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Deadly Games in Western Animation.


  • The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: The Intergalactic Showdown game show from the hour-length special "Win, Lose and Kaboom" exaggerates this trope. The winner gets a new car! The losers get to watch their home planet going kaboom. Ultimately, no planets go kaboom thanks to Jimmy fighting against the host/producer.
  • Butt-Ugly Martians episode "You Bet Your Planet" gives us Togut, a game involving asteroids. The BUMs has to prevent the asteroid from colliding with a planet, and their opponent Humonga has to ensure the collision. The planet in question is Earth, and Humonga has just as many wins as the BUMs.
  • The entire premise of Celebrity Deathmatch.
  • The Hollow: Played with, as while the whole thing turns out to really be a virtual reality game, it was never meant to harm the players' health. However, the game's code does become damaged somehow and the host is legitimately worried by that turn of events potentially killing the players.
  • The Justice League episode "Wild Cards," in which The Joker hides time bombs all throughout the Las Vegas Strip and uses hidden cameras to film the League racing to find them while simultaneously fighting the Royal Flush Gang.
  • Spiderman And His Amazing Friends: "Seven Little Superheroes" sees the Chameleon try to eliminate each of the various Marvel superheroes in brutal fashion, one-by-one. He uses drones disguised as each of the good guys in a "kill or be killed" game both for his own amusement and to wipe out those who would prevent him from achieving his goals. However, he finds that he can't kill off another little superhero that came along: Miss Lion! Apparently, changing his shape doesn't change his scent and this allowed the heroes to get the drop on him.
  • In the Looney Tunes short "The Ducksters", Porky is on a rather sadistic radio quiz show called Truth or AAAAHHH!! (a parody of Truth or Consequences) hosted by Daffy Duck, where Porky has to answer some rather impossible questions or "pay the penalty". These penalties include Porky being crushed by the Rock of Gibraltar, rained upon by Niagara Falls, tied up and blown up with dynamite, pounded with a mallet, threatened by a buzz saw, crushed by a safe, and other forms of abuse.
  • In Tiny Toon Adventures, Pluck and Dizzy compete on a game show called That's Incredibly Stupid, where the idea is to complete tasks you'd have to be incredibly stupid to attempt. Round one is to compete in a demolition derby (without a car), and round two involves finding a needle in a haystack (which is set on fire and has fireworks planted inside). Plucky survives those by putting the brunt of it on Dizzy, but when told the last round is simply to judge a beauty contest, he insists on doing it himself. The host neglects to tell him that the contestants are all of the Amazonian Beauty type, and all are horrible Sore Losers. (Plucky doesn't complete this one; he was a little too stupid.)
    • Montana Max and Babs Bunny also compete in a game show called "Win, Lose, or... KERPLOWWY!" which sees its contestants answer trivia questions or suffer humiliating, and often painful, consequences. Naturally Max bribes host Fink Winkleman into helping him beat Babs, but Buster Bunny manages to catch onto their game and turn the tables on the two.
  • Total Drama: The titular series hosted by Chris McLean zig-zags this. In the first season there were dangerous challenges that could cause the campers to get hurt, but these injuries were really just played for laughs, and the only deaths seen were from random animals that were unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some interns Chris said died setting up the challenges. In later seasons though as Chris went through Flanderization he slowly became The Sociopath, losing whatever little concern he had for the campers' safety and making his challenges as dangerous and potentially deadly as possible. Though no contestants in the various seasons have ever died due to playing the game, it has generally become accepted that joining the show means putting your life at risk and/or enduring being tortured by Chris for the chance to win $1,000,000.
  • In The Real Ghostbusters episode "The Devil to Pay", the heroes were conned by a demon named Dib Devlin into competing in a game show with their souls on the line. Unfortunately for Dib (who was clearly a devil behind on his quota) he underestimated their intelligence, and had no faith in human nature, seeing as the last part of the three-part game could be won by one of them admitting to doing something bad. (Which Ray eventually did.) Even worse, he was a Sore Loser who tried to kill them after he lost, but proved a complete wimp once Peter actually got his hands on him.
  • The Regular Show episode "Fool Me Twice" has Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson participate in a sadistic Takeshi's Castle expy with a deadly obstacle course and a crazed host who gets to punch them in the face with a lethal amount of force if they don't finish in time. Before they begin the host shows a montage of his previous victims, with a horribly disfigured man being referred to as "the only contestant who didn't die".
  • Slugterra: The Shane gang is subjected to this by the Game Master in "The Thrill of the Game". The Game Master's modus operandi is to lure unsuspecting slingers into a far off cavern called Lands End Cavern. There, he forces them to play "game", made up of dangerous obstacles and puzzles.


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