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And Knowing Is Half The Battle
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alt title(s): And Now You Know; The More You Know 
Remember kids! Knowing is half the battle! And the other half is shooting somebody.
"The telephone is a privilege, not a right, kids. And knowing is half the battle!" — Duke
"...What's the other half?" — Mego Spidey
"...Violence. Ehh, heh-heh-heh!" — Duke
The episode of your cartoon series is over already, and the kids haven't yet had An Aesop or a science lesson? Well, we can't have that!
This trope is the practice of encapsulating the moral of the story in The Tag. It often has No Fourth Wall, and has the characters of the show directly lecture to the audience. It allows a show that went 22 minutes wantonly breaking stuff to get that coveted " E/I" rating, by telling the kids not to eat the pretty candies in the medicine cabinet. Most times, the moral laid out in The Tag is a summation of what should have been learned from the story, encapsulated in an Anvilicious manner. Other times, it's just a generic safety tip added to an otherwise purely entertaining episode.
Sometimes it wasn't even a moral lesson, but a science fact related to the Sci Fi setting. The first season of Sea Quest DSV, in a rare live-action variant, had real life ocean expert Robert Ballard from the Woods-Hole Oceanographic Institute give a one minute lecture on the science of the episode next to the credits; this segment vanished when the series jumped the shark in the second season. Schlock Rankin-Bass Sci Fi cartoon Silverhawks had something about the planets framed as a lesson to the crew's Plucky Comic Relief / Robot Monkey. A variant on this could be seen in the short segments in prime-time that recommended the viewer to consult his local library for selected books related to the preceding program.
The name comes from the moral tack-ons from the end of GI Joe episodes, with their own internal Catch Phrases:
This was most common in The Eighties, and happened a lot in The Seventies as well. A Discredited Trope, but as long as cartoons need E/I ratings or family shows need approval from Moral Guardians, someone will do this straight.
Contrast We Havent Learned Anything Yet, where the writers try to wedge something like this into the actual duration of the show.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Sailor Moon — the "Sailor Says" segments which were created out of whole cloth for the North American dub
- On the other hand, the tacked-on messages would sometimes flatly contradict the spirit of the preceding episode. One episode saw the villains disguising their human-energy-sapping apparatus as a miracle weight loss system, tempting impressionable girls who were left listless, emaciated, and in some cases near death. Despite the story being a clear dig at fad dieting, the "Sailor Says" segment was about how great it is to stay in shape.
- That doesn't seem to be contradictory to this troper. There's a big difference between fad dieting and staying in shape, after all...
- Sailor Moon Abridged loves to mock these.
- The "science lessons" in GunBuster and Martian Successor Nadesico may have been partly meant to parody such tags in series imported from the US, as they are something rarely if ever seen in anime as it is broadcast in Japan.
- An anime which plays this straight is Mari And Gali , which attempts to teach middle school students about scientific principles. Its makers still throw in a lot of slapstick and general silliness, so the result is rather strange—to say the least.
- Yakitate Japan ends each episode with a random factoid about bread.
- Moyashimon ends each episode with a segment teaching about a microorganism involved in fermentation featuring anthromorphic bacteria.
- Hikaru No Go ends episodes with a live-action segment that discusses actual Go strategy.
- Harukanaru Toki no Naka de - Hachiyoushou has the "Kotengu Classic" segments, with Kotengu explaining some facts about something specific mentioned in the episode — sometimes these are quite useful, as the series takes place in the Heian Period Japan (sorta), and knowing some basic facts about its culture certainly won't hurt.
- La Corda d'Oro - primo passo does the same with "Lili's One-Point Classic" and music.
- NyanKoi! ends each episode with a segment called MewView, where the main character cats recap the episode in a humorous way, and then sign off with an "interesting fact" about cats.
- Seen It A Million Times: Pop-up "culture notes" on fansubs.
Film
Live Action TV
- Each major American network has their own version of these. The most well-known and often parodied are NBC's "The More You Know Segments", which featured celebrities of the time in Public Service Announcements. Notable parodies include:
- A special feature on The Office season 2 DVD, where the show's characters tell you important facts about life. Dwight informs viewers that he could survive on a wolf's diet, Jim tells you that the black jelly beans are bad, and Ryan tells you, if you're hanging out with your friends, and someone tries to sell you a $9 beer, just say no, because $9 is way too much for a beer. The Office airs on NBC.
- The Daily Show parodies it with 'The Less You Know', a segment about censorship where the rainbow trail on the star logo is blacked out with redaction bars.
- One of J.D.'s fantasies in Scrubs (also on NBC) parodies this with J.D. telling the audience why it's wrong to smother your kids, in a horrifyingly casual manner:
JD: You had a tough day at the office. So you come home, make yourself some dinner, smother your kids, pop in a movie, maybe have a drink. It's fun, right? Wrong. Don't smother your kids.
- In Western Animation, it's the second most often parodied version of this trope, right behind the Trope namer. See below for examples.
- The other three "big four" networks have their own answers to NBC's "The More You Know" PSAs. As for TMYK, the logo at the top of the page is no longer used; they use a different one now, still with the star motif.
- ABC had "A Better Community".
- CBS has "CBS Cares".
- Fox has "Pause". (Get it?)
- In the early seasons, all episodes of Power Rangers ended with "a message from the Power Rangers." Though not as frequent as before, Rangers doing a public service announcement or two has made a comeback in recent years (apparently, listening to your parents is as important factor in being a hero as far as the Overdrive Rangers are concerned... even though their Red Ranger became a Ranger by ignoring his father's prohibitions against his putting himself in danger that way).
- The show Dinosaurs parodied this at the end of a parody of a Very Special Episode, with Robbie exhorting viewers to "end preachy Sit Com episodes" by not using drugs.
- Has happened at least twice in the FOX series 24. Most notably, a PSA was created in the fourth season where Kiefer Sutherland talked about the plight of Middle Eastern residents in the country, just before an episode where his character, Jack Bauer, met two Middle Eastern gun shop owners in Los Angeles. The pre-show announcements for season two and four also had Sutherland promoting corporate sponsors (i.e. Ford sponsored a commercial-free airing of the season two premiere).
- Niea Under 7 featured a short live action "educational" segment after every show with bizarre statements about life in India.
- The ABC Family series The Secret Life Of The American Teenager features a clip of the main character's actress prompting teens and parents to talk about underage sex, because "Teenage pregnancy is 100% avoidable!"
- The Clueless TV series once had one where the audience was earnestly told that the only safe sex is no sex.
- An episode of the Rotten Tomatoes Show had a Three Word Review that described the movie Knowing as "Half the battle".
- One of this tropers favorite 80s show, 'Voyagers' always had someone tell the viewers, during the closing credits, that if they wanted to learn more about the historical periods and/or people from the episode, they could visit their local library.
- Short, but I think it counts: "Help control the pet population, have your pets spayed or neutered."
- Attack Of The Show! will occasionally mock this trope. When they teach the audience a "lesson," Kevin or Olivia will inform then that they "just got learned!". Cut to a parody of the shooting star made famous by NBC; only it's a rocketship flying over the Earth, and it crashes into a blimp, and the blimp hindenbergs back into the atmosphere.
Tabletop Games
- The tabletop RPG Cartoon Action Hour is designed to evoke the feel of action cartoons from the 1980s. In fact, players can earn bonus experience points by role-playing their characters in an After-The-Show Message.
Theater
- The epilogue of Pericles can be roughly summarized as "Look at all these characters! The gods punished the wicked ones and rewarded the righteous ones!"
- Most plays written in the 18th century had prologues that basically said, "this is a good play, you'll enjoy it" and epilogues repeating the moral of the play. Probably justified, since few people at the time actually went to the theater to watch a play - they went to see and be seen.
Web Animation
- A somewhat-recent internet phenomenon was the spoof redubs of the original GI Joe shorts by Fensler Films, which usually turned them into something utterly incoherent and surreal ("Alright, give 'im the stick - DOOOOON'T GIVE 'IM THE STICK!").
- Parodied by Legendary Frog, who had a transforming toaster warn Kerrigan about the dangers of electric shock.
Webcomics
Web Original
- Parodied on Homestar Runner, where the Cheat Commandos do an educational cartoon on avoiding "inappropriate peer-to-teen choice behaviors" called Commandos In The Classroom
 .
- And parodied again in An Important Rap Song, where Crack Stuntman (voice of Gunhaver on the Cheat Commandos) does a corny rap song about not playing with knives (and spring break, for some reason).
- No no no no no, it wasn't the dangers of playing with knives, it was the dangers of playing with too many knives. Because apperently, severed fingers are okay in moderation.
- Also parodied in this Mass Effect fan video, in which Ashley's line "shooting people isn't always the answer" is presented as one of these.
- Played straight, twice, by the Nostalgia Critic and Nostalgia Chick during their joint review of Fern Gully. Once with the trope name (complete with "G. I. JOOOOOOOOOOE" clip), and once with NBC's "The More You Know" screen.
- The latter was also used in one of Linkara's videos.
- Parodied in McCourt's In Session where the eponymous judge delivers a slightly disturbing warning to kids.
- Given the contents of the website, it seems only fitting that Encyclopedia Dramatica uses a variant of the image above for their section, "THE MOAR YOU KNOW."
- Quoted in Chad Vader, S2 Ep8 "Bandito Beatdown" :
Commander Wickstrom: "I wish I knew what to do."
Weird Jimmy: "Well, knowing is half the battle. The other half is doing. Well, not half but [mutters]...65 for knowing [mutters] the doing is-is..."
Western Animation
- Super Friends - safety tips, magic tricks, science projects, you name it. Probably set the tone for all the others.
- GI Joe - never related to the episode
- Several PSA segments were prepared for Transformers, another Hasbro property produced by Sunbow and Marvel Productions concurrent with G.I. Joe. The segments even used the "and knowing is half the battle" line, but they never aired. These were placed as unlockable bonuses in the Armada-based PS2 game, and are also available on some DVD releases of the show.
- Jem, another Hasbro property produced by Sunbow and Marvel Productions (like G.I. Joe' and Transformers) also featured similar PSA segments. Like the Transformers ones, these also mimicked the G.I. Joe versions, sometimes word-for-word, but the "Knowing is half the battle" line was replaced with "Doing the right thing makes you a Super Star".
- Nintendo Power referenced this in a recent issue. They ran a shot in their preview of the new G.I. Joe video game of two members of the team getting ready to charge into battle, and underneath, the caption...
"The other half of the battle? A really big chain gun."
- The GI Joe comic packs parodied these, with ads featuring kids in some sort of problematic situation and the Joes showing up to...tell them about their awesome new action figures.
- Inspector Gadget
- M.A.S.K.
- Captain Planet And The Planeteers — Either the whole show, or just the "Planeteer Alert" at the end, depending on how cynical you are.
- Heathcliff and Pound Puppies — Always about pet care or pet safety
- Animaniacs — Parodied with reckless abandon as the "Wheel of Morality" "Wheel of Morality, turn, turn, turn. Tell us the lesson that we should learn!"
Yakko: "Hey come on, the Wheel of Morality adds boring educational value to what otherwise would be an almost entirely entertaining program."
- "Early to rise/And early to bed/Makes a man healthy/But socially dead."
- Possums have pouches like kangaroos.
- Elvis lives on in our hearts, in his music, and in a trailer park in eastern Kentucky.
- You can teach an old dog new tricks, but you can't teach Madonna to act.
- Be sure to brush your teeth after every meal. This moral was brought to you by the American Dental Association.
- He Man And The Masters Of The Universe plus its Spin Off. It was halfway-used in one episode of the 2002 version, where the Masters needed Orko to help lure a colony of dragons to attack monsters under the control of Skeletor. After that task was successful, the episode concludes wtih Orko admitting to his chagrin that he's still scared of the species, but the heroes reassure him that a proper respect for a fierce and powerful creature is the mark of a wise person. Here, the lesson flows relatively naturally from the plot and the fourth wall is kept intact.
- She Ra Princess Of Power
- Veggie Tales does this routinely.
- Clerks The Animated Series parodied this with a number of post-episode shorts, such as having Jay and Silent Bob present a Mr Wizard inspired magic-from-science segment. They showed a simple sleight-of-hand trick, with the twist that a key element of the trick required invoking the power of Satan.
- Making it better, the third segment didn't do much but have Charles Barkley try to do the segment, then Jay and Silent Bob kick the crap out of him Godfather-style (including the missed punch) and leave.
- Spoofed in an episode of Disney's Dave The Barbarian. "Remember, children, brush your teeth every night or evil tooth decay goblins will move into your mouth and play loud polka music all day! And remember, STAY IN SCHOOL!!"
- South Park has subverted and parodied this in various ways.
- In the 13th season premire, Kyle and Cartman actually quoted the phrase verbatim after Kenny's death from syphilis, caught by getting oral sex from his girlfriend.
- Care Bears, usually a lesson about sharing or not lying, or how bad it is to shoplift, etc.
- Also present and parodied (at the same time!) in the animated series based on Sam And Max Freelance Police.
- This was used in The Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog cartoon series (but not the one that aired on Saturday mornings) with a short 'Sonic
Sez Says' segment every episode, where Sonic explained some sort of lesson (often safety related) to the viewers. Disturbingly, Sonic once took it upon himself to explain "good touch vs. bad touch" to the kids at home ("There's nothing more cool than being hugged by someone you like. But if someone tries to touch you in a place or in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, that's no good!"). The Internet being what it is, this has spawned various edits and parodies, such as "Sonic Gives MC Hammer Advice", which is the "touch" speech with parts of "Can't Touch This" edited in.
- Don't forget to listen to the mighty sloth and not take rides in clothes driers!
- The Simpsons played with this as early as the first-season episode Bart the General
Bart: Contrary to what you've just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy. If you'd like to learn more about war, there's lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool gory pictures.
- A later episode, Bart Starr, had guest star Joe Namath break the fourth wall to deliver an inspiring message.
Namath: Heh heh. Poor Bart. You know, we had a lot of fun tonight. But, theres nothing funny about... vapor lock. It's the third most common cause of stalling. So please, take care of your car and get it checked. I'm Joe Namath. Good night!
- A later Halloween Special provided a message about adult illiteracy.
- Spoofed at the end of the Kim Possible "Grande Size Me", where Ron delivers the moral of the episode to the audience at the end — with Kim and everyone else wondering who on earth he is talking to...
- One of Drawn Together's many running gags.
- The Mysterious Cities Of Gold featured mini-documentaries on South American history and culture at the end of each episode. Unlike most entries on this list, they were actually interesting.
- The Magic School Bus had a segment at the end of each episode responding to "viewers' phone calls", which explained all the things the episode had glossed over because it made a better story. Fair enough, since it was intended as an Edutainment Show.
- The books did this too, ending with a couple pages that addressed complaints about inaccuracies and safety/physics violations.
- Thunder Cats more or less averted this by not having end of episode segments where the cast breaks the fourth wall and talks straight to the viewer, but some of the morals the episodes themselves are trying to teach come over as obvious anyway. This is sometimes pushed a bit too far when one of the Thunder Cats practically spells out the moral in a piece of dialogue in a very anvilicious way (such as one time when Tigra makes a small speech about rules and how they should be obeyed, otherwise they are "just words". The delivery and pacing of the scene makes the moral that is trying to be taught overly obvious).
- Well, Thundercats did have a consultant child psychologist on the staff. Though, to be honest, I'm not sure if the anviliciousness was deliberate, or just the way that Tygra (and it was almost always Tygra) was written - even the voice actor who played him regarded him as a rather "square dude".
- The exact line was "Rules are only meaningful if people agree to follow them. Otherwise, they're just words". In retrospect, it's strangely ambiguous. It sounds like a worthy and moralistic exhortation to follow the rules, but could equally be taken as saying that rules have no meaning if you don't agree with them, or could even be a veiled attack on rules that have no mechanism for enforcement (it was in response to a comment that the "Interstellar Council" ruled against a weapon that the mutants were using).
- It also is actually a standard definition of the difference between 'law' and 'pretty words,' and this troper used it as a basis for arguing that unenforced and unenforceable laws are, in fact, sadistic jokes because complaints about there needing to be laws could be answered with "There are," never mind that those laws exist mainly to waste ink & paper/electrons' time.
- Silverhawks had a similar segment at the end of each episode where Copper Kid got in a space simulator, where he was put against a simple astronomy quiz. Given the nature of the show, it was actually quite appropriate to have a segment about astronomy at the end of the show.
- Which was a bit odd, given that interstellar space was depicted as containing breatheable air and Earth-normal gravity throughout the show proper.
- The Centurions — Same as above, except lecture style.
- Spoofed in an Ambiguously Gay Duo animated short, from Saturday Night Live, in which the Duo present unintentionally double entendre -filled home safety tips. ("Grab the plug firmly by the male end and shove it right in. Don't play with it.")
- As long as we're on the topic of SNL...
Mr. T: "If you believe in yourself, eat all your school, stay in milk, drink your teeth, don't do sleep, and get 8 hours of drugs - you can get work!"
- The otherwise obscure Back To The Future The Animated Series was mostly remembered for that funny guy at the end — a young Bill Nye doing a science-related stunt, usually a do-it-yourself, at the end, sometimes related to the episode's events.
- Static Shock — On a few Very Special Episodes
- Mighty Max had a segment at the end of each episode with Max giving a brief fact related to the subject of the episode. One two-part finale, with Max still out with Virgil and Norman in a hellish setting, had Max's mother remarking on her son's choice of Dante's Inferno as reading material.
- "Mister T"'s animated series puts both the moral in the action story—and then reminds the moral of the story in the tag.
- The Grim Adventuresof Billy And Mandy parodies this in one episode. Erwin steals Grim's scythe and causes a lot of chaos with it. From their beaten up positions, two characters say to the audiance "Remember kids, playing with scythes isn't cool or fun." "It's dangerous!" "So if you see a scythe, don't pick it up! Tell an adult immediately!" ...they then proceed to nod at the camera knowingly.
- In one early morning commercial on Nickelodeon, Katara from Avatar The Last Airbender gives a lecture about swimming safety, and how you should always have an adult around. This is a horribly Broken Aesop considering these are the kids who do everything with the oldest member being fifteen, from world travel, to swimming, to fighting, to completely unpunished insurance fraud. Also Toph farts in the pool.
- The Venture Bros included a Very Special Episode about testicular torsion - an obscure and embarrassing medical problem to which Dean succumbed. The after-credits segment included the Animated Actors woodenly giving awareness lectures while reading off cue cards, in a very 'The More You Know' style.
- Interestingly enough, Doc Hammer actually suffered from testicular torsion when he was younger and based Dean's experience in the episode on his own.
- The football-themed cartoon Hurricanes featured at least one example: at the end of a Sweet Polly Oliver episode, the Token Girl explained to the viewer that women being restricted from playing on the same soccer team as men was "a stupid rule". That's the only one I can remember from that series; I'm not sure if there were more...
- The Family Guy episode "The Son Also Draws", (featuring an Indian casino) ended with the family acting racist towards a nationality stereotype, then immediately explaining why the stereotype is incorrect, with at "The More You Know" star showing up behind them. Then comes Peter:
Peter: That's more than you can say for those freeloadin' Canadians. (pause while the background goes black for him to give his inspirational educational message) ...Canada sucks!
- Family Guy does this several times. In "North by North Quahog" Chris gets caught drinking in the boys bathroon and a GI Joe steps outta the stall and gives a lecture about drinking.
- At the end of "Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington", an episode about smoking, Peter is lounging in his chair and starts "We've had a lot of laughs tonight..." the lesson: Killing hookers is bad. Cause they're people too.
- And besides, they're already dead on the inside.
- Growing Up Creepie, about a gothy girl raised by creepie-crawlies, included short inserts with educational insect facts.
- Ghostbusters (the 1986 TV series by Filmation, not the other one)
- The Popeye and Olive Show had various safety messages, usually featuring Popeye's identical quintuplet nephews, between the shorts.
- Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids would invariably end their episodes with a musical performance by Albert and the gang, that would spell out the lesson of the day. They, along with Bill Cosby's narrative asides, tended to make the lessons go down more smoothly than a lot of 70s cartoons did.
"This is Bill Cosby comin' at you with music and fun, and if you're not careful you may learn something before we're done. So let's get ready, okay? Hey, Hey, Hey!"
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