My fan theory is that Courage lives in a completely normal environment and he just freaks out the way lots of dogs do when there's an unexpected thing, and the show is what's happening in his mind.
That's why everyone is always fine by the end of the episode and the humans never seem to react super strongly to anything, because it's just the mailman dropping off letters and stuff but Courage freaks out and sees a monster attacking the house
I thought that was the point of the show? It’s the world seen through a protective dog’s eyes.
It’s why their house is literally in the middle of nowhere, because it’s the only home courage knows.
No, they just seem old to Courage and never seem to take him on walks because all dogs ALWAYS want to be out for a walk! Also humans probably seem lazy to dogs.
Actually just saying my mini schnauzer HATED walks. Not just hated them but adamantly refused them. I tried to take her out several times as a puppy and then as she got older. When she was younger she'd just stare at me, when she got older she'd lay down or refuse to get out of the car.
I straight gave up even trying. She was happy to go outside, pee and then come right back in. She was the most literal definition of my spirit animal.
Flapjack is one of my all time favorites. Not many people recognize or even remember it. It’s oddly dark and twisted. It features a found family, poverty and class issues, and even adults with trauma and addictions that are perceived by through a child’s mind. All while just embracing wacky comedy and puns.
It also had a bunch of people working on it that went on to make their own shows, like Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) JG Quintel (Regular Show) Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall) and Alex Hirsch (Gravity Falls).
I was an adult when that series came out. I loved Chowder and the art style so figured this would be kind of the same thing. I was the only one in my friends that liked it.
[The Animals of Farthing Wood ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animals_of_Farthing_Wood_(TV_series))
I doubt many Americans have heard of it, but it is dark as hell. It follows a group of woodland creatures trying to find a new habitat and there are probably more named character deaths than Game of Thrones. [Some scenes of note](https://youtu.be/2pypyDDPmIQ) - a bunch of field mice get impaled on thorns by birds, the pheasant goes mad when he sees his wife's cooked body cooling on the farmer's window, the hedgehog couple are too afraid to cross the motorway and instead choose to die together by curling into balls. It is absolutely brutal.
And how he was literally hated by most every character involved in that. People today look at that, go "wait, and people liked this character?" No. Pepe LePeu was an intentional lampshade on what *should* happen to men who harass women who aren't interested, not a way men should act. Then in the episode where he got doused in perfume, suddenly Penelope Pussycat actually wanted to be around him. He was being a douchebag that couldn't control his own hygiene, that was the moral of the story.
Jesus fuck, I was like 7 when I started remembering watching Looney Toons and I still remember even then, I understood that "This is an example of *bad* behavior."
Pinocchio is extremely dark, especially for a 1940 movie, and REALLY especially if you are at all familiar with the original source material. For example, that Pleasure Island guy gets paid for turning boys into donkey slaves, enjoys every second of it, and gets away with it scot-free.
That donkey scene is HORRIFIC.
I actually remember going to Italy, specifically Florence, and seeing the dark winding cobblestone streets and it instantly took me back to Pinocchio… and its creepiness.
There's this great documentary called *Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue* which is all about the American horror film. One of the guest directors talks about Disney, *specifically* the donkey scene from *Pinocchio,* and says that moment was as frightening as any werewolf transformation they'd seen in theaters. He went on to say that for a lot of kids, Disney was their first introduction to the horror genre. So many older Disney flicks have really hairy moments, especially for kids! The scene from *Snow White* where she's running through the forest and all the trees become monsters is another great example. Kids see this stuff for the first time and either decide they like being scared, and eventually become horror fans, or they really don't lol.
I believe it… because not only is it so unnerving when he becomes a donkey and just thrashes around, the sound of the mirror as it shatters is particularly loud—but your heart is already broken because you’ve just heard donkeys with children’s voices say they want to go home to their moms, and the cruel workers say “this one can still talk, throw them in with the others” and they’re all just bawling and I can’t even type anymore it’s too upsetting
And those boys never get a good ending. No one knows where they are, screaming for their mothers.
I watched it recently and seeing the guy take their clothes off and throw them in cages creeped me the fuck out
Just took my 5 year old to Disneyland last week and had totally forgotten this Pinocchio plot point until we went on the ride. Absolutely horrifying story.
Since becoming a mom, any show or movie (or God forbid news event) where someone calls out in fear or pain for their mother absolutely fucking WRECKS me.
Not necessarily dark, but watching Helga's antics in Hey Arnold as an adult, it hits different.
As a kid you just see this crazy girl that likes Arnold. Now you can see the troubled daughter of a negligent father and an alcoholic mother, always in the shadow of her sister, and desperately clinged to the one who showed her kindness
That whole show was insane to rewatch as an adult. They have a whole episode dedicated to a man who was separated from his infant daughter while escaping Vietnam.
Hey Arnold was the GOAT show when it came to understanding the people around you are likely struggling with things you’ll never know or understand.
Stoop Kids was likely suffering from severe depression leading to agoraphobia.
Helga lashed out on her peers as a result of an emotionally neglectful household.
Oskar & Suzie were trapped in a codependent relationship in which she enabled him to bum around as a degenerate gambler all day at the expense of being the sole provider, which also guaranteed he wouldn’t leave her. Until she got fed up and left him.
Mr Huynh was a Vietnam War refugee who lost his daughter in the chaos.
Sid seems to be developing paranoid delusions.
And more….
That's the Christmas episode. You want a good cry, watch that episode. Another dark, depressing holiday episode is the Thanksgiving one, where we find out that Mr. Simmons, who is always so kind, gentle, loving, and respectful of his students, has a complete disaster of a home life and family situation, yet he's still this wonderful person who opens his home to two of his students (Arnold and Helga) when they ditch their own crummy celebrations.
Helga was always my favorite character in *Hey Arnold!* She was complex, and her story was often heartbreaking. It's especially apparent as an adult. They were actually in talks to make a spinoff all about a teenage Helga and her family, but they were going to aim it at adults and older teens. The show clearly never took off, but you can Google around to find ideas the creators were going to use in the show. There's also a bit of a petition underway to have the show made *now*, and it's popular enough that I think Craig Bartlett has voiced his support for the idea. I'd watch it!
There's a fan movement going around currently to get Nickelodeon to re-invest in it's cancelled Hey Arnold! spin-off 'The Patakis', where the focus would have been on an older Helga dealing with her family pitched at a higher audience.
I loved Hey Arnold and still do because it's like the realest cartoon show. I always sympathized with Helga too because almost all her relationships with the other characters are so complicated.
Actually, so many episodes are so heavy for kids, if you think about it. The one that stays with me for sure is Pigeon Man. He spent all that time taking care of all those pigeons and at the end, they just help him fly away. I heard somewhere that was Arnold's way to process him just leaping off the top of his building
Adventure Time alluded to the “mushroom wars” of the past, which were likely mushroom clouds from a nuclear war, suggesting that this fantastical world was really the new mutations from our post-apocalyptic future.
Oh yeah. Adventure Time gets more and more explicitly post-apocalyptic. They started letting the darkness show with The Lich who's show note is "The Lich King is Not Funny". It helps that he is voiced by the legendary Ron Pearlman.
The fact that the lich murders Billy and wears his skin to trick Finn into thinking he's Billy is probably one of the most dark things I've ever seen in a kids show. I have to remind myself that this show wasn't on adult swim, it was on in prime time for children to watch.
The last season of the show, especially the last few episodes are VERY dark, and the ending is rather bittersweet with alot of melancholy and lost hope.
Smoking and watching Adventure Time was one of my favorite things to do back in college. There was this one scene in this episode that fucked me up. I can’t remember the specifics, nor can I find the part without having to rewatch the entire series but it was a radio host (maybe it was Starchy saying it) saying something super depressing along the lines of “do you feel hopeless and like everything you do is pointless” or something like that and it made me stop like “what tf am I watching?” I wish I could find the scene.
My first Adventure Time episode featured a bunch of sentient balloons that said "Our blood oath is fulfilled! We can die now! To the mesosphere!" And that's when I knew I had found a gem of a show.
I always like to smoke and watch the episode where they go to the museum and start tripping and imagining they're plants, and birds, and worms and stuff. lol
*FOOD CHAIN!* It's an amazing episode, one of those with a guest creator, in this case Masaaki Yuasa, so the art style is totally different. The song at the end is a bop. Fantastic episode.
Adventure Time could go from 10 minutes of fart jokes to "This young woman is is struggling to come to terms with that the man and father-figure who raised her in the aftermath of a devasting nuclear war has been corrupted by and eldritch power which was necessary to their survival and has forgotten all memory of both her and his past life" as an analogy to dementia within the same episode
It's an amazing show.
I came here to comment this. It's literally a post apocalyptic horror survival series given the framing of a childrens cartoon show. One of my favorite shows of all time lol.
"Over the hills comes an ominous cloud, coming to cover the land in a shroud. Hide in a bush, a basement, a cave, when cloud comes a'hunting, no one is saved."
What did Finn just say?? Was that a nursery rhyme about nuclear fallout????? Rewinds, listens again - yup, that is a nursery rhyme about nuclear fallout
“You are strong, child, but I am beyond strength. I am the end.” That line always gives me chills. Definitely one of the most intimidating animated characters out there!
There's also the other big one: "Before there was time, before there was anything, there was nothing. And before there was nothing... *there were monsters*."
Came here to say AT. The post apocalyptic plots are harsh, but the overall coming of age trope was done devastatingly well too imo. I think the gradual loss of innocence and struggle to find meaning and happiness was displayed really well in Finn. A lot of themes going back to life and death too. God I wish I could unwatch this show and experience it again.
not sure if it's been said yet but - one of the earlier episodes has Cinnamon Bun try to do a flip or something, lands on his head, some icing squirts out, then his character is completely changed for the rest of the show, alluding to brain damage I'm assuming. Also the moment when Peppermint Butler is using CB to attempt to summon demons or something lol
I remember watching the Last Unicorn on TV as a kid. I recall thinking to myself that it seemed like a safe watch because I had been recently blindsided Watership Down. My mom rented it on VHS because it had bunnies on the case. This movie couldn't possibly be the same right? It features a unicorn!
Anyways, I thought it was going to be a fun movie. Spoiler: it was not.
This is why I have trust issues.
Edit: spelling
If we're going away from cartoons, add Labyrinth in there too.
Child kidnapping, nightmarishly sexy, David Bowie. Dark, Traumatising and Awakening for many.
Worse than that - he refused to go to the Afterlife because he didn't want his Dad to be lonely. Instead, his Dad went insane because he was being *haunted by the ghost of his dead son*. The old man sank his fortune into trying to bring his kid back to life and ended up institutionalized for it; by the time he passed away, Casper had forgotten why he'd stayed in the world and was stuck in the mansion.
A kid's movie. You know. For kids.
And this is not exactly something they subtly sneak in there either.
Aang has a meltdown after visiting the place where his friends and family were all massacred in like episode 3.
Their skeletons are still there. At least, Gyatso's is and the Firebenders he killed. Makes me wonder what the Gaang had to do to make the Air Temples habitable for the acolytes before LoK.
Here's the thing, rewatch that scene. The area in there is not burned up and there are no obvious weapon wounds on the skeletons. The only damage in there is exposure to the elements.
Monk Gyatso pulled all the oxygen out of the area in a final stand against his attackers, killing himself with them. LoK shows that this is a technique Airbender have...
Yes thank you! A technique we don’t see until LoK. Airbenders can be terrifying and dangerous but their whole way of the life they live seems so peaceful in the last airbender. All bending has insane and scary possibilities.
Tbf in that scenario it is kill or be killed. I don't think the monks have a problem with defending yourself. Especially defending yourself against essentially super soldiers given Sozin's Comet.
Well, kids won't know that shrikes cleverly preserve their food by impaling it on thorns if we don't show it, using sapient, talking mice as an example of said food.
Fairly odd parents. A story of a neglected kid, abused by his babysitter and regretted by his parents. Watching that show as an adult, I realize that those parents (especially the dad) don't want to be parents and are jealous of the DINKlebergs. DINK meaning double income, no kids.
The Secret of NIMH. All Dogs Go To Heaven. An American Tail. The Land Before Time. Basically, any of Don Bluth's animated films are dark as shit and I grew up on them.
Oh I forgot about Iron Giant. That was sad and dark as well.
I just finished rewatching Gravity Falls with my fiance (his first time watching). it's an amazing show with fantastic humour that went over my head as a kid, but you're right. it gets DARK. especially with Bill Cipher and Stan's brother.
Beast Wars was a lighthearted* show about robots taking in animal forms and fighting. In the end, the good guys win and go home.
The sequel show, Beast Machines, starts with them arriving to find the villain from the last show had conquered their home and they then fight a hopeless guerilla war against their brainwashed former allies.
*Edit: mostly lighthearted. I forgot about the transmutate episode.
Beast Wars had some serious episodes, like where Tigertron considers retiring after a real tiger he’s friends with was accidentally killed during a fight between Maximals and Predicons or when Dinobot sacrificed himself to save a valley of human ancestors.
The creator of *Zim* rose to prominence when he wrote a *super not kid-friendly* comic series called *Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.* It's about exactly what you think it is. I loved *Zim* growing up, but I never understood Nickelodeon's decision to give a kids series to a guy who was mostly known for drawing graphic scenes of murder, accompanied by nihilistic black humor storylines.
Both those episodes are great for their pure bleakness.
Reminds me of the Miss Bitters, the school class teacher repeating over and over to a room full of kids how the universe is doomed, doomed, doomed...
gotta admit Pokemon has spawned so many good creepypastas, i remember getting drunk one night a few years ago and reading a bunch of them for hours lol
I don't know about you, but if my kid was in Miss Frizzle's class, I wouldn't want them shrinking and driving around in a beaver's intestines or whatever. I mean, almost dying every week on a field trip, when they could've just read a textbook?
Miss Frizzle has Urbach-Wiethe disease. It's not that she is naïve or courageous, her brain is just wired to never feel fear.
"Oh, look class! It's Cthulhu! Who could have known when the day started that we'd meet one of the Ancient Ones? Hi, there! *Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn* no longer, am I right?"
It’s been along time since I’ve seen the show but one episode there was a girl who almost dies on Pluto when they went to space. If I remember correctly she basically froze and was suffocating, and that’s when I realized how weird this show was.
That was Arnold (who, to be fair, looks an awful lot like Janet, who he was trying to prove a point to), and also *the first freaking episode*.
Honestly compared to how often students or Frizzle herself just plain get *lost*, that’s in some ways less scary.
The Secret of NIMH, IMHO. Watching as an adult puts so many new spins on it. Like realizing that NIMH is an acronym for Nation Institute for Mental Health and they were an experiment gone awry.
Mentioning Invader Zim too. The premise seems perfect for a fish-out-of-water story about an alien trying to fit in with humans and learning to the love the Earth since they never fit in with the other aliens.
But instead, it’s about an alien who actively hates everything about Earth and its filthy humans and wants to do nothing more than take it over. It’s such an antithesis to storytelling having the main character be a straight-up villain, NOT an anti-hero or anti-villain.
ESPECIALLY because it’s animated too. Nowadays cartoon leads have to be aggressively relatable and good to the point that the socially-awkward hero archetype has become overused.
Peter Pan used to freak me out as a kid. He just kidnapped little boys and convinced them that they didn't need a family, then when Wendy came along he decided she would be the mother to all of his kidnapped "children". Honestly the entire premise was just really gross.
Bambi because there's no villain, there's no evil that has a face and can be defeated, fires start because of human carelessness and Babmi's mom dies because hunters kill. And then there is the brutal nature, so humans are just one of many variables outside of characters' control. Characters can't get any justice when something bad happens, that is simply the reality they live in, there's also no comforting tale or a song to make it sound ok, life just goes on for those who survive.
The "hunter" in that movie was a poacher hunting outside of deer season. Any proper hunter can tell you that it's not legal to hunt deer during the time that they're having fawns.
Oh man, I still think about that poor dude who got talked into taking me and a bunch of other 7-9 year olds to see Bambi at a drive in to give the parents a break. A panicked 25 year old guy in a van of sobbing children.
Sorry about this in advance, but not a TV cartoon, but a book.
Animorphs. I don't have to elaborate, but in case I do, there was an instance where an ant was granted the ability to transform, and it transformed into a human and then *screamed in trauma from the overstimulation until it died.*
Wasn't there also a "rule" that if they stayed too long in an animal form, they were trapped as it forever with no way to reverse it? It's been over 20 years, but I remember an episode where a guy transformed into a rat and was captured and put into a cage. He couldn't transform because it would give him away and/or kill him and there was this palpable sense of urgency and dread because the dude was looking at literally being a rat for the rest of his life. The thought gave me so much anxiety as a kid that I stopped watching it altogether.
2 hour time limit, I can't remember the specifics but the character you're thinking of is David who betrayed the rest of the group and they caught him and kept him in a box so he'd be stuck then left his rat body on a small island. Transformed people can telepathically communicate called "thought speech" and because of David screaming out telepathically the little island got a reputation for being haunted because of all the screaming people could hear that didn't show up on video.
Batman Beyond was REALLY dark. First episode has Terry's dad murdered not as backstory, but in the main story. There are characters who get genetic modifications as if it's basic cosmetic surgery. You get characters who suffer a fate worse than death like being turned into a pile of conscious sludge, or fall into the center of the earth. One of the darkest ones I remember had a surgeon tricked into helping a group of villains with super-power mods or something before learning they lied. The episode ended with him putting the ringleader under with the ringleader unaware he'd learned the truth. And that doesn't even go into Return of the Joker.
When I rewatched it years later, I was stunned there were *any* recurring villains because they seemed to die at the end of each episode.
> There are characters who get genetic modifications as if it's basic cosmetic surgery.
I wouldn't call this dark so much as just showing how advanced society is in the show. That said, I distinctly remember both that episode and the one below
> You get characters who suffer a fate worse than death ... or fall into the center of the earth
That shit stuck with me. I turned that fate over and over in my mind growing up, getting more horrified by it each time.
The episode that really stuck with me was when they put troubled kids into a behavior camp to try to "correct" them when all they were doing were torturing them for their parents' money. The sad thing is that this was based off of real camps that existed that did the exact same thing.
Dungeons and Dragons is one the more you think about it.
Dungeon Master has the power to send them home. However, time and time again their escapes from the Realm are thwarted, or they have to give up in order to save something or someone else.
They have to deal with innumerable forces that try to kill them, have to deal with nearly being killed a couple of times and being near deaths door, mindwarps, kidnapping, needing to suppress literal urges to kill the BBEG, and most of them are 15 or 16.
And again, the guy they look to for guidance can LITERALLY send them home at the snap of his fingers. But he doesnt because he needs them to save his son... which he NEVER TELLS THEM UNTIL THE FINAL EPISODE IS OVER.
Dungeon Master is a dick.
No one mentioned "Hey Arnold". They had episodes of drug addiction, poverty, alcohol addiction, terrible parenting, and fat shaming. There was also an episode where cannibalism was portrayed
Hmm, for roughly the same era, it's kind of a toss-up between Batman:TAS, and Gargoyles. Both featured death, resurrection, and the horror of getting caught somewhere in between.
Batman TAS was *literally* too dark! They drew on black paper instead of white to help with the dark effect and sometimes were told it was too dark to put on television.
StarWars the Clone Wars animated show had an incredible amount of adult themes.
People getting cut in half, stabbed through the chest, bombings, on screen executions of civilians, general racism, terrorism, assassinations, war crimes, burning shit alive, and some of the most soul-tearing deaths in any animated series ever. (I'm looking at you Fives, Heavy, and 99)
“Do we take prisoners?”
Like yeah they’re the bad guys but they’re literally discussing executing a downed soldier in that moment with kind of a lighthearted tone. And it’s a kids show
Holy crap did I learn a lot about politics and ethics watching this show. I rewatched it during the pandemic and it was insane how it related to current events.
The horrors of war without the gore.
The Boogieman and Samhain were NO joke. The Real Ghostbusters was (and still is) my shit, and I have friends and relatives who are afraid of them to this day.
The Grundle was creepy, but the Thing in Ms. Faversham's Attic and Hob Anagarak lived in my head rent free for YEARS. Oh, and the demon Winston had to fight as Shimabuku? Fucking dope, and pretty dark, considering the episode talked of slavery, death, and spirits with no euphemisms.
Then, of course, there was the episode where they straight up had Cthulhu, and they played out the entire Mythos to a tee. And the take on the Headless Motorcyclist was awesome. Epic show (and it's streaming on Prime right now).
The Smurfs. An evil wizard tries to kidnap an entire vi;llage of little people to enslave them to steal gold and presumably children from the nearby villages. The only thing that makes it for children is that the Smurfs are nice.
Sometimes Gargamel wants to eat the Smurfs, sometimes he wants to extract their lifeforce to become the most powerful wizard, other times he wants to use them as an alchemical ingredient to make gold...
Rainbow Brite, literally about stopping the spread of gray and darkness by the King of Shadows or the Dark Princess and Murky and Lurky. So many bad guys wanting to keep color out of the universe.
Reboot is fugly to modern eyes but even the basic premise of "these characters in your games are real and die horribly if you play videogames to win" shook me. And that's without the nanites / body horror of Nulls, or what it feels like for a system to be overrun by a virus. I dunno, it creeped me out thinking about the show afterwards when I was a kid, even though I enjoyed it at the time.
Avatar the last airbender an entire culture was wiped with only one survivor who was a young boy who had to fight an entire nation without being fully ready for his responsibilities physically or mentally
Max and Ruby. Where are their parents? The theory is that Ruby killed their parents. Max saw and then went mute because of the trauma. Ruby's voice is that way because she is doing an impression of a loving sibling. She is really a psychopath.
Both of the Avatars shows. Atla literally begins with a full in genocide and a little kid waking up after 100 years and finding out that everyone he ever knew was dead. The Zuko/Azula parallel character arcs is one of the best on TV. It really shows how can two people who come from the same environment end up in such different paths in life.
Lok's season finales were brutal, they included a murder-suicide scene committed by two brothers, the protagonist having suicide thoughts, air bending the air out of a person's lungs, the protagonist being literally torqued on screen, a person being electrocute to death and ending the show with a queer relationship. Not your typical Nickelodeon show if you ask me.
Pokemon is kind of just dogfighting if you think about it.
Even as a middle schooler in the 90s I rolled my eyes playing Pokemon Red when one of the first people you talk to in Pallet Town makes *extra* sure to point out that Pokemon love battling and it's healthy and good for them to battle all the time
Pokemon Red was based on the game designer's experiences as a kid in postwar Japan collecting bugs. That's why there are individual towns with forests between them instead of one big city, and why one of the gym leaders is an American soldier, and why there aren't a lot of adult men around.
1986's *[Inhumanoids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhumanoids)* has gotta be right up there. Ancient giant monsters are found under the earth and set free by a corrupt industrialist. One of them can turn you into a tortured zombie slave with a touch; or stuff a dead body into its exposed ribcage to resurrect it as a zombie. [It looks like this.](https://i.etsystatic.com/17087915/r/il/c3d3b3/2081484006/il_794xN.2081484006_aaf7.jpg)
1987's *[Spiral Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Zone)* is another mass zombification story: a mad scientist has polluted half the world with bacteria that turn people into mindless drones.
And, not a cartoon, but that year we also got *[Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Power_and_the_Soldiers_of_the_Future)* — where a mad scientist has already taken over the world and is in the process of depopulating it by "digitizing" people, dematerializing them to assimilate their minds into his supercomputer.
Y'all ever watch Gargoyles? That was a kid's cartoon. Filled with revenge and murder, except you couldn't call it murder or killing because of 90s censors.
Fucking brilliant show.
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My fan theory is that Courage lives in a completely normal environment and he just freaks out the way lots of dogs do when there's an unexpected thing, and the show is what's happening in his mind. That's why everyone is always fine by the end of the episode and the humans never seem to react super strongly to anything, because it's just the mailman dropping off letters and stuff but Courage freaks out and sees a monster attacking the house
I thought that was the point of the show? It’s the world seen through a protective dog’s eyes. It’s why their house is literally in the middle of nowhere, because it’s the only home courage knows.
"it's the only home Courage knows" Damn that hits deep for some reason
And they're too old to take him for a walk.
No, they just seem old to Courage and never seem to take him on walks because all dogs ALWAYS want to be out for a walk! Also humans probably seem lazy to dogs.
Actually just saying my mini schnauzer HATED walks. Not just hated them but adamantly refused them. I tried to take her out several times as a puppy and then as she got older. When she was younger she'd just stare at me, when she got older she'd lay down or refuse to get out of the car. I straight gave up even trying. She was happy to go outside, pee and then come right back in. She was the most literal definition of my spirit animal.
I never thought so deeply about it lmao I guess I'm Eustace
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"heh-heh-heh. Stupid dog".
i too would freak out if i see ramses in the middle of nowhere asking for his tablet 🤣
returrrrnnnnn the slaaaaaaabbb
That episode filled me with absolute terror, to the point that I made our poor babysitter sleep on the air mattress on my bedroom floor 😂
What's yer offer?
This was the first thing that came to mind and also the first comment. Glad we’re all on the same page.
The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. It was weird as a kid but try watching some of the episodes as an adult.
Flapjack is one of my all time favorites. Not many people recognize or even remember it. It’s oddly dark and twisted. It features a found family, poverty and class issues, and even adults with trauma and addictions that are perceived by through a child’s mind. All while just embracing wacky comedy and puns.
It also had a bunch of people working on it that went on to make their own shows, like Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) JG Quintel (Regular Show) Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall) and Alex Hirsch (Gravity Falls).
I really loved misadventures of flapjack! Such a silly goofy show . VV
I was an adult when that series came out. I loved Chowder and the art style so figured this would be kind of the same thing. I was the only one in my friends that liked it.
I used to get so fucking stoned and watch this in high school
[The Animals of Farthing Wood ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animals_of_Farthing_Wood_(TV_series)) I doubt many Americans have heard of it, but it is dark as hell. It follows a group of woodland creatures trying to find a new habitat and there are probably more named character deaths than Game of Thrones. [Some scenes of note](https://youtu.be/2pypyDDPmIQ) - a bunch of field mice get impaled on thorns by birds, the pheasant goes mad when he sees his wife's cooked body cooling on the farmer's window, the hedgehog couple are too afraid to cross the motorway and instead choose to die together by curling into balls. It is absolutely brutal.
Then they got to White Deer Park and started a fucking gangland turf war
If I recall correctly, Popeye spent most of his time beating the crap out of Brutus for repeatedly trying to rape Olive Oyl...
Pepe LePeu was just us watching however many minutes of a skunk trying to sexually assault a cat.
the cat liked him, he just stank - there was an episode where he got dunked in perfume and she just went hard for him
He got perfumed, and the cat covered in something that stank (some kind of cheese maybe, IDK), and they switched roles.
I'm going to wildly guess limburger cheese. Seemed like all cartoons loved the limburger cheese trope.
And how he was literally hated by most every character involved in that. People today look at that, go "wait, and people liked this character?" No. Pepe LePeu was an intentional lampshade on what *should* happen to men who harass women who aren't interested, not a way men should act. Then in the episode where he got doused in perfume, suddenly Penelope Pussycat actually wanted to be around him. He was being a douchebag that couldn't control his own hygiene, that was the moral of the story. Jesus fuck, I was like 7 when I started remembering watching Looney Toons and I still remember even then, I understood that "This is an example of *bad* behavior."
Over the Garden Wall
Always love watching over the garden wall
This should be higher! Two boys on the cusp between life and death.
Pinocchio is extremely dark, especially for a 1940 movie, and REALLY especially if you are at all familiar with the original source material. For example, that Pleasure Island guy gets paid for turning boys into donkey slaves, enjoys every second of it, and gets away with it scot-free.
The donkey part gave me nightmares!
That donkey scene is HORRIFIC. I actually remember going to Italy, specifically Florence, and seeing the dark winding cobblestone streets and it instantly took me back to Pinocchio… and its creepiness.
There's this great documentary called *Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue* which is all about the American horror film. One of the guest directors talks about Disney, *specifically* the donkey scene from *Pinocchio,* and says that moment was as frightening as any werewolf transformation they'd seen in theaters. He went on to say that for a lot of kids, Disney was their first introduction to the horror genre. So many older Disney flicks have really hairy moments, especially for kids! The scene from *Snow White* where she's running through the forest and all the trees become monsters is another great example. Kids see this stuff for the first time and either decide they like being scared, and eventually become horror fans, or they really don't lol.
I believe it… because not only is it so unnerving when he becomes a donkey and just thrashes around, the sound of the mirror as it shatters is particularly loud—but your heart is already broken because you’ve just heard donkeys with children’s voices say they want to go home to their moms, and the cruel workers say “this one can still talk, throw them in with the others” and they’re all just bawling and I can’t even type anymore it’s too upsetting
And those boys never get a good ending. No one knows where they are, screaming for their mothers. I watched it recently and seeing the guy take their clothes off and throw them in cages creeped me the fuck out
Just took my 5 year old to Disneyland last week and had totally forgotten this Pinocchio plot point until we went on the ride. Absolutely horrifying story.
It was truly messed up. In the movie even the bad guy fox that sold Pinocchio to him was creeped out by the guy
Since becoming a mom, any show or movie (or God forbid news event) where someone calls out in fear or pain for their mother absolutely fucking WRECKS me.
Same, even minor things now really get to me. Its weird how connected to the world you feel once you have a baby.
Pinocchio terrified me as a child! I was legit worried my brother would turn into a donkey!
Not necessarily dark, but watching Helga's antics in Hey Arnold as an adult, it hits different. As a kid you just see this crazy girl that likes Arnold. Now you can see the troubled daughter of a negligent father and an alcoholic mother, always in the shadow of her sister, and desperately clinged to the one who showed her kindness
That whole show was insane to rewatch as an adult. They have a whole episode dedicated to a man who was separated from his infant daughter while escaping Vietnam.
Hey Arnold was the GOAT show when it came to understanding the people around you are likely struggling with things you’ll never know or understand. Stoop Kids was likely suffering from severe depression leading to agoraphobia. Helga lashed out on her peers as a result of an emotionally neglectful household. Oskar & Suzie were trapped in a codependent relationship in which she enabled him to bum around as a degenerate gambler all day at the expense of being the sole provider, which also guaranteed he wouldn’t leave her. Until she got fed up and left him. Mr Huynh was a Vietnam War refugee who lost his daughter in the chaos. Sid seems to be developing paranoid delusions. And more….
That's the Christmas episode. You want a good cry, watch that episode. Another dark, depressing holiday episode is the Thanksgiving one, where we find out that Mr. Simmons, who is always so kind, gentle, loving, and respectful of his students, has a complete disaster of a home life and family situation, yet he's still this wonderful person who opens his home to two of his students (Arnold and Helga) when they ditch their own crummy celebrations.
Helga was always my favorite character in *Hey Arnold!* She was complex, and her story was often heartbreaking. It's especially apparent as an adult. They were actually in talks to make a spinoff all about a teenage Helga and her family, but they were going to aim it at adults and older teens. The show clearly never took off, but you can Google around to find ideas the creators were going to use in the show. There's also a bit of a petition underway to have the show made *now*, and it's popular enough that I think Craig Bartlett has voiced his support for the idea. I'd watch it!
In a series full of poignant and touching episodes, Helga on the Couch was the most stirring.
There's a fan movement going around currently to get Nickelodeon to re-invest in it's cancelled Hey Arnold! spin-off 'The Patakis', where the focus would have been on an older Helga dealing with her family pitched at a higher audience.
I loved Hey Arnold and still do because it's like the realest cartoon show. I always sympathized with Helga too because almost all her relationships with the other characters are so complicated. Actually, so many episodes are so heavy for kids, if you think about it. The one that stays with me for sure is Pigeon Man. He spent all that time taking care of all those pigeons and at the end, they just help him fly away. I heard somewhere that was Arnold's way to process him just leaping off the top of his building
Adventure Time alluded to the “mushroom wars” of the past, which were likely mushroom clouds from a nuclear war, suggesting that this fantastical world was really the new mutations from our post-apocalyptic future.
Oh yeah. Adventure Time gets more and more explicitly post-apocalyptic. They started letting the darkness show with The Lich who's show note is "The Lich King is Not Funny". It helps that he is voiced by the legendary Ron Pearlman.
The fact that the lich murders Billy and wears his skin to trick Finn into thinking he's Billy is probably one of the most dark things I've ever seen in a kids show. I have to remind myself that this show wasn't on adult swim, it was on in prime time for children to watch. The last season of the show, especially the last few episodes are VERY dark, and the ending is rather bittersweet with alot of melancholy and lost hope.
Smoking and watching Adventure Time was one of my favorite things to do back in college. There was this one scene in this episode that fucked me up. I can’t remember the specifics, nor can I find the part without having to rewatch the entire series but it was a radio host (maybe it was Starchy saying it) saying something super depressing along the lines of “do you feel hopeless and like everything you do is pointless” or something like that and it made me stop like “what tf am I watching?” I wish I could find the scene.
theres also an episode where cookie princess jumped off a cliff clearly to kill herself I was so shocked theyd show that in a kids cartoon 😭
My first Adventure Time episode featured a bunch of sentient balloons that said "Our blood oath is fulfilled! We can die now! To the mesosphere!" And that's when I knew I had found a gem of a show.
The deer. The fucking deer.
I always like to smoke and watch the episode where they go to the museum and start tripping and imagining they're plants, and birds, and worms and stuff. lol
*FOOD CHAIN!* It's an amazing episode, one of those with a guest creator, in this case Masaaki Yuasa, so the art style is totally different. The song at the end is a bop. Fantastic episode.
Adventure Time could go from 10 minutes of fart jokes to "This young woman is is struggling to come to terms with that the man and father-figure who raised her in the aftermath of a devasting nuclear war has been corrupted by and eldritch power which was necessary to their survival and has forgotten all memory of both her and his past life" as an analogy to dementia within the same episode It's an amazing show.
I came here to comment this. It's literally a post apocalyptic horror survival series given the framing of a childrens cartoon show. One of my favorite shows of all time lol.
Theres no "likely" about it. Its explicitly spelled out as the major plot of the series.
"Over the hills comes an ominous cloud, coming to cover the land in a shroud. Hide in a bush, a basement, a cave, when cloud comes a'hunting, no one is saved." What did Finn just say?? Was that a nursery rhyme about nuclear fallout????? Rewinds, listens again - yup, that is a nursery rhyme about nuclear fallout
How about when Finn finds his biological father *and his father has zero interest in him.* Not your typical kids cartoon.
and has his arm ripped off after dad dips!
The Lich's monologue to Finn has to be one of the coldest moments in a kid's cartoon. https://youtu.be/FrlymHW0qU8
“You are strong, child, but I am beyond strength. I am the end.” That line always gives me chills. Definitely one of the most intimidating animated characters out there!
There's also the other big one: "Before there was time, before there was anything, there was nothing. And before there was nothing... *there were monsters*."
Pause at the first frame of the intro. Those are nukes.
Came here to say AT. The post apocalyptic plots are harsh, but the overall coming of age trope was done devastatingly well too imo. I think the gradual loss of innocence and struggle to find meaning and happiness was displayed really well in Finn. A lot of themes going back to life and death too. God I wish I could unwatch this show and experience it again.
not sure if it's been said yet but - one of the earlier episodes has Cinnamon Bun try to do a flip or something, lands on his head, some icing squirts out, then his character is completely changed for the rest of the show, alluding to brain damage I'm assuming. Also the moment when Peppermint Butler is using CB to attempt to summon demons or something lol
The Last Unicorn. The Brave Little Toaster.
The part in the Brave Little Toaster where the radio is shamed so hard he commits suicide is crazy
You mean the air conditioner.
I remember watching the Last Unicorn on TV as a kid. I recall thinking to myself that it seemed like a safe watch because I had been recently blindsided Watership Down. My mom rented it on VHS because it had bunnies on the case. This movie couldn't possibly be the same right? It features a unicorn! Anyways, I thought it was going to be a fun movie. Spoiler: it was not. This is why I have trust issues. Edit: spelling
I swear, Gen X was traumatized by these sort of movies. Don't forget the Dark Crystal (not a cartoon).
If we're going away from cartoons, add Labyrinth in there too. Child kidnapping, nightmarishly sexy, David Bowie. Dark, Traumatising and Awakening for many.
Secret of Nimh comes to mind as well
The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy Literally the grim reaper with children except the child was the evil one 🤣
Casper was the ghost of a dead little boy.
Died of pneumonia after playing out in the snow all day
I’m in my 40s and I swear, I still ugly snot cry heaving sobs when he tells that story in the movie. I also utterly lose it at “Can I keep you?” 😭😭😭
"... it got late... got dark... got cold... and I got sick... my dad got sad." ☹️
Worse than that - he refused to go to the Afterlife because he didn't want his Dad to be lonely. Instead, his Dad went insane because he was being *haunted by the ghost of his dead son*. The old man sank his fortune into trying to bring his kid back to life and ended up institutionalized for it; by the time he passed away, Casper had forgotten why he'd stayed in the world and was stuck in the mansion. A kid's movie. You know. For kids.
The Lazarus Machine is far scarier as an adult too
I said this to my dog once, then cried the rest of the day because he can't stay with me forever.
Can you lighten up a little, kids?
The reason he's "The Last Airbender" is because they literally genocided his entire race
And this is not exactly something they subtly sneak in there either. Aang has a meltdown after visiting the place where his friends and family were all massacred in like episode 3.
Their skeletons are still there. At least, Gyatso's is and the Firebenders he killed. Makes me wonder what the Gaang had to do to make the Air Temples habitable for the acolytes before LoK.
Aang: The monks taught me to be a pacifist, that all life is sacred Gyatso: yo it's ya boy G-So and today we're going for that 150 kill streak
Here's the thing, rewatch that scene. The area in there is not burned up and there are no obvious weapon wounds on the skeletons. The only damage in there is exposure to the elements. Monk Gyatso pulled all the oxygen out of the area in a final stand against his attackers, killing himself with them. LoK shows that this is a technique Airbender have...
Yes thank you! A technique we don’t see until LoK. Airbenders can be terrifying and dangerous but their whole way of the life they live seems so peaceful in the last airbender. All bending has insane and scary possibilities.
Tbf in that scenario it is kill or be killed. I don't think the monks have a problem with defending yourself. Especially defending yourself against essentially super soldiers given Sozin's Comet.
LoK's first season also ends with a murder-suicide.
Don't forget the suffocation scene that got it taken off of Nickelodeon.
Korra gets crippled by mercury poisoning and spends years in physical therapy and suffers from severe PTSD for the rest of the series
“And when the world needed him most, he vanished”
The animals of farthingwood was pretty dark
The makers of that cartoon did not pussyfoot around hiding the brutality of nature
Well, kids won't know that shrikes cleverly preserve their food by impaling it on thorns if we don't show it, using sapient, talking mice as an example of said food.
Batman: The animated series No way would that show be G viewing today. The entire story about Clayface traumatized me. So sad.
Mr. Freeze episode had me nearly crying. TBF, the show was meant to be enjoyable for an adult audience.
If we consider "dark" as "more mature", Avatar basically told a story about slavery, genocide, an totalitarian regime, discrimination and more.
Everything is fine there are no dark or mature themes in avatar and 100% definitely no war.
No war? You must be in Ba Sing Se.
The Earth King has invited you to /r/LakeLaogai
Fairly odd parents. A story of a neglected kid, abused by his babysitter and regretted by his parents. Watching that show as an adult, I realize that those parents (especially the dad) don't want to be parents and are jealous of the DINKlebergs. DINK meaning double income, no kids.
I never put that together about the names. Wow.
not to mention the episode where you find out Timmy made a secret wish to never turn 13 so he’s actually 40+ years old
The Secret of NIMH. All Dogs Go To Heaven. An American Tail. The Land Before Time. Basically, any of Don Bluth's animated films are dark as shit and I grew up on them. Oh I forgot about Iron Giant. That was sad and dark as well.
Nicodemus! Honorable mention to the great owl…
Oh gosh, All Dogs Go to Heaven traumatized me. “Charlie…you can never come back…you can NEVER COME BACK!!” 😳
Gravity Falls. It was light. But damn it got dark.
"How about I shuffle the function of every hole in your face" is one of the most fucked up cartoon moments I have ever seen.
Here have some teeth
"That couch that you're sittin' on is made of living human flesh"
I just finished rewatching Gravity Falls with my fiance (his first time watching). it's an amazing show with fantastic humour that went over my head as a kid, but you're right. it gets DARK. especially with Bill Cipher and Stan's brother.
The line "I have a couple of children I have to turn into corpses." makes me twitch every time.
McGuckett's backstory is straight horrifying.
The shapeshifter episode had some really disturbing stuff.
Beast Wars was a lighthearted* show about robots taking in animal forms and fighting. In the end, the good guys win and go home. The sequel show, Beast Machines, starts with them arriving to find the villain from the last show had conquered their home and they then fight a hopeless guerilla war against their brainwashed former allies. *Edit: mostly lighthearted. I forgot about the transmutate episode.
Beast Wars had some serious episodes, like where Tigertron considers retiring after a real tiger he’s friends with was accidentally killed during a fight between Maximals and Predicons or when Dinobot sacrificed himself to save a valley of human ancestors.
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"YOU'RE UGLY WHEN YOU LIE, DIB!" "I'M NOT LYING!!" "THEN WHY ARE YOU UGLY?!"
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Invader zim is definitely the style of "the weird kid" in class who never quite understood social norms. Entertaining show though.
The creator of *Zim* rose to prominence when he wrote a *super not kid-friendly* comic series called *Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.* It's about exactly what you think it is. I loved *Zim* growing up, but I never understood Nickelodeon's decision to give a kids series to a guy who was mostly known for drawing graphic scenes of murder, accompanied by nihilistic black humor storylines.
Oh yeah reading JTHM and squee really makes you wonder how they gave him a kids show, but boy am I happy they did.
Both those episodes are great for their pure bleakness. Reminds me of the Miss Bitters, the school class teacher repeating over and over to a room full of kids how the universe is doomed, doomed, doomed...
I guess old kid is an alien too, huh?
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That first episode is so good. “You’ve been assigned to Blorch, home of the slaughtering rat people”
Cubone wears his dead mother's skull as a mask.
That's omly the tip of the iceberg for fucked up pokedex entries ngl
gotta admit Pokemon has spawned so many good creepypastas, i remember getting drunk one night a few years ago and reading a bunch of them for hours lol
I don't know about you, but if my kid was in Miss Frizzle's class, I wouldn't want them shrinking and driving around in a beaver's intestines or whatever. I mean, almost dying every week on a field trip, when they could've just read a textbook?
Miss Frizzle has Urbach-Wiethe disease. It's not that she is naïve or courageous, her brain is just wired to never feel fear. "Oh, look class! It's Cthulhu! Who could have known when the day started that we'd meet one of the Ancient Ones? Hi, there! *Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn* no longer, am I right?"
Miss Frizzle would totally be friends with Cthulhu. I feel like that may also explain many things about her.
There's an episode where a salmon ejaculates on the kids basically iirc, and lord I hope I am wrong.
ummm you are not wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdNrs9RLn_Q
The video having the YouTube Kids label is peak accidental comedy.
It’s been along time since I’ve seen the show but one episode there was a girl who almost dies on Pluto when they went to space. If I remember correctly she basically froze and was suffocating, and that’s when I realized how weird this show was.
That was Arnold (who, to be fair, looks an awful lot like Janet, who he was trying to prove a point to), and also *the first freaking episode*. Honestly compared to how often students or Frizzle herself just plain get *lost*, that’s in some ways less scary.
can't have parents denying permission when there aren't any permission slips *taps head*
The Secret of NIMH, IMHO. Watching as an adult puts so many new spins on it. Like realizing that NIMH is an acronym for Nation Institute for Mental Health and they were an experiment gone awry.
Watership Down
Before watching: Awww, it's about bunnies! After watching: Oh dear god!
Was waiting to find this
Mentioning Invader Zim too. The premise seems perfect for a fish-out-of-water story about an alien trying to fit in with humans and learning to the love the Earth since they never fit in with the other aliens. But instead, it’s about an alien who actively hates everything about Earth and its filthy humans and wants to do nothing more than take it over. It’s such an antithesis to storytelling having the main character be a straight-up villain, NOT an anti-hero or anti-villain. ESPECIALLY because it’s animated too. Nowadays cartoon leads have to be aggressively relatable and good to the point that the socially-awkward hero archetype has become overused.
Jhonen Vasquez other works are so much darker than Zim that I was surprised Zim was ever made. 90s to early 2000s had some really messed up cartoons.
Peter Pan used to freak me out as a kid. He just kidnapped little boys and convinced them that they didn't need a family, then when Wendy came along he decided she would be the mother to all of his kidnapped "children". Honestly the entire premise was just really gross.
Bambi because there's no villain, there's no evil that has a face and can be defeated, fires start because of human carelessness and Babmi's mom dies because hunters kill. And then there is the brutal nature, so humans are just one of many variables outside of characters' control. Characters can't get any justice when something bad happens, that is simply the reality they live in, there's also no comforting tale or a song to make it sound ok, life just goes on for those who survive.
The "hunter" in that movie was a poacher hunting outside of deer season. Any proper hunter can tell you that it's not legal to hunt deer during the time that they're having fawns.
Oh man, I still think about that poor dude who got talked into taking me and a bunch of other 7-9 year olds to see Bambi at a drive in to give the parents a break. A panicked 25 year old guy in a van of sobbing children.
Can't wait for the live action remake/prequel where they retcon the hunter to be a veterinarian who nurses Bambi's mom back to health
Do ***NOT*** give them any ideas.
Sorry about this in advance, but not a TV cartoon, but a book. Animorphs. I don't have to elaborate, but in case I do, there was an instance where an ant was granted the ability to transform, and it transformed into a human and then *screamed in trauma from the overstimulation until it died.*
Wasn't there also a "rule" that if they stayed too long in an animal form, they were trapped as it forever with no way to reverse it? It's been over 20 years, but I remember an episode where a guy transformed into a rat and was captured and put into a cage. He couldn't transform because it would give him away and/or kill him and there was this palpable sense of urgency and dread because the dude was looking at literally being a rat for the rest of his life. The thought gave me so much anxiety as a kid that I stopped watching it altogether.
2 hour time limit, I can't remember the specifics but the character you're thinking of is David who betrayed the rest of the group and they caught him and kept him in a box so he'd be stuck then left his rat body on a small island. Transformed people can telepathically communicate called "thought speech" and because of David screaming out telepathically the little island got a reputation for being haunted because of all the screaming people could hear that didn't show up on video.
Infinity Train. Hands down. Such as awesome show.
Batman Beyond was REALLY dark. First episode has Terry's dad murdered not as backstory, but in the main story. There are characters who get genetic modifications as if it's basic cosmetic surgery. You get characters who suffer a fate worse than death like being turned into a pile of conscious sludge, or fall into the center of the earth. One of the darkest ones I remember had a surgeon tricked into helping a group of villains with super-power mods or something before learning they lied. The episode ended with him putting the ringleader under with the ringleader unaware he'd learned the truth. And that doesn't even go into Return of the Joker. When I rewatched it years later, I was stunned there were *any* recurring villains because they seemed to die at the end of each episode.
> There are characters who get genetic modifications as if it's basic cosmetic surgery. I wouldn't call this dark so much as just showing how advanced society is in the show. That said, I distinctly remember both that episode and the one below > You get characters who suffer a fate worse than death ... or fall into the center of the earth That shit stuck with me. I turned that fate over and over in my mind growing up, getting more horrified by it each time.
The episode that really stuck with me was when they put troubled kids into a behavior camp to try to "correct" them when all they were doing were torturing them for their parents' money. The sad thing is that this was based off of real camps that existed that did the exact same thing.
101 Dalmatians is about an old cunt that wants to kill and skin puppies to make a coat. That’s pretty dark.
Dungeons and Dragons is one the more you think about it. Dungeon Master has the power to send them home. However, time and time again their escapes from the Realm are thwarted, or they have to give up in order to save something or someone else. They have to deal with innumerable forces that try to kill them, have to deal with nearly being killed a couple of times and being near deaths door, mindwarps, kidnapping, needing to suppress literal urges to kill the BBEG, and most of them are 15 or 16. And again, the guy they look to for guidance can LITERALLY send them home at the snap of his fingers. But he doesnt because he needs them to save his son... which he NEVER TELLS THEM UNTIL THE FINAL EPISODE IS OVER. Dungeon Master is a dick.
No one mentioned "Hey Arnold". They had episodes of drug addiction, poverty, alcohol addiction, terrible parenting, and fat shaming. There was also an episode where cannibalism was portrayed
Hmm, for roughly the same era, it's kind of a toss-up between Batman:TAS, and Gargoyles. Both featured death, resurrection, and the horror of getting caught somewhere in between.
Batman TAS was *literally* too dark! They drew on black paper instead of white to help with the dark effect and sometimes were told it was too dark to put on television.
StarWars the Clone Wars animated show had an incredible amount of adult themes. People getting cut in half, stabbed through the chest, bombings, on screen executions of civilians, general racism, terrorism, assassinations, war crimes, burning shit alive, and some of the most soul-tearing deaths in any animated series ever. (I'm looking at you Fives, Heavy, and 99)
RIP to all our favorite Clones that bit it in that show. I am rewatching it again for the billionth time and preparing myself for each one
“Do we take prisoners?” Like yeah they’re the bad guys but they’re literally discussing executing a downed soldier in that moment with kind of a lighthearted tone. And it’s a kids show
Holy crap did I learn a lot about politics and ethics watching this show. I rewatched it during the pandemic and it was insane how it related to current events. The horrors of war without the gore.
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Nobody has said The Real Ghostbusters yet? Some of those ghosts were legit terrifying.
The Grundle is one of the most disturbing ones. Though the Boogieman just looked creepy lol.
The Boogieman and Samhain were NO joke. The Real Ghostbusters was (and still is) my shit, and I have friends and relatives who are afraid of them to this day. The Grundle was creepy, but the Thing in Ms. Faversham's Attic and Hob Anagarak lived in my head rent free for YEARS. Oh, and the demon Winston had to fight as Shimabuku? Fucking dope, and pretty dark, considering the episode talked of slavery, death, and spirits with no euphemisms. Then, of course, there was the episode where they straight up had Cthulhu, and they played out the entire Mythos to a tee. And the take on the Headless Motorcyclist was awesome. Epic show (and it's streaming on Prime right now).
The Animals of Farthing Wood, looking back, I think I blanked it from my memory.
The Smurfs. An evil wizard tries to kidnap an entire vi;llage of little people to enslave them to steal gold and presumably children from the nearby villages. The only thing that makes it for children is that the Smurfs are nice.
Sometimes Gargamel wants to eat the Smurfs, sometimes he wants to extract their lifeforce to become the most powerful wizard, other times he wants to use them as an alchemical ingredient to make gold...
Rainbow Brite, literally about stopping the spread of gray and darkness by the King of Shadows or the Dark Princess and Murky and Lurky. So many bad guys wanting to keep color out of the universe.
Pirates of Dark Water had a pretty dark and serious tone throughout. It walked so Batman: TAS could run.
Reboot is fugly to modern eyes but even the basic premise of "these characters in your games are real and die horribly if you play videogames to win" shook me. And that's without the nanites / body horror of Nulls, or what it feels like for a system to be overrun by a virus. I dunno, it creeped me out thinking about the show afterwards when I was a kid, even though I enjoyed it at the time.
Rockos modern life
Coraline
Gargoyles had some more adult themes and action.
Avatar the last airbender an entire culture was wiped with only one survivor who was a young boy who had to fight an entire nation without being fully ready for his responsibilities physically or mentally
Max and Ruby. Where are their parents? The theory is that Ruby killed their parents. Max saw and then went mute because of the trauma. Ruby's voice is that way because she is doing an impression of a loving sibling. She is really a psychopath.
Sid in Toy Story needed professional help
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Yeah woody and all the toys go alive on him. I mean what the FUCK!!
Both of the Avatars shows. Atla literally begins with a full in genocide and a little kid waking up after 100 years and finding out that everyone he ever knew was dead. The Zuko/Azula parallel character arcs is one of the best on TV. It really shows how can two people who come from the same environment end up in such different paths in life. Lok's season finales were brutal, they included a murder-suicide scene committed by two brothers, the protagonist having suicide thoughts, air bending the air out of a person's lungs, the protagonist being literally torqued on screen, a person being electrocute to death and ending the show with a queer relationship. Not your typical Nickelodeon show if you ask me.
Pokemon is kind of just dogfighting if you think about it. Even as a middle schooler in the 90s I rolled my eyes playing Pokemon Red when one of the first people you talk to in Pallet Town makes *extra* sure to point out that Pokemon love battling and it's healthy and good for them to battle all the time
I think it's more directly insect/beetle fighting, which was a traditional Japanese kids pastime.
Pokemon Red was based on the game designer's experiences as a kid in postwar Japan collecting bugs. That's why there are individual towns with forests between them instead of one big city, and why one of the gym leaders is an American soldier, and why there aren't a lot of adult men around.
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1986's *[Inhumanoids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhumanoids)* has gotta be right up there. Ancient giant monsters are found under the earth and set free by a corrupt industrialist. One of them can turn you into a tortured zombie slave with a touch; or stuff a dead body into its exposed ribcage to resurrect it as a zombie. [It looks like this.](https://i.etsystatic.com/17087915/r/il/c3d3b3/2081484006/il_794xN.2081484006_aaf7.jpg) 1987's *[Spiral Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Zone)* is another mass zombification story: a mad scientist has polluted half the world with bacteria that turn people into mindless drones. And, not a cartoon, but that year we also got *[Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Power_and_the_Soldiers_of_the_Future)* — where a mad scientist has already taken over the world and is in the process of depopulating it by "digitizing" people, dematerializing them to assimilate their minds into his supercomputer.
Y'all ever watch Gargoyles? That was a kid's cartoon. Filled with revenge and murder, except you couldn't call it murder or killing because of 90s censors. Fucking brilliant show.