For examples from The Simpsons, click here.
- After the July 20th, 2012 Aurora movie theater massacre during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, the then-in-development Beware the Batman series was heavily edited before it's premiere so that all instances of realistic guns were changed to Family-Friendly Firearms.
- Two Freakazoid! episodes featuring Diana, Princess of Wales, were pulled for several years after her death.
- The usually shameless Drawn Together delayed the release of the episode "Terms of Endearment" (in which Captain Hero gets confined to a wheelchair as a side-effect of giving up his powers, a reference to the real-life accident which paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve) for over a year following Reeve's death. It was then almost delayed again when shortly before the rescheduled airdate, Reeve's widow announced she had a terminal illness.
- Family Guy:.
- The episode "The Fat Guy Strangler"note was nearly delayed due to the cutaway of Brian forcing George W. Bush to come out of his treehouse and actually deal with the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster.
- On May 1st, 2011, FOX's Sunday night Animation Domination line-up was supposed to include a three-part crossover special featuring all three Seth MacFarlane cartoons (The Cleveland Show, Family Guy, and American Dad!) meeting each other during a hurricane. Sadly, because the Southern and Midwestern United States was already getting pounded by tornadoes and floods, the episodes were pulled at the last minute and replaced with reruns of their respective shows. The three-part crossover eventually aired on October 2nd, 2011.
- Christmas episodes for Family Guy ("Jesus, Mary, and Joseph") and American Dad ("Minstrel Krampus") were supposed to air on December 16, 2012, but were replaced with repeats in light of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre due to the episodes containing "insensitive" material. The Family Guy episode aired the following week as it was pulled more due to its religious themes (with the regular cast retelling the Nativity story) than anything else, but the American Dad episode didn't air until December 15, 2013 since it has gun violence, along with an undeniable Christmas theme that would've been awkward to air in the middle of April, though most of this doesn't really matter, as most FOX affiliates interrupted all of their Sunday night programming with live coverage of the memorial service of the shooting victims.
- "Turban Cowboy" was removed from streaming on Hulu and the official FOX website (though it did eventually start airing in syndication many months later) after the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 thanks to a double whammy: it has a terrorist-themed plot and a cutaway gag where Peter drunkenly runs over marathon runners with his car. The fact that someone put up a video claiming that the episode "predicted" the bombings by editing the two clips together (which Seth MacFarlane called "abhorrent") really didn't help matters.
- Three minutes before the death of Robin Williams was announced in August 2014, BBC Three aired the Family Guy episode "Family Guy Viewer Mail #2," which has the story "Fatman and Robin," in which Peter wishes that everything he touched turned to Robin Williams, which leads to Peter attempting suicide several times over how annoying Williams' comedy is. Making matters worse, the episode ends with Peter cutting off his hands at the wrists (preventing himself from turning any more people into Robin Williams) which was one of Williams' attempted suicide methods in real life. Soon, negative comments flooded the internet about this coincidence
, and BBC banned it from ever airing again on their network. [adult swim] had the episode planned on their schedule on the day Robin Williams died too, but pulled the episode ahead of time and aired another one; the episode wouldn't return to rotation to either network until November 2017.- Speaking of BBC Three, the episode "Meg and Quagmire" made it's UK premiere on July 15th, 2012, however, 5 days later, the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting occurred. Due to the beginning of the episode featuring a scene of Wilford Brimley shooting up The Teen's Choice Awards, the episode was temporarily pulled from reruns out of respect, the episode was returned to UK rotation on January 15th, 2013.
- In light of the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the heightened concern over systemic racism (in addition to growing criticism about lack of diversity in Hollywood), it was announced that white actor Mike Henry was stepping down from his role as Cleveland in the show, stating that "persons of color should play characters of color". This would go on be the case for several other shows where non-white characters had white voice actors, including The Simpsons, Big Mouth, Central Park, PAW Patrol, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, the Johnny Test reboot and Wild Kratts, where several non-white characters have had their white voice actors changed.
- American Dad!:
- The second episode of the series "Threat Levels" was temporarily banned from Adult Swim in 2020 due to the first part of the episode being about The Smiths being put in quarantine after Stan brings home a thermos that presumably had a dangerous virus in it, being possibly too sensitive to air during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The episode was brought back later in the year.
- In the episode "The Vacation Goo," there's a scene where the family walks into the living room (after being tricked into taking a virtual reality trip in the vacation goo) to find Stan watching a Georgetown game on TV and wearing Georgetown gear. According to the DVD commentary, Stan was originally going to wear Virginia Tech gear and be a Virginia Tech fan, but then the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech happened, so they had to change it to a less controversial school at the time.
- In the episode "Francine's Flashback" the scene where Stan brings in Whitney Houston to sing a private apology performance for some cocaine was removed in airings following Houston's death (though the scene was eventually reinstated later), jumping straight from when Stan yells in horror from midnight fishing with his coworkers to Francine saying she will never forgive him for forgetting their anniversary.
- The ending to "Pulling Double Booty" originally involved Hayley taking a matchbook and setting fire to a forest after realizing Stan tricked her into dating him by pretending to be his body double, Bill. This ending was cut from the episode's premiere showings on FOX and Adult Swim due to a large wildfire in Southern California that occurred shortly before (making the episode end with Hayley yelling, "Oh my God! Are you KIDDING ME?!"). The ending is restored on syndicated airings and on DVD.
- Adult Swim pulled a rerun of the episode "Hurricane!" on September 2, 2021 in wake of the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. Oddly enough, sister channel TBS would air a rerun of the same episode a few days later, and UK channel ITV 2 aired a rerun on September 9, 2021, as well.
- The fourth season of the Total Drama series, Revenge of the Island takes place on a polluted Camp Wawanakwa that has become a toxic dumping ground since the events of Total Drama Island, resulting in many unsightly mutations of the island wildlife whom the contestants must dodge in the million dollar prize competition. Originally scheduled to debut in 2011, the nuclear disaster in Japan that year as a result of the tsunami forced the show's Canadian producers to delay the season and edit it extensively to mitigate any sort of insensitive reference to anything that could be tied to the disaster, like renaming the "Radioactive Rats" to the "Toxic Rats" for instance. The season eventually debuted in 2012.
- Following Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash, MTV pulled a scheduled rerun of the Celebrity Deathmatch episode "Sex, Lugs and Rock 'n' Roll" in 2001, after the third segment of the episode showed every scene of car crashes in which it literately made light of fatal accidents, regardless of Earnhardt's death which made headline news during that time. note However, MTV actually brought this episode back from being banned. The episode later returned to air on MTV on March 22, 2003, at 11:00 pm uncut.
- King of the Hill:
- A throwaway line in "Joust Like a Woman" in which a teen boy calls the make-believe king at a Renaissance Faire "gay" was edited out of airings on [adult swim] following several high-profile suicides of teens who had been bullied for being gay in late 2010. The scene was reinstated on Adult Swim two years later.
- Some network television stations ([adult swim] has aired the episode) which air King of the Hill in syndication pulled "The Peggy Horror Picture Show" from rotation following the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, as the episode contains outdated, confusing, and incorrect information about transgender women (even though most of the people Peggy meet are said to be drag queens [who are gay men who only dress as women as part of a stage show or performance], Peggy's new friend, Caroline, in the episode is implied to be a pre-op transgender woman, as her birth identity is a man named Jamie, but she publicly dresses in drag and identifies as a woman, complete with being referred to as "she" and "her").
- Archer initially revolved around a fictional spy agency called "ISIS" (International Secret Intelligence Service), named for the Egyptian goddess of the same name.note But the name was officially retired in Season 6, as the acronym had become inextricably associated with the Real Life terrorist organization "The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria". This may have been why the previous season featured ISIS being shut down by the FBI, with the cast temporarily becoming a drug cartel to make ends meet; most viewers naturally assumed that ISIS would be reassembled by next season, but Season 6 actually saw the cast becoming CIA subcontractors.
- The Bonkers episodes "Fall Apart Bomb Squad" and "New Partners on the Block" (the latter of which is the first episode in which Bonkers' new partner is the blonde police officer, Miranda Wright, due to Lucky Piquel's retirement from the force) were both pulled from the rotation following the 1995 Oklahoma bombings, and strangely never came back to the air even before 9/11. To the delight of fans, both episodes resurfaced in 2019 with the launch of Disney+, fixing the Plot Hole caused by the latter's absence.
- In addition to pulling the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "Mass Transit Trouble" after 9/11 (the second time this happened; see that page for more), Toon Disney also pulled "Magnificent Sonic" from rotation after the Columbine shooting due to extensive use of guns.
- Disney Junior examples:
- The Lion Guard episode "Never Roar Again" was delayed from June 24th, 2016 to November 18th, 2016 after the incident at Walt Disney World's Grand Floridian hotel in which a child was killed by an alligator since a crocodile character played a major role in the episode.
- The Doc McStuffins: Toy Hospital episode "First Responders to the Rescue" had its premiere on September 9, 2017, cancelled due to Hurricane Irma occurring on the same day, and the episode heavily featured a storm. The premiere was moved to September 23, but it was still released on demand and on the app the day of its intended release.
- An encore of the Mickey and the Roadster Racers episode "Ye Old Royal Heist/Tea Time Trouble", which takes place in London, was meant to be shown on June 4, 2017, but was pulled from airing that day due to the London attacks happening not too long beforehand. Fortunately, it was back into rotation.
- The Fancy Nancy episode "Camp Fancy/Nancy's Vanity D'Art" was originally meant to air on August 24, 2018, but was moved to three weeks later on September 14. This is because the former segment involved a rainstorm, which would be seen as insensitive due to Hurricane Lane hitting Hawaii.
- Bojack Horseman has two in-universe examples:
- The episode "Thoughts and Prayers" parodies the phenomenon. The constant mass shootings force the producers of the action movie Ms. Taken to keep editing out scenes with gun violence until the movie is reduced to be about five seconds long and cancelled altogether. It also depicts the production crew as more worried about current events affecting the movie than the fact that people are dying. Another gag in the episode reveals that the studio previously had to pull a film about a clumsy babysitter due to its title: Hurricane Sandy.
- Near the end of the final season, it's revealed that BoJack let Sarah Lynn die so he could cover up his involvement in her overdose, thus ruining his reputation. Not only is a planned Blu-Ray release of his flagship show Horsin' Around cancelled, but the show is edited to remove BoJack's involvement altogether, editing his character out so it's just about three orphans living alone. The show is thus retitled Around.
- The episode "Thoughts and Prayers" parodies the phenomenon. The constant mass shootings force the producers of the action movie Ms. Taken to keep editing out scenes with gun violence until the movie is reduced to be about five seconds long and cancelled altogether. It also depicts the production crew as more worried about current events affecting the movie than the fact that people are dying. Another gag in the episode reveals that the studio previously had to pull a film about a clumsy babysitter due to its title: Hurricane Sandy
- On May 14th, 2019, the official Twitter for SpongeBob SquarePants posted a tweet quoting The Ugly Barnacle on the same day Tim Conway — who voiced recurring character Barnacle Boy — died of complications from brain surgery. After fans complained, the tweet was removed.
- A similar incident happened when the Japanese Disney Twitter account tweeted a post themed after Alice in Wonderland which said "A very merry unbirthday to you!" in English accompanied by a picture of Alice holding a birthday cake, with the Japanese translation, "Happy nothing special day!", note on the 70th anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing. Disney later apologized for the mistake.
- A similar incident happened when the Japanese Disney Twitter account tweeted a post
- Lilo & Stitch: The Series had two different episodes that were affected by the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami:
- Re-runs of the episode "Cannonball" were pulled because said episode revolved around the titular experiment causing tsunamis. It was put back in rotation two months later.
- According to Jess Winfield, the episode "Ace" was supposed to have a scene where Lilo, Stitch and some of the experiments create a tidal wave to impress the head of E.G.O. with Pleakley playing a victim until, thanks to the episode's titular experiment, he unintentionally becomes the victim. Winfield and his staff thought it was insensitive to the victims of the tragedy, so they turned the episode into a Clip Show in which Jumba shows the head of E.G.O. videos of the experiments.
- The premiere of Father of the Pride was delayed after Roy Horn's injury on October 3, 2003. Instead of being a mid-season replacement as originally intended, it aired on August 31, 2004.
- Several animated shows were affected by the Coronavirus Pandemic in early 2020:
- Reruns of the Amphibia episode "Contagi-Anne" were pulled from Disney XD and Disney Channel because of the plot of Anne pretending to be sick so she can skip doing her chores. It's still on Disney+, though.
- The Big City Greens episode "Cricket's Shoes" was pulled from reruns on both Disney Channel and Disney XD, because it involved Cricket getting sick and at one point, he goes outside when he shouldn't, and twice at the beginning and end, he sneezes and gets his germs all over Bill's face.
- The Cartoon Network app pulled the Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart episode "Sick Mao", the We Bare Bears episode "Bubble" and the Teen Titans Go! episode "Body Adventure'' after the coronavirus pandemic. Ironically, a clip from "Bubble" depicting all the germs Panda sees on the subway circulated the internet during the pandemic due to its relevance.
- The Total Dramarama episode "Germ Factory" was pulled because in the episode, the toddlers intentionally try to get themselves sick. In addition, the episode "The A-Bok-Bok-Bokalypse", where the toddlers get chickenpox, was delayed an entire year due to the pandemic.
- Also removed were Craig of the Creek ("The Last Kid of the Creek"), Summer Camp Island ("Sneeze Guard"), and two Bakugan and Regular Show shorts.
- As of 2020, the Baby Looney Tunes episodes "Oh Brother, Warehouse Art Thou?/Flu the Coop" no longer air on Boomerang or Cartoonito. This is because the latter episode has Bugs and Daffy attempt to avoid getting flu shots, ending with them getting the flu. The episode can still be purchased on most digital storefronts however, and watched on the Boomerang SVOD service.
- On March 16, 2020, several PBS affiliates aired the Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood episode "Daniel Gets a Cold; Mom Tiger Is Sick". While this might have been a way for children to cope with the coronavirus epidemic that was currently going on, said repeat wound up airing as many broadcast stations across the country broke into special reports about local governments making businesses shut down for two weeks as a preventative measure. This incident lead to the episode temporarily being pulled from rotation. It returned to regular rotation in September 2020, but the episode was offered on the PBS Kids app during this period.
- Boomerang removed reruns of the Garfield and Friends episodes "Peace and Quiet; Wanted: Wade; Garfield Goes Hawaiian" and "Attention-Getting Garfield; Swine Trek; It Must Be True!" from their channel because the plot of the third segment in the former episode involves Garfield catching the Hawaiian Cat Flu, despite the symptoms of the illness not resembling what one would consider to be the flu, and the second segment in the latter episode has its plot spurred from Orson being sick in bed. Both are still on the Boomerang app, however, and the former episode returned on June 26, 2020.
- The Lou and Lou: Safety Patrol episode "Don't Get The Flu" was pulled from DisneyNow due to the pandemic, despite the short's lessons on not spreading germs being the kind of thing networks were airing to help kids during the pandemic.
- Reruns of the Puppy Dog Pals episode "Land Of The Rising Pup/ARF-choo!" were temporarily pulled from March to May 2020, because the latter segment dealt with A.R.F. catching a virus due to not completing a reboot.
- Reruns of the Ready Jet Go! episode "Sean Has a Cold" and its sister episode "Mars Rock for Mom" were pulled because of the former being about, well, Sean having a cold. It wouldn't air again until May 8. Since the pandemic was still going on around this time, some affiliates aired the episode in an early morning death slot to avoid a repeat of the Daniel Tiger incident. This included the aformentioned WNET, which wound up swapping Ready Jet Go's timeslot with a re-run of Arthur, the show that normally airs at 6AM.
- Reruns of the SpongeBob SquarePants episodes "Suds", "Fungus Among Us", and "Squid-itis" were pulled. All three episodes are streaming on Paramount+ in the United States alongside their sister episodesnote .
- Speaking of SpongeBob, season 12 includes an episode entitled "Kwarantined Krab", in which the Krusty Krab is forced to be on quarantine because of a deadly virus called Clam Flu, and it ended with everyone getting a seperate disease for real, putting the Krusty Krab under "ultra-mega quarentine". Had this episode been released in any other year it would've been "just another episode", but it was the victim of unfortunate timing- it was set to air in 2020, right when a real deadly virus spread rapidly and real quarantines were issued out. As a result, the season 12 DVD set doesn't even include this episode at all, leaving its sister segment "Who R Zoo?" by itself. The episode would finally air on April 29, 2022.
- Yet another episode would also be pulled from its premiere by the COVID19 pandemic. The episode "Hiccup Plague" was set to premiere on January 18, 2021 but was also pulled from its premiere because of its plot being very similar to a conspiracy theory as to the pandemic's origins. Namely, a conspiracy existed that the virus was created in a lab in China and allowed to leak out, and the episode is about two girls creating a plague of hiccups in a treehouse and letting it leak out. Instead, it's partner episode "Lighthouse Louie" was paired with the episode "My Two Krabses". Despite the initial ban, the episode was on the complete twelfth season DVD set. It also was briefly uploaded to Prime Video on January 19th, but pulled a day later. It would finally see an American TV premiere on April 22, 2022.
- [adult swim] pulled reruns of the Bob's Burgers episode "Flu-ouise", due to its A-plot involving Louise getting a flu. It returned to the regular rerun rotation in October 2020.
- The 7th episode of Cleopatra in Space , "Quarantine" which involved almost everyone in school getting sick, was initially not put up on the Peacock streaming service in America though both Peacock and Hulu later added it in 2022.
- The Loud House episodes "One Flu Over the Loud House" and its sister episode "The Price of Admission" have been pulled from airing by Nickelodeon due to the former being a Plague Episode themed around mass infection. The episodes are still available for streaming on Paramount+.
- According to animator Kyle A. Carrozza, some scenes in the Animaniacs episode "Hindenberg Cola" had to be redrawn in order for them to be less upsetting to viewers, since they could have been reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The Apple & Onion episode "Petri" was originally held back due to the episode being "too much about a virus for the times", as confirmed by the creator George Gendi. It was later made available on HBO Max when the full series was added to the service.
- The Abby Hatcher episode "The Princess Flug Bug" has been delayed twice throughout 2020, due to the plot involving Princess Flug pretending to have the flu so she can see the doctor with the other Fuzzlies being vaguly similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. It would premiere along with its' sister episode "Abby's Farm Animal Friend" on April 1, 2022 in an early-morning timeslot.
- The Blaze and the Monster Machines Season 5 finale "The Gold Medal Games" did not air until July 2021 due to being similar to the Olympic Games and the Tokyo 2020 event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Reruns of the Blue's Clues & You! episode "Getting Healthy With Blue" were pulled beginning in May 2020 because the episode dealt with Josh getting sick. It still appears on streaming and DVD releases, though. The episode would finally air on November 10, 2022.
- The PAW Patrol episode "Pups Save A Sniffle", which involves most of the dogs coming down with an illness, was pulled from rotation due to the pandemic, though it accidentally aired twice during this period. The episode finally returned to rotation on April 8, 2021.
- Looney Tunes:
- In A Wild Hare, one of the first Bugs Bunny cartoons and the first cartoon to use the finalized Bugs vs. Elmer format, Bugs covers Elmer's eyes from behind and asks him to guess who. Elmer guesses Carole Lombard. A year later, Lombard died in a tragic plane crash, and a new line where Elmer instead guessed Barbara Stanwyck was recorded and used in all subsequent releases of the short.
- Similarly, one of the first cartoons to feature Yosemite Sam, 1948's "Bugs Bunny Rides Again", has Sam's first line when he enters the saloon calling himself "...the roughest, toughest he-man stuffest hombre that's ever crossed the Rio Grande, and I don't mean Mahatma Gandhi". Around the time of the short's original release, Gandhi was assassinated; resulting in the last part of that line being changed to "...and I ain't no namby-pamby".
- On June 10th, 2020, the Bubble Guppies episode "The Police Cop-Etition!" was pulled from both reruns and the Nick Jr. and Noggin apps due to the murder of George Floyd by police. A re-run was slated to air two days after it was pulled from the apps on the Nick Jr. channel, but got replaced with one of "Come to Your Senses!" the day before.
- Being that one of its main canine characters is a police officer, PAW Patrol suffered from a nasty case of this due to the death of George Floyd:
- First, the social media accounts for the show went dark for five days in remembrance of George Floyd. After people complained about the posts specifically because of Chase, the accounts did not post anything for a month.
- The Nick Jr. website features a specific character as the icon for their shows (for instance, Molly for Bubble Guppies and Blue for Blue's Clues & You!), with Chase being the character icon for PAW Patrol. On June 17th, 2020, the icon was changed to Marshall. This strangely did not affect its international sites, however.
- The Noggin app also changed its icon for PAW Patrol from Chase to Marshall. Because of his promotion to icon status, the ads for the app themselves, which used Marshall, now used Skye instead to avoid confusion.
- Two Ultimate Rescue episodes ("Pups Save The Royal Kitties" and "Pups Stop A Meltdown; Pups And The Mystery of the Missing Cellphones") were pulled from rotation because in the episodes, the other pups become police officers like Chase. The episodes would eventually return to the Nick Jr. app in December 2020.
- Nick Jr's advertising for their summer programming line-up used Rex and Marshall rather than Chase as was the case with previous ad campaigns.
- Finally, some streaming providers removed Chase from promotional artwork.
- An example not involving Chase: Deann Degruijter, the voice of Mayor Goodway, was replaced by Kim Roberts for similar reasons to the replacement of the voices for non-white characters on The Simpsons and Family Guy.
- One of the reasons that the Rugrats episode "Vacation" has rarely aired since 2003 is because it contains a scene in which Expys of Siegfeld and Roy named Heimlich and Bob are attacked by tigers, which became very uncomfortable in light of the incident where Roy Horn was attacked by the duo's trained tiger Montecore.
- The short lived cartoon Pro Stars originally had a theme song with new lyrics set to Queen's "We Will Rock You". This was rather appropriate, given that the song is a staple of sporting events and the main characters were fictionalized versions of famous athletes (Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Bo Jackson). Unfortunately, Queen frontman Freddie Mercury died from pneumonia following complications of AIDS a couple of months into the show's run and a new theme song had to be used.
- VeggieTales was to feature a Silly Song about tornado hunting on Robin Good and His Not-So-Merry Men, but was cut due to a tornado outbreak that occured around the time of the video's production.
- The G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero episode "Cobra Quake" was temporarily pulled from reruns on The Hub in 2011 following the Tohoku earthquake, as the episode involves G.I. Joe trying to stop Cobra from causing an artificially created earthquake to destroy Tokyo.
- The original version of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 episode "Kootie Pie Rocks", which featured Milli Vanilli as guest stars, ended up airing just before they were exposed as non-singers. NBC pulled the episode from reruns following the scandal, and when it returned in syndication it was heavily edited to remove the pair's songs as well as certain dialogue referencing the group. The edited version is what's on present airings and DVD releases, and the original version is no longer available legally.
- The Ren & Stimpy Show was dropped from the NickSplat block and other Nickelodeon platforms in 2018 following John Kricfalusi's statutory rape allegations, though it returned the following year. Kricfalusi's photo was also removed from the "wall of creators" in Nickelodeon Studios.
- The Prince (2021), an HBO Max cartoon parodying The British Royal Family, was delayed from its late spring 2021 release date following the death of Prince Phillip. It was finally released on July 29, 2021, after Prince Phillip had left the American public conscious.
- The DC Super Hero Girls (2019) short "#AbraKachoo" had the plot of Zatanna going to school with a cold and her sneezes consequentially causing her magic to go out of control and create all sorts of havoc. While the short aired on Cartoon Network UK in October 27, 2019, it was never aired as a "bumper" on Boomerang or uploaded to the franchise's YouTube channel like the rest of the Super Shorts due to the unfortunate timing of having uncomfortable parallels to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
