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In an example of the nerfing of violence, almost all guns in animated cartoons made since the late 1970s or early 1980s will use some form of energy principle. Sometimes it's explained. Mostly it's not.

Several reasons why:

• Lasers can be color coded by character alignment. (In fact, one weapon can change color to match the alignment of the user. One wonders whether GI Joe weapons actually have a good/evil switch on the back.)
• Energy Weapons sometimes look cool on TV. Mostly they aren't. Real guns are actually kinda blah. So are real lasers, in fact.
• Shooting someone with a bullet is an imitable act, but a kid can't find his Dad's laser rifle and zapfry his buddy. Yet.
• Another advantage of using energy weapons is that our measure of how much damage it should do is removed. 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 bullet lodged in his chest.

In general, most production houses have (under pressure from various Media Watchdogs who believed cartoon violence stimulated real violence) eliminated anything and everything that looked like a real weapon from their cartoons. Similarly, networks have gone back and Bowdlerized classic cartoons to remove firing guns and casual use of TNT. 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.

Thus we end up with such things as Thundarr The Barbarian's "sunsword", which didn't have a physical blade, and the ranger's "energy bow" in Dungeons And Dragons. Similarly, many Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons simply no longer make any sense as broadcast because of all the cuts and deletions. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine if a quarter-century of this policy has made a significant difference in the amount of violence in society.

Sometimes, with a particuarly bad edit, you can still see that they're OBVIOUSLY guns - they look like guns, they have magazines, and empty bullet cartridges still rattle out the back, as in the 4Kids edit of Sonic X, but they're just obviously guns that fire lasers.

See also Never Say Die, The Hit Flash, Inverse Law Of Sharpness And Accuracy.

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Examples:

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.

Anime

• The weapon originally being held by Helmeppo in the One Piece pic above (from the Four Kids Entertainment edit, not the Funimation one) was originally a flintlock pistol, but was heavily edited into something that looks more like a showerhead on a spring. This already awful example is made worse by the fact that the gun is actually still visible at times. Here's a YouTube vid - notice several things, including:
  • where Coby's eyes are pointing
  • obviously, the characters' response
  • what Helmeppo is holding at about 0:56
  • how conspicuously pasted the hammer looks at 1:09. I'd go as far as to say that if you didn't know what was really happening, this scene would make no sense.
  • For the final nail in the coffin, try holding the cursor on 0:41 — you'll clearly see the gun barrel at Coby's head. Release, and it'll quickly vanish. Apparently they didn't even bother altering it in every frame.
  • And apparently, threatening someone with a gun is bad, but it's okay for the five-year-olds this Macekre is meant for to threaten people with hammers?
  • Side-note: they used that thing for a pistol, but most rifles are turned into freakin' water guns.
  • To be fair, this would go a long way to explain the golden age of piracy. The pirates have comic book physics super powers, the Navy has water guns.
  • Another side-note: obviously censoring like this sucks, but wouldn't it be way more awesome to see pirates wielding frikkin' lasers?!
• 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).
  • That didn't fool this troper for a second when he was younger. They always were, and always will be Gatling guns.
  • Me neither. Arm cannons for the win.
• 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.
  • 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.
  • Another example of this in Yu-Gi-Oh is Marik's Millennium Rod, which, in the original Japanese version, contains a hidden blade revealed by removing the rod's head. At one point, Marik stands over his erstwhile henchman with one half of the rod in each hand, preparing to stab him. The dagger is edited out in the 4Kids version, and Marik is just shown holding the Rod - rather less threatening. This is shown about halfway down this page.
  • Subverted in Yu-Gi-Oh GX in the first opening - it actually says "Never say die!" 4 times and in episode 7 one of the characters tells Jaden that he has a great "never-say-die attitude".
  • 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, or we'll shoot you with our invisible guns!
    ...
    Tristan: Bakura! Don't be a hero! They've got invisible guns!
  • Don't forget the buzzsaws that became "dark energy disks that will send your mind to the Shadow Realm" in the episode featuring Arkana.
    • "Is there no depths to which 4Kids won't sink?"
• A painful example of this trope can be found in the Edited For Syndication 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 discernable 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.

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 donuts 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.

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 Stephen 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.
• Averted in The Incredibles, where robbers and mooks alike use normal firearms, despite it being a Pixar movie. Or perhaps because of it, given their savvy.

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.)
    • The videogame Rainbow Six Vegas references this with the code "GI John Doe" which changes the tracer bullets into blue and red laser beams. Guess which side fires which?
• Gargoyles explained this in the story, and did a Very Special Episode about the dangers of real firearms. In this episode, arms dealers get particle beam weapons and sold several on the streets before they were caught. 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.
  • 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.
    • You forgot to mention that said police officer 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 had the anti-mutant supremacist group stockpile what were clearly munitions, despite constantly using laser weapons onscreen.
  • 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 the later X-Men Evolution Re Tool, 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. Curiously, the one group whom you would expect to have advanced weaponry, SHIELD, appear to use conventional assault rifles.
• 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".)
  • The new Spider-Man series, The Spectacular Spider Man, seems to be in some weird area between lasers and real guns. There have been civilians using real guns with realistic sounds, but all the cops seem have to have guns that always fire lasers, but the sound seems to sometimes switch between a real gun and a cheesy laser effect. Maybe they're just Time Cops.
• 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 Startrooper-esque uniform quite well, and the whole ensemble actually added to the show's atmosphere and internal belivability, 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 laser don't seem to be helpful either.
• 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...
• Not-quite-a-gun-or-editing 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.) They also established that everything that is "defeated" (including Ganon himself) just gets sent to a magic jar in Ganon's lair, pretty much setting this as the definitive Zero Sum Game.
  • 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. This ten-year-old viewer was jumping up and down shouting for him to, for the love of God, just stab the darned thing.
  • The jar at least served one purpose: In the Legend Of Zelda series, like many other videogames, most defeated enemies do come back to life as soon as you leave the screen. So to an extent, the jar just served as a justification for this.
• Partially 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.
• Sort of 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.
  • 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 centuries, 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 subverts this in a way: weapons create energy blasts and the standard laser sound. However, closeup shots of weapons sometimes show belts of linked ammunition.

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). 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.
• 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.

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