Follow TV Tropes


Subverted Kids Show / Web Original

Go To

  • This is a major theme in YouTube Poop.
    • While kids' shows aren't the only thing used in YTP, they are one of the main things in it, and the comedic effect of editing things to sound vulgar is a lot more noticeable when the source material itself is for children. This is taken Up to Eleven by YTPs of edutainment shows like "Dr. Rabbit's World Tour."
    • A common theme is to apply Censored for Comedy to clips of perfectly innocuous kid's shows (most often Sesame Street), with no edits whatsoever besides the addition of Sound Effect Bleeps. The effectiveness varies, but in some cases it's astounding how filthy this one device alone can make a clip from a kid's show, with this clip of The Count singing about how much he loves to count being a prime example, and one of the few that works well without being a tiny fragment completely out of context.
  • Advertisement:
  • Bert is EVIL!, a website where photos are manipulated to depict Bert from Sesame Street doing horrible things and being involved with infamous atrocities and people from the past.
  • Happy Tree Friends, features a lot of fluffy forest animals who all die incredibly violent deaths each episode. The official websites had labels reading "CARTOON VIOLENCE" and "not appropriate for children under 12" all over it back when it still had its own website, but there were still parents complaining about their six-year-olds stumbling upon it.
  • Retarded Animal Babies, which crosses the line twice as much with Gorn and porn. Sometimes, but not always, funnier.
  • An inversion, taking the very serious Watchmen and turning it into an 80s Saturday Morning Cartoon. Beware.
    • And the animation studio's slogan? "Touching your inner child"....
  • Newgrounds takes great pride in doing this. Pico vs. Bear parodies the famous Bear in the Big Blue House as a depraved drug abuser with a suspected history of child molestation.
  • Advertisement:
  • Lemon Demon's Song of the Count (Censored).
  • Polish 3D animator Cyber 8. Nearly all of his videos involve beloved childhood cartoon characters being mulitated and sexually abused.
  • I'm on a Boat (Feat. Ponyo).
  • Doctor Steel's webisodes of The Dr. Steel Show are done in the style of kids shows but are quite subverted. Also his song, Smokey's Theme, ostensibly the theme song for a kid's show about a cigar-smoking trout who loves children.
  • The famous Candle Cove Creepypasta uses this as its premise, but utilises it more for shivers than laughs.
    • "Lost Episode" and "The Truth Behind [show]" creepypastas do the same thing, describing an episode with horrific Deranged Animation and putting forward theories that the characters are based off dead people respectively.
    • There are a few creepypastas that take a similar route as Candle Cove by using made-up shows (as apposed to existing shows), like Happy Appy.
    • Several of Slimebeast's stories involve the narrator reminiscing about or stumbling upon an obscure children's show that somehow got away with highly disturbing and gruesome content.
      • "Class Creeps" is about a few friends who try to watch a video stream of the pilot episode of a 1990's cartoon called Class Creeps. The narrator isn't able to see the video, so he has to rely on his friends sending live-tweets to describe what is happening in the cartoon. The show is about a group of students who get killed in a horrible accident and are then revived as grotesque monsters by a Mad Scientist named Dr. Satanstein. The violent events of the episode end up causing the narrator's friends to gouge out their own eyes.
      • "Dead Serious" concerns a cartoon called Zombionix, where undead cyborgs endlessly mutilate each other in a post-apocalyptic setting. The show has apparently inspired children in the real world to commit awful acts of violence.
      • "Squiggles" describes a puppet show where the title character makes politically incorrect jokes and causes the children in the show's live studio audience to convulse and die.
      • "Funtime with Floppy" has the narrator reminisce on an early 1980's puppet show and how he once sent a letter asking that Floppy stand up to the other characters picking on him, resulting in Floppy's tormentors murdering him onscreen.
  • Advertisement:
  • LoadingReadyRun has a recurring gag where a Mr Roger's-like host is seen reading the end of a children's book and then giving a moral to the story such as "never go outside".
  • Brazilian Tumblr Porra, Maurício! gets panels from Monica's Gang and sees them as perverted content. Among the running gags are Jeremiah having a Gag Penis (as well as having him and Taka as Memetic Molesters), Bucky being Ambiguously Gay, and resident Big Eater Maggy being portrayed as a junkie. Though sometimes it's just "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?" (such as this, where Chuck Billy's girlfriend Rosie Lee reveals somehow her face changed to Leonardo DiCaprio's — It Makes Sense in Context)
  • The webcomic Clarissa is about a little girl living with her happy, seemingly perfect, family. It appears to be nothing that you wouldn't see in a newspaper or on a kids network. It just happens that everyone is a Stepford Smiler and that her father rapes her at night. It's played for laughs. The darkest laughs ever.
  • From CollegeHumor: "ConquistaDora the Explorer". ConquistaDora teaches children how to enslave and conquer the tribes of the new world for the royal kingdom of Spain.
  • Don't Hug Me I'm Scarednote  starts off like your typical Edutainment Show in the style of Sesame Street, with colorful, cuddly puppets and a "teacher" singing about their respective themes such as creativity, love, and healthy eating. However, it gradually becomes clear everything isn't what it seems, as the "teachers" are revealed to either have ulterior motives or have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and eventually subject the main trio to horrible punishments as the episode slips into pure Surreal Horror. (With sarcastic British Humour and satire sprinkled in, too)
  • The SCP Foundation plays host to SCP-993, a cartoon show called "Bobble the Clown" broadcast by an unknown station. Anyone over the age of ten suffers a splitting headache and falls unconscious when trying to watch the show; anyone under the age of ten is subject to watching Bobble teaching them how to do horrible things, like kidnap an ordinary suburbanite and cook his flesh, stalk and murder a London woman, or torture a prisoner of war. Alarmingly enough, Bobble is aware that the SCP Foundation is trying to keep his show from being broadcast, and has produced an episode showing kids how to release several of the Foundation's more dangerous specimens and murder the researchers keeping him contained.
  • The "Counting Song" by Adam Buxton begins like a song teaching numbers to young children and suddenly turns into an increasingly desperate rant against the life of an adult.
  • Done a few times on Homestar Runner:
  • Uncle Ray's House IS a fictional show that would be appropriate for little ones. But there's a Twist Ending that makes this innocent video this trope.
  • Gold Digger creator Fred Perry did an animation of the "You Are a Pirate" song from LazyTown that was filled to the brim with sexual innuendoes. Needless to say, it's kind of NSFW.
  • Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy includes one episode where Wile E. Coyote finally kills that Roadrunner. And then has an identity crisis as he doesn't know what to do with his life after that.
  • This is the central element in the "Almighty Loaf" meme, which takes a talking loaf of bread from a direct-to-video Christian-themed children's show, and turns it into a demonic harbinger of evil who speaks with the voice of the Lord of Darkness himself:
  • Magical Dream Bed.
  • There are plenty of online fan works that take children's cartoons and turn them into this, be it fan art or fan fiction or even a video. Whether it's played for laughs or for horror/tragedy varies.
  • Fuwa Fuwa Foof, an original concept by ExtraordinaryCircus on YouTube. It's the story of an adorable bunny named Foof. Who used to be a gang leader. She pulled a Heel–Face Turn, but her old cohorts (Giri Giri and Kiri Kiri) are trying to get her back into her former life of crime and debauchery. On top of that, there's the song in the opening, "Chu Chu Lovely Muni Muni Mura Mura Purin Purin Boron Nurururerorero" by Maximum the Hormone; not only is it deceptive by starting of like a soft, cutesy pop-rock tune then turning metal a few seconds in, but the full song is actually about rape, kidnapping, pedophilia, and is often interpreted as a commentary on the sexualization of minors in anime.
  • This trope is present in many of the Scientifically Accurate videos, which take children's media, a lot of them starring anthropomorphic animals, and tear them apart by demonstrating what the shows would be like if they were way more realistic. Results are often violent, nauseating, and/or NSFW. One particularly sickening example is Scientifically Accurate CatDog, which portrays the titular characters as a cat and a dog surgically grafted together by an insane surgeon to present as a show idea to an extremely unflattering take-off of Nickelodeon called Nickelodious.
  • The infamous Elsagate phenomenon: YouTube videos showing kids' favorite characters, such as Elsa and Spider-Man, in violent, vulgar, or otherwise screwed up situations. You can find more information about them on their entry on What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?.
  • The journalist and blogger Mr Moth created a series of Twitter posts "Today on Octonauts...", a series of plot synopses from a very different version of The Octonauts. In this version, Kwaazi is a Felinoid Abomination, Shellington is an Apocalypse Cultist, Barnacles can only barely keep his carnivorous instincts under control, Tweak has become some kind of invisible spirit, Professor Inkling is a Mad Scientist, Peso is an Action Survivor, and the Vegimals are a Slave Race and occasional food source. (Dashi ... is also there.) Even the episodes that aren't following the Cosmic Horror Story arc have descriptions like "Today on Octonauts, during a two-day party, the gang accidentally kill a narwhal and have a torrid time covering it up when the cops arrive".
  • The Japanese video "Pokopokopikotan" is basically this trope in a nutshell. It starts off with two girls who wouldn't look out of place in a preschooler-aimed show, running around and playing in their brightly colored world. Then a human hand appears and starts corrupting the world a bit, and things only get worse from there...
  • Louder With Crowder: They parodied political messaging aimed at children by depicting kid's shows such as Sesame Street, Winnie-the-Pooh, and The Flintstones propagating banning knives to combat terrorism, paranoia about rape culture, and gender being completely divorced from biology.
  • The Web Cartoon WTF 101 could best be described as a Deconstructive Parody of The Magic School Bus. The teacher, rather than a charming eccentric, is a deranged misanthrope on par with Rick Sanchez, her "class" is really just detention for a bunch of troublemakers and delinquents in a low-income high school, and her lessons are shown to be highly traumatic to said students, both due to being dragged across the space-time continuum, and the fact said lessons involve such charming subjects as parasites, the dark side of cute animals, and the histories of self-experimentation and bad ideas.
    Prof. Foxtrot: Stop with the screaming! I've only shrunk you down and transported you half-way around the world.
  • Some episodes of How It Should Have Ended take on children's movies, including several Pixar films and The Wizard of Oz, and twist their endings in a way that would confuse the target audience for the original films (like the Inside Out one being a metaphor for being mental insanity). Also, quite a few have violence, like the Toy Story 3 spoof ending with Andy crashing his car and The Wizard of Oz spoof having a scene in which the Wicked Witch is shot with a gun by one of her flying monkeys.
  • AOK has a series called Childhood Ruined that parodies popular children's cartoons, but makes them adult in tone. For instance, Dora The Grownup deals with Dora navigating through problems young adults commonly face while constantly Breaking the Fourth Wall about every situation she encounters (for instance, "Have you ever woken up 5 days a week to go to a job you hate?") and teaching the viewer Spanish words related to the situation, often causing bad things to happen to her because of how weird she acts around other people. Other parodies in this series have included Caillou The Grownup, Very Off Parents, Muppet Elderlies, Adult Arthur and Thomas The Tank Engine: Origins.
    • Another AOK video not under the Childhood Ruined label, Patty Cake, is also this trope. The video starts out similar to toy-based cartoons like Strawberry Shortcake and Shopkins, until Patty Cake gets cut into pieces for her human partner's friends to eat.
  • "Daniel Solves The Trolley Problem" is a fake transcript for a Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood episode based on the Trolley Problem, with the strategy song being about life or death situations rather than the coping skills they're usually known for.
  • SuperMarioLogan has an in-universe example that's a mix of this and What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?. Junior, an elementary schooler, enjoys the show Doofy the Dragon, in which a puppet sings songs that start out innocent, but turn out to be inappropriate, with the lyrics mentioning death before Doofy tries to kill himself.
  • Thingu (no link because it keeps getting taken down for IP infringement and put back up again). The Thing (1982) (a movie set in Antarctica which is notorious for its excessive amounts of violence and Body Horror) remade in claymation with the cast of Pingu (a cute claymation show aimed at kids featuring a cast of Antarctic animals). Need one say more?
  • The animated web video Mongolian Erectile Dysfunction is a mature parody of the classic Tootsie Pop commercial. It includes Mr. Owl attempting to masturbate before the boy interrupts him to ask how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop and has Mr. Turtle depicted as a pedophile wanting to molest the boy. The short also features Mr. Owl swearing constantly and ends with him committing suicide.


How well does it match the trope?

Example of:


Media sources: