And Knowing Is Half the Battle

aka: And Now You Know

"And so what we have learned applies to our lives today, God has a lot to say in his book
You see we know that God's word is for everyone, now that our song is done, we'll take a look"

— "What Have We Learned Song", VeggieTales

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, who they assume to be a child. 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 incredibly obvious manner. Other times, it's just a generic safety tip added to an otherwise purely entertaining episode.

A type of Public Service Announcement or PSA, which often contains these when it uses characters from the show in the same timeslot. Sometimes it wasn't even a moral lesson, but a science fact related to the sci-fi setting. The first season of SeaQuest DSV 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 in the second season. Rankin/Bass Productions 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.

Though this was most commonly seen in The '80s (often as a near-textbook PSA separated from the climax of the actual story by local station commercials), it also appeared in The '70s in police documentaries as a way to end the program with lessons for drivers. In The '80s and The '90s, it became something of an Enforced Trope, as FCC regulations required a certain amount of "educational" content in children's programming, and this became a way to make the actual show "educational." It's not quite a Dead Horse Trope or a Discredited Trope yet, though. And, as long as cartoons need E/I ratings or family shows need approval from Moral Guardians, someone will play this trope straight. May include a "Harmful to Pets" Reminder.

Subverted in shows where We Haven't Learned Anything, period, and the characters remark on it. Compare "Lesson of the Day" Speech.

---

Examples

Trope Namer

• The name comes from the moral tack-ons from the end of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero episodes, with their own internal catchphrases:
  Random Kid: "'Cause now we know!"
  Random Joe: "And Knowing Is Half The Battle!"
  Chorus: "G.I. JOOOOOOEEEEEEE!"
  • Nintendo Power referenced this. 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.
• G.I. Joe Extreme also had PSAs, and even used the "Knowing is half the battle" line too.
  "I didn't know we had a ninja..."
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, rather impressively, makes this line a plot point briefly, as a reference to intelligence operations. It's also printed on a wall of the exercise room. Ripcord asks what the other half is, but no one answers.
• There's also a gag T-shirt which divides the other half of the battle into red lasers and blue lasers.
• G.I. Joe: Renegades drops this in as a Mythology Gag in the first episode as Cobra Industries' corporate motto.
• And then there's the spoof redubs of the original G.I. Joe shorts by Fensler Films. Simply titled G.I. Joe PSAs, these redubs turned the shorts into something utterly incoherent and surreal ("Alright, give 'im the stick - DOOOOON'T GIVE 'IM THE STICK!").
  • (9 seconds of seeing someone fall of a cliff before cutting to the GI JOE title) "Shiiiiiiii-"

Anime and Manga

• Each episode of Aikatsu! ends with an aphorism that tells us the moral of the episode.
• At the end of the TV broadcast of every episode of Asteroid in Love, there's a small segment titled Kira Kira Special Issue which more fully discusses certain astronomy/geology knowledge points mentioned in that episode. For example, the one for the first episode involves Mira Kinohata discusses Mira, the variable star in Cetus.
• Bartender ends each episode with a recipe for an alcoholic drink. The ending sequence also shows a bartender preparing said drink.
• Day Break Illusion has borderline Unreadably Fast Text Info Dumps about the meaning of tarot cards (one card per episode), along with some characters blithering about something that may or may not be related. In one episode, Laplace lampshades the pointlessness of the segment.
• Dragon Ball had two non-canon episodes, "Goku's Traffic Safety" and "Goku's Fire Brigade". The characters learn about traffic safety and fire safety, then address the audience about it at the end.
• Eyeshield 21 ends each episode with basic safety tips for beginning football players.
• GunBuster zigzags this, because, while it might be a parody like the above, relativistic time dilation also plays a major role in the plot of later episodes, so they had to explain it for the story to make sense.
• Harukanaru Toki no Naka de - Hachiyou Shou has the Super-Deformed "Kotengu Classic" segments at the end of some episodes, 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.
• Hikaru no Go ends episodes with a live-action segment that discusses actual Go strategy.
• Used in one volume of the English edition of The Kindaichi Case Files talking about the differences between Western and Japanese computers. They also use it to justify the heavy edits by explaining that if they used a literal translation, the English reading audience won't get a fair chance at solving the mystery themselves.
• La Corda d'Oro - Primo Passo does the same with "Lili's One-Point Classic" and music.
• 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.
• The "science lessons" in 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.
• Massugu ni Ikou has "Mame's Tips For Dogs", which teaches about dog care.
• Moyashimon ends each episode with a segment teaching about a microorganism involved in fermentation featuring anthropomorphic bacteria.
• The Mysterious Cities of Gold featured mini-documentaries on South American history and culture at the end of each episode.
• Niea_7 featured a short live action "educational" segment after every show with bizarre statements about life in India.
• Nyan Koi! 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.
• Pretty Cure:
  • Each episode of KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode ends with a cooking lesson showing the item made during that episode.
  • Each episode of Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure ends with a constellation fortune-telling segment.
  • Each episode of Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure ends with a game involving the Healing Animals or elements.
• Sailor Moon — the "Sailor Says" segments which were created solely for the DiC Entertainment North American dub. Some of these took extremely vague lessons out of the material. That Chick With The Goggles pointed out two good examples: First, "Today we saw buses vanish into thin air. If only we could make the smog that buses cause vanish into thin air, too! Even though we're just kids, we can carpool and make a difference." ...yeah. The second example was that, although one episode actually had in it a lesson to believe in yourself and have confidence, because the episode was about an insecure artist who was afraid to draw what she really looked like because she didn't believe she looked good enough, the Sailor Says at the end of that episode shoehorned a reminder that Drugs Are Bad into a speech about being yourself.
  • Sailor Moon Abridged loves to mock these.
    • "So....Studying....Yeah...."
    • "Remember kids, exercising is hard, but shoving a spoon down your throat is easy! And don't forget to do it after every meal, just like me!
• Yakitate!! Japan ends each episode with a random factoid about bread.
• Some of the Yumeiro Pâtissière episodes end with cooking advice for making certain types of sweets.

Comic Books

• One of DC Editor Jack Schiff's pet projects back in the Golden Age was a series of one-page PSA inserts featuring various popular superheroes teaching kids a brief lesson on the topic of the day; these were actually required by law, since in order to qualify as second-class mail, a publication had to have a certain amount of straight text.
• DC Comics has published numerous PSAs over the decades.
  • In The '70s, it published the "Justice for All Includes Children," which has Superman intervening to teach about matters involving the law dealing with the Miranda Rights, criminal liability, the dangers of hitchhiking etc.
  • It once commissioned a series of in-house PSAs in the early 90s featuring several DC heroes like Robin, Booster Gold, The Flash, among others getting informed about the real facts concerning HIV and AIDS. The most well known of the bunch was the adult-oriented Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean authored Death Talks About Life, featuring Death of the Endless from The Sandman (1989) and John Constantine.
• Marvel Comics have done some similar ads on health issues in the 2010s, including one where Tony (Iron Man) Stark - one of the smartest people in the Marvel Universe - is apparently unaware that men can get breast cancer.
• Scott Pilgrim: Free Scott Pilgrim ends with "Scott Pilgrim Says", where we are taught never to hit a girl. Unless it is an emergency. And that's what Scott Pilgrim says!

Film

• In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, after Bugs Bunny explains the art technique of Pointillism, he says: "I think, when you go to the movies, you should learn somethin'." Doubles as a Brick Joke, as earlier in the film, one of Kate Houghton's criticisms of Bugs' movies was that "nobody learns anything" from them.
• Parodied by Love Actually:
  Billy Mack: Kids, don't buy drugs. If you become a pop star they give you them for free.
• Toy Story 2 has an in-universe example where the last aired episode of Woody's Roundup had the show Woody address the audience about not forgetting their friends and family while singing the recurring song "You've Got a Friend in Me". This convinces the Woody watching, who had just decided to abandon his old friends and his owner Andy to go to a museum in Japan with the rest of the Roundup Gang toys, to reverse his decision and take the Roundup Gang with him.
• In the 1997 informative video The Kids Guide to the Internet ends with the mother pointing out that the Internet is not regulated and you should watch your children's Internet usage. (Which, oddly enough, she did NOT do during the entire half-hour video.)

Literature

• The Berenstain Bears: Played with — the majority of the picture books try to teach a lesson and start off with a simple four-line rhyme explaining it before getting into the story, rather than having the lesson spelled out at the ending.
• In the third story of Cubnet, the reader gets an account of an in-universe Band Toon from The '80s called "Rory and the Rodents":
  Chipmunk: And so the day is saved, thanks to the Rodents!
  Rory: But most of all, me, Rory! And remember, kids, until next time...
  The Rodents: SAY NO TO DRUGS!
  Brenda: (watching the episode on a rerun block over 30 years after it originally aired) Ah yes, the classic "do as I say, not as I do".

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.
  • Before The More You Know, they had "One to Grow On" segments on Saturday Morning, featuring skits involving problems kids go through, and then a star of an NBC show explaining how to deal with it.
  • ABC had "A Better Community".
  • CBS originally had "Stop the Madness". Today, they have "CBS Cares", a frequent target on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
  • Fox has "Pause". The "Pause" segments are innovative because they are clips that somehow avoid imparting any knowledge at all except for the address of the segments' website.
• 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).
• 30 Rock. At the end of the episode Gavin Velure, Tracy's sex doll made a And Now You Know segment.
  Tracy's Sex Doll: You know a lot of people look down on sex dolls. But as you saw tonight they save lives and bring families together. How am I such an expert? I’m Tracy Jordan’s sex doll!
• Adventures in Wonderland does this via a Framing Device. Each episode opens with Alice talking to her cat Dinah about a problem she's currently having, then she goes to Wonderland where a story with a similar theme plays out, and in the end she goes home and talks to Dinah about the Aesop she's learned which will help her solve her problem.
• 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.
• Barney & Friends: In addition to recapping the events of the episode, "Barney Says" reinforces the lessons that were taught in said episode, and often offer suggestions for building on it further.
• In Bill Nye the Science Guy, there were often segments which started with a voice saying "Did you know that...?", followed by a science fact. The segment would then end with the voice saying "Now you know!"
• The Clueless TV series once had one where the audience was earnestly told that the only safe sex is no sex.
• Code Red episodes had a coda where a cast member give a fire safety or first aid lesson.
• The Tag of the Community episode "G.I. Jeff" starts off with a parody of the G.I. Joe PSA about peer pressure and defacing public property, wherein Buzzkill (Britta) decries tagging one's own name as "a waste of spray paint" and was about to deliver a message about more important things to tag with, only for Fourth Wall (Abed) to interrupt and deliver a PSA about how heavy-handed PSAs "could turn an entire generation into jaded, sarcastic babies", before summing up the original PSA with "Graffiti is bad. Go play sports."
• 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.
  • It also parodied it with 'The More You Wish You Didn't Know' on a segment concerning the ACORN scandals.
  • And then, with a series of increasingly poorly titled segments where Jon Stewart tries to speak directly to the younger audience: "This Has Been 'Jon Stewart Touches Kids'... wait, that's the name we're going with?"
• Dinosaurs parodied this at the end of the mock Very Special Episode "A New Leaf", with Robbie exhorting viewers to "end preachy sitcom episodes like this one" by not using drugs.
• Dooley and Pals ends with "Fun Facts" relating to the plot of the show. The better-known "Children's Ministry" version airing on Smile TV (previously known as Smile of a Child) replaces this with "Fun Bible Facts" with a scripture passage relating to the aesop of the show. (This version was actually overseen by the company that made the secular version, rather than be enforced upon by Christian networks.)
• Double The Fist gives us Mephisto Knows. Mephisto tells us about something he doesn't like such as Athletes, Vegetarians, and Traffic Signs.
• The Edison Twins: Most episodes end with an animated sequence called "The Explanation," that illustrates the key scientific principle used in the main live-action story.
• Eureka has a series of PSAs called "Live Smart, Eureka" featured on the Season 2 DVD. They consist of reminding the really smart scientists that what they are doing could potentially be really dumb.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, while no stranger to the Very Special Episode, broke the fourth wall just to mock this sort of message in "Def Poet's Society".
  Will: (Turning directly to the camera, speaking softly) lf you'd like to learn more about poetry, you can reach us at... Psych! We just kidding! Good night, y'all!
• In every episode of Gekisou Sentai Carranger after the next episode preview, one of the characters gives safety tips for pedestrians (of course, 'cause kids are still not legally entitled to drive). Bakuage Sentai Boonboomger, another vehicle-themed Sentai that was released 28 years later, does the same.
• Kamen Rider Kiva had this invoked at the beginning of every episode, thanks to Kivat.
  "Minna, shiteru ka?" ("Everybody, did you know?")
• Key & Peele has a parody PSA featuring Mr. T teaching kids about respect... but ignores everything the kids bring up (like racism, sexism, drugs, or alcohol) until something comes up that he cares about (like names, dress, and especially hairstyles. Towards the end, the kids are actively trying to get him to come back by saying they're going to run off and "do a bunch of drugs" ("Yum! That sounds good.") but he instantly appears when they mention hair.
• How I Met Your Mother ends one episode with a special message from Barney:
  Barney: Hi there. We've had a lot of fun tonight, but on a more serious note, this is the time of year when we remember the importance of giving, and there's no greater gift... than the gift of booty. So, this holiday season, why not bang someone in need? I'm Barney Stinson, and that's (winks) one to grow on.
  • The camera then pans away to show that he's not addressing the audience, but a girl in the bar, and the music cuts out as she rejects him. He immediately turns to another girl and begins the speech again.
• Spoofed by The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which ends every episode with a segment named "What Did We Learn on the Show Tonight, Craig?" right before the ending credits. Quite often, the segment contains no lesson whatsoever, and on the occasion it does have one, it's never a serious one. "Lessons" have included a Spanish vocabulary word and "The kitten in the ["What Did We Learn on the Show Tonight, Craig?"] graphic is a computer animation, not a video of a real kitten."
  • Craig Ferguson also parodies this trope and combines it with Biting-the-Hand Humor by frequently saying "CBS Cares" after giving some unhelpful advice. He sometimes combines this with a Spoof Aesop.
• Every episode of The Inspectors ends with actor Jessica Lundy, alongside Chief Postal Inspector Guy Cottrell, presenting a summation of the episode's postal-related case, including tips on how to avoid the crime in question.
• A special feature on The Office season 2 DVD had 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 Rachel Maddow Show now closes some segments with Rachel proclaiming "You Know More Now", and playing NBC's "And Now You Know" tune (badly) on a kiddie xylophone, while one of her crew swings a star-and-rainbow on a pole behind her.
• "Read More About it" was a variation of this that aired frequently on CBS during The '80s, most notably following animated specials, Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, and a few movies that were Based on a True Story. The segments started off with a TV turning into the pages of a book. These featured the star from the movie or a character voiceover from the animated specials encouraging viewers to learn more about the show's topic by visiting their local library or bookstore along with a list of recommended books selected by the Library of Congress.
• In The Red Green Show Ranger Gord's animated segments parodied these, being ostensibly nature advice shorts, but with the humor coming from the information's nonsensical nature due to Gord's insanity.
• An episode of the Rotten Tomatoes Show had a Three Word Review that described the movie Knowing as "Half the battle".
• 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.
  • It ends with NBC's logo and "The More You Know."
• The ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager features a clip of Shailene Woodley's character prompting teens and parents to talk about underage sex, because "Teenage pregnancy is 100% avoidable!" This mostly only happens during commercial breaks of the show itself. Sometimes other characters do this, like Francia Raisa's character, Adrian.
• The Son of the Beach show attempted to parody this. Unfortunately, the parodies weren't funny.
• This Is the Life and virtually all of the now-disappeared religious anthology dramas that aired from the early 1950s through late 1980s. After the situation at hand reaches its resolution, an off-screen narrator (or sometimes, on-screen host, invariably a clergyman) will review a given situation, offer appropriate commentary and give a brief Scripture reading to recap the lesson of the day.
• The People's Court does this at the end of each case, with host Harvey Levin giving some practical advice on how to avoid the mess the judge just cleaned up. Note: Since laws vary from state to state, he's not always right. Check your jurisdiction's rules to be sure. Indeed, in the original version, the producers explicitly advised this in a disclaimer shown at the end of each program.
• Police, Camera, Action! started doing from 2007 onwards at the end of the show. Even the episode Ultimate Pursuits had one, although that could be considered a parody of Back to the Future (with the accompanying theme music). It's rare to see such things on a documentary...
• In the early seasons, all episodes of Power Rangers ended with "a message from the Power Rangers" (although this was a misnomer, as Bulk and Skull made at least one segment explaining that they were just pretending to be mean). Though not as frequent as before, Rangers doing a public service announcement or two has made a comeback (apparently, listening to your parents is an 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).
• One brought up in Tokusatsu GaGaGa by one of the heroes of the Show Within a Show where after a police officer mistook Mr. Yakuza of passing to Kano the last collectible toy he got, Emerjason does this trope to deliver a PSA about suspicious actions in the middle of the night... only for the same officer to bonk him in the head.
  Emerjason: If you give someone goods in the middle of the night, beware of needless misunderstandings!
  Police Officer: (After bonking Emerjason's head, which causes his headlights to go off) You're the most suspicious one here!
• The 80s show Voyagers! always had star Meeno Peluce 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 ("It's all in books!").
• One episode of Wizards of Waverly Place with a "Reading Is Cool" Aesop parodied this trope by having an end-credits tag with Selena Gomez (deliberately reading off of cue cards and sounding as stilted as possible) talking about why literacy is awesome. There's even a special guest appearance by Rob Reiner, who wasn't even in the episode.
  Rob Reiner: Oh, hi! I love reading, too!
  (Drinks some milk and does a Spit Take)
  Rob Reiner: ...like I shoulda read the expiration date on this milk!

Music

• The Z-Trip, MURS and Supernatural song "Breakfast Club", being a love letter to Saturday morning cartoons, parodies several of these. "Even in cartoons, Americana can't be tackled, but at least you know now, And Knowing Is Half The Battle", "let a ho be a ho, and that's one to grow on", and such.

Newspaper Comics

• In Sally Forth (Howard), Sally's favourite eighties cartoon Starlee and the Moonbeams, being a Jem pastiche, had them. The one we see has two girls finding a downed power line. One wants to play with it. The other wants to use it to sell speculative bonds to their friends so they can take over the electrical company. Then Starlee shows up to explain selling junk bonds would be the wrong thing to do. "And not doing the wrong thing makes you an interstellar person!" (Presumably the audience — and the girls — are expected to realise that this isn't a binary choice, and playing with the live cable isn't the right thing to do.)
• Sunday Dick Tracy strips open with "Crimestopper's Handbook"; a single panel explaining how you can avoid being a victim of crime, or sometimes describing a notable law enforcement officer.

Radio

• This trope is Older than You Think, as some old-time radio dramas did the same thing. The Shadow, for one, sometimes offered in-character advice on how to properly operate and maintain a coal-burning furnace after an episode was over. This rather shamelessly combined this with Product Placement, as the program's sponsor was a coal company.

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!"
• Mozart's (somewhat) dark comedy Don Giovanni unexpectedly ends a night of ribald hijinks and catchy tunes with a final scene of the antihero (antivillain?) being dragged down to Hell. The rest of the cast then come onto the stage and Break The Fourth Wall, lecturing that what the audience has just seen is the fate that awaits all sinners.
• 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.
• The Matchmaker ends with Mrs. Levi Breaking the Fourth Wall and prompting Barnaby to tell the audience the play's moral.

Video Games

• Many Arcade Games distributed in North America from 1989 through 1999 featured a screen during their attract modes that showed a quote from then-FBI director William S. Sessions proclaiming "winners don't use drugs." Many games from 1992 also featured a similar message from EPA administrator William K. Reilly telling players "Recycle It, Don't Trash It!"
• Parodied in passing conversation in City of Heroes, where a Resistance Informant ventures the opinion that Knowing is overrated in terms of battle.
• Mother 3 has a few signs in certain locations that provide the player with real-world information based on the context, such as about certain types of frog that can survive in desert climates, or why mole tunnels can be so long and complex (the latter even encouraging the player to take time out to go watch moles in action some day).
• Need for Speed: Underground: One of the intro videos for Underground 2 is from Brooke Burke (voice actor for Rachel Teller), saying that the racing is fun, but should only be done in the streets of Underground. The player should drive safely and responsibly, wear a seatbelt and obey the laws of the road.
• When drinking in Catherine, a disembodied voice will interrupt you to tell you about some random trivia about the drink you chose.

Web Animation

• Duke finally explains what the other half of the battle is.
• Parodied by LegendaryFrog, who had a transforming toaster warn Kerrigan about the dangers of electric shock. LegendaryFrog also gave us "The Matrix Still Has You," in which inadvertent phasing by The Twins leads to a car accident, and Neo gives us a lecture on seatbelts.
• 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 Important Rap Song, where Crack Stuntman (voice of Gunhaver on the Cheat Commandos) does a corny rap song about not playing with too many (some are alright, then?) knives (and spring break, for some reason).
• In a Sonic Shorts Collaboration, one of the 'episodes' had this to parody the morals that used to be at the end of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons, with an Aesop about Internet plagiarism.
  Tails: Now I know!
  Sonic: And knowing is half the battle!
  Chorus: G I JOOOOOE!
• Parodied in a Transformers short on Newgrounds too:
  Optimus: So remember kids, always look both ways before brushing your teeth!
  Kid 1: Thanks Optimus! Now we know!
  Optimus: And knowing is half the battle!
  Kid 2: So what's the other half?
  Optimus: Huh?
  Kid 2: What's the other half of the battle?
  Optimus: Hmmm... never really thought about that before. Let me answer that question... with MERCHANDISE! (merchandise rains down)
  Kids: YAY!
• Joel and Phil appear together in a parody of one in this Bonus Stage episode. While Phil delivers a message about Bonus Stage not encouraging illegal downloading, Joel delivers the opposite message, explicitly telling the viewers to "steal".
• Camp Camp parodies this at the end of "A Camp Camp Christmas or Whatever", with the characters delivering a Green Aesop concerning climate change. Doubles as a Brick Joke to earlier in the episode, where Gwen theorizes that to be the reason it was snowing in the middle of summer.
  Max: So if you or someone you know is still an avid climate change denier... literally, what the FUCK is wrong with you? You don't even have to go to a library. Just Google "evidence supporting climate change" and learn something for Christ's sake! Oh, and vaccine your kids while you're at it. Fucking morons.
  (everyone sans Nikki glares at the camera)
• The Misadventures of R2 and Miku, which is normally a darkly humorous series, has one atypically serious episode where Miku crosses a line and is left to face her own faults in order to make amends with her friend R2. Despite the episode proper not explicitly touching the subject, it ends with a completely serious PSA about suicide (which is cemented in the description for the video), urging viewers to donate to non-profits dedicated to helping those with suicidal thoughts.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja concludes every chapter with one of these.
• Sam & Fuzzy parodied the good touch/bad touch "Sonic Sez" in this strip.
• Used in this Brawl in the Family strip.
• The Dragon Queen gives one on the proper way to pick up a transexual.
• In El Goonish Shive, Dan has referenced this in the commentary of a couple of strips.
• For some reason, Sonichu issue 10 has a message not to let your kids play M-rated games.
• Each strip of Megamanspritecomic has one tagged at the end, vaguely relating to the strip.

Web Original

Chorus: "UWE BOLL!!"

• 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 NBC's TMYK logo for their section, "THE MOAR YOU KNOW."
• Full Metal Panic Abridged parodies this in the first episode, after warning its viewers about the dangers of creating an abridged series!
• Nash'' always ends his What the Fuck Is Wrong with You? segment by asking 'What did we learn tonight?' Of course, what we learned is always the same: that people are insane, especially in Florida.
• Manatee Girl: The Movie: Parodied and lampshaded in the "Baby Manatee Says" segment. The entire video has an underlying message of a Green Aesop about protecting manatees. The message we're presented with at the end is, to the Snarky Non-Human Sidekick's irritation, "don't lick electrical sockets".
• A few of Thomas Sanders' Vines parody NBC's "The More You Know" videos.
  Your crush not texting you back? Well, keep at it! The more texts and voicemails she receives, the more flattered she'll be! *cue graphic*
• Parodied in this Mortal Kombat inspired clip, where Jade gives a Spoof Aesop.
• This is incorporated into the gameplay of Tropers: The Series, with each episode ending with a character stating what the episode's Aesop was (though it sometimes gets ridiculous).
• A recurring parody called "Made Ya Think" appears at the end of every episode of Ukinojoe's "Great: The Show." This segment follows a satirically formulaic pattern, with every single one starting with text and speech saying "And now, a word" followed by the main host, Bella Caromella, giving an inconsequential piece of advice (e.g. "Did you ever notice that brownies are just one BIG brownie?"), finger guns at the camera and says the title catchphrase- "Made ya think!". Alternative, self-parodying versions, including "Made Ya Sick" and "Made Ya Pregnant", also occasionally appear in certain episodes as well.
• Parodied in Mahou Profile: A History of Magical Girls: In the Mahou Tsukai Chappy episode, after pointing out that four episodes from the same director all feature a Corrupt Corporate Executive as the antagonist, ErynCerise parodies the DiC Entertainment Sailor Moon dub's "Sailor Says" segment:
  Remember, kids, if you see a rich person or corporation hurting your community, then get together with all your friends and seize the means of production for the good of the people! Chappy the Witch says!

Western Animation

• Anything by Filmation, including:
  • 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!"
  • The New Adventures of Zorro (the 1981 version) featured the title character giving an epilogue each episode about Spanish-American history (focused on California).
  • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) plus its Spin-Off She-Ra: Princess of Power. Word of God is that this was to shut up Moral Guardians who might complain about the shows' violent content. 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 with 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. The 2002 series did have morals, following in the format of the original series, but they didn't air with the American episodes; only the international releases. However, they do come on the DVD sets for the curious viewer. They also tend to soften the blow by always making it the exact lesson the episode as a whole was meant to teach you, rather than clumsily segueing into "yo, kids — don't smoke." The 2021 series had a similar Mythology Gag where Ork-0 gives a pep talk to Orko the Great about the lesson he learned, with camera work making it look like Ork-0 is addressing the audience at the end.
    • Robot Chicken parodied this in one skit, where He-Man turns to the camera and tells us "Trees are some of our most precious resources!" Skeletor (who had been chopping down Eternia's oldest tree) promptly asks who he's talking to.
  • Filmation's Ghostbusters (the 1986 TV series by Filmation, not the other one)
  • Bravestarr, as with most Filmation shows. Unusually, there is at least one episode where a villain gets to deliver the message, with Outlaw Scuzz talking about how bad smoking is for one's health, and how he wishes he could quit but he's addicted.
  • The Lone Ranger (1980) had he or Tonto give a small note about the history of The Wild West at the end of each episode.
  • The New Adventures of Batman had such segments at the end of every episode titled "Bat Message", which in addition to providing a moral relevant to the episode would also frequently have Bat-Mite subjected to comical misfortune.
• Bravestarr's counterpart Space Western Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs used it, mostly in the title character's closing voice over.
• The Centsables about six Animal Superheroes, includes short inserts about economics and finance during Act Breaks.
• Super Friends - safety tips, magic tricks, science projects, you name it. Probably set the tone for all the others.
• Superman: The Animated Series once put this trope to an interesting use for the opening of one of its episodes: it starts with a setup that might have come out of one of these PSAs from an old Silver Age animated series with Superman flying in to rescue a kid whose friends have goaded him into endangering himself and giving the kids a little lecture on not giving in to peer pressure before flying away. Our first hint that something's out of place is that, right after he leaves, one of the less admiring kids mocks him for being such a stiff. Sure enough, it turns out this is actually the first appearance of Bizarro, an imperfect clone Lex Luthor made using a bit of Superman's blood. The reason he comes off sounding so pompous is that he thinks he's Superman and is trying too hard to do what he thinks Superman typically does. In case we missed the hint, his next good deed for the day is rescuing Clark Kent and Lois Lane from a car crash, thereby alerting Superman to this odd twist of events as well.
• Batman: The Animated Series did a very Batman way of teaching kids not to be reckless, by having him scold two kids for playing chicken on train, saying, "You play chicken long enough, you fry."
• Several PSA segments were prepared for The 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 (and the scripts from the G.I. Joe PSAs almost verbatim), 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.
  • Parodied in an episode of Robot Chicken where Optimus Prime talks about prostate cancer.
• 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".
• Played completely straight in M.A.S.K., where every episode ends with a tag scene with a moral. Occasionally these are related to the events or setting of the episode, mostly they're completely random segments, often involving T-Bob doing something stupid and dangerous with dire consequences (two separate segments involve him diving into water that turns out to be shallow). They get even weirder in the second season, often featuring characters who don't appear anywhere else in the episode and involving members of terrorist group VENOM relaxing in a suburban sitting room before delivering a lecture on what to do in an earthquake. They were cut from many if not all UK broadcasts and VHS releases.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers — Either the whole show, or just the "Planeteer Alert" at the end, depending on how cynical you are.
• Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats — Always about pet care or pet safety.
• Hanna-Barbera's Pound Puppies had a "Pet Care Corner" where viewers were given hints on how to take care of their pets. The segment was dropped in the second season.
• 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."
  • At the end of the Power Rangers parody "Super Strong Warner Siblings" Yakko tells the audience playing with giant bugs isn't cool.
• VeggieTales does this routinely. Sing along if you know it.
  And so what we have learned applies to our lives today,
  And God has a lot to say in his book.
  You see we know that God's word is for everyone,
  And now that our song is done we'll take a look!
  • Granted, the entire point of the episode is to teach the lesson that's recapped at the end, so it's more of a natural flow. Plus, it helps the younger kids with short attention spans remember why they were watching the story in the first place.
• 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 premier, 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.
• 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 Says segment every episode, where Sonic explained some sort of lesson (often safety related) to the viewers.
  • In one such segment, Sonic 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 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.
  • These segments were referenced in Wreck-It Ralph. In the movie, they had Sonic say "Remember, if you die outside your own game, you can't regenerate!" on a monitor.
  • There's also the episode of OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes guest-starring Sonic, which straight-up makes their own Sonic Sez segment after KO remembers he forgot to learn a valuable lesson. Of course, since this was a parody, the segment used a Spoof Aesop.
• The Simpsons:
  • Played with 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 Star", 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, there's 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.
  • And then there was the episode where *NSYNC (of all people) delivered one about how mocking the U.S. Navy was wrong - although the characters had just spent the episode doing exactly that.
  • "Kids, always recycle. TO THE EXTREEEEEEEME!"
• Spoofed a couple of times in Kim Possible:
  • In "Grande Size Me", 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... The fact that the moral Ron delivers is a Space Whale Aesop further baffles them. The whole episode was essentially a parody of these. The animators were informed that they absolutely had to do an Aesop-heavy episode about kids' health, so they complied, but tried to make it as deliberately blatant and thus hilarious as possible.
  • At the end of "Return to Wannaweep", Ron starts by suggesting that they learned that suspicion and paranoia are bad, except that this time his suspicion of Gill was what saved the day. He then suggests that the real moral is that if Kim and Bonnie had cooperated rather than sniping at each other, Middleton High could have won the cheerleading competition. Finally, the three of them decide that the real lesson is "Cheer camp stinks".
• One of Drawn Together's many running gags.
• 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.
• ThunderCats 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 ThunderCats practically spells out the moral in a piece of dialogue in a very blatant way, such as one time when Tigra makes a small speech about how "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).
• Freakazoid!: In the season one finale, “The Wrath of Gutierrez”, Freakazoid and Cosgrove used a segment like this telling people about the benefits of Hospitals and how they help heal you. Cosgrove even says that the food’s mighty fine.
• Garfield and Friends:
  • In the U.S. Acres segment, “Once Upon A Time Warp”, after Roy gives Wade his money back, Orson closes out the segment similar to a PSA, with Wade finishing it.
    Orson: As you can see, Kids, an important lesson has been learned today.
    Wade: Yeah! If you don’t repay the money you owe, a dinosaur might step on you.
  • In the season 4 segment, "Learning Lessons," the network decides to make Garfield's show more educational. As a result, the Buddy Bears interrupt the cartoon giving everyone educational and history lessons (much to Garfield's dismay).
• 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, usually by Bluegrass. 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 breathable air and Earth-normal gravity throughout the show proper. In fact everything about that universe was divorced from our own laws of physics. This was a world where banging a tuning fork in space created wind and ice.
• Centurions — Same as above, except lecture style. Even Big Bad Doc Terror got to do two; one about "machines" (episode 14) and other about "computers".
• 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 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.^note When the series was shown in the UK, they were cut from BBC1's screenings but left intact on Nickelodeon.
• Mister T (the animated series starring Mr. T) puts both the moral in the action story—and then reminds the moral of the story in the tag. Not that the show was intended to bore kids to death. Mr. T spins crocodiles over his head. And punches sharks.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy parodies this in one episode. Irwin steals Grim's scythe and causes a lot of chaos with it. From their beaten up positions, two characters say to the audience "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.
• 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.
• The football-themed cartoon Hurricanes:
  • 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" but also that rules are rules.
  • Amanda Carey (a.k.a. the Token Girl) is usually the one to explain the episode's lesson (there's at least one lesson for each episode). One notable exception was "Football Fugitives" where it was justified by the fact she wasn't involved in the episode's main plot. Surprisingly enough, she did explain the moral of an episode where she made no appearance at all other than the All Just a Dream episode "The Relegator". Napper explained the moral of another episode where it was left ambiguous if he dreamt the whole thing or not.
• Family Guy:
  • The episode "The Son Also Draws", (featuring a Native American Casino) ends with the family stereotyping certain nationalities and people. Immediately, they explain why the stereotype is incorrect, with "The More You Know" logo showing up above them. When it is Peter's turn:
    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!
  • In "North by North Quahog", Chris is caught with liquor in the boy's bathroom and Flint, voiced by his original actor, Bill Ratner, 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 "Hi, I’m Peter Grifin. You know we’ve had a lot of laughs tonight, but I’ll tell you what’s not funny: killing strippers. Strippers are people too, naked people who may be willing to pleasure you for a price you negotiate later behind a curtain in the VIP room. Besides, there’s no need to kill them ‘cause most of them are already dead inside."
  • And then of course, there's Gary The No-Trash Cougar, who holds children at gunpoint for littering.
  • Parodied via G.I. Jose. The Mexican-like version of G.I. Joe would tell kids to not do crazy stuff that G.I. Joe wouldn't talk about (no, not drugs) and would offer children to take some stuff out of his trinket. It even has a (Mexican) chorus!
    G.I. JOSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
• Growing Up Creepie, about a gothy girl raised by creepie-crawlies, included short inserts with educational insect facts.
• The Popeye and Olive Show had various safety messages, usually featuring Popeye's identical quintuplet nephews, between the shorts. Many of them had a seedy fellow named "Mr. Stranger" who represented the fear of criminals (he'd often be driven away by Popeye or by falling victim to whatever he was encouraging).
  • One example:
    Popeye: Did you boys wash your hands?
    Nephews: No, but they're clean.
  • Then Popeye goes on to explain how millions of tiny germs, too small to be seen, are on their hands, so they need to wash them. (Popeye just happens to be examining his stamp collection at the time, giving him a magnifying glass within reach.)
• King Arthur & the Knights of Justice: "You need to (insert Aesop here) to be a knight of justice".
• Liberty's Kids, a public-broadcasting educational series set during the American Revolution, initially included pieces of bogus news, reported by Benjamin Franklin, in the middle of each program. These interludes, intended to teach (very) young viewers about life in the 18th century, were cut from non-PBS broadcasts to make room for commercial breaks. The format was an Actor Allusion, as Franklin was voiced by Walter Cronkite.
• Spoofed in the ending of the Duck Dodgers episode: "The Fudd":
  Duck Dodgers: That's right kids. Stay in school, don't sass your elders and always color within the lines. Because if you're good and lucky, you'll grow up to be just like me.
• Viewers of Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic were taught a magic trick at the end of the episode by the real Princess Tenko, along with an occasional "The magic is in you!" message.
• King of the Hill often acknowledged social issues, but these were only used a couple of times. One was encouraging viewers to vote, another was about working to get Antonio López de Santa Anna's leg returned to Mexico. In the episode, "Keeping Up With Our Joneses" (where the entire family, sans Luanne, gets addicted to cigarettes), Boomhauer gave a lecture on the effects of smoking on your lungs, comparing a dirty air filter to a clean one, as well as bits and pieces of the negative health effects and reasons for smoking, such as oral gratification, before being led away by a random woman, during the end credits. Of course, it being Boomhauer, the lecture was largely incomprehensible.
• Dexter's Laboratory has an endcap showing Dexter reminding DeeDee not to run with scissors, then addresses the audience by reminding all that running with sharp objects is dangerous...unless you have scissors-proof running equipment. Another features DeeDee teaching Dexter how to make mini-popsicles using an ice tray and fruit juice.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic,
  • In The New '10s, you might as well replace "And Knowing is Half the Battle" with "Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle".
  • This takes the form of the letters that Twilight Sparkle writes to her mentor Princess Celestia at the end of every episode. Unlike others, this is implemented into the plot instead of a random PSA disconnected to the events of the episode; Twilight is officially tasked by Celestia with studying The Power of Friendship and reports her findings in the form of Aesops.
  • In Part 2 of "The Return of Harmony", these letters (sent back by Celestia) gave her the resolve she needed to rescue her friends, power up the Elements of Harmony, and defeat Discord when all hope seemed lost. Even more impressive, she turns the aesop of that episode into an epic "No More Holding Back" Speech against him.
  • Interestingly, season 1 of My Little Pony has the EI rating, while season 2 does not. The production team apparently decided this change of rules was awesome, and thus made "Lesson Zero": Twilight is unable to learn a new lesson about friendship and goes nuts with fear. At the end of the episode, Princess Celestia tells Twilight she only has to write letters when she feels she has learned something, effectively freeing this from being mandatory and expanded the responsibility to include the others element bearers. Since then a "Twilight writes a letter" scene has been rare but the general form remains more or less constant. This also expands the "Twilight Sparkle writes a letter" so that other main characters also retell what they learned throughout the episode.
  • This is given a hilarious subversion in one episode, where Applejack writes a letter just to brag that she already knew the Aesop from the start and didn't learn anything.
  • The format has changed as of Season 4, wherein the ponies have now decided that they'll keep diaries to record Aesops instead.
  • Season 5 and beyond have dropped the Aesop-giving scenes at the end of each episode. The episodes still teach morals, but they're no longer explicitly spelled out at the end. This helps underscore Twilight's character growth, too, as it marks the point where she stops being Celestia's student and becomes a leader in her own right.
    • Spoofed in a later episode where the girls decide to publish their diary so others can benefit from the lessons. The book becomes a bestseller...and readers ignore the lessons and instead engage in fandom wars over which pony they like best.
• Spoofed in a Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law episode about heroin—er, tanning creme addiction, with Peanut as Elton John and Reducto as Jennifer Grey.
• Every episode of Rescue Heroes would end with the characters recapping the lessons learned earlier in the episode. These typically were reduced to restating the emergency situation of the episode, telling you how it should be dealt with, and ending with the annoyingly cheesy phrase, "Think like a Rescue Hero. Think safe."
• Occasionally parodied in the Sam & Max Animated Series, in their "Our Bewildering Universe" shorts. A great example is "Chock Full O'Guts", a short as unnecessarily gory as network standards would allow a kid's show to be, in which they claim to be teaching the viewer about the body, but instead play a heart like a bagpipe, throw intestines around and explain that the pancreas's function is to be a paperweight.
• The Nostalgia Critic and The Nostalgia Chick quote this directly in their review of FernGully, complete with "G.I. JOOOOOOEEEEEEE!" at the end, after Chick explains to Critic why the movie is set in Australia.
• Zula Patrol: Every episode ends in a recap of what they (being audience and Protagonists) learned.
• Every I.N.K. Invisible Network of Kids episode ends with the 'Science Club' segment where Cosmo Soper discusses the scientific or historic basis for something that had been the theme of that episode; like amnesia, or chess.
• The Captain Atom episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold begins with one of these. The Captain tells 2 kids to stay away from a downed power line and delivers the egotistical Aesop of "Next time, be a hero, by remembering you're not." The same line is later turned back around on him after the bad guy takes his powers away and he starts getting in the way by trying to be a hero. At the end of the episode, after his temporary loss of powers has apparently shown him that there's more to being a hero than having special powers, an almost-identical PSA starring the same two kids is shown: "You don't have superpowers, and that makes you some of the most fragile and pathetic organisms in the whole universe."
• Parodied at the end of an episode of The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat, in which Felix steps up to deliver a Fantastic Aesop based on the episode's storyline. Instead of being about just saying "no" to The Aggressive Drug Dealer, it's about not ever buying a magic bag from anyone. (And no, it's not supposed to be analogous to not wasting money or something, since Felix then urges to viewer to purchase an edible wig instead.)
• Davey's father in Davey and Goliath got this duty, recapping the lesson of the day by talking with Davey (and sometimes others) about it. Mountain Dew even produced a commercial that parodied this practice (and subverts this trope in the process).
• At the end of each episode of Inspector Gadget, Gadget, Penny and Brain would teach the kids a safety tip (usually at least tangentially related to the episode's story) like "exercise is good for you" or "always wear a seatbelt".
• Parodied relentlessly in Grojband. Once per Episode, Corey will deliver his "Final Thoughts" regarding the events of the episode and their meaning, which is always a nonsensical monologue that sounds insightful only to him, with the other characters usually being left totally baffled by the "lesson" he is trying teach.
• Spoofed in Spliced's recurring "Knowing is Growing" segments, which have the characters deliver PSAs about absurd problems and misconceptions. Important lessons the show has taught through them include: "Don't stick antelopes up your nose", "Gravy isn't a vegetable, it's a fruit", and "Samurai do not make good pets".
• Parodied in an episode of Scaredy Squirrel:
  Scaredy: I think what we've learned today is that rumors can get out of hand.
  Dave: What? We didn't learn that! The Lady Thugs were just as bad as the rumors said!
  Scaredy: Read the script!
• The hour-long version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) on CBS featured "Turtle Tips" segments that would be featured in between the first and second episode played, featuring environmental messages like "make sure to recycle" and "keep our oceans clean."
• The Plastic Man Adventure Hour, had kids' consumer advice such as the wisdom of shopping around or going to the library for a book instead of buying it.
• The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin had "Protect Yourself", which had Teddy talking with live action kids about how to deal with strangers.
• The Disney Junior short series Nina Needs to Go! always ends with Nina telling the audience "That will never happen again, because now I know-don't wait to go!"
• Every episode of Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos ended with Chuck Norris narrating a moral lesson for the audience to learn.
• Parodied in the Wander over Yonder episode "The Cartoon", which featured a Filmation-style cartoon about Lord Hater. After Cartoon Wander and Cartoon Sylvia realize there's nothing to be learned by following Hater's example, they segue into a lesson in bicycle safety.
• Ready Jet Go!: Sometimes, the Amy Mainzer segments reiterate what was taught in the episode. For example, "Total Eclipse of the Sunspot" taught viewers about solar eclipses. Guess what the Amy Mainzer segment that came after that episode talked about?
• Spoofed in the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Rinse & Spit" with a foot named Gordon talking about oral hygiene.
• Steven Universe:
  • The Dove Self-Esteem Project x Steven Universe shorts during Cartoon Network commercial breaks feature the Steven Universe characters discussing issues such as bullying and body image under the rubric of the Dove Self-Esteem Project.
  • Parodied with Steven and Garnet's fusion, Sunstone. Resembling a '90s Mascot with Attitude, they deliver advice directly to the audience, to the confusion of every other character. Steven Universe: Future shows they use this skill to basically become a life coach.
• Unikitty! did this at the end of an episode in which the cast becomes enamored with using an Awesome, but Impractical mecha to protect the city. They eventually realize that they've caused much more harm than good and decide to destroy the Mecha to free themselves from the inside of it as well as stop destroying the city. Nothing works until Richard, who acts as the Mecha's appendix, presses the self-destruct button. The episode ends with Hawkodile and Dr.Fox explaining that despite the fact they played a ruptured appendix for laughs in the episode, it is a very serious condition for which the viewer should seek immediate medical attention should they feel as though they were suffering from it.
• Redwall had these sort of segments broadcast in-between episodes during it's PBS Kids run. Often they involved Brian Jacques talking about something like how he came up with one of the characters or a group of kids engaging in a re-enactment of a medieval scenario.
• Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat had the "What About You?" segments, wherein Sagwa and Fu-Fu explained Chinese culture and elements of other cultures to the audience.
• Hurricanes had Amanda Carey explaining the moral of the week to the audience at the end of each episode.
• Earthworm Jim:
  • Jim informs us of the hazards of drinking too much coffee in the episode, “Hyper PSY-Crow".
  • In the cold opening of the episode, "Peanut of the Apes," after Peter runs into a wall, Jim explains to us what really happens if that really happened, and to not do what the latter did.
  Jim: Sure it looks cool when people run into a wall in a cartoon, but Peter has just demonstrated what would happen in real life. So remember, Kids: Just say no to running into walls. It may not be the cool thing, but it's the smart thing.
• Every episode of Action Man (1995) ends with a live-action segment of Action Man giving a life lesson to the viewer, such as telling them not to watch too much television and to be respectful towards people with disabilities.
• The Littles: "A Little Drunk" ends with one of these after Dinky drives drunk and thinks he killed Grandpa Little in the episode. The Littles write a contract that kids could make for their parents or guardians to sign promising not to drink and drive, and for kids to not ride with suspected drunk drivers.
• In Seasons 22-24 of Thomas & Friends, aka the Big World! Big Adventures! era, Thomas states the moral of the story at the end of every episode, usually with a Call-Back to a previous episode with a similar theme.
• At the end of each episode of Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum, the trio address the viewers at home and repeat the moral of the story.
• One episode of The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper had the ghosts listing a variety of high-level vocabulary words that came up in the episode. Then they admit that they don't actually know what the words mean, just that they are words, and that they hope the government was fooled into thinking that the show was educational.
• Dinosaur Train: Dr. Scott's mid-episode segments, explaining various scientific facts about the dinosaurs featured:
  "Hi, I'm Dr. Scott, the paleontologist. Do you remember what type of dinosaur Buddy is?"
• Doug: "Doug's Chubby Buddy," a A Very Special Episode of the Disney retool of the show, saw Patti beginning to develop an eating disorder and exercise addiction. In the initial airing, the episode ended with a voiceover from Constance Shulman, Patti's actress, encouraging kids and teens to reach out to health hotlines (which appeared on the screen) if they or anyone they knew seemed to be suffering from the same problems.

Real Life

• Frequently applied by teachers. Sometimes, the teacher will wrap up the school day by recapping a lesson from the day, or give information that could affect the students the next day (e.g., "Don't forget the permission slips for the field trips. If they're not signed, you don't get to go to the zoo.").
• Many small-town newspapers (including The Daily Bread) still have columns where local clergymen — usually on a rotating basis — will provide insight on issues affecting Christians, or perhaps the community at large, along with the requisite Scripture.
• Taking this trope literally, reliable intelligence and clear communication has been a make-or-break factor in many a military campaign.

---

You know, we've had a lot of fun today. But you know what's not fun? Red Links. G'night!

---