Nightmare Fuel / Mega Man (Ruby-Spears)

• In a flashback during the first episode detailing Rock and Roll's creation, Dr. Wily had them strapped to an operating table to reprogram them. Via an electric drill to their heads. While they were awake. Complete with both of them struggling and the mad doctor creepily reassuring them about it. It's the robot equivalent of a lobotomy, and we see the drill approaching from Rock's point of view.
  • Wily's line as he approaches Rock and Roll with the drill is unsettling.
  Wily: A little tuck here, a little slice there, and you'll soon feel differently about this!
• Also in "The Beginning", Wily warned Light not to follow him after he kidnapped Rock and Roll. If he did, Ice Man would freeze him and Cut Man would slice him up.
• Wily's plans in "The Big Shake" and "The Day The Moon Fell" both involve causing extreme natural disasters, via earthquakes in the former and pulling the moon out of its orbit in the latter. They're played completely seriously and show just how much of a sociopathic monster Dr. Wily really is, being willing to cause mass murder and worldwide devastation just to make its survivors bow before him and prove his superiority to Dr. Light.
  Wily: I will create chaos! Destroy everything! Mankind will beg me to take over!
  • To give you an idea of how much of a Moral Event Horizon this is, Wily's own robots — robots he designed, programmed to be loyal and subservient to him and everything — vocally object to the moon plan. Considering these are the same bumbling dunderheads who are all too willing to try to destroy Mega Man on-sight and cause collateral damage without a care in the world, that's saying a lot.
• In "Electric Nightmare," Roll is battling a female cosmetics robot who gave her a bad facial. It's a fast fight, and cartoony until the end. Roll uses a buzzsaw to slice the robot in half across her stomach, her upper half falls to the floor, and then Roll vacuums her face off.
• The episode "Curse of The Lion Men" was not well-received, but it has one moment of genuine scariness. After zapping Dr. Light with his mind controlling lionizing Eye Beams, Tar turns his attention to Wily and turns him into a lion man as well. He then frisks him for his reprogramming device and zaps the Robot Masters with it, including Proto Man and Roll, turning them all loyal to him.
  Proto Man: (strained) You... are... our leader... Tar!
  • As part of a Death Trap, Mega and Rush are about to be ground up at a salmon-canning company. They actually show the salmon hitting the saw blades.
• The image of Rock/Mega on a lab table as a Terminator-esque endoskeleton in the intro is a little unnerving, even though it only shows up for a few seconds before dissolving into an image of Mega from that same position but with his "skin."
• And there's the first nightmare in "Mega Dreams"; while the idea of Guts Man and Cut Man pretending to be a couple may amuse you, that moment comes after a shot of a stuffed dino with what looks like blood on its muzzle.
• In "Brain Bots", Wily places Mega Man in a Death Trap. The trap consists of a Descending Ceiling with spikes. Unlike some death traps, Mega was bound to the floor as it descended. What pushes this into nightmare fuel is what Wily said about it; he uses it to recycle robots he no longer needs into scrap metal. Meaning he's done this to his own robots.
  • What makes it worse is that some robots, like Fire Man and Star Man, were only ever in one episode and never seen or mentioned again.
• Some of Cut Man's lines fall under this. His Peter Lorre-esque voice makes it worse.
  Cut Man: Open it nice and slow. I'll give them haircuts...from the neck up!
• In "Mega X", the amount of destruction caused by Wily's superlaser. It vaporizes the surrounding landscape and makes Wily think he did the same to both Mega Man and X.
• Vile and Spark Mandrill are pretty scary, as thanks to their far more advanced armor and weaponry, the technology of Mega Man's era has literally no effect on them to the point they're completely unstoppable until X arrives to even the odds; and even he has trouble with them. No wonder even Wily was terrified and subservient around Vile in particular when the two force him to help them take the Lightanium rods.
• In "Bro Bots", Proto Man's revelation as The Mole is met with resistance. How does he control the heroes? By threatening to shoot the governor in the face.
  Proto Man: Power down, or I'll give Deacon a plasma shave!
  • In the same episode, Mega Man stumbles onto Wily's plan to create robot doubles of elected officials and control the city with them by finding a copy of Dr. Light. And given Wily had both Light and the governor suspended over a pit of acid, he may have been going for a Kill and Replace scenario.
  • And likewise, Needle Man's first "death" in the Museum scene. He initially threatens Proto Man (who was pretending to be good at the time to fool Mega Man and his family), but the Psycho Prototype simply walks up to him, reminds him of their plan, and then proceeds to open him up and rip a fistful of wires out of him before throwing his still-spasming body at Heat Man. Granted, he got repaired later, but even for this show's standards (as covered below), that was just brutal.
• Sometimes the Robot Masters (and Rush) are literally blown to pieces. This isn't too bad until one episode showed Roll in pieces, which got creepy as Mega Man picks up her head to talk with it.
• The show often used acid as a weapon, one time weaponizing acid rain; some kids became convinced that they'd die in an acid rain storm.
• While the episode involving Mega Man and other robots "devolving" may be ludicrous (robots don't turn into caveman-like robots), it was still freaky seeing their gradual transformation.
• "Bot Transfer" has Mega Man and Snake Man swapping bodies, with an appropriately panicked reaction from the former. Their voices aren't mental, so Mega Man is stuck with a snake's hiss as well as his body, and completely unable to get help; worse, his family doesn't suspect the "real" Mega Man until the last second.
• A lot of bad guys get broken into pieces, usually along the torso joints. This includes Fire Man being pulled apart by Roll's vacuum in The Beginning, or robots getting bitten apart by Snake Man's weapon. Crystal Man gets his arm blown off at the elbow in The Mega Man in the Moon, and is still walking around like that until the end of the episode. And at one point Dark Man is reduced to a torso, half an arm, and his head, and he's still completely aware of this- even having to drag himself around because no one will carry him when they run away at the end. Imagine if they did this to people for a second.
  • Probably the worst examples of this happening though, had to be either Needle Man having his wires torn out Mola Ram-style by Proto Man (mentioned above under Bro Bots), or Hard Man's demise in Bad Day at Peril Park. There, Hard Man is shown blocking Mega Man's Buster shots with his armour, taunting him all the while until eventually Mega Man fires a charged shot into his mouth. This causes Hard Man to panic and frantically claw at himself as he realises what's happening, before he swells up and explodes from the inside. Now normally, this wouldn't be so bad; but Hard Man is literally blown to realistic pieces, with machinery and internal mechanisms scattered everywhere. Mega Man even picks up one of his disembodied arms (with ripped wires and framework hanging out of it) to attain the Hard Knuckle afterward.