Weirdness Magnet / Western Animation

• Courage the Cowardly Dog has something strange happening each episode despite the show being set in the middle of Nowhere. This kind of makes sense. If nothing weird happens here (somewhere), what's the only place left? There is in fact one episode that explicitly states the farm was built over a cemetery.
  • Given in an in-universe explanation in the series' proper finale and cross-over with Scooby-Doo. As it turns out, a dark matter meteorite, the one that killed the dinosaurs long ago, is buried deep within Nowhere with its ability to mess with the laws of physics.
• Another contender for the king of this trope would be the flash animated series O'Grady, which aired on Noggin's teen block, The N. This series, featuring quite a few of the same crew and cast members as Home Movies, was centered on the lives of four teenagers living in the town of O'Grady which was constantly plagued by "The Weirdness." The Weirdness was weird, unexplained occurrences that affected the citizenry in every single episode. The show was compared to The Twilight Zone for this aspect of its premise. Examples of the Weirdness include the "Old Cold," a disease which caused sneezing-induced age shifts (the young turned old, the old turned young, and main character Abby went from about 15, to 30, to 60 something) and a a bizarre force-cord which caused two people to be inseparable for the duration of the Weirdness.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: Poor Jackie. All he wants to be is a simple archeologist and he gets into a plot with criminal organizations, magic talismans, top-secret government organizations, demons, ghosts, curses, an order of fighting druids and magic reality books. Every day seems to be a "bad day" for Jackie Chan.
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were often subject to this, with Michelangelo usually providing the Lampshade Hanging.
  • Similarly, their human friend April O'Neil is one by proxy, sometimes trying to get away from the weirdness.
• Ben 10; be it the Big Apple or the Grand Canyon, no matter where Ben Tennyson goes on his four-season summer vacation road trip, he seems to have a knack for attracting weirdness in the form of various aliens and monsters. If the weirdness isn't immediately obvious, expect Ben to go looking for it. He'll find it within two minutes. This is lampshaded early on by Gwen, almost by name:
  Gwen: You know, ever since you've had that watch, you're like a magnet for the weird.
  • Apparently this wasn't just for him — Azmuth lets him keep the Omnitrix partly because it's a "magnet for trouble". Apparently even though he is an alien, Azmuth had the same problem Ben does.
• Sokka, The Smart Guy on Aang's team in Avatar: The Last Airbender, known to occasionally acknowledge tropes, is the first to point out that "weird stuff happens to us" — somewhat justified given that Aang is The Chosen One.
• All the main characters of Kappa Mikey appear to be dogged by random events, though considering the stuff that goes on in a typical episode, they might just live in a world where that sort of mayhem is an everyday thing.
• The Simpsons: The titular family falls somewhere between this trope and The Main Characters Do Everything. Most anything that happens in Springfield will invariably be linked back to a Simpson in some way, shape or form. Eventually, the show began to lampshade this, such as when Smithers once re-introduced Mr. Burns to Homer by reminding him, "All the recent events of [his] life have revolved around [Homer] in some way or another", or when an irate Superintendent Chalmers explained to Skinner that, "[He] oversees fourteen schools, and for some reason, [he] always finds himself talking to [Skinner] about one of the Simpson kids".
• The fundamental premise of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Indeed, in the series' infancy the network execs made the creators of the show turn the characters into detectives, because they couldn't conceive of a show where every single episode consists of something completely crazy happening to the protagonists, apropos of nothing.
• Lampshaded in South Park "Pandemic 2 — The Startling," when Genre Savvy Craig gets sucked into the boys' adventure because they were using his birthday money for their scheme.
  Craig: That's a shock. I decided to follow you guys, and now I'm in the Land of the Giant Lost World.
  Stan: Craig, it isn't our fault! You make it sound like we always wanna be in situations like this but we don't have any choice!
  Kyle: Yeah! Stuff just happens!
  Craig: "Stuff just happens."
  Kyle: That's right!
  Craig: You just wind up being sent by the government to take down the city of Lima only to wind up in the Land of the Giant Lost World.
  Cartman: That's right.
  Craig: You know what stuff happens to most kids? They fall off their bikes. They get in fights with their parents. They get swindled out of their birthday money.
• Egon from The Real Ghostbusters seems to attract more than his fair share of strangeness, even though he's already in a profession known for running into weird things.
• The "Life with Loopy" segments on KaBlam! had this as its main premise. Among other strange misadventures, Loopy has managed to build a robot out of old stereo parts (which later tried to lead the other appliances in a robot rebellion), faced Mother Nature in a bowling contest, talked with the actual Cupid about getting her big brother Larry a date for the school dance, and accidentally created a monster out of a jar of expired wart-removal cream.
• Josie and the Pussycats cannot give a concert anywhere without bumping into a supervillain.
• Dan from Dan Vs. The targets of his vengeance include a werewolf jogger, a supervillain dentist, a ninja cookie-thief, and the ghost of George Washington. Mildly justified by the characters living in a Crapsack World. Dan gets the brunt force of all the chaos because his antisocial tendencies and his obsession with revenge mean that the psychos hoping to steal his identity, or the robots that want to use his body to build an army, think no one will miss him. And they're right.
• Mordecai and Rigby from Regular Show. These guys can't escape an episode with facing such odd situations as a black hole spawned by too many rock paper scissors ties, a half deer, half man trying to kill them, fighting off zombies spawned by a malfunctioning movie projector, and so on.
• Lots of The Everyman characters in old theatrical cartoons were this—they existed to react to whatever bizarre, surreal situations and adventures the animators could come up with. Examples include:
  • Felix the Cat (who continued to be this with his TV series in the 50s and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat in the 90s).
  • Mickey Mouse.
  • Porky Pig: In his solo shorts he's been tormented by Leprechauns, homicidal mice have tried to kill him, twice, and he's been abducted by aliens.
  • Bimbo the Dog.
• Gravity Falls: The titular town in Oregon, USA is home to many strange phenomenon to the stuff of myths to beings beyond the cosmos...yet the townsepople remain oblivious or unaware of it.
  • Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines, and arguably Soos seem to be drawn to the strange things in town. While this can be justified in that Dipper is trying to figure out the town's secrets, there are times when the oddities just come to them. This is actually lampshaded by one side character in "Fight Fighters":
    Robbie V: Why is it that whenever you're around, there's always monsters or ghosts or, whatever!?
    Dipper: I dunno, man.
  • Exaggerated: according to The Author, the real Stanford Pines, the entire town might be one big literal weirdness magnet. Weird things are drawn to Gravity Falls, which is why occasionally we see creatures from outside it, like Mermando the merman from the sea, or Sev'ral Timez, the boy band of clones. Millions of years ago, a UFO created the future site of Gravity Falls when it crash-landed, and the town's inherent weirdness may have been what attracted the craft. This magnetism is exactly what prevents Bill Cipher from leaving the city limits.
    • He explains this even more directly to Dipper in the canon post-episode Journal 3 book: he stands at the city limits, and holds a handful of jellybeans - with one defective oddly shaped jellybean among them - and drops it onto the ground. The weird, defective jellybean proceeds to roll towards the town. The best theory he came up with is that Gravity Falls is a thin point between parallel dimensions, allowing weirdness to seep in from other dimensions and act like a magnet for it, though the exact cause of this is unknown (it might just be a naturally occurring thin point).
• Packages from Planet X has Dan Zembrosky, who seems to be able to attract and even activates the packages meant for the evil alien Copernicus.
• Kim Possible is definitely one of these. She put up a website looking for mundane teenage jobs like babysitting — instead, she constantly encounters robots, mutants, magical forces, doomsday machines, or even aliens.
• On Milo Murphy's Law, Milo seems to attract all sorts of weirdness as a side effect of him literally being a living embodiment of the adage "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." ^note It's a genetic trait passed down through males in his family. In the first episode alone, Milo and his new friend Zack are nearly crushed by a concrete pipe, almost burned alive in a oil fire, chased by a pack of wolves, lost in the sewers, caught in a flooded construction site, and abducted by aliens in their efforts to get to school on time.
• The setting for The Amazing World of Gumball is already pretty weird, but whenever something especially weird happens, the Wattersons are always at the center of it, or more specifically, Gumball.
• My Little Pony Tales is generally a mundane, Slice of Life show, but there are the occasional fantastical elements. When these fantastical elements show up, they gravitate towards Patch for some reason, with her meeting the ghost of an ancient knight in the first episode, later running into a UFO that turns out to be a trio of flying, glowing magical ponies, one of which is a Winged Unicorn, and finally finding out she might be the long lost princess of an island nation. She's not. Her best friend from when she was at an orphanage was, and the process of finding that out involved a magical crown that only glows when worn by the true princess.
• Todd Chavez of BoJack Horseman has a bizarre tendency to go on wacky misadventures given the otherwise-serious nature of the show, including one episode where he and the Prince of Cordovia swap places, and a later episode in which his cell phone falls in love with him.
  Todd: You know, sometimes I feel like my whole life is just a series of loosely-related wacky misadventures.
• We Bare Bears: The Bears seem to be a magnet for strange things that happen in the Bay Area. In the very first episode, they accidentally crack a crime ring run by pigeons. They make friends with a super-genius pre-teen when she breaks into their house to study their habits for a college project. They find an old jean jacket in the dumpster that turns out to be a good luck charm. When they decide to rent out their cave on an AirBNB-like service, their first and only customer is a Sasquatch named Charlie, who goes on to become a reoccurring character. And that's just the first season. This gets lampshaded in the season 4 episode "Go Fish", where Panda is trying to call the authorities when their fishing boat is attacked by a giant goldfish, and he cries out "Why does this always happen?!"
• Family Guy: While the Griffin family as a whole has had it fair share of zany-ness (Peter running into Death multiple times, befriending Jesus Christ, and getting into a brief feud with Santa Claus), a good majority of it is mostly drawn to Brian and Stewie, who have-among other things-traveled in time, gone to alternate dimensions, and saved Christmas. Lampshaded by Brian, after learning that Stewie is being stalked by tiny!Tom Cruise.
  Brian: Y'know, it times like this that I think, if I didn't talk, and you were a normal baby, we wouldn't have any of these problems.
• DuckTales (2017): Pretty much everyone is aware of the Duck/McDuck family's tendency to attract weirdness wherever they go. A reporter even lampshades it in one episode while reporting on the time hurricane that's ravaging Duckburg.
  "The storm has unsurprisingly centered above McDuck Manor."
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Invoked in episode “Mewberty”, when Star goes through the titular growth stage (the Mewni equivalent of puberty), Marco asks her if with “things are going to get weird” she means in “classic Star’s weird” or “destroy the school weird” kind. Star assures him it’s the latter.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: The title character. Part of the show’s premise is that something weird always seems to be happening in Bikini Bottom. It just one of the reasons why Squidward always tries to stay away from him.
• Amphibia: The Plantars, especially after they took Anne in. This is even lampshaded a few times, like in the episode “Combat Camp,” where Hop Pop deliberately tries to avoid getting his family into any “wacky adventures,” which, of course, happens anyway. Another time, when the Plantars get back to Wartwood after their journey in Newtopia, the townsfolk claim that the town has become quite boring without them always causing trouble.
• Archie's Weird Mysteries: After an incident in the Riverdale High Physics Lab involving a failed science experiment, Riverdale has become a hotspot of weird paranormal and supernatural activity. Good thing too, because this gives Archie a chance to hunt them down for reports.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Strange things usually happen to Marco Diaz because of Star because she considers it normal but there are times where weird things are encountered on his own such as the invisible goats or how he even met Star in a second and third time in the pilot. It's not just people or creatures from other dimensions he's attracted, Janna also applies to this as she frequently invades his personal space and teases him by stealing his house keys, having all of his personal details and finger prints and finally studies witchcraft and demonology through books which are stored in a secret panel behind his locker.

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