Nightmare Retardant / Western Animation

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
  • An in-universe example with Willie Nelson, a monster who lives in the Aqua Teens' attic, but isn't very good at being scary even when Master Shake tries to teach him how to. And then they find out what the attic looks like...
  • There's also the episode with a sinister ventriloquist doll who marks his entrance going "Kill...KILL...KILL!" with a dramatic close-up and ominous music. He quickly turns out to be completely harmless, and more annoying than anything else. Then they find out Carl got a similar doll who says "Die!" instead of "Kill!" and the two hook up.
  • And then the episode where Frylock kills Shake, Meatwad, and Carl, who come back as zombies to torment him into a nervous breakdown as his house burns down around him. Then they start getting into a repetitive, overly-long argument and it turns funny again.
• An episode of The Backyardigans was based around this entire trope. The episode was titled "Scared Of You" and featured Tasha as a mad scientist with Austin playing her assistant, she gives Austin some secret notes and tells him it's a secret (a birthday invite because it's Austin's birthday in this episode) and tells him to find three monsters: A mummy king (Tyrone), a rather cute werewolf (Uniqua) and a vampire (Pablo). When he meets the mummy king at first, the mummy king is terrified of him at first but then says..."You're not scary", the same happens when he meets the werewolf and the vampire, he then points out that none of them are scary. Then at the end they reach the spooky castle where his master lives, the monsters all go and hide while he looks around, then everyone yells out "Surprise!", and a big monster dance party starts.
• Batman: The Animated Series
  • Brilliantly subverted in the episode "House and Garden." The episode's monsters are shadowed whenever they're shown to make them creepy; when their appearance is revealed (think a giant cactus man) they're predictably silly looking. Then it's shown how they're created, and they become absolutely terrifying.
  • The production team admitted that they struggled to make the Scarecrow look scary. Many of his intial looks failed largely because of how cartoonishly skinny Crane was, making him look out of place when compared to the other more realistically proportioned characters. They would tinker with his design throughout the show's run until they suceeded in The New Batman Adventures by giving him an undead preacher look and recast the part with Jeffrey Combs.
• In Ben 10: Omniverse, villain Trumbipulor attempts to invoke Nightmare Fuel by designing his Mecha-Mooks to look like the most horrible, menacing and scary creatures he can think of. The problem is, being an elephant, he is scared of mice. Needless to say, the heroes aren't really impressed seeing robot mice attacking them.
• The Doug episode "Doug's Nightmare on Jumbo Street" has our hero suffering from nightmares after watching a horror movie called The Abnormal and not being able to work up the nerve to see The Reveal of the monster's true form at the end. When he finally does, it becomes an in-universe version of this trope when "The Abnormal" turns out to be a guy in a lumpy, loudly-colored costume with an obvious zipper in the back. He then has one last dream where he and his dog Porkchop encounter the Abnormal, spot its zipper, and get some good laughs when they see that the monster was being played by a tower of little dogs inside the suit.
• In Dragon Tales, this happens In-Universe in one episode where Ord is unable to sleep after having recurring nightmares about being chased by a terrifying monster. His friends try to get him to confront his fear by dressing up as the monster, and their costume ends up looking so goofy that Ord bursts out laughing at the sight of it and completely loses his fear of the monster.
• Spoofed on an episode of Garfield and Friends. In the episode "Close Encounters Of The Garfield Kind", Jon, Garfield and Odie are watching a cheesy made-for-TV sci fi movie. One of the scenes shows what's supposed to be a creepy looking alien saying, "Greetings people of Earth. We come in peace. Take us to your leader." However, the fact that he's wearing kitchen mittens, and his space ship is clearly a cardboard prop negates any sense of fear Garfield, Jon and Odie have.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • An In-Universe example, the pilot episode had the Grim Reaper confused and annoyed that the two children weren't afraid of him, which, along with Mandy's rather sarcastic response that he was "a truly terrifying and horrific creature", set the tone for the entire series to come.
  • Another in-universe example: the Boogeyman. He tries. Really.
• Invader Zim spoofed this trope a couple of times. Remember the disgusting, horrifying and unspeakably grotesque ROOM WITH A MOOSE?? Ultra Peepi to a lesser extent. His unbearable cuteness sweeps away all the horror he fairly causes among people at first, which makes it a whole lot easier for him to destroy the city (even the military refuses to attack the cute giant hamster). But the point is that Ultra Peepi wasn't actually intended to be horrifying at all. He was supposed to be a genuine Nightmare Retardant, so that people wouldn't pay much attention to the havoc the hamster's creating, therefore letting themselves be gradually killed off.
• Justice League Unlimited: parodied, how does The Flash (who switched bodies with Lex Luthor) convince the other villains he's evil? He doesn't wash his hands.
• The Kim Possible finale "Graduation" starts with Kim and Ron confronting Drakken, who had just consumed a formula that would turn him into a plant monster...but only caused him to sprout petals around his head.
  Ron: He's a pansy!
  Kim: I'd say marigold.
• The Mighty Heroes episode, "The Monsterizer" has the reassuring version that follows a beginning that is genuinely frightening for kids of a villain forcibly transforming innocent people into mindless creatures in a dark house. That sequence is immediately followed by the series' title sequence which has blazing bright colours set to a rousing march as powerful superheroes are called to action to stop this horror.
• Done on purpose in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "28 Pranks Later", where what would be genuinely scary imagery is completely neutered by the rainbow frosting on the muzzles of the ponies who were zombified by cookies. It's pretty much the only way a show in this genre and time slot could do a Zombie Apocalypse episode, managing to get away with the frosting on their faces dripping like fresh gore, and even including the all-important scene where the survivor approaches a couple of characters hunched over something and discovers they're zombies feasting on a fresh kill (in this case, of course, a box of cookies).
• Any recording of the Oggy and the Cockroaches episode "The Ghost Hunter" that's recorded by phone. Especially the Chinese version.
• Phineas and Ferb has quite a bit of this. While there are some scary moments, they are often offset by funny moments or the Lampshade Hanging of their absurdity.
  • In "The Monster of Phineas-n-Ferbenstein", Dr. Doofenshmirtz's ancestor tries to transform himself into a monster using a potion he made, but he didn't check the settings of the machine that makes it, so he turned into a pink fairy instead.
  • The Halloween episode "That's the Spirit" lampshades and then completely subverts Real After All.
    Phineas: Isn't this the moment in one of these things when someone really turns into a ghost?
    Russell: ...Dude, that's it!
    Phineas: Oh, okay. See ya next year!
  • The obligatory Dwindling Party zombie episode "Night of the Living Pharmacists" has the characters turning into... pharmacists. Well, technically they aren't pharmacists, but...
    Shaun: Don't touch me! I don't want to be a pharmac—! Wait a second... That doesn't even make sense. You get touched by a pharmacist, you become a pharmacist? I mean, you can't just grow a lab coat.
    Ed: I don't know, perhaps the disease infects your clothin' as well.
    Shaun: Infects my c— Are you insinuating that my clothes are alive?
  • For anyone who found the steadily multiplying series of shambling and brain-dead Doofenshmirtz clones horrifying in spite of the silliness, the stinger song "Lots of Me" probably cleared that up real fast.
• Pingu; despite being the highlight for the infamy surrounding Pingu's Dream, the walrus' laughter/chuckle isn't that hard to remind of Dr. Hibbert.
• The Simpsons:
  • A non Treehouse of Horror example is the Screamatorium, a very low budget and pathetic ghost ride that features cheap ghosts stuck to the walls, a coffin containing nothing but a spring, a skeleton that goes hee-haw like a donkey, and an old woman displaying "the ravages of age".
  • There is a Treehouse of Horror episode where Flanders attempts to make a "Hell House", a religious alternative to Halloween haunted houses with the intent to scare people, in this case, children, into being a good Christian. It starts off as Nightmare Retardant, with a crappy sketch where Skinner gets hit by a cardboard bus after looking at a smutty magazine, punished for thinking the human body is beautiful. The children think it's stupid, and thus fails in converting them, so Flanders prays to God to give him the ability to scare the kids into religion. This trope is subverted: God answers, and Flanders turns into a Satan-looking monster and forces them to sit in a hellish realm and watch several scenes featuring the consequences of the seven deadly sins. By the end, the children promise to be good Christians.
  • Inverted and played for laughs with The Grumple, a character from an ice-show that looks like a man in a Dr. Suess-ian suit. Later in the episode, Homer knocks it out in a bar fight, and we see it has green blood.
    Homer: What the hell is this thing?
• South Park
  • One episode has live-action footage of "giant" guinea pigs terrorizing the town and its citizens.
    It's a Guinea Bear!
    No, it's a guinea mouse, stupid!
  • The episode "Cow Days" had another deliberate example of this too, with a haunted house that was decidedly un-scary.
    "So, the Chamber of Farts has another victim, eh? Don't worry; there are no ghouls here. Only... farts!"
  • "Woodland Critter Christmas" has the newly-born Anti-Christ, who looks like a hairless rat with horns and makes high-pitched gibberish sounds. It's killed when Santa Claus whacks it with a hammer.
  Stan: What the hell is that?!
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Scaredy Pants" SpongeBob tries to frighten trick-or-treaters by putting a sheet over his head and pretending to be a ghost, but the kids just laugh at him and call him "The Haunted Mattress." When he has Patrick shave his body to make him appear round, they comment that he must've been demoted to a Haunted Sleeping Bag.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) reimagines Krang as an entire species akin to the Utroms called "The Kraang", who get around using disguises that, even compared to the stylized designs of the show, look very, very fake. They seem like they'd be borderline Paranoia Fuel... But then they start speaking in nothing but redundant, corrupted metaphors or literal-minded phrases, pretty much destroying the fear factor.