Incredibly Harsh Cartoon Endings

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What are some Cartoon episodes you watched that ended very bitterly?

Dexter's Lab had a good number of episodes that ended harshly. A lot of people point to the episode where Dee Dee trained Dexter to destroy his own lab only for his behavior to end up scaring her to tears and Dexter is forced to repair the ruins of his own lab alone as the darkest ending of all time, but there's an overlooked episode that when analyzed correctly one ups that episode by a huge margin.

The episode is "Let's Save the World You Jerk!"

The premise is that a meteor is headed for Earth so Dexter pilots a mech and destroys it. Suddenly a shower of giant meteors approach and they're too much for him to handle so his robot is destroyed. He's forced to reluctantly ask his rival Mandark for help. Mandark pilots his mech into space and the same thing happens to him so they reluctantly combine their mechs and try to work together to destroy the meteors. Unfortunately, they argue over a battle plan and end up separating and fighting each other. The meteors pass by and destroy both their mechs down to severed heads. The Earth is destroyed with nothing to remain except a few space rocks. The episode ends with Dexter and Mandark ramming their severed robots' heads into each other blaming each other for Earth's destruction. What makes this ending incredibly harsh is, oh I don't know, the Earth is gone and all their friends and families are dead. Their labs are gone too and all they have to live in is their severed robot heads until their life support systems run out which eventually they will.

There was The Powerpuff Girls episode "Twisted Sister", where the girls come home from a long day of fighting crime and just want to relax, but Professor Utonium gives them a bunch of chores to do. The girls then get an idea, they'll create a new Powerpuff Girl who can do the crimefighting for them while they take a break. So they sneak into the lab and start creating the formula the Professor used to create them, but they didn't all the right ingredients, which was sugar, spice, and everything nice, and accidentally adding Chemical X. Instead they had artificial sweetener, and a bunch of dirt and leaves and twigs that were kind of like spices. They end up creating a new Powerpuff Girl, but she turns out to be huge, hunchbacked, homely, and kind of slow and dumb. She's very friendly though, and the girls name her Bunny. Then they tell her how to be a Powerpuff Girl, by flying around Townsville, finding criminals, beating them up and taking them to jail. Bunny seems to understand, but she ends up releasing the criminals from jail and beating up the police. The girls see the incident reported on TV and they fly off and find Bunny. Blossom tells Bunny that maybe sending her out to fight crime was a mistake. This upsets Bunny very much, and she flies away crying. Then all the many criminals that were released show up and start attacking the girls. They start crying out for Bunny to come back and help them, and she does, beating up all the criminals and saving them. But then... Bunny just blows up!

When the other Powerpuff Girls regain consciousness, all that's left of Bunny is a scrap of her dress. Blossom says that the formula they used to create Bunny must have been unstable, which is why she blew up. The girls are very sad, and they realize they were the ones who were bad and not Bunny. And then even the Narrator is crying and says to just go to commercial.

Anyway, I feel that Bunny is the only true or canon fourth Powerpuff Girl and not Bliss from that awful remake, and I think most other fans feel the same way.

There was a Tom and Jerry cartoon I saw as a kid that had Jerry and Tuffy as the Musketeers in France, and when Tom failed to catch them at the end of the cartoon he was sentenced to death by guillotine. It shows Jerry and Tuffy walking by and then they look up to see the blade of the guillotine dropping, and then Tuffy is like, "Poor, poor pussycat... oh well, c'est la vie!", and then it ends. I don't remember anything else in the cartoon, just how it ended. But it has been a long time since I'd seen it.

I remember a tom and Jerry cartoon that was really infamous. It ended with them both having lost the love of their lives including all their money and everything trying to win them back and so they sit on the train tracks as an oncoming train can be heard.

I've heard about that one, but I was pretty sure most people already have. It was even rumored that Tom and Jerry were killed off for real because there wasn't anymore new T&J cartoons for a long time afterwards. But of course they didn't die for real, and even if they were killed onscreen, it doesn't make sense that after years of surviving being blown up, crushed, riddled with bullets, and sliced into pieces, all it took to end them for good was being hit by an ordinary train?

It was "Blue Cat Blues". Tom was despondent because he couldn't score with Toots/Tootles, whatever the female cat's name was. Because of the depressing tone, many stations wouldn't show the episode.

George of the Jungle 2007 cartoon- The episode "Frankengeorge"

George tries to resurrect a dead Rhino only to start a zombie apocalypse throughout the jungle.

There's a scene in Dead Rising where DHS Agent Brad gets trapped in a dark room with small light source and surrounded by hundred of zombies and what's worse, he's out of ammo. Fade to black as the zombies close in on him.

That's how this cartoon episode ends.

Bart and Homer are stuck on a rocket being shot into the centre of the sun, only before they die they gotta put up with Rosie O'Donnell, Courtney Love, Spike Jones, Tonya Harding, Pauly Shore and Tom Arnold singing Clang-Clang-Clang Goes The Trolley.

Understandably they escape into the vacuum of space where their heads explode.

Thankfully, Treehouse of Horror episodes are what ifs and not canon.

Yes, that episode aired in 1999, when there was much hype that the world was going to end on New Year's Day at midnight because the computers would all reset to 1900 and crash, which would cause much chaos like major power outages, planes falling out of the sky, and the nukes being launched. I feel like I'm the only person who remembers any of it, and I had horrible doomsday anxiety. I had all kinds of anxiety but the doomsday anxiety was the second worst form of anxiety I had back then. On NYE, the staff at the home I was staying at even filled the bathtub and all the sinks with water, which you're supposed to do when the world ends, apparently, because you're going to need water to make your unspeakable suffering and dying less hellish. And then it was the year 2000 and nothing happened. Although I was relieved, I started hating the whole human race for making us go through all that insanity for virtually nothing. But of course then we had 9/11 and the world has gotten worse and worse ever since and maybe we would have been better off sent back to 1900.

Also in that episode it looked like it was not only midnight in the US, but in the whole world at the same time and there was no such thing as time zones. How typical for the murricans.

That's Genndy Tartakovsky. Anyone seen "Primal" ?

I was in the middle of elementary school at the time. I never learned about it because my family are skeptics. Turns out there was a bug, but it was fixed in advance. That didn't stop corporations from marketing to the doomsday preppers for profit so any info of everything will be fine was largely buried.

I've watched the first season. I haven't gotten to the rest of the show yet, but from what I've seen, it's really good. It's brutal. It's savage. It's like Turok meets God of War.

Chicken Little by Disney. Not that awful CGI movie, but a traditional Disney short made in the 1940s.

It starts off with the narrator introducing the various farm birds, like the Henny Pennies who are like gossiping housewives, and the stuffy upper class Turkey Lurkies, and the Ducky Luckies and Goosy Loosies who hang out and get drunk at the "bar" (actually a water trough), and Cocky Locky, who is the leader, and finally Chicken Little. The narrator describes Chicken Little as kind of slow, but a good egg. The whole poultry community is protected by a tall sturdy fence with a big lock, and the farmer's rifle is kept next to his front door. Then Foxy Loxy appears and he knows the fence is too strong and tall and the farmer will come out and shoot him if he tries to break through, so he gets out a psychology book and watching through the cracks and holes in the fence he looks for the dumbest bird, and he sees Chicken Little playing with his yo-yo and says, "He looks nice and stupid." And then Foxy breaks off a piece of a sign for a fortune teller that's blue and has stars painted on it, throws it over the fence and bonks Chicken Little on the head. He then tells Chicken Little through the fence that the sky is falling. Chicken Little runs off to tell everyone, but Cocky Locky inspects the piece of "sky" and says it's just some painted wood and they have nothing to worry about. Cocky Locky is a rational and level headed type of leader, so then others believe him and leave Chicken Little alone, who is crying because no one believed him, the dumb, silly member of the coop. But Foxy starts going around the fence imitating the other characters, and saying things like how Cocky Locky might be wrong, and soon all the birds fly into a panic. They end up leaving their home and going to what looks like a cave where they'll be safe from the end of the world, but Foxy goes in after them and seals the cave shut with a boulder. But the narrator tells us not to worry, because these stories have a way of working out. But then it shows the inside of the cave where Foxy Loxy has just finished eating all of the birds, polishing off a wishbone and then placing it next to rows of wishbones, like markers to a grave site. The narrator is horrified and says the story had a happy ending when he read it. Foxy then opens up his psychology book and says ironically, "Don't believe everything you read, brother!" while playing with the deceased Chicken Little's yo-yo.

Then the cartoon ends and we hear the happy, comical music that normally plays at the end of a Disney short.
Most Disney cartoons based on fairy tales have a happy or positive ending, but this one sure didn't. I think it's because the cartoon was made during WWII and it was more of a warning to people in real life. Also I think the book that Foxy reads was originally about Hitler and how he used psychological manipulation on people, but they censored the cover to a more generic title.

And of course, instead of a fox there is a fat, hideous, demented orange turkey that's making the sky fall on the world right now.

As someone who likes foxes and also eats chickens, that sounds like a happy ending to me.

Every Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, except those where Marge was calling the shots.

I would like to add several Rick and Morty episodes, but I really should be specific, like the episode where Rick is setting up a beam to kill himself, but falls asleep, and the beam misses.

Then there is this.