Weaksauce Weakness / Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "Ultra Sheen", using his encyclopedic knowledge of Ultra Lord, Sheen remembers that his Arch-Enemy RoboFiend has crippling lactose intolerance (despite being a robot). Spraying him with llama milk causes him to sneeze so hard he explodes.
• One episode of Arthur revealed that Bionic Bunny's weakness is table salt. As soon as it contacts his skin, he loses his powers, retains water, and becomes grouchy.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Element-bending is basically Supernatural Martial Arts combined with Elemental Punch, meaning that you can stop the craziest of superpowered benders by tying up their hands and legs. Though there are those with whom even that won't work (Aang can blow people away with a sneeze, Iroh and Korra can breathe fire, Bumi can earthbend with his face, Yakone and Noatak have demonstrated psychic bloodbending, Combustion Man and P'li can blow things up by thinking at them, and Ming-Hua can waterbend despite having no arms.
  • For Earthbenders specifically, their specialty is manipulating dirt, rock and soil, but metal is a no-go for almost all of them; the one person who knows how to manipulate metal is Toph. However, she has her own weaknesses in her reliance on her tremorsense; being blind, she instead senses people through vibrations in the ground as they walk. If she's standing on something that absorbs vibrations, such as wood, she can't sense them coming.
• In Batman Beyond, the assassin Inque is vulnerable to water, which dilutes her form so she can't stay in one piece and has to pull herself back together over time. Despite this, she's likely the strongest villain in the series (in terms of physical power), who has likely come closer to killing Terry than anyone else (even his Arch-Enemy Blight), and while he has defeated her, he has always needed help from someone else to do so.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: In "The Super-Batman of Planet X!", Batman is stranded on a strange, alien planet and teams up with the local near-identical Batman to foil crime. Then it turns out that thanks to the planet's atmosphere Batman becomes a Flying Brick, much to the local Batman-X's chagrin. That is, until the commonly occurring mineral Quartz renders him worse than powerless and allows Batman-X to save the day.
• Ben 10:
  • In "The Galactic Enforcers", it turns out that the leader of the Galactic Enforcers (an alien superhero team, said leader an obvious parody of Superman) has a devastating weakness to chocolate, which Ben himself points out is a lame superweakness.
  • In "Camp Fear", a fungus monster is killed using ordinary athletes' foot powder.
• Ben 10: Ultimate Alien features in the episode "The Big Story" an otherwise-invulnerable plant monster that dissolves on contact with... peanuts. No explanation is given beyond "it's allergic".
• Birdman from the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons had the powers of flight, energy beams that shot from his hands, enhanced strength, and a personal force field — and drew his powers from the light of the sun. Fair enough, there are plenty of other solar-powered heroes out there (Superman, Cyclops [sometimes], Starfire). Unlike those heroes, however, Birdman apparently had no energy reserve; he became weak as a baby after being removed from sunlight for less than a minute. As it was implied that being out of the sun for an extended period of time ("extended" apparently being something like five minutes) was fatal to Birdman, it's a wonder he didn't spontaneously drop dead at night. No wonder he became a lawyer. After he became a lawyer, he developed a new Weaksauce Weakness; he's completely worthless if he loses the Birdman insignia that he keeps on his forehead.
• In one episode of The Bots Master, the Big Bad uses a special alloy to make his Mecha-Mooks nigh-invulnerable. The good guys think that they're screwed, until the inventor of the alloy tells them that the alloy can be dissolved by...citric acid. In the end they use lemon juice to defeat the new Mecha-Mooks.
• Bureau of Alien Detectors: When making an unstoppable zombie army, it's a good idea to ensure that the one thing that will kill them doesn't exist naturally in the atmosphere. Oxygen.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers:
  • Being a paragon of clean Earth, Captain Planet is weak against your usual forms of pollution (smog, toxic waste, etc.), as well as Hitler-level hatred, apparently. You might consider these not particularly weaksauce, but it suggests Gaia went seriously wrong in the design stage: the things he was created to fight against are the things that do him the most damage. It's like J'onn J'onnz deciding to be a firefighter or Alan Scott deciding to only fight evil loggers.
  • The Planeteer's individual rings also (occasionally) don't work when there is too much pollution, which again brings up several questions regarding Gaia's design philosophy for the weapons of her pollution fighting champions.
  • His Evil Counterpart Captain Pollution has an even lamer weakness: direct sunlight, lack of pollution, and clean water. Yes, any remotely clean source of drinking water sprayed in his face will make him bow down and crawl helplessly. This seriously deters his ability to establish himself as a credible threat.
• Namor the Sub-Mariner of Marvel Comics is similarly affected by pollution (though not by hate, which is good, since he seems to run on it), but that makes sense, as he's a water-breather. Because he's a Half-Human Hybrid, he's also subject to insanity and fits of rage if he stays submerged for more than two weeks. Or emerged for more than two weeks. So he needed to switch environment every week to stay sane. Until authors simply forgot the issue.
• In the CatDog episode "Greasers in the Mist", where CatDog has Lola Caricola infiltrate the Greasers to try and learn about their weaknesses, everyone refers to this trope as "Porkfat", named after the weaksauce weakness of the in-universe movie character, Mean Bob.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The Kids overcome Father's pyrokinesis by drenching him in ice cream. (Oddly enough, he still eats it from time to time, especially when he's depressed.)
• Danny Phantom:
  • Desiree's main weakness is that she has to grant every wish she hears, including wishes like "I wish you were defeated." She even says "I... I must obey!"
  • The Fright Knight is also stupidly vulnerable. If his sword gets sheathed in a pumpkin, he is instantly defeated. His worst nightmare is probably somebody using an ordinary pumpkin as a shield.
• Darkwing Duck:
  • Not exactly canon, but when he retells his origins in "The Secret Origin of Darkwing Duck," he describes meeting another hero whose weakness is Coo-koo Cola. She winds up falling into a vat of the stuff at a factory and, well... adds to the Disney series' death count. Then again that story's complete baloney (to name but one problem, that hero was played by Gosalyn and Launchpad was her sidekick, neither of whom Darkwing met until after they'd been active for a while), so it only counts for invoked in a Show Within a Show.
  • There's also Comet Guy (Super Weight: 4), whose Achilles' Heel is that every time he hears the sound of a bell, he starts dancing mindlessly until he hears a whistle. His intellect might also count, but frankly it probably can't even do 2+2. Darkwing teaches him to work around the bell problem by via becoming a Dance Battler.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • All that fairy magic is neutralized when they are under a butterfly net. There's also all the various "Da Rules" which prevent them from undoing some of the more disastrous wishes, but do nothing to stop them from getting into these situations to begin with. One thinks an "I wish that no wishes that will somehow prevent me from undoing those wishes can be cast" wish might save a lot of trouble.
  • Despite all their bluster of being strong, the Yugopotamians have a huge weakness - they’re terrified of anything considered cute, happy, or saccharine. This comes up in several episodes featuring them, where they panic and stop fighting every time they encounter something that falls into that description. In one episode, for example, they challenge Timmy to eat a bar of chocolate, something they consider the most lethal poison in existence, and they pass out in fright when he easily does so.
• Imaginary Man, a superhero imaginary friend on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, is weakened by girly things, particularly flowers. Similarly, his evil nemesis Nemesis, loses her powers whenever her hair is messed up. It later turns out they were thought up by a boy and his sister, respectively, just to annoy each other.
• Parodied in an episode of Freakazoid!, where Gutierrez confronts Freakazoid armed with a small collection of famous Weaksauce Weaknesses like a chunk of kryptonite, a gold card and a glass of water. Then he finds out that his weakness is actually graphite bars charged with negative ions. And "poo-gas" (but then again, nobody likes poo-gas.)
• Four Eyes!:
  • Emma can be dubbed as "lactose intolerant" but her reaction to everything dairy would put her hidden alien status at stake as this shorts out her disguise.
  • Then there's her not having to take off her glasses or else. Though it's shown she doesn't really mind them that much, she fears having someone bump her so hard, it flies off.
• Spoofed in Futurama where some robots are watching B-grade monster movie where the monster is a human who is "impervious to their most powerful magnetic rays", yet can be brought down by a simple sharpened stick.
  • The Wizard of Oz parody in "Anthology of Interest II" spoofs that movie's witches' melting when they touch water, having both Mom and Leela as witches who predictably end up splashed with a small amount of liquid and melt away.
• Gargoyles:
  • The titular creatures turn into immobile statues during the day, which leaves them extremely vulnerable. They try to work around this in various ways (working a deal with humans in exchange for protection, magic spells, etc.) However, this is actually a bit of a double-edged sword. Though vulnerable as stone statues, they are COMPLETELY healed of almost ANY wounds (even potentially fatal ones) when they return to flesh and blood. Hudson, being the most experienced of the main cast, uses this to his advantage, defeating the better armed and fitter Demona while protecting an injured Goliath by simply keeping her at bay until dawn. When the sun sets, Goliath is healed and they easily dispatch her together.
  • Oberon's Children, like other portrayals of The Fair Folk, are all vulnerable to iron. Iron can disrupt their magic, actually hurt them, and imprison them. In his not really first appearance, Puck is forced to obey Demona after being bound with iron chains. The Weird Sisters are also coerced into doing a favor in exchange for being released from an iron chain. Later, Trickster God Coyote is trapped in the robot Coyote's latest body which was constructed with iron from a magical cauldron. Their ruler Oberon, while not immune to iron, is powerful enough to withstand being impaled by an iron harpoon though it does cause him to wither in appearance for a short time. (Ringing an iron bell defeated him in his first appearance, but then, this was after he purposely reduced his power.)
• According to God, the Devil and Bob, Satan can't stand Tony Orlando songs. This comes in handy the one time he actually tries to knock off the comedy routine and physically attack Bob.
• Mighty Ray of Hero: 108 has the ability to shoot lightning from his eyes. The drawback is that he has to eat a banana to do it...and he hates bananas. He can also have his eyes knocked out of his head, which happens more often than you'd like to think.
• Zim of Invader Zim is a member of a hyper-advanced, genetically engineered race of aliens for whom Humongous Mechas are a mundane occurrence and whose sole purpose seems to be conquering the entire universe. His main weakness? Water (possibly just polluted water) and meat.
• Jackie Chan Adventures:
  • In the season 4 premiere, Tohru threw an onion at Tarakudo on the strength of his mother's fairy tales about onions repelling oni. Tarakudo screamed about his eyes burning and vanished. Several episodes in we get Jade digging an onion out of a dumpster.
    Tarakudo: No! Anything but onions! (Jade throws it at him.) My eyes! My eyes! (poof)
  • A one-off villain could be turned to stone if exposed to salt.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: According to Word of God, Lucius actually has some pretty terrifying powers, including Reality Warper abilities. The sole reason he doesn't use them is because his pride would be wounded if he admitted he needed them. Without them, he becomes a rather Harmless Villain.
• Justice League:
  • The Imperium, White Martian expys in Justice League have an even greater weakness than the usual fire. Direct sunlight causes them to burn and evaporate near instantly. One would think they'd be moving along planet systems away from suns, but no.
  • Alan Scott's weakness to wood was parodied in the Justice League Golden Age Affectionate Parody episode "Legends", with his stand-in version "Green Guardsman", who had a weakness to aluminum. Either way, you've got a superhero who could appear on the news after having been beaten to death with a baseball bat — and considering that one of his foes was the Sportsmaster, who did wield a baseball bat... it's pretty darned weaksauce.
• Kaeloo: One of Mr. Cat's biggest weaknesses is "zumba with friends"; that is, if his friends turn on zumba music and dance, he starts involuntarily dancing along with them and is forced to stop doing anything else he might be doing at the moment.
• Kim Possible:
  • Felix Renton's Super Wheelchair is one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the series. It can hover and has Combat Tentacles. But it can be hijacked by a wireless game controller.
  • One of Dr. Drakken's schemes was to create an army of Kim Possible clones. The scheme failed when Wade figured out that the clones were chemically unstable and would melt if exposed to carbonated soda.
  • In So The Drama, Drakken created a synthodrone that could pass for human. It blocked Kim's last-ditch attempt to stop Drakken... until one bite from Rufus drained its synthogoo and destroyed it.
• The controversial Looney Tunes short "Injun Trouble" (and its 1945 color remake "Wagon Heels") features Injun Joe, The Superchief as its villain. Injun Joe is a powerhouse; he shatters mountains and laughs at gunfire. But Porky Pig's sidekick Sloppy Moe knows Injun Joe's secret weakness: he's ticklish!
• Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil:
  • Not only is vampires' weakness to sunlight so great that they can be turned to dust by UV fluorescent lights, but they're deathly afraid of balloons.
  • And when Senator Whitehead turns into a giant monster, his weakness is beatboxing.
• An episode of Martin Mystery had an alien fungus monster that had taken over a small town and replaced the inhabitants with clones. Both it and the clones could be killed with salt. As luck would have it, the small town just happened to be in northern Utah.
• The second act of the Mr. Bogus episode "Totally Bogus Video" showed that the Dirt Dudes are vulnerable to fruit punch, as it causes them to melt when it comes in contact with them, a la the Wicked Witch of the West.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot:
  • "This Time With Feeling" has an incredibly powerful, sadistic, and sexist supervillain, Himcules, who gets stronger and stronger anytime he hurts or humiliates someone. And of course, he appears right after Jenny has implanted sensors in herself that either tickles herself or causes her pain. Stuck in "Pain" mode, Himcules continues to gain more and more muscle (and even pleasure) every second he makes her cry in pain... then she comes upon a little girl who kindly (sorta) switches her "Pain" switch to "Tickle", and it just so happens that laughing at Himcules is his only weakness.
  • Another example would probably be Jenny herself. She’s a powerful crime-fighting robot whose only weakness is ...water.
• In what might be one of the most literal examples of this trope, The New Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show episode "Scooby's Gold Medal Gambit" featured a villain known as Chameleon who was a Master of Disguise, capable of disguising himself so flawlessly as to be completely unrecognizable. His one flaw? He hated Worcestershire sauce. So much that whenever someone so much as mentioned the condiment, he felt compelled to break character to scream about how much he hated Worcestershire sauce.
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Night of the Living Pharmacists", the instant cure to the "pharmacist" (Doof clone) plague is water.
• In the Planet Sheen episode "To Chill a Mocking Blurg", the Blurgs explode after being complimented.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • Being kindergarteners, the girls have plenty of weaknesses of their own any other time—they have been shown to be deathly afraid of "cooties", cockroaches, and broccoli. The episodes these weaknesses show up in usually involve some sort of super-powered or evil version of it, so it's not always so silly...
  • The original incarnation of their Spear Counterpart enemies the Rowdyruff Boys are so grossed out by the girls' kisses that they explode. And after being genetically modified to actually gain strength from this past weakness ( aka puberty), they gain a new weakness, humiliation. Yes, humiliation. Anytime they are embarrassed and laughed at, or "whenever their masculinity is threatened", they shrink.
• The Sheep in the Big City episode "Fleeced to Meet You" had a sketch where the superhero Completely Powerful Guy is informed by his sidekick Wonderful Boy that there are various criminals on the loose that he's expected to stop. Completely Powerful Guy claims that the villains' various attacks, such as using dynamite, pollen, or even tickling, are his most dangerous vulnerabilities, though it's implied that he's just making up excuses to avoid going after the crooks. Wonderful Boy rightly calls Completely Powerful Guy out on avoiding going after the criminals with the flimsy excuse that they could easily hurt him.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • The alien jellyfish in the episode "Planet of the Jellyfish" dissolve into puddles of goop upon contact with mayonnaise.
  • One of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy's antagonists is the Dirty Bubble, who is... a bubble. Go ahead, guess a weakness.
• If SheZow gets her hair messed up, she loses her power — fortunately for her, she has a can of hair spray in the Beautility Belt to fix this.
• Superman: The Animated Series: Mr. Mxyzptlk is so powerful that he has no natural weaknesses. To make his fights with Superman more challenging, he gives himself one. Which one does he choose? Saying his own name backwards. Used hilariously in "Mxyzpixilated" with Superman using clever and creative ways of exploiting Mr. Mxyzptlk's "weakness", often without having to use any sort of super powers at all. In one, Clark tells Mxyzptlk he can't "play" until he finishes proof-reading a paper. Mxyzptlk grabs it and uses magic to cross out all the typos. Three guesses what they spell.
• The members of the Sushi Pack are rendered powerless by any kind of heat, but even worse, they feel compelled to announce this every time a villain pulls out a heat lamp.
• In the Talespin episode, "Pizza Pie in the Sky", the normally healthy and active Louie is severely allergic to anchovies. One whiff of the irregular anchovies that Baloo and Kit bring him is enough to make him ill and delusional.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward Sh'Okanabo's first attempt to infect Earth with his progeny is thwarted by...sunlight. Although this is handwaved as a particular, unexpected feature of Earth's, and Sh'Okanabo himself is not normally affected, dealing with his weakness is the thrust of his character arc throughout the remainder of the season.
• ThunderCats (1985):
  • Mumm-Ra had a weakness to his own reflection. The writers eventually realized this made Mumm-Ra too lame, so they had him get over it. The Thundercats had a harder time dealing with him after that. Even more so when he got an Infinity +1 Sword of his own.
  • Plutar was weakened by soap. The show was so far in the future that modern society was all but forgotten; soap was treated as an ancient science.
• In The Transformers, the Decepticons were once driven off by a fire suppression system that sprayed them with fire-retardant foam after Megatron claimed it would short out their circuits. Why this doesn't make Inferno and Hot Spot (Autobots who turn into fire trucks) into the Decepticons' primary nemeses has never been explored. In what may be a weird mixture of Call-Back and Running Gag, Sideways in Transformers: Cybertron and Starscream and Blackarachnia in Transformers: Animated have also been incapacitated by fire-retardant foam for varying lengths of time. This includes the foam from a traditional human-sized fire extinguisher, in the case of Sideways.
• In Wander over Yonder the extremely powerful Lord Dominator has only two weaknesses; being cut off from the armor that provides her powers (understandable and not often a problem) and, far more embarrassingly, a severe allergy to pollen. In the second-to-last episode of season 2 this leads to her humiliatingly defeating herself by picking up a flower.
• WordGirl isn't so much defeated by a cute little kitten, but rather easily distracted by one. She also compensates for her language abilities by showing a complete lack of competence in art, poetry, and dance.
• Yin Yang Yo!:
  • The only thing that prevents Brother Herman from taking over the world is the fact the he's allergic to panda fur. As long as Master Yo, the last panda on the planet, is around, failure will be his only option.
  • His brother Carl, The Evil Cockroach Wizard has been shown to be a very powerful villain capable of global domination himself, but he has one glaring weakness: self-esteem. He's been defeated by insults and peer pressure, and his own low opinion of himself keeps him from going full-tilt against the heroes and his brother.
• Zeroman's weakness is anti-static sheets, which mess with Zeroman's suit's systems.

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