Nightmare Fuel / Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja

• Even if it's not focused on much in-show, the idea that typical high school upsets like breaking up, being bullied or losing friends can open you up to being turned into a mindless monster.
  • The monster designs themselves can get pretty unsettling at times.
• Some of the "destroy the ninja" plots are pretty horrifying when you remember they're aimed at a fourteen-year-old - McFist has tried to decaptitate him in multiple episodes, the Sorcerer almost crushed him (not in the figurative sense), one of Viceroy's robots tried to suffocate him by basically standing on his windpipe, he almost got vaporised in one episode (and if his scarf didn't have some sort of miraculous anti-strangulation function, that probably would have gotten him instead)...the list goes on.
• To a degree, how the season 1 finale is played. Most heroes in shows like this are at least equal to the big villains in power by the time they hit a showdown like this one...but this episode explicitly shows that Randy is enormously, laughably out of his league when facing the Sorcerer. Even when he brings Howard as the Tengu into it, it takes minutes for the Sorcerer to win, and he's about to kill Howard when the First Ninja intervenes.
• In "Fudge Factory", McFist almost succeeds in destroying the Ninja...via sticking his head in a high-speed industrial fan.
• "Ninjception" pretty much runs on it, figuratively and literally. The Sorcerer Orb that Randy got at the start of Season 2 invades his dreams and basically puppets his body to the school so he can free the Sorcerer and return the orb. Meanwhile, Randy is trapped in continual dreams of him accidentally destroying the world/killing Howard while Howard continually eggs him to "stick the ball in a hole" (the Orb breaking in the dream is what destroys everything and starts the next one)...then it turns out that dream Howard is actually the Orb's manifestation in the dream and he basically ends up looking like he's been possessed by a demon (slit eyes, floating, horrible neck cracking).
• "Randy Cunningham's Day Off" has Randy make like Ferris Bueller and fake being sick for a day off. Only unlike the movie where Bueller's lie escalated with various people visiting the house, Randy's little lie escalated to the point where the doctor ordered a missile strike to decontaminate the area!
• Detention Island. The worst offenders in Norrisville High school get sent to a former military stronghold turned detention center on a jungle island in the middle of the ocean filled with death traps. It's all run by a crazy A.I that can turn from friendly to psychotic the second cheating is involved. Bash is self-explanatory but what kind of other troublemakers does the school have for the school board to sign off on something like that?!
• "Ball's Well That Friends Well":
  • Evil!Julian manages to steal the power of the Sorcerer in addition to the power he already had, and nearly conquer Norrisville after sending Randy to the Land of Shadows.
  • To get out of the Land of Shadows, the gang has to basically get eaten by a monster.
  • Evil!Julian is so dangerous that Randy has to do the unthinkable and free the Sorcerer in order to beat him.
• Evil!Julian as a whole is Nightmare Fuel, at least most of the time. The most horrifying thing about him is that he came from an adorably sweet Perky Goth and looks like a Palette Swap of him, and also sound a lot like him. He's such a Soft-Spoken Creepy Teen that it's really unsettling...
  • There's also the scene where Evil!Julian tries to drag Julian into the Land of Shadows through the bathroom mirror in "Snow-klahoma!". It's both disturbing and kind of heart-breaking to listen to Julian scream for his life as he's trying to save himself from himself.
  • It gets worse when Evil!Julian succeeds in switching places with Julian in the Ice Maze. Not only does Julian panic even more than before, but the end of the episode shows him trying to call for help through a mirror at school.