Shockingly Expensive Bill / Western Animation

"Remember the trouble we got into with that Speak to Santa Hotline back in Brooklyn?"

"I don’t understand, Mr. Krabs. How can you spend $100,000 in one night?!"

— SpongeBob SquarePants, "Krusty Love"

Characters receiving Shockingly Expensive Bills in Western Animation Television Series.

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• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "Hypno Birthday to You", Mr. Giggles, the clown hired for Jimmy's many birthday parties, thanks to his Hypno Beam so he could obtain a new chemistry set, charges the Neutrons $1,695.00 for his services. Hugh faints at the sight of it, and Jimmy is punished by having to Work Off the Debt by scrubbing floors at summer school.
  Jimmy: No one with a genius IQ should have to scrub floors to pay off a clown! How long does this go on for?
  Sheen: Forever, trust me.
• One "Sonic Says" subject from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog is about false advertising. Tails watches a commercial for a toy robot priced at $9.98, only to find out it actually costs $99.98 with all the bells and whistles thrown in.
• The Amazing World of Gumball
  • In "The DVD", Gumball and Darwin go out of their way just to get the $25 restocking fee for a DVD they dropped in the garbage disposal. After Nicole pays for it herself, she gets charged $700 for the time Gumball and Darwin had it. They decide to cut and run.
  • In "The Finale", the Wattersons are charged $800,000 in damages done to Elmore.
  • In "The Points", Tobias spends $15,000 in microtransactions on a Freemium game. He initially exaggerates how much he spent and says that it's numbers they haven't been taught in school yet.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force
  • In "Kidney Car", after Shake completely pulverizes Carl's Cool Car in a demolition derby, Meatwad gets a repair estimate for it from a towing company that, due to his bizarre demands such as an exorcism for the apparently haunted air conditioner, totals out to $32,724.51.
  • "Boost Mobile" opens with Frylock opening the mail and finding a $2,600 electric bill caused by Shake charging his giant Boost Mobile phone.
  • In "Grim Reaper Gutters", Shake purchasing Frylock's computer cost over $3,000 bucks on the bill. Shake then hides out in Mexico until Frylock chills out.
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Joker's Millions", Joker is willed $250 million by a rival gangster, seemingly as a hatchet-burying gesture. After Joker's gone a little spending spree, a man from the IRS tells Joker he has to pay inheritance tax and gives him a sum that sends Mistah J flying off of his chair. The real kicker is that most of the money Joker received was fake, but admitting it would be telling the world he got played by a dead man. And the balance due?
  Ernie: 137 million?
  Joker: Yes, and if I don't pay up, I'll go to jail for tax evasion! I'm crazy enough to take on Batman, but the I.R.S.? Nooo thank you!
• Beetlejuice: In "Keeping Up With the Boneses," the Ghost With the Most tries to one-up the Boneses couple by getting a credit card and going on a shopping spree. Once he gets his first bill and finds he doesn't have a cent to his name, the creditors keep Lydia as collateral until he either pays the bill or gives back everything. He gives back everything but is now left to pay the interest on the charges.
• In the second episode of Birdz, Eddie runs up a nine gazillion dollar charge on his father's credit card buying gifts for his friends.
  • In "To Beak or Not to Beak", the bill for Eddie's beak surgery is "$$$ A LOT".
• In the Brickleberry episode "Crippleberry", lawyer Malloy gives Woody the bill for how much to pay to make Brickleberry handicapped accessible just for Steve.
  Woody: Why do I have to call a phone number to find out how much I owe?
  Malloy: Uh, that is not a phone number, that is the amount due.
• The Classic Disney Short "The Trial of Donald Duck" has Donald going into a fancy restaurant to get away from the rain and orders a small cup of coffee. After being served a thimble-sized cup, he gets angry and decides to eat his packed lunch at the table. The maitre'd is outraged, so he decides to charge Donald for his own lunch. Unable to pay the bill with the one nickel he has on his person, he is sentenced to pay it off washing dishes... a decision the maitre'd regrets after he breaks most of the restaurant's flatware in the process.
  • In the Mickey Mouse Works short "Donald's Dinner Date", Donald takes Daisy on a date with the promise of keeping his temper under control. In the end he does manage to do so, even at the hands of Goofy as his waiter, but Daisy winds up losing her self-control over how Goofy handled their service, despite Donald trying to console her. After Goofy hands him the bill however, which simply shows the total at "REALLY Expensive!", he goes completely nuts.
  • In another "Mickey Mouse Works" short, "How To Wash Dishes", Goofy becomes tired of his same old job as a dishwasher, so he decides to go on vacation with the help of a narrator—and a shiny new credit card! The entire short shows him going on vacation including buying plane tickets, clothes, and souvenirs all with his credit card, to which he simply tells the person involved in the co-payment to "Charge it!" As the short ends, he is dining at a fancy restaurant when his credit card is declined due to a racked up bill, leaving him back at square one working off the debt by washing dishes.
• Close Enough: "100% No Stress Day" had Emily freaking out over the ham being stolen because that means no food in the house as well the montage of stressful moments in Emily's life, one of which includes an absurdly long student loan bill and the reason they can afford the condo in Southern California is because they share it with a divorced couple.
• In the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation L.I.Z.Z.I.E.", after an "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight fails, it takes a brainwashed Numbuh 1 to receive an extremely expensive restaurant bill to make Lizzie's Boyfriend Helmet on his head go haywire and explode, returning him to normal.
  Numbuh 1: WHAT?! How can you charge that much for a lousy STEAK?! UGH!!!! It's-it's-it's- IT'S HIGHWAY ROBBERY!!!!!
• In The Crumpets episode "My Family's Full of Losers", Uncle Hurry charges his TV game show viewers fifty quid^note Fifty British pounds. The pound sterling is sometimes mentioned in the English dub besides the euro. per second for any phone call deciding which Crumpet family member should be disqualified.
  • In "Sound the Alarm", when Caprice calls the phone service while trying to cancel the delivery of her typo-ridden text to Marylin, she receives a message relating to payment.
    Please repeat your request clearly. Press one to pay more. Press two to double your monthly tariff.
• Dexter's Laboratory: Appropriately named "Dexter's Debt", Dexter finds himself saddled with a bill from NASA from having them monitor his lab that's worth 200 million dollars. The episode focuses on Dexter's frantic attempts to try and make enough money to pay off the bill before they appropriate his lab as compensation. In the end, Dee Dee wins a sweepstakes with the prize money being exactly what Dexter needs, but in exchange for letting Dexter use it to pay off the bill, Dexter has to turn over part of his lab over to her.
• Donkey Kong Country: In "Double Date Trouble", Cranky needs two new Trigger Barrels for his footbridge traps. With Bluster Barrelworks closed for the weekend, DK resorts to using the assembly line himself, and his monkeying around results in several hundred barrels being made. DK convinces Bluster to send the barrels, claiming Cranky wouldn't pay unless he got same day delivery, and after they all arrive, presents Cranky with the bill;
  Cranky: (Takes one look at the bill and gasps in shock)
  Donkey Kong: Bluster says it's due in 30 days.
• In an episode of Earthworm Jim, when Psycrow tries to force the President to surrender control of the United States to him, Jim thwarts him by showing him a parchment, which frightens Psycrow to the point of bolting right through the wall. When the President asks what it was that scared him, Jim tells him that it was the national debt. One look at said debt then scares the President enough to do the same exact thing.
  • In another episode, when Peter calls a fortune teller, she tells him that his future reveals "a very large phone bill." Jim then draws his blaster and shoots the phone.
• The Fairly OddParents!: when Timmy was momentarily a grown-up. Eating at a restaurant and is surprised at the bill, saying "This is more than I get for my allowance- I mean, more than I make in a month!" Cut to him washing dishes in the back.
• Played with in Family Guy. After getting his hospital bill Peter cracks an angry joke at the receptionist if this was his bill or his phone number. She replies it actually is his phone number.
  Peter: (Beat) Well it's still pretty high.
• The animated adaptation of Father Christmas has a downplayed example of this when Santa, who has been enjoying the hospitality of Nero's Palace, Las Vegas for most of the summer season, gets his hotel bill. He's visibly discomfitted, but has no apparent difficulty paying it despite his seemingly humble lifestyle: One can only surmise that the job pays well, even if this is the first real vacation he's found time for in ages.
• In Frosty the Snowman, Karen finds out that sending Frosty to the North Pole by train isn't cheap with the total bill coming to $3,000.04 including tax.
• One Futurama episode has Bender Work Off the Debt at Elzar's restaurant because the crew didn't expect the bill to be so high. (They didn't expect it because Elzar had blinded Leela earlier and led them to believe the meal would be free.)
  • In the DVD commentary, producer David X. Cohen says this was based off a real-life incident that happened to a writer on The Simpsons; he (the writer) and a group of 10 friends went for a meal prepared by a shared acquaintance who was a chef. The chef told them he would "take care of" the meal, which they all assumed meant the meal was on the house. After a lavish meal which included wine, champagne and cigars, they were shocked to receive a bill for $3,500.
• In Garfield and Friends episode "Green Thumbs Down", Jon buys groceries delivered to his house. When handed the bill, he screams at the total amount due, then shoves the money right into the deliverer's mouth and angrily gives up buying groceries altogether because he thinks paying $1.93 for tomatoes is outrageous. He buys gardening supplies to grow his own vegetables — and ends up spending $200 per lettuce leaf and $300 per radish.
• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy episode "Just the Two of Pus", Sperg goes to the hospital for a horrible case of acne and Dr. Ted is otherwise completely ineffective at doing anything about it, giving him a paper bag to hide his face. After spending the episode trying to get rid of the acne by rubbing his face with Grim's bones after a mystic tells him to, Sperg gets rid of it with Billy's caustic batch of stew, which also causes his mouth and nose to disappear. Sperg goes back to Dr. Ted to fix his mouth, but he just assumes the bag worked and charges him $16,000 for it, which Sperg can't object to.
• Kaeloo: In Episode 64, Stumpy has to pay for a meal that he bought at Mr. Cat's new fast food restaurant. He takes one look at the bill and drops an F bomb.
• On King of the Hill, Hank received a $900 Army haircut bill when Bill cuts his hair at the base after Hank's barber went insane. He wrote a letter to his congressman in response. The Army gave him a $3,900 check and a crystal award as a percentage share of eliminating government waste resulting in Bill losing his job.
• In one episode of Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Pleakley discovers credit cards but doesn't realize that they have to be paid off later. At the end of the episode, Nani presents him with all the bills that have arrived for him.
  Pleakley: Is that a balance due or an intergalactic ZIP code!?
• The Looney Tunes short "Porky Pig's Feat" had Porky Pig and Daffy Duck being stuck with a huge bill after staying in a fancy hotel that even charged them for air and sunshine. (The situation wasn't helped by Daffy gambling away all their money either.) They frantically try to fight off the hotel manager and run out on the bill, but are eventually caught for good and confined to their room until they can pay off the debt. A few weeks later, they get the bright idea to call Bugs Bunny and see if he can give them any advice, only to reveal that Bugs is confined to a nearby room himself!
  • If you do the math for the hotel bill Porky got, you would realize that it should be $20 more than what was listed on the bill.
• This happens to Mighty Mouse in one episode of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, when he gets a doctor's bill.
  Mighty Mouse: EIGHT...HUNDRED...DOLLARS?!!
• In Mr. Bean: The Animated Series episode "The Visitor", Bean has to get rid of Harry and decides to "treat" Harry to a free dinner. Harry having eaten lobster, chicken, fries, chocolate cake, wine and more at a restaurant ends up screaming in shock at the bill's final amount but relaxes because Bean promised to pay… not realizing Bean snuck out. In the end, Harry has to wash dishes, crying while doing so. Roll the credits!
• In My Life as a Teenage Robot episode "Labor Day", Jenny has an accident that wrecks half of Tremorton. Skyway Patrol sends Mrs. Wakeman the bill for the damages, which is totaled to;
  Mrs. Wakeman: Three hundred million dollars?! That's a lot of zeroes!
  Skyway Patrol officer: We'll mail you the rest of the zeroes on the separate cover!
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "The Saddle Row Review", the interviews between the journalist and the cast take place in a café. When Big Eater Pinkie Pie is presented with the bill for the mountain of food she has eaten, she looks shocked at it for a moment, then with a sheepish grin on her face passes it to the journalist.
  • Subverted in the episode "Point of No Return". Twilight worries that the late fee on her overdue library book will be huge, but it turns out the library caps its fees after one month late and it's only 28 bits.
• Rocko's Modern Life
  • In "Rocko's Happy Sack", Rocko gets to the checkout lane right before the 90% off sale at the supermarket ends, but Filburt is going so slow that the sale ends and Rocko's total goes from $1.50 to $150, leading to Rocko yelling at Filburt to change it back.
  • In "Junk Junkies", a pizza place charges Rocko with $500.95 in unpaid bills. He has to sell things from his garage to pay them off so he's not forced to pay by making pizza deliveries.
  • In "Boob Tubed", Rocko is charged for an extravagant television when he wanted to buy something less expensive. According to Heffer, the TV will cost him a dollar a month for the next 632 years, meaning that it's about $7,584.
  • In "Floundering Fathers", Rocko's ancestor tells Ed that when his ancestor John Quincy Bighead bought the land that would become O-Town from Native Americans for $2.98 and a pack of breath mints, he shorted them 29 cents. 200 years later figuring for inflation, Ed now owes their descendants $37,000 and two tons of breath mints (which could actually cost close to or more than the 37k).
• At the end of the Roger Rabbit Short "Tummy Trouble", Roger does a Wild Take and faints at the sight of his hospital bill.
• At the end of "I Dream of Duffy" from Rugrats (2021), Drew tells Stu not to worry, that he'll pay for everything that Angelica ordered using Duffy. He asks Duffy for the total and as Duffy gives the total (which we don't hear), the scene cuts to the exterior and Drew's scream of pain and anguish.
• The Rupert episode "Rupert and the Temple Ruins" begins with Mr. Trunk giving Rupert's father Mr. Bear a bill for his plumbing repairs. We do not see what the price is, but Mr. Bear's alarmed reaction makes it clear that it must be pretty steep.
• This is a common gag on The Simpsons:
  • In "The Dad Who Knew Too Little", PI Dexter Colt charges Homer $1000 for expenses, including a $40 steak. Homer flees, refusing to pay, and Colt swears revenge.
  • One time, they were checking out of a hospital and:
    Homer: Is that the bill or your phone number?
    Nurse: That's the phone number. That's the bill.
    [Homer faints]
  • In "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes on Every Fish", Burns asks Smithers how much it would cost to bring the power plant up to code. Smithers calculates that it would be about 56 million dollars.
  • In "Brother From Another Planet", Marge finds a $378 phone bill for calls made to the Corey hotline by Lisa.
  • In "Bart vs. Australia", Bart makes a collect call worth $900 to Australia.
  • In an Itchy & Scratchy short in "Lisa the Vegetarian", Itchy tricks Scratchy into eating a piece of his own stomach, which he keeps trying to eat as it keeps popping out of the hole he cut it from. Itchy later gives him a bill of $100, which causes Scratchy's head to explode.
  • In "Catch 'Em If You Can", the kids chase their parents presumably around the world, using Rod and Ned's credit cards, respectively. At the end of the episode, they both freak out at their hefty credit card bills.
  • In "Mypods and Boomsticks", Lisa accrues a $1200 bill from Mapple for downloading 1212 songs from iTunes. Lisa tries to appeal the bill by visiting Steve Mobs, but is promptly ousted.
  • In "The Old Man and the Lisa", after Mr. Burns regains his fortune selling his startup company for 120 million dollars, he gives Lisa a check for 10%. Lisa cannot accept the money out of conscience, and she tears up the check causing Homer to suffer four simultaneous heart attacks. As Lisa apologizes, Homer says he understands; it is just that they really could have used that 12 thousand dollars. Lisa then hesitantly begins to tell Homer that 10% of 120 million is 12 million dollars only to cut in midsentence to the outside of Homer's room as the "Code Blue" alarm goes off.
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror XXVI" segment "Wanted: Dead, then Alive", during Bart's Death Montage, he asks Sideshow Bob how much power the Reanimator he has created is using; instead, Bob hands him an electric bill that says that Bart's "current billing period" is "$3,205 due", causing Bart to suffer a Hollywood Heart Attack and die.
  • In "22 Short Films About Springfield", Moe tells Barney that he once had NASA calculate the drunk's bar tab, and the bill is in. He read off 70 billion dollars, but that turned out to be for the Voyager spacecraft. The actual result was only 14 billion dollars. (For comparison, assuming that he drinks five pints of beer a day at 2.50 a pint, he'd hit that sum in a little over 3 million years.)
  • Subverted in "Husbands and Knives", where Homer goes to a plastic surgeon for an experimental procedure and attempts to anesthetize himself by looking at his bill. However, he finds that the price is fairly reasonable, and that's what knocks him out.
  • In "The Winter of His Content", Grampa and his friends move into the Simpson house. After using a defibrillator on Old Jewish Man and Jasper when they have heart attacks, Homer has one himself on seeing his $2,467 electric bill, so Marge revives him.
• A South Park episode has this when Stan was repeatedly yelled at by his dad for spending in-app purchases on a Terrance and Phillip Freemium mobile game and develops an addiction becoming like his grandfather.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Krusty Love", Mr. Krabs is shocked at the cost of the bill ($100) for his fancy dinner with Mrs. Puff. The waiter apologizes and brings him the real bill, which he finds even more shocking ($100,000). SpongeBob himself lampshades it.
  • In "Krusty Towers", Mr. Krabs is initially shocked at his hospital bill ($15,000) but decides to send SpongeBob, Patrick, and Squidward to med school to get in on the racket. Earlier in that episode, Mr. Krabs turned his restaurant into a hotel after learning how much the last hotel he was a guest at charged for a hamburger. His earlier reaction was getting his claw inside his mouth to retrieve the hamburger and give it back to avoid paying for it. Surprisingly, aside from being covered in saliva, it had no sign of being a previously eaten hamburger.
  • In "Whale of a Birthday", Mr. Krabs gives SpongeBob his credit card to buy birthday presents for Pearl. At the end of the episode, he's bought a mountain of presents and hired the boy band Boys Who Cry, then gives Mr. Krabs the bill for all of it. We don't get to see the total amount, but Squidward did mention that the bare minimum cost of hiring Boys Who Cry just to show up is $1,000,000, and Mr. Krabs wasn't too happy with how much SpongeBob had charged him.
  • In "Le Big Switch", the French chef that Mr. Krabs got as part of an exchange program gives him a massive bill for his services after Mr. Krabs has been forced into bankruptcy due to the chef's extravagant demands.
  • In "Tutor Sauce", Mr. Krabs is handed a bill for all of the damages to the Krusty Krab that SpongeBob incurred with his driving, which included rebuilding the entire restaurant after it was destroyed in an oil tanker explosion. When SpongeBob drives into the side of the building, the contractor takes the bill and adds onto the total amount.
  • In "What's Eating Patrick?", Patrick is unsure if he can compete in a Krabby Patty eating competition since it requires him to eat the patties whole if he wants to win, meaning he can't taste them. Mr. Krabs threatens to charge him for all of the patties he ate while training, and the bill has an impossible amount of zeroes.
  • In "Drive Happy", SpongeBob's snobby new self-driving car takes them to a fancy mechanic place and sticks SpongeBob with an enormous bill.
  • In "Plankton's Old Chum", Plankton makes up the holiday Chum Day to get SpongeBob to hide his chum throughout the town, which results in Bikini Bottom being covered in chum the next morning. While everyone is enjoying it and Plankton takes credit for it, the health inspector charges him $1,000,000,000 unless he eats it all. He complies, ending up very obese at the end of the episode.
  • "Bubble Bass's Tab" shows that Bubble Bass has been getting out of paying for his extremely large food bills at the Krusty Krab by putting them on a tab. Krabs finally has enough of it and declares Bubble Bass cannot order anymore food until he pays up his massive tab. Bubble Bass, being a childish, Money Dumb Basement-Dweller, can't pay the tab and flees until Squidward and SpongeBob defeat him in a game of Three Deadly Challenges. Bubble Bass is forced to work off the debt, but he's so terrible at manual labor due to being lazy, overdramatic and obese that he begins causing chaos in the restaurant. It gets so bad that the Krusty Krab patrons actually pitch in to help pay off the bill.
• In the Steven Universe episode "Mr. Greg", Greg decides to spend some of the ten million dollars he got in royalties at the end of "Drop Beat Dad" on a trip to Empire City with Steven and Pearl. After throwing money around at a fancy hotel, the rather lengthy bill Greg gets apparently put enough of a dent in his money to put him off any spending sprees for a while.
• Super Mario World: In "Rock TV", Luigi reminds Mario of "the trouble we got into with that 'Speak to Santa' hotline", where they managed to rack up a phone bill of $1,295.31. The flashback has Luigi handing Mario the bill, cuing a Wild Take from Mario upon seeing it. This episode provides the image for this page.
  Mario: Phone bill, amount due: $1,295.31! Ooooooh! [faints in shock]
• Taken to a ridiculous extreme in the cartoon "Whining Out" from the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Life in the 90's". After tying down the waiter to get some service at a very snooty restaurant, Buster, Babs, Plucky, and Hamton each end up getting a tiny stale piece of cheese in gravy, each item costing tens of thousands of dollars and totally to "Everything you own and your first born". They pay the bill using Montana Max's student I.D.
• In the Wander over Yonder episode "The Matchmaker", when Sylvia is charged a large amount for her and Wander eating at a diner, it's followed by her reaching into her wallet and pulling out a sizable stack of money. The Once an Episode titles become a Running Gag in this episode, and when Sylvia pays there's one that reads "The Overpriced Lunch".

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