Mind Screw/Western Animation

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"What the hell was that?", indeed.

• Aeon Flux. The TV show. Some episodes are worse than others, but the complete lack of continuity, bizarre dystopian setting, overtly philosophical conversations (or complete silence depending which season you're watching), and unusual symbolism that is indistinguishable from the Rule of Cool events. It's weird. It is, however, absolutely awesome.
  • The fact that the creator Peter Chung seems to actually know what's going on, but deliberately stops himself when he starts explaining it is either very annoying or very liberating depending on how you look at it.
  • None of this is helped by the fact that each episode is a self-contained story that is clearly already in progress, with no recap and zero exposition. That or a Yungian nightmare, take your pick, either one is both valid and complete bullshit.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is more or less constructed from this trope. The various episodes follow vague premises with more Mind Screw moments and Non Sequitur Scenes then virtually any other show. A particularly memorable one though, is at the end of an episode where they unmask a villain (bare in mind he's adult-sized) to reveal... an earthworm.

Billy: "Wait what?" Mandy: "Billy, if you had been paying attention the whole time you would have figured out he was obviously an Earthworm."

• In SpongeBob SquarePants, the first episode where you see Pearl does not seem weird... Fridge Logic ensues, as you ask yourself, "How the heck can a crab father a whale?!"
  • And if you're thinking, "Well duh, she's adopted", Mr. Krabs has previously called Pearl "his own flesh and blood." And the show never notices.
    • Maybe he says it figuratively?
      • The show has plenty of other Mind Screw episodes as well. "What's a gorilla doing underwater?"
        • Squidward in Clarinetland. Trippiest. SpongeBob. Episode. Ever.
• Even though Ralph Bakshi's animated films are more known for their adult material, some of his films, especially Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, have trippy sequences that could be considered mind screw.
• Twelve Ounce Mouse
• Parodied in Perfect Hair Forever: "I wish these hot dogs and cats were not symbolic of anything, and this was all just a dumb anime mindf*** !"
• Transformers: Beast Machines was more of a Heavy Mind Petting, but it was still pretty clouded with symbolism, and the fact that it could be deciphered tended to raise another problem when the message didn't go over well.
• The final episode of Teen Titans was really more of a No Ending, but it was such an over-the-top and inexplicable No Ending that it has to be mentioned here. It has been stated in interviews that the show's staff wasn't too keen on explaining things in the story; what transpired here can be best described as that policy's logical conclusion.
  • It should be noted, though, that the sort of question Glen Murakami wasn't keen on answering were things about the characters' non-suited lives, and the "how did villain X get out of the Cardboard Prison last time?" sort of things that he considered unimportant, a distraction from the main plot. This was the only episode in which nothing was made sense of. (Well, Beast Boy does move on after the Terra incident - which we'd thought him over three seasons ago. The rest is pure randomness.)
• Xavier: Renegade Angel is basically one massive, nonsensical mind screw after another, until the whole thing resembles a 3D-animated acid trip Gone Horribly Wrong.
• The episode of Totally Spies!, "Deja Cruise". To make a long story short, it was like the girls' dreams were having dreams. The WOOHP contract may as well have this clause on it: "CAUTION: Prolonged employment at this occupation may cause you to lose the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality."
  • I just thought it was a virtual reality.
• ReBoot had an episode that only makes sense when you realize it is a Homage to The Prisoner, oddly enough. The end of the episode revealed it was All Just a Dream, but the Mind Screw elements make more sense because of that, and Matrix received some Character Development bordering on a World of Cardboard Speech.
• Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy: in "One Plus One Equals Ed", the titular trio try and know everything so they can become super-smart and famous. In their quest for knowledge, however, all of reality breaks down- trees are flat as cardboard, Eddy eats the sun, Nazz turns into a dinosaur, and on and on. The madness only ends when the Eds are flying on a balloon that gets popped by the animator's giant pencil. And they never speak of it again.
• The Simpsons,
  • Parodied in "Mr. Plow" where an advertising company produces a TV advert for Homer's plowing service, featuring a opera-singing woman screaming at a snow-globe before smashing it on the pavement. In black and white. The family's response sums it up well.

Lisa: Dad, was that your commercial? Homer: ...I don't know.

• Pictured above is the Itchy-and-Scratchy replacement "Worker and Parasite" from "Krusty Gets Kancelled". Krusty's reaction ("What the hell was that?!") is dead on.
  • Word of God states it's Matt Groening's love letter to eastern European animation.
• And, of course, the "Mr. Sparkle" commercial from "In Marge We Trust", where a Japanese detergent mascot that looks like Homer Simpson's head shatters a two-headed cow like glass (among other things).
• Similar to the ReBoot example above, "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes" only makes sense if you know it's a parody of The Prisoner.
• One off-joke in an episode shows Homer watching Twin Peaks, finding the show engrossing while having "no idea what's going on".

• The Futurama episode "The Sting", in which Leela's perception of reality becomes more and more deranged, with events that turn out to be dreams, a hallucination of a morbidly cheerful musical number, a 2001: A Space Odyssey parody, and descent into obsessive insanity. It turns out everything in the episode since the bee attack was her nightmare.
• The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat is probably one of the most Mind Screwiest western animation films ever. And unlike the film it's a sequel to, Ralph Bakshi had absolutely nothing to do with it.
• One in the Time Travel episode of Gargoyles, to quote The Nostalgia Critic:

NC: Basically, they make it back to Manhattan, but it turns out Xanatos took over in the forty years they were gone, but then it turns out that it isn't Xanatos at all, but a computer with Xanatos' memories, but then it turns out it wasn't the computer, but Lexington, who was overtaken by madness, but then it turns out that the whole thing was an illusion created by Puck to get the time medallion, but then it turns out that it was all a dream, but it may not have. Interesting? Yes. Confusing? Oh, hell yes.

• At the end of the Super Mario World episode "The Yoshi Shuffle", Luigi's brain is apparently melted (giving rise to the Fan Nickname "Retard Luigi") following this exchange:

Luigi: Uh, did I catch the ball? Mario: Whaddaya mean, catch the ball? You were the ball!

• The Animatrix is an animated series inspired by The Matrix, but "half of it couldn't even be understood unless you were crazy or an art major."
• Parodied in Family Guy in "Oceans Three and a half

Brian: I am not folowing the story here. Stewie: Shut up.

• The Canadian short La Salla. 15 seconds in, the main character is shooting replica cows at paintings for no obvious reason.
• In Ugly Americans, the entire episode of "G. I. Twayne" is practically a giant Mind Screw episode towards both the main character Mark Lily as well as the viewers. As it turns out the entire thing is just a pre-enactment. This screws Mark so much he shows clear paranoia at the end of the episode.
• Aang's stress-related hallucinations in Nightmares and Daydreams get so over the top that you might just forget that he's nervous about the invasion and start to think that the creators are on something.
• Pretty much every episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Monster from the Id", though it's justified by the fact that most of it is spent literally inside the mind of a Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Here's a real Mind Screw: Doofenshmirtz hates birthdays because his parents weren't there when he was born.
• Some Woody Woodpecker shorts can get very nonsensical, even by cartoon standards.
• Pretty much all of Adventure Time. Good luck trying to understand any of it!
• Regular Show, which usually starts out with a fairly simple, straightforward, and every-day plot (learning to play guitar, getting tickets to a concert, throwing a friend a surprise birthday party, etc), but by the last few minutes of the episode, their totally normal actions will usually have broken reality, woke up some kind of Eldritch Abomination, traveled through time, or they've ended up getting attacked by something. Usually something really messed up. And the really screwy thing is that after the cosmic horror part is solved, it's usually only an afterthought, at which point the characters focus on the normal subplot that got them into it.
• Ho-boy, Aeon Flux. To give just one example, the title heroine dies in several episodes, yet the show still seems to have at least some continuity. You'd be hard pressed to find someone among the show's most diehard fans who won't admit the show confuses the hell out of him. That's the point - probably.

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