The Darkest Episodes of Kids Shows and Cartoons

Bro you forgot tom and Jerry the episode is blue cat blues

Nah 5 year old me was absolutely freaked out by the Cell killing scene. It was a core memory 😭 I was never too freaked out by Courage the Cowardly Dog, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Adventure Time or Chowder. But that scene, haunted my nightmares.

The mutant hamster episode from the powerpuff girls fucked me up

Anime should never be on this list for US Animation. Japanese cartoons or anime has some restrictions, but are at time not limited to suggested material. Japanese people are more disciplined than Western people. This means is that they wouldn't imitate or embrace as much as we tend to do and when some there dose slip through the cracks, there is hell to pay. Thats why crime in Japan is not really a big problem there. The Dragon Ball franchise is not really a kids show. Everything animated don't necessarily mean that it is targeted 4Kids, pun intended. Look at Family Guy and The Boondocks. Family Guy in particular is what I like to use because it is PG 14. 14? There is death, sex, drugs... Everything that not even a 14 year old should be seeing, but they watch it even at the age of 10. Boondocks? Wow. Entertaining, but not good for immature audiences. For the US, we are living in sensitive times. The material in old Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry and yes even Disney cartons just wont fly these days and animators are forced to tone things down because we tend to have the inability to hold our water in real life. There is one thing in DBZ that people didn't understand for a spell. They use to say "In another dimension"... In the US edit. People really didn't know that that means death or the threat of being killed. LOL, just imagine if I pull a gun one some one a and say if you don't shut your mouth, I will send you to another dimension.

I’m surprised they didn’t bring up graveyard shift from SpongeBob that episode used to creep me out and gave me nightmares. Especially when the hash slinging slasher got off the bus and showing the spatula. Nosefartu flinging the lights and smiling at the end and turn the lights off.

Cell absorbing people on DBZ was disturbingly AWESOME!!!🤘💀🤘

When I was kid every time litch was appearing in the screen I was running away from the room

I wonder who did mbc 3 show Invader Zim even with its disturbing content

When I used to be kid I hated Invader Zim very much due to the disturbing theme of the cartoon

I've got a few of Dark Episodes of Kids Cartoons and shows that are on my mind-
Dark Awakening from Original Transformers Cartoon-Optimus is revived there as the Robotic Zombie, and he looked terrifying at the end. What the writers were thinking?!
Phineas and Ferb Busted from Phineas and Ferb-Basically, a What If Candace busted the duo, and they got sent off to the school, where their imagination was being removed. Candace rescues them, only for the whole thing to be a dream.
Where is thy Sting? from Transfomers Animated-An episode that has a body swap, and a near dead Transformer at the end.

The Invader Zim stuff makes more sense when you realize the creator made adult oriented comic books and Jason Stiff snuck in intense stuff.

Was probably the same age as T.J at the time, and remember thinking something was fishy from the moment they started chatting & it got personal...aka meet up and whatnot.

They knew videogames were the rage back then. Sonic was the biggest thing around, and many kids would flock to grab his games.

My usual go to for a cartoon from my childhood that terrified me is the episode of The Real Ghostbusters called Dairy Farm. The undead rooster followed by arms coming out of the ground left a lasting mark. However an episode of a kids show that got me as an adult, was the Pokemon episode One Journey Ends, Another Begins.... They never had to my knowledge really had a Pokemon die in the show so for that to happen really hit. It would have regardless, the fact that I watched it the morning of a funeral for a friend who had been a teacher of mine in school and therefore was much like Stoutland was to Litten to me, made it particularly hard.

The Rugrats episode Pickles V.S Pickles is kafkaesque

Just got to return the slab episode that is the one that truly terrified me as a child

I remember the episode of courage where the mummy with the plagues creature thing scared the living hell out of men idk why the Medusa hair threw me over the edge too

Mr. meaty was f***ing terrifying

Anime is still cartoon.

How tf could you forget to mention the mask episode of courage

I think kid-friendly shows can still get away with a lot of stuff nowadays
I guess I can mostly only speak from the 2010s since I havent watched many newer ones
But shows on Cartoon Network like Steven Universe and especially Adventure Time had some very intense content
Besides, shows in the 80s were often very censored, and the 90s were much less obv but they still had some harsh restrictions in some places, like they often couldn't say "die" for instance.

Was I they only one who didn't get scared by King Ramsey?

Heads of beef episode and King Ramsay’s curse were the creepiest for me in Courage

When you lived through practically all of these and think it cant get any worse then you find meatcanyon channel.

As disturbing as flapjack was I always found myself laughing at the Dr's design and Peppermint Larry getting bosses around by his silent candy wife lol

As soon as you said Static Shock I knew exactly which episode you were going to mention. I remember nothing about any episode of that show EXCEPT the one where Richie got shot.

Man I wish they still made episodes like these, would be real something

I remember Dad from Codename Kids Next Door always used to scare me when I was young. Also the episode of SpongeBob where Squidward uses the elevator to travel through time, especially the prehistoric segment for some reason, always gave me the creeps. I also distinctly remember a skit on MAD when that ran on CN I believe, of a zombified Bambi if I remember correctly. Scarred me every time I saw it for some reason.

Does no one want to talk about Samurai Jack?? I used to watch it as a child and it has some pretty intense visuals

SpongeBobs scariest episode is the gorilla one

Animes literally are cartoons

As for the dragon ball statement, it actually is a kids show in japan lmao. The difference in cultural standards of the place and also era pretty much caused it to be seen as for older kids elsewhere tho, but in japan was very much a kids show and to this day it's current series Super still is!.
Great video!

Maybe it wasn't really dark but I used to be sooo scared of the bus episode from Spongebob. When he's stuck in like a deserted town at night?? And he always manages to miss the bus

Most of the shows I watched growing up were very mundane and innocent, they never really tackled heavy topics, but they weren’t dumbed down either. The worst that could happen would be someone accidentally breaking something or getting stuck outside somewhere.
I was just really sensitive as a kid, and wanted everything to just be wholesome and peaceful. I refused to watch Thomas because of how often the characters were ‘upset’.

While I wouldn’t call this grim dark or anything, it was really depressing. ‘Go West Young Meowth’ was the only episode in Pokemon I actually cried at. It tells us about Meowth’s backstory of how he was a stray, and he taught himself to speak just so he could impress a female Meowth, who just called him a freak for his efforts.

Weirdly enough, the episode of Flapjack that scared me most and sticks in my mind is (I believe these are just 1 episode but it could be two) is where an oil tycooner challenges Flapjack, K'nuckles and Bubbie to a race, which they obviously won, but for some reason, the giant black steel whale the tycooner raced with (it even has a little tophat) creeps me out. It's just this giant, black, dirty whale thing with glowing red eyes, permanent snarl and a segmented body, probably creeped me out not only cause it was the middle of the ocean, but the Flapjack universe's ocean. Constantly overcast with an old medieval style and dark green waters.

I'm pretty sure there's also a scene (in the same episode?) where they're either in the tycooner's robot whale or something like that, and there's an aquarium with a completely unmoving dead looking shark that slowly floats around. Keep in mind, these are all in the Flapjack style, so it really unnerved me for reasons I can't even explain. There's also the episode where K'nuckles and Flapjack are on a raft, I'm pretty sure looking for Candy Island, and they end up drinking sea water. It goes full creepypasta with distorted audio, and the only colors are black with red outlines. I'm pretty sure they either reach Candy Island in a hallucination, or they don't and somehow wind up back at their docks.

Absolutely incredible show, though.

You don't watch new shows. Even bluey, the biggest show itself, goes into deep topics. you got MLP, Bluey, (Steven Universe I guess but not really), even Paw Patrol.

After that episodes of
mr meaty when they cooked there hands me and my
Family ate chicharrón right after I was 8

The cartoon/episode that totally dumbstruck me when I was a child was Stimpy's fan club episode of ren an stimpy. That was the first time I really got a taste of psychopathy/murderous insanity and it really stood out to me. Especially the "with these hands..." Scene. Lol, looking back, I watched a lot worse, including the infamous banned epi of rockos modern life the couple times it aired, but that one.. it just stood out to me badly..

Surprised the Fat Albert episode about gang violence wasn’t featured. A child character is literally shot to death in that one!

Anybody else think Z'skayr/Ghostfreak from Ben 10 was pretty creepy? He only appeared in a few episodes of the original series but he was pretty intimidating and genuienly succeeded in his goal for a few minutes before being killed.
Until Alien Force brought him back for some filler.

Imperfect Cell was terrifying to me as a kid but god damn it,he's my favourite form of my favourite Dragon Ball antagonist. He just added an element of horror not often seen in Shonen

And I remember watching alf as child and corage dog

I remember flapjack and that episode was just creepy as kid give nightmares

Hey, you actually included some stuff I either don't see mentioned often or didn't even know about
props!

The fact that Thomas the tank engine can jump from track to track, but there is episodes where, Henry got bricked up in a tunnel and wasn’t let out till next episode, multiple scraped engines and a diesel with a claw on his roof

Something super silly about the episode perfection is that in the latin america dub they decided, for some reason, to make the fish at the ending be super argentinian and even reference the biggest futbol star at that moment Diego Maradona ("te lo juro por dieguito maradona!"). Its so fucking off the blue and goofy its the only thing i can think of when the episode is brought up 😭😭

i remember the Drangon Ball show not being for kids, here in Denmark (i dont know if we still have it) but we had "morning TV" for kids that primarily was for kids and i remember South Park and Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon and Courage on there ^^

Literally the first day I ever gave DBZ a chance was the same day they aired that episode of Cell on 4Kids/Toonzai. I didn’t watch the show again until around the time the Broly movie released.