Genre Deconstruction / Western Animation

• Amphibia is a deconstruction of Trapped in Another World-type wish fullfilment stories. Anne Boonchuy and Sasha Waybright were both completely miserable when they first arrived in Amphibia with no warning, Anne surviving off plants and roots in the woods for days while Sasha spent an entire month imprisoned by a hostile army. The only one who seems to have an unambiguously happy life in Amphibia is Marcy Wu, who got the favor of the king and became his chief ranger. The Season 2 finale "True Colors" reveals that is only because she wanted it in the first place, and knew what the music box would do when she first tricked Anne into stealing it. And even she doesn't get away from the deconstruction, as the king is actually a Manipulative Bastard who's merely playing along with her fantasy as part of his true goals.
• Bob Chipman has described Bob's Burgers as a this to the I Just Want to Be Special fantasy of creative misfits whose geeky interests and outcast nature turn out to be their source of superiority, as seen with the X-Men, Peter Parker, Steve Urkel, and Lisa Simpson. He feels that the unstated implication of this premise is that creative misfits and ugly ducklings who don't "show them all" later in life deserve all the mockery they get from their peers. This perfectly describes the Belchers, who are all invested in one creative field or another, except they're all bad at it and are often the butt of the joke... yet this doesn't matter, because, at the end of the day, they're still portrayed as a loving family who all have value as human beings.
• BoJack Horseman deconstructs family-oriented "hugging and learning" sitcoms like Full House. The titular character learns early on that he can't fix his mistakes with a simple apology, but truly has to change his behavior. Even if he has changed, other characters are not obligated to forgive him.
• The Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "One + One = Ed" is a deconstruction of how cartoons work, similar to Duck Amuck.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show deconstructs most of the show's tropes, most notably Eddy's Flanderization into a Jerkass, Edd's role as the No-Respect Guy, and the blatant Amusing Injuries and Status Quo Is God. The movie starts off with another Zany Scheme going horrendously wrong, with the Kids displaying some very unamusing injuries, and now the kids want to kill the Eds. Eddy's behavior is causing more and more problems during the Eds' journey, and finally, when Ed and Eddy fake their deathes as a joke on Edd, he snaps and tries to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here, stating he'd rather face the kids than spend another second with Eddy. And to top it all off, the ending. It's revealed Eddy's Brother was a twisted Big Brother Bully who used Eddy as a punching bag when they were kids, which gave Eddy his Inferiority Superiority Complex.
• Family Guy does a particularly nasty deconstruction of Looney Tunes and its Amusing Injuries in Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, wherein Elmer Fudd is out "hunting wabbits", shoots Bugs Bunny four times in the stomach, snaps his neck amidst cries of pain, and then drags him off leaving behind a trail of blood. In another episode "Brian Goes Back to College" where Peter and friends became The A-Team, the show's "amusing injuries" are discussed as actually life-threatening.
  • The second Christmas Episode "Road to the North Pole" deconstructs Santa Claus to creepy levels.
• "Hey Good Lookin''" by Ralph Bakshi (who else) is one big Deconstruction and Take That! against anyone who believes that the 1950s were really just like Grease or Happy Days. The main character is ostensibly as cool as The Fonz but actually a Dirty Coward who can't back up his bragging, the Plucky Comic Relief is actually a racist sociopath, their gang aren't really True Companions despite looking like it, the supposed Big Bad never explictly does anything really bad and the ending's Broken Aesop is intentional about the "Romance" between the main character and Rozzie.
• It's Oppo, a student film made by Cal Arts student Tyler Chen, deconstructs Nick Jr., as well as preschool television programs and morally unscrupulous media companies in general. Watch the entire thing here. (NSFW for nudity)
• Looney Tunes director Chuck Jones often used deconstruction on his cartoons. The best known example is Duck Amuck: First the scenery changes, forcing Daffy to adapt. Then Daffy himself is erased and redrawn. Then the soundtrack fails, then the film frame, and so on until Daffy is psychologically picked clean. Another example is What's Opera, Doc?, which takes the base elements of a typical Bugs Bunny cartoon and reassembles them as a Wagnerian opera. (Conversely, you could also say that it takes the base elements of Wagnerian opera and reassembles them as a Bugs Bunny cartoon.)
• Moral Orel deconstructs The Moral Substitute by presenting a culture where ALL MEDIA are Christian fundamentalist propaganda, and showing just how messed up and disturbing said culture would be.
• The famous Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy" is a deconstruction of the general weirdness and insanity of its setting, based around the premise of What if a real-life, normal person had to enter Homer's universe and deal with him? Frank Grimes, a relatively humorless but hard-working man who is still forced to live cheaply despite working almost his entire life, encounters Homer on the job at the nuclear power plant. You can imagine what happens next - the result is funny, but also disturbing and very dark upon further reflection (one of the darkest Simpsons episodes ever made).
  • At one point, Homer is about to drink a beaker of sulfuric acid when Grimes stops him. Grimes reacts exactly as we would expect a normal person to react - he's visibly freaked out, and when Homer blows off the danger with laughter, he shouts, " Stop laughing, you imbecile! Do you realize how close you just came to killing yourself?!" A series of such incidents ultimately drives Frank Grimes into insanity and death.
    • The episode eventually winds up in Crosses the Line Twice territory when, at Frank's funeral, the "mourners" do not cry but rather laugh when Homer dozes off and mumbles some idiotic gibberish. Even the minister.
  • The episode also highlights the absurdity of one man having such a rich and adventurous life (meeting Gerald Ford, winning a Grammy, going into space...)
  Frank: (in disbelief) You...went into outer space. You.
  Homer: Yes. You've never been?
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, being the self-aware show that it is, devotes its premiere episode to comedically deconstructing the premise of its parent franchise and the "little girls' cartoon" genre which its predecessors codified by asking what happens when a setting where everyone is friends with each other by default plays host to someone who isn't interested in friendship. Enter the introverted (and somewhat conceited) Twilight Sparkle, who is dumped in Ponyville and left to react as any of the sane, adult human beings who may be watching would if placed amidst the colorful characters that inhabit such a world: with bewildered frustration. Throughout the episode, the other ponies' overzealous attempts to befriend Twilight merely drive her to ever-greater seclusion and jadedness in their unwitting validation of her cynical worldview. The close of the episode is a Downer Ending where Nightmare Moon (who acts as a dark counterpart to Twilight thanks to her past exclusion turning her into an omnicidal Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds) demonstrates the inherent dangers of the fantasy setting that helps Equestria exist in such perfect harmony by plunging the world into The Night That Never Ends. Miraculously enough, the following episode manages to reconstruct every last one of these elements with flying colors.
  • Normal episodes end with Twilight Sparkle sending a message to her mentor Princess Celestia about what she learned about friendship that day, satisfying the Edutainment quota for the week. The episode "Lesson Zero" specifically begs the question: "What happens if there was no friendship message to write about?" Thus begins one of the most bizarre, creepy episodes of the series when our normally calm and collected (and slightly OCD) Twilight races to find, and eventually create, a friendship problem to report about. Ultimately, an Aesop about missing the Aesop is arrived at, and introduces a running change where any of Twilight's friends can provide the Aesop (likely as a way to avoid having to shoehorn in Twilight into every episode).
    • Which is then kinda mocked in one episode, where Applejack writes that she didn't learn anything, because the Aesop one could've learned from that day's adventure was something she'd always known.
• The episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) "Town and Out" is about them moving to "Citysville" deals with what would happen if their brand of heroics was applied to a real life city.
• South Park, as well as deconstructing everything else on the planet, has a fine line in deconstructing itself. In "Kenny Dies", the Running Gag character they had killed over seventy times already gets a terminal disease and slowly expires while Stan and Kyle react with utterly realistic grief and despair.
  • "You're Getting Old" portrays Stan Marsh and his parents as completely fed up with the insane events constantly creeping in their daily life, along with Status Quo Is God. Randy, somehow an adult Sixth Ranger to the children, is forced to admit how immature that makes him when he cling to whatever awful next big thing comes out in an attempt to look cool and relevant; Sharon has this speech:
    "I'm unhappy too. We both are, obviously. How much longer can we keep doing this? It's like, the same shit just happens over and over and, then in a week it just all resets until- it happens again. Every week it's kind of the same story in a different way but it, it just keeps getting more and more ridiculous."
    • ... and Stan himself gets depressed as he grow out of his childish hobbies before his friends, without finding anything else to enjoy, and becomes "a cynical asshole" who literally experiences anything as "shitty". At the end of the episode, he has taken up drinking to cope with his depression, but as he hides it, to everybody else it seems like nothing has changed.
  • Also, this speech from Craig Tucker, one of the boys' classmate, in "Pandemic":
    "Do you guys know why nobody else at school likes hanging out with you? Because you're always doing stuff like this. You're always coming up with some stupid idea to do something, and then it backfires, and then you end up in some foreign country, or in outer space or something. That's why no one likes hanging out with you guys."
• Tales From The Cryptkeeper, despite its Lighter and Softer nature, often used this trope:
  • "All The Gory Details" deconstructs the tropes made by Frankenstein (1931). The Mad Scientist? Was trying to protect his creations. Said creations? Just want to be left alone, and only attack the heroes to destroy the evidence of their existence. It also deconstructs the idea of the Hardboiled Detective with Harold Klump, who embodies every negative trait involved with the trope and twists every positive trait into a negative. His determination? Keeps him from getting anywhere and gets him changed into one of Kromwell's creations at the end. His snarkiness and general misogyny? Alienates him from his partner, who ends up leaving after having enough of his abuse.
  • "Hyde and Go Shriek" deconstructs the Godzilla Threshold trope at the end. Try to stop the kid you bullied when he has a werewolf formula by drinking more of it? Congrats! Too bad he set it up so that you would be captured and taken away instead. Have fun in government testing!
  • "Fare Tonight" deconstructs the "Kid Hero fights monsters" genre made by The Monster Squad, as the kids in question, while able to talk big about killing vampires, end up being about as prepared to fight an actual vampire as kids with no professional training whatsoever would be in real life. They only win by pure luck at the end.
  • "The Works... In Wax" deconstructs classic monster films by portraying the climactic monster hunts... from the viewpoints of the monsters. The hero actually helps them escape their deaths, and they help him in a Big Damn Heroes moment.
  • "Cave Man" deconstructs Encino Man, by showing what would actually happen if a caveman were brought into the modern world. It doesn't end well.
• Transformers: Animated is a deconstruction of the whole Autobot-Decepticon War. Things ain't so black and white as before, in fact the Autobots' leadership is flawed and somewhat corrupt, with one higly racist, incompetent, cowardly jerkass general on it, who only is amongst the High Command because he blames his mistakes on Optimus Prime, whose status as All-Loving Hero makes him somewhat of a push-over, and its leader is ready to commit dirty tricks to defeat the Decepticons. The Decepticons however, are as much the monsters they were in G1, and this time Megatron's pragmatic enough to blast Starscream's ass any time he tries to overthrow him. Starscream only survives thanks to the Allspark piece on his head. Without it he would have died right from the start. Also, because the Decepticons are war machines while Optimus' group are just maintenance bots, fending off just one Decepticon is a struggle that usually requires the entire team. Then comes the season three...
• In Undergrads, college dorm life is deconstructed to counter its inspiration Animal House; Rocko's Fratboy behavior is looked down on heavily by his frat brothers, who view him as a source of grief. Nitz' everyman status really puts only a grade above Gimpy, the resident Hikikomori of the 4 of them.

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