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Cheaters Never Prosper in Western Animation


  • Hilariously subverted in the 2 Stupid Dogs episode "Let's Make a Right Price." The dogs are contestants on a spoof of The Price Is Right, where the little dog wants the consolation prize, a box of doggie treats. They spin the Big Wheel where the prize is a new car, so the little dog jumps on the wheel and forces it from "1.00" to "5." The Bob Barker-looking host admonishes:
    You cheated. You get the car!
  • Used as the moral in a "Sonic Sez" segment in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • The All Hail King Julien episode "Jungle Games" has King Julien make a bet with his Evil Uncle with the fate of the kingdom on the line. Both teams begin cheating but only against each other, which ends up allowing a third team to pull ahead of both of them to win the gold.
  • In Around the World with Willy Fog, Sullivan hires a cunning master of disguise known as Transfer to make sure Fog loses the wager by keeping him from completing his trip around the world within the eighty-day time limit. In the end, however, Fog evades every one of the traps which Transfer lays and reaches the Reform Club in time to claim victory. Shortly afterwards, Sullivan is dismissed from his position as governor of the Bank of England for "misappropriation", having used the Bank's funds to pay for Transfer's travel expenses.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • Subverted in Avatar: The Last Airbender where Toph, Sokka and Aang spend an episode cheating Fire Nation folk out of their money with such varied methods as cheating a cheater in Three-card Monte to a full-on flopsy scheme. They end up in trouble, but only because they indirectly become famous. They never give back any of the ill-gotten goods either.
    • Though played straight because earlier in the episode there's a man playing the "three cups with something in one of them" game, and he picks Toph because she's blind. It's revealed that the reason no one's been able to win is that he was either flipping the object under the cup into his sleeve and sticking another in a different cup than what they'd be watching or leaving all three empty. Toph, an earth-bender who has learned to sense vibrations, detects the sleight of hand and puts one of the rocks back under the cup without him even knowing, cheating the guy.
    • In the The Legend of Korra "And the Winner Is...", Tahno and the Wolf-bats resort to cheating to beat the protagonists in a pro-bending tournament. Thanks to the fact that he bribed the referee, they're declared the winners. The stadium is promptly attacked by the local Well-Intentioned Extremist, who kicks their butts, removes their powers and takes the time to call them out for cheating during his radio broadcast.
  • Bianca from Beverly Hills Teens. Several of her successful attempts to sabotage Larke during a competition are actually seen by the judges as an original touch deserving a first place.
  • Big City Greens: The Aesop of "Bat Girl", where the Greens compete in a baseball game against a rival community center. Nancy joins their little league team to even the score against the unsportsmanlike rival team, but they learn that cheating is not really the way to win, at which point the Greens' team loses the game on purpose, proving that the only thing even better than winning is just being a good sport.
  • Spike (later Butch the Irish Dog) in several Droopy cartoons. Whenever the two are on a competition, he tries to sabotage Droopy, but as Droopy is Born Lucky, they end up backfiring on Spike, or even actually helping Droopy win. One cartoon has Spike tricking Droop into signing a document stating that he cheated, thus disqualifying him and making Spike the winner; but, Spike got his in the end: the prize was a kiss from the Queen of Sports - who was hideously ugly.
    Spike: Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiim!-*Tree or wooden pole falls on him rather than Droopy*-ber.
  • The Fairly Oddparents:
    • Vicky is notorious for this; you name that competition, she will cheat in it:
      • In "Hex Games", she and Timmy battle it out for the title of Queen/King of the Skatepark in a skateboarding competition. After Vicky flattens the wheels of Timmy's skateboard on the larger half pipe and blows up the big ramp, only for Chester to save him, thanks to the new state-of-the-art multipurpose braces AJ designed for him when his other braces fell off in a skateboarding accident, Timmy still wins, but Vicky refuses to relinquish her crown, until she is plowed into the ground by Francis following his attempt on the big ramp.
      • In "Miss Dimmsdale", she competes in a Beauty Contest in the hopes of winning a $10,000 cash prize and being Mayor of Dimmsdale for a Day so she could torture every child in town like there's no tomorrow. Despite sabotaging all of her competition (the only known contestants besides her were AJ's mother, Mrs. Crocker, Principal Waxelplax and Mrs. Turner), and bribing, blackmailing or, in the case of Timmy and Adam West (alias Catman), almost killing the judges, Vicky still loses and is beaten up by the other contestants after last-minute contestant Mr. Turner shows up and clumsily wins the pageant, proving men can compete in beauty pageants.
    • The Anti-Fairies and Pixies cheat at everything, as noted in "Pixies, Inc." and "Fairly Oddlympics".
    • "The Big Bash" is an aversion: Remy cheats, but ties with Timmy, but the real winner was Cupid, as not only did he cheat everyone out of rule free wishes, but the "Scavenger Hunt" turns out to be his shopping.
    • The chapter book Scout's Honor provides another contest between Timmy and Remy, with the latter cheating using his money. It's thanks to Cosmo and Wanda exposing Remy's cheating that Timmy wins the bet.
  • While generally subverted With Bender in Futurama, in the episode "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", Bender cheats at poker by using X-ray glasses. However, after winning, he hints too strongly at them, and when he's exposed, he's promptly beaten up by the others.
  • In the Tom Slick short in George of the Jungle, every of Tom's lead opponent (mostly Baron Otto Matic) cheat in every way to win the race and always fail.
  • In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Billy decides to replace the fake skeleton in the class with Grim so he can help him cheat on his history test. Turns out Billy was wrong and it was actually a math test, and Grim explains that he knows nothing about math.
  • Subverted in Johnny Test, there is an episode based on the fact that cheaters never win. The cheater does end up winning, but they also fall over a waterfall because they were too busy gloating to notice it. The moral: even when cheaters win, they lose.
  • Hey Arnold! has two consecutive examples in the episode "Spelling Bee":
    • The first comes when the school spelling bee is down to its last three participants: Arnold, Helga, and a boy named Seymour Stump. On his turn, Seymour correctly spells the word "pasquinade", which puzzles and slightly impresses Gerald and the moderator, who each believe that it's a word that most kids could never get right. But as Seymour bows to the audience's applause, a microphone falls out of his ear, revealing that he has been cheating with the help of his mother, who is outside in a van feeding him how to spell each word. Upon discovering the microphone, the moderator disqualifies Seymour and has a security guard named Hines forcefully escort him off stage. All the while, Seymour protests in vain that he's "an innocent pawn in a corrupt game."
    • The second comes right after Seymour's disqualification: previously, Bob had pressured Helga into participating in the spelling bee in the hopes of her repeating her sister Olga's successful win from years prior, and became so sure of her success that he promised everyone via a commercial a free beeper if she lost. Helga had managed to keep up with everyone up to this point, but when she comes close to losing after barely managing to correctly spell "velocipede", Bob panics and decides that he needs some "insurance" to assure victory. Just after Seymour is taken away, Bob approaches Arnold and tries to bribe him to throw the competition with a check worth $500, the amount of the bee's prize money, with him citing, "If you lose, you win. If you try to win, you'll probably lose." This proves to be a huge mistake, as not only does Arnold turn down the bribe by crumpling up the check and correctly spelling his next word ("onomatopoeia"), but Helga discovers it and becomes hurt not only by her dad opting to stoop to such underhanded methods against her beloved, but also for not having any faith in her to win on her own. She then proceeds to get back at him by throwing the contest by deliberately misspelling her next word, "qualm", which ironically, is the same word her sister won her spelling bee with. Bob is not only left utterly humiliated at this, but is also forced to fulfill his customers' demands for the free beepers he promised them upon Helga's loss.
  • Kaeloo: In the episode "Let's Play Golf", Kaeloo cheats at golf by distracting the others, Hulking Out and hitting the ball. When the others find out, they accuse her of being a "dirty cheater" and Kaeloo proceeds to hit herself over the head with her golf club as a form of self-inflicted punishment.
    • In Episode 101, Stumpy, Quack Quack and Mr. Cat all cheat in various ways in an Olympics-style sporting event, so Kaeloo gets annoyed and beats them up before crossing the finish line herself and winning.
    • Subverted in Episode 95 where Stumpy's team does win after cheating.
  • Every episode of Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. The Rottens cheated in absolutely every event and almost always came in last. However, this is one of the few shows in which while the results were subsequently discounted due to the team's cheating, several of their tricks during were accepted as not actually being against the rules, and the Rottens indeed were able to come in first place at the end of the episode, albeit very rarely.
    • There's one 'pity win' episode where the Rottens get away with every single trick they pull.
    • In one episode, an attempt to cheat didn't help them win, but it did get them a bonus to their score for accidentally breaking a world record.
    • Other characters occasionally get called on doing questionable things, but they tend to be less outright cheating and more trying to bend the rules and failing.
  • Mertle Edmonds from Lilo & Stitch: The Series does this constantly through every contest she and Lilo are in and actually manages to get away with it in some cases. In the episode "Yapper", she and Lilo compete in a a dog show, where she sabotaged Stitch's water bottle by replacing it with a bottle of a particularly strong blend of coffee (if you saw the first movie then you know what caffeine does to Stitch) and ended up winning the contest, but conceded the trophy because the duo helped rescue her dog, Gigi (actually an experiment), from Gantu. Another case was the episode "Slick", where she used the titular experiment against Lilo (not that Lilo didn't use it first) during a fundraiser and once again won, but she overbinged on the prize (a supply of shave ice) making it a case of Not Worth It. The trope is played straight in the episode "Spike", where they competed in a quiz contest between their two families; Mertle uses her friend, Teresa, to feed her the answers through an earpiece, but Lilo and Stitch find out halfway through the contest and use the titular experiment to infect Teresa with his intelligence-reducing quills, making her give Mertle the wrong answers. Come next round, Mertle is on her own and promptly loses.
    • There's another case in the episode "Slugger" where Lilo and Mertle bet their prized possessions in a baseball game (Lilo her Elvis records, Mertle her dolls). Lilo thought it was going to be a baseball like they had done at the start of the episode. But Mertle, upon seeing an experiment that would give her an advantage, changed it to a basketball game and had Gantu brought in as a ringer. In addition, Gantu was placed on Mertle's team and if Mertle won, Gantu would get to take Slugger. Ironically she wound up losing thanks to Pleakley who played a similar sport on his planet and was a natural. The look on Mertle's face when she's forced to hold up her end of the bet is pretty satisfying, especially considering she was a major Jerkass in this episode.
    • In the episode "Sprout", Lilo was the one who tried to cheat. She and Mertle bet that whoever won an orchid contest at the Kokaua Town Fair would have private access to a secret beach for a week. The problem for Lilo was that she didn't have an orchid in time and was ill-prepared, so she took one of Jumba's experiments, the titular living plant-like one, and entered it in the fair. However, at the fair, Mertle knocked it over by legitimate accident and the experiment grows out of control to a monstrous size. Despite the chaos it caused, Lilo actually won the blue ribbon, but she realized she didn't win fair and square. So she relinquished the ribbon and the bet to Mertle and also accepted being grounded by Nani for a week (Lilo was accepting of a month, but Nani reduced it as she felt that her sister learned her lesson).
  • In the Little Bear episode "Little Bear's Sweet Tooth", Mitzi cheats during the Harvest Day sack race by swinging on the trees and is disqualified so Owl and Emily's Granny teach her a lesson even after she cheers that she won. Therefore, Cat and Emily are the real winners of the sack race.
  • During the music video for the song "Cheaters Never Really Win" at the end of the Little Dogs on the Prairie episode "Cheating", the main characters participate in a sack race but nearly all of them cheat in various ways (Darcy uses balloons to float over everyone, Hollister spills marbles on the ground to cause Gilroy to slip and fall, Patterson keeps his sack over his legs but rides a bike at the same time, etc). All of the cheating methods wind up backfiring on them. Sport is the only one who does not cheat and he winds up winning the race.
  • Looney Tunes:
    • In the classic cartoon "Rabbit Transit," Bugs Bunny (offended by the story of The Tortoise and the Hare) challenges a turtle to a race. Bugs cheats like crazy and loses but only because the turtle outcheats him (he had a jet engine under his shell and in the earlier "Tortoise Beats Hare" uses dozens of other turtles).
    • The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries:
      • In the series premiere, "The Cat Who Knew Too Much", Tweety is entered in a Canary Crooning Contest in New Orleans, and is birdnapped by Rocky and Mugsy, who were working for an opponent of Granny's who tried to win the contest with Mugsy disguised as Tweety. The scheme is thwarted and Granny's opponent and his gang are arrested.
      • "Fair's Fair" has Granny participating in a bake-off. While entering, she suspects one opponent, Betsy Cracker, of cheating, which could be how she won every bake-off year after year. She is proven right when Betsy is caught using berry pie filling instead of regular berries, which are the only kind the rules allow. Granny switches out the pie filling with regular berries, which ultimately causes Betsy to lose. To add insult to injury, when Betsy demands to know why her recipe got mixed up and inadvertantly tells the judge and the crowd the truth, Granny shows the judge the evidence and Betsy is disqualified and barred from future cooking competitions, and then ends up with a face-full of pies with shaving cream.
  • The Loud House
    • The Casagrandes episode "Arrr In the Family" has the family attend a pirate dinner show and CJ anxiously wants to be picked on stage to raise the Jolly Roger. When it seems CJ is about to get picked, a rude, spoiled little boy named Ralphie, who had been picked to be on stage all the time, wants to get picked again, even going so far as to steal a little girl's birthday hat to cheat his way into it. After losing a mock swordight to CJ, Ralphie apologizes to him for his malicious actions and admits he wasn't bad as captain, but it still doesn't excuse him for stealing the girl's birthday hat, who promptly kicks him in the shin and takes back the hat. Ralphie is left to groan in pain saying he deserved that injury.
  • In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode, "Gonzo's Coop Dreams", Gonzo substitutes for Beep in a game of basketball against the Bad Eggs when the latter injures his wing. Because Gonzo has never played basketball before, he has a difficult time trying to score points. When he finds out that Bunsen and Beaker's Cant Lose Shoes allow whoever wears them to win any game, he distracts Bunsen and Beaker so that he can borrow the shoes while they aren't looking. Gonzo manages to catch his score up to that of the Bad Eggs, but his ruse is exposed when he gets the shoes wet and they malfunction. Gonzo agrees to play fair for the rest of the game, and despite his best efforts without the Can't Lose Shoes, the Bad Eggs still win. Thankfully, the Bad Eggs and Gonzo are good sports, and they agree to play another game against each other soon, this time with Gonzo playing fair the whole game.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
    • In "Fall Weather Friends", Applejack and Rainbow Dash get so competitive with each other, they attempt to cheat one another during a race. In the end, they both come in last. However, in this case, it's justified as they were cheating each other so much they didn't notice everyone else had gotten ahead of them. They're both formidably athletic, so if they hadn't been busy cheating, they would probably have arrived among the first.
    • The Flim-Flam brothers in "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000". Once the Mane Six and the rest of the Apple family start to outpace the cider machine during the cider contest, Flim and Flam skip the quality control process to get back in the lead. Though this wins them the contest, the resulting product is so terrible that they get run out of town, which would have happened anyway if they lost. At least if they had lost on even terms, it wouldn't have completely ruined their business.
      • Amusingly, had they just run the competition straight up - without allowing for the "honorary family members" to join in - they would have won handily AND had quality cider.
    • In "Rarity Takes Manehattan", Suri Polomare basically cheats her way through the fashion industry- she takes advantage of her assistant Coco Pommel for all the actual work, and cheats Rarity by stealing a special fabric (she told Rarity she'd be using it to make accents, but actually used it to copy Rarity's dress designs and claimed the fabric as her own). While she isn't caught, she doesn't come out well either- Rarity manages to pull off a last-minute fashion line using stuff she found around her hotel room that won the contest legitimately, and Coco Pommel is inspired by Rarity's kindness and quits, leaving Suri with no way to actually capitalize on her reputation for making the fabric since Coco was the one who could actually sew and Rarity was the one who knew how to make the fabric.
    • Zigzagged in "Magic Duel", Trixie returns to Ponyville and challenges Twilight to a magic duel, where the loser is exiled. Nobody knows that Trixie is cheating by using The Alicorn Amulet to increase her magic and do spells only for "the highest level unicorns." Trixie wins the duel when Twilight can't copy her trick and exiles her. Twilight's friends learn about the amulet and are able to tell Twilight, and when Twilight confronts Trixie on her cheating she denies it. Twilight then challenges Trixie to a rematch with an amulet of her own and completely wins by outsmarting Trixie by using the magic she's supposed to be an expert in against her, sleight of hand and stage magic.
  • An Al Brodax Popeye cartoon had Popeye and Brutus in a race. Brutus cheats in a snowy mountainous area backfires, with Popeye shouting "cheaters never win" to him. It echoes and causes an avalanche on top of the two, with Brutus calling out "You and your corny sayings!" which causes another echo and avalanche.
  • The Proud Family: In "Spelling Bee", this applies to both Penny and Timothy Smythe, the son of Oscar's old rival, Crandall Smythe, who competed in a Spelling Bee with him a long time ago. Oscar enters Penny in a spelling bee to show off against Crandall, who had entered Timothy in the bee, as well, and such event is taking place on the same night as the beach retreat at their school. The whole point behind it was for Oscar to relive his glory days. Timothy accepts help from the Gross Sisters, who feed him the answers through an earpiece, only for him to get caught due to the earpiece picking up a signal from a fast food restaurant's intercom. Oscar helps Penny win by mouthing the letters, but Penny chooses not to accept it, with her microphone being on the whole time. Although both Timothy and Penny end up being disqualified at the end, they, as well as the Chang Triplets, would rather not waste their time with their feuding fathers over who won and join the rest of their classmates at the beach retreat. The lesson Oscar learned: parents shouldn't use their children to relive their glory days, though not before he sees BeBe and CeCe spelling while playing with blocks.
  • The Real Ghostbusters plays with the trope in "Night Game." A war between the forces of Good and Evil manifests as a game of baseball...and Winston finds himself caught up in it! His friends go in to rescue him but have to remain neutral since the game is already in progress. At one point, they point out that Evil just cheated. The umpire replies: "But evil cheats...That's why we call them "evil." Only good is not allowed to cheat. If good adopts the ways of evil, then it becomes evil."
  • Rocket Power:
    • The Aesop of "Total Luger" and "Capture the Flag".
    • Also shows up in "Race Across New Zealand" where Theodore McGill is encouraged to cheat by his father, Chester in the Prince Waikikamukau games. When Raymundo and Chester competed against each other in the first-ever Waikikamukau competition, the former suspected all along the latter cheated, and he would be proven right years later. When Theodore wins the last race, his conscience eventually catches up with him and he reveals that he cheated by taking an out-of-bounds shortcut, which was how Chester cheated against Raymundo years ago. Both Theodore's win and Chester's previous one from the first games are, respectively, revoked and rightfully awarded to Otto and Reggie in a tie and Raymundo as he should've been years ago.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Subverted in spades by Mr. Burns in "Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield". He boasted an undefeated record in golf for decades (except one time when he lost on purpose to Richard Nixon) but only because Mr. Smithers was cheating by planting balls for him on the green - without telling Burns. When they're finally caught when he plays Homer, Homer is anxious to tell everyone, but Smithers convinces him to keep quiet about it, promising that Burns will recommend Marge for the Springfield Country Club if he does; Burn thus gets away scot-free. And ironically, even though Burns apparently kept that promise, as the club voted to accept Marge, she decided against joining.
    • Lisa spends most of the episode "Saddlesore Galactica" trying to enforce this trope. Her school lost a Battle of the Bands to a school band from Ogdenville despite the fact that the Odgenville school used glowsticks during the act, as visual aids in the competition are strictly forbidden, and she is frustrated when even the judges of the competition didn't care about the rule violation, especially since without them, Ogdenville would've still won. In the end, she's successful when then-President Bill Clinton got involved - Ogdenville had their win vacated.
  • In an episode of South Park, Cartman pretends to be mentally handicapped in order to enter the Special Olympics; unfortunately for him, he's not actually athletic and comes in dead last.
    • In the same episode, Jimmy uses steroids to win, and then because of what Cartman does, he gives up his medal (given to him by a group of steroid-abusing athletes). He then gives a "Reason You Suck" Speech about why people who use steroids are terrible people, while Barry Bonds grins in the background.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Inverted in Teen Titans Go! where in the episode "Artful Dodgers," The Titans cheat during a dodgeball rematch against the Hive (who were playing fairly in every dodgeball game against them). The Titans win by calling the police after being eliminated. Cyborg claims the victory was by default. Jinx also points out that they were cheating before the Titans all got eliminated.
  • In Teenage Euthanasia, while at a funeral convention, Trophy uses her undeath powers to sabotage her rival Sophie Bennett at an embalming fluid competition. When their funeral homes are both tasked with embalming a dead rat, the spiked fluid seems to leave Sophie's rat even worse off, but suddenly backfires and brings it Back from the Dead. Baba then splashes the fluid on Trophy, temporarily turning her into a rat woman.
  • Total Drama:
    • Sam in the Total Drama All-Stars episode "Food Fright"; he wins the challenge for his team, but then in the elimination ceremony, it's revealed that he was caught smuggling pancakes out of fear of going to Boney Island a second time and that he was starving, thereby not only losing the challenge for his team but also getting himself flushed.
    • Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race features the Ice Dancers, Jacques and Josee, as the season's main antagonists, who constantly cheat on challenges and unfairly sabotage other players, making several enemies during the competition. Given their rage upon a Bronze medal win, it makes their elimination at third place all the more satisfying.
  • In one episode of Totally Spies!, Jerry crossly says this straight out to a villain who used robotic implants on the latter's Olympic team to make them stronger and faster: "When will you learn that cheaters only cheat themselves?"
  • Every single episode of Wacky Races. Dick Dastardly has the best car in the show, and if he'd just race honestly, he'd win every time. (Granted, almost everybody in that show cheats to some extent, but it's mostly just to make their own journeys easier. Dastardly is one of the only characters that tries to deliberately impede the others).
    • Ironically the one time he did win a race through straight out racing (despite trying to cheat earlier), he was disqualified because he stretched out the cone of his race car to reach the finish line. Despite, you know, every other racer having similar devices on their cars. Apparently, it's all right to use them during the race except the last leg of it. Then again, it was pretty early in the series.
    • Even more ironically, Dick Dastardly almost won a race through legitimate means (shouting as he did so, "I'm going to win this race fair and square even if I have to cheat to do it!") but stopped short of the finish line because Muttley wanted his autograph. The debut episode had him stop to pose when the narrator exclaimed the race would end in a photo finish.
  • Welcome to Tonka Town: This happens to Grease, Pitstop, Twoey, and Turbo in “Race Day In Tonka Town”, although they never get disqualified and their cheating doesn’t backfire- Chuck just has a Heroic Second Wind that allows him to catch up and just barely manage to reach the finish ling before Grease.
  • Outright exaggerated in the WordGirl episode "Two Brains' Quartet." Dr. Two Brains doesn't even try to win legitimately despite multiple protests from his henchmen that they could probably win and cheating is likely to backfire. They end up disqualified, but the henchmen plead to perform anyway, and their song is amazing — the mayor outright states that they probably would have won if they hadn't already been disqualified for cheating.
  • In the Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! episode "The Wubbzy Shuffle", Wubbzy becomes sneaky and cheats at Jumpity Jump, Nutty Nut Toss, and Chewy Cheese Checkers. Then, no one but Widget's newly built robot Kicky wanted to play kickety-kick ball with Wubbzy and Kicky wins the game. This was planned for Walden to teach Wubbzy a lesson after cheating at games.

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