Kick The Dog / Western Animation

Or, alternatively, torture the dog...

"Let's go shoot some animals! That sounds like fun!"

— Jeff, Family Guy

Kick the Dog in Western Animation.

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A-M

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Usually the crap Shake pulls is funny, but he crosses the line when he takes Meatwad's adorable pet kitten and fries it in a microwave. Fortunately, all the animals he abused come back from the dead and try to ram him into the microwave.
  • He Crosses the Line Twice in "The Marines", where Shake decapitates a kitten with a jigsaw.
• Arcane: After playing a children's game consisting of stacking playing pieces into a tower with Marcus' daughter as a subtle threat that would go over her head but Marcus would get right away, Silco makes sure to knock the tower over before leaving.
• In Around the World with Willy Fog, the villain Transfer is hired by Sullivan to impede Fog's progress and prevent him from completing his trip around the world. At one point, he disguises himself as Detective Dix and slips Rigodón a mickey to prevent him from informing Fog of a change in the departure time of the steamship he's supposed to take. But then when Rigodón and Tico end up aboard the steamship without Fog, he disguises himself as the first mate, accuses them of being stowaways, and spends the passage cruelly working them to the bone. As far as Transfer knows, he's already accomplished his mission of stopping Fog at this point. He's not getting paid to make Rigodón and Tico's lives miserable — he's just a jerk.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Princess Azula's very first scene (with dialogue, as she had no lines in her debut) and her memorable exchange of dialogue with her Captain served to support what the writers had announced about her before, that unlike her brother, Azula is no sympathetic Anti-Villain but a cold-blooded villainess.
  • Firelord Ozai's Agni Kai with Prince Zuko. Any sympathy one might have had for the former is effectively killed after he burns nearly a quarter of his son's face off and essentially calls him a worthless failure who deserves to suffer, all because Zuko spoke out against a general who planned to use We Have Reserves to win a battle. To make it even more of a Kick the Dog moment, Zuko had no idea he was going to face his father until the duel took place and refused to fight back.
  • Zuko outright says that while his father had said that his sister, Azula, was Born Lucky, he would tell Zuko that he "was lucky to be born". This is shown in one of the comics and is actually even worse in context as Ozai tells a pre-teen Zuko this right after telling him that if his mother and the Fire Sages hadn't pleaded for his life, he would have had him thrown out right after birth due to believing he wasn't a bender.
  • Zhao, in his appearance in "The Southern Air Temple", openly insults Zuko, a teenager, calling him a failure and saying that even his own father didn't want him (though he's ultimately proven correct come Book 2), just to show how arrogant and cruel he is.
  • A more classic dog-kicking (more properly, turtle-duck kicking) scene is a flashback to Zuko as a young boy, throwing bread at cute innocent little turtle-ducks floating in the palace pond saying he is mimicking how Azula feeds them. Given that even as late as the Season 3 premiere, the turtle-ducks were shown still fleeing in panic whenever the older Azula walked near the pond, she seems to have done this a lot.
  • Jet was also subject to a visual◊ kicking the dog (feeble old man) moment in his initial appearance.
  • When Mai was introduced, she agreed with Azula to back out of a hostage change for her own baby brother, making herself look like a cruelly Emotionless Girl who doesn't care about anything except obeying Azula because that's what she wants her to think.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • In "Pretty Poison", Pamela Isley let's out an Evil Laugh at the thought of a comatose Harvey Dent being expected not to pull through, her having been the one to place him in said life threatening state via a goodnight kiss.
  • "A Bullet for Bullock" is a Day in the Limelight for Harvey Bullock that consists largely of Bullock kicking every metaphorical dog he sees. Before this episode he seemed like a sour cop who bent the rules a little too much (although he prided himself on never taking a bribe), but he established himself as an absolutely unsympathetic Good is Not Nice dick when Summer Gleeson, the Gotham news reporter and anchor, offered to help him if he waited a few minutes, and he rummaged through her office instead of waiting. Heck, Bullock's treatment of Nivens, his landlord, is what prompts the landlord to try to kill him in return.
  • In Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, the Joker literally kicks an adorable (robotic) dog.
• In the Season 1 finale of Blinky Bill (the "Wedding Picnic" episode), Marcia bites Shifty Dingo. Blinky himself isn't better, telling Shifty that he's going to get blood poisoning, and says his big brother Danny will come after Marcia after she believes that she actually has caused those things to happen to Shifty.
• In Season 3 of The Boondocks, 8-year-old sociopath Lamilton Taeshawn shoots a dog, hammering in how little he cares for anything or anyone.
• The Eco-Villains from Captain Planet and the Planeteers would occasionally remind the audience that they are the bad guys by doing something very cruel just because they can. The most infamous example is the ending of the episode "Whoo Gives a Hoot?", where Looten Plunder rubs it in the Planeteers' faces that they've failed to prevent him from clear-cutting a forest where endangered species lives and smugly dares them to try and stop him from clear-cutting the next forest he intends to target.
• In Clone High, Principal Scudworth frequently kicks the dog. He frequently conducts terrible experiments on (and kills) students. In the final episode, he rigs the prom so he can be prom king (to console himself from having lost the title in his own prom to John Stamos). John Stamos shows up and is awarded the title, but then sympathetically offers the crown to Scudworth. Scudworth then takes the crown, stabs Stamos in the eye with it, and then proceeds to wear it and take the title.
  • His villainy is overshadowed by his rival principal in "A Shot in D'Arc". They discuss how after last year's basketball game, the rival principal won Scudworth's first-born son, Brian. After discussing the terms of this year's wager (all the while the rival principal's eating a meal), Scudworth asks, "By the way, how is Brian?", to which the rival replies (slurping up some food), "Dee-licious."
• Used In-Universe in a Daria episode when Daria assures Quinn she shouldn't be scared of the town's "mass murderers, serial killers, torturers, cannibals... puppy kickers."
• In the Jonah Hex portion of DC Showcase, Red (Jonah's current bounty-waiting-to-be-collected) rides into town drunk and shoots a dog who bothers him. In the literal sense, not the figurative.
• Done many times in Ed, Edd n Eddy. In "Your Ed Here", Kevin blackmails Eddy into doing embarrassing things to keep him from revealing Eddy's Embarrassing Middle Name (Skipper), and despite Eddy doing everything Kevin tells him to do, Kevin still tells everybody Eddy's middle name and then laughs in Eddy's face before riding away on his bike.
• Family Guy:
  • In "Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington" a Corrupt Corporate Executive almost performs it literally. After saying out loud his evil plans to instigate children to smoke, he pets a dog and, seconds later, throws the dog out of the window and shoots it instead of kicking.
  • Stewie, however, does do this to Brian in "Patriot Games" when Brian fails to repay a debt to him. And again, when he's lying on the floor in a vet after being injured by Chris in "Long John Peter" (its a long story).
  • As does Quagmire in "Quagmire's Dad" after finding out that his Transgender mother had sex with Brian, even though Brian didn't even know who it was until moments earlier.
  • In the infamous episode "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven", Brian tells Meg that God isn't real because she looks like Peter and she lives in a family that doesn't care about her or respect her.
  • Carter's "orphan" joke from "No Chris Left Behind".
  • In "Life of Brian" after Brian is run over by a car a squirrel then proceeds to literally kick him right in the face.
• In the Futurama movie The Beast With a Billion Backs, the Robot Devil makes a deal with Bender on the condition that he takes Bender's first-born son. The Robot Devil cackles evilly, pleased with the moral dilemma he is sure he has just but Bender in, but Bender just quickly leaves, finds his son, brings him to Robot Hell, and swiftly kicks him into a magma crater. The Robot Devil is left shocked by how fast Bender was to come to that decision.
  Robot Devil: Wow! That was pretty brutal even by my standards.
  Bender: No backsies!
  • The much more literal Robo-Puppy Mistreatment Alert!
  • The cold open of an episode has the Professor announce that he's taught the toaster to feel love. Said toaster runs up to Bender and starts licking him like a dog, for which it gets backhanded across the room.
  • In another episode Bender's parts are jacked and he goes on a search for them. When he finds his legs, they've just been successfully attached to robot orphan Tinny Tim, enabling him to walk without a crutch for the first time. Taking back the legs? Well, hardly noble, but at least they're his. Stealing the dolly, the kid uses to get around normally? That's evil. Getting bored with it after a short time and tossing it on a trash heap? Well...
• In the Gargoyles four-parter "City of Stone", Gruach is forced into an arranged marriage with Gillecomgain, the murderous Hunter. At one point, Gillecomgain takes a flower and looks at her somewhat wistfully, but then crushes it. Greg Weisman said they were worried we might start to feel sympathy for Gillecomgain being stuck in a loveless marriage, so the flower-crushing was a somewhat manipulative signal that it was okay to hate him. Later, he holds a knife to Gruach — taking his own wife hostage — to threaten Macbeth. All this made it easy to cheer when he fell to his death shortly thereafter (also a case of Karmic Death, as he'd earlier killed Macbeth's father by throwing him off the same castle wall).
• Gorillaz bassist and self-proclaimed mastermind Murdoc kidnapped their singer 2D to record the Plastic Beach album. That was cruel, vaguely disturbing and allover thoroughly unpleasant, but at least purposeful. However, in addition to assaulting and incarcerating him on the desert island, Murdoc also put 2D in a submarine basement complete with a huge porthole overlooking the open sea. Thing is, 2D has a pathological fear of whales, and now a gets wonderful view of them twenty-four seven. There was no real reason for doing this, other than to psychologically torture the poor guy, so the whole ordeal falls straight into Kick the Dog territory.
  • The reason for the whale was so that 2D didn't escape (Murdoc was somehow paying it to watch him, apparently); the real Kick the Dog comes from his fights with Murdoc, and he's even shown looking suitably bruised up here◊. Phase 3 has made many fans want to give him a massive hug.
• In How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the Grinch's dog, Max, suffers many indignities at the Grinch's hand.
• Played straight with Pizzazz of the Misfits kicking a cat in the first version of "Take a Hike, Jack!" in the Jem episode "Old Meets New".
  • Eric Raymond kicks the dog on a regular basis, from actually slapping Jerrica in the face to destroying the only known recordings of Jacqui Benton's (Jerrica and Kimber's mother) singing career.
• Heloise and Lucius on Jimmy Two-Shoes do this pretty much on a full-time basis. Heloise has built prisons that offer the prisoners chances to escape, only to cruelly dash their hopes. Lucius, meanwhile, often forces Samy to do humiliating things for his amusement.
• In the Kaeloo episode "Let's Play Treasure Hunt", the main four go camping and Mr. Cat says he will get wood for the fire. It turns out he's too lazy to go get any, so he just sets Stumpy's favorite comic books on fire. Stumpy starts crying, and Mr. Cat callously tells the "spoilt brat" to shut up.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • Vaatu drives Wan's spirit friends into a murderous rage and makes them attack Wan's human friends. Wan fails to stop them, and when he wakes up and attempts to help any survivors Vaatu pours salt in the wound by appearing and saying, "Oh, don't bother. They've all been killed."
  • Lin Beifong gets a few in the Season 3 episode "The Metal Clan". First, she pops Naga's ball shortly after the Krew decided to head to Zaofu against her wishes. Then she angrily dismisses her niece Opal (who's trying to be friendly in order to mend the rift between Lin and her half-sister Suyin), telling the girl that she wants nothing to do with her. This ends up driving Opal to tears and draws Korra's anger. A later episode contextualizes it by establishing that she does have good reasons to resent her sister.
  • One of the bison poachers tells Jinora that it’s rumored that the Earth Queen ate her dad’s pet bear, Bosco.
• Bugs Bunny and similar Looney Tunes characters usually wait until someone does this to start tormenting them.
  • Animaniacs once broke the Fourth Wall, in an episode featuring a nice but overbearing nanny who smothered the Warner Brothers and their sister Dot. Wakko Warner almost hits her with a "funny" mallet, but then walks away dejected because he can't bring himself to do it. The story cuts to a father watching the episode with his daughter, and the father explains this very trope.
    • Thankfully, Slappy Squirrel has no problem with kicking puppies. Or blowing them up. A rare example of Kick the Dog being applauded.
• A literal example appears in The Mask episode "Sister Mask," when Pretorius had control of the Mask, and made the Mask kick Milo. Stanley wasn't happy about that, and when he got his revenge, he turned the Sister Mask on Pretorius, made him become a soccer ball and then made him kick around his robot body and his own henchmen. He even nearly calls out this trope word-for-word:
  Stanley: And that's for making me kick my dog!
• Mina and The Count, a cult favorite from the What A Cartoon! Show on Cartoon Network, had the count carelessly smacking a screeching cat away within the first minute of his introduction. Fortunately, he gets his comeuppance in the most hilarious way.
• Mr. Pickles: The simplest way that one of Mr. Pickles' victims is established as an Asshole Victim is by being violent or aggressive toward him when they see him. At one point Mr. Pickles seems a little on the fence and is extremely happy when he is struck hard enough to bleed and thus have reason to attack.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Discord had a lot of these before going straight. In fact, everything he put the Mane Six through was simply for his own amusement, as he's a Reality Warper who could win with ease but just thinks making ponies suffer is fun.
  • Prince Blueblood spends the whole gala from meeting Rarity until the Disaster Dominoes turning the traditional courtesies on their heads.
  • In an earlier episode, Fluttershy bumps into Gilda the Griffon while leading a family of ducks across the marketplace. Gilda flips out, mocking Fluttershy's apology and driving her to tears, something that makes Pinkie Pie mad. "This calls for extreme measures... PINKIE PIE STYLE!"
    • Though what's sad is that if the episode "Putting Your Hoof Down" is any indication, Fluttershy gets almost as much crap from her neighbors on a regular basis.
  • In "Ponyville Confidential", Diamond Tiara makes the CMCs write increasingly scurrilous gossip articles, and then when they try to back out, blackmails them. Then, when she finds that they've pulled a long-overdue fast one, she shoves "Dinky Hooves" aside and snatches her paper. Before her Heel–Face Turn, Diamond Tiara also mocked Scootaloo's inability to fly. Unusually, Tiara did this in an effort to undermine Scootaloo's confidence and seemed to have no genuine interest in whether the young pegasus could achieve flight or not.
  • Mane-Iac in Power Ponies, amidst her plan to destroy the entire town she is about to use her dryer cannon to finish off Flutterfly for good, only for a firefly to show up out of nowhere and blind her crosshair. She then swats it away and causes the poof bug to go flying into a wall. Of course Fluttershy sees this and becomes completely furious, lays a "The Reason You Suck" Speech on her, and Hulks out. Cue Oh, Crap! from Mane-Iac followed by a No Holds Barred Beat Down, as Fluttershy proceeds to reduce her cannon to nothing more than a pile of scraps.

N-Z

• The Popeye cartoon "Protek the Weakerist" and its color remake, "Barking Dogs Don't Fite", have the central action of Popeye having to walk Olive's cute little dog, only to run into Bluto and his massive bulldog who promptly chases him all around with every intention of mauling him with Bluto's approval. Bluto is no stranger to this trope, but this short is one of his worst. The plight of that little dog being victimized by that beast is so hard to see (while Popeye's not doing much better against Bluto as always) that it' s satisfying to see Popeye and his dog share a can of spinach to give the two what they asked for.
• Appropriately enough, given the name of the trope, just about every episode of Pound Puppies (1980s) has Katrina Stoneheart at least attempt to do something cruel to Holly and the Pound Puppies, one of her worst atrocities being in the Christmas Episode "Happy Howlidays", where she hid several months' worth of bills from Holly and never revealed them to her until it was too late to pay them on time, knowing full well that Holly would be forced to shut down the Puppy Pound and leave the dogs out on the streets.
• Benson in the Regular Show episode "Replaced". He plans on firing Mordecai and Rigby and replacing them. However, when he did it, he took their pictures just to look at their faces.
  • If that weren't bad enough, the episode prior, "The Best Burger in the World", instead of punishing the two with his usual way (making them clean the mess up and threatening to fire them if they don't), he steals their burgers and eats them. While this doesn't sound bad, keep in mind that these were actually the best burgers in the world, made only once every 100 years.
  • Margaret does this to Mordecai at the end of "Do or Diaper".
• Robot Chicken's parody of Grand Theft Auto advertises one of its features as "kick a puppy."
• In Rugrats, Angelica Pickles plays this trope very well, especially when torturing Tommy and his friends in some episodes.
  • Rugrats in Paris: Coco Labouche plays this trope, too.
• Being Made of Evil, Aku from Samurai Jack habitually kicks dogs whenever he gets a chance. A great example is when he ordered a scientist to build a new group of killbots in exchange for Aku not razing the scientist's hometown, but as soon as they were finished Aku sent the killbots to raze the scientist's hometown as a test run for battling Jack.
• In The Simpsons:
  • "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment", the detective Rex Banner has a kick the dog moment of sorts; he decides that before using a catapult to fire Homer out of town for breaking the law, he's going to test it on a harmless cat. This is probably to set it up so that you don't feel very sorry for him when he gets launched from the catapult a minute later.
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror VI" segment where the giant ads all come to life, Marge convinces Homer to return the giant doughnut to the Lard Lad in order to end the destruction. Lard Lad gets back his doughnut, smiles at it contently, and then kicks Santa's Little Helper into the next state and walks away down the street smashing the roofs of every house with his giant doughnut along the way.
  • Springfield's own resident evil, Monty Burns, has plenty of such moments.
    • "Last Exit to Springfield" is full of them; when we first see him, he is laughing malevolently at a window washer whose platform has collapsed under him, and closes the curtains as we hear the unfortunate man fall to the ground. After literally kicking a dog (who got into his supposedly top secret control room through the broken screen door), he tops himself in the final act by shutting down power to all of Springfield to try to force the striking power plant workers back to work.
    • Burns comes awfully close to literal in "Dog of Death" when he has Bart's innocent, gentle pet dog strapped to a chair, and Forced to Watch several clips of animal abuse to turn him into an Angry Guard Dog. Later in the same episode, when Smithers says to Burns, "A sweet little boy is here to see you," Burns says, "Release the hounds." Said little boy is actually Bart.
    • The episode has an earlier one where Marge goes through pictures Santa's Little Helper, the first features Homer quite literally doing this, then throttling him, then SLH biting Homer back, then burying him, then punching him.
    • Burns also sends a vicious Angry Guard Dog after Bart (who was hungry after running away from home) for trying to steal a pie which was left on the windowsill. Burns would have otherwise disposed of that pie anyway.
    • In "22 Short Films About Springfield", Burns and his most loyal assistant, Smithers, who has a life-threatening allergy to bee venom, are on a bicycle, Smithers gets stung by a bee, and Burns just yells at him to keep paddling and dishes out a barrage of vicious insults. Apparently, dialing 911 was out of the question.
    • "Homer vs. Dignity" is a full episode of Burns doing metaphorical dog-kicking. Desperate for money, Homer asks Burns for a raise, and Burns instead decides that it's only under the condition that Homer be Burns' personal "prank monkey." These pranks involve putting Homer into a series of increasingly humiliating circumstances and culminates in Burns dressing Homer in a panda suit and having another panda rape him. Eventually Homer gets fed up with this and quits, using the money he already had to set up a parade to distribute toys to needy kids; Burns shows up to try to bribe Homer into throwing fish guts instead of presents; Homer is shown contemplating to it, and then it cuts to fish guts being thrown at the kids; but it is revealed that Burns is the one throwing it after all.
    • "Raging Abe Simpson and His Grumbling Grandson in "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish" reveals him and Abe to be the last surviving members of their WWII unit, and that a deal was made such that the last surviving member would get to keep a case of art stolen from civilians; Burns hires an assassin to kill Abe, but said assassin is not successful at it. Bart convinces Abe to go get the case anyway, and when Abe and Bart retrieve it, Burns shows up and takes the art at gunpoint. Bart calls Burns a coward, then Burns points the gun at his face; Abe says Burns can take the art as long as he does not hurt the boy. Burns remarks that he would rather do both, then kicks Bart into the empty case and kicks the case into the water. Note that he could have taken the art without drowning the child, he just tried to drown the child anyway, for no apparent reason other than that said child insulted him.
    • In "Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part One" he developed a project to block sunlight from reaching Springfield, to deprive them of one more alternative source of heat and light. His usually unquestioning assistant Smithers strongly objected to this and was fired as a result. A town hall meeting was held about this, and Burns showed up just when the whole town was being shown what Burns' oil drilling operation did to Bart's pet dog, who was seen using wheels just to walk down the hallway.
      Burns: Oh, those wheels are squeaking a bit. Perhaps I could sell him a little oil.
• South Park:
  • The first act of the episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die" is one sustained Kick the Dog moment for Scott, particularly when he makes Cartman beg for his money back, then burns the money in front of him, while boasting that his parents give him a huge allowance. Of course, he doesn't exactly get off lightly.
  • Cartman himself gets these moments, many times: hitting Token with a rock, trying to kill his mother, and infecting Kyle with HIV.
  • Done somewhat literally in the Season 7 episode Fatt Butt and Pancake Head, in which the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez is presented as a Jerkass, mean spirited Yandere. She carries a dog with her during the first scene in which she appears, and once she gets inside a limousine the dog starts barking, and no longer after this she throws it out of the vehicle. Instead of "Kick the Dog" is "Throw Away the Dog". But Wait, There's More! She also yells at Principal Victoria to shut up after she asks her to take a photo with the students at the school.
  • When Clyde's mother dies, her last words are to blame him for her death and even comes back as a ghost to tell him it's entirely his fault she's dead.
  • In the Great Expectations parody episode, Pip shows Estella a baby bunny and tells her that a heartless person would break its neck. Estella proceeds to break said bunny's neck... and the necks of 26 others. She only stops because she gets bored.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In the episode "The Cent of Money", when Gary swallowed a kitchen magnet and could attract coins, Krabs dragged him around town, continuously injuring Gary with the bombardment of magnetically attracted coins, all the while stealing from people. Finally, when we saw how injured Gary had become, Krabs didn't care and said he looked fine and went to attract a wave of coins before SpongeBob arrived. This is actually considered a candidate for a Moral Event Horizon on Krabs' part.
  • Krabs also kicked the worm when he sold Squidward to repo men in "Le Big Switch".
  • The plot of "One Coarse Meal" involves Krabs putting on a whale costume in order to scare away Plankton. This seems tame at first, until the paranoia eventually causes Plankton to attempt suicide. When SpongeBob tells Krabs about this, Krabs laughs. Keep in mind that Plankton is his former best friend.
  • Squidward loves doing this to SpongeBob in the early seasons. Examples include:
    • "Fools in April," in which he made SpongeBob cry during a cruel, painful prank, though at least the townspeople are not laughing at the poor fellow and in fact call him out.
    • "Home Sweet Pineapple," in which he gleefully dances/cheers when SpongeBob is moving away (something that SpongeBob is distraught about early on).
    • There's also "Christmas Who?" in which Squidward taunts SpongeBob when Santa doesn't show up, laughs at him, and even shakes his butt triumphantly in his direction — while SpongeBob is crying.
    • Lastly, "Naughty Nautical Neighbors," when Squidward intentionally ruins SpongeBob and Patrick's friendship for no good reason aside from them interrupting whatever he’s doing.
  • The customer in "Pizza Delivery" who yelled at SpongeBob so harshly that the poor guy cried. Squidward, of all people, and who is no stranger to this, as shown above, is shown to be absolutely appalled by this, and he rightfully repays the customer for his cruelty by smashing the pizza in his face.
  • Patrick, of all people, had a moment of this in "Yours, Mine, and Mine". Throughout the episode, he refuses to share a Krabby Patty Toy with SpongeBob, and to make sure he can't have it, he purposely eats it right in front of him.
    Patrick: If I can't have it, no one can! (eats Patty Pal, obviously with no second thoughts)
  • In "Grandma's Kisses", Squidward and the Krusty Krab patrons cruelly make fun of SpongeBob for getting a kissy mark from his grandma. It was so bad that SpongeBob ran out of the Krusty Krab crying miserably. Then in the ending as SpongeBob and Grandma share a hug, the others were watching from the window laughing at them.
  • Another particularly cruel example is "Someone's in the Kitchen with Sandy" after Plankton steals Sandy's fur. This leads to her being laughed at by Bikini Bottomites, climaxing in her arrest for public nudity.
  • Another example from the Bikini Bottomites is in "Stuck in the Wringer", in which they remorselessly drive SpongeBob into a depression by telling him he deserves to be glued in his wringer after witnessing him have an argument with Patrick.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Liberty On Ryloth" Tambor has villages of unarmed Twi'leks bombed on Dooku's orders, intended to show the galaxy "the cost of a Republic victory".
• Star Wars Rebels:
  • In the episode "Spark of Rebellion" Aresko harasses a vendor, then arrests him for "treason" when he complains. Luckily, Ezra distracts Aresko and his men with a fake distress signal.
  • In the episode "The Future of the Force" the Inquisitors decide to Leave No Witnesses aboard the transport they kidnapped Alora from, despite later making it clear they have no tactical need or orders to make sure no one witnesses their nabbing of force sensitive infants.
  • In the episode "The Holocrons of Fate" Maul mocks Kanan's blindness, which Maul caused when he tried to cut Kanan's head in half in "Twilight of the Apprentice".
• Steven Universe has a zigzagging example in the episode "Monster Buddies", in which the seemingly tamed Centipeetle goes into a panic upon see Garnet brandishing her gauntlets and begins defensively spraying acid erratically. The Gems, who didn't trust the creature's reformation to begin with, start attacking it to protect Steven, with Garnet at one point literally kicking it across the room. Thankfully, Steven does end up convincing both the Centipeetle and the Gems to stop fighting, and the monster ends up redeeming itself through a (technically temporary) Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Played straight with Peridot, who opens her first appearance by crushing one of her own mini-robots underfoot with an expression of disdain because it was damaged.
• Tangled: The Series: In the subplot of "Queen For a Day", Varian's meddling with the black rocks causes his father to be encased in amber; not knowing how to help, he goes to Rapunzel, but once he gets there, Corona is under a state of emergency and Rapunzel cannot help him just then, because her own parents are in fatal danger due to Zhan Tiri's deadly blizzard, and leaving right now could put them at great risk. This results in Varian undergoing a Start of Darkness and vows payback for anyone who turned their backs on him, especially Rapunzel.
• In Teen Titans:
  • Starfire's sister Blackfire does this constantly in dr appearances:
    • She tries to frame her for a crime and steal her boyfriend.
    • Two seasons later, she tries to force Starfire into marriage so she'll have to leave their home planet, giving Blackfire a clear shot at the throne.
  • Slade injects the Titans with nanobots to blackmail Robin into being his apprentice.
    • Also, he literally kicks Robin while he's lying in pain on the ground in "Haunted".
  • Control Freak steals James Bond's gadgets, then pushes him off the Eiffel Tower.
• Spoofed in the episode "Armless But Not Harmless" of The Tick, when the heroes pretend to be villains, up to a point where they are confronted and asked to literally eat some kittens to prove they are evil. They refuse, blowing their cover. If they were smart about it, of course, they could have refused to eat the kitten simply because that would have been disgusting, or gone with being supervillains of the motif who like cats.
• At one point in the HBO Animated Adaptation of Todd McFarlane's Spawn, we see Jason Wynn, Spawn's former boss when he was human, talking to someone on the phone whilst holding a puppy. Casually, not even stopping his conversation, he walks over to a fish tank and drops the puppy in... said tank is full of piranha, who start ripping the puppy apart. There's no reason why he had to do this. He just does it because he can.
• Tom and Jerry, being arch-enemies, are liable to take literally any possible opportunity to do this to each other simply to be a dick to their rival. For example, in one episode, when Spike is prevented from protecting Jerry due to a leash law, Tom gleefully takes time out from chasing Jerry to torment Spike while staying just out of leash range. By the end of the short, the leash law has been lifted, and Spike wastes no time in getting payback.
• In Total Drama World Tour, most of Alejandro's actions against other competitors are purely to get ahead in the game. Except for how he eliminated DJ, throughout the episode of his elimination he helped DJ get over his curse just to reveal that he faked the curse removal and DJ is still cursed by animals which causes him to lose the challenge. Considering that said competitor was a Death Seeker of sorts and likely would have eliminated himself soon, this seems to serve no purpose.
  • In All-Stars, when Mal wasn't manipulating almost everyone to his will and almost murdering several of them in the process, he was breaking their things while they slept.
  • In Island, Heather reading Gwen's diary in front of everyone was not only a pointless act of cruelty, but one that actively sabotaged herself by making enemies out of her entire team and costing her team the challenge, with the only thing saving her from elimination being her alliance and Izzy and Owen being easily manipulated.
• Porter C. Powell of Transformers: Animated at the start of Season 2. Sari's father is missing in action. What does he do? Steals his company, kicks Sari out of her home with nothing but the clothes on her back and informs the poor girl that there's no papers to prove she even exists. Particularly jarring since Sari was better liked than the human sidekicks of previous Transformers continuities.
• Remington Smisse from Wakfu often betrays his allies (especially Evangelyne), even when doing this inconveniences him.
• In penultimate episode of Wander over Yonder, "The Flower", Dominator notices Wander and Sylvia trying to take care of a flower and decides to crush their hopes by destroying it. At this point she had nearly destroyed the entire galaxy, so the only reason she diverted her plans for something so petty was to personally see the despair on their faces up close.
• In Winx Club, the Trix do this on a daily basis. Some of their moments are: trying to murder Bloom's parents, crippling Galatea by destroying her wings (Icy), turning Mirta into a pumpkin (Icy again), threatening to kill Musa's father (Stormy)...basically, most of their heinous acts either border on or are attempted murder. Counting all their acts of needless cruelty would make one hell of a drinking game.
  • On Chimera's first appearances she tries taking Stella's pizza from her, and again she takes the dress Stella was about to buy. Curiously, at this point the two girls were unaware of each other's identities. Shortly after, they lean that they will become step-sisters through an arranged marriage of their parents.

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