Where Did They Get Lasers - Television Tropes & Idioms

What are you so afraid of, Coby? It's just some kind of showerhead with a spring connected to the handle.

With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?

— Mark LoPresti

Don't move a muscle, or we will shoot you with our invisible guns!

— Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series

In an example of the nerfing of violence, almost all firearms in animated cartoons made since the late 1970s or early 1980s, if they appear at all, will be radically different from real guns, either in form or in function. Sometimes it's explained. Mostly it's not. The name of the trope comes from the fact that most of these use some form of energy principle.

Several reasons for this have been theorized:

Changes in American gun culture, akin to those that made things like smoking an increasingly rare phenomenon in American media.
Imitability. Shooting someone with a bullet is an imitable act which might result in negative publicity, but a kid can't find his Dad's laser rifle and zapfry his buddy. Yet.
Higher leeway on how much damage it deals and how it is portrayed. It is easy to accept an action hero getting blasted away by an energy beam and then jumping back to his feet, but if he got shot with a bullet, then we'd have to deal with the fact that he has a physical object lodged in his chest.

Note that this is usually limited to bullet-firing weapons. More destructive weapons like RPG's may still be seen in cartoons, despite (or perhaps because of) the increased difficulty in obtaining them. In rare cases, a cartoon will have large guns fire actual bullets, but still no realistic small arms.

This trope manifests in several ways:

When characters who would be expected to own guns—such as policemen—don't have them, or don't use them in cases which they would be expected to do so.
When most or all of the guns in a particular universe are energy-based or use abnormal ammo, regardless of the owner or the universe's particular technological level.
When a firearm looks and acts like a real firearm, even including parts which make sense for bullets but not for lasers, but whose ordnance still looks or sounds like lasers. Inversely, when an unrealistic-looking gun fires actual bullets.
When a cartoon which previously featured realistic guns is altered to make them less realistic, or eliminates them altogether.

This philosophy has sometimes extended to cartoons from previous decades or those imported from other countries. In general, most production houses have (under pressure from various Media Watchdogs who believed cartoon violence stimulated real violence) eliminated or altered anything and everything that looked like a real gun from their cartoons. Similarly, networks have gone back and Bowdlerized classic cartoons to remove firing guns and, in some cases, casual use of explosives. The reasoning behind these sometimes bizarre substitutions seems to be the belief that if it doesn't look like a real weapon, the poor child's psyche won't be warped and he won't have the desire to use a real weapon on someone else.

This trope is a fairly cyclical one, with guns going from "acceptable" to "not acceptable" and back again in the span of a handful of years, and sometimes within the same show. Whether or not it appears also depends greatly on a particular show's creator and how willing he or she is to fight for realism.

Beware, censors, if laser beam weaponry ever becomes a reality, you're kind of screwed.

A Sub Trope of Ray Gun.

Examples

Anime

In the first few episodes of 4Kids' One Piece dub, guns would occasionally be replaced with a sillier-looking equivalent, the most notable seen in the picture above. Originally the standard flintlock pistol seen in the OP universe, it was heavily edited into something that looks more like a showerhead on a spring. Simultaneously, other guns would be edited or recolored to look less realistic—Navy soldiers' rifles were changed to resemble super-soakers, for example—but would still explicitly shoot bullets.
The dub of Digimon Tamers slightly modifies the names and sound effect of Gargomon's attacks (essentially done with a Gatling gun in the original).
- Beelzemon, on the other hand, got to keep his realistic guns and CGI Matrix-esque bullets.
- In Digimon Data Squad, Rize Greymon's bullet sounds were changed to laser sounds, even though he was still shooting from a gun.
  - Oddly, the name of the attack was still "Trident Revolver".
- An interesting example: The Digimon Revolvermon is basically a giant revolver barrel with limbs and a cowboy hat. While the English dub chaged his name to Deputymon, his appearance and attacks were not altered at all.
The broadcast version of the dub of Gundam SEED actually has ballistic weapons visually edited to look like lasers. They missed a few shots. Click here◊ to see examples. The editing got really inconsistent in the last two episodes, which were aired so late at night that Cartoon Network could get away with more than when the show was aired at 10 PM. And some of the "lasers" were ridiculous enough to undergo Memetic Mutation — search for "Disco Gun" for details.
- This was edited much less in Canada (Gundam SEED aired at 9PM or later on Fridays, from what this troper recalls) - mainly editing out the over-graphic deaths had by some 'extras' (such as from the radiation weapons - swelling and popping), and (again, from vague memories) toning down a bit of the (somewhat-infamous) Kira/Flay encounter.
Both the Yu-Gi-Oh card game and TV show have monsters that wield or resemble guns edited into lasers... in America!. The most notable example of this is the monster called "Barrel Dragon", which could be described as resembling several guns welded together in Japan. (Whether this counts as Truth In Television is arguable.) An exception is the "Ancient Gear Soldier" in Yu-Gi-Oh GX, which uses a submachine gun-arm - it can be argued this was just because editing it would have looked ridiculous.
- There's also the henchmen who had their guns removed and were considered threatening because they were pointing at someone. This was parodied several times in Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series, which was made with the edited footage, where the Mooks were clearly holding edited-out guns:
  Thug: Don't move a muscle or we'll shoot you with our invisible guns!
  ...
  Tristan: Bakura! Don't be a hero! They've got invisible guns!
- A later episode included a goon holding Grandpa at gunpoint. The editors had apparently learned their lesson from the above example: the Mooks just weren't intimidating armed with only their fingers. They hadn't learned it well enough, however, as they replaced this guy's gun with...a slingshot.
A painful example of this trope can be found in the Edited For Syndication Toonami dub of Outlaw Star, in which guns were edited to become lasers, but almost every scene showing Gene buying bullets stayed in the show.
Zatch Bell (a.k.a. Gash Bell) has bizarrely inconsistent censorship. In several episodes, automatic rifles are edited to fire lasers and feature large metal bulbs along the barrels. In others (namely, the episode "Danny Boy) guns are not censored at all, even when they are fired at - and hit - Danny. However, in the very next episode, a pistol is edited to look like it's made of Green Rocks and fire glowing green bullets (clearly shown as such in Bullet Time) with laser sound effects, even though those particular bullets were blocked by a magical shield without hitting anyone. The only discernible reason for the inconsistency is that the latter gun was aimed at a girl.
Keroro Gunsou's weapon nut Giroro is especially noticeable in that his low-ordinance weapons (e.g., his trademark barrelless handgun) don't actually seem to use bullets, despite being treated as if they do.
In the anime version of the manga Reborn!, Reborn's gun is colored green and is actually a shape-shifted form of his pet lizard, and the special bullets it fires transform into energy before they can hit and power-up Tsuna (with the bleeding from the shots removed too). Similarly, Lambo's grenades are colored purple. Oddly enough, the other guns in the series remain untouched.
- Also, instead of shooting himself with his Ten-Year Bazooka, Lambo now leaps inside of it. Kind of odd...
An interesting reversal: in the English dub of the Dirty Pair OAVs (the 10-episode ones) the lasers have had their sounds changed to sound like guns (specifically Kei's blaster has a sound reminiscent of a Desert Eagle). This was due to there not being a voiceless track to dub over so a completely new sound effects track had to be made. They still fire laser blasts however.
In Mega Man NT Warrior they have laser guns, and the originally-sharp laser swords were blurred from the original...sometimes. Somewhat justified, as all combat takes place on the Internet with A.I.
Heck, an entire episode of Pokemon was banned outside of Japan because of one scene in which a gun was used to threaten someone. That's right, banned. Not edited, just straight out banned.
- Having watched the episode, I can say it wasn't because of just one scene - the episode is just filled with gun shooting, because it features the rather Trigger Happy Safari Zone warden. Even if it was edited to become lasers, the shots would still be overly violent for a Pokemon episode (and, mostly, for a 4Kids' episode). Besides, I think 4Kids just wasn't very good with digital painting that time.
- There was one instance you see a gun being held by someone in a Growlithe police force training exercise. Most likely because it wasn't actually used, it wasn't edited in American broadcast.

Comic Books

Non-TV example: in one part of the syndicated comic strip Dilbert, Dogbert gets a job as a hostage negotiator, telling the assailant to come out unarmed. He then orders a policeman to shoot him... with a donut that fires bullets.
- According to one of Scott Adams' books, based on his blog, it was originally a gun, then changed to 3 BAM! sound effects, then he decided he could get away with the donuts firing bullets.

Literature

Yes, believe it or not, this trope occurs in books. Most notable example being Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. And all sequels. While it is pointed out that fairy technology is decades ahead of human technology, it doesn't quite make sense that a 13/14-year-old is able to hack into this superior technology, which extends to DNA-coded handguns which send info to a computer about who shot what gun where, on what setting and how many times.
- What are you talking about? Colfer regularly includes modern (human) firearms, wielded by both good and bad guys, and even drops brands and models whenever he can; Instances I've found are: Kalishnakov (which is pretty damn obscure, when you think about it), SIG Sauer - over and over and over, Beretta, and even a desert eagle gets mentioned at some point. As for the 'DNA-coded lasers', They're only mentioned in one book, and they're also not actually used by any humans - only by fairiesto further a plot point - and are a new tech, even by fairy standards. So far as I can see, the only weapons that are hacked are guns that happen to be lazer instead of ballistic.
  - Kalashnikov... obscure? Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947.. obscure? Really? The AK-47 is an obscure gun? Really?

Film

In the Star Wars spin-off film Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, the Ewoks fight goblinlike creatures that live in a Dark Ages castle, get dinosaur-looking aliens to pull their wooden wagons that use log-ends as wheels, and fight with laser pistols - despite the fact that the technical manuals clearly state that projectile weapons still are used in the Star Wars galaxy.
- To make things worse, Lucas at one point was supposed to be considering removing the "bullet holes" on dead stormtroopers' armors.
The 20th Anniversary Edition of E.T. the Extra-Terrestial famously substituted guns held by police with walkie-talkies. This was parodied mercilessly in the South Park episode "Free Hat", where all of Steven Spielberg's thugs carry walkie-talkies in such a manner that suggests they were "originally" carrying guns. They cock their walkie-talkies to threaten the boys ("Hold it! Don't make me use this walkie-talkie!"), and Spielberg himself at one point steals one and threatens to "shoot".
- Even moreso, when the boys saw an editing version of Saving Private Ryan, featuring US soldiers being graphically killed by machine guns, while returning fire with walkie-talkies.
- Better still, in Australia, so much was "altered" in the 20th Anniversary Edition, that the studio was legally required to resubmit it for classification - where it was given a harsher rating of PG from it's original G, due to "supernatural themes". If they had simply released it without any changes, it would have retained it's original G rating from 1982. So... yeah.
Averted in The Incredibles, where robbers and mooks alike use normal firearms, despite it being a Disney Pixar film.
- Pixar in general isn't afraid to avert this trope. The Big Bad in Up tries to shoot the heroes with an antique rifle.
In All Dogs Go To Heaven, Carface's tommy gun is turned into a tommy gun...that fires red lasers. How they got advanced laser weaponry in 1939 is never explained. Oddly enough, they leave in the part where they violently gun down Charlie in front of the apple cart. (And a bunch of other things wrong with this movie)

Live Action TV

Power Rangers almost always edits its Super Sentai footage to turn bullets and missiles into lasers. In a particularly egregious example, in Power Rangers SPD, such an edit was made in a Super Sentai scene with the Omega Ranger catching a hail of bullets fired at him by the bad guy with his bare, supersonic-powered hand; a physical impossibility in its unedited form, it's rendered even more ridiculous afterwards.
- As they explained moments later, he was catching laser pellets.
- As if that weren't bad enough, Power Rangers in various generations have a habit of Calling Your Attacks, when all they do is shout "Lasers!" and proceed to fire a laser.
- Also, the red Dekaranger's personal weapon was a pair of magnum pistols, rewritten in Power Rangers to fire laser beams. Many fans, in defiance of the Rule Of Cool, insist that bullets "look cooler" than lasers, prompting suspicions that Power Rangers fans have never actually seen bullets. In their defense, the CGI-enhanced bullets in Dekaranger did look pretty cool. But not like real bullets.
- Not always. Lightspeed Rescue had a Megazord that had a giant gun that fired bullets (supersized bullets), and Time Force had Mooks that used 'advanced machine guns' that fired bullets...which were useless against the Rangers anyway.
- Power Rangers in Space also had giant bullets from mecha, as did SPD once or twice... apparently, the 'less imitable' factor makes bullets from Humongous Mecha more acceptable than bullets from humans (or basically human-shaped People In Rubber Suits.)
- Even RPM does this, in spite being darker and edgier. Lollipops in places you'd expect a cigarette? At least if Venjix started with a virus, some of the laser beams make sense.
- Probably the funniest example of this is the Power Rangers US-made clone/rip-off Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills where all the protagonists sport melee weapons (e.g. sword, ax) but have to fight the monster by firing lasers from their melee weapons.
In Stargate Atlantis , Ronon wields a death ray despite being from a world whose technology level is more or less equivalent to the 1950s. This is lampshaded in the episode Travelers where, while being held hostage by a more advanced people with the same guns, Col. Sheppard states "I always wondered where he got it."
Avoided in Firefly, which seems to go exactly the opposite of this trope. While the guns make a futuristic sound (perhaps due to their caseless ammo?), in all other respects they are very much firearms as we known them, and characters are forever getting bullets lodged in them. (Well, almost as we know them. In Heart of Gold, Wash fires a revolver on what can only be described as "burst mode".)
- In the movie Serenity, this seems taken to extremes, with an anti-aircraft gun being salvaged from an attacked settlement and fitted on the ship for use in space combat; in fact, similar guns were adapted for space-station defense by the Soviet space program, making this Stranger Than Fiction.

Video Games

In Super Smash Bros Brawl, it was specifically said that Solid Snake could not use guns... but his rocket launcher, mortar, grenades, and land mines are all good. This may have also been for gameplay reason though, since a projectile that moves almost instantly (like Sheik's needles) that you could fire almost constantly would be really cheap (also, explosions are more fun and more hilarious). Also, Fox, Falco, Wolf, and Samus get to use energy weapons, but that's more a matter of Frickin Laser Beams than this.
Occurs within the Command And Conquer novelization of Tiberium Wars. Within the novel, the regular infantry of Nod (the bad guys) are armed with energy weapons. While Nod do have lasers within the game, its only limited to special forces, while the regular mooks get conventional weapons. The trope is almost invoked by one soldier "Where the hell'd they get-" after seeing the lasers. The change isn't because of censorship, but as a result of a continuity error.
- In the expansion to Tiberium Wars, the Black Hand subfaction can upgrade their basic mooks to use lasers. That said, they are Elite Mooks, since the Black Hand is apparently Nod's elite.
Inverted (sort of) in Osu Tatakae Ouendan. At first the cops use real guns to fight rampaging robots which don't do anything. Then they figure out their weakness and attack with water guns instead, which are very effective.

Web Animation

"Cheat Commandos", a direct parody of GI Joe, uses conventional guns that make conventional gunfire sounds but fire laser blasts. The enemy faction is actually named Blue Laser.

Western Animation

GI Joe, number 1. (I'll get those Blue Lasers!) In fact, some of the early episodes of the series had the guns firing laser beams, but making more or less realistic automatic weapons fire sound effects. It didn't take long for the animators to replace them with Sci Fi laser beam sounds, though. This effect actually made the Joes' laser-specialist characters, Flash and Sci-Fi, utterly useless in the cartoon. By contrast, the comic book version wasn't limited by such censorship, and not only featured real ammunition, but several character deaths along the way (including one storyline in which several Joes were massacred by one insane Saw-Viper, something that would have never gotten past the Media Watchdogs).
- In another, Cobra managed to get the Joes' funding cut down to the point where they had to ration the bullets used for target practice, even showing the bullets themselves in a box.
- To make things worse, in one episode, a Joe specifically referred to his rifle (well, "weapon," anyway) as a "laser"...and an even later episode showed a Joe moving a slider control on the back of his weapon from a marked "Stun" setting to "Max." A search of episode scripts gives a number of other occasions where weapons (from both sides) are referred to as "lasers," specifically, in dialogue.
- And, naturally, this is coupled by other evidence, visual and otherwise, indicating that the various weapons AREN'T lasers. (Humbug. Let the fanWanking explain it.)
- This troper distinctly recalls hearing one reference in the entire series to "tracer ammo", apparently implying that what we've been seeing is supposed to be tracers. Doesn't look much like real footage of tracers, but hell it is only a cartoon.
  - The videogame Rainbow Six: Vegas references this with the code "GIJohnDoe" which changes the tracer bullets into blue and red laser beams. Guess which side fires which?
The same trope was used almost exactly the same way in future cartoon incarnations, such as the CGI movies and G.I. Joe: Sigma Six.
Partially justified in Gargoyles, one of the few series which dealt with the matter semi-realistically: while the first few episodes portrayed "particle beam" weapons as being accessible only to the very rich (such as millionaire David Xanatos), everybody else carried and used real guns. However, in the episode "Deadly Force", mob boss Tony Dracon steals a shipment of these and sells several of them on the street. Thus, the writers establish that there are energy weapons available for villains to use if they know where to look. They specifically comment that the particle beam is invisible, the laser that you can see is just for targeting.
- Which actually gets it backwards, since a real laser would normally be invisible from the side (unless it's passing through mist or dust or is extremely intense), while a particle beam is more likely to ionize the atmosphere and make it glow like a lightning bolt does.
- In any case, this doesn't explain why every single bad guy out there, even muggers, use lasers instead of guns; surely they're not easier to obtain...
- Also notably, one of the protagonists has a real gun, which looks like a real firearm, and fires real bullets, and she actually uses it (and, at one point, is shot by it in the aforementioned Very Special Episode). It's because she's a police officer, naturally. She also gets shot with her own gun after Broadway (playing around with it) drops it, further pushing the point that guns aren't toys.
The old X-Men animated series was a serious offender. Everything shoots "lasers". Machine guns shoot lasers. Tanks shoot big red beams that somehow arc like heavy artillery. Also typical for this trope, the series had the anti-mutant supremacist group stockpile what were clearly regular munitions, despite constantly using laser weapons onscreen. Also typical; heroes and bad guys alike constantly get shot and get back up seconds and a pained grunt later.
- Even sewer-dwelling edge-people have lasers! The animated version of the battle between Storm and Callisto for leadership of the Morlocks was fought with what looked like double-bladed lightsabres. (In the original comic book, it was a knife fight.)
In X-Men Evolution, the weapons used by Cody and his friends are explained as being mining tools modified to fire at longer ranges. This doesn't explain, however, why the Army was using tasers and gas missiles. Mercifully, an episode set in World War II had more realistic guns.
Alongside X-Men, Spider Man The Animated Series (known for its particularly heavy censorship and restrictions) also excessively used laser weaponry. Many realistic guns were not allowed, and no firearms could shoot bullets, so instead they fired lasers complemented by "futuristic" sound effects. This often led to preposterous scenes in which ordinary policemen wielded bizarre, futuristic pistols, and the mere appearances of realistic-looking guns (as seen in "Tombstone" and "Day of the Chameleon") were pointed out as major exceptions. (One brief, honest-to-goodness exception comes late in the series, in "Secrets of the Six".)
- Personally, given that this is a setting in which people can tamper with genetic material to induce superhuman powers (with or without physical expressions of that power), natural mutations can provide superpowers, and Power Armour and Giant Robots are viable weapons of war being produced by munitions companies (Iron Man, anyone?), this troper always felt that it makes sense for people to carry energy weapons.
The Spectacular Spider Man, on the other hand, has cops and common criminals use guns which are meant to be realistic ones, but still sound more like lasers in the TV broadcast. The DVD, however, has them sounding more realistically.
Kim Possible. All about the crazy special effect beams. The police, secret agents, and other authorities are often completely unarmed. The base defenders at Area 51 have rifles, in one episode, but they never fire; their appearance might well be an oversight.
- And on the same vein, American Dragon Jake Long. Apparently, Disney prefers to use melee weapons like swords, axes, and polearms as charged, ranged energy weapons in fights, instead of, you know, actual melee weapons, and even if by some chance, they use them as melee weapons, don't expect them to be any match for the heroes' convenient reflexes and agility.
An episode of the Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes cartoon did a Lampshade Hanging, where at one point the villain complained, "If this were prime-time, I could use real bullets!"
In one interesting subversion, Batman The Animated Series had bad guys almost always attack the hero with firearms, most notably Thompson submachineguns. Sure, marquee villains like Mr. Freeze and The Joker had gimmick guns that fired ice beams or laughing gas, but all the mooks had to make do with more mundane armaments. Use of the Thompson is almost a trope all by itself. This may have something to do with Batman's adamant hatred of guns. Later DCAU shows such as Superman The Animated Series and Justice League got the same free pass.
- This went so far as to have things that were not originally intended as weapons (like a medical prototype laser or a sonic drilling device) be gun-shaped anyway, so enemies could easily attack Batman with it. You'd expect them to be designed with a little more industrial safety.
- Though they did give the guns in Superman a "futuristic" design (along with the cars, the trains, and the city in general). This may have been due to a different design ethos (the Gothic Batman vs. the Zeerust Superman), or because Intergang was selling arms to criminals provided to them by the technologically advanced Fourth World due to Darkseid's interest in destroying Superman, or both.
- On a related note, of the DCAU's peers, Teen Titans (whose placement in the DCAU has long been debated) and The Batman (not so much) are forbidden to use guns, although both saw exceptions in their respective TV movies. The Batman, to its credit, had its gun-deprived cops wielding not lasers, but decidedly more realistic tasers.
  - Technically, The Batman featured guns in a number of episodes, they were just made to look substantially different from regular guns and were only ever fired on a couple of occasions. On those occasions, however, they did appear to fire regular old bullets.
  - This troper thinks that Teen Titans used this trope very well, and found that the laser guns complimented the city police's Stormtrooper-esque uniform quite well, and the whole ensemble actually added to the show's atmosphere and internal believability, because you got the impression that the Titans are actually a necessity in Jump City, because the police force is so beleaguered by metahuman-related disaster that they need full body armor and More Dakka just to function and give their cops a decent chance at surviving a serious problem.
In Godzilla: The Series, futuristic laser weapons were used by the army instead of guns. This is partly justified by the fact that regular guns won't really affect giant monsters, but the lasers don't seem to be helpful either.
- This is actually an interesting example of lasers being acquired during the series. In early episodes, real guns (including M16s) are used. During the "Monster Wars" story arc, the invading aliens end up leaving some of their Energy Weapons on Earth when they retreat. Soon after that, lasers show up as military weapons, in all likelihood reverse-engineered from the alien ones.
Averted in Darkwing Duck; sure, DW had his gas gun, but many of the villains used normal guns. Lucky for Darkwing, they went to the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Darkwing Duck wasn't forced to Never Say Die either.
- Until Toon Disney got its hands on the show, that is. They even cut out a shot of Megavolt firing a lightning gun.
Averted in the original 1960s version of Jonny Quest. It's most obvious in the famous episode, "The Robot Spy," where a military base throws apparently its entire arsenal at the robot from rifles to tanks, but nothing short of Dr. Quest's experimental para-power ray gun can bring it down. The twist is that although the gun destroys the robot, Dr. Quest is far from satisfied, as the gun was intended to cleanly immobilize machinery by draining its power, not simply work as an exotic artillery piece.
When the Gerry Anderson series Stingray was turned into a movie by mashing a few episodes together, the scenes where the various craft fired torpedoes at each other were changed so that laser beams were fired instead.
- Same creator, same principle, different series: when some episodes of Captain Scarlet were mashed together to create a movie, the missiles fired by the Mysteron saucers were turned into lasers, and shoddy-looking ones at that. It is possible that this was simply an attempt to make them more alien, but either way it failed at whatever it was trying to do.
Ben 10 usually has this as a Justified Trope, being a sci-fi cartoon. That doesn't explain why mall security has lasers in one episode, though. (Or a helicopter that also shoots lasers, but that's another thing altogether.) Okay, so maybe its not so justified. Maybe the shoplifters are just getting really out of hand?
Several cuts were made in the English dub of SonicX. For instance, several military troopers holding Sonic and his friends at gunpoint shot real bullets in the Japanese original, but were changed to lasers in the dub.
- This becomes even less believable when lasers that were previously guns are shown being shot around in a Space Station takeover during a flashback of an event which took place fifty years previously. Because of course, they had lasers in the nineteen-fifties.
  - A space station in the 1950s, on the other hand, is entirely believable...
Sometimes averted in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003). While the trope was initially in full effect (with the exception of a robot-mounted mini-gun)—as evidenced in an episode where Raphael faces an organized crime group armed with chains and bats instead of guns—more realistic-looking guns started appearing as the series wore on and 4Kids grew less restrictive. The second season featured stylized machine guns (and in one exceptional instance, a revolver), which evolved into more realistic ones in the third season; it wasn't until the fourth season that handguns began appearing. While laser weapons did appear throughout the series (and far more frequently than "real" firearms), their appearance was justified in that at first, only the particularly well-funded used them; however, once an alien invasion left a large amount of advanced ordnance lying around, a black market was created, and street gangs began using them as well.
Justified in Transformers Generation 1. The writers knew that they weren't going to get away with having humans use real guns, so Chip and leading industrialists are shown in a short montage "developing weapons for humanity to combat the Decepticon threat" or some such line. From that point forward, even private security guards had lasers.
- Early episodes has humans using normal guns... Except that Transformers are Immune To Bullets. It doesn't end well for the humans.
- In Transformers Animated it's not quite clear whether the various police officers and drones are using lasers or regular guns (though Captain Fanzone was clearly shown using a rocket launcher once), and most of the human criminals are supervillains using more bizarre weapons like Trick Arrows and a ray shot from the horn of a stuffed unicorn. Of course, Animated is set in the 22nd Century, so it's not that out of place.
Danny Phantom. Justified, since all weapons in question were designed to fight ghosts. Battle scenes show that ghosts can phase through solid things like rockets and grenades (and thus presumably bullets), but they don't even attempt to phase through ectoplasmic weapons.
Exo Squad half-hearted uses this: weapons create energy blasts and the standard laser sound. However, closeup shots of weapons sometimes show belts of linked ammunition.
Thundarr The Barbarian had his "sunsword", a mystic weapon of power, not remotely ripped off from any energy-bladed weapons you might find on Star Wars. It's properties were somewhat interesting. It could cut through brick walls, reduce solid steel to ribbons, and hack through forests with ease, but every single time he tried to use it on an animal-type-organism, it was immune, to his endless surprise! At best, it operated as a kind of club. More often, he just stood over the defeated villain and threatened him! The villain, apparently unaware the sunsword was useless against all animal tissues, usually surrendered.
In The Adventures of Sam And Max: Freelance Police, the title characters never got to use their guns, but they did use all manner of explosives and blunt instruments, and the occasional flamethrower.
The Street fighter cartoon adaptation had a chinese drug cartel using laser guns. Also in the Final fight episode, the bad guy used a wheelchair with lasers.
For some reason, the human Cowboy Cop reluctant ally of The Mighty Ducks also has a laser pistol. Then again, criminals in this series seem to be able to get their hands on rather exotic futuristic weapons, so we can probably say it's Twenty Minutes Into The Future.
Nobody remembers the Rambo cartoon show of the mid 80s? The Rambo movies were reviled at the time for being ultra violent and bloody, yet the cartoon gets made anyway and substituted laser guns - complete with "machine gun" sound effects.
Similarly, the original [[Robocop]] animated series had villains using laser weapons instead of regular guns. May be justified by Robocop being set Twenty Minutes Into The Future though.
In Zorro: Generation Z, the mayor's Mooks have weapons that look an awful lot like Star Trek The Next Generation phasers, while Diego himself uses a weapon that is a combination laser, Laser Blade and laser whip. Some of the criminals have Laser Blades as well. This troper initially assumed it was meant to be set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, but there's no other evidence of this.
Averted in C.O.P.S. - despite being set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, both the C.O.P.S. and crooks use guns that shoot regular old bullets. The only one who has a laser weapon as standard-issue is Mace, who is the team's laser expert.
The Chaotic episode Chaotic Crisis kinds went the Rule Of Cool route on this one, with the human military using tanks with flamethrowers.
Not-quite-a-gun example: In the cartoons based on The Legend Of Zelda, Link couldn't kill the enemies by stabbing them with his sword like in the games. Instead, he had to defeat them by shooting them with the Sword Beams — which are also in the games, but are only available at full health and thus aren't used as much as regular stabbing. In one episode, Link foolishly trades his sword for a fancier one which, he discovers at a critical moment, does not shoot laser beams. This renders him entirely defenseless despite the fact that the replacement is still a fully functional sword.
The Powerpuff Girls features an episode which shows policemen fire fully-functional, bullet-shooting pistols and machineguns which are, however, inexplicably coloured fire hydrant red. Whether they have the correct shape of real-world firearms is hard to judge, thanks to the show's... Simplistic animation style.