Family-Unfriendly Death/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Family-Unfriendly Deaths in Live-Action TV include:

  • Zoom. Jittery, terrified talking paper collage vegetables in a garbage disposal, waiting and waiting for the horrific moment when the memorably nasty-looking blades would start spinning and puree them all.
  • Power Rangers had its share of gruesome deaths, even if it's not fond of the word "death."
    • Frax's death in Time Force was a Dies Wide Open involving a scream and parts of his robotic face falling apart. This after his having been reprogrammed into a mindless automaton by the Big Bad.
    • Flashbacks in Wild Force showed vines assault and grow through the bodies of two terrified humans. Apparently, a bloodless death can't possibly disturb anyone.
      • They actually only got away with this one due to a Channel Hop. They told the first network (FOX) that the characters would later turn out to have survived, which makes it okay somehow. They then "neglected" to tell the second network (Disney) that the death had ever happened, so they didn't have to keep the promise, and they stayed dead.
    • Ninja Storm had a cyborg villain suffer melting at the hands of another, treacherous villain. His half-slagged body is seen in a rare exception to PR's Everything Fades tendency. His executioner quips that he was "having a little meltdown".
      • Ninja Storm has one that wasn't the death itself, but... the monster of the week was a pig. The Rangers beat him, he goes giant, they beat him again, he explodes... and then we see Lothor eating his barbecued remains; the other villains were as disgusted as should be expected.
    • The Master's hatching from Matoombo's body near the end of Mystic Force was almost Alien-level bad. The exact same thing happens to Titan of Mahou Sentai Magiranger.
    • A rather nasty, Mecha-Mooks loophole exploiting death in Zeo where two groups of enemy mooks have a battle royale. The mooks are Tengas (bird men) and Cogs (spandex robots) You see Tengas and Cogs sluggin it out for a few shots, then it cuts to one Tenga holding down a struggling Cog while another Tenga tore open its stomach and ripped out its electronic guts. This wasn't Chouriki Sentai Ohranger footage that slipped past the censors, either - Tengas were Power Rangers-exclusive mooks, so it was all original footage.
      • Oh my goodness, Zeo. Louie Kaboom, the temporary leader of the Machine Empire. Under a love spell cast by the new villains he takes on the Rangers in combat, and is eventually defeated. However, unlike most of the mindless minions that fell to the Rangers, he remained alive for a few moments, stumbling around in pain while on fire and professing his love for the villain that brainwashed him.
    • Many Grinders in Power Rangers RPM are also destroyed in very gruesome ways.
    • Super Sentai was far worse when it came to this. Especially in the early 80s. In the first episode of Denshi Sentai Denziman, for example, construction workers are skeletonized into piles of sludge and bones. The Big Bad leader's name is Queen Hedrian, after the Japanese word "Hedoro", which means sludge.
  • The Muppet Show. A large monster eats a smaller, cuter monster while singing a very eerie version of "I've Got You Under My Skin" to his victim. Did the person who came up with that gem have a vore Fetish or something?
    • Even worse is the glowworm sketch, which involves a lizard-esque creature sits on a wall while humming a tune ("Glow Little Glowworm") and eating worms that poke at him until it bites a worm that's actually the nose of a bigger monster that proceeds to eat the lizard. If only Jim knew that people would take that sketch in a different way decades later.
    • The Swedish Chef was strangled by his own spaghetti bolognese.
      • And beaten by a sentient pile of dough, shot by a turtle, hit in the head with his own cleaver...yikes.
  • Doctor Who is well known for having ostensibly started off as a somewhat educational sci-fi series that would be fun for the whole family... but quickly led to the tradition of kiddies hiding behind the couch. From Dalek Death Rays, to being eaten alive by a giant spider-thing, to having your blood sucked out of your neck through a straw, almost every other adventure brought a new and painful way to die.
  • Through the Dragon's Eye, a 1990s kids' educational series for schools, featured an anthropomorphized quagmire which would merrily drag cast members down to their doom. And this was used in a cliffhanger.
    • The Big Bad, who happens to take the form of a sort of skeletal bird with an exposed ribcage, wrapped in a black cloak and with Freddy Krueger-style scissor fingers, actually melted several of the secondary characters. Seriously. Into pools of liquid...
      • They got better. But not until right at the end, weeks later. And kids were actually required to watch this in classes.
  • While their deaths aren't actually seen, Kenan and Kel, in "Two Heads Are Better Than None", find three severed heads on a table. Of innocent victims. Who had been previously introduced.
  • Monk is generally a PG-rated, family-friendly show, but the pre-credits sequences often feature gruesome and disturbing death scenes. Usually, ones that involve blood.
  • Same can be said of Bones, and it's probably so parents can tell the kids to bugger off for the first five minutes and come back after the titles. The show uses up its Nightmare Fuel quota nice and early, while the parents get to revel in the Squick, totally guilt-free and without having to worry about sudden violence or Nightmare Fuel later in the program.
  • While most Kamen Rider series simply have kaijin blow up when killed, Kamen Rider Amazon shows the titular hero decapitating and removing limbs, with copious amounts of blood; this actually caused the series to be canceled when Moral Guardians complained. When the World of Amazon is revisited in Kamen Rider Decade, Amazon's attacks simply cause a brief fountain of blood, followed by an explosion.
  • Kamen Rider Ryuki introduces Kamen Rider Scissors/Masashi Sudou who gets a particularly memorable send-off when he is eaten alive by his own Mirror Monster.
    • The titular rider gets himself stabbed in the back in the penultimate episode, complete with Blood From the Mouth
    • Not to mention Kamen Rider Ohja getting gunned down by dozen of police.
  • Kamen Rider Double: Isaka basically dies from a G-Rated Drug overdose that causes his entire body to blacken and crumble into dust.
  • Caleb's death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - bisected from the groin up. Being a psychotic, mysoginistic serial killer seems to make this acceptable viewing, however.
  • Despite being comedy, Get Smart often had characters die in Nightmare Fuel ways. Particularly disturbing was the murderer whose aerosol weapon coated his victims in transparent plastic, within which they suffocated while looking like department-store mannequins.
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