• In the early 1990s, many MegaCorps would send, ostensibly out of the goodness of their hearts, free "educational kits' including lesson plans, worksheets, and other materials to elementary school teachers. In truth, they were really unsubtle advertisements for the company's products. These were often heartwarmingly/hilariously/heartbreakingly misguided. One of the most infamous such lesson plans doubles as a Broken Aesop: "Let's learn good nutrition with Ronald McDonald and friends!" Um...
  • Homestar Runner satirized this with typical aplomb in Commandos In the Classroom.
• Another example was the D.A.R.E. group in the late 1980s that tried to encourage kids to not do drugs and in their educational kits they included a pencil with the slogan "Too Cool To Do Drugs". Unfortunately, because they set their slogan not to start at the eraser end but at the lead end of the pencil, as it was sharpened the slogan devolved on the pencil from the original message, down to "Cool To Do Drugs", to simply "Do Drugs".
  • A similar incident happened on a smaller scale for some rubber wristbands for red ribbon week. The slogan on the wristbands: I've got BETTER things to DO than DRUGS. Observant students quickly noticed the message in all caps. Despite the mistakes (and news coverage) the exact same design is still in production.
• Then there's this Digital Piracy Is Evil ad from Warner Bros. using a scene from Casablanca. Only trouble is anyone who has seen the movie knows Rick is actually angry at Ilsa for resisting the Nazis! So WB is comparing themselves to... what?
  • While not as uncomfortable in terms of subtext, the one where the Wizard Of OZ yells at Dorothy and company for, er, pirating media is pretty terrible too.
• "Don't Drown Your Food" is a PSA about not overloading your foods with high-calorie condiments, but the message is so vague that it makes it seem as if you shouldn't put any condiments on them at all.

• The English dub of Sailor Moon added eye-crossingly stupid "Sailor Says" portions to the first season; to be "educational", DiC tried to add an Aesop to the end of the show no matter how it fit, or didn't. A favorite was "Queen Beryl did a bad thing when she destroyed the Moon Kingdom and you will destroy Earth too if you pollute!" Drugs Are Bad was a frequent one, even though the plots had nothing to do with that.
  • Even more hilarious when the original version clearly gave them an aesop to work with...and they went with something else entirely. One episode was about being true to yourself, and people will like you. The Sailor Says segment was about... not giving into peer pressure by doing drugs and other bad stuff.

• Parodied in The Doom Comic with a Green Aesop about safe disposal of radioactive waste, only for him to stop halfway through to notice something worse: his BIG GUN is out of bullets! For the record, the story is entirely about the marine's hunt for his beloved BFG. Yeah.
• Chick Tracts are (in)famous for their inability to convey a message.
• Back in the late 1980s when AIDS was still the new pandemic, Archie comics sometimes included a full-page PSA featuring Principal Weatherbee telling the students: "Your best defense against AIDS is education" but didn't say anything else. So, where is this education we're supposed to get?
  • Sorry, but you'll have to learn how to get educated!
• In the 80s there was an X-Men one-shot called Heroes for Hope in which the X-Men take on famine in Africa... which, as everyone knows, is caused by an ancient demon that feeds on human misery. Oh well, at least Marvel gave the proceeds of the comic to charity.
  • The demon in question was established to be merely a consequence of the misery in the area, which was caused by far more complex causes... but it was very, very easy for the casual reader to get the above impression.
  • In retrospect, Mikhail Rasputin's quasi-introduction falls into this category by Fridge Logic— Peter Corbeau compares his death to the real-life Apollo 1 fire... except that it was later revealed that Mikhail hadn't actually died, but had been sent to another dimension, gone insane, and come back as a supervillain. Addressing real-life disasters is hard in a comic that's so big on bringing people Back from the Dead.
• Serenity (not that one) - it was supposed to be a story of bad girl finding about the wonders of God's love and becoming better person in the process. The way it was handled makes most people see it as depressing story about lonely girl getting subjected to emotional harassment and manipulation by bunch of Christian zealots, until she turns into brainwashed drone, while all she wanted was to have friends.

• Cars 2 had a pretty bad aesop. So Tow Mater totally embarrasses the snot out of Lightning McQueen by acting like a dumb hick, and the moral they were trying to deliver is "Accept your friends as they are". The moral that lots of people came away with is "Don't ever bother to try to better yourself, not even temporarily. Don't ever act according to your environment. Dirty and uncultured is the way to go."
• Song Of The South is mostly infamous for its Values Dissonance, but even outside this the Br'er Rabbit segments have a couple of morals that can come across as extremely weird:
  • The first segment has Br'er Rabbit leaving his home in the briar patch, because the old place has brought him "nothin' but trouble." Then, he is caught and almost eaten by Br'er Fox, but manages to escape and returns home to the briar patch. The moral, of course, is that you can't run away from trouble because there's no such thing as a place where no trouble exists — but the way things are played out, it comes across more like "it's wrong to want a better life for yourself" and "if you go out in the world and run into any kind of trouble, give up and go back home immediately."
• The Incredibles breaks a number of aesops, including the Family Unfriendly Aesops "extraordinary people shouldn't be held to ordinary standards," and "artificially trying to make people extraordinary isn't always as good as it sounds." (In the film it's stated as "When everyone is super, no one will be")
  • The first one breaks because of genre limitations: few, if any superhero stories have realistically tried to answer the question "who is responsible if Superman uses your car to beat some criminal into submission, or breaks your back while preventing a disaster?" While it's popular to say that all lawsuits are frivolous, sometimes malpractice does in fact happen, in any industry, and the people responsible do need to be held to account. The idea that regular people would somehow, at this one point in time, sue superheroes out of business out of greed is idiotic: more than likely some protocol or insurance system would have been developed to ensure that most people aren't left out in the cold when Mr. Incredible or whoever else has to smash up a few windows to catch a crook.
  • The second one breaks because Syndrome is made so ridiculously evil that any merit his idea had is lost. Many of society's greatest achievements have come when everyone was given "extraordinary" power: people today can move more mass across greater distances than a team of horses, and compute more data and produce more written output sitting at their desks at home than the greatest minds and publishers of the 19th century: this has not turned everyone into a supervillain, nor has it prevented extraordinary people from being any less extraordinary: if anything, it has only enabled more people to be truly extraordinary.

• The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was an attempt to turn a line of trading cards — which were deliberately intended to be violent and thoroughly disgusting — into an Aesop about appreciating those who look different. It worked out about as well as you'd expect throwing An Aesop into a film based on Garbage Pail Kids would be. Bonus points for its being a Broken Aesop: the titular characters are just as ugly on the inside (some have even interpreted the Kids as being incarnations of the Seven Deadly Sins) — but hey, they sure sang a catchy song about teamwork, right?
  • While robbing a shop!
• Reefer Madness: The moral was (at one point) meant to be "marijuana is evil", but...
• Free Willy: The whole notion of freeing an animal who was forcefully taken out of his environment and separated from his family to live a life in captivity doesn't exactly work out too well when one remembers that this film could only have been made possible by using an animal who actually was forcefully taken out of his environment and forced to live a life in captivity.
  • An attempt was made to avert this by actually freeing Keiko, the whale who played Willy, but Reality Ensued and Keiko kept trying to associate with humans, eventually catching pneumonia and beaching herself.

• Enjoy this list of awkward Berenstain Bears books. Not all of them have Clueless Aesops, but remember, these books tend to be written for very young children.
  • Why did they even need a book about Mama being pregnant? They already had the one in which Sister was born.
  • Papa Bear is racist?! Argh!
• This Cracked.com list of 'Great Books for Traumatizing Children' appears to be mostly made up of Clueless Aesops. They range from anvilicious (Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs) to outright fucked up (Alfies Home) to Nazi propaganda (The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pinscher).
  • Although, the last one does get its intended message across. It's just that the message is horrible.
• On the surface, Twilight is a safe, clean, nonviolent fantasy serving as a cautionary tale about the dangers of premarital sex. Bella is certainly tempted, but Edward does the good Christian thing and pressures her into getting married first. This is all well and good, except it's coming from the same story that portrays an emotionally abusive ephebophile stalker as romantic. In the real world, teenage romances do not last forever, and marriage is the last thing that random charming attractive guy will pressure unsuspecting women into. The lesson is outright contradicted in the final installment, when the pregnancy nearly proves fatal. Marriage does not protect from STDs, nor does it physically or emotionally prepare one for pregnancy. And the first time they actually sleep together after their wedding, it's a violent event that leaves Bella injured and the bed destroyed. The Aesop here seems to be less, "Wait until marriage" and more, "Don't have sex ever."
  • Many readers draw religious parallels and symbolism from the books, particularly when considering that Meyer is a Mormon. Meyer claims that she didn't intend the books to be influenced by her religion or promote her beliefs, but admits that her values do shape her writing. Regardless of intent, many readers feel the result is clueless aesops.
  • On a related note to the Breaking Dawn pregnancy, Twilight is simply not the kind of series that should be having a debate about abortion. Also, the pro-life/pro-choice thing is slightly irrelevant when it's clear that the baby is most assuredly killing the mother, and she may or may not survive to give birth (in other words, exactly the kind of exception most pro-life advocates are willing to make when it comes to their stance on abortion). The fact that it's a Creepy Half-Human Hybrid that makes Bella thirst for blood during the pregnancy only makes things worse- Bella may well be giving birth to the Anti Christ (a few characters even think she literally is).
  • The series also glosses over the difficulties of raising a child by having Renesmee never cry and grow into adulthood abnormally fast. It's easy to avoid abortion in a world where your baby is immortal and will be able to take care of herself after only a couple of years.
• Another religious book- I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The intended message was: "Christians should not forget their spirituality - including, but not limited to, serving others - no matter how much they wish for romance, marriage, and sex". The message that actually came across to most readers was "Do volunteer work as a substitute for a romantic relationship". Needless to say, many readers were disappointed and angered.
  • It doesn't help that the lesson stuck so well that churches who pushed this book ended up full of lonely 30-year-old singles with no idea how to court the opposite gender.

• Perhaps the best example: The barely remembered (or perhaps nicely repressed) Disney Channel Special Presentation, Winnie the Pooh: Too Smart for Strangers. Seeing the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood dole out advice to the kiddies on how to avoid being kidnapped and molested is stunningly fucked up in itself. If there is a list of characters who should never explain — nor even be aware of — child abuse, Pooh is easily at the top. But apparently, that wasn't bizarre enough for The Disney Channel; instead of using the animated characters, they chose to use the unspeakably terrifying costumed characters from the show Welcome To Pooh Corner. The whole thing seems coldly designed to scar a child's mind.
  • Not only that, but the lesson this special tries to get across also becomes twisted and warped: Taken at face value, this is 40 minutes of Winnie the Pooh and friends telling children to be suspicious and paranoid of everyone they don't know, to act rudely to strangers, and to even flat-out lie to adults. It's all to keep children safe, and the advice itself was not much more horrible than most extended anti-stranger PSAs of the era (Welcome To Pooh Corner was a program of The Eighties). But coming out of Pooh and Piglet's mouths...
  • Furthermore, some of the tips can lead to more harm than good. One for example is to go to your neighbor's house if you receive a threatening call. All well and good, but what if the neighbor is the one who made the call to begin with? For that matter, most child kidnappings are not committed by strangers.
  • Oh, and Pooh? Not too smart for anything, ever. This makes the proceedings even less reassuring for kids.
• The Hannah Montana episode about Oliver having diabetes is a re-edited version. The original episode portrayed diabetes in a downright dangerous and inaccurate way. Bonus points for jokes about fainting diabetics! Whee!
  • To clear things up, "No Sugar, Sugar" (the original) made it seem like any amount of sugar is bad for a diabetic. "Uptight (Oliver's Alright)" (the re-edited version) presents more accurate information about the condition, in that diabetics (especially type 1) need sugar every once in a while to keep their blood sugar levels even.
• A Canadian children's program once tried to tackle the serious subject of alcoholism and Intermittent Explosive Disorder. That show was Todays Special... And for maximum childhood destroying effect, the IED-prone alcoholic was played by Gerry Parkes, better known as none other than kindly old Doc from Fraggle Rock!
• Kids Incorporated had an anti-drugs episode, an episode about homelessness, an episode about child abuse, and a surprisingly poignant episode about Kid's estranged older brother. Oh, and they each contained the usual happy covers of popular songs and Imagine Spots and were each aired in the middle of a week's worth of otherwise completely off-the-wall fantasy episodes with magic robots and such.
• The Mork and Mindy episode with Mr. Bickley's blind son seems to have multiple Aesops: accept handicapped people, learn to see life in a new way, don't abandon your son... But it's not well-handled because this is a show about a cloudcuckoolander alien who says the darnedest things. Just to give an example of how poorly executed this episode was, they used the "Does your guide dog get scared when you're skydiving?" joke.
  • "Hold That Mork"'s Aesop was about gender equality. Nothing wrong with that, but it was delivered through the plot of Mork joining The Denver Broncos cheerleaders. Even if the message is good, let's face it, the whole point of the episode was really about providing fanservice for the both the male viewers and, apparently, Robin Williams fangirls with a cross-dressing fetish.
  • The only episode that tops that one in the "Fanservice with tacked-on Aesop" category is the two-part "Mork vs. The Necrotons". In a nutshell, Mork gets captured by the titular aliens, whose leader is played by Raquel Welch. Innuendo, both visual and spoken abounds, so much that even Mr. Get-shit-past-the-radar himself later on said that it made him uncomfortable. And the message at the end was... The Power of Friendship. Yeah.
• Many Public Service Announcements with an anti-drug message were so poorly executed that they practically made a joke of their own message. The point is especially lost because most of them do not seem to portray any other consequences of doing drugs.
  • One of the weirdest ones by far is "If you take pot, your girlfriend will leave you for a Space alien".
  • Pee-Wee Herman gives a serious (yet somehow hilarious) message about not doing crack. We all know the numerous things wrong with that PSA, right?
  "This... is crack."
  • The anti-drug PSA where the girl's dog talks to her and asks her to stop smoking pot. Honey, if your dog is talking to you, pot is the least of your problems. At least he's trying to help.
    • Arguably, the moral is "if you're taking so many drugs that you hallucinate that your dog is warning you off, you'd better rethink things".
  • An early "Above the Influence" add showed two teenaged boys smoking pot in the office of the father of one of the boys. One of them noticed a gun on the desk and picked it up absently. When his friend asked "is it loaded?" he said it wasn't and fired, presumably killing his friend. The intended message was probably something like "marijuana will impair your judgement in life threatening ways." But the danger came off as so contrived that message could easily be "don't leave a loaded gun with the safety off on top of the desk in your unlocked office when your thirteen-year-old son is in the house."
  • There was another odd set of anti-drug ads where a girl high on weed is shown (through icky special effects) to have melted into the couch. Doug Benson has a terrific deconstruction of how clueless this ad was in Super High Me: if your reaction to an anti-drug PSA is "Whatever they were smoking, I want some", it has failed.
• The Saved by the Bell episode about Jessie's caffeine pill addiction, legendary for its narm. Indeed, "I'm so excited... I'm so scared!" became a huge Memetic Mutation.
  • Also the episode that dealt with the dangers of drinking-and-driving. Now, this subject unfortunately isn't that far removed from real-life high schools (not that Bayside could be considered entirely realisitc), but the presentation is questionable. Bottom line, Zack and friends get found out because they keep telling different cover stories and get left with a lot of holes to plug. It's as if the intended lesson was "If you're going to lie, keep your story straight so you don't get caught."
• There was a Public Service Announcement at a local TV station which used its puppet mascot and tried to explain the difference between "good touching" and "bad touching". The trouble is, they used footage from Looney Tunes cartoons while they were talking about "good touching"... including Bugs Bunny's crossdressing smooches on Elmer Fudd, and multiple shots of Pepe Le Pew. Someone clearly wasn't paying enough attention when that PSA was made....
• Punky Brewster's anti-drug episode featuring the "Chicklets". The final scenes with P(SA)unky & friends in the middle of an anti-drug protest are anviliciously hilarious. The thing can be seen in all its glory here.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 had a tendency to identify (and mock) these in The Fifties educational shorts it aired, which had titles like "A Date With Your Family". The lessons in said shorts ran the gamut from Clueless, to looking very Warped thanks to Values Dissonance, to being straight-up Warped regardless of the time they were made. Hence, such gemlike riffs as "Emotions are for 'ethnic' people", and "Expressing individualism is just plain wrong".
  • And:
  "Dad, I had a feeling today."
  "Well don't, son."
  • While we're on the subject, another fun rip on the strange messages given by such shorts is Nada Surf's song and music video, "Popular".
  "Remember to wash your hair only once every two weeks!" (Eww...)

  • This sounds odd today, but shampoo was harsh, even corrosive back in the Fifties. Washing it every day would have made them look like they stuck their fingers in a light socket regularly for fun. It sounds warped out of context though.
• Riff Trax has continued MST3K's tradition on that score, like with their commentary on the short Drugs Are Like That, a parade of dubious and contradictory metaphors for drugs. At different points in the short, for example, habitual behavior (such as hair twirling) and spontaneity (represented by making a minor change to a Lego-block machine) both become drug-use analogues.
• The Truth's line of anti-tobacco PSAs are often well written, but one is an egregious case of research failure, where they try to prove tobacco companies were aiming their products at kids because cigarettes were shown in The Muppet Movie — because clearly a movie featuring Muppets can only be for kids. The Muppet Movie was released in 1979, when Jim Henson was out to prove puppets could appeal to older audiences and a film didn't need an R rating to be made for adults.
• The well-intentioned episode on Star Trek: The Next Generation in which a member of a race of asexual aliens and Riker fall in love. Though the episode was intended as a defense of LGBT people, Riker's love interest was played by a woman. As Cracked.com put it: "The episode's message ends up completely garbled. Intended as a condemnation of homophobia, the episode instead comes off as the story of one woman's brave quest for cock in the face of lesbian tyranny."
  • Also their choice for all the 'asexual' aliens to be played by women, because you know it wouldn't do for Riker's Love Interest to look like a man. (Okay, it is scientifically accurate because the only vertebrates we know of who can reproduce asexually are all female). This actually annoyed Jonathan "Riker" Frakes a bit, but the producers didn't have the balls to have the hot babe androgynous alien played by a guy.
  • What's worse is that at one point, the Love Interest decides she identifies as female solely based on the fact that she finds a male attractive...
  • "Symbiosis", the anti-drug episode. The Enterprise rescues some of the crew and a couple of barrels of cargo, considered more important than crew by those who weren't rescued, on a ship going between two planets in a system that has only interplanetary travel and is losing that. Planet #1 is supplying a drug to planet #2 that is an addictive cure for a plague that has, Dr. Crusher discovers, been wiped out centuries ago. This is the sole industry of Planet #1 — they don't even have their own ships — but only Planet #2 uses the drug. Everyone stops the Enterprise from seizing the drugs by citing the Prime Directive. Because of this, Picard retracts an offer to send parts for fixing the ships to Planet #2 because of the Prime Directive.
    • An argument can be made that the episode isn't anti-drugs so much as anti-exploitation and slavery. There is a slightly out of place Character Filibuster on the subject, but it arguably avoids being too anvilicious by virtue of coming from the character's established traumatic background.
• Due to Executive Meddling, the entire Weird Al Show ended up as clueless Aesops, which annoyed the star.
• Diff'rent Strokes decided to tackle sexual predators in the two-parter "The Bicycle Man". In the story, Arnold wants a bicycle. After becoming friends with Mr. Horton, the owner of the bicycle shop, over part one, he, and his friend Dudley (Diff'rent Strokes' recurring Very Special Episode scapegoat), start spending time with Horton in the back room where he lives. After riding on Mr. Horton's back and playing "Neptune, God of the Sea," Horton offers them some alcohol (which only makes Arnold worried that he might be caught with it on his breath) and sits them down to watch some cartoons. "That mouse just lost his drawers! [audience laughter]" Yeah, so after enjoying a nice X-rated cartoon, Arnold is uncomfortable enough to leave. Dudley wants to stay, and Arnold goes home. After letting slip what happened, Mr. Drummond calls the police. They arrive right as Horton is about to... uh... begin. Dudley appears on screen drugged with tranquilizers and shirtless. Then they have a couch conversation about how important it is to tell an adult about such things. While this is admittedly far more direct and open than the "bad touch" PSAs of the 90s, there is laughter throughout the episodes right up to when Mr. Drummond calls the police. Yes, even during the set-up to the molestation. That must have been the most awkward studio audience ever.
  • Harsher in Hindsight considering Shavar Ross (Dudley) came out later saying he was repeatedly molested by a family friend during the show's run.
• Even Police, Camera, Action! is not invulnerable to this trope. In fact, possibly more so than Hannah Montana.
  • The 1998 episode Rust Buckets is a possible example of this, and just could not handle the episode's issue (unroadworthy vehicles) well. In fact, in Part 2 after the commercial break, it went off-topic!
  • The episode Unfit to Drive from the 1996 series, Enough's Enough from the 1997 series, and (to a slightly lesser extent) the 1997 episode Don't Look Back In Anger tend to sometimes forget what the aesop they're dealing with is.
• Parodied by The Goodies with their Mary Whitehouse expy-approved sex education film, which avoids any mention of anything related to sex:
  Narrator: This is a man. And this isn't.
  • Also parodied by The Sooty Show (even though the episode itself was a straight attempt at trying to get across at least some basic sex education) when Matthew tries inexpertly to give The Talk to Sweep, hampered by his use of Dissimile and Metaphorgotten.
• The children's show The Big Comfy Couch suffered from clueless Aesops at times... including the downright bizarre lesson "Don't fall down with your hands in your pockets."
• Highway To Heaven has many clueless Aesops:
  • Trust in God? No, an angel will do whatever you need.
  • Always do what God says? No, the angel breaks the rules whenever he sees fit, sometimes without remorse.
  • Be yourself? Sometimes, but not if you're fat. If you're fat, you need to lose weight so people will like you.
  • Avoid violence? No, take up for yourself, even if it's for something trivial, like a stolen sandwich.
  • Gambling is bad? Only if you haven't rigged the results for yourself (appears in numerous episodes).
  • Never lie? Flexible depending on the situation.
  • Money is the root of all evil if you have it. If you don't have money, money is the cause of all your problems, as is evidenced in episodes where a senior-citizens' home is being sold, a woman's animal shelter is being sold to developers, and an episode where kids won't have Christmas because their dad doesn't have a job.
• "Walker told me I have AIDS."
• There was a brief flare-up of PSAs that instructed children to go and get an adult if they saw or read anything on the Internet that made them uncomfortable, without quantifying what such things might be. Given the number of things one can find online that can make grown adults uncomfortable, and medical images of a graphic nature, this seems a little ill-thought-out. (But at least parent and child can sit and stare at the walls for a while together.)
• The pedophilia awareness PSA Tricky People made an admirable attempt to be serious and would have actually been pretty effective... had the creators not decided to include the ridiculously cartoony Barney-esque character of Yello Dyno.
  • And if that wasn't enough, they give the evil pedophile a wacky, bumbling sidekick, who provides Comic Relief.
• In the Isis TV show, one episode, "Spots of the Leopard," has a girl named Jenny suspecting her father of being a diamond thief. Throughout the episode, despite all the evidence pointing at Jenny's father, both Isis and her alter-ego Andrea keep reassuring Jenny that she should just have faith in her father. Meanwhile, everything he does makes him look like he's the diamond thief, inclding lying about his whereabouts and double-crossing the police. In the end, Andrea/Isis was right, but she had no way of knowing that until the real criminal confesses.
• Glee is frequently accused of this.
  • Perhaps the most infamous and obvious example was in the season 3 episode "I Kissed A Girl," which was supposed to be about LGBT acceptance after a lesbian character was rudely outed against her will in the previous episode. For starters, despite the title, there were no girls kissing. Rather than focusing on the actual lesbian character, the episode was made all about the atonement of the guy who outed her, which consisted entirely of suggesting the glee club do a "Lady Music" theme. Seriously.
  • Another example would be 4x18 "Shooting Star" where they had a school shooting... but the gun going off was all accidental and didn't hurt anyone, and a teacher covered for the student at fault. So there were no actual consequences for the student who brought a gun to school and caused gunshots and terrified the entire student body and faculty. Many reviews of the episode claimed the message was lost by the end, or it was a failure, or it could've been much better, etc.
  • There's also Glee's harmful portrayal of eating disorders in season 4. As Catherine Weingarten says, "Marley was convinced to become bulimic to avoid becoming like her [morbidly obsese] mother. The mean girl Kitty easily convinces Marley that in order to play the part of “Sandy” in Grease she has to look a certain way. Marley does not even seem to understand that Kitty is getting her to experiment with dangerous eating disorder behavior. So Marley becomes fully bulimic and later even passes out during sectionals, which prompts everyone in Glee club to hate her. There is so much misinformation here about how one gets an eating disorder and the seriousness of eating disorders. It is common for people to not fully understand what an eating disorder is and only know about them through sensationalist tabloids or TV shows. Now Glee is adding itself to the list of shows spreading harmful and untrue information about eating disorders. Glee makes eating disorders seem campy and not very serious. We are supposed to be annoyed by Marley and not even care when she passes out at sectionals." There is also Liana Rosenman who wrote, "It is really dangerous [for Glee] not to include a public service announcement of the dangers of eating disorders." and "Marley has an eating disorder for two days and then magically recovers. That is far from the truth. I struggled with anorexia for five years." Other people have published similar sentiments: "One topic Glee has failed horribly at covering is eating disorders. Eating disorders are often life threatening and last night's episode of Glee made it nothing short of a joke."

• "If Everyone Cared..." is Nickelback's spectacularly non-specific, crowd-pleasing, inoffensive protest song. It warrants a mention here because the whole thing is Chad Kroeger whining about how much better the world would be if, like, nobody ever had to be sad and stuff. Yeah.
  • "If everyone loved and nobody lied/If everyone shared and swallowed their pride". He does at least go on to have a call to action. Kinda.
  • Considering the same band came up with "Never Again", a ferocious (if over simplistic) diatribe against domestic violence it's doubly jarring.

• British magazine Take a Break, which incidentally, is known for trying to put An Aesop in where it can, ran a story about a couple with Down's Syndrome who decided to get married. They explained to the couple "If you get married you won't be able to have a different boyfriend or girlfriend ever again". However, did they not explain what divorce was to them? This gives the wrong impression to some parents of disabled adults.
  • Somewhat justified, as when people decide to get married, they at least intend for it to be permanent. Or rather, things don't quite work that way...
    • Taken one step further, when recently in June/July, they went into full-on You Can Panic Now / New Media Are Evil / Old Media Playing Catchup mode, which is the wrong impression for today's Genre Savvy Internet generation.

• Any children's show where a main character or actor dies either avoids the issue entirely, casts someone else to take their place, or say they "moved away"... except for the most notable aversion: The death of Mr. Hooper (Will Lee) on Sesame Street.
  • Sesame Street did have a show about divorce. Then they realized that there was no way they could present the issue well and scrapped the episode, swallowing the cost.
    • Part of the issue with that episode was that it apparently not only showed the aftermath of the divorce, but the parents going through it as well. Kids were just too upset by it.
    • A good couple decades later, they made another storyline about Abby Kadabby having divorced parents. They showed her as happy and as the divorce happening in the past. While it didn't go on the regular show, it's available as a resource for divorcing parents and has been shown to go over much better with children.
  • Another episode of Sesame Street that got canned tried to deal with homosexuality... by having Mr. Snuffleupagus' father come out of the closet.
• The world's creepiest ventriloquist dummy and the world's worst ventriloquist say, don't look at dirty pictures. Not that they tell the 6-8 year old audience what "dirty pictures" are.

• Averted in an Adventures in Odyssey episode that teaches An Aesop about cursing. Though it would seem impossible to teach such a moral in a Christian children's radio show, where you obviously aren't supposed to use curse words, it manages to pull it off by having some kids thinking that a certain word is a curse word and using it in such a way. It's a bit odd, but it actually works pretty well.

• This review of Michael Jackson THE IMMORTAL World Tour, the Cirque Du Soleil tribute to the musician, calls out the "They Don't Care About Us" number for presenting one of these in the below quote. (Later, the critic notes that the intended anti-greed message is undermined since the show probably wouldn't exist if there weren't tons of money to be made off of Jackson's memory.) Keep in mind that this show features Bubbles the chimp as a character and a production number with a giant sequined glove dancing around, among other things.
  During [the number] dancing robots appear with LED breastplates that first flash dollar signs amidst videos of urban and international violence, then display hearts as Mother Teresa appears onscreen to feed starving children. The number was originally designed for Jackson's This Is It shows (performances that were preempted by the artist's demise), so Cirque can't entirely be blamed for its unseemly exploitation of human suffering for commercial entertainment. Of course Jackson would have seen himself as raising awareness, and Cirque doubtless think the same thing about the pro-Gaia number ["Earth Song"] that unfolds as 30,000 people sip from souvenir plastic cups.

• The Tales series in general, and Tales Of Symphonia specifically, are chock full of Narm Charm: it ranges from overly-dramatic to flat-out-bizarre, but still manages to be awesome despite that.
  • Tales Of Vesperia has some interesting things to say about justice that get completely lost due to the game's Black and White Morality. Yuri murders Ragou and Cumore. Sodia later attempts to kill Yuri because she thinks of him as a criminal. This is supposed to question Yuri's actions and show that justice is sometimes a very subjective thing. Problem is, unlike Ragou and Cumore, Yuri does not fap to the screams of dying children but is a clearly heroic character. So the whole thing just makes Sodia come off as a dangerous psychopath trying to Murder the Hypotenuse. The justice plot is later dropped entirely for a Green Aesop that doesn't make much more sense.
    • Its even worse than that. Ragou was caught red-handed for feeding people to his pets For the Evulz and was punished with a slap on the wrist. Cumore had the authority to keep sending people out to die in the desert because frankly no one cared to stop him. The justice system is obviously, hilariously broken and it's apparent that Yuri's vigilante acts saved a lot more lives than Flynn's Lawful Stupid approach to things.
• The moral they try to get across in I. M. Meen is that you should read more. What we get is more like "Never ever touch a book or else that book might suck you into a horrible labyrinth and an evil man will torture you like some kind of sadistic pedophile".
• Yakuza 4 has a sidequest where orphaned kids who were separated from their illegal immigrant parents when said parents were deported are spraying graffiti to express their hate for Japan. Tanimura and Zhao pull them aside for an important lesson: Is it the fault of the clearly flawed process for dealing with illegal immigrants? Nope. Is it the fault of the hostile, zero-tolerance mentality that the Japanese people have towards illegal immigrants? Nope. Is it their parent's fault for thoughtlessly putting themselves at risk for this situation to begin with? Nope. IT'S NO ONE'S FAULT! SO JUST STICK YOUR NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE AND FORGET ALL ABOUT IT! Never mind the kids who will fall victim to the same situation that you're in someday, and that you, as a casualty, are in the perfect position to be an activist.

• Parodied in Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, in which The Big Man asks the readers to 'keep it real about AIDS'.
• Evil Diva did a story about rape. That would be bad enough for its own reasons. But thanks to the fact that story presents the subject by pandering to a loads of stereotypes and quickly becomes ridiculous - Diva goes to a college party, meets a stranger, who assaults her after few minutes talk in front of everyone and no one seems to care - the message turns into "college students are evil".

• This trope was brutally satirized in The Onion article "Talking To Your Child About The WTC Attack", which encouraged parents to give a no-holds barred explanation of the world history leading up to the World Trade Tower attacks in order to answer why this bad scary thing happened (serious Tear Jerker warning). Although given that the material is fairly obscure even among adults who try to keep with the news, the real moral might have been "Try hard to understand world history, and don't believe the simplified explanations we have to tell our kids."
• Poked fun at by The Cinema Snob in his review of "Rock: It's Your Decision". The reformed, ex-rock-and-roll-fan protagonist preaches to a group of kids about what he saw at a rock concert once: The people listening weren't just sitting quietly and listening to the music! They were getting up and dancing! The music was controlling them! The Snob snarks, "This is an emotional response, like crying when you're sad. This, too, is sinful, and should be suppressed."
• The Bionicle serial The Yesterday Quest had Toa Chiara react to the sexism displayed by her creators (who believed that females are by default peaceful and gentle) by killing a random animal. What a lot of fans took away from this is that "yes, girls can very well be as violent as guys", or alternatively, "Chiara's crazy." In fact, the author originally didn't even intend to make an Aesop here, he just accidentally mixed up the pronouns for another character (thereby making a male out of someone who belonged to a female race), and decided to give an in-story explanation to the typo, leading to the claims of sexism, and then to this.
• The Sun, a British newspaper has a feature called "Sun Justice", which is what it says, except more of a campaigning platform but they do get it wrong a lot. Whilst it may be worthy of Shy Keenan to campaign on it, unfortunately the newspaper itself over-sensationalizes the issues; for example, it takes The New Rock & Roll and You Can Panic Now Up to Eleven, and confuses trolling with cyber-abuse. So the message is... well, it's not clear, what, exactly.

In general:

• Often, in cartoons meant for children, there will be a story where the rival girls will talk smack about a major female character behind her back. The end of the episode invariably has the rival girls being called out or punished somehow, with the Aesop being that you shouldn't spread rumors. This still happens in real life, as if the real lesson being learned is "Bringing down another girl will make you popular as long as you don't get caught!"

Specific works:

• There was an animated story in Yo Gabba Gabba! about anthropomorphized drops of water and oil who live in towns across from one another. They are separated by a line in the middle of a road and they are not allowed to mix with one another. Now, the story looks like it's heading towards a Green Aesop when an oil drop runs across the road and collides with a water drop. But the story focuses on how together they make a pretty rainbow. And then all the oil and water drops start playing together. The message was supposed to be "it's wonderful when people who are different play together", but unfortunately children will probably interpret it as "go ahead and pour oil in the sink/bathtub/etc. to make pretty rainbows".
  • Also, oil and water? Not well-known for mixing together. It (hopefully) should be blatantly obvious that generally oil should not be in water.
• Family Guy in general, since its Black Comedy status makes taking any Aesop it offers seriously near-impossible, especially when it comes to religion and gay rights.
  • It gets bad when they introduce a character that's every offensive gay stereotype rolled into one, and Seth MacFarlane goes on record saying that the gay community is intended to identify with him.
  • The episode with Quagmire's transgender father also counts as this.
  • They tried to tackle Domestic Abuse in "Screams in Silence" and while a commendable effort (if incredibly clumsily handled), keep in mind this is a show where women are routinely beaten and killed for laughs.
• The (in)famous episode of Arthur called "Arthur's Big Hit." Since it was discussed many times before, here's a summary: the episode was supposed to teach us a good moral like "Violence won't solve your problems"; instead, the story went out of its way to make Arthur the bad guy.
  • What makes it even worse is that D.W. never got punished. Arthur spent a week making a model plane, and DW not only ruins the wet paint, then blames it on Arthur, but she then throws his plane out the window, after he specifically told her not to touch it. She's not even sorry that it broke, blaming the plane for being defective because it didn't fly. Arthur hits D.W. in retribution, but gets all the blame.
    • From what we've seen. Her punishment could have happened off-screen, but all the viewer is shown is their parents saying that they'll deal with her, only for them to let it slide completely while Arthur is punished for the whole rest of the episode.
• Anvilicious as it could be at times, Captain Planet sometimes went in over its head. It gave us the following stellar examples, some of which can be viewed via list of uncomfortable "Captain Planet" episodes:
  • The infamous "If It's Doomsday, It Must Be Belfast" episode, which was meant to promote world peace. What it managed to do instead was become the single most offensive example of both the Oireland trope and The Troubles trope, making the struggle between Catholics and Protestants look like The Jets against The Sharks. Highlights can be seen here. (And the comments. Dear God, the comments.)
    • Even better, while the titular subplot is far better known, this episode also had the team attempt to solve the Israeli / Palestine conflict... with Ma-Ti. Yeah really.
  • While not as Ripped from the Headlines as the other episodes, the time that the Planeteers went back in time to battle Adolf Hitler. It's hard to talk about how racism is bad when the good Cap equates his hate with pollution. Granted Hitler's ideas weren't the best, but still...
    • And it's even worse when you consider that, in Real Life, Hitler and the Nazis were big on conservation. To the point where some historians have argued that the Nazis intended to turn the entire nation of Poland into a nature and hunting preserve after the war!
  • The Mind Pollution episode. Linka gets hooked on a fictional drug called "Bliss" that has instantaneous addictive properties. Since the nuances of real drug addiction are drawn out and complicated, everyone who used Bliss just got turned into a mindless zombie.
  • "Teers In the Hood" for the waffles!
  • Oh goodness, the AIDS episode...
    Todd: Man, AIDS stinks!
    • It should be said, however, that the writers (according to the late Ben Hurst, one of them) were proud of that episode for what Aesops they were allowed to convey (i.e. that HIV is not easily transmissible and any stigma is largely unfair to the victims). And that they were allowed to cover it at all.
  • Maybe not as infamous as the other examples here, but certainly one of the strangest And Knowing Is Half the Battle segments and not just for this particular show. Most of them said things like, "make sure you don't leave all the lights on all day", "only run the air conditioner if you really need it", or "recycle your waste paper"; perfectly reasonable and good advice for the show's young audience. This one, however, asked the kids to curb overpopulation and the various problems it can cause by promising to have only three or less children when they grow up.
    • If you're trying to curb overpopulation, wouldn't a logical approach be to teach kids that orphans are perfectly good kids who need homes? That way you're teaching compassion for others instead of accidentally calling anyone who had quadruplets evil.
    • What's more, since this was a show aimed at kids, they had to execute the whole anti-overpopulation message without mentioning birth control or abstinence. So kids are told to make smart choices about family planning, but they're not explicitly told how.
  • The show crippled its aesops from the very start due to restrictions in what they were allowed to say and show. Specifically, they weren't allowed to show pollution and wastage committed by ordinary people in the industry, in case children vilified their parents for working industrial jobs or developed uninformed anti-industry opinions. Instead they used cartoonish villains, which just sent the message "pollution is caused by sewer-dwelling ratmen and radiation mutants".
• The infamous Saturday morning special Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue tried to deal with the dangers of marijuana — by wasting a perfectly good Massive Multiplayer Crossover and having beloved children's cartoon characters spew quaint little platitudes about how drugs are bad. And marijuana users are apparently angry, semi-violent hoodlums a la Reefer Madness. When that cartoon was broadcast in prime time in Italy, it was preceded by an "insanely long" and "insanely boring" message by the then-Prime Minister.
  • American children were treated to a similarly anvilicious message from Bush, Sr.
  • And Aussie kids got one from Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Kind of funny in retrospect, as he's the Prime Minister celebrated for downing a yard of ale in eleven seconds when he was younger (making it into the Guinness Book of records), so you have to wonder what else he got up to back then. But then, this is Australia, where you're looked upon as weird if you don't like to get smashed at least occasionally.
  • Apparently, the special was not advertised as being a Very Special Episode prior to it first airing, fooling kids into thinking that it was going to be a purely fun crossover cartoon super special. Little did they know that they were about to be anvilicious'd to oblivion.
  • Y'know, some of those very cartoon characters being aware of drugs explains WAY too much.
• The Flintstone Kids "Just Say No (to drugs, of course)!" prime time special. It's less infamous than "Cartoon All-Stars", but it could almost be the type specimen of the Clueless Aesop Very Special Episode. It features your trademark crazy inaccurate information, a whole new set of characters introduced during the episode, and radical changes made to a main character after hanging out with the aforementioned new characters. The latter two elements were used just to deliver the Aesop and none of them were ever acknowledged after this one episode. And, oh yeah, there's the bizarre sight of the slapstick-prone Flintstones characters talking about drugs. And to top the whole thing off with a bonus, there's a killer Hilarious in Hindsight moment or "Funny Aneurysm" Moment: Michael Jackstone.
  • Another Hilarious in Hindsight moment: "It tastes gooood, like a-- *click click* cigarette shoooould!!"
  • The special also failed to make drugs look any worse than smoking. Apart from being unable to win a race that he apparently usually wins, the drug dealer kid's biggest problem is that he'll be taken to the police station, after which his parents will come to pick him up and yell at him. Let's repeat that. The kid (named Stoney for extra anvilicious points) was arrested for drug possession and they're actually going to allow his parents to stop by and take him home that same day. And his actual punishment will be his parents yelling at him. So if you do drugs, the worst you can expect is that your parents will yell at you.
• Quite a few Dragon Tales episodes have perfectly good Aesops that wipe out on the shores of Most Writers Are Human And Do Not Live In Magical Lands, and wind up just looking strange. To wit: Lorca is a magical dragon who lives in a Magical Land with Unicorns and wizards and magic everywhere. Oh, and he's in a wheelchair. So the little kids watching this fantasy cartoon where children have wonderful adventures in a Magical Land can learn that disabled people are just like you and me. Even when they are dragons in wheelchairs. We get the intended message, but it seems a little on the nose to have a mythical creature in a wheelchair.
  • Also broken because although he can't walk, he can still fly.
• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, "Sonic Says," "Bad Touching." The big problem with this, and other episode tags and PSAs like it, is that shows in the Animation Age Ghetto were allowed and encouraged to warn against sexual molestation, but were forbidden to define it. They could tell kids to tell parents or the cops about "bad touching," but they couldn't say what sorts of touching are bad.
  • Even worse is this Sonic Sez, which attempts to teach a respectable Aesop ("Only dial 9-1-1 in a real emergency"), but Sonic inadvertently tells kids that "If you're being attacked by people who mean you harm, calling 9-1-1 would be a dumb joke."
  • There is an even more ridiculous Sonic Sez, that may suggest the writers knew exactly how silly this was. Grounder smashed himself while chasing a rabbit, a container of pills falling out of him in the process. The rabbit goes to take them, only for Sonic to stop him. The pill bottle reads, "For Grounder, Robot Headache Pills, Take One A Day With Oil."
• An episode of the Double Dragon cartoon involved a kid obsessed with video games. He was taught that life is not a video game... by a pair of magically-super-powered crime-fighters who summon dragons and shoot fire and stuff... in a show based off a video game.
  • The Double Dragon 'drugs are bad' episode... had its moments. A fungus that the sewer-dwelling mutants chew for energy is concentrated into a dangerous drug by (RPM) the Shadow Master, who uses it to enslave people to him. So far, so good. Vortex started taking it to be a stronger fighter and smashed apart a training dummy in a fit of rage when it was suggested it wasn't exactly a good thing. Then the Shadow Master deliberately exposes Billy to RPM after he captures him, and it looks like an interesting setup of addiction vs willpower, and how Billy vs Vortex might recover... and then Dragon Magic cleans the junk out of Vortex and Billy. We never see what happens with the other addicts, above and below, or any consequences, not even for Vortex having drugs around the dojo where kids come to take martial arts lessons! Also compare the episode where Jimmy gets addicted to The Third Eye of the Dragon. Both eps are less 'drugs are bad' and more 'magic fixes everything'.
  • There was also the guns are bad episode. The city bans every kind of unlicensed handgun. The Shadow Master increases production of his illegal handguns, since there is now a greater market; resident criminals buy weapons from him illegally and go on a rampage. When regular citizens find that they can't even buy licensed weapons, unless they're in law enforcement, they start buying them illegally to protect themselves. The police prove unable to stop the wave of crooks or shut down the Shadow Master's operations. The moral comes across less 'guns are bad' then 'crooks are already willing to break the law, and will get weapons. You need to be able to defend yourself.' Bonus points for no grey areas between 'no legal guns at all' and 'no restrictions on guns.'
• Happens In-Universe in South Park, when the school decides they need to teach the kids about safer sex — without actually talking about sex. So they just tell the kids that boys always need to wear condoms, or else they might get girls pregnant, and leave it at that. Hilarity Ensues.
  • At the end of the episode, Chef specifically calls this out, points out that the people teaching the sex ed (Mr. Garrison, Mr. Mackey, and Miss Choksondick) are all misguided, misinformed, or just plain clueless about sex themselves, and says that if the parents want it done right they should do it themselves.
    • Although in a straighter example of this trope in action, Chef himself often had a bad habit of singing songs about sex to the children, which doesn't leave him much room to criticize.
• According to Drug Avengers, an obscure and very weird educational cartoon recently exhumed by Everything Is Terrible, the reason Earth will not be able to join the Galactic Federation in the future is because we do too many drugs. Yup.
• The Moral Substitute to Care Bears, Kingdom Chums, really should have known they wouldn't be able to handle making a singalong about The Ten Commandments after Thou Shall Not Kill. Simply put, the song is about being nonviolent and not arguing, but doesn't touch the whole "killing" aspect, because, y'know, the cartoon is about kids, for kids.
  • Their attempts at making a song about adultery, however, was simply incompetent, in part because they couldn't really say what to do besides "be loyal". It comes across as saying, once you're married, you cannot talk to anyone ever again. And yes, they are furries, just to make everything more awkward.
• Used in-universe in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, "Over a Barrel". Pinkie Pie decides to sing a song about sharing in order to get the bison and the cowponies to get along and agree. They do... that it was the worst performance they'd ever seen. Brought up again when the bison are about to call off the attack, but Pinkie Pie celebrates by singing another verse, enraging them and causing them to attack anyway.
  • Lauren Faust has spoken about regretting the way the episode "Feeling Pinkie Keen" was handled. What was intended to be an Aesop about being open to different ideas and ways of perceiving the world, even if you don't particularly understand them (something that makes sense as there are a lot of things kids that age don't understand yet but are factually true) instead unintentionally came off as, 'Atheists/Scientists/Skeptics are jerks and are demonstrably wrong.'
• The Care Bears Welcome To Care A Lot episode "Welcome to Grump-A-Lot" has Grumpy Bear lose his temper at his friends, causing a "Grumpy Storm" to break loose and turn everyone except for Grumpy into foul-tempered opposites of their normal selves. The lesson (as spelled out by Tenderheart) is that "While we all get frustrated, we must learn to control our emotions." Which would be fine, except Grumpy only blew up at the others because he was all set to watch TV in peace and everyone showed up at his place without being invited, ate all his food, criticized the way he had laid out the snacks, deliberately stood in front of the TV screen so he couldn't see anything, talked and sang loudly over the announcer, and utterly refused to respect his privacy. So the lesson came across more as "It's wrong to want time for yourself, and if your friends walk all over you and refuse to consider your feelings on the matter, you have no right to get angry at them about it." Bonus points because this was the exact kind of lesson that the Care Bears franchise originally tried to avoid with Grumpy Bear; the entire point to his character was to teach kids that it's okay to sometimes be grumpy.