They always say to grow up big and strong, and dragons take that very seriously.
Dragons in cartoons tend to come in all shapes and sizes, often involving fire. Lots and lots of fire.- Adventures of the Gummi Bears:
- One episode has a female friendly dragon. Contrary to the idea that all other characters (both humans and bears) have of the dragons, she's an Actual Pacifist harmless creature.
- Another friendly, yet apparently non-sentient (or at least one that can't talk), appears in another episode befriending Cubbi and Sunni. This dragon is more serpentine and has no legs, but has wings and breath fire.
- Another dragon, this time a baby apparently from another race than the others (as has legs and wings and is much bigger), appears in another episode. The baby seems harmless save for his fire-related hiccup. The mother is more menacing but seems to be motivated only by Mama Bear instinct as the baby was mishandled by Duke Igthorn.
- In another episode, "The Magnificent Seven Gummies", the Gummi Bears travel to China to fight an Eastern Dragon.
- Adventure Time: Dragons are vaguely-serpentine Giant Flyers that breathe fire. Aside from that, "Different" doesn't even begin to cut it
◊.- Puhoy introduces the Blanket Dragon
- Neddy the candy dragon, a Nervous Wreck with an upside-down face.
- Puhoy introduces the Blanket Dragon
- Aladdin: The Series:
- One episode has the Genie build a mechanical dragon to test Aladdin's bravery. Unfortunately, Genie accidentally destroys the remote used to control the dragon, and as a result the mechanical dragon starts to malfunction and goes on a rampage.
- Another episode revolves around two twins, one good and one evil, that can magically fuse together to form a Chinese dragon. Whoever initiates the fusion gains control of the new body, and so the evil twin constantly seeks the good twin to form the evil dragon body and wreak havoc. By the end of the episode, Aladdin and his friends teach the good twin to stand up for himself, causing him to overpower the evil twin and form a good dragon for the first time.
- American Dragon: Jake Long: Dragons are all weredragons, who are collectively tasked with mediating and protecting the magical world. They're only implied to reproduce in human form, usually with humans because dragons are rare; being a dragon somehow skips generations in Jake's family. Despite this, dragon form is referred to as their true form, which is shown from how they catch (silly) diseases and when Jake is hit with a potion that nullifies magical illusions. Dragons are also weak against Sphinx hair. The dragon forms also vary from nation to nation, mainly by facial differences (length of head, horns, etc). Jake, being a mixed-race character, in dragon form shows markings of both traditional Western and Eastern dragons, whose dominance depends on the season. In Season 1, he had a more Western body type (big and buff) with a longer Eastern type head; in Season 2, he strangely has a more long and skinny Eastern style body, with head and face now little more than his human self with scales and a snout.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: Adding to its absurdly long list of Mix-and-Match Critters, dragons are a hybrid of Western and Eastern dragon types. They are like eastern ones except they have wings, are associated with fire and are kept by humans as a means of transportation, and appear quite intelligent. It later turns out that they are thought to be extinct, since people started hunting them to get the title "dragon", and are actually the source of firebending.
- Notably, the Sun Warriors claim that fire, particularly that which the sun is made of, is the source of life as it produces the heat necessary to live. That means, at least philosophically, that The Last Airbender's dragons breathe both fire and sheng chi.
- The Legend of Korra confirms that dragons were in fact the beings that taught Wan, the first Avatar, how to firebend without the use of the Lion Turtles. Later, one appears in Season 3 which looks more Western than Eastern under the command of Zuko, implying that the species is also recovering.
- Ben 10: Alien Force has alien dragons! They resemble Western dragons in appearance but take Eastern influences in being incredibly intelligent, advanced enough that they've built their own civilization, as well as achieved space travel. The one Ben and company first encounter was a mapmaker that landed on Earth 1000 years ago before being imprisoned...and was as big and powerful as one would expect of dragons of legends in addition to that intelligence. He wasn't very happy after he broke out and nearly went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge before being convinced to just leave the planet and head home to his family.
- Biker Mice from Mars: "So Life Like" had Lawrence Limburger try to kill the Biker Mice by bringing cartoon and comic strip villains to life. The first villain he brought to life was Snortblast, a villain from the in-universe comic strip Biker Knight who happened to be a dragon who breathed fire through his nostrils.
- In Blackstar, the title character's steed, Warlock, is a clear hybrid of equine (general body plan, posture, forward-bending front knees, "mane") and draconic (green skin, batlike wings, sharp teeth, fire-breathing) traits.
- The Big Bad in Bravestarr is the giant magic-using bullskull-headed cyborg ghost dragon Stampede. Technically, he appears to be an undead broncosaur, an extinct animal species that looked like a cross between a bull and a dinosaur. He has been known to reanimate fossilized broncosaur skeletons to use as Kaiju, and also once created a robot broncosaur that was so powerful and intelligent it rebelled against him.
- Dave the Barbarian has Faffy, a small lightning-breathing dragon who looks like a winged pig. It also has more conventional dragons. Faffy himself is routinely referred to as a "flying potato" and noted to be pretty pathetic by dragon standards.
- Dragon Flyz: Airlandis's dragons are wyverns. The villains' dragons have the standard pair of wings and four legs instead of two.
- Dragon Booster has quadrupedal dragons that are used as modes of transportation. The main focus (Beau) can change colors to avoid attention.
- The very dragon-like Dragamon from the Dragamonz mini-series, are divided into five distinct races. Each of the five races, known as the Wildthorn, Stormclaw, Firewing, Slytoxin, and Stonescale respectively. Are attuned to the different source of elemental magic.
- Dragon Hunters, as the name suggests, takes this trope and runs with it. Gwizdo and Lian-chu, the titular hunters, go after a number of different kinds of dragons over the course of the series, and no two alike. With all the variety, "dragon" basically seems interchangeable with "monster" in this setting.
- The Dragon Prince: Dragons are powerful, magical creatures and the most powerful inhabitants of the magical land of Xadia. They are divided into distinct races attuned to the different sources of primal magic, and are further split between "regular" dragons and the immense and powerful archdragons, who are the rulers of their kind. Adults are very large, but infants are the size of a small dog, and eggs are easily stuffed in backpacks.
- Sun dragons are the most traditional kind — they tend to come in warm-spectrum colors ranging from gold and yellow through orange and to red, although green and gray-blue ones have also been seen, and breathe fire.
- Storm dragons are gray to blue in coloring, possess numerous horns and thick manes of white hair and breathe lightning. Their eggs are blue with colorful specks, pulse with light and can only hatch during thunderstorms.
- The Dragon Slayers breaks the definition of dragon. It does have a few traditional dragons, but also has big giant warty hoglike things, floating blobby tentacled things, and one of the main characters was a "dragon" who is basically Ren with a couple of horns for garnish.
- Dragon Tales has flying dragons with pouches in which they store things and small feathery wings. One two-headed dragon is a type of conjoined twin.
- Dragons: Riders of Berk, the Sequel Series to How to Train Your Dragon, features dragons shown in the film as well as new ones, although some of the new dragons were mentioned or shown in the book of dragons in the film. The dragons all fly and breathe fire, but there is still a huge variety. The Deadly Nadder shoots spikes out of its tail, the Monstrous Nightmare can set itself on fire, the Thunderdrum has a roar loud enough to be a sonic weapon, the Timberjack can slice through trees with its razor-sharp wings, the Scauldron can vomit superheated water, the Rumblehorn is an armored behemoth with a nose like a bloodhound's and so on.
- In DuckTales (1987), Big Time Beagle was briefly turned into a dragon by accident thanks to Magica de Spell in the episode "Send in the Clones".
- The Fairly OddParents! featured a Time Travel episode where Timmy travels to the Middle Ages and fights a dragon. They are stated to be impervious to magic, so Timmy has to fight it alone... until King Arthur shows up.
- Fangbone! has featured and mentioned dragons a handful of times, most of which are fairly typical western-style dragons that Venomous Drool sends out to battle Fangbone and Bill. However, one episode featured a Tar Dragon, a massive black-scaled, six-legged dragon that breathes thick, sticky black tar instead of fire. Said dragon was in fact the Bond Creature of Venomous Drool accidentally summoned to Earth by Bill.
- Garfield and Friends: One rather odd episode is about Garfield and his owner Jon Arbuckle ordering food at a Chinese restaurant, where the waitress notices that Garfield is eating too much food. She cautions Jon by telling him an ancient Chinese folktale about an evil dragon who threatened a village to completely relinquish their food, otherwise he would have set their village on fire. A big tiger-striped cat challenges the dragon to an eating contest in order to get the villagers' food back and wins. The dragon grows furious and chases away the cat, and while everyone's food has finally been rescued by the cat, both the dragon and the cat were never seen again. After she's finished, the waitress tells Jon that if the orange-and-black cat's descendant (in this case, Garfield himself) eats too much, then the dragon from the folktale will have his revenge. The episode ends with Garfield and Jon leaving the restaurant, while the dragon looks on while disguised as a paper dragon.
- Gravedale High: In "Goodbye Gravedale", one of the substitute teachers chosen for Max Schneider's class after the students drove him away because of a misunderstanding was a dragon named Miss Burns, who proved to be a Sadist Teacher by forcing the students to take 12 tests on the same day. In the end, she is eliminated when the class tricks her into using her fire breath on the sprinkler system, causing it to go out.
- Hellboy Animated:
- Hellboy: Sword of Storms apparently set out to make its dragons as different as possible, stretching the definition of "dragon" a bit further than it could go in the process. Everything from human-sized, human-shaped ogres with lightning powers to unimaginably huge, squashy undersea demons are identified as dragons. This might not have been so jarring if the audience saw anything onscreen that anyone off the street would call a dragon.
- Hellboy has also fought regular dragons in some of the spin-offs, including The Dragon Pool, which features a Eastern-style dragon who breathed fire. As well as, in typical Hellboy fashion, his zombie offspring and the result of his long-ago breeding with humans. He also fought & defeated (sort of) the St. Leonard Wyrm, which looked more like a cross between a giant python & a saltwater croc than anything.
- The Herculoids. Zok, the dragon with laser beam eyes and tail.
- In Hilda, Lindworms are Western-style dragons with no legs and sea-weed like fins. The only one seen in the series enjoys gardening.
- On Ivor the Engine, which is mostly a slice-of-life story with no obvious fantasy outside of Ivor's implied sapience, Jones the Steamer finds a strange rock by a volcano outside of Llaniog. When it's left in Ivor's firebox, it hatches into a dragon; "Not one of your lumping great fairy-tale dragons, but a small, trim, heraldic Welsh dragon." His name is Idris, and he comes out of the volcano to sing with the town choir on occasion.
- Jackie Chan Adventures:
- The main antagonist, Shendu, is a dragon, a demon one at that. He has traits from both the Western and Eastern aspects of dragons, which is probably not a surprise given that it is a Western show that has an emphasis on Eastern traditions. Even stranger is how his statue in the early episodes is a traditional Chinese design, long and swirling, but his actual form is the mixed form above. However, he is a shapeshifter. That might explain the difference between his spiritual and physical form.
- Drago looks even more humanoid than his father, or his uncles and aunts. It's never discussed, but he may not be a full-blooded demon.
- Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters has plenty of these, specifically Tatsurion◊, Moorna◊, Orion◊, Nechrodragon◊, and Terradragon◊.
- Magi-Nation: The hyrens and guardian hyrens. Best examples, the guardian hyren of The Weave is a green anthropomorphic chicken, the guardian hyren of Naroom is a winged plant-cat, the guardian hyren of the Underneath is a bat-wyvern, and the guardian hyren of The Deeps of Orothe is a giant squid-like creature. The fog and mist hyrens of Bograth are made of water vapor. Snout and Peepers are closer to a traditional Western dragon, but two headed with an uneven number of eyes and nostrils per head. Also they are all dream creatures aka sentient masses of energy created from the dreams of magi.
- Miraculous Ladybug: Being one of the twelve Eastern Zodiac kwamis, Longg unsurprisingly fits the Eastern dragon archetype. He is intelligent, friendly, a Mentor Archetype (if a little long-winded), and grants the power to transform into wind, water, and/or lightning.
- Monkie Kid: The Dragon clan is this (despite looking like humans), as they have the ability to use the energy of a dragon or even become one.
- My Little Pony: Dragons are the franchise's most commonly seen species after the ponies themselves. The most notable dragon character, Spike, is a baby dragon smaller than the ponies, who lacks wings and goes around on two legs. When adult dragons are seen, they're typically much bigger, surly and antisocial, and in characterization vary from simple jerks to dangerous monsters.
- My Little Pony 'n Friends:
- In Rescue at Midnight Castle, Tirek uses dragon-like animals named Stratadons as minions, which he uses to kidnap ponies. He also uses dark magic to transform captured ponies into tusked, wingless, dragon-like beasts to pull his chariot.
- In "Through the Door", the monster from the Land of Legends is a cartoony European dragon with minuscule wings, a long neck, a shock of curly hair and the ability to breathe fire. Curiously, he's never actually referred to as a dragon. He's literally just a Punch-Clock Villain (the series really likes this trope) and is very Emo about having to be the bad guy all the time.
- In "Spike's Search", Spike sets out to find other dragons to learn from when he realizes he has no draconic role models in his life. Unluckily for him, the ones he finds — a trio of bipedal, wingless, crocodile-bellied louts — are bullies and gluttons who run a Protection Racket where they force villages to feed them in exchange for not burning them down. At the end, when Spike is feeling rather morose about his first impression of his species, Danny comforts him by saying that there must be more to dragons than that — there are lots of different kinds of ponies, so surely dragons must be different from each other too.
- My Little Pony (G3):
- Spike mentions waking up from a 1000-year nap, but he still looks like a baby. That really makes you wonder how dragons age...
- Whimsey Weatherbe is a female dragon with an orange body, yellow scales, brown hair, and pink wings. She can control the weather using her breath, such as by creating wind or snow.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Dragons are chiefly of the Western type, but can be very varied in appearance; individual dragons have appeared with traits including retractable thagomizers, additional limbs, hair, horns, crests, and extremely varied body shapes — one adolescent dragon stands on her tail, while another walks on his forelimbs instead of his hind ones. The majority seen are adolescents, which are bipedal and tend to be between twice and thrice the height of a pony. The adults are quadrupedal and in the same size range as houses. They breathe fire, which varies in color between individuals, and hoard gemstones because they eat them. They only appear sporadically in early seasons, but later ones feature them more extensively and expand more on their nature and culture.
- Dragons seem to age quite slowly but live a very long time. Spike's personality fits a kid between eight or ten years old, and the canon timeline supports him having lived about that long, but he's still tiny enough to ride on Twilight's back, and chubby as a toddler; the ponies all refer to him as a "baby" dragon. Meanwhile, adult dragons are large enough to swallow a pony in one bite (in Fluttershy's words) and, apparently, sleeping for one hundred years only qualifies as a nap.
- Dragon maturity is a complicated process. "Secret of My Excess" shows that it is related to greed and hoarding: the more they hoard the bigger they get and giving it up makes them shrink. "Molt Down", however, states that this "greed-induced bigness", as one dragon puts it, is not the "natural" way that dragons mature. Normal draconic puberty involves a young, still wingless dragon going through "the molt", a sort of sudden and acutely uncomfortable puberty where they gain painfully itchy red scales all over their bodies, become unable to control the volume of their voices, randomly belch gouts of fire and gain terrible body odor that attracts giant monsters that will try to eat them. At the end, the dragon becomes encased in a shell of rock and breaks out a few moments later with a newly grown pair of wings.
- "Gauntlet of Fire" expands on dragon society, revealing they have a monarchy of sorts led by a Dragon Lord, who rules with absolute authority (disobeying the Dragon Lord doesn't even seem to occur to dragons) but with term limits — at a certain point, the Lord has to step down and allow a new dragon to take their place in a contest that seems to change with each occasion, going by Torch's comment that he designed the episode's challenge himself. The dragon lord has the magical power to call other dragons to accept his challenge. The current Lord at the start of the episode, Torch, is also huge, much bigger than any other adult dragons seen. It also includes the first appearance of female dragons.
- Dragon eggs require volcanic levels of heat to incubate — the ones in "Sweet and Smoky" are laid in a communal nesting ground above a buried lake of lava, as anything cooler will not allow them to hatch.
- The second season FiM introduces Discord, a "draconequus" that has the head and body of an Eastern dragon but the horns and limbs of other creatures. He's the resident Anthropomorphic Personification of Disharmony and Chaos capable of bending reality to his very whims for a good laugh at the expense of others.
- Besides the canon dragon species, FiM has had a number of creatures that also fit this trope. Part 2 of the pilot features Steven Magnet, a sea serpent with an overall design reminiscent of both Western draconic sea monsters (overall snakelike body shape, no limbs save his arms) and Eastern dragons (hair and a mustache, an overall benevolent personality and the ability to render an entire river impassable, in his case a side effect of being upset). "Feeling Pinkie Keen" also has a hydra, a towering, reptilian Armless Biped with four heads on top of long necks that lives in a swamp and tries to eat the main characters. "The Last Crusade" mentions the existence of wyverns, but they're not described in any depth. The oddest of these is the tatzlwurm, which while based on a type of Alpine dragon more resembles a sandworm. Notably, both hydras and tatzlwurms are noted to be predators of young dragons.
- My Little Pony: Make Your Mark: In "The Isle of Scaly", the dragons are quadrupedal, unlike in G4, where they're bipedal. They have Cutie Mark-like patterns on their thighs like ponies, and they also specialize in elemental magic, not just fire in G4. Their magic is what makes their scales shimmer, which is lost when Opaline starts stealing their magic.
- My Little Pony 'n Friends:
- Noah's Animals and Other Stories: The old Dragon has a very typical western dragon design. He is also the Last of His Kind, and has lost the ability to breathe fire and fly.
- Pac Manand The Ghostly Adventures: Dragons have the typical western body type but only one eye.
- The Pirates of Dark Water featured dragons (or rather "Dagrons"), but they were apparently exceedingly rare. Dagrons were pretty much your standard green Western dragon critter. One episode featurd a magic cowl that would turn the wearer, physically and mentally, into a dagron.
- PJ Masks: The episode “The Dragon Gong” featured an Eastern dragon who could be summoned by ringing the titular gong, and was forced to obey whoever rung it. A later special reveals that she can turn into a human.
- Pocket Dragon Adventures: Like the franchise the animated series is adapted on, Pocket Dragons are mischievous but always friendly mouse-sized dragon race that love to live in human's homes and help with their chores. The series focuses on the main six of these creatures who live with a kindly old wizard.
- Potatoes and Dragons: The eponymous dragon can't fly, and its body and head are just kind of a green lump with stegosaur-like spikes. It also has an irrational hatred of crowns for some bizarre reason. One episode has King Hugo unleash a blue-colored dragon that breathes ice instead of fire, hoping it will defeat the Dragon.
- The Real Ghostbusters episode "Egon's Dragon", Egon awakes a dragon that served one of his ancestor, a wizard. The dragon seems to be quite peaceful and even a little child-like but causing too much chaos because of his size, so Egon (with clear remorse) has to put him to sleep (as in sleep magically in a wheel, not as in kill it) indefinitely.
- Rupert: Tiger Lilly keeps a small Eastern dragon as a pet.
- Son Of The White Horse: The three dragons are part of the ancient evil released out of curiosity by the brides of the progenitors' three sons. They resemble the multi headed humanoid dragons from Hungarian folklore, but strongly deviate from the traditional depictions. The three headed dragon is a massive golem of rock and lava, the seven headed is a Military Mashup Machine that looks like several World War 2 German tanks welded together, and the twelve headed dragon looks like a cross between a modern day metropolis and a giant computer mainframe.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) had a frankly bizarre interpretation of dragons. Basically, take bits of every animal that lives in Australia (including a pouch), stick them together, add giant creepy lips and a nose ring, and there's Dulcy the Dragon. She's clumsy, but then again, she's young. We see her as a child briefly in "Blast to the Past Part 2", so she's in her early teens in present day at best. The older female dragon the Freedom Fighters meet and save in "Dulcy" is far more mature. Also, some — but not all — dragons can control the elements, and are called "Protectors". The only dragons shown have been female, so whether it's a Gender-Restricted Ability is unknown.
- Storm Hawks: Before they were hunted to extinction, dragons had bodies that overall resemble a wyvern. In the present-day, the baby dragons raised by Rinjin resemble a cross between wyverns and eastern dragons, with personalities more along the line of the latter due to being raised by humans.
- Teen Titans: Malchior is a very traditional Western kind of dragon, although he plays a less than traditional role for a dragon.
- Transformers: There are quite a few Transformers who transform into dragons, despite real dragons generally (but not always) being nowhere to be seen. Aside from all being Western-style dragons, they're as different as the individuals that turn into them. Of particular note is Transformers: Prime, in which human myths about dragons were inspired by the remnants of a number of Predacon clones that were dispatched to Earth thousands of years ago. Prime Predacons all have draconic alt-modes.
- Wakfu:
- The series, which shares the universe with the MMORPG Dofus, takes a different way. The god Osamodas, creator of most living things, once had three mythical dragons, who shaped themselves into the world of Dofus. Therefore, there were other dragons, about a dozen, who were strong powerful creatures of magic and had the power to create the eponymous Dofus, magical dragon eggs. Nobody knows how many survived the cataclysm that led to the Wakfu era, but there are at least six Primordial Dragons left as shown in the OVA where Ogrest is able to summon them thanks to controlling their Primordial Dofus.
- One of the Creator Gods of the entire universe is the Great Dragon, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Stasis energy. When he created the universe alongside the Great Goddess Eliatrope, they created six immortal Eliatrope Dofus which contain a baby dragon and a baby Eliatrope that possess the power of Reincarnation in addition to unique gifts shared by each of the Dofus siblings. These dragons are actually among the first shown in the series itself with Grougaloragan, an incredibly ancient black dragon who has to rely on Aura Vision to see thanks to his blindness and is a Shapeshifter (preferring to appear as an old man) who leaves the baby Yugo with an adoptive father he saw had a good heart. As it turns out, Yugo is just the most recent incarnation of one of those Eliatrope-dragon sibling pairs, with his dragon brother Adamai being raised by Grougal with the intent of having them meet when they were older.
- Wishfart has had dragons appear a handful of times. They're usually depicted as looking like western dragons but with the long serpentine bodies of eastern dragons. One appeared in the episode "Ciao, Bright Eyes" as the pet of resident Wicked Witch Dusty, although it was also shown to be a fully sapient being.
- Xiaolin Showdown:
- Dojo is an Eastern Dragon in a Western show. He spends most of his time in a very small form, but can shift into a wide variety of shapes, and serves as the team's transport. "Wide variety" includes "he once transformed into a working subway train". He also occasionally goes on rampages where he grows a second head and becomes a gluttonous world-destroying dragon.
- The Sapphire Dragon is one of the Shen Gong Wu that takes the form of, you guessed it, an Eastern sapphire dragon. It's also one of the most powerful and dangerous Shen Gong Wu that appears to be wholly sentient and can cause a Zombie Apocalypse by turning people into mindless sapphire statue minions with its Breath Weapon, and it gets stronger with each puppet it creates. Its only two weaknesses are soot (which was why it was originally hidden in a volcano and completely blacked over) and the fact as a Shen Gong Wu it can forced into a Cosmic Clash Showdown where its loss will immediately seal it back up. It's not even entirely clear it's actually a real dragon that was somehow imprisoned.
