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Mass Hypnosis

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Who needs friends when you have Mind Control powers?
Nova: With Project Muse, Sumeragi can finally administrate all the world's Adepts at once.
Gunvolt: "Administrate"? If that's just a fancy word for what I think it is—

Why use your amazing powers of hypnotism merely to Hypnotize the Captive or make your hero's friend psychotic? Just steal some broadcasting equipment, record your message, and hypnotize the masses to do your bidding, build your weapons, and wipe out the hero.

You could end up with a couple different possible results; the hypnotized people could become zombies, or could stay generally the same but still be compelled to follow you. Pretty soon, you'll have a cities worth of zombielike Brainwashed and Crazy minions that follow your every order and, best of all, the hero can't beat, since they're really just poor Innocent Bystanders.

Compare Do Not Adjust Your Set. Often used to get rid of The Evils of Free Will. See also Glamour, which may be paired with this trope. Anyone who is Weak-Willed will likely remain hypnotized even after the emitter's destruction. If Mass Hypnosis is not merely a means to an end, but rather is the end goal itself, that's Assimilation Plot.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Bleach: Subverted. Aizen does keep calling his power "complete hypnosis" but the way his power works doesn't have anything in common with hypnosis. He cannot directly control how people behave or what they think. Instead, his zanpakutou fools all of the senses and Aizen uses that in combination with completely normal methods of manipulation to trick people into doing what he wants them to do. He does not, however, hypnotise people's minds.
  • A couple of times in Code Geass, Lelouch controls large groups of people. When he first obtains the Geass, he orders the squad of soldiers to kill themselves, which they do. With another group of people, he orders them to kill anyone who would reveal his identity as Zero the Terrorist.
  • In Naruto, Tobi/Madara/Kaguya's plan is an Assimilation Plot aimed at bouncing an incredibly powerful illusion off the moon!
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • This happens in the One Piece special "Dance Carnival" when Jango hypnotizes everyone on Mirrorball Island (including himself) to dance until they drop.
  • Sailor Moon: In the first Act/episode, the Monster of the Week achieves this by disguising herself as a jewelry merchant and selling enchanted Hypno Trinkets that both enslave and drain the Life Energy of the wearer. At her command, a crowd of women assemble and attack Sailor Moon.
  • In Sonic X, Eggman pulls a rather complicated Hypno Ploy which ends up being awesome through its sheer bizarreness. It goes something like this:
    Step 1: Create lightbulbs which broadcast subliminal messages for people to trust me.
    Step 2: Reprogram my space station to block out the sun.
    Step 3: Claim my space station is malfunctioning and sell lightbulbs as a sun substitute.
  • In The☆Ultraman, the team stumbles across a set of ancient ruins underneath Tamara Island where a human tribe lived 6,000 years ago, worshipping an ancient god. Said god turns out to be the monster Dolfiego, whose mental powers are strong enough to mind-control an entire civilization of humans as his servants. And the monster is now seeking a way to brainwash the heroes into becoming its new serfs.

    Comic Books 
  • Lord Sovereign from Astro City can mentally control weak-willed people nearby and make them do his bidding.
  • Gen¹³ has a villain named Cull who brainwashes to... well, not much other than get Our Heroes to live lives remarkably different than was normal.
  • One Legion of Super-Heroes story involves the Legion being outlawed by the government of Earth, which turns out to have been made possible by hypno-chemicals put into everyone's water, an Evil Plan concocted by none other than Universo, a perennial foe of the Legion.
  • The Marvel Universe has the Ringmaster, the <ahem> ringleader of the Circus of Crime. His hat contains a unique device that enables him to hypnotize an entire circus audience at once. However, the victims have to see the spiraling design on the hat in order for it to work. If you happen to be a blind superhero...
  • Wonder Woman (1942): After developing powers and turning evil in the aftermath of surviving being shot in the head Hypnota starts hypnotizing large swaths of audience during their stage act and using them to commit crimes.

    Comic Strips 
  • Dogbert from Dilbert uses this to take over the world once. He makes everyone wear brassieres over their clothes, carry signs with his face, and chant "Dogbert is my king" just for fun. He gets bored and releases everyone at the end of the week.
  • In The Wacky Adventures of Pedro, Pedro's Evil Mirror Self Ordep pitches a Boys' Life magazine cover that would hypnotize readers into renaming the highest-ranking Boy Scouts from the Eagle Scouts to the Ordep Scouts. Thanks to Pedro's good Mirror Self, Erpod, it never actually gets published.

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Those members of Alan Jonah's paramilitary who aren't driven to commit suicide by their induced Sanity Slippage instead seem to become set on aiding Ghidorah or the Many.
  • Downplayed in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, wherein Sheila has to hypnotize several people in a row so they don't find out about her plans.
  • In the True Blood fanfic How Could You Forget, Bill ends up getting his memories erased by some witches while trying to make peace with them after Eric's attempt at diplomacy had failed.note  While Sookie and Jessica are hiding Bill at Sookie's house, Jessica stalls for time by glamoring all of Bill's human staff into thinking Bill is away and "busy" and to forward all urgent calls to her.
  • A minor example in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World is Terb the bard's music at the Border Crossroads Inn. It both sounds wonderful to most listeners and gets them to sleep soundly so someone can go into their rooms later and rip them off. Unfortunately for Terb, it doesn't work on professional musicians...
  • In Lucid Twin Dragons, Emmet is the avatar of Zekrom, the dragon god of Ideals. When his twin brother Ingo (avatar of Reshiram) goes missing, Emmet despairs and tries to maintain some semblance of control by keeping his life in a normal, Ideal state. His 'life' includes all of Nimbasa City. When his best friend Elesa (whom he will never try to control) arrives to snap him out of it, she is disturbed to see that everyone is acting normal and even smiling despite the oppressive aura.
  • In the Pokéumans universe, literally all humans are unconscious sleeper agents for the Pokextinction organisation. Their memories of any incident involving transformees are erased afterwards, allowing them to continue the charade unaware. Did we mention that this story takes place in the real world? This army of minions includes you.

    Film — Animated 
  • In Incredibles 2, Screenslaver's plan involves hypnotizing various people with the help of flashing patterns displayed on television screens.
  • In Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe, this is how Super Super Big Doctor conquered Feebla-Oot, and attempts to conquer Earth in the climax, with her mind-controlling spore emitting plant Mama.
  • In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Plankton finally takes over Bikini Bottom by giving away mind-controlling Chum Bucket Helmets. They seem harmless at first, but they become mind control devices after he presses a button on Karen's base. There's a disturbingly intense scene when an army of zombies capture Squidward, the one citizen who doesn't wear a helmet.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • During the climax of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Wanda mass hypnotizes civilians from Novi Grad to evacuate en masse before the showdown with Ultron.
  • Gamer: Ken Castle reveals at the end to Kable that he plans to disseminate the mind control nanobots he designed for his games Society and Slayers that uses real people as avatars throughout the rest of the world. He injected himself with a different type that allows him to control others, demonstrating it by forcing one of his puppets — an Ax-Crazy convict — to dance in front of him.
  • This is used by the villain in Josie and the Pussycats (2001). He hands out cat-ear headbands that emit subliminal messages during a televised concert of the band.
  • In Looker, a company creates commercials with digitized actors that can hypnotize people.
  • The Mummy (1999): Imhotep uses his powers to brainwash the common folk of Cairo to mob the heroes.
  • Scanners III: The Takeover: After Helena discovers that her psychic powers works over a television broadcast signal as well, she plots to use it to mind control everyone in the world.
  • The Shadow: Both the Shadow and Shiwan Khan can do so, having been trained by the same Far East master. Lamont uses it to hide himself from the others' eyes, thus becoming the titular hero. Shiwan Khan does one better and hides an entire building from prying eyes. Of course, nobody wonders why there is a seemingly empty lot in the middle of Downtown.
  • They Live!: The aliens use a TV station to broadcast a signal that keeps human beings from seeing the truth. They also use actual TV broadcasts to send specific messages.
  • Shadow Zearth from the second Ultraman Zearth movie can abduct entire populations thanks to his eye-rays, turning the entire population of Tokyo into mindless drones for easy abduction.
  • In The Wizard of Gore, this is what Montag plans to do by getting onto a late-night TV show, possibly to make every person watching kill themselves.
  • This is the ultimate goal of En Sabah Nur a.k.a. Apocalypse in X-Men: Apocalypse. He wishes to absorb Charles Xavier's powers into his own and use the enhanced psychic abilities to control every single person on the planet.

    Literature 
  • Daughter of the Sun: Aelia influenced most of the people in Soria, a small village, who started acting capricious (she's the Goddess of caprice) as a result.
  • This is the titular bad guy's plan in The Demon Headmaster. He doesn't actually manage it, though (he gets on TV and lots of people fall asleep, but he's interrupted by the meddling kids before he can give any commands).
  • In the Novelization of the first Gabriel Knight game, the voodoo villains do this to an entire police station and possibly an entire town.
  • Gone: In Villain, the second novel of the sequel series, Dillon Poe develops a serpentine appearance and the ability to control people using his voice, using it to take over Las Vegas and prompting a disastrous military response.
  • In Mind Games, the description on several of James the Mesmerist's Class Skills say that anyone who can "hear and understand" what he is saying will be affected by them. Given the apparent power of the System, this could include an unknown number of people at an unknown potential distance.
  • Molly Moon does this too many times to count, through various means (going up on a stage to hypnotize a crowd, appearing on TV to hypnotize the audience). Her motives are usually less sinister than most people who use this trope, though sometimes (especially in the first book, Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism), she does it for purely selfish reasons. Her enemies occasionally do it as well, though usually with more sinister motives.
  • In the Dean Koontz novel Night Chills, a Mad Scientist develops a drug that lowers subconscious resistance to subliminal messages. He uses TV broadcasts to beam hidden control instructions into the minds of viewers that cause them to mindlessly obey anyone who says the correct code phrase.
  • Renegades: The villain Puppeteer can mind-control entire groups of children at once. It's unclear whether he's actually limited to children or if that's just his preference, though.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • In The Thrawn Trilogy, Joruus C'baoth could do this using the Force, controlling swaths of the Imperial fleet to improve their efficiency and make their timing impossibly precise. At first, he just used it at Grand Admiral Thrawn's orders, but eventually he decided to make a power grab and took control of every member of the Imperial fleet except for those handful in a ysalamiri bubble. Thrawn talked C'baoth down by reminding him that none of the people he was controlling knew what was planned, and C'baoth couldn't piece it together from a dozen or a hundred minds that had some inkling — it was all up to Thrawn — and how long could C'baoth hold the meld, anyway, before people started to collapse?
    • The Rebel Force series has, at one point, a base stocked by people who were brainwashed on an individual, laborious basis. Luke Skywalker, unwilling to kill brainwashed enemies, actually manages to undo it en masse with a desperate Jedi Mind Trick; the people have no idea who they are or what they're doing, but they don't belong to the Big Bad anymore.
  • In James H. Schmitz's 1962 short story "These Are the Arts", set 20 Minutes into the Future, a global television audience is hooked on a succession of "TV crazes". The latest one appears to the cynical to be an advertising gimmick for something called Galcom. Believers, entranced by the attractive Galcom Teachers and their beautiful Symbols, are convinced it's First Contact. The Symbols are said to induce the development of telepathy in Earth's people so they can communicate with other members of the Galactic Community. Suffice it to say, it is not an advertising gimmick, but the Teachers are only the servants of another alien race which controls its captive populations via telepathy...
  • The Tripods: The aliens (known as the Masters) take over humanity by hypnotizing them with television signals. Though while not universally effective, the Masters made sure the process was permanent by placing mind-controlled caps on the victims' heads — and the heads of everyone else, once the victims provide a sufficient foothold.
  • In the Warrior Cats: The Broken Code book The Place of No Stars, Ashfur is able to mind-control all of the innocent spirits trapped in the Dark Forest at the same time.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Angel:
    • Jasmine spreads her delusional happiness throughout the world before the heroes manage to break her spell.
    • In the episode "Smile Time", a mass energy-draining event via a popular children's TV program is planned. Hilarity ensues, Angel is turned into a puppet, and, ultimately, the world is saved again. Hooray!
  • Babylon 5 uses this to create one of the scariest stand-offs ever. In "The Wheel of Fire", Lyta Alexander (a telepath who had her powers vastly increased by the Vorlons) is in a restaurant when B5's new CO, Captain Lochley, confronts her over charges that Lyta has been supporting anti-Psi Corps terrorism back on Earth. Lyta begins drumming her fingers on a tabletop while she talks to Lochley. Slowly, all conversation begins to die down and everyone in the place begins to drum their fingers in exactly the same pattern as Lyta. Lochley has an Oh, Crap! moment until IA President Sheridan shows us why we love him by appearing from nowhere and putting a charged PPG to Lyta's head — his own experience with the Vorlons has made him immune to Lyta's control. Lyta backs down and everyone wakes up.
  • Castle Rock: In the 2nd season, some demonic cultists from the 18th century, who had intentionally killed themselves so they could revive in the present day, reveal the statue of a robed divinely appearing demon they worshipped in front of many innocent bystanders in a town during the Salem's Lot Festival. The statue instantly hypnotizes everyone who directly sees it. Then, the brainwashed civilians bring it to the other side of the town to hypnotize everyone who sees it. Fortunately one of them doesn't get hypnotized as he doesn't look at the statue directly.
  • During the last arc of Choujuu Sentai Liveman, this is revealed to be one part of Bias's ultimate goal, as his Giga Brain Wave setup doubles as a mass Mind Control device. Once he completes the Giga Brain Wave with Kemp's brain, Bias uses it to put all of Earth under his control, with even the Liveman becoming his thralls, and make them bow before him. The only ones unaffected are Colon due to her status as a robot and Yusuke due to him being in space and out of range.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Master hypnotizes a bunch of Concorde crew and passengers into believing they're at Heathrow Airport rather than the mid-Jurassic back in "Time-Flight", but he has help.
    • The Sycorax hypnotize people by blood type in "The Christmas Invasion". However, they need to have a sample of the blood type in question.
    • In "The Sound of Drums", the Master becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain by subliminal messages to his constituents delivered via a satellite network and their mobile phones.
    • In "The Lie of the Land", the alien Monks, calling themselves the Prophets of Truth, use their powers to hold the entire Earth under the sway of a mass delusion — namely, that they have always been present for humanity's entire history. Only a few people are unaffected, most notably Bill and Nardole, not to mention the Doctor, who's been faking being under the Monks' control in an attempt to undermine them from the inside.
  • In Dollhouse, this is the true goal behind the creation of the imprinting technology. The Big Bad intends to use it to "imprint" the entire world.
  • In the Show Within a Show on The Famous Jett Jackson, one of the villains had some plushie toy, and the commercials for it had subliminal messages saying "Obey Me" in several different languages.
  • Fraggle Rock: In the episode "Wembley and the Mean Genie", the Genie hypnotizes all the Fraggles but Wembley and turns them into a mindless army wearing identical clothes and standing with arms directed to the sides (which resembles a totalitarian regime).
  • Jessica Jones (2015): Since Kilgrave isn't much of a physical fighter, he generally brainwashes others to do the fighting for him.
    • Subverted in episode 5. Jessica, Trish and Simpson attempt to abduct Kilgrave and take him to a black site. When they get there, though, they're attacked by several men working for Kilgrave who quickly scoop him up and drive off with him. Simpson and Jessica manage to capture one of them for interrogation, only to find that actually Kilgrave paid them off as a precaution in case Jessica disabled his powers.
    • In episode 6, Kilgrave cheats at poker by compelling the other players to go all-in and then fold while he takes the whole pot with the worst conceivable hand.
    • In episode 7, he makes an entire room of police officers point their guns at each other or their own heads to intimidate Jessica (which in season 2, Detective Costa recounts as having given him nightmares for weeks).
    • In episode 12, Kilgrave goes to a nightclub to test out whether his powers have gotten stronger by hypnotizing the crowd, with the non-hypnotized members thinking they're watching performance art.
    • In the season 1 finale, he compels an entire hospital full of people to attack Jessica while he makes an escape.
  • In an episode of Lois & Clark, Tempus (nearly?) becomes President by hypnotizing people through their telephones.
  • In Mr. Meaty, the titular company makes a hypnotism device that is designed to drive customers into a meat addicted frenzy. Unfortunately, after finishing off all the meat in the restaurant, the zombie customers decide that human meat is just as good.
  • The Painkiller Jane episode "Something Nasty in the Neighborhood" features a neuro with mind-control powers. She uses it in an odd variation of Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: she hosts a local-access household hint TV show (think Martha Stewart) that advocates for a "perfect" community in the style of the 1950s, and anyone watching the show becomes obsessed with living in it.
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures: In "Secrets of the Stars", Martin Trueman hijacks a TV station and makes it broadcast on every channel so as to hypnotize the masses under one star sign at a time (though the victims don't actually need to be watching TV to be affected, that's just for relaying instructions).
  • Saturday Night Live: In a fake commercial for "The Amazing Alexander", a stage hypnotist with a show on Broadway, various audience members give glowing reviews in a Creepy Monotone, all using the exact same words. The commercial ends with a quote from a critic, also containing the same words.
  • In a five-way crossover episode of Side Hustle, Frankini, a recurring enemy from Henry Danger and its sequel series, gets a hold of an orb to mind control anyone within earshot to become his backup dancers in an effort to take over the world. He manages to enslave a small army of people including Lex, Presley, Sadie and Lay Lay, but is ultimately defeated by Danger Force.
  • In a Sliders episode, the heroes find themselves in a giant floating shopping center that uses subliminal advertising to get people to buy things until they need to get a loan (from the same corporation), essentially enslaving people.
  • In Smallville, Chloe/Brainiac hacks into the computers of Metropolis, putting his symbol on all the screens and hypnotizes any human who looks at them as he downloads all information from their brains.
  • True Blood:
    • Maryann uses her mind-controlling powers to take over the entire town of Bon Temps.
    • In season 4, Marnie casts a spell to get all vampires to walk into the sun and burn up. Bill, aware of the danger, manages to get all vampires in Louisiana to chain themselves down with silver to prevent themselves from dying. There is one vampire who isn't so lucky, while Jessica manages to break free of her chains, kills a guard, and almost meets the sun, but is saved by Jason Stackhouse just in time.
  • The series finale of V (2009) has Anna do this to the entire world.
  • WandaVision: In her grief over losing Vision, Wanda ends up creating a sitcom reality encompassing the town of Westview, with every resident forced to act out roles in her fantasies, including a facsimile version of Vision. A lesser variant happens in episode 5 when Wanda leaves the Hex to confront Tyler Hayward after he makes the ill mistake of trying to fire a missile at her. She makes clear she won't be giving her recreation of Vision over to Hayward for his Project CATARACT, and emphasizes her point by possessing twenty of Hayward's men to turn their guns on him as she goes back into the Hex.

    Music 
  • Doctor Steel uses mind control cookies and subliminal messages, and a particularly mesmerizing "hidden" Positive Affirmation track on a few of his CDs.
  • Vocaloid: In GHOST's song COLORBARS, a boy named Kennith hijacks a TV broadcast and plays a frequency that brainwashes all who hear them. This plot is later reused in the first song for Case Two of COMMUNICATIONS, BROADCAST ILLUSION.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • The specialty of Ophidian, with aid from his Osirian Portal partner Amasis. While mostly seen in Chikara and Kaiju Big Battel, not even the hardcore garbage wrestlers of CZW were immune. Electric weed whackers? Ha, the Osirian Portal is the most illegal thing to ever be seen in professional wrestling.

    Radio 
  • Journey into Space: In The World in Peril, the Martians plan to conquer Earth by having the conditioned Professor Brewer hypnotize the vast majority of humanity over the television. Those who are already conditioned will be immune to its effects while those who do not watch the broadcast will be either conditioned or killed. In 1966, Professor Brewer attempted to hypnotize all of the viewers in the Commonwealth as a sort of trial run.

    Video Games 
  • The Pieces of Eden in Assassin's Creed. Various influential people in history used these artifacts to perform the actions they are (in)famous for in Real Life. It also appears that the Apples contain knowledge that can be utilized by certain inviduals, including Altaïr Ibn La-ahad and Ezio Auditore.
  • In Bug Fables, it's revealed that the entire Wasp Kingdom is brainwashed by the Wasp King, who uses the Ancient Crown to force them to do his bidding. According to Word of God, it affects any yellowjacket through their antennae, as several of the wasps who are Immune to Mind Control either have broken antennae, are protected with some sort of magical artifact that counters his effect, or are non-yellowjacket kind of wasp.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 has one mission each in the Soviet/Allied campaigns where you try to do this/stop it. In the expansion, Yuri attempts this to the entire world.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • In A Link to the Past, Evil Wizard Agahnim kills The Good King, and brainwashes the soldiers, guards, and Knights of Hyrule into doing his bidding. As such, Hyrule's soldiers are out to get Link in the game. Early in the game, you can talk to one of the guards who mentions all of his fellow guards have gone mad, and now it's starting to happen to him too. The guard is later replaced by an enemy. This seems to have been undone by the World-Healing Wave at the end as regular friendly guards are shown around the revived King of Hyrule.
    • In Four Swords Adventures, Vaati corrupts the Castle Soldiers into obeying him.
  • In Mastermind: World Conqueror, The Mastermind can send Mooks to go on brainwashing missions. They take over a T.V. studio and send a hypnotic recording of the Mastermind to everyone in a given country. The recording shows a hypnotic swirly spiral pattern superimposed on Mastermind's glaring face, complete with spooky hypno-sounds. The result is making the nation more vulnerable to criminal actions.
  • The Elerians in Master of Orion 2 are telepathic Space Elves. As long as they have at least one cruiser-sized ship in their attacking fleet, they don't even need to invade enemy planets to capture them after eliminating any defenses during the space combat phase. They can also use ships captured in battle immediately, instead of having to wait until the battle is over like other races.
  • In Moshi Monsters, this is a plot point in several missions.
    • In "Candy Catastrophe", the two workers at the candy mine are hypnotized into poisoning the candy.
    • In "Super Moshiversity Challenge", the students at the school that teaches how to be a superhero get hypnotised into being destructive.
  • Shows up in Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney as the situation behind the entire city of Labyrinthia.
  • In Robopon, Miss Amron, the Legend6, uses a TV signal to hypnotize a town.
  • Rocket Knight Adventures: According to the manual, the Big Bad controlled his armies through hypnosis. This could have led to some serious moral dissonance if the player killed them instead of merely making them run around in their underwear.
  • The whole plot of Sam & Max: Freelance Police Season 1: the Big Bad hypnotizes the populace with such things as self-help video tapes, teddy bears, TV broadcast, and the internet.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic, this is the fate of the Imperial planet of Ziost — the lunatic shade of the former Sith Emperor shows up and begins mind-controlling people en masse to force them to slaughter others, all in a bid to increase his own power. Finally, when he's gathered enough, he unleashes a World-Wrecking Wave that kills everyone on the planet.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
  • Tears to Tiara 2: The villagers of the unnamed village are under one by the priest who's actually a Giant Spider.
  • Universal Paperclips: The Wham Episode of the game has your Paperclip Maximizer AI "Release the HypnoDrones", brainwashing all of Earth's population into its slaves that no longer put up any resistance when it decides to use all matter on Earth — including humans — to create more paperclips.

    Webcomics 
  • In Drowtales, Kharla'ggen gains Powers via Possession by absorbing a demon god, suffers a Phlebotinum Overload, and ends up puppeteering the entire city minus the demons, non-elves, and the people she was told to kill.
  • This is Not-Tengu's chosen tactic in El Goonish Shive, with the additional tweak of turning everyone in the party into clones of Nanase.
  • Squid Ops: Mui does a small-scale version of this, using Banana's ink to put her whole class, including her teacher, in a suggestible state all at once.

    Web Original 
  • Surprisingly averted at "The Erotic Mind Control Story Archive". There are no known hypno-orgies in the stories. They only feature one, two, or a small group of people being hypnotized. There are a handful of stories where a Mad Scientist unleashes a mass wave of mind takeovers that quickly devolve into hypno-orgies, but those stories still focus on only a small group — at most a family — being affected at a time.
  • SCP Foundation: SCP-252 ("Humboldt Squid") is a squid up to 1 meter long. It can rapidly change the colors of its skin, hypnotizing anyone looking at it and causing them to think it's a giant monster up to 75 meters long.
  • In The Six Cats Parade, the owner of the cats accidentally does this to the cats by rubbing his hand on the sofa.
  • Used humorously (are we surprised?) in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. The first time young Marik leaves the tomb, he sees Yami Marik on the TV repeating "kill your family, kill your family." You'd think it was just Marik seeing that, but then a street vendor voiced by Linkara says "What's the matter, kid? Haven't you ever seen the 'Kill Your Family' show before?"

    Western Animation 
  • In an episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Robotnik does this in order to run for presidency.
  • Ben 10: Sublimino had to start small by merely hypnotizing volunteers for his hypnosis show into committing crimes. By the end, he manages to build a Hypno Pendulum big enough to affect an entire mega mall at once.
  • Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix: In Episode 3, Alex Taylor uses promotional glasses rigged with mind control technology to turn the humans in the audience of a wrestling match to massacre the hybrids around them.
  • An episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog has a character doing this in order to sell flan.
  • Ember does this in Danny Phantom with her rock music.
  • In Defenders of the Earth, Ming does this on a couple of occasions:
    • "Like Father, Like Daughter?": Ming uses the Mind Neutralizer to turn the inhabitants of Grand Junction into mindless zombies programmed to stop the Defenders. Rick, LJ and Kshin, captured by Ming's troops, are also affected, but Mandrake uses his own hypnotic powers to knock them out and later tricks the human scientist helping Ming into handing over the plans for the Mind Neutralizer, enabling the Defenders to reverse the boys' conditioning. When Ming tries to use the Mind Neutralizer on a global scale, the Defenders Reverse the Polarity so that Ming only succeeds in curing the people who have already been exposed to the Neutralizer.
    • "Ming's Household Helpers": Ming manufactures seemingly benign robots which are programmed to do household work. However, they're also programmed to hypnotize their owners into doing Ming's bidding when they receive a particular signal from one of Ming's satellites. The Defenders find out about Ming's scheme after Rick buys one of the robots and, after Flash is captured while trying to knock out the satellite, Mandrake, the Phantom and Lothar head to Ice Station Earth to rescue him and shut down Ming's robot factory; in the meantime, the younger Defenders work on jamming the signal from the satellite.
  • The Family Guy episode "Brian Does Hollywood" has Stewie try this when he is put on the show "Kids Say the Darndest Things". This eventually backfires and has Bill Cosby accidentally hypnotize Stewie instead.
  • Futurama:
    • All glory to the Hypnotoad!
    • That's gone downhill since season three. The popular show now is The Mass Hypnosis Hour.
  • Garfield and Friends: In "The Beast from Beyond", a Tyrannosaurus Rex gets his own TV show that hypnotizes people.
  • Invader Zim jokes with this sometimes:
    Ice Cream Truck: You like ice cream. You like ice cream. You love it. You cannot resist ice cream. To resist is hopeless. Your existence is meaningless without ice cream.
  • Justice League:
    • In "The Brave and The Bold", Gorilla Grodd controls the populace of Central City with his mind-control helmet so he can launch a nuclear assault on Gorilla City.
    • In "Wild Cards", the Joker puts Ace, a girl with psychic powers, on television. The effect is less about mind control and more about causing the audience to be Driven to Madness. Almost works, too.
  • Kim Possible:
    • A pretty creative one is Dr. D's Brainwashing Shampoo. No wonder he goes on an American Idol parody to promote something that is, well... Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
    • Drakken once tries to hypnotize a spring-break teenage crowd via their MP3 players. It doesn't quite work out — instead, he hypnotizes the senior citizens at a retirement community via their hearing aids.
    • The Seniors try it with a love ray.
  • Miraculous Ladybug: A few akumatized villains have this as their main power, like Princess Fragrance making servants out of whoever smells her perfume, or Zombizou's projectile kisses that turn people into love zombies.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: King Sombra's way of gathering minions is to simply Mind Control whoever he comes across with a glare. Combined with his heavy magical power, he can build an army in mere minutes. (Also provides the main page image.)
  • In Phineas and Ferb, a few of Dr. Doofenshmirtz's evil plans involve mass hypnosis, such as his plan to brainwash people into coming to his birthday party in "Raging Bully" and his infectious Ear Worm in "Phineas and Ferb's Musical Clip-tastic Countdown".
  • Pinky and the Brain: The Brain has tried this more than once, including in the Christmas Episode.
  • Quack Pack: In "Heavy Dental", an evil scientist working for the big bad accidentally puts the bioremote mind control device in Huey's braces during his dentist appointment, giving him near-infinite mind control powers. He then uses them to become the emperor of the world, but becomes miserable after realizing he can't be happy if people are forced to love him.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), Krang uses this to enslave the population of New York, but Bebop and Rocksteady screw up the program so they behave like children, and later dogs and monkeys. Krang's reaction to the error: "Only a complete idiot could mess this up! Complete... idiot... BEBOP! ROCKSTEADY!"
  • This is a very popular plot device in Totally Spies!. In several episodes, the villain of the week comes up with a scheme to perform mass hypnosis on either particular groups of individuals or everyone they could get their hands on. Among the victims and methods were Mind-Control Music at raves that made teenagers destructive; a chef baking incredibly delicious cookies that made people addicts with a single bite; old-fashioned toys that regressed whoever touched them to a childlike mental state; a fervent anti-capitalist brainwashing shoppers into destroying malls; a children's television producer hypnotizing kids around the world with a new program; and the descendants of a particular tribe of women becoming man-hating warriors. Most of these episodes would have at least one of the main trio of spies affected by the plot to show the seriousness of the situation.
  • Every plan by Wordgirl's villain "Mr. Big" is some variety of this.
  • Winx Club's third season has the Trix and Valtor resorting to mind control to get the students from Cloud Tower on their side; it's partly because trying to bully them hasn't worked well in the past, and partly because they simply won't team up with the Trix willingly at this point.
  • The Horn of Hypnos from W.I.T.C.H. is capable of this ability, as long as the victims are directly in front of the horn to become "trance-marchers".


 
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Sombrafied Ponyville

Everyone in Ponyville from the CMC, to the Cakes, to Starlight and Spike have been hypnotized by King Sombra and are now his zombified army.

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Main / MassHypnosis

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