Western Animation / Stylistic Suck - TV Tropes
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Stylistic Suck / Western Animation

Go To

  • The Pack, based off of early Image Comics the likes of Youngblood (Image Comics), from the eponymous episode of Gargoyles. All shots from the show consisted entirely of action scenes, with no plot other than "the Pack fights evil ninjas", pretty similar to episodes from such shows.
  • The Venture Bros.:
    • The Rusty Venture cartoon seems to be even more a spoof of Jonny Quest than the show it inhabits.
    • One episode ends with a public service announcement for Testicular Torsion shot in a grainy 1960s-esque filter and featuring the cast delivering their lines in a terribly stilted manner and clearly reading off cue cards (indicated by their eyes constantly shifting from left to right).
  • The Soap Within a Show "All My Circuits" from Futurama is another over-the-top soap-opera-within-a-show ("Let me get this straight. Is there anyone here who doesn't have amnesia?" "I don't remember.") There's also Fry's holophonor opera, which the Robot Devil critiques for having the actors describe how they feel instead of showing it.
    • Note that even at his own wedding, Calculon so believes (most likely programmed to) in his soap opera ways that he is tricked by the main cast in a convoluted way to rescue Bender, all by badly acting out different soap opera cliches, including amnesia, fake-dead, lost sibling and quite a few more in just a few minutes.
    • The same show has a total subversion as well with "Everyone loves Hypnotoad", the best show in the history of television.
    • There's also the incident in which the Earth is attacked by giant brains, and Fry eventually stops them by trapping their leader in a book he wrote, "a crummy world full of plot holes and spelling errors!"
      Head Brain: The Big Brain am winning again! I am the greetest! Now I am leaving Earth for no raisin! [sic]
    • "That’s Lobstertainment": "The Magnificent Three" features a typo correction that doesn’t get edited out, an utterly absurd premise and background extras being directed to do silly motions.
    • "Charlie’s Angels 3" is a Cliché Storm full of Dull Surprise acting courtesy of Lucy Liu, complete with the dramatic twist that the Mayor Pain is a vampire.
    • To save the Earth from aliens, the crew writes and acts the ending of ''Single Female Lawyer.'' An ending that Fry made up in an hour (which was only about four minutes of material), having only a vague memory of part of one episode.
      Lrrr: Overall I'd give it a C+ - okay, not great. As a result we will not destroy your planet, but neither will we share with you our recipe for immortality.
      Fry: Way to overact, Zoidberg.
    • More recently, there's the badly-drawn motion comic that Fry did in "Lrrreconciliable Ndndifferences", for which he also did all the voices and sound effects.
      Leela: (about the third and last comic) Good ending. Not great.
    • The Transcredible Exploits of Zapp Brannigan certainly qualify. Although it's a Dream Sequence, it is presented in the style of a low budget 1950's sci-fi serial.
    • The various "anthology" episodes made during the Comedy Central seasons qualify. Reincarnation goes through several bad animation styles, from classic black & white rubber-hose animation to 8-bit arcade game and finally to 70s badly-dubbed anime. Saturday Morning Fun Pit pokes fun at various 80s and 90s Saturday Morning Cartoon animation styles. Naturama is a series of bad nature documentaries.
  • 12 oz. Mouse is filled to the brim with this in terms of animation.
  • Transformers: BotBots: The Real 'I, Cheeseburger' (a spoof of both The Real Ghostbusters and Hamilton) and Clogstopper's puppet show.
  • In the American Dad! episode "The Never-Ending Stories", Klaus becomes a rapper and releases a video for his song "Guppy Love"; the music video is LAUGHABLY bad and makes no sense; it features a boat sailing through the New York City skies, Klaus rapping about how badass he is, before detouring into rapping about his favorite food-all while dressed like famous rappers including The Notorious B.I.G., Kanye West, Lil Yachty and Insane Clown Posse-while a group of mermaids sing "Nutrigrain bar and Mountain Dew" over and over again with utterly deadpan expressions.
  • South Park:
    • This was part of the original appeal of the show, portraying absurd and foul situations in extremely crude animation. The original shorts and the series's first episode were animated with construction paper. The show has gradually improved the art style over the years, and occasionally includes bits of impressive CGI for contrast. It does, however, still keep a lot of the crude animation in order to avert Production Lead Time and stay as current as possible to events.
    • "The Terrance and Phillip Show" was a parody of what critics accused South Park of being: a crudely-animated cartoon all about farts. Eventually the show discarded the parody by making Terrence and Phillip a live-action show. Canada is always drawn crudely to match, as are the Danes, the "Canadians of Europe."
    • In the two-part episode "Cartoon Wars", terrorists strike back at Family Guy by creating a badly animated cartoon showing barely animated cutouts of western figures like George Bush and Jesus crudely pooping on each other while shouting about how much they enjoy "crapping on each other" in broken English.
  • One episode of Celebrity Deathmatch features the finding of a time capsule with a cheaply done Totally Radical faux-version of the show from the 80s where Boy George fights Don Johnson (with Ronald Reagan as the guest referee). It's possibly the show's finest moment.
  • The Simpsons:
    • In early episodes, the children sometimes watch a cartoon called The Happy Little Elves, but the writers stopped putting it in because lots of people didn't understand that the suck was stylistic rather than just plain suck.
    • In other episodes, the characters go to see various musicals. While usually pretty well-sung, they often use hilariously poor or inappropriate source material for a musical, such as Planet of the Apes (1968) and A Streetcar Named Desire.
    • Itchy and Scratchy's Poochie, which is hated by everyone (except Homer, who voiced Poochie) in-universe. The show itself is an example; it's a total ultraviolent send up of Tom and Jerry (more specifically of Herman and Katnip, itself a more sadistic ripoff of T&J), but where Tom and Jerry was a battle of wits between two mutual rivals with actual humor, Itchy and Scratchy just consists of a Ax-Crazy mouse effortlessly killing a helpless victim who has done nothing to antagonize him. Amongst actual Simpsons fans the cartoon is liked only for its terribleness and shock value, and Matt Groening himself states Itchy and Scratchy would never fill a full 10 minutes as the audience would get tired of the same joke being repeated over and over.
    • In "Krusty Gets Kancelled", after the Gabbo Show gets the exclusive broadcasting rights for Itchy and Scratchy, a desperate Krusty shows a short from its Eastern European counterpart, Worker and Parasite. It consists entirely of a stiff, sketchily-drawn cat and mouse bouncing around a scribbled background speaking vaguely-Slavic gibberish, followed by a title card reading ENDUT! HOCH HECH! Krusty's reaction: "What the hell was that?!" The audience's reaction: leaving.
    • In "Skinner's Sense of Snow", Principal Skinner decides to show the students his favorite seasonal movie, The Christmas That Almost Wasn't But Then Was. Spoiler Title aside, the film barely has anything to do with Christmas, save the opening scene at Santa's workshop; the reindeer are obviously cardboard cutouts, and an elf wanders onscreen for no reason other to declare that he's happy before exiting. There's also a two-hour sequence of a hobgoblin serenading a shepherdess, during which a stagehand wanders into the shot, looks at the camera, and runs off. Skinner is the only character who expresses anything other than pained boredom while watching it.
    • Bart's comic-turned-computer animation "Angry Dad", which is a badly drawn version of Homer, becomes the most watched non-porn video in the internet (making it ten-trillionth overall).
    • "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" consists of nothing but parodies of intentionally badly scripted spin-off TV shows.
    • The McBain films (shown piecemeal over several different episodes) are an unusually high-rent one of these, parodying the schlocky action flicks of the late 80s and early 90s. The lead character is The Ahnold speaking all his lines in a monotone voice, the plots are incredibly cheesy and absurd, the dialogue consists mostly of bad one-liners or exposition, and everything is delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer (one of the films is titled "You Have The Right To Remain Dead"). The straightest example, though, is a film meant to be "a mix of action and comedy", which is just McBain reciting a terrible stand-up routine in front of a brick wall and answering hecklers with a hail of gunfire and a grenade.
    • E-I-E-I Doh”: "The Poke of Zorro" is an abomination of a movie that somehow pits Zorro against the Three Musketeers, the Man in the Iron Mask, some ninjas, and the Scarlet Pimpernel before King Arthur declares Zorro the new king of England. It also ends with an incredibly awful rap song, and the credits list mentions there was a robot version of Zorro played by Shawn Wayans, a magic taco voiced by James Earl Jones, Péle as the hiccuping Narrator and at least one time traveler played by "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, among several other either unrealistic or just stupid-sounding characters.
    • "The Dad Who Knew Too Little" featured a kiosk selling personalized animated videos for people to make for their kids. The finished products have very cheap limited animation and tinny sparse music and, fittingly, kiddish plots. Each one has the main protagonist be "portrayed" by the kid the video is produced for, with a photo of said kid's face crudely pasted onto the very different-looking protagonist's body, and blank spaces in the dialogue for whoever's making the video to say the name of his kid, along with what he likes...
      • Ned Flanders's personalized video is "The Adventures of Spaceman Rod," depicting Rod Flanders as a big buff astronaut who likes "being quiet during trips, clapping with songs, and diabetes" that lands on another planet and dances with friendly frog-like aliens.
      • Homer ends up getting one for Lisa, due to the toy store at the mall selling out of the Turbo Diary she wanted. The video is "The Adventures of Lisa Simpson: Girl Cowboy" and is one big Epic Fail: the photograph of Lisa's head shows her making a disgusted face, and Homer claims that Lisa's favorite food is McNuggets, her best friend is Maggie and her favorite book is "magazines", even though Lisa is actually a vegetarian, barely has any friends (as Maggie is her little sister), and loves reading actual books of all kinds. Naturally, the video upsets Lisa.
    • "Thank God It's Doomsday" features Left Below, a ham-fisted Christian film with overdramatic acting and ridiculous fundamentalist fearmongering.
  • Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! has one episode centred around a major studio discovering a silent movie starring their most famous actor that was never completed and decide to film new material for it. Said material doesn’t even attempt to match with whatever the original plot was, adding in alien robot ninjas that fire lasers (despite ninjas and lasers being unknown at the time the original movie would’ve been made) who get defeated by a dance battle.
  • Home Movies: This show features this trope almost every episode, given that the central premise of the show is that three kids make their own movies. Although many times their movies are also parodies in disguise. They're actually really impressive considering they're 8-year-olds. Sort of. Subverted in a couple of episodes where the kids do very bad productions (Bye Bye Greasy, Renaissance Fair) that the audience absolutely loves. How could you not? Although they do bomb pretty comprehensibly in the Camp episode.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • In "Suited For Success", the Mane Six(minus Rarity)'s requested modifications for their dresses turn out so tacky that Rarity's fashion show fails miserably, leading her to shut herself in her room for several days.
    • In "The Show Stoppers", when the Cutie Mark Crusaders enter a talent show in an attempt to earn their cutie marks, they each cover roles more suited to one of the other fillies. The result is, well... this. They end up winning "best comedy act" as it had the audience laughing so hard, and pretended it was all part of the act. You even hear Scootaloo's voice actress start to crack up during the second chorus (this is really noticeable on the vocals-only cuts of the song). In fact, when composer Daniel Ingram turned in his first take of the song to Lauren Faust, she rejected it and told him to make it sound worse!
    • Pinkie's Wonderbolt Rap in "Testing, Testing, 1 2 3" is deliberately made to look like a cheesy 90's-era rap video – complete with reduced audio/video quality, a 4:3 aspect ratio (the show is produced in 16:9), and VHS artifacts.
    • Spike's rendition of the Cloudsdale anthem in "Equestria Games". It's also Cringe Comedy, since Spike is fumbling through the words of a song he doesn't know. Spike's voice actor, Cathy Weseluck, deliberately did not learn the lines or listen to the melody to make it sound more authentically bad.
    • Whenever there is an Imagine Spot or a drawing by one of the main characters, there is a decent chance that the quality of the art involved will be this, especially if Pinkie Pie is the source.
  • The Rocko's Modern Life episode Wacky Delly, where Ralph Bighead has Rocko and his friends produce the Show Within a Show of the same name in an attempt to get fired. It backfires really hard because of how awfully hilarious the end product is.
    Cheese: I am the cheese. I am the best character on the show. I am better than the salami and the bologna combined.
  • An episode of Justice League featured a (presumably animated) series based on The Flash. Not only was it apparently drawn by Rob Liefeld, but the "joke" an entire scene builds up to is Flash saying "Take that, you cur!" after punching an enemy.
  • Avengers Assemble: has Ant-Man leave the Avengers to work on a movie entitled “Human Ant and the Revengers”, a self-deprecatory parody of the MCU, with an aesthetic pulled from United They Stand. Not only are the effects in the trailer obviously unfinished, but the costumes look incredibly poor and the title indicates that there’s some Her Codename Was Mary Sue in effect.
  • All the reenactments in ReBoot all have very obvious production errors, with the Megabyte binome obviously bouncing into frame after falling off stage in one episode, and the Mainframe Strolling Players Modern Major General parody having everyone who was hoisted to the ceiling fall back onto stage and when the background scrolls across there is text on one saying "don't scroll past this point".
    Bob Impersonator: I'M A GARDENER! I KNOW EVERYTHING!
    Director: ...Psst. It's Guardian. Guardian.
  • An episode of Batman Beyond opened with a Batman musical. Though the writing and singing weren't half bad (Kevin Conroy himself sang the part of his musical double!) with all things considered, it was the tone that was ridiculous. Bruce was not pleased.
  • The first story in The New Batman Adventures episode Legends of the Dark Knight is animated in the style of the old Hanna-Barbera series, right down to the music cues abruptly ending and replaced with a new one.
  • In Pinky and the Brain, this tends to happen whenever Brain's plan involves entering the art world or the entertainment industry. For example, the episode "Broadway Malady," in which the Brain decides to finance his latest scheme by producing Angst: The Musical.
    • Of course, a lot of post-1960s musical theatre really is like that. One of the playwrights casually referenced by Brain in that episode is Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, and – let's be honest here – some of Sir Andrew's stuff is so pretentious and melodramatic that it can easily qualify as sucky unless you're a diehard fan.
  • Looney Tunes:
    • "Porky's Preview": Porky, then in the "kid" stage of his career, drew the cartoon himself, with stick figures, one scene scribbled out and restarted, and the music slightly off-key.
    • "Duck Amuck" has a scene where the unseen animator who's screwing with Daffy draws a crude, black and white, stick figure background for him.
    • In its sequel "Rabbit Rampage", Bugs Bunny is drawn as a stick figure at one point, causing him to warn the animator, "Continue to draw me like this, buddy, and we'll both be out of woik."
    • In "Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers", Bugs Bunny finds his fiercest enemies (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, and Daffy Duck) replaced by "pale sterotypes" of themselves who are both drawn and animated incredibly crudely. The Daffy clone is even briefly animated in Synchro-Vox at one point.
  • As the slogan "What would happen if kids could draw their own cartoon?" shows, Stickin' Around revolves around this trope.
  • KaBlam!: Depending on who you ask, Henry and June come off sometimes as this. However, the fans wouldn't have it any other way.
  • From The Ren & Stimpy Show, Stimpy's cartoon "I Like Pink" is a bizarre, nonsensical, poorly drawn and animated cartoon with very little plot.note  John Kricfalusi's original idea was for the cartoon to be fully developed as a tribute to shorts from the The Golden Age of Animation, but he was fired before the episode was complete, effectively flipping the show's moral from "hard work produces good art" to "overworking your animators results in bad cartoons."
  • The 'Dramatic Reenactments' done on Mysterious Mysteries of Strange Mystery in Invader Zim, which include things like bad costumes (which fall apart), the crew visible in the background, and the actor playing Dib accidentally setting part of the set on fire. And it is hilarious!
  • During the rashomon episode of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters Krumm's recollection is animated in a childish scrawl.
  • Family Guy:
    • In "Chick Cancer," Peter has made his own Chick Flick, "Steel Vaginas." The film is a collection of every chick flick cliche in the book, even the ones that contradict one another (i.e. the opening narration establishes Peter's character as someone who met the lead female for the first time, only for the very next scene to reveal that he's her father who wanted a son). Not only that, but the acting is wooden, there's barely any plot, the dialogue is asinine ("We gotta get this woman to surgery time, right stat now!"), the special effects are cheap (the newborn baby is played by an adult woman wearing a bib and bonnet and covered in Spaghetti-Ohs, and Joe is made to look like he's walking by having MS Paint legs superimposed over his wheelchair), and the bloopers are still in the final cut (Cleveland accidentally drops a bag of leaves on Peter when the latter is dancing in the autumn foliage, and they keep a shot of Peter shoving Lois' head underwater to make the "drowning" more convincing.")
    • In "Foxy Lady," Peter makes a cartoon series, "Handiquacks," which is just as bad as his chick flick. The animation consists of crude crayon drawings that move in a stiff, jerky manner, the character designs are weird and ugly, the dialogue makes zero sense, the jokes are hackneyed, and the theme song was recorded in one take with lyrics that were made up on the spot and sung off-key.
    • Peter strikes again with Peterotica from the episode of the same name. We don't see much of it, but we can tell it's written in rambling, disjointed stream-of-consciousness (one such work is called, The Hot Chick Who Was Italian or Maybe Some Kind of Spanish) that makes one wonder how anyone could get off to it. For bonus points, the audiobooks are narrated by Betty White. Here's a quote:
      ...and then Captain Leeroy Hot Dog Zanzibar and Gina from my work got in the backseat of his really cool spaceship. Gina was finally wearing that tank top I got her and nothing else. Zanzibar knew he couldn't control his space horniness any longer, and then they totally did it. And if I'd have been there, I would've been like "Aw, sweet."
    • The Christmas movie Peter watches on TV, Kiss Save Santa Claus.
    • In "I Take Thee, Quagmire", Peter and the guys decide to fake Quagmire's death, in order to end his marriage to his deranged wife, Joan and film it; Joe dresses like a ninja and "stabs" Quagmire with a katana, Cleveland shows up dressed like a Nazi with a ball-gun and shoots Quagmire, and Peter "finishes him off" dressed like a "pots-and-pans robot" with a toy laser pistol. Peter then holds up a toy T-Rex (with his hand still in the frame and singing the Jurassic Park theme) to pretend to eat Quagmire's body.
    • In "Back to the Pilot", Stewie and Brian prevent 9/11 from happening during a trip to the past. When they return to the modern day, they discover that (among other things) the show has become a cheap, lazy All-CGI Cartoon where the characters make bland statements instead of jokes.
      Peter: [flatly] Chris, I heard you got a D on your report card. [turns to audience] Here's a cutaway.
      [cut to Peter standing on a blank white background]
      Peter: Matthew McConaughey is terrible.
  • The poetry Jimmy writes under the effects of a love sweater on Jimmy Two-Shoes.
  • One episode of Phineas and Ferb had Doof'n'Puss, a show about Doof and Perry with a ridiculous premise, outright insane plot and gigantic amounts of camp. Doof pitched it to a TV producer (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), who actually bought it.
  • Rejected by Don Hertzfeldt is this from start to finish. The cartoons shown start off being poorly drawn, nonsensical, and completely inappropriate, and get much much worse, fast.
  • "Mama Don't Allow" was an Animated Adaptation of a story about a possum who plays the saxophone so badly that his mother kicks him out of the house until he learns to play it. (Notably, as scriptwriter Mark Evanier recalls, they hired professional saxophonist Tom Scott to play the part… who was so good, he actually had a very hard time playing badly enough. Read it here.)
  • Superman vs. the Elite features a poorly animated Superman cartoon that seems like a Call-Back to the corny superhero shows of the past such as Super Friends. Even Big Blue himself seems slightly embarrassed after watching an episode.
  • Beavis And Butthead featured this bit in which the duo create poorly drawn versions of themselves that get killed over and over.
  • Ben 10 episode Super Alien Hero Buddy Adventures had the Show Within a Show Super Alien Hero Buddies, with characters based on the known Omnitrix aliens. The episode segment they show is very, very painful.
  • MAD revels in making most of its parodies of CGI movies in an extremely stiff and low detail style akin to Chinese mockbusters, albeit a thousand times funnier.
  • The Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Batman's Strangest Cases" has a Batman/Scooby-Doo crossover which parodies the Limited Animation and loopy logic of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, and an adaptation of Bat-Manga that not only had Limited Animation but was badly dubbed.
  • Garfield and Friends:
    • In a season 5 episode, Garfield's frustration with the degrading portrayal of cats in most cartoons leads him to create his own self-empowering feline cartoon character, "Sam the Cat". Unfortunately, the thin plot of Sam's only episode involved cheap acts of revenge against people Garfield found annoying in real life, and then the entire rest of the cartoon was Sam sleeping for over 20 minutes. Garfield hears a horrid popping noise while watching his cartoon – it turns out to be the sound of everybody in the entire country changing channels at the same time.
    • In "Mistakes Will Happen", Garfield has been getting fan mail about mistakes in his show, so he watches an episode to prove it doesn't have any. He is Instantly Proven Wrong when the title card says "Mistake Will Happen" and has Garfield's head on Odie's body. The rest of the episode is full of intentional errors, from lines that make no sense ("Garfield's been a very bad dog lately, I'm going to teach him a lesson she'll never forget!"), characters repeatedly changing clothes or switching colors, and other things that make absolutely no sense being thrown in.
  • The modern Mickey Mouse cartoon Get a Horse! is animated like an early sound cartoon circa 1928, and includes common errors found in cartoons of the era, such as film pops, coloring mistakes and primitive sound effects.note 
  • King of the Hill has the book A Dinner of Onions from the episode "Full Metal Dust Jacket", which based on the characters' comments is implied to be a massive Cliché Storm. One of the first things Hank says about it was that the entire first two chapters were only a dream.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • In one of the TV shorts, a very cheap commercial for the Mystery Shack is shown, complete with bad green-screen and Grunkle Stan constantly either messing up his lines, or getting hit by something.
    • One of the TV shorts made for the show is "Fixin' It With Soos", an in-universe web show made by Soos and loaded with cheap special effects, like gratuitous clip-art and poorly cut-and-pasted images.
      "Hey, dudes, welcome to Fixin' It With Soos, the only home fix-it show I edited myself on my own home computer."
    • In the third story from "Little Gift Shop of Horrors", Mabel watches Believe in Yourself, a parody of cutesy 1980s cartoon shows, where you can see the background cel's peg holes and writing labeling the scene it's on.
    • Sheriff Blubbs and Deputy Durland’s PSA on peer pressure features them playing teens (they’re at least 35), an extremely tame metaphor for alcohol, an over the top way of saying no and No Budget.
  • In one Trollz episode, the girls see a 50s-style video about then-new technology, such as dishwashers.
    Ruby: This movie was old when my grandparents were young!
  • The Amazing World of Gumball:
    • How to Ratatwang Your Panda, from "The Treasure", is a Take That! at cheap knock-off studios like Vídeo Brinquedo, is a very poor movie within the show with terrible CGI, obvious animation errors, and a fart attack joke for humor.
    • The humans from "The Sweaters," who not only look like Filmation-era cartoons, but move with very Limited Animation. This becomes acknowledged by how the background characters in the tennis match are actually stiff, cardboard-like figures. One of the shorts from "The Extras" takes the latter concept and makes a Running Gag about it.
    • In "The Money", it's revealed that the Watterson's money is somehow tied to the show's own budget. The visual effects intentionally glitch up and downgrade as they rush to act in a commercial, ending with everything being depicted through crude drawings on post-it notes before they sign the contract for the ad.
    • In "The Test", Gumball ends up rejecting the protagonist role by reining his nastiness in, leading to Tobias taking over unwittingly and the show adapting to it; the result is a mess of a sitcom that keeps switching between sets nonsensically and whose writing is one sucky cliche after another with no end in sight. The show itself would have gotten cancelled right then and there had Gumball not reclaimed his position (by unleashing all his bile at once and melting Tobias' face off in the process).
    • "The Candidate" has the kids trying to distract themselves with an old VHS tape, that contains a badly-sung, horrendously animated parody of a Youtube Kids Channel complete with a banal nursery rhyme. It's so bad the TV grabs the remote and essentially commits suicide with it.
  • The entire Krusty Krab commercial in the Spongebob Squarepants episode "As Seen on TV", featuring Mr. Krabs, Squidward and Pearl's horrible acting and a boom mike appearing in one shot.
    • The episode "Mermaid Man & Barnacle Boy VI: The Motion Picture", ends with the premiere of the titular film at the Krusty Krab. Considering the film was made by Spongebob and the other characters, it ends up exactly as bad as one would expect: Extremely grainy film, stiff acting, horrible special effects and props, and at one point Mermaid Man is replaced by a stunt double (Sandy wearing a piss poor Mermaid Man costume) through a blatantly obvious jump cut.
    • The live action Patchy the Pirate segments are largely based around this, as they take the wackiness of the show's cartoon world to the real world with Potty the parrot being the most egregious element.
  • Almost the entire Steven Universe episode "Rising Tides/Crashing Skies" is styled to look like it was shot with a camcorder and edited (poorly) using Windows Movie Maker. In universe, the episode is a documentary made by Ronaldo for his blog.
  • Whenever Jem needs an extra band the series uses "The Limp Lizards". Their only song is called "Broken Glass" and it's a poorly sung, wangsty mess with random soundbits of glass breaking sprinkled in. In the pilot episodes The Limp Lizards were one of the intentionally crappy bands Eric hired to make The Misfits sound better during a concert. Despite their horrible music in future episodes it seems The Limp Lizards become popular in-series.
  • In the Wander over Yonder episode "The Cartoon", Lord Hater has the Watchdogs create a propaganda cartoon about himself. The result is a horribly-animated, horribly voice-acted mess that looks like a cross between Clutch Cargo and the very worst output of Filmation.
  • We Bare Bears:
    • The video Grizz makes trying to become internet famous in "Viral Video", with strained attempts at being cute by getting on a box while saying what he was doing and humiliating poor Panda into doing something funny.
    • When the bears see Chloe's presentation on how they live in "Chloe", they decide to "improve" it, resulting in an over-the-top Clip-Art Animation about how awesome bears are. Not only does it get Chloe a bad grade, it also crashes her computer.
    • Whenever Panda draws something, it's in an Animesque style typical of bad Fan Art, with everyone having the same face.
    • In "Rooms", Panda discovers a DVD in Grizzly's bedroom containing a clumsily-made one-man movie made by Grizzly called "Crowbar Jones: The Reckoning". Panda even describes it as "So bad, it's good."
  • The BoJack Horseman Show Within a Show Horsin' Around. It's characterized as a cheesy, mass-appeal sitcom from The '90s with low production value and stale writing. The cast and crew do it purely for the money, and many jokes revolve around the fact that BoJack defends its quality.
    • The show frequently lampoons catchphrase-oriented comedy of 90s sitcoms. The Horse has a Mad Libs Catchphrase of "I've heard of [common expression], but this is ridiculous!", which often doesn't make sense. Sabrina has "That's too much, man!" which is treated as hilarious by the laugh track. Ethan's catchphrase "Yowza yowza bo-bowza!" gets shoehorned into the show at to the actor's insistence but provokes only awkward silence from the audience.
    • The fashions are all humorously dated, with the Horse wearing Cosby sweaters and sporting a shaggier mane evoking a mullet.
    • The Christmas special "Sabrina's Christmas Wish" is an entire episode dedicated to showing an episode of Horsin' Around, with most of the comedy coming from the Stylistic Suck. In spite of being a tireless apologist for the show, BoJack reacts to its various rough edges while watching it.
    • The title character's defictionalized website is, put lightly, a horribly outdated eyesore filled with self-complimentary lies, parodying amateur-created sites that were found on Geocities and Angelfire.
  • In Episode 105 of Kaeloo, Kaeloo introduces all the characters in the style of moving drawings on a sheet of ruled paper, and her drawing of Stumpy is absolutely terrible. Lampshaded by Stumpy himself.
  • Pretty much every single song to ever be sung by a character in Bob's Burgers is entertainingly horrible.
    • The rock songs that Tommy the health inspector from "Nude Beach" sings are so awful that he has to blackmail venues into letting him perform.
    • Linda often sings songs she composed herself. The Thanksgiving song from "Turkey in the Can" stands out as particularly awful. Furthermore, she's voiced by a man doing an intentionally half-assed impression of his mother.
    • Gene is an amateur musician, in every sense of the word "amateur."
    • All songs by Boyz 4 Now are a piss-take on cheesy boy band pop songs.
  • Wirt from Over the Garden Wall is as prone to Purple Prose as any teenaged poet.
    "Is the dove never to meet the sea for want of the odious mountain?"
  • One OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes short is an in-universe infomercial for BoxMore, made by Lord Boxman and his robots. The editing and effects are atrocious, the robots (especially Darrell) can’t act at all, the interviewed customers are either reading off cue cards or rambling about unrelated topics, the boom mic repeatedly slips into frame, the Jingle sung by Shannon is horribly off-key, and the whole thing looks like it was filmed with an old camera from the early 90’s.
  • In an early episode of Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinks, Pixie and Dixie are watching "Knockout Mouse," a TV cartoon that makes the cartoon the two are in look like Disney made it.
  • One Freakazoid! parody, "Toby Danger", blatantly mocks Jonny Quest, right down to the limited animation and stilted dialogue.
  • During the 90's Cartoon Network aired a series of four shorts called Cartoons That Never Made It, featuring intro sequences for intentionally bad fictional Failed Pilot Episodes. The shorts includes "Frothy Dog", a show about a dog with rabies, "Heidi and the Yodelers", a Josie and the Pussycats parody with Swiss stereotypes, "Salt 'n Slug", a romance between a slug and a living salt shaker, and "Rupert the Grouper", a show about a dancing fish who suffocates to death partway through the intro sequence after jumping out of his fishbowl to dance along to his theme song and stays dead for the rest of the short.
  • Pickle and Peanut:
    • On an aesthetic level, the show literally and figuratively features a cut-and-paste art style, with the eponymous characters themselves both resembling magazine cutouts.
    • The holiday special episodes have short segments that feature an Art Shift into rudimentary, polygonal CG animation akin to early PlayStation titles. (Think Bubsy 3D and you’ve got the right idea.)
  • Xavier: Renegade Angel: The entire show is in poor-quality CGI, and looks more like a PS2 bootleg game than an actual show. The art style often crosses with Deranged Animation, with really trippy visuals. To say nothing about the characters and plot.
  • A lot of rap and hip-hop in The Boondocks is done with this in mind, with repetitive lyrics, simplistic subject matter, and enough bleeps to consume large chunks of the song. Thugnificent's songs include "Booty Butt Cheeks", which consists entirely of "Booty butt, booty butt, booty butt CHEEKS!" repeated over and over, and "Stomp 'Em In The Nuts", which is on a pretty similar level of complexity.
  • The student films shown in the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Animaniacs" (No relation). Some are pretty good, but others, like Elmyra's and Dizzy's, are done in amateurish art quality. Gogo's film is actually live-action clips spliced together, which he calls Realism. Plucky's film wins the film festival because it's about a second long.
  • In "Meat, the Butcher" from Dog City, Eliot attempts to convince Ace to lay low from the titular Meat by erasing all the exits in his room using his paintbrush... only for Ace to literally take the brush away from him and draw (a very crude caricature of) Dog City himself just so he can get outside.
  • The opening of Trash Truck has a card stating that the show is "A Glen Keane Productions."
  • The Patrick Star Show: In "Just in Time for Christmas", Patrick remembers something his mother said that gives him a clue on what to get her for Christmas. We see a poorly-drawn crayon version of her in a thought bubble, abruptly flapping her mouth open with two frames of animation.
  • Bluey: The episode "Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound" is about the Heeler family making a movie to cheer up a hospitalized Bingo. It’s adorably amateur even for a home movie: multiple flubs are left in due to shoddy editing, Bluey's acting tends to be too over-the-top, Bandit is clearly reading his lines from a cue card, and Never Work with Children or Animals is in full effect with Bluey's younger cousins Muffin and Socks. But Bingo loves it, and it even comforts Chilli (who's been staying with Bingo while she's in the hospital).
  • Transformers: EarthSpark: The expository flashback sequence in the first episode explaining humanity and the Autobots' war against the Decepticons on Earth in the 1980s is done in the 2D, hand-drawn art style of the original 80s Transformers cartoon and comics by Marvel and Sunbow… complete with all the inconsistent art, blatant animation mistakes, cheesy 80s synthesizer music, clunky fight scenes, stilted dialogue, simplistic storytelling and Early-Installment Weirdness of those series. It even does a (purposefully awkward and noticeable) Aspect Ratio Switch to the 4:3 ratio that analog televisions used in that time period.
  • DuckTales (2017): In the episode "GlomTales!", the usual intro is replaced with one created by Flintheart Glomgold, featuring ugly stick figure drawings and cutout animations, blocky CGI, and boastful lyrics full of repetition and painful rhymes.
  • Rocket Power: In response to a bad movie they saw, the four main characters decide to make their own movie. It is endearingly bad, with wonky camerawork, ad-libbed lines (Lars, playing the role of the Big Bad, declares that "TWO DORKS ENTER, ONE DORK LEAVES!"...and then quietly apologizes to Ray, who plays the role of The Dragon, for calling him a "dork"), and invokedattempts at special effects.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks sometimes makes subtle fun at special effects issues in previous Star Trek shows:
    • Peanut Hamper is animated to look as if she's suspended on an invisible fishing line, because that's how the exocomps in "The Quality of Life" moved.
    • In "I, Excretus", a four-fingered Pandronian is sometimes shown with five fingers, a nod to an art mistake with the original Pandronian in "Bem".

Top