Subverted Kids Show / Web Original

• Played with by Angel Hare. The version of the show on the VHS Jonah bought at the thrift store is a completely normal Christian themed children’s show ala VeggieTales. The version he recorded on TV as a kid is much more surreal and unnerving, but not in the way one would normally expect. The horror doesn’t come from the show itself, but from what it reveals about Jonah’s past.
• While kids' shows aren't the only thing used in YouTube Poop, they are one of the main things in it, and the comedic effect of editing things to sound vulgar is a lot more noticeable when the source material itself is for children. This is taken up to eleven by YTPs of edutainment shows like "Dr. Rabbit's World Tour."
• Bert is EVIL!, a website where photos are manipulated to depict Bert from Sesame Street doing horrible things and being involved with infamous atrocities and people from the past.
• Happy Tree Friends features an adorable cast of anthropomorphic animals who constantly die in incredibly violent and bloody ways each episode. It used to have an official website with labels reading "Cartoon Violence: Not for Small Children or Big Babies" all over it, but there were still parents complaining about their six-year-olds stumbling upon it.
  • However, in a contrasting note, it's quite impossible for parents to claim that the show sets a bad example for small children, given its fairly consisted aesop about household safety. Many of the characters' deaths involve accidents caused by playing with kitchen tools, matches, and the old favorite: not turning something off at the plug.
• Retarded Animal Babies, which crosses the line twice as much with Gorn and porn. Sometimes, but not always, funnier. Its title alone should warn you that it is definitely not kid-appropriate.
• An inversion, taking the very serious Watchmen and turning it into an 80s Saturday-Morning Cartoon. Beware.
  • And the animation studio's slogan? "Touching your inner child"....
• Newgrounds takes great pride in doing this.
  • Pico stylistically looks like a crude children's cartoon and was sarcastically advertised as edutainment, but had its young characters experience school shootings, express interest in arson and the dead, and regularly featured over-the-top drug usage and gore. Pico vs. Bear in particular parodies the famous Bear in the Big Blue House (later changed to a Corrupted Character Copy named Big Brown Bary) as a depraved drug abuser with a suspected history of child molestation.
  • In the early days of the website, the side page Teletubby Fun Land was dedicated to kids writing in about the depraved antics of the Teletubbies.
• Lemon Demon's Song of the Count (Censored).
• Polish 3D animator Cyber 8. Nearly all of his videos involve beloved childhood cartoon characters being mulitated and sexually abused.
• Shape Buddies. This show is another one of those, containing blood, drugs and dark humor.
  • Almost every episode Rhombus dies
  • In episode 5a, one of the adult shapes had a cigarette in their mouth
  • In episode 2 there was alot of death and has the highest kill count in season 1
  • In the season 1 intro, Arrow is seen holding a gun
  • The show has alot of death, bloody or not
  • In episode 2, Bean sings a song about him being quiet, it had some questionable lyrics in the end
• Doctor Steel's webisodes of The Dr. Steel Show are done in the style of kids shows but are quite subverted. Also his song, Smokey's Theme, ostensibly the theme song for a kid's show about a cigar-smoking trout who loves children.
• The famous Candle Cove Creepypasta uses this as its premise, but utilises it more for shivers than laughs.
  • "Lost Episode" and "The Truth Behind [show]" creepypastas do the same thing, describing an episode with horrific Deranged Animation and putting forward theories that the characters are based off dead people respectively.
  • There are a few creepypastas that take a similar route as Candle Cove by using made-up shows (as apposed to existing shows), like Happy Appy.
  • Several of Slimebeast's stories involve the narrator reminiscing about or stumbling upon an obscure children's show that somehow got away with highly disturbing and gruesome content, which usually has some kind of supernatural effect on those who watch it.
    • "Class Creeps" is about a few friends who try to watch a video stream of the pilot episode of a 1990's cartoon called Class Creeps. However, the narrator is unable to get the video feed to load, so he has to get his friends to describe what is happening in the chatroom. The show is about a group of students who get killed in a horrible accident and are then revived as grotesque monsters by a Mad Scientist named Dr. Satanstein. Also, anyone who watches the episode is eventually compelled to gouge out their own eyes, which quickly leads to death from blood loss. By the end of the pasta, only the narrator is spared as he can't see the video feed.
    • "Dead Serious" concerns a cartoon called Zombionix, where undead cyborgs endlessly mutilate each other in a post-apocalyptic setting. The show has apparently inspired children in the real world to commit awful acts of violence.
    • "Squiggles" describes a puppet show where the title character makes politically incorrect jokes and causes the children in the show's live studio audience to convulse and die.
    • "Funtime with Floppy" has the narrator reminisce on an early 1980's puppet show and how he once sent a letter asking that Floppy stand up to the other characters picking on him, resulting in Floppy's tormentors murdering him onscreen.
    • Ironically, Slimebeast also wrote "Lost Episodes", a Meta Origin for all of those "lost episode" pastas, where they have no dark secret origin and were just edits made by one kid with access to high-end (for the time) video editing equipment, deliberately made to be scary and disturbing purely for the sake of being scary and disturbing, with no grander purpose or symbolism behind it at all, and certainly nothing supernatural about them. However, it ends with him Brain Uploading himself into a cartoon of his own creation, and the sequel, "Sid's Video", reveals that the resulting tape does have supernatural effects, namely it edits any recorded media in its vicinity to make it more disturbing.
  • In general, this is a popular trope for creepypastas. What is more shocking than seeing your favorite childhood video game or television show turn into something twisted and wrong?
• Dog Toons' Homemade Intros web series combines both humour and horror to create a truly bizzare and outright horrifying experience. The premise is simple: with each video the creator, Noah tries to re-make an intro, but he's really bad at it. At first, the series started out relatively tame with typical parodies, though as time went on it started to get more weird with its Deranged Animation and making a lot of the children's shows tackled be Darker and Edgier (for one, the Go, Diego, Go! intro is about Diego trying to run away from the animals that are out to kill him, and his parents have accepted that their child is far gone). That's without mentioning that the show headed straight towards Paranoia Fuel once it entered 3D. Not all of these videos are of kids shows, though the vast majority of them are.
• LoadingReadyRun has a recurring gag where a Mr Roger's-like host is seen reading the end of a children's book and then giving a moral to the story such as "never go outside".
• Brazilian Tumblr Porra, Maurício! gets panels from Monica's Gang and sees them as perverted content. Among the running gags are Jeremiah having a Gag Penis (as well as having him and Taka as Memetic Molesters), Bucky being Ambiguously Gay, and resident Big Eater Maggy being portrayed as a junkie. Though sometimes it's just "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?" (such as this◊, where Chuck Billy's girlfriend Rosie Lee reveals somehow her face changed to Leonardo DiCaprio's — It Makes Sense in Context)
• From Dropout/CollegeHumor: "ConquistaDora the Explorer". ConquistaDora teaches children how to enslave and conquer the tribes of the new world for the royal kingdom of Spain.
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared^note As seen here. starts off like your typical Edutainment Show in the style of Sesame Street, with colorful, cuddly puppets and a "teacher" singing about their respective themes such as creativity, love, and healthy eating. However, it gradually becomes clear everything isn't what it seems, as the "teachers" are revealed to either have ulterior motives or have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and eventually subject the main trio to horrible punishments as the episode slips into pure Surreal Horror. (With sarcastic British Humour and satire sprinkled in, too)
• The SCP Foundation plays host to SCP-993, a cartoon show called "Bobble the Clown" broadcast by an unknown station. Anyone over the age of ten suffers a splitting headache and falls unconscious when trying to watch the show; anyone under the age of ten is subject to watching Bobble teaching them how to do horrible things, like kidnap an ordinary suburbanite and cook his flesh, stalk and murder a London woman, or torture a prisoner of war. Alarmingly enough, Bobble is aware that the SCP Foundation is trying to keep his show from being broadcast, and has produced an episode showing kids how to release several of the Foundation's more dangerous specimens and murder the researchers keeping him contained.
• The "Counting Song" by Adam Buxton begins like a song teaching numbers to young children and suddenly turns into an increasingly desperate rant against the life of an adult.
• Done a few times on Homestar Runner:
  • The Strong Bad Email kids' book has Strong Bad "write a children's book." Which means he steals a book called "Everyone Is Different" from his brother and turns things like "Some people are very tall. Quincy is very tall." into "Some people are very tall and merciless. Quincy is destroying San Antonio" with a black Sharpie.
  • Another Strong Bad Email suggests that Strong Bad get his own children's show. He then explains why he's not 'cut out for that kind of sugarjob.'
    Strong Bad: Look, the Cheat is behind the freakin' box! (Record Needle Scratch) He's behind the box!! I'll kill ya! I'll kill all your dogs!!!
    (cut back to Strong Bad in front of the Compy)
    Strong Bad: So, you can see how that might be less than pleasant. What with all the letter writing and the angry mothers and the subsequent stringing me up in town square for all to see.
  • One of the shorts released as "Decemberween in July" has Strong Bad giving the same treatment he did to "Everyone is Different" to a holiday-themed kids' book called "That Time Of Year".
    Old Version: Greta is making cookies. When will they be done?
    
    Strong Bad: Greta is feeding the mouse bug spray. When will he be done for?
• Uncle Ray's House IS a fictional show that would be appropriate for little ones. But there's a Twist Ending that makes this innocent video this trope^note The intro gets interrupted by a news bulletin revealing Uncle Ray to be a sex offender, afterwards Uncle Ray finishes the song and notices a news ticker at the bottom of the screen warning the viewer that he's wanted by the police before immediately running out of his house.
• Gold Digger creator Fred Perry did an animation of the "You Are a Pirate" song from LazyTown that was filled to the brim with sexual innuendoes. Needless to say, it's kind of NSFW.
• Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy includes one episode where Wile E. Coyote finally kills that Roadrunner. And then has an identity crisis as he doesn't know what to do with his life after that.
• This is the central element in the "Almighty Loaf" meme, which takes a talking loaf of bread from a direct-to-video Christian-themed children's show, and turns it into a demonic harbinger of evil who speaks with the voice of the Lord of Darkness himself:
  The Almighty Loaf: Even now, the evil seed of what you've done germinates within you.
• Magical Dream Bed starts out sweet and innocent. Then the jet fighters show up, and it all goes out the window.
• There are plenty of online fan works that take children's cartoons and turn them into this, be it fan art or fan fiction or even a video. Whether it's played for laughs or for horror/tragedy varies.
• Fuwa Fuwa Foof:
  • Fuwa Fuwa Foof is a concept for an animated show made by Kyra Kupetsky (who later created Chikn Nuggit), with a hypothetical opening sequence uploaded to YouTube. It's about an adorable bunny named Foof... who used to be a ruthless gang leader. She had retired, but her old cohorts Giri Giri and Kiri Kiri are trying to get her back into her former life of crime and debauchery.
  • On top of that, there's the song used for the video, "ChuChu Lovely MuniMuni MuraMura PrinPrin Boron Nururu ReroRero" by Maximum the Hormone. Not only is it deceptive by starting off like a cutesy pop-rock tune and then turning into death metal a few seconds in, but the Japanese-language lyrics are about child kidnapping, rape and pedophilia, and the song is often interpreted as a commentary on the sexualization of minors in anime and manga.
• This trope is present in many of the Scientifically Accurate videos, which take children's media, a lot of them starring anthropomorphic animals, and tear them apart by demonstrating what the shows would be like if they were way more realistic. Results are often violent, nauseating, and/or NSFW. One particularly sickening example is Scientifically Accurate CatDog, which portrays the titular characters as a cat and a dog surgically grafted together by an insane surgeon to present as a show idea to an extremely unflattering take-off of Nickelodeon called Nickelodious.
• The infamous Elsagate phenomenon: YouTube videos showing kids' favorite characters, such as Elsa and Spider-Man, in violent, vulgar, or otherwise screwed up situations. You can find more information about them on their entry on What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?.
• The journalist and blogger Mr Moth created a series of Twitter posts "Today on Octonauts...", a series of plot synopses from a very different version of The Octonauts. In this version, Kwaazi is a Felinoid Abomination, Shellington is an Apocalypse Cultist, Barnacles can only barely keep his carnivorous instincts under control, Tweak has become some kind of invisible spirit, Professor Inkling is a Mad Scientist, Peso is an Action Survivor, and the Vegimals are a Slave Race and occasional food source. (Dashi ... is also there.) Even the episodes that aren't following the Cosmic Horror Story arc have descriptions like "Today on Octonauts, during a two-day party, the gang accidentally kill a narwhal and have a torrid time covering it up when the cops arrive". Beginning in 2020 he followed it up with a version of Chuggington in which the Chuggers are "monsters who thirst for blood and oil", and the Unfortunate Implications of the show's fetishisation of work are lampshaded.
  Today on Chuggington: Koko has to work while suffering undiagnosed PTSD, the solution to which is simply "get over it".
  This, incidentally, is literally the plot of the episode "Slow coach Koko", I have grown lazy.
• The Japanese video "Pokopokopikotan" is basically this trope in a nutshell. It starts off with two girls who wouldn't look out of place in a preschooler-aimed show, running around and playing in their brightly colored world. Then a human hand appears and starts corrupting the world a bit, and things only get worse from there...
• The Web Cartoon WTF 101 could best be described as a Deconstructive Parody of The Magic School Bus. The teacher, rather than a charming eccentric, is a deranged misanthrope on par with Rick Sanchez, her "class" is really just detention for a bunch of troublemakers and delinquents in a low-income high school, and her lessons are shown to be highly traumatic to said students, both due to being dragged across the space-time continuum, and the fact said lessons involve things like parasites, the dark side of cute animals, and the histories of self-experimentation and bad ideas.

  Prof. Foxtrot: Stop with the screaming! I've only shrunk you down and transported you half-way around the world.

• Some episodes of How It Should Have Ended take on children's movies, including several Pixar films and The Wizard of Oz, and twist their endings in a way that would confuse the target audience for the original films (like the Inside Out one being a metaphor for mental insanity). Also, quite a few have violence, like the Toy Story 3 spoof ending with Andy crashing his car and The Wizard of Oz spoof having a scene in which the Wicked Witch is shot with a gun by one of her flying monkeys.
• AOK has a series called AOK Ruins Your Childhood that parodies popular children's cartoons, but makes them adult in tone. For instance, Dora the Grown Up deals with Dora navigating through problems young adults commonly face while constantly Breaking the Fourth Wall about every situation she encounters (for instance, "Have you ever woken up 5 days a week to go to a job you hate?") and teaching the viewer Spanish words related to the situation, often causing bad things to happen to her because of how weird she acts around other people. Other parodies in this series have included Caillou the Grown Up, Very Off Parents, Muppet Elderlies, Adult Arthur and Thomas The Tank Engine: Origins.
  • Another AOK video not under the Childhood Ruined label, Patty Cake, is also this trope. The video starts out similar to toy-based cartoons like Strawberry Shortcake and Shopkins, until Patty Cake gets cut into pieces for her human partner's friends to eat.
• "Daniel Solves The Trolley Problem" is a fake transcript for a Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood episode based on the Trolley Problem, with the strategy song being about life or death situations rather than the coping skills they're usually known for.
• SuperMarioLogan has an in-universe example that's a mix of this and What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?. Junior, an elementary schooler, enjoys the show Doofy the Dragon, in which a puppet sings songs that start out innocent, but turn out to be inappropriate, with the lyrics mentioning death before Doofy tries to kill himself.
• Thingu (no link because it keeps getting taken down for IP infringement and put back up again). The Thing (1982) (a movie set in Antarctica which is notorious for its excessive amounts of violence and Body Horror) remade in claymation with the cast of Pingu (a cute claymation show aimed at kids featuring a cast of Antarctic animals). Need one say more?
• The animated web video Mongolian Erectile Dysfunction is a mature parody of the classic Tootsie Pop commercial. It includes Mr. Owl attempting to masturbate before the boy interrupts him to ask how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop and has Mr. Turtle depicted as a pedophile wanting to molest the boy. The short also features Mr. Owl swearing constantly and ends with him committing suicide.
• Object Terror has a really cute style, lovable characters and, well, Gorn. Not just that, but alcohol, sex, swearing and further more.
• The Feisty Pets episode "Feisty Pets Invade Disney!" contains a parody of "It's A Small World" called "It's A Feisty World" that is about disgusting and violent topics rather than the peace and harmony themes of the original song.
• Brock Baker has done a few videos delving into this, including one where Goofy threatens Damian "Makemebad35" Saunders-Baron over money Goofy lent him, culminating in him, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Winnie the Pooh threatening Damian with violence; the foursome swearing; Goofy getting off on pain; and the implication that Goofy killed Clarabelle Cow, turned her into his shoes and later fed parts what was left of her to Damian. Baker later used his impressions in a recreation of a scene in Joker (2019), more specially, the scene of Arthur Fleck killing Murray Franklin with Goofy as Arthur, Winnie as Franklin, and Pete as Dr. Sally and another video by Baker sees Goofy try to threaten Damian into getting Disney+.
• Mystery Skulls Animated is a colorful Affectionate Parody of the Scooby-Doo franchise, and the first video, "Ghost", just seems like a fun romp where some meddling kids get tangled up in spooky shenanigans... until it's revealed that the Vengeful Ghost chasing them is the Fred stand in, who was killed by his possessed friend. Later videos play out more like an anime, featuring a Big Bad Ensemble out to violently kill the gang, and the songs used for the videos also contain profanity — in particular, "Ghost" has a scene that highlights the song's Precision F-Strike.
• Petscop seems to be the type of game you might have played in your childhood going by the first level- cute pets to catch, puzzles, and a happy atmosphere- but when Paul enters the cheat code he found and exits the level, he finds himself in a dark void/grassland, and as the game progresses it becomes more subtly creepy and depressing with themes and allusions to child abuse. Also, there is infrequent but strong swearing, both from Paul and from the game itself.
• Super Mario Richie, with its use of colourful thumbnails and seemingly kid-friendly plushies, this trope would seem to apply, especially considering the fact that series such as “Path of the Psycho” and “Thug Life” contain graphic violence with blood, profanity, and scenes of alcohol, drug and tobacco usage.
• The official 20th Century Fox channel released a "Predator Holiday Special" featuring said hunter alien rampaging through a Rudolph-like stop motion North Pole.
• Bad Abc looks like a seemingly normal video of a cartoony character saying the ABC's. Then it ends with the man telling the viewer to suck his dick while calling them a "motherfucker" and giving them the finger.
• Cas van de Pol produces colourful, comedic abridged recap cartoons of family films... Which feature tons of Gorn and Vulgar Humor. Many of the videos begin with the disclaimer "NOT "made for kids"!", though that hasn't stopped Cas from having problems with the YouTube algorithms directing his content towards YouTube Kids.
• The Kid and the Camera starts out playing as if it was a children's program from the 90's starring a cheerful boy named Cailen who after accidentally breaking a camera he got on his 6th birthday, meets a fairy known as the Cipsneed who says he can fix Cailen's broken camera. However, the "Cipsneed" is actually a human kidnapper who lures Cailen to his heavily implied death; with the story format going from a kid's show style to a crime horror story format instead as the ending approaches.
• Natsumi Step! is a Japanese flash animation created in 2003, involving an adorable girl named Natsumi Andoh and adorable critters like cats and dogs, and there is also a catchy pop music playing in the background(which it doesn't play at the bonus part). there were 2 flashbacks of her breaking up with her boyfriend at the beginning of the video, the cat captain turns out to be a reaper, and drove Natsumi Andoh to hell when Natsumi waves goodbye to the cute critters. There was also a part of the video that has her name in it, and says that she would die in 7/20 at 23:36 PM, which means she committed suicide and died in this video. At the bonus, you can see Natsumi Andoh holding a crowbar and she is crying, and it ends. When you click "play" again, she will look creepy and she may look like she would kill you with a crowbar, the meaning of this is that she has killed her boyfriend, and that's why she went to hell, it says end again.
• This infamous video known to the public as "Qubo's final minutes on the air — 2/27/2021" depicts how Qubo apparently shut down - various Qubo characters being massacred by firing squad one by one on a hellish red background. Please note that this video is a hoax and, being a children's channel, isn't how Qubo pulled the plug.

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