The page picture is part of a UNICEF campaign in Belgium using The Smurfs to raise awareness of child soldiers in Africa. The full commercial is here. UNICEF had to run the advert late at night to avoid scarring any children for life with it. The words at the end are something to the effect of "Don't let war destroy the world of children."
If you're familiar with other Unicef ads, you probably won't be surprised to hear that they seem to have quite a thing for this trope. Among other things, they had a little girl play with her dog and step on a landmine (all done in what appears to be crayon drawings), followed by a picture of several heavily bandaged, realistically drawn children. Or the other one where storks drop several babies over a city, they slowly land with parachutes, smiling while looking down on the city or up at the sky with those big eyes, then a squadron of evil looking airplanes show up, carpet bombing the entire city, using bombs with psychotic grins painted on them. The ad ends with the babies landing on the smoking ruins of the city, looking frightened and hopeless. You can tell something like this leaves a big impact if someone can recall it after 12 years with great detail, after seeing it exactly once.
In an old issue of Nintendo Power, there was a full-page ad for the Nintendo 64 game Battletanx: Global Assault which featured tanks blowing up a world of absolutely-not-Teletubbies-honest.
Likewise, TV ads for the game had the so-not-the-Snuggles-fabric-softener-bear chased down and mauled by one of the tanks.
Don LaFontaine: "Something has gone wrong in the happy-go-lucky world of Nintendo."
An infamous animated promo for a 1983 special report entitled “Green Street Reds” for the KGO (San Francisco ABC affiliate) local evening news showed a Soviet SAM shooting Santa Claus and his sleigh out of the sky. This resulted in many angry calls from parents with inconsolable children and the offending clip was quickly pulled. You can watch the clip here.
This ad for 13eme rue, a French action and thriller network. The statement translates to "This is how we'll do a children's show if we have to do one".
The "Let's All Go to the Lobby" promo parody, Follow the Sun...
Anime and Manga
Excel Saga has the cute little Puchuus, who are actually violent and imperialistic. When they get injured or killed they shift from cute to plain ol' hideous, resembling Golgo13. There is also a sudden shift from their tiny, adorable cries of "Puuchuu!" to overly dramatic broken English. "Ow that hurt! You make-a me bleeeeeed!". The protagonists seem to enjoy blowing them up and kicking them around.
Higurashi's story is a time loop wherein several characters always start out as schoolyard best friends in a sleepy little rural Japanese town called Hinamizawa. Each cycle of the loop starts out sickeningly cutesy - playground hijinks, characters making nonsense noises ("nipaa") and other characters gushing over how adorable it is, and typical melodramatization of the mundane. Baseball and hide-and-seek, in particular, are seen as Serious Business with the former regarded as an epic battle and the latter subjected to a child's idea of in-depth military strategy. An episode or two into the cycle, though, characters begin to die in horrifically violent, painful and gruesome ways and one character - Rika - is conscious of the cycle of reincarnation and the futility of fighting it. If you've seen the South Park Mysterion/"Coon And Friends"/Cthulhu episodes, you get the idea. She's Kenny. Only rather than being played for dark laughs, it's played just plain dark. Then, when everyone you care about has been reduced to ashes, wet meat, or a comatose vegetable, the plot reset button gets hit and it's time to watch them suffer all over again.
Hibiki No Mahou It features extremely cute character designs, some of them very Moe. But the subject matter and overall tone of the series is dark, considering it's a Deconstruction of the magical school genre.
My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic IDW: We get a chilling vision of what could have happened to Equestria in the form of what the Changelings do to a peaceful land of cute kitty people they just so happened to land in after "A Canterlot Wedding".
In Oz The Great And Powerful there's Oz as a whole, and the land of Teacups and porcelain people in particular. Though there are dangers in Oz most of it highly colorful, whimsical and safe, especially those parts under the good witch Glinda's protection. The "apocalypse" comes in from the wicked witch besieging it with flying monkeys; the land of Teacups is shattered and it's denizens massacred. Main character China Girl is actually introduced after having had both of her legs broken to bits. The rest of the movie could be seen as an attempt to undo this trope and save Oz.
Tabletop Games
Savage Worlds first Plot Point campaign, Evernight starts out as a pretty idyllic Dungeon Crawl Standard Fantasy Setting. And then the monsters that suck out people's innards invade.
— I'll rid this world of Wishes and fill it with Weapons.
One of the most disturbing moments in Super Paper Mario is when you arrive at Sammer's Kingdom just before the world is wiped out. You try to retrieve the MacGuffin in order to stop it... but you can't make it in time and barely escape. Then, when you go back in... it's gone. All of it. Gone.
The sequel turns things into an out-and-out Crapsaccharine World, with one level having you going through what is in all intents and purposes a torture chamber on your way to off the Big Bad.
The little known shareware game Blip & Blop: Balls of Steel by defunct software house Loaded Studio is all about this: the titular balls start by killing a village of Smurfs (which, incidentally, killed the "great scientist" Gargamel), then destroy (very) thinly-veiled expies of Care Bears, Snorks, Lemmings and various other videogame and cartoon characters. Which are almost all equally evil and murderous.
The end of Doshin The Giant: The final monument is the Tower of Babel, which blocks out the sun. Since Doshin is an embodiments of the sun, that's bad news. Barudo Island begins to collapse, and the villagers flee in terror while Sudoru ponders the nature of life and death. Doshin holds up the tower to let them escape, but since we've never seen any other land mass, we never see anyone actually get to safety, and it's possible for Doshin to walk off the edge of the world, the only conclusion is that everyone drowns. Finally, with the island sunk beneath the waves, Doshin collapses and becomes a new island.
The Maw: Your world is a brightly colored land full of cutesy, silly critters. You're going to eat them all.
Hello Kitty Roller Rescue has evil aliens invading Earth with the intention of turning everyone on the planet into a cube, complete with a Downer Ending if you fail to defeat the final boss.
The series is like this; a demon trying to give everyone horrible and painful nightmares, the Mirror World imploding on itself, a once-cute-then-suddenly-fanged-beast trying to take over Dreamland by destroying Dreamland... All the while, Kirby is eating everything he comes across. Give or take the apparent thousands of years Kirby could live...
Diablo III has Whimsyshire, a bright and happy land filled with teddy bears and unicorns that are all trying to kill you.
The whole idea behind Naughty Bear is playing the role of a serial killer amongst a group of teddy bears.
Many fan-created adventures consist of cute creatures fighting evil creatures, or the other way around.
The "Creepy and Cute" parts pack almost encouraged this.
Due to the game's cartoony nature, almost all of the violence can be considered this.
Dino Run. Cutesy, sometimes hat-wearing pixel dinosaurs, colorful 8-bit Ghibli Hills... and the premise of the game is that all this is about to be destroyed.
One of the core aspects of Playstation All Stars Battle Royale is the clash between cuter franchises with more mature ones. This can be explained through two comparisons between the game and its main inspiration, Super Smash Bros.. First, while the SSB characters are - as seen in the third game - construct replicas (read: non-living beings) of their original selves, the PSASBR fighters are the real deal, and each one of them is summoned in his or her original art style. Second, the stages in PSASBR, contrary to the ones seen in SSB, are based on two games at the same time - one of which eventually invades the other. This reaches its logical extreme in the Franzea level, based on Loco Roco... and is eventually invaded by Metal Gear. Such Mood Whiplash is stated by Word Of God to be, partially, the point of the game.
In Burrito Bison, the Gummies bring this upon themselves by kidnapping Bison to wrestle Jawbreaker. Burrito Bison Revenge shows just how bad he left it once he escaped: the Arena is not pretty.
The player's job in Thwaite is to prevent this from happening to a village.
Penny Arcade pulls this one all the time. The strip plays it inverted when mocking content filters in Gears of War 2 — the blood and gore is replaced by rainbows and confetti.
VG Cats, frequently and crossing even more lines than Penny Arcade.
Breakfast of the Gods is a webcomic about breakfast cereal mascots in a very grim and serious war. It's surprisingly bloody. The third book is called "Apocalypse Yum".
Happens to the Dimension of Lame in Sluggy Freelancewhen the demons from the Dimension of Pain finally invade.
Web Original
An almost literal example with SCP-871. It is a cake that must be eaten. If it is damaged but not eaten, it will be replaced. If it is not eaten within about 24 hours, a second one will appear. If those two aren't eaten, then four will appear. Smart people have done the math and realized that this could wipe out life on earth in approximately 80 days from a single sample left unchecked. There are, at present, 237 such cakes.
If Balloons Could Talk by Neil Cicierega poses the titular question. The first few seconds of the hypothetical world involves everyone happily skipping around with their talking balloons, and then...
There is a story called Day of the Barney in which the purple dinosaur commands his young viewers to kill all the adults. He then takes over using his armies of hooded, mutant "Beloved Ones" and enforces a children-only world by having a ceremony occur whenever a child turns 13-years-old: the boys are decapitated, and the girls are brainwashed, locked into rape camps, and forced to give birth to more half-human "Beloved Ones." The memorable thing about the story? It was played straight (and was surprisingly well-written). In the sequel story, it's revealed Barney is actually an Elder God.
This legend from Hitherby Dragons. And it's certainly not the only one; many, many other stories having coming apocalypses and slaughters happening to a variety of Sugar Bowl worlds. The entire "Unclean Legacy" story is a bleak landscape that occurs after Gargamel has captured the Smurfs, and one stretch of the story of Ink Catherly is in a corrupted, putrefying version of Candyland.
There's an episode of The Fairly Oddparents involving "the Giggle Pies", which are adorable, cuddly, rhyming puffballs of cuteness. They actually are evil, though, and plan to take over the world by subjugating the populace to their cuteness. They are said to taste like manure, which is how the Yugopotamians beat them: Yugopotamians find manure delicious.
Happy Tree Friends enjoys both repeatedly massacring the cutesy Gang of Critters and causing wholesale destruction of their wooded homeland.
The three-parter, "Imaginationland", in which the land of good thoughts is being slaughtered by the land of bad thoughts.
This also cued the return of the Woodland Critters that Cartman had thought up. They're a level of nasty so bad that even Jason didn't want to meet the person that imagined them!
"Woodland Critter Christmas". The sickeningly cute, (yet devil-worshiping) Woodland Critters are subject to a Sugar Apocalypse. to be fair, they DID deserve it.
In "Dances with Smurfs", the Smurf village is destroyed by bulldozers. It wouldn't have been so funny if UNICEF had not already been there.
The Strawberry Shortcake parody people launch a genocidal campaign of dehumanization and consumption of the Sockbat race.
The Smurf village is destroyed by a lawnmower.
Clara lures in cute forest animals so they could get eaten.
In Yellow Submarine, quoted above, one of these gets the plot moving. The heroes must resort to the Power of Rock to save Pepperland.
Wizards. An evil wizard unleashes his hellish forces on an ugly little hippy-dippy land populated by cutesy elves and fairies. Then there's the big battle scene in which little Rice Krispies mascot look-a-likes get mercilessly slaughtered.
Watership Down. Played straight, then inverted when you find out what the rabbits are capable of doing to each other.
Fiver: The field... the field... it's covered with blood!
Hazel: Blood? Don't be ridiculous... Why don't you go fetch me a cowslip? There's some fine grass over here.
Rainbow Brite: Inverted in The Beginning of Rainbow Land when you find out that Rainbow Land was originally a lifeless wasteland.
People in the Candy Kingdom on Adventure Time explode when they're scared. So Princess Bubblegum has to resurrect the dead. This results in zombies. So she has a huge slumber party with everyone, with Finn guarding the castle, and he can't tell anyone about the zombies. It's actually a subversion.
The Cute King and his army of Cuties accidentally do this to themselves. They always fall apart or explode if they work themselves too much.
In Trollz, this happened in the backstory, with the old Trollzopolis being destroyed by Simon, as well as a lot of their magic being corrupted and taken. The world almost bit it, too.
The pilot special for the My Little Pony And Friends series. It starts off with the cutesy sweetness usually associated with the franchise, then reptilian monsters come out of the sky and snatch up ponies to be turned into the dragon-like servants of a demon-centaur named Tirac. My Little Pony The Movie had some evil witches unleash The Smooze on Dream Valley, and several episodes of My Little Pony And Friends had Ponyland being threatened with danger, such as the chauvinistic penguins from "Baby It's Cold Outside" and the magic-stealing Lavan from "Quest of the Princess Ponies".
In "Magic Duel," another, Ponyville-localized instance of this trope is enacted by theGreatandPowerfulTrixie, who has acquired a relic called the Alicorn Amulet, which enhances her magic to godlike levels. She quickly defeats Twilight in a Wizard Duel, banishes her from town, and converts Ponyville into her own private fascist state. The reason she takes her quest for revenge so far is because, unbeknownst to her, the Amulet also an Artifact of Doom that is corrupting her the more she keeps using it.
On Jimmy Two-Shoes, a UnicornOmnicidal Maniac Twinkles the Terrible causes planets to explode in an explosion of pink dust, which settles in a heart-shape.
