No OSHA Compliance / Western Animation

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• Referenced in an episode of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, when a tough monster suggests scaring some humans in what Ickis refers to as a "Fire and Clang Factory".
• Played for Laughs in American Dad!, where in one episode Stan comments that an old walkway might be unsafe before he promptly falls through it, and the dozen or so after that one-by-one. Meanwhile Steve takes the perfectly safe elevator to the bottom, reading a newspaper to Stan as Stan continues to fall through walkway after walkway.
• Archer: The ISIS office building is extremely poorly built and a "lawsuit waiting to happen". When Pam and Cheryl consider setting up a Tontine they point out that the building is full of asbestos and other hazards that are likely to kill off most of the staff and make it that much easier to win.
• Batman: The Animated Series had most of its fights in places like this, and the animated version of Two-Face can trace his origin to such an encounter (also, in the 1989 Batman movie, the origin of The Joker hinges on such a place).
  • Gotham's power plant, for instance, seems to be composed of ledges over a Bottomless Pit with a control center at the top.
  • Even The Creeper got his origin this way. Ironically it was the same place where the Joker had fallen to the vat of chemical waste, yet they never bothered to change the places of the vats or at least make the rails higher.
  • A hospital in "Feat of Clay" has a room full of contagious diseases kept in glass vials and jars on shelves with no restraints that anyone could just trip into and knock over. It isn't even locked. Nothing actually happens (Bats uses it for an interrogation), but it is still unforgivably dangerous. It turns out that Batman just says that to get the crook to talk. The chemicals are actually harmless; the one Bats used specifically turned out to be ordinary sea water.
• In the original series of Ben 10, the episode ''Secret of the Omnitrix' opens in a factory that perfectly fits this trope.
• In Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, Dr. Donovan repeatedly tries to rush experimental technology into stores without extensive product testing. This always comes back to bite him in the ass.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers features a funhouse in the episode "Seer No Evil" where part of it seemingly involves flinging people around onto a hard surface. Ironically, when the episode's villain falls victim to this, it just seems like what would normally happen to a person if they went into the funhouse.
• Clock Cleaners involves Mickey, Donald, and Goofy trying to clean a running piece of heavy machinery on the top of a skyscraper, with no safety harnesses or railings to be seen anywhere. Goofy in particular nearly falls to his doom on several occasions— once by walking along a ladder that's missing a rung!
• Codename: Kids Next Door had a lot of places like this, but perhaps the worst was the condemned amusement park that appeared in "Operation I.N.T.E.R.V.I.E.W.S", the Rainbow Monkeys Let's Learn About the Lavatory Park; a theme park about toilet training. The adult Numbuh Three commented in the interview that she had no idea why anyone thought it would be a good idea in the first place, and that when she eventually became CEO of the Rainbow Monkey company, she ordered it torn down simply to do away with the smell. In any case, the place was a deathtrap, as evidenced from the battle at the conclusion of the episode where Numbuh One finally defeated the Delightful Chidren from Down the Lane, seemingly for good.
• The Freak Lab Accident that gives Danny Phantom his powers is the result of this and a Scare Dare. His parents' portal to the Ghost Zone was shown to be a failed experiment after they finished building it, but only because they'd forgotten to actually press the "on" button — which, inexplicably, they put on the inside of the portal. When Danny's friends dared him to walk inside it, he accidentally activated the portal and got his DNA fused with ectoplasm, turning him half-ghost.
• In Darkwing Duck the Liquidator has almost the same origin as The Joker. He was originally Bud Fludd the owner of a bottled water company. He capitalized on a heat wave by poisoning his competitors' water supplies until he was interrupted by Darkwing. During the scuffle he tripped and fell into one of the already contaminated vats. Darkwing did try to get him out... but the stuff dissolved the broom handle. Bud went nuts after his transformation into a powerful water elemental and blamed Darkwing for "throwing" him into the vat.
• The Fairly OddParents! lampshades this in a short where Timmy wishes for him and his grandfather to live in an old-timey cartoon. His grandfather points out all the improbable dangers as well as the improbable escapes.
• Lampshaded in the Family Guy Star Wars parody Blue Harvest. One scene has a pair of Death Star crewmen complaining about the lack of guardrails and their attempts to get some installed.
  • Interestingly, this played with in terms of Peter's jobs, specifically, the one at the brewery, as, in one episode, Angela reminds him to wear his helmet after she promotes him to operate forklift. Though, with all how incompetent he is, he's arguably an OSHA violation as well.
• A Futurama episode shows the Professor making government-mandated safety upgrades to the spaceship "(the crew) has been suing (him) about". Among them: taping up the crack in the dark matter reactor, and putting the lion in a cage. Leela might also be considered non-OSHA, what with the whole not having any depth perception and all. Plus the current crew is at least the second (the other having been eaten by space wasps), and it's implied there have been more.
  • Fry initially has trouble with the doors and the tube-based public transport system after first entering the year 3000.
• The record factory from the "A Star Is Lost" episode of Inspector Gadget is one of these. The conveyor belt that carries Gadget, Penny, and Rick Rocker is an especially notable example; there's absolutely no reason for the conveyor to begin at any point before the actual record press (To say nothing of the humongous size of the press itself).
• Metalocalypse thrives on this trope. Dethklok's concerts have so little in the way of safety regulation that fans have to sign waivers declaring that they won't blame Dethklok in a case of injury or death, and this is not an idle threat—the first episode has them dropping a massive metal cube which folds out into their concert stage on top of a crowd of people and crushing hundreds of them, before firing gallons of boiling hot coffee into the crowd and giving them flesh-melting burns. Other concerts have included such things as dumbfire missiles, high-powered lasers, predatory animals in easily-broken cages, massive machinery that falls apart if a single bolt comes loose, and materials that catch fire at the first sign of a spark. One episode suggests that this is encouraged by Dethklok, as they both hate their fans and consider the massive casualties caused by this lack of safety to be "more brutal."
  • The chefs that are employed to Dethklok have it even worse. They die so often, the band believes they are cursed. The only one to survive is Jean Pierre and even then, he winds up looking like the Frankenstein Monster after he's chopped to pieces by helicopter blades and put back together wrong by Dethklok.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Cloudsdale is a city in the sky made entirely of clouds that can only be walked on by pegasi (and ponies who've been enchanted with the ability). It has been established that some ponies have an inability to fly at early ages (e.g. Fluttershy and Scootaloo, but the latter at least lives on the ground), meaning any filly who happens to walk off the edge or into a gap (of which there are many) can easily fall to their death. Hell, this damn near happened to Fluttershy, who was saved by a timely pack of butterflies. This also happened to Rarity and three Wonderbolts whom Rainbow Dash saved mere inches from hitting the ground.
    • Which this could be somewhat explained by the fact that most pegasi seem to be overconfident, and lack of flight at a young age seems is either a rare condition or a normal, temporary side effect of puberty, as ponies younger than Scootaloo are shown in the second episode flying, and Pound Cake can fly before speaking.
    • "Tanks for the Memories" shows that the Cloudsdale Weather Factory is a terrible example of industrial safety. Highlights include a room full of lightning stored on high shelves in fragile jars with no safety rails, a fan powerful enough to suck up all loose objects in a room full of loose objects, and critical water pipes that a single pony can easily kick out. Rainbow Dash did enter the factory with the specific intention of industrial sabotage, but the damage got way out of hoof, and could have happened pretty easily by accident.
  • Canterlot is even worse, with the ENTIRE city being constructed on the side of a SHEER CLIFF (which includes, among other things, a giant castle) where a well-placed earthquake or mudslide could wipe it off the map. It's only held off from falling into the valley below by a few support beams and prayers to Celestia. Canterlot also has dragonsneeze trees that dragons are highly allergic to. One must wonder how Spike, who grew up with Twilight in Canterlot, was able to survive without getting a severe reaction.
  • Ponyville itself appears to also be this in "The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well". Balconies that cannot take the strain of three elderly ponies standing on them, a long and VERY steep road that ends in a ramp, a construction site where a single crane error almost got the entire construction crew killed. It appears that Rainbow Dash's heroics might be the only thing keeping the town's populace alive.
    • The Applewood Derby race track from "The Cart Before the Ponies". On top of it being a figure eight course, it also overlaps two intersecting major roads. It was only matter of time before this◊ happened.
    • Sugarcube Corner can be this as well, as demonstrated in "The Show Stoppers". In an attempt to get their cutie marks, the Cutie Mark Crusaders try to make their own taffy by using a large machine, unsupervised. Scootaloo's tail gets stuck in the machine and her friends also get caught trying to pull her out. The machine pulls them around until they come out stuck together.
  • Discussed in "Stranger Than Fan Fiction", when Quibble Pants almost dies from a collapsing Rope Bridge during a Daring Do Adventu-cation and he accuses the people running it of being incompetent hacks who are trying to sell a bootleg version of the real thing with no adherence to safety standards. Unbeknownst to him, he's not actually in a replication of a Daring Do adventure; he's in the real thing.
  • "Applejack's Day Off" has Applejack visit the local spa, where she discovers that the unusually long line for the steam room is due to a leaking steam pipe. The leak had been treated as a minor inconvenience by the spa staff, when leaking steam is in fact a serious safety hazard. Steam can very quickly cause severe burns, as well as create a slip-and-fall hazard when it condenses on to the nearby floor. To top it off, Applejack ends up fixing the leak (by tightening some bolts and then wrapping the pipe in duct tape) while steam is still coming out of it. If not for cartoon physics, the episode would have ended with Applejack in the hospital.
• Although it predates the OSHA, the Popeye cartoon Lost and Foundry fits this trope perfectly.
• Referenced in a Robot Chicken episode, where a Cobra operative remarks that the Cobra workplace is completely OSHA compliant... While a Funny Background Event involving a forklift, some crates, and another Cobra henchman on a motorcycle surprisingly results in an accident being barely avoided. The camera pans over to show a splattered henchman stuck to the ceiling from the last time there actually was one.
  "It's been thirty-three days since our last on site accident. The uh, Weather Dominator exploded. We lost about 133 guys. You can still kinda see what's left of Scott Anderson up there. We should really clean that up, we've been chucking a softball at it, so it's up there pretty good."
• In an episode of Science Court, I.M. Richman sues a person because their pipes are leaky, resulting in a buildup of water on the floor which is a slipping hazard. While the court finds the defendant not-guilty of the accusation (Leaky pipes), the jury strongly advises in their verdict that the defendant should look into better insulation for their pipes due to the sheer amount of condensation leading to water buildup on the floor. They're not wrong actually — if Richman were actually hurt, he could legitimately sue for damages, and even if he wasn't, he could bring them to court if only to get a ruling on how dangerous it is.
• Notably averted in Shaun the Sheep: the sheep all wear yellow safety vests, hard hats, and, when applicable, welding masks when using dangerous equipment. Sheep in proper safety gear are funnier than sheep that are not.
• The Simpsons: The Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is a safety nightmare. There are repeated scenes of Burns doing things to try and circumvent getting shut down, from running for governor to bribing officials.
  • If only it stopped at Mr. Burns. His employees seem to be the most incompetent gaggle of nitwits ever created. They hired Homer Simpson for crying out loud, and have not fired him after numerous accidents that came within a hair's breadth of looking like the sordid offspring of a threeway with Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island and the Love Canal... Then there's Lenny, who refitted the soda machines in Sector 7G to dispense beer if one asked for club soda. The only sane employee they ever had (Frank Grimes) killed himself after Homer showed him up during a kids' nuclear plant design contest. Homer was once able to cause a nuclear meltdown in a test environment containing no nuclear materials. The worst part is, Homer is the one in charge of the safety (which he got after Homer, ironically, led a public safety campaign against the nuclear plant. Prior to that, Homer was just a waste handler).
  • To see how good Homer is at his job, three times he temporarily leaves his spot at the reactor control station. He is replaced by 1) a chicken, 2) a brick hanging from a lever, and 3) a "drinking bird" plastic toy that presses the "y" button on the keyboard for every question asked.
  • Mr. Burns' Yes-Man Waylon Smithers seems somewhat competent (at least compared to most of the plant's employees) but even he isn't perfect. He once admitted that one of his 2,800 duties is lying to Congress.
  • And the icing on the cake? It's been like that for so long, that bringing it up to code would cost MILLIONS.
    • In various episodes, we see clips of plant workers doing everything from playing chess in the reactor core, to holding cockfights in the lunch room, to engaging in "Nap Time" in the middle of the day. One episode started with everyone at the plant (Burns and Smithers included) sleeping on the job. They also scream and panic whenever there's an emergency, remove emergency procedure posters to make get-well-soon cards, have sword fights with nuclear rods, and engage in log-rolling contests using drums of nuclear waste.
    • One time, Mr. Burns actually decided to go through with a safety procedure, specifically a fire drill. However, all the employees utterly panicked, waiting for their coffee to finish, running in place, and beating each other with the fire extinguishers. Homer Simpson of all people was the first and only employee who actually managed to get out of the plant (though the "only" part is because Homer blocked the entrance with a bench upon escaping, and even then it took him at least 15 minutes).
    • And perhaps worst of all, the employees at the nuclear plant are required to visit 3 separate rooms to get coffee, cream and sugar.
  • The nuclear power plant does, however, get regular visits from safety inspectors who do point out the dangers and flaws of the plant. They are diligent enough to demand Burns fix the plant's hazards and don't take cheap bribes from him.
  • Also played for laughs when Skinner and Bart were fighting over a large boiling vat of Peanut Shrimp (Bart is allergic to shrimp, Skinner is allergic to peanuts), and the ramp they're on is easily cut with the wooden sticks they were fighting with.
  • Itchy and Scratchy Land had rides where people would come within inches of being gouged by spikes and have the ride hit a buzz saw. This was before the robots revolted. Particularly bad is the part where a ride has spikes on top extend over the front seats. Apparently tall people sitting in front never occurred to them.
  • Also mentioned but not seen is the Krustyland House of Knives; Krusty swears that the tourists were decapitated before they entered it.
  • Invoked and played for laughs at the start of "Brawl In The Family", when Springfield's Republican Party choose to scrap all environmental laws. We see copious smoke from the smokestacks of buildings labelled as a steel mill, a smoke factory, and a daycare centre.
• Tombstone's origin story in Spider-Man: The Animated Series also involves falling from a narrow catwalk into a vat of green acid, during his attempt to frame Daily Bugle editor in chief Joe "Robbie" Robertson. (Let's face it, a lot of villains tend to get their start in places like this.)
• Both the Krusty Krab and the Chum Bucket in SpongeBob SquarePants fall under this category for different reasons. For the Krusty Krab, it's because of how cheap Mr. Krabs is when it comes to running the place. His employees are never paid (and if they are, very little), he recycles food people throw away to resell it and he does all the repair jobs himself because he’s a total cheapskate. For the Chum Bucket, it's because the food is inedible, the place is in disrepair and no one besides Karen wants to work for Plankton because he’s a jerk and a criminal.
  • In "The Krusty Sponge", Mr. Krabs tried to make the Krusty Krab Spongebob themed and sold Spongey Patties, spoiled Krabby Patties that turned yellow with green spots. This results in him getting arrested for poisoning his customers.
  • Let's not forget "Krabby Land", a shoddy and cheaply made playground Mr. Krabs (and only Mr. Krabs) built in order to entice children and get his claws on their parents' money.
  • There was also the time Mr. Krabs and Plankton tried to steal each other's customers by selling people food covered in grease in the episode "Greasy Buffoons". It kept getting worse and worse until it all culminated in the two of them feeding people pure grease. That's when Spongebob decided to call the health inspector on them.
  • How bad is Plankton's food? In "Plankton's Regular", Nat is revealed to have had his stomach pumped four times after eating it.
  • There's also Patchy the Pirate's VERY unsanitary ways of being a fry cook in an effort to be like his hero Spongebob in the episode "Friend or Foe". He kept hamburger meat in an old boot (he claims it's to give it flavor), he let rats in the kitchen (he claimed he brushed and washed them), he didn't wash his hands (every time), didn't wear a hair net and even he admitted that the food he prepared tasted awful.
  • Fred, the "MY LEG!" guy, works at a sawmill where he pushes logs right into the saw with his legs. SpongeBob points out it would be a lot safer to use a "TABLE LEG" to push the logs in, but, of course, it goes wrong with SpongeBob getting sucked in and the resultant jam blowing up the factory.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • "Kayshon, His Eyes Open": Apparently, sonic showers can be set so high as to cause nosebleeds and physical pain with no more effort than pushing a few buttons.
  • "The Spy Humongous":
    • Mariner and Rutherford hate "Anomaly Consolidation Day", when the ensigns have to collect and clean up the hazardous materials and alien artifacts that officers have collected, due to this trope being in full effect. Most of the officers don't bother to follow proper procedure in the first place, the glass containers that they put the materials in also keep breaking open, and they don't have a way to keep them secure. The result is a day's worth of being stung, poisoned, transformed and mind-controlled by a series of poorly secured, poorly understood and very dangerous items.
    • When Rumdar accidentally blows himself into space, the ship's computer doesn't sound an alarm or tell Ransom when he specifically asks whether the Pakled left the ship.
  • "Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus": Somehow, Stevens is able to lean against the Cerritos' warp core twice in one day, suffering very painful radiation burns.
  • "I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee": At least two officer rooms are positioned directly in line with the warp nacelles' Bussard collectors, blinding the occupant in red light. While the windows have a dim feature, the fact that it's not active as standard is concerning.
• Steven Universe: Played for laughs multiple times. The local amusement park, Funland, is woefully understaffed with very little measures of safety whatsoever. Visitors have climbed the outside of the Ferris wheel and obstructed the path of a roller coaster unhindered. The plot of the episode "Serious Steven" even hinges on an accident caused by Steven being able to climb right out of a ride in motion.
  Steven: Horrible accidents happen here every day!
• Superman: The Animated Series: Played with. A concert held by a shock jock had the police arrive to shut it down, due to safety concerns of having tons of both people and electrical equipment outside during a thunder storm. Things did indeed go wrong.
• Thunderbirds: This trope is the raison d'etre of many, many episodes, almost all of which could have been resolved with a large, clearly labelled emergency stop button. Some examples:
  • "Trapped in the Sky": The new supersonic Fireflash passenger plane can stay in the air for six months if necessary thanks to its onboard nuclear power plant....except it also requires servicing after every few hours, otherwise it will irradiate everyone on board.
  • "Pit of Peril": the US military has apparently been dumping flammable equipment in old open pit mines and never fencing them off, then losing the records, since one of their own vehicles falls in and becomes almost impossible to recover since the fire's still raging a hundred years later.
  • Crablogger: The titular logging and lumber processing machine has no dead man's switch, so when its operators are incapacitated it keeps going without their input. Even worse, the shutdown procedure is so complex its designer needed to be interrogated, and it's so convoluted that it falls off a cliff before the shut down sequence finishes.
  • Brink of Disaster: The businessman who built the Pacific-Atlantic Monorail was greedy and not concerned with safety, and it shows. The trains are automatic, which isn't necessarily a bad thing - except it means there are literally no internal controls whatsoever, not even a radio to a remote control room. As such when the track ahead fails, the power unit practically needed to be dismantled to make it stop.
  • Thompson Tower of Tower of Terror lasts for all of one day before a fire in the basement car park spreads throughout the entire building and brings it down. There are fire doors to contain it, but there are no alarms or announcements so they close before a family that was out of view of the CCTV cameras can evacuate, and subsequently jam shut.
• ThunderCats (1985). The home of the mighty mystical gyroscope — that's keeping New Thundera in one friggin' piece — LIVES this trope. Lots of smooth, shiny construction material, no guard rails, narrow walkways galore, and the gyroscope itself floats above a pedestal surrounded by an insanely deep pit.
• Total Drama:
  • The first season had numerous references to interns being injured or killed in various accidents, presumably due to a lack of safety precautions. Particularly noteworthy is the incident when an intern dies whilst testing part of the final challenge. Chris reacts by saying to himself, "That seems safe enough."
  • In World Tour, the cast travels in a less than airworthy jumbo jet.
  • Camp Wawanakwa suffers from "No EPA Compliance" after Chris rents the island out to a "nice, family oriented" bio-hazardous waste disposal company in the interim between Island and Revenge of the Island, causing the flora and fauna of the island to mutate. Aside from a designated "Fun Zone" on Boney Island, the camp is mostly remediated by the time All Stars take place. However, by the end of said season, the island sinks due to improper fracking by Chef Hatchet to create the final challenge.
  • The titular Pahkitew Island is revealed as such when the contestants discover the island is artificial and its systems go haywire.
• In the Transformers: Animated episode "Autoboot Camp", they have simulated weapons that can be turned deadly with the flip of a switch. While there might be a legitimate reason to have some live ammo in a simulation training, there are none for having the things to be turned lethal at the flip of a switch (either through debris, cyber-fauna, or actual sabotage).
• In Young Justice (2010), Silas Stone's lab has a cable trailing across the floor which is bumped every time someone opens the door. Eventually, Vic Stone accidentally pulls it out of the alien device it's plugged into and causes an explosion.

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