series of events that only lead to her death, being saved by Edward most of the time. Till in the last book she actually dies, she is just reborn as a vampire.
Cory Doctorow's novels invariably include a character ranting about Cory's favorite anvils. Look for the big fat anvil in Little Brother regarding young protagonist's verbal battles with his pro-surveillance, pro-Homeland Security straw man classmate, or how the protagonist in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town just happens to be totally into building free wifi.
In A Wrinkle In Time, the Big Bad is called IT, rules its people with an iron fist, forces conformity, punishes independence, and is alien to human feelings. Gee sure is obvious anti-technology around here.
- It's actually supposed to be a metaphor for communism.
The "Guns are bad" message in the Discworld novel Men At Arms comes across this way to some readers, particularly those in the United States, which has a different attitude towards gun control than most of the world. (Your Mileage May Vary a lot) But it's indisputably the case that the "religion is bad / Belief Makes You Stupid" view in The Science of Discworld 3 gets hammered for all it's worth; luckily, only the non-Pterry chapters are preachy, making them much easier to avoid.
Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" — as if any novel by Nader would be a light-hearted romp.
Deltora Quest, gambling and dishonest moneylending are very, very bad. Bad things tend to happen to those who indulges in them.

Literally just about every sitcom or drama since 1970 has had at least one "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" episode. Many have had several.
Full House invariably ended in someone learning a lesson. Usually 'it's okay to torture Kimmy Gibler'. One supposes a female character with opinions is a terrifying thing. Unless you're cute, shut up, because everyone hates you anyway.
Babylon 5 had a really terrible habit of giving things away by dropping literary references and allusions that were nowhere near as clever or obscure as it's creator probably believed they were. The first season even has an episode ("Infection") where the captain defeats an alien super soldier made by an ancient race of Space Nazis by lecturing it while it's shooting at him until it realizes that yes, clearly Space Nazism is a flawed ideology. The episode is widely regarded as the worst episode of the show, period. It was the 4th episode shown. Not coincidentally, the first one written and the first one shot. Even the JMS felt that it was too anvilicious, and said that if they'd had enough scripts to be able to do so, he probably wouldn't have shot it at all. Clicky
Boy Meets World had many anvilicious aesops, particularly of the Cant Get Away With Nuthin variety. Perhaps it was the force of all those anvils that led the main character to be so unhinged in the final seasons.
Virtually anything written by Ben Elton feels the distinct need to tell rather than show.
Pick an episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Surprisingly, the Animated Adaptation is far less so. The format allowed a lot more outrageous situations, which actually make the moral of each episode make some sort of sense.
Star Trek:
- "Let That be Your Last Battlefield", concerning a race where people who were black-skinned on the left side of their face and white-skinned on the right, were persecuted by the people who were white on the left and black on the right. Anviltastic!
- Similarly, a Star Trek Enterprise episode was such an Anvilicious AIDS parable that they went and plugged an AIDS website after the episode. To be fair, UPN made all of their shows do anvilicious AIDS-related episodes as part of an Viacom HIV awareness campaign in 2003. So Enterprise was not alone.
- An Enterprise episode featured religious fanatics whose planet was a smoking ruin because of a schism over whether creation was nine days or ten. The Aesop being, of course, "The little stupid differences are nothing compared to the big stupid similarities!", but worked in with a loud thudding sound.
- Then there was the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone," which went anvilicious against the capitalists of the era on its way to demonstrating through Picard's actions that what Kirk did in the corresponding TOS episode was wrong. Gets Funny Aneurysm Moments from later events; Data proudly announces that the Federation has no television—but it will eventually come out that holodecks are, in their way, worse.
- The Star Trek novel "Ship of the Line" by Diane Carey has a few Take Thats to this Anvil-happy episode. Will Riker argues with Morgan Bateson, who is from 90 years before TNG. When Riker says the Picard line "We strive to better ourselves," Bateson snaps back "Who do you think you're 'better' than?" Bateson points out the arrogance of 24th Century Starfleet members. Picard also gains new appreciation of Jim Kirk through some interactive historical holodeck programs, leading to a CMOA against Gul Madred.
- Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Symbiosis," where Species A is saving Species B from a deadly virus that hasn't actually existed in centuries by selling them space crack, and we learn that doing drugs is bad. It even includes a bonus speech to Wesley about just why drugs are bad. The speech is hilarously taken out of context on YTMND, where it appears Tasha appreciates drugs.
- Another TNG episode: In the fourth season "Drumhead", we get an entire episode focused on an overzealous starfleet admiral going on a witch hunt in the Enterprise to find an accomplice of a spy working for the Romulans, and thereby accusing an innocent crewman who has the misfortune of being the grandson of a Romulan as well as Picard himself. A blatant Aesop against those same witchhunts.
- TNG Episode "Force of Nature" about warp drive being dangerous to the fabric of the Universe. Comparing global warming to the destruction of the universe. Real subtle guys.
- Another Original Trek episode: "The Omega Glory", described rather accurately by cracked.com as "It's common for aliens in the Trek universe to be metaphors created to address contemporary political or cultural issues, but in the case of the Kohms and Yangs subtlety was set on fire, strapped to a dump truck full of dynamite and rolled off a cliff."
Norman Lear practically pioneered the trope for American prime-time TV. All In The Family, Maude, Good Times, Sanford And Son, One Day At A Time, and The Jeffersons were all thick with Anvilicious plots and Points To Be Made. So were his later series, but by then people had become less tolerant of his anvils. Then again, All In The Family, Sanford And Son, and The Jeffersons had highly sympathetic bigots, which lightened the intended anvils in those series.
The New Zealand TV soap Shortland Street does this all the time. The 1998 episode in which Jenny Harrison appeared on a television show to rant about the poor state of the New Zealand health service is probably the most anvilicious scene of Shortland Street in its 16 year history, though to be fair it was also Truth In Television.
You can include the entire Degrassi franchise in this, the result of creator Linda Schuyler trying to make a series that would showcase the effects of certain issues on children. Famous examples of Anvilicious behaviour in the franchise include Dwayne having to deal with AIDS and Shane (a.k.a. "Canada's national baby daddy") dropping acid and jumping off a bridge in Degrassi High, and Manny getting an abortion in 'Degrassi The Next Generation''. So someone jumps off a bridge and/or has an abortion every episode? Pretty much.
J Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame was very blunt in how he much he hated children or anything cute that would supposedly ruin the show, evident by how they were all instantly killed in quite jarring ways. Even a teddy bear given to him as a joke. To be fair, the children shown generally last for at least most of the episode that they appear in before dying in a suitably dramatic manner, and two of them survived "In The Beginning"'s framing story intact. Though to be REALLY fair, the fate of poor Ba-Bear-Lon 5 was pretty much of a Crowning Moment Of Funny. And then there's the commentary, where he's talking about how awesome it was seeing it impaled on a pole, and says straight up not to ever give him something cute.
Green Is Universal, a concept so heavy-handed and self-righteous that it couldn't be contained on just one network. Indeed, this bi-yearly theme appears on every cable and broadcast channel owned by NBC. NBC in turn is owned by General Electric, a polluter so massive and frightening that even Captain Planet would fear to confront it. The irony is so thick and juicy that you could cut it with a steak knife.
- Bonus points awarded for extending it to, of all things, their sports casting when they thought it was a good idea to make the guys sit around in the studio with their lights off.
- Except that they paid whatever miniscule environmental benefit all back, with massive interest, by flying to the Arctic to film a promo. Unless they faked it (the reporter's breath has no fog), in which case they're scamming the audience.
- Lampshaded in the 30 Rock episode "Greenzo," where David Schwimmer is a mascot who tries to put a positive spin on GE's corporate practices.
- General Electric stands to make a huge profit off of manufacturing "Green" products. Thus, they are promoting their own products by being green.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer:
- "Beer Bad" was anvilicious, but at least had the decency to hang an amusing lampshade on that aspect of the episode:
  Xander: And was there a lesson in all of this? What have we learned about beer?
  Buffy: Foamy!
  Xander: Good. Just so that's clear.
- "The Harsh Light of Day" was another extremely anvilicious episode. The whole story seemed to be saying that Men are BAD and HURT WOMEN unless they give women WHATEVER THEY WANT out of a relationship. RIGHT NOW. NO EXCEPTIONS.
- The drugs/magic episode, "Wrecked", is probably the most blatant metaphor in the whole show. And so badly handled to some fans that they would rather forget it existed.
Doctor Who during the years that Andrew Cartmel was script editor (1987-1989) had a tendency to be a bit on-the-nose about how 'right-on' the show was.
The Radio drama "The Last" is ridiculously anvilicious in it's anti-war message. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with statements like "Money that should have went to space exploration went to develop more weapons" and "She should have known dropping bombs is wrong, that war is wrong".
Not to be left out, the Torchwood Season three miniseries delivers one of these about School League Tables, when they are used to determine the worst ten percent of the nations' children to round up to be taken away and used as drugs by a hostile alien race. Yes, that's right, ranking schools results in mass murder (of a sort at least).
24 often runs afoul of this, whenever the show is focused on anything other than Jack Bauer kicking ass.
- Yes, thank you for introducing a preachy side character, but we know not all Muslims are terrorists, thanks.
- Twenty Four also has to drill into everyones head how torture is fine and could save lives because it always works. People who are against torture are obviously lawful stupid and are getting in the way of saving lives.
The (very short-lived) Weird Al Show, thanks to a rampaging case of Executive Meddling, had one specific lesson for each episode to teach, and that lesson was mercilessly repeated to the point of drawing attention to it in voice-overs before each commercial break. Half of the enjoyment of the DVD release comes from the scathing commentary of Al and others on the anvilicious display of insipid points.
Now And Again lasted only one season but it still had its own offender, "There Are No Words", about how good it is to read (and write). It features characters who comment at length about their affection for books, and an obligatory book-burning scene.
Supernatural: "Life sucks, get a helmet."
Eleventh Hour: The episode with the Flesh Eating STD.
The Twilight Zone: Several episodes written by Rod Serling come off as terribly heavy-handed today ("The Gift" is an egregious example, made worse by casting with Unfortunate Implications)— but given that Serling created the show due to Executive Meddling with his more socially conscious scripts (the story about his script based on the lynching of Emmett Till is a doozy), it may just be that one generation's subversive social commentary is the next generation's dropped anvil. It's easy to forget that Emmett Till's funeral was recent at the time of the script, and that having a righteous black man surrounded by corrupt racists was, well, so out of the ordinary it is amazing it aired.
- Sometimes it's difficult for those who grew up in the 80s and 90s to remember that some of those classic programs were on the air before (or at the very start of) the civil rights movement. It's jarring to remember that, at the time, showing non-whites as stupid, worthless, and/or actively evil was generally considered just fine.
While the cable anthology horror series Masters Of Horror tends toward good old-fashioned gore and nudity, Season One's Homecoming, directed by Joe Dante (of Gremlins and The Howling fame), is anvilicious to the extreme. For no clear reason, the soldiers killed in Iraq rise from their graves as shambling zombies — not to eat us, but simply to vote against the current president. The supporting characters are all pastiches of real-world political heavyweights: Karl Rove becomes "Kurt Rand," Ann Coulter is "Jane Cleaver," etc. When the zombies garner enough sympathy to sway public opinions, and the election outcome favors the opposition, the zombies' votes are thrown out to skew the results (in Ohio and Florida, natch). Of course, the zombies won't stand for this, and suddenly all of America's war dead (all the way back to the Civil War) rise from the grave to get revenge.
Star Trek the original series, which was unique for its era in that it was likely the only show in which no one smoked. Gene Rodenberry had originally cast Majel Barrett as the second in command of the Enterprise, a feminist first for the time, but was put under pressure by his producers to put cigarettes into the show. He refused, so they gave him the ultimatum, cigarettes or Majel. Majel did finally make it in in a more traditional role as Nurse Chapel.
Another tale has it that the network gave him an ultimatum between having the alien character or the woman. Rodenberry went with Spock.
Stargate Atlantis drops an anvil by having Rodney McKay say that the real solution to global warming is "everyone doing their part". Then it goes Space Whale Aesop.
The Secret Lifeofthe American Teenager does this this on an episode-to-episode basis about sex, and a scene-to-scene basis for the moral of the episode.
"Just because you're having a baby together doesn't mean you two are right for each other"
"You shouldn't be with Ricky just because you're having his baby."
"The parents of a baby aren't the people who created the baby, but the people who take care of it."
...etc.
-Various people during the Very Special Episode about baby daddies.
The final scene of the final episode of the remake of Battlestar Galactica is a ridiculously anvilicious message about the dangers of overdeveloping modern robotics. Or maybe "Treat your creations with respect", or "do not enslave artifical lifeforms".
The characters in The West Wing display at times a tendency to really try and hammer the point they're trying to make home.
Sea Quest DSV featured an annoying episode involving Lucas and Condoms
Subverted by the premise of Seinfeld, which relied on the mandate "No hugging, no learning." Demonstrated especially in the last episode, in which the four characters end up in prison, and pretty much continue to behave in the same way they had throughout the series.
A recent episode of Ugly Betty basically had the message "cults are bad, they'll take all your money, and they'll drug you for no real reason." Most episodes have at least one kind of social message that the writers pound into our heads repeatedly, but this one was just really blatent (and annoying).

The Onion: Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers

Earth Maiden Arjuna is pretty much the anime version of Captain Planet (see below), with the "awesome" superhero replaced with a Magical Girl as with more psychological angst.
Dancougar Nova got pretty Anvilicious in one episode, which made oblique references to the War on Terror being fought solely over oil, and featuring a nearly rabid, transparently American commander crushing the titular robot while declaring that because his nation is strong, it gets to decide what justice is.
Being about how war affects humanity, the Gundam franchise has dropped many anvils over the years.
- The original Mobile Suit Gundam, including its subsequent sequels had a minor subversion by dropping opposing anvils at the same time.
- For a case of necessary anvil, we present Gundam 0080. War is not a game, and a Zaku can never beat a Gundam.
- In Gundam 00, the moral is "if you kill someone because you hate the person, no matter the reason, good chance that you end up worse than him".
- Also, a quote from the leader of ~~America~~ the Union...
  "They're aggressively ending conflict all over the world. Isn't that our job?"
- Gundam has morals? Too busy watching giant robot fights to notice.
In Zero No Tsukaima, the episode in which Colbert-sensei dies was a very thinly veiled message about why war is bad, the entire second season being about how War Is Hell.
In an episode of the Kirby anime, Dedede gets addicted to snacks and becomes grossly fat, unable to even stand up. This is followed by two characters announcing out loud that this is what happens if you only eat snacks and stay up all night watching television and Dedede being paraded through the town, pointed and laughed at. All of this before the episode is even halfway through.
The Aesoptinum factor of Soukou No Strain is made particularly obvious when not only is the research conducted on harmless aliens, but they look and like little girls and anesthetic doesn't work on them. So every time one is dissected, they're being brutally tortured and the scientists just shrug and figure 'Hey, they'll get used to it eventually.'
The first Pokémon movie and the first straight-to-dvd special, Mewtwo Strikes Back and Mewtwo Returns respectively, club the viewer over the head with their messages. Gee, thanks for telling us that fighting to the death isn't fun, that judging someone or yourself by the circumstances of birth is wrong, and that it's a good idea to protect natural resources. We would have never figured that out. They're not very hard to grasp, even before the giant swarm of killer bugs comes to help enforce the Green Aesop, even given the young demographic. Then every character available starts repeating the aesops, including Team Rocket, and it goes straight to Narm.
- The dubbers added all of the anviliciousness to the first movie (due to the fact that they literally rewrote the entire script), but the second movie does have a blatant Green Aesop in both versions.
- Considering the anvil of Pokémon is "Catching wild animals is not only a wonderful thing in itself; you can also force your captured animals to fight."...It's a sport, and Pokemon like fighting.
In the CLANNAD anime, the opening scene contains protagonist Okazaki encountering a strange, beautiful girl at the bottom of a hill on the way to school, facing the uphill with the morning sun shining at her face and Dramatic Wind with about a million Cherry Blossoms blows through the scene as the camera takes its que to focus almost exclusively on her. Of course, the fact that some viewers still attempted shipping after that display may speak towards the fact that they may not have been heavy-handed enough.
In Hayate No Gotoku's second season, admittedly it focuses a lot on Hinagiku, but just in case you didn't get the clue that she likes Hayate, the entire end theme is making sure. Granted that that's focused on a lot in the chapters that're covered, but continuing to play it several weeks after most anime that season had already switched to their 'third' ending.
Arguably, the whole point of Sai Kano is to drop a 13-episode Kill Em All anvil of War Is Hell. For everyone, not just soldiers.
To some up, the writers of Blassreiter would like you to know that anyone who is mean to immigrants is pure evil, the media is full of idiot sensationalists, and if God is there He does not like you.
The infamous final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are an Anvilicious Author Filibuster on the rather extensive psychological issues of the main cast (particularly those of Shinji Ikari), as well as a discussion of how some people avoid human contact out of fear of being hurt by others. Apparently we had not already seen enough of how screwed up the cast was. However this arguably is a product of Real Life Writes The Plot because Gainax ran out of money when making the series and had to cobble together the final two episodes on a shoestring budget.
You don't have to be watching Yu-gi-oh! long to figure out that the main theme is friendship. Not only do many of the main characters constantly make speeches about it (with Anzu/Tea being infamous for it, although there are many characters who are just as bad, if not worse), but there are also numerous motifs and symbols throughout the series which are meant to represent friendship. These include Yugi's Millennium Puzzle, the smiley face drawn on the hands of the main cast, and several different Duel Monsters cards. On top of that, the first syllables in Yugi's and Joey's/Jounouchi's names are purposely meant to spell out the word "Yujo", which means "friendship" in Japanese.
D. Gray Man knows how to do this as well. When early on in the anime, an Akuma starts shouting about how the loved one that resurrected him as an Akuma should just have learned to live on without him, it became painfully apparent that this is the Aesop where the entire show is based upon. Truly a shame.

Parodied in the Weird Al Yankovic song "Don't Download This Song." "Cuz you start out stealing songs/Then you're robbing liquor stores/and selling crack and running over school kids with your car."
"Green Christmas", a song on You Tube. It is very Anvilcious about its environmental message and has nothing to do with Christmas. The word 'Christmas' was put in there as a form of Wolverine Publicity.
- Not to be confused with "Green Chri$tma$", an anvilly-but-funny swipe at Christmas commercialization by humorist and ad man Stan Freberg. Or the Barenaked Ladies' "Green Christmas", which is just about being lonely at Christmas.
- Compare the last, joke line of Relient K's I'm Getting Nuttin For Christmas: "Well I'm getting nuttin' for Christmas because I contributed to the green-house effect which melts the Polar Ice Caps which melts the North Pole where Santa Clause lives. He's mad. Pbbthh!"
"Green Blues", an anti pollution song.
If you listen carefully to Beyonce's "If I Was A Boy", you can hear that she pauses before the words "better man" just so the loud thud sounds from impacting anvils don't drown out the lyrics.
Some bands are Anvilicious in their entirety, especially where politics are concerned. We're looking at you, Rage Against The Machine, and System Of A Down. Of course, the "licious" come from "delicious" in this case, for those of us who are sympathetic to anarchist views.
- Or, in Rage's case, if you're sympathetic to the biggest, fattest guitar riffs ever committed to tape.
- There's "sympathetic to anarchist views" and then there's "not wanting to sit through a long lecture about how we suck for disagreeing". Shut up and sing, Serj.
- Also far from all anarchists sympathize with the brand of anarchism put forward by Rage against the Machine. However this is quite predictable seeing as there are a myriad of different types of anarchist movements.
How about Story of the Year's album, "The Black Swan"? Almost every song on it screams anti-war messages in your face. Of course, this doesn't stop the music from being good, so who's complaining?
Political punk rock is by definition Anvilicious. Recent Green Day has been pretty anvilicious, but Anti-Flag is a freaking building, and a big one at that.
Subverted by most of the crossover and grindcore (Yes, it counts as subversion, as Crossover and Grindcore are direct descendants of hardcore punk.) bands such as Stormtroopers Of Death, Anal Cunt, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed by having songs like "Fuck The Middle East", "Speak English or Die", "Body By Auschwitz", or "White On White Crime". Anal Cunt is a joke band, and to a lesser extent, so is Agoraphobic Nosebleed.
Thrash metal is often guilty of this. "One" by Metallica embodies this in the most grim fashion imaginable. Although, one must give credit to the German bands for, for the most part, averting it. Kreator, especially. And then you have the newer bands like Municipal Waste, who have a 20,000:1 ratio of "let's get wasted and thrash!" lyrics to anvilicious lyrics.
Black Metal... just... black metal.
Nickelback's "If Today Was Your Last Day." Tell me you can't guess what he's singing about from the title alone. The video manages to be even MORE Anvilicious, with the band sending insightful messages to people and making everyone get along at the end.
Pretty much anything by Lily Allen falls into this category, the most bare-faced example being the played-for-laughs Fuck You, a twelve-verse rant about how conservatives are necessarily terrible people, with a chorus consisting entirely of the titular obscenity to drive the point home. Too subtle for ya?
Anything by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Imagine a political pamphlet produced by an especially humourless extreme left winger being read out over a drum machine beat. That's pretty much what their album sounded like. Consolidated were similar but at least they had a couple of good tracks.
About ninety-nine percent of output of The Specials (especially the stuff written by Jerry Dammers).
Pink Floyd's 1983 album The Final Cut, was released in response to the Falklands Conflict.
- In which we learn (again; see "Pigs (Three Different Ones)") that Roger Waters reeeally doesn't like Margaret Thatcher. Okay Rog. We get it.
Pretty much any country music released since 2001. Especially anything by Toby Keith.
"Capital G" from NIN's Year Zero album. It's about as subtle as a Texan in a flight suit.

Hair sure drops a few about friendship, racism, and the vietnam war.

Bill Watterson admitted that the Green Aesop in a Calvin And Hobbes story where Calvin and Hobbes took a trip to Mars was "pretty heavy-handed."

The truly Anvilicious narrator in Blood Brothers not only shows up to highlight every moment of foreshadowing in the musical, but also appears at the end to let any terminally inattentive audience members know what the message was.
Parodied/played for laughs in Avenue Q. "The Money Song" starts with an over-the-top Anvilicious moral on charity and being generous... then halfway through the song, everybody runs into the audience asking for money.
The Toxic Avenger, based on the campy movie of the same name, could be a hilarious hour of nothing but New Jersey jokes, which it is in some places, but eventually it gets bogged down by its need to hammer "Pollution BAD!" into the audience. Emphasis on hammer.

RuneScape recently made an Anvilicious quest about global warming, to the extent that the end of civilization was predicted because of one coal power plant.
In Tales of Symphonia Dawn of a New World, Richter tells a timid Emil that "courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality." Then he says it again. And again. Then you get a flashback of him saying it about 5 seconds after. It eases up a bit after that, but damn, they really wanted to drill those Arc Words into your head.
- They say that phrase 26 times throughout the game, including flashbacks.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is often depicted as this, mostly depending on whether or not one buys into the Alternate Character Interpretation. If one does, then congratulations, you have a Anvilicious Wall Banger. If one does not, then it might wind up so because it's a moral that heavy gamers are apt to reject - "Excessive escapism is bad for you".
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core does this a lot, with Angeal in particular. "DREAMS AND HONOR!"
"Everyone has a right to life!" (For the record, it's not what you think it means and basically boils down to "genocide is wrong" and "no one should need to make a Heroic Sacrifice."
Tales Of Rebirth has about 40 hours of game - 10 of plot, 30 of people telling you that racism is bad.
Ace Combat 5, a game focused on air combat with an awesome soundtrack and lots of explosions, features a trio of wingmen for the player character whom hate war, often to the point of giving pacifistic rants in the middle of missions where they are assisting the player in killing dozens, if not hundreds, of enemy airmen, sailors, and soldiers.
Eternal Sonata is extremely guilty of this in the ending. All the characters, one at a time, stand in front of a black screen and speak directly to the player and blatantly spell out the ideas and concepts that they struggled with during the entire storyline and spell out some of the more subtle notions like products that make life easier but are actually quite dangerous and if human beings are the masters of creation or the masters of destruction.
Metal Gear Solid had a character in it whose primary purpose was to lecture the player about how nuclear weapons were bad with her endless list of statistics and Wangsty backstory. Even after beating the game, you'd see a screen giving the number of ICBMs in the world as of the version's release.
Solid Snake smokes in many of the Metal Gear games, and it's frequently observed (by other characters as well as by in-game text) that this is bad and harmful to him. Even in Metal Gear Solid, where you can't advance through the game at one point if you don't smoke your cigarettes, you can watch your Stamina slowly decreasing the longer you keep smoking. In Metal Gear Solid 4 Snake persists in his habit in spite of having obvious breathing difficulties; this culminates in a child literally snatching his cigarette away and lecturing him on how very bad his habit is.
In Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar Games reminds the player that American conservatives are absolutely evil at just about every opportunity possible. It's best summed up by the in-game TV show "Republican Space Rangers". They also give Liberals a going over, portraying them as paranoid conspiracy theorists. Actually, all humour in later GTA games is based on campy exaggeration of typical (usually negative) traits of portrayed groups. Most characters in these games are walking, talking caricatures.
Chrono Cross would like you to know that Humans Are Bastards. Although once, the reveal about the Pantheon telling you this hits, it's hard to tell how seriously we're supposed to take it.
"Always eat your vegetables, you know." Sally says this in every game.
We get it, Nu Metal sucks.

Pastel Defender Heliotrope was blatantly banging the readers over the head with ideas of the oppression of women and sexual identities and evils of religion...when it bothered to make sense. Then, just to make sure ALL the bases were covered, JDR reveals in the ending that the entire thing was started because some robots wanted to ask permission to do we're-not-sure-what but no one was around to ask. Just to make sure that she's striking out against anti-piracy legislation in the most Anvilicious and crazy way possible.
Unicorn Jelly by the same author.
This Nodwick storyline. Yes, Mr. Williams, we all know Microsoft is doing all that. Stop rubbing it in and switch to ReactOS already!
El Goonish Shive has a particularly painful anvil dropped in an oddly familiar explanation of how religion works on the Uryuom homeworld.
Irregular Webcomic decide to drop the anvil of Be Careful What You Wish For in this strip. Intentionally, with the link to this page.
Dominic Deegan drops numerous anvils of "intolerance is bad!". We know this because everyone who acts intolerantly is usually portrayed as irredeemably evil, not to mention the fact that something horrible will probably happen to them before the end of the arc.
The Comics I Don't Understand site has a special tag for anvilicious comics.
Made fun of in this Nip and Tuck comic. Nip, a B-movie writer/star, talks about why he does not do romance in his movies. He explains how bad Hollywood romance plots are. He mentions My Fair Lady and Taming of the Shrew and how a girl with nothing wrong with her is run through a "Magic Makeover Machine" which is supposed to end up with the hero seeing her true inner beauty. The illustration that accompanies the talk shows a simple caricature of a woman getting smashed by a hydraulic press with the word "AESOP" written on it.
While Chris is usually pretty good about it, Misfile has a few strips that make it more than clear that Ash's character is supposed to be read as an Ft M transsexual, and that everything he goes through is supposed to drive home An Aesop about accepting transsexuals, except for the ones that are supposed to drive home An Aesop about accepting homosexuals.
Lampshaded/parodied here in Tally HO!. With an actual anvil no less.
The Final Thoughts in ''Doctor McNinja'' often make a point of dropping several anvils. Most completely irrelevant to the story's content.

The Spoony Experiment's Spoony said it best: "Get it?! These are black people! We were mean to them!"
Yellow Cake is loaded with anvils since it's an allegory of the evils of imperialism and ends with a Reason You Suck Speach, you bastard.

Family Guy delivers its many, many messages with all the subtlety of a ten-pound sledgehammer. You could probably make a drinking game out of how many times the show makes a poorly veiled Take That against something (take two shots when they're making jabs at Republicans or women). This has unfortunately affected the show's quality, where one joke was pretty much the characters saying "Laura Bush killed a guy." over and over again. Furthermore, Brian has changed from being the straight man and witty intellectual to becoming basically a vehicle for Seth MacFarlane to deliver his annoying (even to this leftie) socially liberal, anti corporate agenda. It reached a new low in a recent episode, in which Stewie steals a Nazi's uniform after traveling back in time, and a McCain-Palin campaign button is attached to the uniform.
- The episode where Meg finds religion and Brian is outed as an atheist. Judging from the reactions on Dethroning Moment Of Suck, anvilicious may be an understatement for that one. That episode wasn't even logical. Rather than some well reasoned argument for why god couldn't exist, the reason Brian gave was basically if god existed then Meg would be pretty. This becomes even more confusing when you take into account that Meg is fictional. There's no god because an atheist television producer (Seth MacFarlane) made one of his cartoon characters ugly(with even that being debatable)? That's infuriating on multiple levels to this agnostic.
- The episode where the abstinence-only agenda of schools is bashed by Lois. Yes, it has a great message, use protection, but the anvil really, really needed to be dropped after the first repetition of said message.
- Also, the episode for legalizing marijuana, where the cops who pull over Peter and Brian don't mind that they have a bloody trash bag in their backseat, but go ballistic when they find out Brian has some pot.
- Smoking pot somehow turned Quahog into a utopia overnight. Moral of the story: drugs are the key to perfect happiness apparently. Brave New World was right.
  - Especially considering this was stated immediately after a news report that the anchors stumbled through due to being stoned out of their minds. This makes the 'utopian Quahog' seem more like an Informed Ability and that the real situation should be the exact opposite of what Brian claims it to be.
- Let's not forget the earlier anti-pot episode where Peter and Lois thought smoking pot made them into talented folk singers when, in reality, it turned them into drooling babbling idiots who only THOUGHT they were singing well. Chris admonishes them with a lecture at the end of the episode.
  - Not just any lecture. A lecture in which he claimed that THC was a mild form of LSD.
"One Beer", a mini-episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, does a send-up of heavy-handed Cant Get Away With Nuthin cartoons about the dangers of underage drinking. They have a bottle of beer. Hampton notes they usually wouldn't touch such a thing, but Buster replies that they have to act out of character for the plot to work. The single bottle of beer (split between Buster, Hampton, and Plucky, which means each got about four ounces) puts them into a foggy dreamland, in which they eventually drive a car off a cliff and die. Not surprisingly, the executives eventually refused to re-air the episode, because they felt it was so heavy-handed that it came off as sarcastic. (Which was, in fact, the series writers' intent all along; in response to some attempted Executive Meddling by some figures at Warner Bros. Television, who thought Tiny Toons needed to be more "educational", all three segments of that particular episode ("Elephant Issues") were deliberately written to come across as moral sledgehammers delivered as un-subtly as possible, in hopes that it would discourage the censors and network execs from asking them to do it again. It worked.)
Yes, Transformers Animated writing staff, we get that the Autobot High Command is the Bush Admistration and that fearmongering and promoting a Witch Hunt is bad. Enough already.
Spoofed mercilessly in a "U.S. Acres" short from Garfield And Friends. Roy got a job on "The Buddy Bears", an obnoxiously cheerful kids' Show Within A Show, where part of his role as "Big Bad Buddy Bird" was to have sixteen-ton safes dropped on his head for not agreeing with the singing, dancing ursines. The quite literally anvilicious moral, according to the Buddy Bears: "Always go along with the group, or someone may drop a sixteen-ton safe on you."
It could be said that the premise of Captain Planet And The Planeteers was anvilicious. A group of eco superheroes who command the powers of nature to fight evil polluters. Yup, bad guys who don't produce anything; just pollute. Though in its defense, if they had written it as a cyberpunk story about a bunch of eco-terrorists fighting against the overwhelming power of the corporate menace, it wouldn't exactly have been able to appeal to children now would it? That's the lesson here: if it's U.S. children's television, it must make use of anvilicious aesops. Removing them makes the show no longer acceptable for children!
Sometimes happens in South Park, such as in one episode where a character explains to another character about how there is no global warming, climaxing with "What are you, a retard?" South Park specializes in dropping anvils so hard that it becomes part of the humor.
- Each episode in which the denouement dialogue begins with, "You know, I learned something today..."
- Another episode brutally parodied this trope. Stan, Kyle and Kenny attempt to illegally download songs off the Internet for free. They download one song and almost instantly, an entire FBI squad busts into the house, holds the kids at gunpoint and arrests them. This was also a Reef Blower. When Stan asks what's wrong with downloading music, the officer responds that an artist will have to buy a slightly smaller island for his kid, or wait a few days before buying a gold plated swimming pool.
- In the episode "Canada on Strike!" they brutally attacked the Writers' Guild of America strike with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the knee. Given the fact that Parker and Stone seem to hate everything that anyone else approves of, this isn't particularly surprising.
- Let's not forget that they actually made fun of this trope (and themselves) in "Cartoon Wars" (the one where they kept making fun of Family Guy).
"Random Guy (about Family Guy)":"I just want to watch a show that isn't preachy and up its own ass with messages." After said episode Family Guy became REALLY "preachy and up its own ass with messages".
- It was actually parodied as early as "Pink Eye," in which Kyle starts going on a speech about how Halloween isn't about costumes and candy, but about loving, sharing and giving to people - at which point Stan tells Kyle that he's actually talking about Christmas, and the Halloween really is just about costumes and candy.
- One instance where they dropped the anvil on their foot was "Britney's New Look". Yes, it had a damn fine point - don't get so into celebrities. However, it sacrificed virtually all humor to do so, save for a throw-away gag here and there.
Practically every episode of The Proud Family, with its politically correct suburban upper-middle-class conservative African-American family learning some lesson, often concerning race relations.
- Y'know, 'cus they're black. Why else have a show about a suburban upper-middle-class conservative African-American?
- The show drops the anvil especially hard in the episode "EZ Jackster". The scriptwriters manage to slam The Matrix movies (the "bad kid" is black and dressed like Morpheus did in the movies) and hit the audience over the head with a story about how illegally downloading music and spending time online is bad, and nice kids don't do it. Oh, and it visually equates illicit filesharing to drug abuse. Seriously.
  - However, his costume may be a reference to Morpheus, the file-sharing program often used to illegally download music.
- It also routinely dishes out "feminism is bad, and even if you try to do what the boys do, you'll fail anyway." Check out the football episode.
- Oh, and not all Muslims are terrorists. Sorry we waited until the end to drop that one.
Parodied on the Animaniacs cartoon, where the final sequence to many episodes was the "Wheel of Morality", a Big 6 style wheel the characters would spin to randomly determine the moral of the episode in a parody of And Knowing Is Half The Battle. ("Wheel of Morality, turn turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn!") One short played up the randomness and gameshow / gambling aspect by having the result be a prize in the form of a free vacation. What makes this especially amusing is that the creative team on the show was pressured to include lessons in the format. The above was only one response, while another, vastly more scathing one has Slappy Squirrel go through plastic surgery to start her career over... so she can make cartoons more violent, just like they used to be.
Does anyone else remember the Pound Puppies cartoon? It was so bad that at one point, the adult puppies (?) tell one of the child puppies (?!) a story about how a kid lying about breaking a vase causes the death of everyone they know and the destruction of their whole fantasy world. Kind of harsh.
Cartoon All Stars To The Rescue uses healthy doses of Narm and Nightmare Fuel to create a special so Anvilicious that it may very well be a form of brainwashing. The show put the drug addict kid through what can only be described as a Cartoon Carnival of Souls as part of their Drugs Are Bad argument.
He Man And The Masters Of The Universe had 'What moral did we learn in this episode?' segments at the end of each episode.
- Including this little gem. Sure, it's a great lesson, but the delivery, as with any kids show that tries the same thing, means it almost always comes off sounding like they're just trying to make you laugh more.
GI Joe taught us all that knowing is half the battle. So now you know. The other half? Blowing shit up.
- Bonus points if it's The Enemy.
- Sun Tzu said that, really.
In later years, Popeye cartoons were sometimes used as a way to get kids to eat their vegetables, particularly spinach, as the title character uses it as a Super Serum. Sometimes, it worked.
Back in the old SEGA Genesis days, Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog ended occasional episodes with a "Sonic Says" section which gave kids good advice.
The episode "Grande Size Me" in Kim Possible focused on how it's better eating healthy food than fast food. Cue a Super Size Me parody, Incredible Hulk transformation and Breaking The Fourth Wall. Lampshaded and played for laughs at the end of the episode where Ron gives a speech to the viewer about how mutating your DNA is bad, and you should never do it.
The Polar Express makes sure that no one misses its religious message. The plot revolves around a boy who is tortured by doubts of Santa Claus, who is shown to be like a god to everyone at the north pole. The boy is a stereotypical woobie just because "Christmas doesn't work for him." Everyone who doesn't believe in Santa is annoying, scary, or both and the most spiritual of the kids apparently is the best leader... yes, we got the message.
The Noodles the Rabbit segments of British dark animated comedy show Monkey Dust combine a scientist describing horrific animal experimentation to an uncaring executive over sad piano music and the experimental rabbit acting like Bugs Bunny. Naturally, the final segment shown ends with the scientist being killed by a falling anvil.
A Pup Named Scooby-Doo:
- In one episode, the villain was using dolphins in his drug smuggling operation. When Velma mentioned drugs, she said it after a pause to give it more emphasis. Scooby then responded in disgust. This happens twice in nearly the exact same wording. The fact that it's a Scooby-Doo spinoff makes it even funnier.
- Another episode had a surfer whose career apparently ended after he began using steroids. Cue shocked look from Shaggy: "DRUGS?! Drugs can mess you up!"
Fern Gully: Humans suck, pollution is the devil and cutting down trees is pure evil because as any fairy will tell you they feel pain. The animated musical.
The Donald Duck episode "Der Führer's Face": "Boy, am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America!"
The Darkwing Duck episode "Dead Duck", where Darkwing has a dream that he died in a motorcycle crash due to not wearing a helmet. However, the anvilicious message of "wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle" is somewhat odd when considering that Launchpad never wears a helmet when riding/driving the Ratcatcher.
- To be fair, the episode really only dwells on the helmet thing as a running gag; most of the episode focuses on Darkwing as a ghost, trying to avoid being sent to Hell.
The Fairly Oddparents: Be Careful What You Wish For. Also, "It's A Wishful Life" states: Do nice things to be nice, not to get rewarded" after showing Timmy how much better things were without him after he wanted some acknowladgement.
Yin Yang Yo goes ahead and mocks this with a villain called 'The Lesson', who tries to literally hammer home various messages into peoples' heads. (usually Yang) Even Yin, who agrees with him on principle, thinks he's a jerk and helps foil him.

The Chronicles Of Fate. The entire theme of this setting is basically one big anarchist message about how society is bad. That's it. That's all it's about. You cannot play a good character who believes in law, order, and following the rules in this world. Everyone who does those things is, by definition, evil in this sitting. Only people who practice chaos and freedom are heroes. Perhaps the creator of this setting is trying to say something about their views on anarchy vs civilized society?

Mr. T, in every incarnation, is anvilicious to the point of becoming a running joke, thanks in no small part to the ironic humor of a large violent macho man screaming at you things a meek female kindergarten teacher would normally tell you. A favorite satirically jumbled line: "If you believe in yourself, stay in milk, drink all your school, don't do sleep, and get eight hours of drugs!"

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