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Hoist By His Own Petard / Western Animation

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Often a Death Trope, so expect to see unmarked spoilers ahead.

When a Western Animation villain is getting cocky, the heroes usually use whatever he's so proud of against him before too long.

  • The Addams Family (1992): In the episode "Double O Honeymoon", Gomez Addams used the scissors of a member of a gang on the entire gang. The owner got promptly chased afterward when Mr. Addams explained, "Why blame me? He's the one with the scissors."
  • Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: In "Hero of the Year", Dr. Robotnik conducts a whole elaborate plan to have Wes Weasley lead Sonic, Tails and the various other Freedom Fighters to a yacht to have an award ceremony for Sonic. Robotnik crashes the party and forces Sonic to allow himself to be stranded in a bathysphere at the bottom of the sea in exchange for the others' safety, then admits that he lied and was planning on sinking the yacht with everyone aboard, and smugly goes back to his fortress to have his own award ceremony. Weasley's reward was that he'd get his own shopping channel, but Robotnik lied about that too; Weasley wasn't given the freedom to actually broadcast, and their contract was written in disappearing ink. Upset that he's been had, Weasley rescues Sonic to take revenge on Robotnik.
  • Adventure Time: A non-fatal example. Flame Princess tricks Ice King into hurting himself with his own freeze attack by throwing a fireball above his head, which he then freezes, causing the block of ice to land on his head.
  • Animaniacs: In one episode, a disgraced cartoon character named Buddy attempts to get revenge on the Warner Siblings for ousting him of his (incredibly boring) cartoons by blowing them up at a party held in their honor. However, when Yakko admits they wouldn't have gotten there without Buddy, he races out to accept an award only to realize too late he fell for another one of their gags and is taken out by his own bomb, then is blasted into the surface of a giant prop mallet, which then falls onto the stage, crushing him.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • Zhao plans to conquer the Water Tribe by capturing the moon spirit (in the form of a koi fish) to cut off their ability to waterbend, rendering them defenseless. They end up anything but defenseless when he kills the spirit and enrages its companion, the ocean spirit, enough to use Aang as a medium to become a giant water monster, wipe out Zhao's entire fleet, and drag him to a watery grave. Him killing the moon spirit also makes this a Karmic Death. Especially ironic considering that his "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Zuko a few minutes before would fit perfectly considering the circumstances behind him killing the Moon Spirit.
    • Later there's Combustion Man, who twice tries to use his explosion powers after a nasty blow to the head. The first time, it detonates prematurely, sending him flying back. The second time, it doesn't even leave and blows him up.
    • Iroh's lightning redirection technique is a way to make this happen to someone. Azula is the only one who uses it in a weaponized fashion, while Iroh, Aang and Zuko use it to simply redirect the lightning off in a different direction.
    • The Grand Finale pulls this trope on Zuko himself with regards to this very strategy. When he tries to goad Azula into striking at him, she sees through this and aims her lightning at Katara instead, forcing him to take the blow for her. And in turn, to top it all off, she promptly gets her ass kicked by none other than Katara herself!
  • Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse: Raquelle plots to steal Barbie's spotlight at a fashion show. She tries to prevent Barbie from attending the show by programming the Dreamhouse's Master Computer, Closet, to lock Barbie in the house. Unfortunately, Raquelle gets locked inside as well.
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold:
    • Batman says this almost word-for-word when his reliance on Superman-like powers while on the alien planet Zur-En-Arrh leads to his being taken out by a Kryptonite Factor-like weakness.
    • Said again in another episode by second-generation Batman after The Joker is exposed to his own gas.
    • Batmite, in the final episode of the series, ends up falling due to his own scheme: the plan was to make the show jump the shark to the point that it would be canceled, to make room for a new Batman show. He did get it canceled... but failed to consider that, as a fictional character that is part of the show and too silly for most Batman adaptations, he would also vanish.
  • Bob's Burgers: Bob's decision of Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting is admirable given his own father was extremely strict. However, his decision of how to do so has come to bite him in the ass. He never truly raises his voice with his kids, never truly punishes them and leaves them to their own devices (sometimes out of a desire to not get involved). As a result, Tina is a girl who is still awkward with others and lacking understanding in social norms, Gene is a loudmouth who tries to be the center of attention with gross noises or jokes, and Louise is a troublemaker who borders on being a psychopath. In fact, most of them have little respect for him or his work ethic and are of little to no help in the restaurant, sometimes making problems in said restaurant worse.
  • Season 4 of BoJack Horseman has this line delivered by Todd Chavez after he drops the controller to his drone throne.
    Todd: Aw, man! I was hoisted by own petard — the one petard I thought would never hoist me!
  • Camp Lazlo: In the episode "Hold It, Lazlo", Edward has his mind set on humiliating his fellow camper Lazlo after the latter beat him in a lemonade drinking contest. At first, he makes several attempts at keeping Lazlo, who needs to pee really badly after drinking so much lemonade from getting relief (and possibly wetting himself), but when that fails, he tricks him into wearing a diaper, calling it a "tinkletog", something that astronauts wear. Lazlo is gullible enough to believe it and shows up in a diaper among his campmates. At first, Edwards plan seems to be working perfectly, but then Lazlo manages to convince everyone else that it's actually a "tinkletog" and turns it into a trend. Edward, jealous of all the positive attention Lazlo is receiving when he was the one who came up with the idea, puts on a diaper himself and loudly brags about it...just in time for his four older brothers to pay a surprise visit.
  • Captain Planet and the Planeteers: In "The Conqueror", the villain named Zarm corrupts four older Planeteers, which results in Gaia becoming mortal. However, he then leaves her and Ma-Ti alone, only causing an earthquake in an attempt to kill his nemesis after she goes to talk to the rogue Planeteers, who are still convinced he's a good guy. Cue his "conquerors" abandoning him.
  • Care Bears (1980s): In one of the early cartoons, Professor Coldheart takes a shortcut with his plan to use his freeze ray on an entire town, bouncing the ray off the bell in a tower to hit every kid in one shot. It works, but the Bears are then able to remedy it by using the bell the same way, with the Care-Bear Stare.
  • Celebrity Deathmatch: Lampshaded. While the trope certainly applies in several fights, and does indeed during the Chuck Berry/James Brown match, it elects this remark from Nick Diamond:
    Nick: Hoist on his own petard? Well, I don't think the audience knows what "petard" means, 'cause I sure don't.
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Nine times out of ten, this is how the Rangers defeat their foes. Professor Nimnul in particular has always been defeated via whatever he was using for his Evil Plan, whether that be from the Rangers turning his inventions against him or his henchmen deciding to retaliate against him for poor treatment of them.
  • Code Lyoko: XANA having the Mantas attack and possibly kill Franz Hopper is what convinces Aelita to use the last of Franz' energy to activate the multi-agent program. However, with XANA's return, it seems to have been just another part of its ironically named Xanatos Gambit, albeit one that seemed to be a major setback.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door:
    • The Villain of the Week in "Operation C.R.I.M.E." is a supposedly psychic kid who predicts crimes by using crayons to draw what bad thing the students at Gallagher Elementary are about to do. However, it turns out that it's a lie so that he can be the only one to get pizza bagels in the cafeteria — unfortunately for him, it's lima bean sandwich day.
    • Happens to Father twice:
      • In "Operation: G.R.A.D.U.A.T.E.S.", it comes to light that he had allowed the Code Module he stole from the Kids Next Door to be stolen back because he linked it to his Transformation Ray, turning all active KND operatives into animals. His plan ends up backfiring on him when Tommy figures out his plot, quits the KND so the ray won't affect him, then puts Father's DNA in the Code Module, turning him into an animal and allowing Tommy to destroy the ray.
      • Father later manages to make the above scheme work for him in the Sequel Episode "Operation: I.T.", when he uses the fact that he was technically a Kids Next Door operative to become Supreme Leader and uses the position to infest all the treehouses with broccoli. Numbuh 362 later threatens him to give her back the job with that same broccoli. Not to mention, she wouldn't have been able to get the job back in the first place had Father not began another game of tag to taunt her and Numbuh 1.
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog: Since Courage isn't a hand-to-hand fighter, this is his preferred method of beating the Monster of the Week.
  • Cybersix: In the finale, Von Richter could have just fled his base and survived. Instead, he wants payback and unleashes all his monsters to kill the titular cyber. They swiftly turn on him, while one shows Cybersix the exit and smiles.
  • DC Animated Universe:
    • Batman: The Animated Series:
    • Justice League:
      • At the end of "Tabula Rasa", Amazo has copied the powers of six of the seven Leaguers and is winning handily. Just as he's about to win, J'onn reveals himself and deliberately lets himself be copied so that Amazo can use telepathy to reveal Lex Luthor's true intentions. Once he realizes he was just a pawn in Luthor's latest scheme, Amazo leaves to explore the universe and find himself.
      • At the end of "Only a Dream", Dr. Destiny falls on the syringe of sleeping drugs he intended to use on Batman, leaving himself a vegetable when he fell victim to the powers he'd been using on the League all through the episode.
      • In the Justice League Unlimited episode "Kid Stuff" Mordred removes all adults from the planet with a spell so he can rule over the remaining children. A deaged Batman goads Mordred into turning himself into adult to have the upperhand against himself and the other deaged members of the Justice League - but then Mordred's own spell kicks in and whisks him off to the Pocket Dimension all the other adults were in - including Mordred's very pissed off mother Morgaine Le Fay.
    • Batman Beyond:
      • Derek Powers gets infected by the very nerve gas that he was going to sell to a foreign dignitary. The attempt to save his life from said gas exposure only ends up turning him into Blight, a radioactive meltdown incarnate.
      • Also, even later, he ends up being backstabbed by his son, who's acting under the belief that he should backstab anyone he can for power, a belief that Derek Powers ironically taught him.
      • Paxton Powers, the above-mentioned son, is later abducted by the Royal Flush Gang, who demand ransom. Bruce Wayne says that Wayne-Powers Enterprises won't pay because it's against company policy — and that Paxton would know, since he wrote it.
      • The drug dealer selling Venom slappers on the street in "The Winning Edge" dies(?) of an overdose after falling into a pile of them (and Bane himself was rendered a vegetable after a lifetime of using Venom); the eponymous villain in "Shriek" is rendered deaf after his shockwave suit malfunctions; in "Splicers", Dr. Cuvier's fate is sealed after he is injected with too much of his splicer formula, turning him into a walking pile of mutations... This happens a lot in the series.
      • The villain in "Sneak Peak", the villain wears a belt that makes him intangible. He uses it so much that it starts to alter his body and make him permanently intangible. After a desperate attempt to blackmail Batman for a cure fails, he ends up turning intangible for the final time and falls through the ground to the center of the Earth.
  • Defenders of the Earth: The episode "Bits n' Chips" plays with this trope. Ming takes control of Dynak-X and arms her defenses against the Defenders. This leads to Mandrake, Lothar, Rick and LJ nearly getting caught in a trap (designed by Rick) which consists of a pit with an energy mesh which instantly incinerates anything which touches it at the bottom. However, thanks to Lothar's skill with grappling ropes, they all manage to get out unscathed, albeit barely in Mandrake's case; the rope breaks just as he reaches the far side of the pit, but Lothar pulls him to safety.
  • Dexter's Laboratory:
    • "The Continuum of Cartoon Fools" has Dexter blocking all the entrances to his lab in order to keep Dee Dee out, but locks himself out in the process as well.
    • In "Trapped with a Vengeance", Yonni the Yanitor builds a death course as a means of revenge against Dexter for making a mess in his school. At the end, Yonni causes a mess anyway and gets a scolding from his wife, thinking that he was goofing off.
    • In "Dial M for Monkey", a villain obsessed with gold ends up being melted underneath a pile of gold bars.
    • "Ego Trip" shows that Mandark would be ultimately defeated and rendered harmless by his own handiwork: Mandark devises a machine that steals all of humanity's intelligence using a power source Dexter created years earlier, turning him into a large (as in, fat) emperor. However, during a fight between four eras of Dexters and Mandarks, the modern-day Dee Dee wanders in, pulls her What Does This Button Do? routine and deactivates the machine, restoring humanity's lost IQ and causing Mandark's body to explode, leaving him a helpless brain.
  • Doug: In one episode, Doug is caught with Mr. Bone's yodeling trophy and he has no way of trying to prove he didn't have it nor proving he was framed. Stuck with detention, he finds himself being confronted by Roger, who reveals that he was the one who did it and, as he gloats, accidentally pushes the PA system, having his confession echoed throughout the school. Needless to say, Roger went into panic mode once Mr. Bone confronted him.
  • Drawn Together: Clara shuts down Wooldoor Sockbat's "Clum Babies" store (Wooldor's sperm have magic healing powers) in a transparent parody of religious objections to stem-cell research. She contracts tuberculosis shortly thereafter.
    Clara: Please! [cough] I don't want [cough] to die [cough] so ironically... [passes out]
  • DuckTales (2017): In the first season finale, Magica DeSpell does this twice. The first is capturing Scrooge in the first place. While the Duck Family was ready to swallow their own pride and apologize for their explosion after learning the truth of Della Duck and the Spear of Selene, DeSpell's release, gloating, and attack on Duckburg hastened all of that. The main one was accidentally saving Scrooge - having trapped him in his lucky dime the same way he did her, she tries to get it back when Dewey snatches it from her. When she blasts magic at him, he blocks it with the dime, freeing Scrooge. As he so elegantly puts it: "Way to dispel your spell, DeSpell!"
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy: Near the end of "Sir Ed-A-Lot", Eddy locks Sarah in a "cage" just like she did to him earlier.
  • El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera: Sartana and Django get this in succession. Manny has dropped Django into the Miracle City volcano, to which Sartana just shrugs and brings him back with added Infernal Retaliation. Django puts Manny on the defensive, but then he accidentally blasts Sartana, destroying her magic guitar and banishing her and her army back to the land of the dead. Manny celebrates, but Django himself doesn't disappear because he has his own magic guitar, which he pulls out to demonstrate... with his still-flaming hands.
    Django: Well that was stupid. [explodes]
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • In "Inspection Detection", a glut of material wishes as Fairy Inspection Day approaches causes Timmy to be accused of a recent shoplifting spree at a local department store. After he figures out that Francis is the actual culprit in spite of his parents and the police being too stupid to believe him, Timmy ultimately proves it by pulling a stolen TV, VCR and generator out of Francis' pants and using them to show a security tape of Francis stealing a tub of lard.
    • In "Super Bike", the titular bike pulls a Wounded Gazelle Gambit by pretending to be injured, taking off his mirror and breaking it. Later, this clues Timmy in on how to defeat him: Super Bike is Nigh-Invulnerable, but the parts that fall off him aren't.
    • When Timmy runs for Student Council President in "Hail to the Chief", Tad and Chad bribe everyone with cake to vote for them. Said cake gives everyone food poisoning, which leaves Timmy as the sole voter.
    • "Micro Phony" has a double example. Timmy uses a voice-changing microphone to become suave radio personality Double-T, convincing Dimmsdale's parents to spend summer vacation with their kids and ruining Vicky's babysitting service. When Vicky finds out what he's up to, she steals the microphone and uses it to impersonate him, discrediting him and insulting all of Dimmsdale's parents in the process. When the FCC show up to arrest Double-T (you can't say "moron" on the radio), Timmy turns this trope back on Vicky by holding the microphone up to her mouth when she starts speaking, causing them to assume she's Double-T and arrest her.
    • In School's Out! The Musical, the Pixies, H.P. and Sanderson, are ultimately screwed over by a double helping of this:
      • Firstly, Flappy Bob, the key to their 37-year plan to take over Fairy World and the Earth. Just as said plan had pretty much succeeded, and Flappy Bob was about to discard his clown heritage forever, he overheard the Pixies (who were basically his adoptive parents) bragging about how they'd been manipulating him his entire life and insulting his intelligence. This prompted him to do a Heel–Face Turn.
      • Secondly, the contract that Flappy Bob had signed with H.P. and Sanderson was supposed to give the Pixies total control of Fairy World and, in turn, stated that "Earth will be safe and fun as defined by Flappy Bob". Of course, when the contract was signed, Flappy Bob's definition of fun was the one that the Pixies had raised him to have: dull, boring, and overly-sanitized. But after his Heel–Face Turn, his definition changes to "everything back the way it's supposed to be", which completely undoes the Pixies' plan. For bonus points, Timmy tells the Pixies that if they hadn't sent Flappy Bob to law school, he probably wouldn't have noticed that loophole.
    • Poof's Anti-Fairy counterpart has suffered this on two occasions. His debut episode "Anti-Poof" has him refuse to take a nap during his conquest, which Poof takes advantage of by making him too drowsy to stay awake. In "Timmy's Secret Wish!", Foop gets all of Timmy's wishes undone by exposing the titular secret wish, realizing too late that since Poof is the result of one of Timmy's wishes and he was born in the first place to maintain the balance of an Anti-Fairy for every fairy, he will have his existence undone as well.
  • Family Guy:
    • Happens to Stewie in "Brian Does Hollywood" when he plans to enslave the viewing audience during Kids Say the Darndest Things via hypno-goggles. Unfortunately for him, Bill Cosby ends up using them against him.
      Stewie: I'm going to sit here and enjoy it. And I like pudding, and Ghost Dad was the best movie I've seen since Leonard Part 6.
    • In "Padre de Familia", Peter demands that the brewery where he works fire all illegal immigrants. Soon, he finds out that he himself is an illegal immigrant. Three guesses what happens next. However, this is only an example because the writers evidently have no idea what an illegal immigrant is.
    • A heartbreaking one comes from "Life of Brian". Stewie decides that his time machine is just too much trouble and destroys it. A few moments later, an out-of-control driver strikes Brian while he was setting up for street hockey, killing him. After a while, Stewie realizes that he can undo Brian's death and seeks to repair his time machine. However, he finds out that he can't obtain a crucial piece because the man who he obtained it from was killed for unknowingly drawing Mohammad.
  • Final Space: Since a petard is an explosive device for blowing open doors, it makes the death of Avocato a very rare literal example of this trope when he's killed by one of his own dropped door-opening bombs.
  • Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale: During the rugby game, Wal throws an uppercut in the scrum... and punches himself. To add insult to injury, the referee tells him that next time he punches himself, he'll be sent off.
  • G.I. Joe: Resolute: Cobra Commander's last-ditch effort to get back at the Joes is aiming his super weapon on Washington, and to ensure he survives he locks himself up in a saferoom. Duke then aims his WMD at his base and traps the Commander in his own saferoom. However, he somehow escapes.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • In "Boss Mabel", Dipper manages to defeat the Gremloblin by using a mirror to turn its fear-inducing gaze upon itself.
    • In the Season 1 finale "Gideon Rises", Gideon loses favor with the townspeople and is arrested when his running surveillance on the town — done to trick the town into believing he was psychic, ultimately a minor operation in his schemes to take control of Gravity Falls — is exposed by Stan Pines after his hearing aid picked up the feedback from Gideon's mics.
    • Bill Cipher is undone when his fondness for conning people to make unsavory deals with him and jumping into their minds bites him in his equilateral ass during "Weirdmageddon Part 3". He's so eager to accept Ford's deal — the knowledge Bill seeks in exchange for sparing Dipper and Mabel — that he jumps into the proffered elder Pines without checking which one he's actually dealing with. Yes, the deal-abusing Eldritch Abomination gets conned by a classic Twin Switch and is finally erased, along with Stan's mind, when Ford wipes both out with the memory eraser gun.
  • The Exorcists in Hazbin Hotel have armor that protects them from all manner of infernal armament, and angelic weapons that eradicate any demon struck by them. Unfortunately, their sloppiness in handling the regular exterminations has left a small number of angelic weapons behind, which leaves a black market for them and no amount of murderous mischief as a result. This trope comes into play in Episode 3, when Carmilla uses angelic blades on her shoes to behead an Exorcist, and later in Episode 8, where the Hotel staff and cannibals load up on everything they can get so they can defend themselves against the latest extermination. Adam lampshades this trope once the shadowy tendrils Alastor's barrier manifests use those same weapons to thin the ranks on the outside.
    Adam: That's how they can kill us?! With our own weapons?! Fuckin' weak, dude.
  • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002):
    • Skeletor's creation is the result of this. Keldor, the man who would become Skeletor, and Randor are sword-fighting and Randor is able to disarm Keldor. Keldor pulls out a vial of acid and throws it at Randor. Randor activates a shield, blocks the attack and pushes the acid back towards Keldor, dousing his face with acid. Had Keldor not begged Hordak to save his life, no matter the cost, he would have died right there.
    • Hordak does this to himself when battling Greyskull. Had he not ordered his minions to "summon the Portal to Dispondos," his spirit form (and the entire Evil Horde) would not have been trapped in that dimension after losing his body.
  • The Herculoids: Gorvak, the leader of "The Android People", is killed by the warrior android duplicate of Zandor he created.
  • Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5: The ultimate goal of Krytus is to free the locked away Red Sentient civilization, so they can have their revenge on the Blues. When he accomplishes this goal, he finds out the Reds are just as sick of the war as the Blues, and they promptly seal Krytus away.
  • The Intruder II opens with its title villain using a space ship to lure TOM and SARA to it. Week 6 ended with TOM overloading the ship's engine to kill the Intruder.
  • Jonny Quest:
    • The villain of "Mystery of the Lizard Men" fires a laser at the Quests' ship, Dr. Quest reflects it back with a mirror and blows him up.
    • In "Arctic Splashdown", an enemy Mook tries to blow up the Quest's ship with a bomb. It ends up falling off the ship (thanks to Bandit), lands in the Mook's raft and blows him up.
    • The villain of "The Curse of Anubis" is killed by a cave-in while trying to trap the Quests inside a burial chamber. To be fair, the walking undead mummy who'd been after him for the whole episode and had finally caught him would most likely have killed him anyway.
    • Dr. Ashida from "Dragons of Ashida" breeds huge carnivorous lizards that he uses to hunt down escaped servants (and eventually the Quests). At the end of the episode, his servant Sumi finally has had enough of the doctor's abuse and throws him into the dragons' pit, where he's eaten alive.
    • The villains of "Pirates from Below" try to blow up the Quests' underwater vehicle with a mine. Race Bannon removes it and releases it, whereupon it floats up to the bottom of the Big Bad's boat and goes "Boom".
    • In "The Devil's Tower", Von Dueffel blows off his biplane's wing with a hand grenade he was attempting to throw at Dr. Quest and crashes.
    • In "The Quetong Missile Mystery", General Fong shoots a guard out of pure frustration at the Quests escaping him. The dead guard then falls on a Plunger Detonator and blows Fong up with one of his own planted mines.
    • In "House of Seven Gargoyles", enemy Mooks shooting at Dr. Quest while they're under a glacier cause an ice collapse, killing them and the Big Bad as well.
    • In "Terror Island", Dr. Chu Sing Ling is blown up by a power plant explosion caused by one of the giant monsters he created.
    • In "The Riddle of the Gold", Ali plans to use a tiger to kill Dr. Quest, but the tiger ends up killing him instead.
  • Happens in Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures also. The first episode even uses the trope name, almost word for word.
  • In Justice League Action, a dijinn that absorbed Parasite and is using his absorption powers to drain Superman and Wonder Woman. In response, they send in the Martian Manhunter to aid them. The djinn's sword is knocked away before he absorbs the Manhunter's powers, but when he goes to retrieve his sword, he's repulsed by its flame — he absorbed the Manhunter's powers along with his fear of fire.
  • Kaeloo:
    • Frequently happens to Mr. Cat. For example, in the episode "Let's Play Cops and Robbers", he gives Stumpy a banana as a weapon. At the end of the episode, during a car chase scene with Stumpy pursuing Mr. Cat, Stumpy launches the banana, which gets stuck in Mr. Cat's nose and causes him to lose control of the car. Sometimes it happens with even the most minor things; in one episode, he tries to hit Quack Quack on the head with a mallet, but since he is completely drunk at the time, he winds up hitting himself on the head.
    • In Episode 113, Kaeloo takes Stumpy to court, with Quack Quack as the judge, for "mistreating" objects and convinces the jury that objects have souls and therefore Stumpy should be punished. Mr. Cat, who is Stumpy's lawyer in this episode, decides to use this to his advantage. He decides to call a can of yogurt, which is Quack Quack's Trademark Favorite Food, as a witness, pointing out that if objects have souls, the yogurt counts as a witness. Quack Quack devours the "witness" almost instantly and is taken to jail by Mr. Cat, who is also a police officer in this episode. Kaeloo steps out of the courtroom to talk to some reporters about the incident, and since everyone is gone, Stumpy takes the judge's place and declares himself "not guilty", which apparently works in Smileyland's judicial system.
    • In Episode 138, Kaeloo tells Stumpy to clean his incredibly messy room, and the latter resorts to Playing Sick so he can sit around playing video games instead of cleaning. Kaeloo sees right through this, so she says that if he's sick, he must need medicines... and brings in a truckload of vaccines. Stumpy, who is terribly Afraid of Needles, says that he "got better", and is forced to clean his room.
    • Villainous example: Kaeloo tries to give Mr. Cat the Silent Treatment so he'll stop the unethical activities he's doing in the episode. Mr. Cat chooses to ignore this and continues to address her in a friendly tone of voice, asking her if she'd like to join in a fun activity he's planning. Kaeloo starts crying because her friendship with Mr. Cat is too strong to never speak to him again, and she gives up on the idea.
  • Kim Possible: In "Ill-Suited" Dr. Dementor creates a device that allows him to remotely control Kim's battlesuit. After using it to make Kim and Ron beat each other up, he puts it on, allowing Rufus to use the device to make Dementor beat himself up.
  • King of the Hill:
    • Buck Strickland's mistress Debbie Grund plans to kill Buck after he spurned her for his wife, intending to pop out of a dumpster and shoot him after he went to a nearby motel. Buck wasn't able to get there on time due to circumstance and took so long that Debbie got hungry and went to the nearby restaurant to get some food. On the way back she had too much trouble balancing her nachos and shotgun at the same time so she threw the shotgun into the dumpster and promptly shot herself dead climbing in.
    • One episode has a criminal convince Peggy to bring him a load of cocaine in a sand timer by claiming to be one of her former students who loves the game Boggle, and now that the evidence is there threatens her to bring more or he'll turn her in. Ultimately she refuses and decides to take her punishment so he turns her in, only for her to notice the sand timer is absolutely spotless from him literally licking it clean due to his addiction. She points out there's no evidence and gets off scot-free.
  • In Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, the now mentally unstable General Tsin (who at that point had been capturing the show's villains and paralyzing them with a smoke that left them completely immobile, yet conscious and aware) actually says this word for word when he suggests that Po would use the same gas he used on his recently freed enemies to paralyze him. Luckily, Po has other ideas:
    Tsin: So what are you gonna do now? Freeze me like I did them?! Hoist me with my own petard?!
    Po: Don't have a... petard handy, but, aahhh, I do have another idea.
    [cut to Chorh-Gom prison, where Tsin is put behind bars]
  • The Legend of Korra:
    • In Season 2, Korra's Evil Uncle Unalaq teaches her a method to pacify rampaging Dark Spirits before he's outed as the Big Bad. She uses this same technique to banish him after he merges with Vaatu and becomes the Dark Avatar.
    • In Season 3, P'li (who has similar abilities to Combustion Man) blows her head off when she attempts to unleash a blast on Lin, only for Suyin to wrap a piece of metal around P'li's head. Later, Ming-Hua is electrocuted through her water arms after she attempts to lure Mako into an underground lake.
  • Looney Tunes:
    • Though he doesn't kill them, many a Bugs Bunny cartoon has Bugs (wittingly or unwittingly) turn a plan or an ability against someone. For instance, Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam have been blown up by the Exploding Xylophone trap because Bugs just cannot hit the right notes on "Those Endearing Young Charms" and they get so frustrated that they run out and do it right.
    • Both Elmer Fudd and Bugs are victims of this in "The Hare-Brained Hypnotist". Elmer's latest plan to hunt Bugs involves mastering hypnosis to hypnotize him, but Bugs turns it against him. Deciding to make Elmer feel a little empathy in hopes of getting him to leave him alone, Bugs commands Elmer to think he's a rabbit. This backfires greatly: Elmer ends up being even more of a trickster than Bugs is, and ends up driving Bugs crazy for the rest of the short.
    • This is a frequent cause of Amusing Injuries for Wile E. Coyote, whose Acme Products constantly backfire upon him — in fact, it would likely be easier to list the times this doesn't happen to him. Word of God claimed that this was actually a rule: No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products (Trucks, trains and similar vehicles were the exception from time to time. Even then, he's usually put in their path by his own plans/devices). In "Operation: Rabbit", he's nailed by the same specific thing twice: having built an explosive Fembot of an attractive female rabbit, he promptly falls for the same kind of device— as an attractive female coyote— from Bugs. Reeling from the explosion of the coyote bot, he realized his rabbit bot is about to go off. He tries to throw it out the window... too late!
    • In "From Hare To Heir", Sam, Duke of Yosemite, gets a double whammy. When he saws through the floorboards right in front of the bathroom, he covers the hole with a rug. Unable to get Bugs to come out diplomatically, he bursts through the locked door, rushes him out, and winds up falling through that very spot right down to the moat. The second time, when Bugs opens the bathroom door, Sam attempts to rush him and gets another date with gravity for his troubles (and the same overhead shot showing him cursing all the way down).
    • In "Assault and Peppered", when Daffy declares war on Speedy, he falls victim to a number of his own weapons and traps all through the short: having his own cannonball fired on him, three times, stepping on his own land mines before he could return to his homebase as Speedy stole the chart marking off where he hid them, and finally, accidentally firing his own cannons on himself while they were intended for Speedy during his 21-Gun Salute.
  • The Mask:
    • In one episode, the Mask uses a time-manipulating villain's own time-loop device against her, trapping her in an endless cycle of him dropping a grandfather clock over her head.
    • Subverted in another episode when Stanley tries to use Ipkissa Maskosis on Masked Dr. Neuman. It does not work, as he is a trained psychotherapist (insane or not), so Stanley has to use another way to defeat him.
  • The Loud House:
    • In "No Such Luck", Lincoln spreads a rumor that he's bad luck to get more free time on his hands. This ultimately backfires when he is alienated by his family and is kicked out of the house. Even when he is let back into the family and his parents and sisters no longer believe him to be bad luck, it is revealed that they have sold all his furniture and they only believe to be good luck when he's wearing a mascot costume.
    • In "Pipe Dreams", when Mr. and Mrs. Loud think the kids have broken into their secret bathroom, Mr. Loud goes to extreme measures to tighten up on security. This backfires when he and Mrs. Loud are trapped inside. Mr. Loud's attempt to escape the vents also backfires, as he and Mrs. Loud wired them and he gets electrocuted.
  • In Magical Maestro, a stage magician who's mad at opera singer Poochini for refusing to let him be an opening act gets revenge by impersonating the conductor and using his magic wand to put Poochini through a series of embarrassing transformations in the middle of his performance. Unfortunately, at the end of the cartoon, the magician's disguise is blown, and Poochini takes the guy's wand and gives him a taste of his own medicine.
  • In Men in Black: The Series, the Fmeks are a race of tiny warlike beings from the planet Fmoo. In "The Little Big Man Syndrome", they infiltrate Earth and plan to use it to redirect their Death Ray fired from Fmoo to destroy Arquilia (pretty much because the equally small Arquilians have a much bigger planet than them). As the beam is about to hit the giant satellite dish, Kay and Jay manage to redirect it just in time. Since they didn't have a lot of time to come up with a new (safer) targeting vector, they redirect the beam back at Fmoo. The last scene of Fmoo is a planet-wide evacuation. In later episodes, the Fmeks are, understandably, pissed about the loss of their homeworld.
  • A non-fatal heroic example in the Mighty Magiswords short "The Curse of Dummystein": after the titular Dummystein magisword steals Vambre’s voice and begins using it to tell one groan-worthy joke after another, Vambre makes numerous attempts to knock Dummystein out and get her voice back, most of which backfire. It becomes literal when she uses the Little Blue Bomb magisword only to get tripped up by the mic and land in the middle of her own bombs, with Dummystein having somehow gotten up to a balcony.
    Dummystein: I have to tell you, usually the only person 'bombing' in here is me. Wah-waahh!
    [Rimshot, BOOM]
  • Miraculous Ladybug: Main villain Hawk Moth's power is to transform others into Akumatized villains, offering them help with whatever problem attracted his attention (and allowed him an opening to brainwash them) in exchange for them getting him the heroes' Miraculouses. Usually he has leverage on them in the form of being able to cause them pain and take away their powers, but the robotic villain Robostus was able to hack into his security system and turn it against him, leaving him too distracted dodging his own missiles to stop Robostus while the villain decided to take the Miraculous for himself rather than Hawk Moth.
  • In The Mr. Men Show, Little Miss Naughty's pranks tend to backfire on her.
  • My Little Pony:
    • My Little Pony 'n Friends:
    • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
      • In the very first episode, Nightmare Moon's attempts to stop the main cast from getting to the Elements of Harmony not only leads to Twilight realizing that she and the others represent each of the Elements of Harmony, but also allows her to befriend the others and actually be able to use the elements.
      • In "The Return of Harmony, Part 2", Discord is ultimately defeated thanks to quite a few of his own petards. First, he let the main cast get back the Elements Of Harmony and letting them try to hit him with them, which he'd ensured wouldn't work since he'd broken apart their friendship, in order to crush any hope they had left. He also committed the big mistake of giving back Fluttershy's wings and Twilight and Rarity's horns (he had previously given Rainbown Dash's wings back, so she would fly away after he brainwashed her). Thanks to this small detail Twilight Sparkle figures out how to break his Mind Rape on the most part of the gang and Fluttershy helps them to reach Rainbow Dash and heal her, too. They confront him with their friendship, and the Elements Of Harmony, renewed. Applejack mentions this, but Discord, having turned her into a liar and not knowing she's turned back, doesn't listen to her. He refuses to believe his Mind Rape had been undone and thus tries to repeat what he did before, only to be done in by his own Genre Savvy. It's impossible to tell whether or not the Elements Of Harmony will fizzle out until they're just about to fire, rendering Discord incapable of realizing his folly until it's too late.
      • Queen Chrysalis, the leader of the Changelings and Big Bad of the season 2 finale, "A Canterlot Wedding", is revealed to have been feeding off of Shining Armor's love for Cadence to make herself stronger. When Shining is broken free of her control, he and Cadence use the real Power of Love to send her and her mooks flying off into the distance Team Rocket-style.
      • Lord Tirek, the Big Bad of Season 4's finale, is taken out thanks to him backstabbing Discord, whom he convinced to pull a Face–Heel Turn. While draining Discord of his magic put him at equal footing with the four Alicorn princess-powered Twilight Sparkle, it leads to Discord having a Heel Realization and giving Twilight the last key to open up the chest containing the Rainbow Powers.
      • Starlight Glimmer, the Big Bad of Season 5, is stopped by the very time traveling spell she tries to use to Ret-Gone the Mane Six's friendship in the season finale. After constantly failures in forcefully trying to prevent Starlight from stopping the first Sonic Rainboom, Twilight Sparkle grabs Starlight and drags her to the newest future she created by her actions — a barren wasteland. It sets off a Villainous Breakdown that leads to Twilight convincing Starlight to abandon her vengeance and start making new friends.
      • Queen Chrysalis gets hit with this again in Season 6's finale. In her revenge scheme against the Mane Six and the royal family, she and the Changelings are able to replace them all, but decides not to replace Starlight Glimmer, claiming that she wasn't worth replacing. Starlight ends up being the one to derail her entire plan and ends up causing her to lose everything but her very life.
  • The New Adventures of Superman: In the episode "The Electro-Magnetic Monster", Superman uses the Deimosians' own electromagnetic device against their ship to defeat them.
  • Ninjago:
    • In the first half of the season 1 finale, Big Bad Pythor P. Chumsworth succeeds in using the four Silver Fang Blades to awaken the Great Devourer. Not only did he underestimate the Devourer's size, (he thought it was inside the statue that he put the Fang Blades in when it was actually in an underground chamber due to being so huge) he also didn't consider it not obeying him, resulting in him being one of its only two victims.
    • The Great Devourer itself deserves a mention because it was ultimately destroyed by Lord Garmadon, who became what he is now because it bit him as a child.
  • The Patrick Star Show: In "Best Served Cold", Squidward sets a trap for Cecil: Cecil will pull the newspaper and end up pulling a stake that drags him into a newspaper press. However, Cecil winds up pulling the paper with his teeth, frustrating Squidward. Squidward demonstrates how it's supposed to work and gets caught in the trap himself.
  • In Phineas and Ferb, this happens all the time to Dr. Doofenshmirtz.
    • In one episode, he invents a deflating ray and wields it from a blimp. Three guesses what happens and the first two don't count.
    • In "Leave the Busting to Us!", Doof escapes from Perry in the van he stole from the Bust 'Em people. He then mocks Perry for having to stop at the traffic light since he's a good guy, while as a villain he doesn't have to obey the rules... then is promptly caught up in the tornado accidentally created by his Gloominator 5000-Inator.
    • Naturally, Doof isn't particularly fond of this trope. Once when Perry uses it on him, Doof says, "That isn't clever, it's just cliché!"
  • A Running Gag with Pinky and the Brain. The Brain's schemes are often ruined either by an oversight on his part or by his own inventions.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (1998): When Princess becomes the Mayor in "Bought and Scold", she makes crime legal. She figures this will put an end to the girls stopping crime. This means crimes can be committed against her, like being robbed of all her items. The girls agree to give her back the items they took if Princess gives the Mayor his job back.
  • The Proud Family: The episode "Penny Potter" introduces Penny's great-aunt, and Suga Mama's older sister, Sista Spice, who has Mind over Matter powers and cons people into believing she can give them the same power for a price. When she tricks Oscar into giving her a stage so she can con the whole town, she is soon forced to let her Unwitting Pawn Zoe try moving an object without her presence, which exposes the scam. Her attempt to flee with the money is stopped by Suga Mama, who turns Spice's power against her by deflecting a telekinesis ray back at her with a garbage can lid.
  • Cyril Sneer of The Raccoons is pretty much His Own Worst Enemy, as his plans constantly backfire on him. Probably the biggest example is "Gold Rush!", in which Cyril plans to buy up the Evening Standard newspaper and put it out of business. He's working with Mr. Knox and is smug about waiting until the last minute before the noon deadline to make the deal so the Racoons can't stop him. Cyril is waiting out the clock, ignoring son Cedric frantically trying to tell him something. He finally calls up Knox to make the deal... only for Knox to tell him it's too late as the deadline passed. When a confused Cyril points out it's not noon yet, Cedric reminds his dad how Cyril had set all the clocks in the factory back five minutes so he could squeeze some extra work time out of his employees without paying them so it's actually 12:03. Cyril can only let out a loud scream at his mistake.
  • While he almost always walks away from it, this seems to happen to ReBoot's Megabyte quite often.
    • Megabyte steals a supposed weapon from Hexadecimal, which turns out to be a viral bug that freezes whatever it comes in contact with, starting with him.
    • His attempts to leech energy from games backfires when he gets stuck within two games merged together and attacked by the resulting game characters.
    • Attempting to steal Mainframe's core energy gets him knocked into said energy and becoming part of a game which would destroy the entire system if lost.
    • Double-crossing Mouse more than once turns out to be more than a mistake when she reconfigures his portal to the Supercomputer to one leading to the Web.
    • Then there's turning Hexadecimal into a weapon, which, once she gets free, gets his Tor wrecked.
  • In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Kid-Kart Derby", Mitchell cheats in the race by installing an ion drive into his kid kart, but then when he starts to use it, it doesn't work. Jet then informs him that ion drives only work in the vacuum of space.
  • In the Rick and Morty episode "The Ricklantis Mix-up", a Rick on the Citadel attempts to use a portal gun powered by his own bootleg portal gun fluid to escape the police, only for the portal to push him back and make him disintegrate.
  • Robot Chicken: A Home Alone sketch has Kevin finish setting up his traps for the robbers—which end up doing him in when he accidentally causes a house fire and triggers several of the traps himself in his state of panic, ultimately ending with him caving his head in with a clothing iron that he hid in the basement ceiling.
  • Happens nearly constantly in Rocky and Bullwinkle to Boris and Natasha.
    • In one episode of the "Treasure of Monte Zoom" arc, the narrator even said the phrase word for word. Boris, confused by the phrase, stops the action to ask what it means, the annoyed narrator clarifies "It means you fell into your own trap!" and the satified Boris continues riding the treasure chest he was trying to drop on the titular duo to his own doom. Clearly, this saying has been around for some time.
    • In a specific (and more humorous example), one episode saw Boris and Natasha trying to poison Bullwinkle's drink. Bullwinkle offers the toast "Well, here's to crime!" and the two villains are obligated to drink their own poison.
  • Rugrats:
    • If Angelica does something to the babies or tries to get something for herself, chances are that what she did will turn around and bite her in the ass. These have included revealing she broke Tommy's lamp (and forgetting that the grown-ups can hear her), handcuffing herself to her bed, and wiping out on the ball that she had earlier tossed over the fence.
    • On the non-Angelica side of things, there's the Junk Food Kid, a toddler bully who was beaten when Tommy burst the humongous bubble gum bubble she blew using a candy cane she tossed aside.
  • Samurai Jack:
    • In the "Fall" segment of "The Four Seasons of Death", a Mad Scientist makes a virulent poison and laces a well outside his lab to see what happens. Jack arrives at the well and takes a drink, seemingly toppling over dead as he succumbs to the poison. The scientist rushes out to see the results, only for Jack to spring up and spit the poisoned water into the scientist's mouth, killing him and turning him into a pile of leaves.
    • Abundant for Aku in Season 5.
      • He finally realizes that he's hopelessly outmatched, so instead of attacking Jack, Aku destroys all of the portals he could use to return to the past and then retreats to his lair, planning to let his nemesis die of old age. However, the magic he used to send Jack into the future made the samurai immortal, leaving them at a stalemate.
      • Also, immediately after Aku destroys the last portal and retreats, Jack's spirit breaks to the point that the magic katana forsakes him. He's without the sword — and thus helpless against Aku — for decades, but Aku is so adamant to avoid any news of Jack that by the time he finally finds out, Jack has already reclaimed it.
      • The real kicker, the one that leads to his final destruction, stems from his own ego. With the only remaining way Jack can return to the past being for Aku to use his powers to send him there, it should have been impossible for Jack to escape the Bad Future. However, at one point, Aku gave some of his essence to a group of cultists, the leader of which ingested it and subsequently gave birth to a group of daughters who were raised solely to kill Jack. Jack defeats and kills all but Ashi, the strongest of them, and she has her eyes forced open to Aku's true nature. When Aku confronts them, he senses and then awakens his dormant powers within her, which nearly leads to Jack's death, but Jack's declaration of love to Ashi frees her from Aku, and with her new powers in control, she sends both herself and Jack back to the past, where he finally kills Aku for good.
  • Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: When Harry the Hypnotist, a.k.a. the Ghost Clown, tries to hypnotize Shaggy and Scooby into thinking they're gorillas, they use a couple of mirrors to trick him into hypnotizing himself. Then they simply have to lure him into a circus animal's cage with a banana. Likely the funniest way a villain is apprehended in the series.
  • V.V. Argost gets this during the finale of The Secret Saturdays. After killing Zak's Mirror Universe counterpart and absorbing his powers, he proceeds to absorb Zak's powers as well — and here's where V.V. makes his big mistake. Zak Monday is an antimatter counterpart to Zak Saturday, and antimatter and regular matter do not mix. Argost learns this the hard way when the combination atomizes him out of existence. Argost actually gets a triple dose of this because he had to protect himself from the sound-based weapon he was using to absorb Zak's powers in the first place, and therefore couldn't hear Zak's warning about mixing his powers with Zak Monday's. So not only did the mixing of matter and anti-matter do Argost in, the weapon he used to do it and what he was using to protect himself from it both played a part in causing his demise.
  • She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In "System Failure", a computer chip is scanned into a computer, but the chip has a virus that infects the computer and then several robots, which act homicidal to anything that makes sound. Bow ends up shooting the computer with a sonic arrow, causing the robots to smash the computer and destroy the chip.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Taken to an extreme in "Barting Over". Bart decides to take revenge on Homer for all the years of strangling him. Except because his hands are smaller than Homer's, he remedies the situation by using Homer's belt. Had Bart continued to strangle Homer with that belt without Marge trying to stop him, Homer would've suffocated to death in a few seconds.
    • Done to Sideshow Bob in "Funeral for a Fiend", with the phrase "Hoist on his own petard" being part of his plan for extra humor. Basically, Sideshow Bob creates a fake restaurant designed specifically to appeal to the Simpsons family. When they come over, Sideshow Bob ties them up next to a crate of dynamite that has a laptop computer on top. The computer's battery will overheat, detonating the dynamite. Lisa gets Sideshow Bob to come back after correcting him on a Shakespeare reference and he uses the laptop which explodes in his face. After that, he drops the trope incorrectly, so Lisa corrects him again.
    • In "Treehouse of Terror XXI", when Dracula and his son start to greedily suck Homer's blood, they get bloated, queasy, and pass out due to Homer's blood having high cholesterol and other obesity-related ailments.
    • In "The Great Phatsby", Mr. Burns meets a hip hop mogul who claims to have read Burns' book on being ruthless and taken it to heart. The mogul subsequently cheats Burns out of his entire fortune. During the attempt to get it back, Burns asks him why he did it. The mogul reveals he was following the advice Mr. Burns himself gave in his book: to be completely ruthless, you must destroy the one who made you.
  • South Park:
    • In "Cartman Sucks", Cartman decides to show an incriminating photo to the class before Kyle can to take the wind out of his sales, only to discover that Kyle didn't have it after all and that he simply misplaced it.
    • Cartman pulls a Hat Trick with this in "Imaginationland" and is hoist by his own petard three times. How poetic. He wins a bet with Kyle where Kyle is required to suck his balls, and he has three opportunities to have it happen: every single time he would have succeeded, if he hadn't tried to drag it out for as long as possible to savour it by dressing up as a sultan, a king, and the pope. Because he took so long building up to it, Kyle got away due to a Contrived Coincidence each time: the first time the government abducts Stan and Kyle, the second time everyone in the building is made to muster in one area, and the third time they happen to hear on TV that the government has ruled imaginary things aren't real meaning Cartman technically lost the bet that leprechauns are "real".
    • In "Dances with Smurfs", Cartman's convoluted plot to depose Wendy as student council president and make money off his (totally original) film, Dances with Smurfs falls apart when Wendy actually plays along with his ruse, claims he was her inside man, then giving Cartman her place as student council president, landing him in boring meetings he never really wanted a part of, and preventing him from ever doing morning announcements again (as one student cannot do both). To add insult to injury, Wendy also reveals she wrote a similar story to Cartman's, and sold the rights to James Cameron, resulting in Avatar. Cue Villainous Breakdown.
    • In "Crippled Summer", Nathan's attempts to get rid of Jimmy backfire on him, thanks to his sidekick Mimsy.
  • The Spectacular Spider-Man:
    • When Venom returns, he steals a genetic cleanser in order to strip Spidey of his powers and then reveal his identity to the world, so he will be defenseless against all the enemies he's made over the last few months. However, it's Spider-Man who uses the cleanser to separate Eddie from Venom.
    • In the season 2 finale, Green Goblin's glider is damaged after Spider-Man uses one of his own bombs against him, which then sends Goblin into a large container of more of his own bombs, originally intended to kill Spider-Man, creating a tremendous explosion. Unfortunately, Joker Immunity applies, because, of course, No One Could Survive That!.
  • In the finale of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends's Story Arc, Doctor Doom, who has finally taken over the world through clever use of a satellite-mounted laser, has his plot foiled and is subsequently vaporized by the same device.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Kayshon, His Eyes Open", Captain Riker tells the original and transporter clone of Brad Boimler that Starfleet cannot have two of the same person on the same ship and thus one must return to the Cerritos with a demotion to Ensign while the other can stay aboard the Titan as a Lieutenant Jr. Grade. The transporter clone anticipates the real Boimler wanting to play out the idea of the two of them fighting over who will return and refuses to play, letting the real Boimler step up to "volunteer" to return to the Cerritos.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
    • In "Prisoners", Shark Man Riff Tamson falls afoul of this trope in the literal sense — Prince Lee-Char kills him with one of his own bombs.
    • In "Missing in Action", Jerkass diner owner Borkus kicks Colonel Gascon and WAC-47 out of his business apparently due to Fantastic Racism. Gascon and WAC subsequently go around to the back to dumpster-dive and immediately run into the other reason Borkus kicked them out: amnesiac clone Gregor, who is subsequently enlisted by D-Squad to help them escape Abafar after they get him to remember that he's a One-Man Army.
    • "Unfinished Business" has Separatist Admiral Trench get hit with this spectacularly. First off, his reputation as The Dreaded makes Separatist Council member Wat Tambor too afraid of him to tell him that the Techno Union no longer has access to a stolen Republic strategy algorithm because Echo, the captured ARC trooper they were getting it from, has been rescued. As a direct consequence, this lets Echo screw Trench over and bring about the defeat of his forces at Anaxes by using his reliance on the algorithm to mislead him, resulting in the defeat of the Separatist forces attacking Anaxes and Trench's death.
  • Steven Universe:
    • In "Coach Steven", Pearl beats Sugilite by breaking the ground she's standing on, causing her to fall down a cliff. Sugilite doesn't seem hurt in the slightest, and starts giving Pearl a Badass Boast before being hit in the head by her own flail, causing her to unfuse.
      Sugilite: Is that all you GOT?! You think that'll be enough to–- [flail hits her in the head]
    • "Jail Break":
      • Subverted during the fight between Garnet and Jasper. Garnet knocks the Gem Destabilizer out of Jasper's hands, but instead of using it on Jasper, she snaps it in half to show that she doesn't need "fancy tools" to win.
      • Lapis pulls one on Jasper, who all but forces Lapis to fuse with her into the huge, monstrously powerful Malachite. Jasper either forget that both minds are still separate, or was convinced that Lapis was too scared and weak to try anything, because Lapis proceeds to use her water powers on Malachite itself, binding the pair of them in watery chains and dragging herself and Jasper to the bottom of the ocean. Jasper intended to abuse Malachite's enormous power to destroy the Crystal Gems, but clearly didn't figure that that same could be used against her.
  • Said almost verbatim by the Peculiar Purple Pieman in one of the Strawberry Shortcake specials ("Big Apple City"). The guy sabotaged a traffic light so it would stay red to secure his victory at a baking contest, and Strawberry Shortcake and Orange Blossom were unable to cross the street to get to a subway. When they manage to find an alternate subway (via a mole), the Pieman tries to cross the street to beat them to the TV station holding the bake off. It's only when he's smacked by a car when he realizes, due to his sabotage, that he can't cross the street himself, shouting, "hoisted! By my own petard!" Doubles as Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • A recurring bit on Superfriends is someone stealing Superman's powers and boasting they're now invincible. At which point, someone hits them with Kryptonite while pointing out that by taking on Superman's powers, they've also inherited his main weakness.
  • Twice in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003):
    • The first occasion occurs in "Return to New York, Part 3" with Baxter Stockman when, after the main power source of his exo-suit is destroyed, he gets back up again and gloats about how each component of it has its own backup power supply. This prompts Donatello to work over to an Arm Cannon that was cut off earlier and say "So what you're saying is, this arm should still be fully functioning, right?" Cue hilarious Oh, Crap! moment before Don blows away Stockmen with his own gun.
    • The second occasion occurs in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover movie Turtles Forever when the Utrom Shredder's latest body proves surprisingly vulnerable to his Technodrome's super-laser.
  • Thomas & Friends:
    • In "Break Van", the Spiteful Brake Van's plan to hold James back results in James becoming so tired that he begins losing steam on Gordon's Hill and Douglas, who is being James' back engine, takes up the strain, causing the Break Van to be crushed to death in the book and TV series.
    • In "Toad Stands By", S.C.Ruffey, who is at the front of a long line of trucks, tells the other trucks to hold Oliver back, not realising that Oliver and Toad have their own plan for revenge after the trucks teased Oliver over the turntable incident. As a result, S.C.Ruffey falls apart and the Fat Controller reveals it to be a result of rotten wood and rusty frames. After S.C.Ruffey is rebuilt, he and the other trucks decide to never tease Oliver again. In the original book, however, S.C.Ruffey's fate is much darker as he is deemed "unserviceable before he came".
  • Tigtone: In "Tigtone and the Demon Maze", Tigtone and Helpy are in a giant maze where the only condition is that killing anything will send you back to the start, including Mercy Kills and suicides. After many attempts, Tigtone is eventually able to suppress his murderous urges and get to the end, only for an enraged Helpy to kill him when the Maze Demon tries to goad Tigtone into taking revenge by killing the Maze Demon with a dagger. Their solution? Get to the end again, but this time have the Maze Demon stab himself in the neck so he'll be the one sent to the start of the maze, where he then falls into a Rube Goldberg Device they built that causes him to stab himself and respawn ad infinitum.
  • In a Citizen Kane-themed episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, Buster enlists Babs and Plucky to discredit Montana Max after Max frames Buster for cheating on an exam by planting a false book of answers. The title is actually lampshaded by Babs and Plucky.
    Buster: C'mon, guys, it's time to hoist Monty by his own petard!
    Babs: What's a petard?
    Plucky: I hope it's not heavy to hoist; I'm hernia prone.
  • Tom Terrific occasionally has its villains defeated by their own creations.
    • In "Instant Tantrums", the villain Mr. Instant schemes to use a powder to make children throw tantrums. In the end, he gets exposed to his own concoction and is left throwing a tantrum over his failure that causes him to destroy all his equipment and ensure that he never makes anything like instant tantrums ever again.
    • "Isotope Feeney's Foolish Fog" has Isotope Feeney create a fog that makes people dumb. In the end, he gets trapped in his castle with the last cloud of foolish fog and is made an idiot by it.
  • Total Drama
    • Heather previously threatened Lindsay with a head shaving if she ever betrayed their alliance again. Incidentally, Heather betrayed Lindsay in "That's Off the Chain," and Lindsay used Heather's own threat against her as a dare in "I Triple Dog Dare You," leading to Heather's Traumatic Haircut and subsequent elimination.
    • In the Revenge of the Island ending where Lightning wins, Cameron attempts to defeat Lightning in a duel by using his Powered Armor to magnetize the latter's junk armor. He succeeds, causing Lightning's armor to attract several oil drums that promptly explode when Lightning's club becomes a lightning rod, but Cameron's armor becomes completely drained and he falls over first, so Lightning, albeit burnt and dizzied by the explosion, falls on him and wins.
    • In Pahkitew Island, this literally happens to Max after he builds a trap and forgets where he put it. Seconds later, it figuratively happens when he braggadociously tells everyone that he built it. He gets spared from elimination, but not scorn.
  • Transformers: Animated:
    • Optimus beats Soundwave to scrap using Soundwave's own electric guitar, Laserbeak.
    • In "Decepticon Air", Sentinel Prime orders the Elite Guard to take a shortcut to Cybertron by barging through an Energon storm while their ship's cargo is carrying Decepticon prisoners. The storm brings Swindle back online, and Swindle sets free the other Decepticons who then easily pulverize Sentinel and his crew. Before Lugnut could bring the finishing blow upon Sentinel, ironically Swindle saves Sentinel by talking Lugnut into sparing Sentinel for spare parts.
  • Transformers: Prime:
    • Silas gets crushed by his own creation, Nemesis Prime, when it falls through the roof of his base, where it'd been fighting Optimus Prime. However, MECH has Breakdown's body, so it appears that Silas will pull an Emergency Transformation/Grand Theft Me.
    • Silas ultimately gets done in by this again, after deciding that becoming a Transformer means that he no longer needs his human allies and tries to join the Decepticons, ironically, by being their "Human Factor". Megatron ultimately saw the irony in this, and after Silas's failure, orders Knock Out to vivisect Silas, the same way he vivisected Breakdown.
    • This is how Airachnid got Put on a Bus. Arcee tricked her into getting frozen in a stasis pod formerly occupied by one of her Insecticon minions.
    • Soundwave gets defeated in the Grand Finale when he opens up a ground bridge to try to dispose of Miko in the Apex Armor suit, prompting Raf to open another ground bridge. The two ground bridges overlapping each other imprison Soundwave in the Shadowzone.
  • In an episode of T.U.F.F. Puppy, Bird Brain discovers that he's the Last of His Kind, meaning that he's an Endangered Species and can now go about his business unimpeded because Dudley and Kitty legally can't hurt him. At the end of the episode, he makes a mutant clone of himself, meaning he's no longer the last member of his species and they can hurt him again note .
  • TUGS:
    • Zorran is a frequent victim of this trope. For example:
      • In "Trapped", Zorran decides to leave the Star Tugs (as well as Zug) trapped Up River so the Z-Stacks can have Bigg City Port all to themselves and neglects to alert the salvage crew. But he reckons without the trapped tugs resorting to Billy Shoepack and his dynamite, which is used to blow up the tramper. The resulting tidal wave sweeps Zorran onto some rocks with Captain Star's closing line stating that Zorran was much more successful in trapping himself than the Star Tugs.
      • Another example of Zorran falling in this trope is in "Quarantine". Feeling annoyed at not being able to tow in any schooners, Zorran learns from Sunshine about Nantucket lowering its quarantine flags and decides to take it for himself. He fails to realise that there was no official about until it's too late and when the Coast Guard catches Nantucket, Zorran is also quarantined.
      • In "Bigg Freeze", Zorran refuses to give Ten Cents and Sunshine a fuel barge which he intends to give to Vienna, despite the Star switchers arguing that Lillie needs it more and without Lillie's light, Vienna will just sail through. Zorran refuses to believe this but when Vienna turns away Zorran's fuel barge, he is forced to give Lillie for half price.
    • There was a double example of this in "Warrior". First Izzy Gomez attempts to sneak into without a tow and because there is no tug guiding him, he runs aground into the rock foundations...and in front of the Coast Guard who later slaps Izzy with a hefty fine after he is rescued.
      • In the same episode, Zip and Zug decide to leave Ten Cents to rescue Izzy himself in the hopes of claiming savage. But just as they're about to take over, Warrior arrives in time to save the day. Not only that but the Coast Guard reveals that their behaviour has cost the Z-Stacks their chances of gaining the rock contract.
    • In "High Tide", whilst competing with Big Mac and Warrior for the steel contract, Zak suffers engine trouble and he suggests to Zebedee that they take a shortcut across the canal to beat the Stars. However, they reckon without the high tide, the steel rig's height and the railway bridge spanning the canal, causing the bridge to collapse and Top Hat and Lord Stinker having to save the goods train. The steel company are unimpressed with the damage the Z-Stacks have caused to their steel rig so when the steel company gets the contract for repairing the bridge, Captain Star is able to convince them that the Star Tugs should get the contract to deliver the steel.
  • Simon Bar Sinister of Underdog will oftentimes be defeated when he ends up on the receiving end of his own inventions: the Camera Ray in " Simon Says", the Shrinking Water in "The Big Shrink", the titular amnesia-inducing net in "The Forget-Me-Net", the titular tickle feathers in "The Tickle Feather Machine", the Valentine Vault in "Simon Says, Be My Valentine"... the list pretty much goes on and on.
  • The Venture Bros.:
    • In "Love-Bheits", Baron Ünderbheit ends up marrying Dean, who's dressed as Princess Leia for a costume party. Since same-sex marriages are outlawed in Ünderland, the Baron finds himself exiled from his own country.
    • In "What Color is Your Cleansuit?", Billy ends up in a trivia game with Augustus St. Cloud where he has to correctly guess the number of robots in a room that contains H.E.L.P.E.R., a walking eye fused with him, Nomad, and Twiki. Billy guesses four. St. Cloud declares victory, as he thinks Billy didn't realize that Twiki was carrying Doctor Theopolis, which would make a fifth robot... but Billy turns the tables by pointing out that Nomad isn't actually a robot, but rather a merging of two probes that developed an AI. When St. Cloud tries to hastily claim that Nomad is called a robot in the episode, Billy out-trivias him by listing off all the terms used to refer to Nomad in the episode, none of which are "robot" or even a suitable synonym. In short, St. Cloud was undone because he put Nomad in the room.
  • Much like Wile E. Coyote, Wacky Races' Dick Dastardly falls victim to his own machinations in trying to thwart the other Wacky Racers.
  • On both sides in the Wallykazam episode "A Very Villainous Vacation". Victor tells Wally to look, that there's a volleyball volcano. Wally says that there's no such thing as a volleyball volcano. Since these are magic words for the episode, they appear in the air and Victor grabs and tosses them, creating the volleyball volcano. Wally says that he can make it vanish. "I learned that word from you, Victor." Victor snatches the magic stick and absconds with it, but Wally is able to get it back and vanish the volcano.
  • Wunschpunsch: Has anyone kept counting how many spells of the week have somehow brought harm to the wizards or at least one of them?
  • Yogi's Gang:
    • Peter D. Cheater is a villain who spends the entire episode tricking others into fake setups to cheat them. He even takes the group's ark, until he trades it back to them over a fake treasure map that Yogi even tries to warn him is fake. All his plans would have worked if he hadn't cheated himself right out of them.
    • The Sheik of Selfishness wants to spread selfishness through the world. He ends up locked out of his own home because he never leaves a key under the doormat so nobody will share his stuff and his subordinates won't help him to reach a window because he taught them to never share.
  • Young Justice (2010):
    • Red Arrow/Speedy's anger at not being inducted into the League is what motivated Aqualad, Robin, and Kid Flash to strike out and investigate Cadmus on their own. Their success there led to Superboy being freed and the formation of the Team. The Team then went on to be a major thorn in the side of the Light, culminating in them saving the entire Justice League from being mind controlled by the Light. The hoisting in question? Speedy's angry outburst was caused by a deep desire to join the League, which had been preprogrammed into him by Cadmus when they were flash-cloning him on behalf of the Light, which wanted to use Speedy as a sleeper agent within the League. The very thing that let the Light take control of the League produced the only thing capable of stopping them.
    • In season 4, this is the ultimate fate of Lor-Zod. In his bid to assassinate Superboy on Mars, he had infused the gene bomb that Ma'alafa'ak had set to wipe out the Red and Green Martians with Kryptonite, and orchestrated events such that Conner would sacrifice himself to take the explosion in their place. Months later, after losing the fight to claim Earth as New Krypton with his newly-released parents, his Time Sphere re-emerged, seemingly offering him an our to start over, which he took. He found that its temporal coordinates had been preset, to right before the gene bomb had detonated on Mars. Taking this as a new opportunity to ensure Superboy's death, he exited the Time Sphere, which then vanished. The Kryptonite-laden bomb exploded, reducing Lor-Zod to an ashen silhouette on the cavern wall. It turned out that Metron, whom Lor-Zod had previously tortured and robbed him of his Phantom Zone projector, had successfully repaired the Time Sphere from the damage it had sustained and configured it to bait Lor-Zod into his own demise. As noted on this trope's main page, the original meaning of the phrase was to be blown up by one's own bomb; well, Greg Weisman always did love to insert Shakespeare references into his works.

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