Family Unfriendly Violence / Western Animation

And all this over a bit of candy...

Shows with their own pages:

• SpongeBob SquarePants

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Individual examples:

#-L

• Quite a few times on Adventure Time, which is a kid's show:
  • In "Dad's Dungeon", where a fruit witch accidentally eats her cursed apple and consequently gets covered in vines, which rot off to reveal an apple that has entrapped her. Her two sisters then eat her and what's left behind is a apple core covered in bones and blood. Not apple juice that sorta looked like blood, actual blood (it was even visible on the red apple skin).
  • Another of the worst examples is "No-One Can Hear You", first when the Stag deliberately breaks both of Finn's legs (particularly shocking since it comes out of nowhere and there's no scary build-up). Then at the end of the episode, when a cinder block gets dropped on the Stag's head you can see his skull get crushed and his neck break.
• Amphibia is usually pretty in-line with its TV-Y7 rating, but the season 2 finale has a child impaled onscreen with an Energy Blade, a scene so gruesome it made execs almost reconsider the scene entirely. There's even a closeup of the sword going through the character's torso. Season 3 later has two characters experience dismemberment.
• The Animals of Farthing Wood had this real, real hard. Despite being called a series for toddlers, we see animals being spiked, run over, dying in front of our eyes, bitten to death, being eaten, getting shot in the ass and various other examples.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • In "The Storm", we see how Zuko got his scar. Although we are treated to a Gory Discretion Shot, it's entirely obvious that Ozai shot his son in the face with fire (for speaking out of turn, no less), which would be rather...disconcerting to younger viewers.
  • "The Boiling Rock" has a man tortured by being held upside down for a long time, which sounds like Cool and Unusual Punishment, but is actually quite painful and is a real form of torture.
  • In "Appa's Lost Days," Appa gets into a fight with a giant boar crossed with a porcupine, and although he wins, he winds up stuck with several giant quills. He pulls one out, and not only does he visibly bleed (a rarity for this show), but it is apparently so painful that he roars at the top of his lungs and doesn't bother trying to get rid of the rest. He remains that way for days.
  • Bloodbending is first introduced in "The Puppetmaster". The victims always look in great pain and shock. Potentially, a Bloodbender could not only manipulate muscles, which is implied, but crush the victim's internal organs, stop the heart or, in a similar vein to extracting fluid from plants (killing the plant in the process).
  • The show's premise itself ("the Last Airbender") is dependent on a genocide that took place in the story universe 100 years prior to the plot of the show. They might not be allowed to use the word itself, but however you look at it, the Fire Nation killing off every single one of the Air Nomads for being Air Nomads is genocide.
    • Aang crying over the skeleton of his dead mentor surrounded by the skeletons of dozens of his attackers is a pretty chilling scene, it has to be said.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • The Avatar sequel series continues the tradition nicely, taking the already-disturbing concept of bloodbending and turning it into something utterly horrifying It's hard to believe they were even allowed to show Aang screaming in agony as his limbs were twisted the wrong way and his attacker attempted to kill him by twisting his neck. None of the other bloodbending scenes were quite that violent, but seeing teenaged Noatak practically torturing his brother Tarrlok with it at his father's request was just as disturbing.
  • Amon's ability to remove people's bending looks quite disturbing in practice. It's basically framed as a Public Execution, and his victims fall forward lifelessly with staring eyes and gaping mouths after he does it.
  • Pretty much every time Amon attacks a public place could be an example. His takeover of the Pro-bending Arena during the finals is bad enough, but he still manages to outdo himself later on, kidnapping the entire Republic City council besides Tenzin, gassing the police station, bombing the entire city from airships, and attacking Air Temple Island for the express purpose of capturing Tenzin and his children.
  • Amon's bloodbending on Korra. They show an extended scene of her being grabbed and tossed around and put in painful poses, complete with her screaming in pain.
  • The deaths of Noatak and Tarrlok are probably the least family-friendly violence in the entire show — they die in an explosion after Tarrlok opens the fuel cap of their getaway boat and activates an electric glove over the top of it. It's not bloody, but they still managed to get away with a Murder-Suicide on a Saturday morning Nickelodeon show.
  • Book 2, if anything, pushes things even further — it opens with a presumably lethal ship sinking and remains willing to slaughter extras throughout, as all of Avatar Wan's friends find out the hard way. In one memorable instance, we're treated to the sight of Professor Zei's seventy year old desiccated corpse. The show's non-deadly violence continues to be rather disturbing, too — Korra shoves a man's head in her polar bear dog's mouth to make him talk, there's another terrorist bombing (this time caused by a comic relief character), fighting against bending in the Spirit World with no body temporarily erases parts of Korra's arms and torso, and, worst of all Vaatu emerges from Unalaq's mouth, rips Raava out of Korra's body, and beats her to death as Korra struggles in helpless agony. She gets him back for it later by putting her hand into his chest and ripping out Raava before spiritbending him to death.
  • There are heavy implications that Suyin was attempting to assassinate Kuvira in her sleep. It failed due to Kuvira using a double and she catches Suyin.
  • Just as a side note, it is more acceptable to show violence in the cartoon The Legend of Korra than other cartoons, as it's aimed more at teenagers than little children (much like Japanese anime often are), which is somewhat unusual for western cartoons (as western cartoons tend to be aimed at pre-teens and younger children). The only problem could be if for example a parent mistakes it for being a "kids show" and let their eight-year-old kid watch it. That's a rather easy mistake to make given that, target audience aside, it's still rated Y7 and has aired on Saturday mornings.
• In one of the early episodes of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Bucky Barnes drops a drawbridge on an unsuspecting HYDRA Mook. Though to the show's credit, Captain America briefly seems shocked by what he's just witnessed.
  • In "Alone Against A.I.M.", the Technovore violently eviscerates a group of A.I.M. agents. The entire scene is only shown in silhouette, but it's quite clear what's going on.
• Batman: The Animated Series does this quite a bit:
  • People are routinely thrown across rooms, hit in the jaw with fists/crowbars/baseball bats/two-by-fours, and seen falling 20-30 feet onto their faces, necks, shoulders, etc.. Victims usually sit up a moment later rubbing their foreheads, but even once you realize this pattern, the moment of impact never really gets any less cringe-inducing.
  • Even Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, which got away with blood and on-screen deaths, has a few glaring moments, most notably, Bruce getting hit in the stomach with a baseball bat, which is being held out by a passing motorcyclist and thus connected with huge amounts of force, then getting up a few seconds later without so much as a cracked rib. The DC Animated Universe in general has very violent "kids shows" (though it may not have been intended to be).
  • A particularly memorable instance of this occurs in the Harley Quinn's Villain Episode "Mad Love". They cut away from the Joker slapping Harley, but they clearly show him throw her out of a window several stories to the ground. Harley survives, but we see her on top of rubble, blood coming out of her mouth (averting Bloodless Carnage as well).
  • Regarding the page quote, it's worth pointing out that victims who are gassed and given the Joker grin are not mentioned to be alive or seen again afterwards, making it very easy for the kids watching at home to infer that the gas is quite lethal.
• Its distant sequel series, Batman Beyond is no stranger to violence and its movie, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, is even worse. There are two different death scenes for different characters, one for The Joker and Bonk, the pale Jokerz. The former is either shot in the chest with his own bang-flag gun by his hostage or slips and falls, which entangles him in electrical wires over a pool of water and fries him alive. The latter is shot with a bang-flag gun or sprayed with Joker Venom gas as a warning to the rest.
• Code Lyoko has a surprising ton of violence:
  • In the titual virtual world, the heroes get quite regularly 'Devirtualized' by, in no particular order, enemy laser shots, being crushed by Malevolent Architecture, chopped apart by XANA William's huge sword, and more than once pull Suicide by Cop on each other to avoid something worse. If Devirtualization didn't lead them back in the real world, which almost happened in some episodes, the show would have ended very quickly.
  • In the real world, the characters, who are kids, are regularly in severe danger of death by the Monster of the Week, and once XANA begins doing possessing people, all bets are off: the kids are regularly chocked, thrown around like ragdolls, and electrified, and at times are mere moments away from meeting a very gruesome end. Nobody actually does die, mind you, but it can get very unnerving.
  • One of the more specifically unnerving moments is in the episode "Cold War", in which XANA causes a cataclysmic lowering of temperature within the city. Near the climax of the episode, Yumi has her lower half pinned down by a log, with Ulrich completely unable save her. He's forced to watch, helpless, as Yumi starts slowly freezing to death, and the only reason anyone makes it out alive is a last second Reset Button. It's easily one of the most disturbing scenes in the show. What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?
• Danny Phantom had this in spades in 'The Ultimate Enemy.' We see some rampant destruction of buildings, but also the effects of the violence on the ghosts and many of the humans—many of them are crippled, or in the case of one human character, losing an arm altogether. Vlad also states that in the future, human Danny ended up being killed by his ghost side.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy mostly averts this, having more of a slapstick type of violence that's over-the-top, yet somewhat tame. However, Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show reveals the kids' injuries from the Eds' latest scam: Jonny with a bear trap on his head, Nazz with almost all of her hair fallen off and wearing a magician's box, Kevin looking like he was set on fire, and a chunk of Rolf's torso and arm bitten off, as well as a thin, long lump on his head.
  • However, that's nothing compared to the horrifying torture Eddy receives in the hands of his older brother, who twists Eddy's leg in a way that well past comical and a step higher to horror. The fact that Eddy begs in agony to stop just exacerbates the situation.
• Gravity Falls has a surprising amount of this considering that it's a Disney show. Some of the highlights are Dipper nearly getting his tongue cut off with lamb shears, a kid getting eaten alive on screen (though he was fine by the end albeit "twaumatized" in his words), and Dipper embedding an ax in a monster with no gory discretion shot. The show has also has shown blood on a few different occasions, such as taxidermy animals bleeding from their eyes and mouths as they chant demonically. One episode also shows a bunch of demons playing a game using a dead body, where, after spinning said body a la Spin the Bottle, the spinner eats whoever it lands on. "A Tale of Two Stans" has Stanley painfully branded by red-hot metal onscreen, resulting in a perma-scar that in season 1 had been previously assumed to be a tattoo.
• Happened quite a few times on The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (what do you expect from a show where the Grim Reaper is one of the Main Characters?). One of the most gruesome examples is when Billy is thrown off his bike and hits the ground face-first; his entire face is shredded off, revealing the muscles and arteries underneath. He's completely healed five seconds later, but still...
• Herman and Katnip is a clone of Tom and Jerry, but with that series's violence and sadistic nature taken up a notch. It's to the point that these two were the true inspiration behind Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons, according to Word of God.
• The short-lived but popular Nicktoon Invader Zim had a plethora of Nightmare Fuel, although asking the famously disturbing Jhonen Vasquez to make a kid's show was...probably not the smartest of ideas to begin with, but turned out fantastically. It was definitely not suited for the station though. For a few examples:
  • In the episode "Bestest Friend," Zim befriends an Earth child, and later rips his eyes out; even the fact it's only shown in the shadows doesn't dilute it much. (Though, as Jhonen said, he did get a new pair of eyes.)
    • Just as bad, or worse, is when he falls off the roof of a house after being attacked by a squirrel the eyes made him believe was Zim. The column of smoke implies that the eyes either malfunctioned or exploded when he hit the ground. Supposedly, the only reason he didn't end up pulling a Kenny (dying in more than one episode) was because the network wouldn't allow it.
  • Then there was "Dark Harvest," which had Zim going around stealing children's organs and jamming them into himself.
  • Or "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy," where Zim slowly ruined Dib's life by throwing rubber pigs into a time machine, thus causing Dib to become more and more seriously damaged — and eventually killing him. (though he's eventually resurrected).
  • "Lice" had a school infested by lice, a series of cruel "treatments," a hideous Louse Queen, and the clincher, — Zim's skin can kill lice. After the threat is eliminated, we get to see a skinned-alive Zim writhing around screaming "THE PAIN!"''
  • "Bolognius Maximus" turned Dib and Zim into sausages. Sure, they hit the reset button right after, but the damage would be done at that point.
  • In the episode "Hamstergeddon" Peepi the class hamster is tampered with by Zim and he becomes a giant monster that begins to eat the students (we see him pull them under the floor and we hear crunching sounds), he then goes on a rampage and steps on many people, at the end of the episode was a message saying that no hamsters or people were harmed, that was probably the only way Jhonen was able to get away with it.
    • In the DVD commentary he constantly and explicitly says "she's dead/he's dead". Then he goes on about the large amount of people who died during the message saying that no one was harmed!
  • The episode "Game Slave 2" had Gaz stalking Iggins, the stupid little boy who lied about a preorder and bought the last Game Slave 2 after she'd been waiting in line for hours to get it. It appeared, at the end of the episode, as if Gaz had killed Iggins (after making sure that he'd never have batteries for the system again) but, because Nickelodeon execs took umbrage at this, they tacked on the wildly out of place "Flying Iggins" ending.
  • In "The Frycook from Outer Space" at one point to escape from his job which he hates he hides himself inside a taco which allows a fat alien to eat him and therefore doesn't allow the laser to fry him when he goes by, after leaving the restaurant he bursts out of the alien's stomach leaving a gaping hole in him and spilling his stomach contents on the ground, it didn't seem to bother the alien much.
• Justice League has a bad habit of playing incredible violence against minimally superpowered foes as being slapstick or perfectly harmless, even when it should have maimed or killed the person. Countless guns are blown up in people's hands with little more than a flinch, thieves slipping and landing on their heads, entire blocks being blown up complete with people panicking, that sorta thing. A nasty example would be the fate of the vile Steven Mandragora. The episode "Double Date" holds him as the Huntress's target, someone she is willing to kill to avenge the parents he killed before her very eyes, and while tough enough to take a punch or sonic wail, not particularly superpowered. The Huntress plans to kill him with a few crossbow bolts. In the episode's denouement, she has the option of killing him in front of his son or letting him back into police custody. Instead of executing him with the crossbow bolts, she refuses to kill and instead... drops a ton of steel I-beams on his head from at least a hundred feet up.
• Kaeloo practically revolves around this trope. Ax-Crazy Mr. Cat will use a variety of weapons on Quack Quack, and in the end he himself will be horribly beaten up (or worse) by Bad Kaeloo.
• Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness:
  • In the episode "Sight For Sore Eyes" the villain Junjie takes over the Jade Palace. After Chao comes back to check, an arrow is shot at him from a group of snow leopards. He catches it... and is promptly shot by a dozen more. Complete with violent sounds. While he doesn't die, he is severely wounded and imprisoned. Makes you have second wonders about such a lighthearted show...
  • In the one hour special "Enter the Dragon", the Big Bad needs to remove the legendary Hero's Chi from Po, which he does by sticking him in a giant funnel and literally crushing it out of him. This ends up killing him.
• The Lion Guard is aimed at preschoolers and airs on Disney Junior, an early childhood-aimed network. Despite this, its level of violence is on par with what cartoons aimed at elementary schoolers can have. The fights are not bloody, but can look rather painful.
• Ironically, this is much less common in Warner Bros' Looney Tunes cartoons, where the impact of the violence is often blunted by the recipient's reactions to it (and the usual cartoon exaggeration. For example, Daffy Duck can be shot point-blank with a gun, and come out with nothing more than a misaligned bill and frustration towards Bugs Bunny for getting the upper hand once again.
  • The original cut of Hare Ribbin' had the ending gag with the Russian Dog crying after he thinks he killed Bugs, and wishing it would've been him instead. In response, Bugs shoots the dog in the mouth. The Hays Office objected to it, and Bob Clampett was forced to change it to the dog shooting himself after Bugs offers him a gun. Lampshaded at the end:
    Russian Dog: This shouldn't even happen to a dog!
  • In Birdy and the Beast, Tweety sets a cat on fire, then douses him with gasoline. This causes him to explode. Somehow, this does not deter him.
  • In False Hare, the Big Bad Wolf gets shut into an iron maiden while trying to kill Bugs during a fake rabbit club initiation. His nephew opens it and cringes at the results.
  • The Larry Doyle-produced shorts from the early 2000s can get pretty nasty with the violence.
    • In Museum Scream, Sylvester gets attacked by a vicious flying scorpion (which causes him to break out into spots), drenched in (simulated, but still functional) stomach acid, cut into pieces, and having multiple copies of himself getting blown to bits by fireworks.
    • In My Generation G-G-Gap, Porky (who is trying to get his daughter out of a rock show he thinks could be dangerous) gets sliced apart by some wires, thrashed around like a guitar by a rockstar, and electrocuted for a good half-minute.
• Looney Tunes Cartoons, on the other hand, has a lot more of this compared to the originals. There are scenes like Tweety breaking apart Sylvester's ribcage, Bugs deflating into a horrific sack of fur and skin, Sylvester committing suicide after getting neutered, Petunia Pig getting more and more battered while trying to take a picture of a squirrel, or Taz getting deep red cuts on his cheeks.

M-Z

• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack has Captain K'nuckles's story about how he got two wooden hands: When he was a kid he stuck one hand in the garbage disposal, which was hand-operated. Since he couldn't afford to buy a fake hand, he carved a replica of one he saw in a pawn shop... but it was for the wrong hand so he cut off his other hand and carved another replica for the first hand he lost. Later in that same episode, Flapjack calls K'nuckles a liar, so a gang of people come out, says he stole all his stuff until he was reduced to a pair of eyeballs and one wood hand. In a later episode, after K'nuckles eats so much Candy Coated Hot Dogs, it causes him to explode with blood and hot dogs splattering all over the Candy Barrel.
• Given that a large chunk of its characters were robots, Ruby-Spears' Mega Man was able to get away with dismembering or otherwise mutilating them (but not on FOX), with key examples including:
  • Various robots being torn to pieces by Snake Man's Search Snake weapon.
  • Fire Man getting pulled apart by Roll's vacuum arm in "The Beginning". There's also the threat towards Doctor Light (a human) by Doctor Wily in the flashback— warning him not to follow him, otherwise Ice Man would freeze him alive, and then Cut Man would slice him apart.
  • Guts Man getting a basketball-sized hole blown through his chest with an X-Buster shot in "Mega X", and having his head literally ripped off his neck by one of the dolls in "Crime of the Century".
  • Roll is seen battling a berserk female cosmetics robot who gave her a bad facial in "Electric Nightmare". It's a fairly standard cartoony fight until the end— where Roll uses her buzzsaw arm attachment to slice the robot in half across her stomach, her upper half falling to the floor, before Roll switches to her vacuum arm and tears her face off.
  • After the attack on Doctor Light's lab in "The Big Shake", there's not much keeping Mega Man's right arm attached to his body. Similarly, Crystal Man gets his arm blown off at the elbow in "The Mega Man in the Moon", and is still shown with the wound near the end of the episode.
  • Dark Man is reduced to a torso, half an arm, and his head towards the end of "The Day the Moon Fell", and he's still completely aware of this- even having to drag himself around with his lone arm because no one will carry him when his fellow Robot Masters flee.
  • The disruptor chip placed on Mega Man in "Bro Bots" essentially sent severe electric shocks directly to his "brain". It's supposed to "scramble [his] circuits", but the SFX suggest otherwise.
    • In the same episode, you had Needle Man's first "death" in the Museum scene. He initially threatens Proto Man (who was pretending to be good at the time to fool Mega Man and his family), but the Psycho Prototype simply walks up to him, reminds him of their plan, and then proceeds to open him up and rip a fistful of wires out of him before throwing his still-spasming body at Heat Man. Granted, he got repaired later, but even for this show's standards, that was just brutal.
  • Hard Man's demise in "Bad Day at Peril Park". He's shown blocking Mega Man's Buster shots with his armour, taunting him all the while until Mega Man fires a charged shot into his mouth. This causes Hard Man to panic and frantically claw at himself as he realises what's happening, before he swells up and explodes from the inside. Now normally, this wouldn't be so bad— but Hard Man is literally blown to pieces, with machinery and internal mechanisms scattered everywhere. Mega Man even picks up one of his disembodied arms (With torn wires and framework hanging out of it) to attain the Hard Knuckle afterward.
  • In "Crime of the Century", Proto Man fired his Arm Cannon into a room of humans. And they didn't move afterward, heavily implying that he actually killed them, on-screen.
    • It's not even the first time Proto Man has directly threatened human beings— in "Bro Bots", his revelation as The Mole in that episode is met with resistance. So how does he keep the heroes under control? By threatening to shoot a nearby governor in the head—
    Proto Man: Now power down, or I'll give Deacon a plasma shave!
  • Worst of all however, had to be the implications in a scene from "Brain Bots"— where Doctor Wily places Mega Man into a Death Trap consisting of a Descending Ceiling with Spikes of Doom, and with Mega Man strapped to the floor to ensure he can't escape. Fair enough, but what pushes it into this was what Wily said about it; that he uses it to "recycle robots he no longer needs into scrap metal", meaning that he's done it to his own robots. Considering as well that several Robot Masters— including Fire Man, Gravity Man, Dive Man, and Star Man— only appeared in one episode and were never seen nor mentioned again afterward, that speaks volumes.
• While My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic largely avoids this and sticks to the family friendly stuff, they've nevertheless had their moments. The deaths of the evil clones of the Mane Six at the hands of the Tree of Harmony actually had to be toned down because it was too violent, and you can really tell the animators knew they had nothing to fear in the show's final season when they kicked it off by having King Sombra get his skin peeled off on-screen when he's killed.
• The giant dog in the first episode of Over the Garden Wall gets crushed between a rock and the turning mill-wheel of the Woodsman's mill, complete with a Sickening "Crunch!" and vomiting a massive spray of Black Blood. It still survives (and returns to normal), but yeesh.
• Pig Goat Banana Cricket has lots of this:
  • In Fudge Apocalypse, Pig gets shot with lazers.
  • In Zombie Broheims, Banana pulls out some Zombies organs.
  • In Prince Mermeow Moves In, Prince Mermeow almost gets his head chopped off by a guillotine.
• Popeye would punch animals and turn them into meat products or fur coats.
  • Happens to birds in the Popeye versions of both Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) is full of this, especially in the earlier seasons. The most violent things tend to happen to the monsters the girls fight, who sometimes get decapitated, torn in half, impaled, or ripped limb from limb.
  • One of the most disturbing examples is in "Candy Is Dandy", where the girls get addicted to candy to the point where it's treated like a drug addiction. When Mojo Jojo betrays their trust of rewarding them with the candy by stealing it, they beat him to the point where he is hideously deformed (pictured above) and has blood dripping from his mouth. They seem to leave Mojo in that state a lot.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show was full of this: Ren would often abuse Stimpy usually by slapping him or hitting him with any object he could find, and Ren often had some of the worst of the violence done to him like getting hit by a car and reduced to a bloody mess, having his lower body stripped to the bone by a buzzard, having his skin, blood, and organs sucked out by a vaccum cleaner, smashed to a messy puddle with a shovel, electrocuted, set on fire, etc. One episode was banned after one late night airing which included a scene where Ren brutally beat his owner George Liquor with an oar. This episode also was one of the reasons for creator John Kricfalusi's firing.
  • "Magical Golden Singing Cheeses" is known by many fans as the single most violent episode. It includes a scene where a court jester scrapes his elbow with a cheese grater, then rubs it with a lemon, and then pours salt on it. Another even more disturbing scene comes later when Stimpy accidentally stabs a giant's toe with a crow bar, prying off the giant's toe nail.
  • Blood has also been displayed several times in the show. One, in "Sven Hoek", where Ren threatens Stimpy and Sven - while saying the line "tear your arms out of the sockets" and very realistically imitating the action, a blood spray is visible for a brief moment.
    • Also, at the end of "The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen", in a scene where hats are being thrown up with triumph, there's a very indiscreet shot of a bleeding intestine in the air.
    • There were plenty of bloody bandages in a Games episode (oddly), "Ren's Pecs".
• Regular Show was full of this, even if blood is usually absent. For one, the show almost always averts Family-Friendly Firearms. As a matter of fact, several episodes received a TV-PG-V rating for this.
  • First off, we have the massive gunfight in the episode "Steak Me Amadeus".
  • Also, the way Skips nearly died in "Free Cake" was a horrible way to go, where he starts to skeletonize, while his flesh crumbles to dust.
  • The bear animatronic being shot and exploded in "Fuzzy Dice", only offshoot by him being a robot.
  • Skips slamming Rigby into a table and killing him in "Over the Top".
  • Much of the zombie violence from "Grave Sights", where zombies were decapitated, impaled, among others.
  • At the end of "But I Have A Receipt", Mordecai stabs the store clerk in the chest with a ruler. He somehow gets off alright, though he has difficulty putting on his seatbelt.
  • In "Firework Run", Hector was killed after being blown up by his own firework.
• The earlier episodes of Rocko's Modern Life were full of this. Scenes include:
  • An ox getting his arms ripped off by arm crunchers with blood spraying from his stumps in "No Pain, No Gain".
  • A bird smoking a cigarette coughs up his heart in "Flu-In-U-Enza".
  • A dog belonging to a shark tears a man's leg off with blood dripping from it in "Sand in Your Navel" .
  • Heffer's face is ripped off while riding a roller coaster, exposing his skull in "Carnival Knowledge".
  • Really Really Bigman ripping off people's arms to give them autographs and tossing a child into the sun in "Power Trip".
  • Rocko getting attacked by Earl the bulldog and emerging with a bloody nose and a chunk bitten out of his tail in "Ed is Dead: A Thriller".
  • Rocko's eyelids getting stretched sideways (exposing a bit of his brain) by another rollercoaster patron fearfully clinging to him in "Tickled Pinky".
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police was working with rather mature source material and adapting it for seven year olds, so had to tone down the characters' bloodier excesses (and replace their guns with tanks and flamethrowers). It still leaks into this pretty frequently, though. An example is an episode where Sam and Max raise a baby alligator, and discover it won't eat any food except off Max's arm. His arm gets increasingly mangled throughout the episode, until eventually he mentions he's lost all sensation in it, and they both giggle about it. The Effigy Mound, a (now out-of-print) Sam & Max sketchbook, features some of the censors' notes from the show. It becomes readily apparent that they weren't any more clued in about this whole "Sam & Max" business than the people who thought it would make for a good kids' show in the first place.
• The entire Samurai Jack series veers between this and Bloody Hilarious. Every fight scene with robots involves Symbolic Blood and High-Pressure Blood to a ridiculous degree. In numerous cases Jack ends the fight liberally soaked in oil and standing on a mountain of dismembered Mecha-Mooks parts. And also in battle sometimes Jack would get full of bloody cuts all over his body. The first major battle of the series had all three of these in no short order. This is actually a parody/homage of samurai films' brutal deaths of combatants.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is full of this in spades. Ironic, considering the Scooby-Doo franchise originated out of response to complaints of too much violence on Saturday morning TV in the late 1960s. Amazingly with all of the carnage and destruction and even a few family-unfriendly deaths, the show still got away with a TV-Y7-FV rating!
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars has many instances throughout its long run, and not just deaths. If characters aren't killed by lightsaber impalements on-screen, we sometimes have characters getting their limbs dislocated and in some cases, cut off on-screen or tortured (sometimes with visible cuts and bruises in the later seasons). Word of God says they were able to get away with this a lot because it was a continuation of the films, which already had plenty of the same type of violence themselves. And it was marketed to both kids and adults alike.
  • Probably the most extreme of these was Riff Tamson getting blown to bits completely onscreen. And no, we don't mean blown to bits in the sense that "there's an explosion where he was standing and then the body just disappears", we actually see the scattered body parts, including a close-up on his head.
• Steven Universe sometimes contains this, though it generally only happens to alien characters:
  • The episode "Steven the Sword Fighter" has Pearl getting impaled by her sword-wielding hologram-clone. The fact that she's going to be fine thanks to some Bizarre Alien Biology isn't explained until after Steven starts crying over her gem because he thinks she's dead (though Pearl herself does try to tell him before her body disappears).
  • The episode "The Return" has this fun scene involving Garnet brutally getting cut in half while her limbs fall apart onscreen.
  • In "Bubbled", the Ruby nicknamed "Eyeball" tries to stab Steven with a chisel.
  • However, all of this pales in comparison to Lars's death. When Lars jumps on top of a Shattering Robonoid, it explodes. Lars goes flying into a wall with a Sickening "Crunch!" and falls a good thirty feet to the floor. While this is an example of Bloodless Carnage, it doesn't make the scene any less shocking, especially since it comes entirely out of nowhere.
  • The movie ends up providing us with some entertaining moments that kids can enjoy, such as the Crystal Gems outright being cut in half along with the villain Spinel being sliced through, both via scythe, shortly after, and Spinel actually making Steven bleed during their fight at the movie's climax, the first time any kind of blood was shown in the series.
• SWAT Kats:
  • In "The Giant Bacteria," Dr. Viper puts a drop of something-or-other onto Morbulus' arm, causing him to start turning into the title monster. The transformation is pure Body Horror and presented as incredibly painful, as Morbulus turns into a fizzing purple mass and screams in an increasingly distorted, pained voice. Worst of all is when his head transforms; he has eyes in the back of his head and they move up to the front while he's changing.
  • In "The Metallikats," the eponymous robot gangsters get pretty violently destroyed. In particular, Mac malfunctions and explodes, and one of his eyes rolls into Mayor Manx's "putt cup" (that thing you hit a golf ball into when playing office golf), while Molly falls off of the Turbokat while trying to kill T-Bone, and we see her hit the street and explode onscreen. But because they're robots, they are revealed to have survived at the end.
  • In "Chaos In Crystal," convict turned giant crystal monster Rex Shard is shattered into pieces by a sonic boom from the Turbokat. Bizarrely, this doesn't kill him, it just causes him to return to normal size, alive but unconscious (implying he was only "giant" because of several layers of crystal armor).
  • In "Katastrophe," Dr. Viper's mushroom monster assistant takes the full force of an explosion and ends up splattered all over the Turbokat. Because he's amorphous, he's later revealed to have reconstituted himself offscreen (presumably T-1000 style).
  • In "The Deadly Pyramid," plucky Robot Buddy endures a lot of punishment at the hands of the giant mummies, who fling him violently against buildings. He is eventually so damaged he can only lie on the sidewalk, twitching pathetically as he attempts to move. And unlike Mac and Molly, we never do get confirmation that he's survived.
  • In "Unlikely Alloys," there's more violence against the Metallikats as Mac gets grabbed by Zed's metal tentacles, lifted into the air, and pulled apart and assimilated as Molly watches screaming in horror. However, his consciousness survives inside of Zed. At the end of the episode, he and Molly (who got assimilated as well) are revealed to be just fine again although a little worse for wear.
• Symbionic Titan. Aside from the brutal monster battles, some of the human fights can get pretty intense as well. "The Fortress of Deception" features a scene where Lance is taken in for questioning. He is tortured by getting shocked and beaten by a large muscular man, blood is seen trickling from his mouth and he spits some of it out, later that same man is seen lying on the floor in a puddle of blood and teeth.
• The Teen Titans (2003) episode "Haunted". It's half-an-hour of a grown man viciously pummeling a teenage boy, while all the boy's friends refuse to believe his attacker exists. The attacker didn't exist. Which meant that to the friends, he was beating himself up. And was at one point clearly diagnosed as being under so much stress (for fear of the imaginary attacker) that it was damaging his health.
• For implied violence, the various mutilations that happen to Baxter Stockman in the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series qualify to an almost ridiculous degree:
  • The first time he fails the foot clan he had an eye removed.
  • The second time he ended up in a wheelchair and was missing his arm.
  • After his first robot body is destroyed, he's reduced to a head connected to a spider-bot.
  • After escaping, he's then found again by the Foot and reduced to a brain, an eye, and a spinal cord.
  • He eventually makes a new organic body, but it ends up rapidly decaying and driving him insane.
  • Finally, after the body is destroyed, he's revived as a brain in a jar again, even though he was actually wishing he'd died.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) has several examples. While Bloodless Carnage applies, it's still quite shocking:
  • In "The Gauntlet," the Shredder dishes out an absolutely brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on the Turtles, including kicking Raphael into an electrified sign and Michelangelo being crushed and stuck under pieces of said sign.
  • Slash in "Slash and Destroy," who severely wounds Donnie offscreen, smashes Mikey around, and has an absolutely brutal fight against Raph. Even when Leo joins the fray, he's quickly and painfully smacked off to one side.
  • In the second season finale, Leatherhead violently mauls Shredder by shaking him like a rag doll in his powerful jaws.
  • In the third season finale, Shredder runs Splinter through with his blades, killing him.
  • In "The Tale of Tiger Claw," it's revealed in a flashback that Alopex cut off Tiger Claw's tail, and currently wears it as a belt. Not only that, but at the end of the episode, she slices off Tiger Claw's right arm, on-screen, as a warning that she could just as easily have taken his life.
  • In "Requiem," Rahzar is dragged to the bottom of a river by Leatherhead and drowned. Splinter is killed by Shredder once again, stabbed through the back, and this time his body is flung off of a high building, eliminating any chance of survival.
  • In "Owari," Shredder is killed when his head is sliced off by Leo, who then carries it with him and throws it on the ground contemptuously.
• Tom and Jerry, despite being a beloved and classic cartoon, is famous for having some of the most violent gags ever devised in theatrical animation, especially the older episodes. These include Jerry slicing Tom in half, shutting his head in a window or a door, Tom using everything from axes, pistols, explosives, traps and poison to try to murder Jerry, Jerry stuffing Tom's tail in a waffle iron, kicking him into a refrigerator, plugging his tail into an electric socket, pounding him with a mace, club or mallet, causing a tree to drive him into the ground and so on. Luckily, these are all Amusing Injuries, so there is no blood and gore.
  • Oddly enough though, the closest the series ever came to blood was in the recent direct to video film Tom and Jerry: Blast Off to Mars which features Tom attempting to grab Jerry only to crush a tomato. This leads Tom to believe that he crushed Jerry's body to the point that his hand is covered with Jerry's blood.
    • Later in the same movie, the Martians decide to invade Earth. When they get there, one of the lovable astronauts we had been watching throughout the movie gets up and confronts one of the aliens face-to-face, remarking that he didn't look too tough. The alien gets angry, so he whips out his ray gun and actually vaporizes the astronaut, reducing him to a pile of ash. The aliens then decide to go on a rampage, and start vaporizing every innocent civilian in sight, while you hear their screams of pain. It's not gory, but it's not done in a cartoony style, making it traumatizing and out-of-place in a Tom and Jerry movie.
    • One cartoon directed by Chuck Jones contained another 'false gore' scene. The storyline involved Jerry and another mouse playing malicious pranks on Tom to make him believe he was attacking himself in his sleep. They tried lowering a hangman's noose where he was sleeping, placing a gun on a string nearby, and other stuff. Then the mice poured ketchup on Tom's belly while he was asleep, covered a knife with ketchup, and put the knife in Tom's hand. When Tom woke up, he thought the ketchup on the knife and his belly, was blood, and that he'd accidentally stabbed himself. When he found out what the mice were doing, he shoved them in a bottle, rigged with a gun that would go off if they tried to escape.
  • There is an episode during The French Revolution with Tom messing up a fancy dinner while trying to catch Jerry and another mouse, and being sentenced to death. The last scene is a Gory Discretion Shot showing a faraway guillotine with drums playing. The drums stop, the blade drops, and there is this visceral, organic "chok!" sound you hear in your nightmares for the next ten years.
  • In the direct-to-DVD movie The Fast and the Furry, a large number of secondary characters are rather messily Killed Off for Real. To elaborate, a mother of four is heavily implied to be devoured by jungle insects, a man is cooked alive by a mermaid, a little old lady and her dog fall to their deaths, a Mad Scientist is vaporized, and a Corrupt Corporate Executive is disintegrated.
  • The shorts directed by Gene Deitch are infamous for getting pretty harsh with the violence, which scenes like Tom getting thrown into a pot of boiling water, having a shotgun wrapped around his neck and it being fired, making him go deaf (he somehow regained his hearing), getting his head crushed with a burning-hot griddle, or getting Buried Alive. He would also get beaten to a pulp by his master, and it was so brutal that Jerry would wince while watching it.
• Ever since the writers went off their medication at the beginning of the third season, Transformers: Animated has been a bit like that. In addition to the Family-Unfriendly Death of Blurr, we've seen the mangled body of Ultra Magnus and Sari accidentally stabbing her best friend Bumblebee through the chest, a near-fatal injury. The death of Soundwave also counts.
• The Transformers franchise has a history of this.
  • Transformers: Prime goes full-throttle with this.
  • The first episode has Cliffjumper getting stabbed by Starscream, complete with Machine Blood, while the third and fourth include Bulkhead tearing out an Vehicon's "guts" and Optimus and Ratchet slicing their way through a small army of the robot undead.
    • Later we get to see Car Fu where the Autobots run cars off the road and blowing up at least one of them, with human mooks inside. As a bonus, this is apparently acceptable for Optimus's order to use MINIMAL force.
    • In "One Shall Fall" Optimus goes all out on Megatron. He grinds his truck wheels into Megatron's face and then punches hard enough to spill energon, more Machine Blood. You wouldn't want to see what that would have looked like on a regular human.
  • It's rare for a Beast Wars episode to end without at least one or two cast members (one of whom is usually Waspinator) having been grievously wounded.
• The short "Willie the Operatic Whale" from Make Mine Music ends with the opera manager harpooning Willie, who's shown thrashing about in the water in a far less cartoony style than the rest of the short has, while the manager gleefully cries "I gotta heem, I gotta heem!"
• This trope comes up a lot in superhero cartoons. Take Young Justice (2010); we've got two scenes of stabbing (in one of them you can see the knife go through the hero's back)— they're both fake, in one way or another, but still creepy. One of the stand-out examples would be Black Beetle slamming Wonder Girl's body repeatedly against a wall for ten seconds while we get flashes to all her unconscious teammates.

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