Harsher in Hindsight/Western Animation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Blitz Wolf, an MGM Wartime Cartoon, features the Three Little Pigs blowing up Tokyo after an overly-long gun barrel gag [1]. This was three years before two Japanese cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) really would be blown to pieces -- with atomic weapons, no less.
  • Betty Boop has one in the short A Language All My Own, which has Betty coming to Japan as a goodwill ambassador. Its quite uncomfortable to watch when you know what would happen a decade later.
    • The short "Be Human" features an abusive farmer whipping and beating his animals. Said farmer has since been compared to Billy Joe Gregg, a farmer who was charged with beating his cows and calves on his Ohio farm in July 2010.
  • One Hundred and One Dalmatians: The Series, which was released in 1997, had an episode "Alive N Chicken" where Spot the chicken tries various methods to fly. The episode was banned because of the 9/11 attacks, especially the part when Spot flew into the Dog Chow Tower. It's because of this that the episode was banned in reruns.
  • In a late first season episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Cool Old Guy Iroh declines an offer to have his fortune told, saying that, "At my age there is really only one big surprise left, and I'd just as soon leave it a mystery." Roughly a year later, just after finishing recording his lines for the second season, his voice actor (Makoto Iwamatsu, best known by his stage name "Mako") died of esophageal cancer at 72.
  • Remember that awesome finale of Justice League Unlimited? Where you have Batman, Lex Luthor, and Superman facing Darkseid. Remember when Batman refused to use a gun Lex offered him against Darkseid? Or when Batman dodged Darkseid's Omega Beams? Not so awesome after Final Crisis where Batman used a special Newgods gun to mortally wound Darkseid before being hit with the Omega Beams is it?
    • To be fair, the JLU situation also wasn't as dire -- all we saw Darkseid and his forces do in JLU was trash some stuff including the Daily Planet building. JLU Darkseid didn't bodyjack people, kill Orion, take free will away and enslave people, or throw the Earth (and The Multiverse) out of whack by his first "death". Things in the comics universe during Final Crisis were at the Godzilla Threshold at that point.
    • From the same universes and again involving Darkseid is Dan Turpin's fate. In the earlier Superman: The Animated Series, Darkseid killed him out of spite during his retreat in "Apokolips...Now!" In Final Crisis, with the death of his original body and his current body burning out, Darkseid basically bodyjacks Turpin. Animated Turpin got off light.
  • Episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series had Kraven the Hunter track The Punisher and Spider-Man's mutated Man-Spider form down to a parking garage because of the smell of gunpowder and ash and soot left in the Man-Spider's webbing residue. ...from the World Trade Center parking garage bomber. Guess which bit got cut out after 9/11.
  • The Gary Coleman Show ("Seriously, this is a cartoon"), featuring Coleman as an angel, will be tough to watch now, as Coleman has passed away.
  • The Koos is Loose episode of Dexter's Laboratory is hard to watch after Dom DeLuise's death now, what with the episode ending with Dexter imagining Koos away and Koos' line "Goodbye Dee Dee, goodbye Dexter. You'll never see me again..."
  • Looney Tunes: in the cartoon "Often an Orphan", Charlie Dog's Freak-Out includes the line "Look! It's the towers! THEY'RE FALLING!!"
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "The Smoking Peanut" is about a clam at a zoo going berserk after SpongeBob throws a peanut at it. Several years later, a tiger escaped from its habitat and attacked three teenage boys at the San Francisco Zoo. Some people believe the boys had taunted it. Also in that same episode, the clam throws one of the zookeepers while on a rampage. In 2010, an orca killed one of its trainers at Seaworld.
  • The Simpsons episode "All Singing, All Dancing had Snake bothered by the family's constant singing and threatening them with a gun. To stop the end credits music he fires, as Phil Hartman's name appears. Hartman would be shot by his wife months later.
    • Speaking of The Simpsons, it's a little unsettling watching the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire where they call New Orleans "The Sodom and Gomorrah of the Mississip'" after Hurricane Katrina.
    • Try "Bart of Darkness" where Bart witnesses Flanders scream bloody murder over killing something, the entire episode it is implied to be Maude until the last second, with "She's with God" meaning Bible Camp. Now try watching that episode after watching the one where Maude dies.
    • In "Bart The General", Bart has a nightmare where he's killed by Nelson and Nelson walks up to Bart's corpse in a casket saying "Here's one for the road" followed by punching his corpse. Now try watching that when you find out that the bullies who drove Phoebe Prince to suicide laughed at her casket.
      • Speaking of Phoebe Prince, try watching "The Boys Of Bummer" (which already left a horrible taste in the collective mouths of whatever fans remain of the show due to how cruel the townspeople treated Bart over his botched play during a Little League game) with her in mind. If it hasn't already, it will make you want to send death threats to the writers.
      • The scene in "Lisa's Date with Density" where Milhouse ends up getting wheeled to the hospital after Nelson beat up Milhouse over a love note that supposedly was from him stops being funny thanks to the recent rash of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual teens getting physically and emotionally abused in school (some of which have taken their own lives because of it).
    • In "$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)," one of the many failures at Burns' casino is that Siegfried & Roy are mauled by their own tiger while entertaining. Ten years later, it happened in real life to Roy Horn. The writers mentioned in the DVD commentary that the incident was bound to happen sooner or later and they were amazed when it did.
    • From season seven's "The Day The Laughter Died" when Bart and Lisa were watching a Schoolhouse Rock parody (or as Lisa puts it, a "...campy 70s throwback that appeals to Generation X-ers"): "We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little."
    • From "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" (which is already plagued with being dated and depressing following the 9/11 attacks): "They put all the jerks in Tower One!" On the DVD commentary, the writers said they felt really bad about that line after 9/11.
    • In the season one episode "Krusty Gets Busted," Krusty the Clown has a heart attack from grilling pork products during an episode of The Krusty The Clown Show (which is a clue in clearing Krusty of the robbery charge). In season three's "Like Father, Like Clown," Krusty is revealed to be Jewish.
    • With all the concern over kids in school getting bullied (particularly ones who recognize that they are homosexual) these days, the flashback in season 12's "Bye Bye Nerdie" where Homer punches Smithers (wearing a pink shirt and shorts to school) in the stomach while singing "Kung Fu Fighting" (with Barney on the recorder providing instrumentals) would raise a lot of cries of "Dude, Not Funny".
    • In a 2000 episode, Lisa became President in the future and was forced to fix the last President mess. Said president was Donald Trump. I wonder who wins the 2016 Presidential Election, 16 years later...
  • In episode "Downtime" (aired March 4, 2011) of Young Justice, Superman tells Aquaman that "The Justice League have a problem in Tokyo". A week later, Japan was hit by a devastating earthquake.
  • The Real Ghostbusters: the episode where the boogieman returns has Egon fall off the roof of the World Trade Center.
  • The Critic has two:
    • The episode "Sherman, Woman and Child," (aired in March 1995) had a scene in which Jay's chain smoking make-up artist Doris Grossman attempted to make a smoke ring bunny but it ended up turning into a shape with a demon-like appearance which told her "Doris...Tick! Tock!" Seven months after it aired, her voice actress Doris Grau died from emphysema.
    • One can't help but feel a little bit sad watching "Siskel and Ebert and Jay and Alice" due to the death of Gene Siskel, especially when seeing Roger Ebert on a see-saw all by himself and then he and Siskel singing about how they miss each other.
  • In-universe example - In the South Park episode "Cartman Joins NAMBLA", the boys are playing "Investigative Reports With Bill Curtis," a Life-meets-Monopoly type game in which players have to guess whether an event was denied or covered up by the U.S. government. When Kyle gives Cartman a jail-time card in the game, Cartman retaliates by giving him an AIDS card. The other characters are horrified by this. In the episode "Tonsil Trouble" (which aired 8 years later), Cartman literally infects Kyle with AIDS thanks to a blood mishap.
    • "201" reveals that Scott Tenorman and Cartman were brothers, due to having the exact same father, which meant that Cartman killed his own father. Cartman doesn't seem too concerned about having commited patricide, though.
  • In the Family Guy episode "Dog Gone", Brian unties a large dog left outside, only for said dog to violently attack and kill a smaller dog (before being shot to death by cops), this scene became even more uncomfortable to watch after something similar happened in real life. [1]
  • In the very first episode of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, the Eds falsely accuse Jonny of stealing everybody's stuff and as punishment is sent rolling down a hill in a tire. After it turns out he didn't, Edd asks Eddy if they should feel sorry for Jonny's predicament. Eddy nonchalantly replies "You know what they say. A little childhood trauma builds character." Guess Eddy really meant that, given how the series finale movie revealed that Eddy's brother has physically abused him for as long as they've been together.
  • In Disney's Pinocchio, the Coachman takes unsuspecting boys to Pleasure Island, where he turns them into donkeys and sells them to slavery. Then along came Kony...
  1. ↑ The edited version on Cartoon Network makes it look like the pigs were aiming their gun at the Hitler Wolf's trench
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