Eye Scream/Western Animation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Yet more subverting of the Animation Age Ghetto: Here is a list of instances of Eye Scream in western animation.

  • The legendary Sandman Animation from 1992. The titular Sandman jumps around the boy's bed, then swipes at his eyes when he opens them. Especially the post-credits sequence, oh god the post-credits sequence.
  • Rocko's Modern Life seems to have a lot of fun with eyeballs. A TV sucks Heffer's brain out through his own twisting, elongated eyeballs in "Boob Tubed". Rocko's toad boss extends his own eyes and shoves them into Rocko's sockets when intimidating him. And don't even get started on The Fatheads...
    • Mrs. Fathead bludgeons Mr. Fathead with a parking meter and one of his eyeballs like glass. Then the elf living in his eye becomes irate.
    • "Gaze into my Nipples of the Future."
    • In another episode Rocko when he becomes a giant gets punched in the eye by Really Really Big Man.
    • In the Halloween special Rocko gets a piece of candy lodged in his eye socket and Filbert pulls it out causing his eye to stretch and snap back in place.
    • When Rocko gets contact lenses, Heffer checks them out by poking at them.
  • In The Simpsons, Homer has suffered some painful eye trauma on a few occasions such as when he gets his face caught in a hose and one of his eyeballs is protruding. It happens again when Willie strangles him. In another episode, with a flashback with him and Marge as kids, he accidentally stabs himself in the eye with a switchblade and has to wear a patch for a while. In yet another one, Patty puts out a cigarette in his eye.
    • Homer hides from Bart in the Krustyburger playplace ballpit and Bart pokes his eyes until you hear a loud squirting sound. In the movie, Homer receives a hammer claw to the eye.
    • In an episode of Itchy and Scratchy ("Skinless in Seattle") on "Bart Sells His Soul", Itchy saws off the top half of the Space Needle, the point of which lands in -- you guessed it -- Scratchy's eye.
    • Played for laughs when a war veteran with an eyepatch tells a story: "Lost this eye in Haiti. I was drinking a Mai Tai and forgot to take the little parasol out."
    • Gil being kicked out of the Springfield Men's Mission. Strapped for cash, he goes into a shop on the other side of the road named 'Sell your Eyeballs for Money!' Squick. You don't see this, but you still hear two plucking sounds in succession.
    • Flanders had his kids act out violent Bible stories for a movie he was going to make and after acting out the story of Cain and Abel, one of the kids looks like he has his eyeball hanging out of its socket.
    • "My eye! I'm not supposed to get pudding in it!"
    • In the kickboxing episode, Homer and Bart agree that there is nothing funnier than self-inflicted violence/pain .. and Homer gets the straw from his drink shoved into his eye.
    • After Homer gets a bucket glued onto his head, Bart tries to drill eye holes for him with predictable results. Oddly, he takes it completely calmly: "Easy, easy...(squish) Too far."
    • One Christmas episode has Homer giving Lenny a cube with pictures as a gift, mentioning he even cut the sharp corners off so it won't hurt so much if it hits Lenny in the eye. He promptly demonstrates how little it hurts by hitting Lenny in the eye with it.
    • The primary side effect to Lisa's happy drug in A Scorpion's Tale: dangling eyeballs.
    • Marge trying to watch a solar eclipse raw. She's awestruck by it...until the sun comes back out and completely burns her eyeballs to nothing. Complete with a bloodcurdling scream for good measure.
  • In the fourth Futurama film, a Martian Muck Leech attaches itself to Leela's eyeball.
    • There's also an episode where Leela, after being complimented on her eye, touches it vainly, complete with indentation marks. The commentary track for that episode mentions that anyone who doesn't wear contacts is likely to be bothered by that scene.
    • Supposedly, people squirm when they see Bender's eye being drilled into in the third movie, Bender's Game.
    • The eyePhones from "Attack of the Killer App". Exactly what it sounds like.
    • In "The Duh-Vinci Code" Fry gets a nail lodged in his eye after attempting to use it to shut down a machine.
  • The "Bestest Friend" episode of Invader Zim. Zim is being stalked by his new best friend, Keef, for the whole episode, and in order to get rid of him, Zim uses mechanical claws to RIP OUT HIS EYES and replace them with cybernetics. We all mourn the show's untimely cancellation, but with stuff like that going on, it's a wonder it lasted on Nickelodeon as long as it did.
    • It's only shown in silhouette, but that's quite sufficient.
    • There was also that episode where Zim crashed his ship into a giant screen. Said crash was jarring enough to knock one of his eyes out. After which he simply picks it up and sticks it back in.
    • There's also the bit in "Walk of Doom" when he looks straight at the sun and his eyes burn and bubble.
  • The Venture Brothers' Brock Samson gouged out the eye of his would-be lover and frequent enemy Molotov Cocktease; he keeps it in a jar for sentimental value.
    • That was nothing compared to Dr. Venture getting punched in the face and realizing that his eye is hanging out of its socket by a nerve. They even showed a few seconds of his eyesight.
    • Also the shots from the POV of Venturestein, a corpse reanimated by Dr. Venture. At one point, a fly crawls over his eyeball. Then, while still on his eye, it gets swatted.
    • Also, in the pilot, Brock drives his thumbs into The Monarch's eyes, and inserts his wings in him.
  • Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids includes the story of "The Peeler" a charecter from a Victorian nursery rhyme who punishes children who refuse to go to sleep by peeling away their eyelids using an old style potato peeler, and then carrying them around with him as a kind of macabre butterfly.
  • In Adventure Time, there was a scene in "Too Young" in which the character Lemongrab is so afraid that his eyes actually roll back into his head, leaving only the whites exposed as he screamed horribly. *shudder* Jesus... Seriously- try looking up as high as you can. Sooner or later, it'll hurt. Imagine that happening to you.
      • Jossed to a certain extent. In times of serious trauma, it is common for one's eyes to roll back into one's head, leaving the whites exposed. It's a natural instinct of the body to protect the eyes from seeing something horrible, or being damaged by something. Under these reflexive circumstances, it isn't painful, and the eyes go back to normal some time later. Still doesn't make the above mentioned scene less creepy, but at least we know he isn't in actual physical pain...
    • In the same episode, Peppermint Butler gets spicy serum in his eye.
  • In The Ren and Stimpy Show, there was a scene in the episode "Sven Hoek" in which Ren graphically described how he would torture Sven and Stimpy. Although we didn't SEE anything, the sound effects of him gouging out their eyes played over the soundtrack. It was insanely unsettling.
  • Plucky Duck of Tiny Toon Adventures gets stuck in an advanced Wild Take (the "Clampett Corneal Catastrophe", an Homage to Bob Clampett), transforming him into a giant eyeball with legs. After being pushed through the nurse's office door, he bounces off the walls, causing Elmyra (the aforementioned nurse) to cower in fear and protect herself with a very sharp scalpel. It gleams in the light, just in case you were unsure of just how razor sharp it really was.
    • In "Duck In The Dark" Plucky has a sleepover at Buster's and spent most of the night watching horror movies, every time he closes his eyes he sees monsters at one point he tries to wake up Buster but he has changed into a disgusting looking monster that has one of his eye balls hanging from a nerve.
  • The South Park episode "Good Times With Weapons", where Butters gets a ninja shuriken straight into the eye! Owww.
    • And the adults were too distracted by Cartman's wardrobe malfunction to care.
    • Two of Kenny's deaths involved his eye's being removed in "Starvin' Marvin" one of the mutant turkeys pecks out one of his eyes and in "Spooky Fish" the killer fish eats one of his eyes after pulling him into the bowl.
  • An episode of the Earthworm Jim cartoon featured Jim looking for a new sidekick, and one of the candidates was Turns-His-Eyelids-Inside-Out Boy.
  • In a SpongeBob SquarePants episode, SpongeBob tries to help his bodyguard (actually his would-be-killer) reach a window by attempting to jump onto his back wearing cleated shoes. He misses the back, and the cleated shoes land in both of the guy's eyes! Yeah, his eyes aren't gouged out, being a kid's show and all, but it doesn't decrease the Squick value.

Strangler: Get your feet out of my eye sockets!
SpongeBob: I'm trying, but my cleats are stuck in your corneas!

    • Another ep featured several different depictions of SpongeBob getting a black eye. Though it shows multiple objects impacting with his cornea, there's nothing too graphic or violent because, again, it's a kids' show.
    • Though, this says otherwise.
      • To be specific: That was from an episode in which the Flying Dutchman's ship breaks down, forcing him to take up residence in SpongeBob's pineapple. The Dutchman tried several mildly scary things in order to disturb SpongeBob, and, towards the climax of the episode, appeared as a huge snake with a huge, grotesque baby's head, which melted, turning into an effigy of SpongeBob, whose eyes elongated into hideous wiggling white worms and squiggled onto the floor. As well as the fact that spiders came out his eye sockets and mouth.
      • There was a scene in the episode "Wet Painters" where SpongeBob sees a microscopic drop of paint on Mr. Krabs' first dollar and his eyes crack open, causing his irises to ooze out.
    • By watching enough episodes its clear that Spongebob is very literal when given eye related orders. If he's told to keep his eyes peeled he will rip the skin off his eyeballs.
    • In "Whelk Attack," Sandy asks SpongeBob and Patrick to lend her their corneas. They remove their corneas like contact lenses and give them to Sandy, then there's a shot of SpongeBob and Patrick with gaping holes where their pupils should be.
    • Played with in the episode "Graveyard Shift" when Spongebob's eyes scream.
  • In the Beavis and Butthead episode No Laughing, Butthead stabs Beavis in the eye with a pencil. Beavis leaves it in for a while, then calmly removes it with a small spurt of blood.
  • In Drawn Together Princess Clara's father the king almost decides to gouge her eyes out with a fork to stop her from seeing Spanky.
  • In one episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, when a toilet Frylock built destroyed Carl's body, leaving only his head, Frylock attempted to build him a new body out of black market organs he ordered from the internet. Unfortunately, the organs were all eyes. He could move, barely, and every step hurt as much as you'd expect.
    • Another episode had Carl, Frylock, and Meatwad shrunk by Shake and they get revenge by crawling to his head and taking over his brain. When Meatwad is returned to regular size and neglects to help Carl or Frylock we later see they had to get out by blowing out Shake's eyes.
    • Yet another episode has Shake stealing Frylock's laser-contacts, and Meatwad later retrieves them by pulling out Shake eyes (off screen) and shoving them over his own.
    • The episode "Universal Remonster" plays this trope for laughs, with Oglethorpe trying to activate a retinal scan, both times hitting the button for the wrong laser (no thanks to Emory not labeling the buttons) causing the laser to shoot his eyes out.
  • One of the clips in Don Hertzfeldt's short Rejected involves a multi-tentacled alien pulling out someone's eyes. That there is no blood and they come out with a silly "pop" helps make it less cringeworthy.
  • The first episode of The Drinky Crow Show shows, in painfully explicit detail, Drinky yank his own eye out with a clamp, then slice the optic nerve with a razor blade.
  • In The Ren and Stimpy Show, Ren often poked Stimpy in the eyes once through his nostrils, and often when Ren got punched in the face his eyeballs would often be hanging out of his sockets, and one particularly painful looking example is when Jimminy Lummux smashed Ren's face with his guitar and there is a bone sticking out of one of his eyes!
    • In "Lumber Jerks" Ren got stung in the eye by a hornet.
    • In "Farm Hands" Ewalt gets his eyeball yanked out by a crow, but apparently he feels no pain.
    • In "Sammy and Me" upon getting his Sammy Mantis kit one of the items Stimpy gets is a false eye which he inserts like a lightbulb into one of his own eye's.
  • Played at in the animated Transformers movie. Besides the dramatic beginning and ending, the only dialogue from the final battle between Optimus Prime and Megatron consists of Megatron screaming, "I'LL RIP OUT YOUR OPTICS!"
    • The Transformers wiki, Teletraan-I, interprets the scene differently: "I can see the splinter... It's right... there..."
    • There's also the scene where the Autobots get inside Unicron by crashing a rather pointy ship through one of his optics, which he ends up clutching in pain. Also, when they end up escaping Unicron, they do so by crashing through his other previously unwounded optic.
  • The Extreme Ghostbusters episode "The Unseen" involving an orb that summoned a demon who would steal the eyes of anyone who looked at it. The episode went so far as to show the empty eye-sockets on two or three occasions, and at least showed the eyes flying right out of their sockets.
  • The short Australian CGI spoof Samurice. Ricesashi plucks out the eyeballs of the first ninja rice that attacks him.
  • One Tom and Jerry cartoon has Jerry tricking Tom into looking at something in his hands, when Tom looks Jerry promptly punches Tom's eyeball causing him a lot of pain.
  • In American Dad Stan's one eyed father provides a briefly shocking moment when Steve wakes him in the night and he turns toward the camera revealing he airs out his socket at night. Seeing what is normally covered by his patch out of the blue is momentarily startling.
    • He stores spices in the empty socket, and can also drink through it.
  • In an episode of Metalocalypse the music producer Dick Knubbler after loosing too much oxygen in the submarine his eyes explode.
  • The Justice League Unlimited episode "The Doomsday Sanction" had this nasty exchange...

(Superman uses heat vision to collapse the ceiling, but Doomsday easily lifts the rock off)
Doomsday: "Ah, I remember. Those eyes."
(Pins Supes to the wall, then punches him in the face with his spiked knuckles)
Superman: "Ahhhh!!!!"
Doomsday: "Let's see you do that again."

    • Near the end of the fight, Supes' eyes heal offscreen, allowing him to blast Doomsday with a surprise heat vision shot.
    • The episode "Only A Dream". As part of Superman's nightmare, his heat vision activates continuously, like Cyclops from X-Men. He tries closing his eyes, and the beams destroy his eyelids!
    • Superman using Darkseid's own Omega beam vision to hurt him by simply clapping both hands over his eyes in the Superman the Animated Series finale. It left the New God potentate with some pretty horrific facial scars.
  • In a two part Family Guy episode, during their fight Lois claws out Stewie's eyes, but he apparently can see fine later.
    • A couple of Peter's cutaway flashbacks also use this, such as the one where Peter is on a submarine, messes with the pressure knob instead of turning on the radio. and the eyes of all the submariners pop out of their sockets. I'm pretty sure Quagmire gets a demon horn to the eye in another of these flashbacks.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender has Zuko's famous near-miss of getting shot in the face with freaking fire. By his father. His eye still works, however.
    • It's still noticeably damaged, and is almost always partially closed.
  • One episode of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy has Rolf deliberately squirting lemon juice into his eyes.
  • One episode of He Man and The Masters of The Universe 2002 had the hero defeat an Eldritch Abomination by stabbing it in the eye and running it through.
  • In The Fairly OddParents episode "Timmy's 2-D House of Horror", Vicky's family sees horrible things through a magic pair of 3-D glasses such as Mrs. Turner serving spaghetti and EYEBALLS.
  • In Batman: Under the Red Hood Jason Todd pokes out one of Ra's al Ghul's minion's eyes after being resurrected.
  • In one episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, after Billy is blinded after staring at the sun too long, an optometrist attempts to show him how simple and painless putting on a contact lens is. Unfortunately, he's putting a small realistic contact lens on a huge cartoony eye.
  • Toy Story
    • The Baby-Spider toy in the 1st one. It's missing an eye and by God did it give children nightmares back in the day. There is nothing about that toy which is not terrifying.
    • In the 3rd movie, Mrs. Potato Head loses one of her eyes, and later on she uses her missing eye to check on Andy's bedroom as their owner starts to worry about his toys. She finally gets her eye back at the end of the film.
  • One of the Scarers from Monsters, Inc. (also by Pixar) for some reason has removable eyes.
  • Surprisingly frequent in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. It's always Played for Laughs, though.
    • In the episode "Green Isn't Your Color", Twilight Sparkle accidentally pokes herself in the eye while swearing to keep Fluttershy's displeasure with her modeling career a secret.

Twilight Sparkle: Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my... AUGH!

    • In "Sisterhooves Social", Granny Smith accidentally pokes herself in the eye with a megaphone when her rocking chair swings too much.
    • Twilight gets another one in "It's About Time" when she accidentally looks into the sun with her telescope. This one results in an "emergency" Eyepatch of Power, courtesy of Pinkie Pie.
    • Pinkie herself gets one in A Friend In Deed. Although nothing actually happens to her eye, seeing the eyeball poke through a keyhole (and look around) is definitely cringe-worthy.
    • Then in "Hurricane Fluttershy" Rainbow Dash crash lands and has a head-on collision with a tree, which results in her eyes popping out from the other side. The creaky sound as she tries to pull herself free is preety squicky by itself.
  • KaBlam!!: In the episode Won't Crack or Peel, Henry and June enter a staring contest with the audience. June has to take a leak, so she keeps her place by plucking her eyeballs out, sticking them to the screen, and leaving them there.
  • This troper saw a 1940s Bugs Bunny ripoff of unknown origin (didn't look American) where the Fudd stand-in bear-man hunter gets knocked in the back of his head, and his eyeballs pop out and dangle by their optic nerves - gah.
  • A Monty Python's Flying Circus animation has a man staring at his television - a series of mechanical devices emerge from the set and runs an abrasive brush over his eyes, pulls them out to bounce around til they suck back in, and taps them back into his skull with a hammer. His wife finally warns him to turn it off - "It's bad for your eyes!"
  • On ReBoot, Matrix gets his eye slashed out by the User during a Game and ends up replacing it with a cybernetic replacement.
  • Transformers Prime has a particularly memorable example- the Decepticon Breakdown is captured by human baddie Silas and disassembled so they can learn more about his inner workings. They start by gouging out his eye- er, optic. Granted, he feels no pain because they disabled his pain receptors, but the look of sheer horror on his face afterwards shows he's still suffering.
  • On Jackie Chan Adventures, Hak Foo has an attack he calls "Monkey Plucks Two Peaches" which involves jumping on his opponent's shoulders and gouging out their eyes with two fingers. The one time he does this he was merely demonstrating his skills to Valmont and the Enforcers and stopped his fingers millimetres before they reached Tohru's eyes.
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