History AwesomeButImpractical / WesternAnimation

* An episode of ''WesternAnimation/AquaTeenHungerForce'' sees Shake extolling the [[IProduct eHelmet]], a [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin helmet]] that has cell phone and text-messaging capabilities (and, as Carl shows, can display some really out-there porn), but requires a ''really heavy'' battery pack to operate it. It's little wonder Frylock sticks to his small, lightweight cell phone, which does all that and has a 14 Megapixel camera. Shake still tries to one-up Frylock with a camera attachment which comes with IV drips, as at that point it is so heavy Shake cannot move at all. Shake, being too {{pride}}ful to accept his eHelmet is a flop ("The mouth is a primitive hole that will soon be phased out!"), tries to counter Frylock's UsefulNotes/{{MP3}} player, which has space for 10,000 songs, with an "e-iano", which can play every song out there by converting it to a single ragtime tune. There's also no way to turn off the e-iano, so you must buy a silencing cover or add the eToms to drown it out. At that point, the weight of the eHelmet + attachments causes Shake to sink into the ground, so he adds a pair of robot legs. Not only do they suspend the user upside-down, Carl's eHelmet legs begin humping Shake's (probably because of all the porn), prompting him to order an ArtificialIntelligence attachment. Said AI is at the level of a four-year-old, and while it does repel Carl's eHelmet's advances, it also likes to go swimming. And the eHelmets aren't waterproof.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Archer}}'' himself is an example. When in the field he's single-handedly captured an entire space station, defeated a Cuban hit squad armed with automatic weapons using only two Molotov cocktails, an ice scoop, and a broom handle, and sneaked past an entire armed force of enemy agents while a liter low on blood and drunk. His behavior at literally everything else, however, makes his inhuman abilities wildly impractical, to the point that he's been deliberately shot three times by his own coworkers for how much he irritates, belittles, and berates them.
** In ''Skytanic'', the team travel on the ''Excelsior'', an airship that combines the luxury of a cruise liner with air travel...and takes two days to go from New York to London which is its only route. Archer openly laughs on "who's going to waste two days on a trip they can make in six hours?" As it happens, Archer is dead right as the company is about to go under for that exact same reason which drives the captain (who'd invested his 401K into it) to bomb the ship in a desperate money-making scheme.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'', a series set in a universe that runs on Awesome, But Impractical, one particular item stands out: [[NotSoHarmlessVillain The Monarch]]'s Battle Panoply. [[spoiler: It is a solid suit of complete body armor that happens to restrict 100% of his body movements and makes him spin around uncontrollably in flight, shooting lasers everywhere. To deploy it in the field, two people had to help him don the armor, and then his henchmen had to move him around like a statue. One henchman even died deploying the wings.]] Naturally, this didn't end too well for him. Justified somewhat in that it had never been tested.

* One of Ben Tennyson's alien forms in ''WesternAnimation/Ben10AlienForce'' is the awesome [[PhysicalGod Alien X]], [[RealityWarper capable of reshaping the very fabric of the universe at a whim]]. But there's a catch: Alien X has three separate personalities, Serena, the voice of love and compassion; Bellicus, the voice of rage and aggression; and Ben, the voice of reason (and when [[IdiotHero Ben]] is the voice of reason, you know there's trouble). In order to perform any action at all, up to and including ''speech and physical movement'', two of those three personalities must agree to do so. Considering the other two personalities have been arguing for an eternity before Ben's arrival and aren't likely to be convinced by a 15-year-old, this doesn't happen very often. Nor is simply picking one of them to agree with going to help much; they've got ''millions of years'' worth of disputes that they want to resolve first before getting to the current issue. For example, when he arrives, they present him with the question of whether or not they should ''save the dinosaurs''. To them, this is not an impractical question: they ''could'' reverse time and save the dinosaurs... although Ben, having evolved from creatures who thrived in the wake of the dinosaurs' extinction, would create a paradox (no, [[{{Pun}} not the time traveller]]) if he did so. Ben and his friends soon rig a lock on the Omnitrix to prevent it from calling up Alien X again by accident.

* "Pegleg" Pete's RV in ''WesternAnimation/GoofTroop''. High-tech, flashy, and BIG, it slowly fell apart the minute he started to actually drive it. Come to think of it, this was a running theme for Pete throughout the show -- a super-duper home entertainment system was another one of his "follies."

* One of Ben Tennyson's alien forms in ''WesternAnimation/Ben10AlienForce'' is the awesome [[PhysicalGod Alien X]], [[RealityWarper capable of reshaping the very fabric of the universe at a whim]]. But there's a catch: Alien X has three separate personalities, Serena, the voice of love and compassion; Bellicus, the voice of rage and aggression; and Ben, the voice of reason (and when [[IdiotHero Ben]] is the voice of reason, you know there's trouble). In order to perform any action at all, up to and including ''speech and physical movement'', two of those three personalities must agree to do so. Considering the other two personalities have been arguing for an eternity before Ben's arrival and aren't likely to be convinced by a 15-year-old, this doesn't happen very often. Nor is simply picking one of them to agree with going to help much; they've got ''millions of years'' worth of disputes that they want to resolve first before getting to the current issue. For example, when he arrives, they present him with the question of whether or not they should ''save the dinosaurs''. To them, this is not an impractical question: they ''could'' reverse time and save the dinosaurs... although Ben, having evolved from creatures who thrived in the wake of the dinosaurs' extinction, would create a paradox (no, [[IncrediblyLamePun not the time traveller]]) if he did so. Ben and his friends soon rig a lock on the Omnitrix to prevent it from calling up Alien X again by accident.

* From ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles'', [[BadassCape capes]]. For the reason why, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M68ndaZSKa8&t=2m10s just watch this]]. [[spoiler:A bit of a BrickJoke, as [[BigBad Syndrome]]'s cape is what leads to his undoing]].

** This pops up quite a bit in the show. Brock frequently avoids using any [[ShoePhone Bond-esque spy gadgets]] in favor of his Bowie knife, explaining they either rarely work or are too specialized to be really useful. In an early episode, Dr. Venture invents a "Joy Can" that fulfills the every desire of whoever's inside and winds up sealing Brock and the boys inside it. In yet another episode, Venture needs to use a shrink ray his father invented (to win a bet) only to find it's fallen into disrepair and he's not a skilled enough scientist to fix it.
** Played with in "Careers in Science" with the Gargantua-1's "Problem Light", it's a diagnostics system that's composed of a single red light which turns on when anything on the huge station malfunctions without giving any specific information what malfunctioned. [[spoiler: Subverted 7 seasons later when it turns out that the actual purpose of the device is plot-important.]]

** "Battle of the Planets": The Martians worked themselves into extinction turning Mars into a giant spaceship. When Zim asks the Martian hologram why they did that, it says "Because [[RuleOfCool it's cool]]!"