Spins a web, any size. Catches thieves, just like flies."
In fiction, there are many creative ways to use a spider web. Mandatory offensive tactic for a Giant Spider or any character with spider-themed powers, its most common application is tying someone head to toe in webbing to prevent escape, and what usually follows is not pretty. The web will typically hang from the ceiling in the way that a spider might wrap a fly in web before drinking its fluids. Special caution is advised while wandering an Enchanted Forest or a Creepy Cave where it commonly happens, as it is extremely rare for a character in such a sticky situation to get rid of it without help.
In Video Games, this trope frequently manifests as lowering whatever speed stat there is, outright forcing a character to wait the effect out to be able to move at all, or both at once depending on the developer.
See also Bound and Gagged, Mummy Wrap, and Projectile Webbing.
Examples:
- Gaju Bhai: In "Tin Tin Tula", Tin Tin Tula weaves webs all over Gajrajpuri, going as far as to wrap some of its residents with webs, including General Bhagat. They're freed the moment the spider is defeated.
- Inuyasha:
- In the 100th episode, Kagome, Miroku, Sango, and Shippo get webbed up in demon moth cocoons.
- A moth demon called Gatenmaru wraps both InuYasha and Miroku inside a poisonous, corrosive cocoon.
- Earlier, the Kumogashira (spider demons) try to do this to InuYasha.
- Karakuridouji Ultimo: Jealous has this as one of his abilities, being that his theme animal is a spider. The fact that Stan Lee is a co-producer might be part of the reason as well.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid shows that Lutecia's tiny robotic Insects are capable of doing this when they immobilize Fabia in this manner.
- Monster Musume: The ability for arachnes (half-woman half-spiders) to rapidly cocoon others in their silk is one of the major reasons they are considered so dangerous. Especially given that many of them enjoy using it to perform bondage and domination on others. Whether their targets are willing participants or not.
- Pokémon: The Series:
- Happens a few times when the characters run across spider-based mons. In early episodes, even the relatively useless (in the games) String Shot attack could do this.
- Pikachu learns the Electroweb attack during Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon, which can not only trap opponents but also shield him in a pinch.
- Sailor Moon: The seventh episode sees the unfortunate Idol Singer Mikan Shiratori get cocooned in rapidly solidifying glass in her shower by the Monster of the Week, a youma named Derella.
- So I'm a Spider, So What?: The main character uses this trope constantly over the course of the story due to being a Giant Spider in an RPG world.
- Batman: Killer Moth did this to two of his henchmen when they screwed up — the cocoons were airtight, and the victims suffocated.
- ElfQuest: Preservers like to wrap living beings in suspended animation cocoons. The cocoons don't give a clue as to their occupants' shape, though in the case of humans or elves the size is usually a giveaway.
- Hack/Slash: Samhain on the cover of issue 12
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- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): Happens to the cast when the main characters encounter a gang of unfriendly spiders.
- Savage Dragon: Widow can spin webs to tangle people up. It was unknown how she achieved this for many issues until a single panel cropped up showing her hanging upside down from a web-strand... only both of her hands were free and her leg was obscuring the direct source of the web. One reader jokingly wrote in and asked if she spun webs the same way spiders do, and Word of God responded: yes.
- Spider-Man:
- Spider-Man does this to anyone he needs really tied down. And occasionally his wife.
- This happens to Squirrel Girl in a prelude to Spider-Island.
- Venom has been known to do this to a few people too, but there have been cases where he purposely let the victim suffocate. (Venom is usually reluctant to kill anyone other than Spider-Man; the folks he does this to tend to be criminals and other scum.)
- Wonder Woman Vol. 1: When Wonder Girl rescues Ronno from a Giant Spider she wraps it up in its own giant web that her merboy friend had been stuck in as they escape.
- In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin imagines himself as a bug flying around outdoors until he gets stuck in a spider web. Cutting Back to Reality, Calvin has somehow tangled himself up in a tree hammock.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: The Dungeon of the spider-using Dungeon Keeper, Arachne, has some people like this:
- The Totally Amazing Spider-Man: Poor Clover ends up wrapped up in Spider-Man's web after staging a mugging with Sam and Alex in a bid to capture him. Sam geeks out over its chemical properties, much to Clover's chagrin.
- A Bug's Life: Rosie the black widow does this to PT Flea near the end as a way to keep him from interfering to Flik's and the circus bugs' plan to defeat Hopper.
- Alien:
- This happens to several victims throughout the series. The Xenomorphs use a kind of unexplained organic resin to cocoon people, leaving them as bait for facehugger eggs.
- In a deleted scene of the original Alien, Ripley found Dallas and Brett completely cocooned, and slowly transforming into more Alien eggs.
- It briefly happens to Newt in Aliens, before Ripley frees her. There was originally supposed to be a Xenomorph specifically bred for cocooning in Aliens, but it never made it past the concept art stage.
- The Amazing Spider-Man: As usual for him, Spider-Man does this to the Lizard. He even imitates a spider by crawling all over him while wrapping him in webs.
- Big Ass Spider!: Some characters are cocooned by the eponymous critter when it wants to have some food ready for its newly hatched offspring.
- Camel Spiders: When Erin gets to a general store, she goes inside and starts asking around for the proprietors. She finds them webbed up in the backrooms, telling her to get out so she doesn't end up like them.
- Eight Legged Freaks: Scarlett Johansson gets cocooned by a Giant Spider, as do several other people. One scene has a character come across a number of cocoons that are still writhing and have their voices muffled, before one of them is impaled on the fangs of the biggest spider.
- Gremlins 2: The New Batch: This happens partially to Marla , courtesy of the Spider Gremlin. (It isn't able to wrap her up completely, though she does blunder into its web.) Kate finds her before it gets to her and considers leaving her to her fate for what happened earlier (Kate had assumed she had seduced Billy); when Marla confesses and tells her what actually happened, Kate decides to cut her loose, but then the monster appears. Fortunately, Gizmo, now sick of being bullied by the gremlins, appears dressed up like Rambo and kills the thing with an makeshift bow and arrow tipped with an ignited bottle of white-out.
- In Infestation, everyone in the area passes out after a bright flash and strange noise. Upon waking, the main character finds himself, and everyone else in sight, wrapped up by the invading creatures.
- Some of IT's victims are webbed up for later eating after their brains are broken by the Deadlights.
- In James and the Giant Peach, Miss Spider and the Old Green Grasshopper team up to give Aunts Spiker and Sponge this treatment.
- Killer Klowns from Outer Space: In a variant, the aliens wrap up their human victims in cotton candy.
- In The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Shelob captures Frodo by envenomating him, then catching him and beginning to web him up in one of the most chilling scenes of the whole trilogy. Luckily for him (and the world in general), Sam arrived just at that moment.
- Stephen King's The Mist has several people cocooned by monstrous spider-like things from the mist. Since they're able to cocoon people despite their webs being caustic enough to cut off people's limbs in other scenes, they presumably can spin different types of webbing. (As do ordinary spiders.)
- The cover (and just the cover) of Night Screams.
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- Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity: While running through the jungle, Rik gets trapped in a giant spiderweb; making him easy prey for Zed.
- Web of Death has the titular weapon, a lantern holding an ancient tarantula who can expel poisoned webs. Anyone hit by the webs will be wrapped up... and drained of their blood, shriveling within seconds and dying a painful death with plenty of Body Horror added.
- In Doom, Bill Ritch is wrapped in webs after the spidermind interrogates him.
- Larklight: The alien Giant Spiders called the First Ones do this to their victims as a standard practice. The still-living victims can stay preserved for years. One of the victims is Art and Myrtle's thought-dead Missing Mom.
- H. P. Lovecraft: The DelRey paperback collections feature cover art taken from a panoramic painting by Michael Whelan; one section/cover has a human(oid) body strung up like this. Despite nothing like this ever happening in any of the stories.
- In the short story "One Night Strand", the protagonist discovers to his disgust and horror that the noisy couple next door are some guy he nicknames "Mr. Bones" (since he's so thin) and a Giant Spider. Mr. Bones is all webbed up while his spider lover is engaging in foreplay. The story ends with the protagonist fleeing in his jeep. While he's driving, he has a bit of in-universe Fridge Horror when he recalls seeing the remains of webbed up insects in spiderwebs and connects that with Mr. Bones, and gives his jeep more gas.
- In The Perils of Enhancegirl this happens to Enhancegirl and Korean heroine Stellar in part IV, courtesy of Arachna, who defeats, and wraps up both heroines.
- Tolkien's Legendarium:
- The Hobbit: While deep in the forest of Mirkwood, twelve of the thirteen dwarves are captured by a colony of gigantic spiders and hung from the trees to be eaten later. Bilbo is able to rescue them before this can happen, turning himself invisible with his magic ring and cutting the dwarves free.
- Shelob does this to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings when she captures him in her lair and paralyzes him with her venom. Sam tears the webbing after rescuing his master, but can't get Frodo to respond, leaving him to think he was too late.
- Tortall Universe: This happens to Daine in the last book of The Immortals. She accidentally falls of a cliff and gets caught in a trap made by giant spiders with human heads called Spidrens. The next series, Protector of the Small, has Keladry and her fellow pages encountering victims who aren't rescued in time.
- Angel: This appears in "Couplet", when Fred and Gunn are in the flesh-eating tree's roots.
- Deadtime Stories has a dog face this fate from a Giant Spider in "Along Came a Spider".
- Doctor Who:
- "The Runaway Bride": Donna and Lance get webbed up and hoisted into the Racnoss Empress' webs. The Empress later cuts Lance down so her emerging children can eat him (off-screen, thankfully).
- ""Arachnids in the UK": The overgrown spiders do this to their victims, as they are capturing food to save for later. The first seen victim, Anna, is said to have suffocated to death as a result. This is also implied to have happened to the two later victims, Frankie and Kevin.
- Also "Planet of the Spiders", which is about a planet overrun with giant spiders who trap humans by encasing them in webs.
- Also "The Web Planet".
- Ghostwriter, in a fiction writing contest (a story-in-a-story), had one of the characters slimed and attached to a door.
- Once Upon a Time: In Season 6 Episode 16 "Mother's Little Helper", Emma Swan ends up battling The Great Spider from the Echoless Forest. The creature manages to wrap Emma in a cocoon of webbing, which nearly suffocates her until Rumpelstiltskin comes to rescue her and they defeat the beast together.
- Power Rangers:
- Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue had this happen to four of the rangers and the entire Aquabase personnel. They were stuck to a giant web while spider eggs were slowly hatching to eat them alive.
- Also happened to Billy in the original series courtesy of Lord Zedd's Archnofiend.
- Subverted in The River. The father, whom everyone has been searching for, is eventually found like this (though encased in amber), but it turns out he did this to himself in order to survive.
- Star Trek: Enterprise had some alien organism effectively web up Captain Archer and four other crew members.
- Subverted in Star Trek: Voyager; the forehead-of-the-week's corpses just happen to decompose that way.
- Supernatural: The victims of the arachne in "Unforgiven".
- The X-Files has this in "Darkness Falls". It's different in that the subjects are killed before being cocooned(as seen by the badly-eaten corpses of loggers earlier in the episode). It's possible that the bugs were just storing food, or leaving it for their babies.
- In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Benjy is transformed into a bug monster and is then able to excrete a green material that can be used to web people up into cocoons. A group of Neo-Nazis attack him and he retaliates by killing them all and webbing them up, which is what the other students come across when they're able to hunt Benjy down to an Abandoned Warehouse.
- Call of Cthulhu: Very likely to happen to anyone who tangles with the giant spider-like Great Old One named Atlach-Nacha or Leng Spiders.
- Dungeons & Dragons: In the Basic D&D module Talons of Night, Finnister MacAlister and any other captive NPCs are found paralyzed and wrapped up in web with egg sacs bound to their chests — they're intended to be food for the baby spiders.
- In Rocket Age, the Trip Line Spider has no trouble webbing humanoids up for later, along with making traps.
- Talislanta has the Crag Spider and the Vasp, both of which use webs to trap their prey.
- Baldur's Gate:
- In a standard game, this is the result of failing a save against the wizard spell "Web", or traps that copy its effect. The web stays until the character successfully makes a new saving throw, but the character can get webbed again as long as he's still in the spell's area of effect.
- An optional late-game dungeon has some areas with lots of dead bodies all cocooned up, the handiwork of either phase spiders or carrion crawlers.
- With the Sword Coast Stratagems Game Mod installed, giant spiders will shoot wads of webbing at characters, holding them in place for a while if they fail a saving throw.
- In the maze game on Big Funin Furbyland the villain is a spider you have to avoid. If it catches you, it says "blah blah blah" as it sovers you with a web. You then lose valuable time waiting until the web disappears.
- Blood (1997) has this, in the final level of Episode II, where the big boss is a giant spider.
- Brütal Legend has this before the battle with the Heavy Metal Queen, a giant spider made of motorcycle parts. Some of the cocoons are twitching, but not because the victim is still alive — when you get near they burst and reveal dozens of tiny spiderlings.
- In Darkest Dungeon, this isn't shown directly, but the Giant Spider enemies include a subtype called Webbers who shoot webs at your party. Doing so inflicts the Stun status, implying they've been wrapped up in webs and need a round to get free. During this time, they are Marked, which means that the other spider types with them will target the webbed victim exclusively, doing both high direct damage and a dangerous blight effect.
- Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Spider lairs have loads of webbed corpses.
- Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening: When you first discover the Arachne, numerous human-shaped cocoons can be seen hanging upside-down from the ceiling and from webs.
- In Diablo III, you rescue Karyna, the Dummied Out mystic Artisan, from the enormous web she's caught in moments before the Spider Queen arrives to suck her guts out.
- In Doom³, in areas populated with Trites, a number of webbed corpses are scattered around. Being related to them, Vagaries also have them in their choice of decoration. An interesting example is in the first Vagary's lair: one of the bodies on the ceiling twitches like crazy when you're still seeing the place through a windownote , but by the time you get inside, it's dead still.
- Dragon Age: Origins: Any area that includes Giant Spider enemies is bound to have quite a few of these to loot. The spiders can also do this to playable characters, stunning them for a short period of time.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- Land Dreughs, a temporary land-dwelling form of the typically aquatic humanoid octopi race of Dreugh, are said to do this with their victims. Dreugh undergo a process known as "karvinasim" to become Land Dreughs, temporarily becoming terrestrial in order to breed. Land Dreughs leave their victims cocooned in this state to serve as food for their young.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Skyrim's native Giant Spiders do this to their victims. In the first plot-relevant dungeon you explore as part of the main quest, you find a bandit leader still alive and webbed to the wall. He promises to hand over the item you are seeking if you cut him free. Of course, the instant you do so, he takes off running and calls you a fool. He will likely die a quick death to the dungeon's Draugr or death traps if you don't catch up and kill him first. One spider-filled cave even has the corpses of woolly mammoths webbed up this way.
- The Elder Scrolls Online lets you do this yourself with the "Trapping Webs" skill from the Undaunted skill line. The webs cut enemy speed in half, and last for 10 seconds before exploding into poison.
- Ghostbusters: The Video Game: The Spider Witch's level is just one big level dedicated to our webby friends. There are bodies hung from the ceiling and the whole level is basically wrapped in webs. An arachnophobes worst nightmare for sure.
- Guild Wars: In "The Wilds" mission, several webbed prisoners must be saved towards the end.
- Identity V: The Soul Weaver can wrap Survivors up in cocoons as an alternative elimination method. Notably, she’s the only Hunter that has one.
- Hollow Knight:
- The dangerous tunnels of Deepnest are littered with wrapped-up corpses of bugs left by the Sneaky Spider inhabitants.
- In the Distant Village, The Player Character suffers an Inescapable Ambush at a Treacherous Checkpoint and is left stuck to a wall in Herrah's lair. Fortunately The Knight can burst out of the wrapping and escape.
- On two occasions, Zote the Mighty can be found grumbling and struggling where predatory monsters have left him ensnared. If The Knight cuts him free, he will Complain About A Rescue He Doesn't Like.
- Kingdom Rush: Origins: Webspitter Spiders can encase barracks troops in cocoons of webbing, temporarily making them useless.
- Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver has this in the Silenced Cathedral, which is inhabited by spider-like degenerate vampires. Many of them are still moving.
- Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars: The Spider Queen recaptures rebellious slaves by firing webs from her scepter to wrap them and reel them in.
- Limbo: Temporarily happens to your character. You have to make an escape while still covered in webbing, greatly reducing your mobility. It's a bit of a comic relief moment, actually, unless you trip into a pit of spikes...
- Monster Hunter:
- Monster Hunter 4 introduces the Nerscylla, a gigantic spider that throws balls of web in an attempt to immobilize you. If it's successful, the Nerscylla will either attempt to bite you with its huge pincers to inflict poison or sting you to put you to sleep. The Shrouded subspecies, introduced in 4 Ultimate, can do this as well.
- Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate: Despite being a mantis and not a spider, Ahtal-Ka is capable of shooting balls of web capable of immobilizing the hunter. And when mounting the gigantic Ahtal Neset, it can make it shoot a big stream of web (sometimes several back to back).
- Mountain King: A spider lurking at the very bottom of the mountain will cocoon you if you come into contact with it. You must wiggle your way out of it before the spider comes back and eats you.
- Neverwinter Nights likes to leave human-sized web cocoons around wherever there are giant spiders.
- Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath: One of the living ammo the Stranger can shoot from his crossbow are spider-like creatures that web up enemies, allowing Stranger to capture bounties alive.
- Overlord II: A handful of minions meet this fate after your ship is wrecked on a spider-infested tropical island. You can rescue them, though.
- Pathways into Darkness states that if you are successfully killed by giant spiders, they web up your body and drag you away to be eaten.
- The Pokémon moves String Shot, which lowers the opponent's speed; Spider Web, which completely prevents the target from escaping; Sticky Web, which lowers Speed stat by one on a Pokemon switching in; and Electroweb, which deals electric damage and lowers the target's speed. Two families of spider Pokémon can learn all of these (a third, which is part-Water type, only learns Sticky Web and Spider Web), and it's pretty obvious how they all work.
- Purgatory 2: This happens to Emma after the Big Bad Oliver drops her into the Giant Spider lair, but Ebel and Enri rescue her before the spiders eat her.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil – Code: Veronica: Happens to Claire Redfield, in a Shout-Out to the Alien trilogy. And there's a webbed-up corpse in the moth corridor.
- Resident Evil: Outbreak: Not by the in-game GiantSpiders, but by the Giant Moth. Characters that get grabbed by the moth in "Below Freezing Point" will be found webbed to a wall one floor below. The following video shows how this is done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKA0EctdauE
- Runescape gives us the Araxyte lair, decorated with hanging webbed up corpses. Some of them are still moving.
- In The Sexy Brutale, this is the ultimate fate of one of the guests. Just like all the other guests' deaths, it's your job to figure out how to prevent it.
- Starcraft II: the mission Outbreak, you come across human shaped cocoons labeled "Infested Refugee".
- Super Cyborg have you fighting a giant insectoid monster called the Captured Bedlaah, who's entangled in the middle of a giant spider-web. It's a Stationary Boss due to it's predicament, but after you kill it you then face the web's owner, a Giant Spider called the Akhamafold Octopod. Who's not very happy at you blowing up it's lunch.
- Terraria:
- Harder difficulties (Expert Mode and Master Mode) see the Black Recluse enemies given the ability to inflict this on players, resulting in two different resulting appearances depending on if the player ends up stuck to the floor or a wall.
- The Stylist NPC is found in this state.
- Existing spider webs can also be found in the world, which temporarily slow the player down, but eventually snap if the player is inside of them for too long (and can easily be broken with any weapon anyway).
- Uncle Albert's Magical Album has a spider web maze with two woodlice trapped in web serving as morbid decorations.
- On your way through Hotland in Undertale, you find an area that's full of spiderwebs. You have to try and cross the one that blankets the entire path in order to proceed, and the result is... predictable. During the boss fight against Muffet the Spider, your soul indicator is restricted to jumping from one "web" to the next, and one of the ACT options is "struggle", which just makes her laugh.
- Warcraft:
- Warcraft III: Nerubians can use Web attacks. Undead Crypt Fiends in particular can use webs to allow ground units to attack air units. In the Nerubian levels of the expansion, you can see dwarves All Webbed Up just before they explode into spiders.
- World of Warcraft has a few boss encounters where either the mooks or the bosses can cast a web wrap. Notably Maexxna, the final boss of Naxxramas' Arachnid Quarter, will cast web wrap against the entire raid a number of times during the encounter. Web-wrapped NPCs occur in several arachnid-populated areas as well.
- Warhammer Online has several quests to go into a town overrun with "Silkens", giant mutant spiders that wrap victims in cocoons. One of them is to burn the cocoons of marauders who have proven too weak to the cause by being cocooned as food/gestation units and need to be destroyed to ensure the weakness is purged. Another is to gather the blood of a prominent villager and anoint a banner with it — the villager happens to have already been cocooned, so you need only stab him and gather the blood from the twitching, prone cocoon.
- CliffSide: During Cordie's attack on the bank, a bunch of people end up wrapped up in her webs from head to toe like mummies.
- In the web series DEATH BATTLE! episode "Batman vs. Spider-Man", this is ultimately how Spider-Man takes down Batman, although it is said outright Batman could have escaped if given enough time, it left him vulnerable long enough for Spider-Man to deal the death blow.
- The Dreamwalk Journal spinoffs The Widow and Nightshade, the Merry Widow (NSFW) feature partially-wrapped anthro-arthropod victims, waiting not to be eaten but screwed senseless.
- Parodied in Girl Genius: The spider even uses a knife and fork, and webs up its victim while the main characters are arguing
over who has to squash it.
- In Homestuck The victims of Vriska's Giant Spider lusus are briefly seen stuck in a web
. Many of them were probably already dead when they got there, since Vriska kills people in a variety of ways other than luring them to her hive.
- Spinnerette is a rare heroic example, since she's part spider. She hasn't gotten to do it to any villains yet, though; her only use of this tactic so far was when her own teammates
were hit with a Hate Plague poison.
- There's a fan-made Daring Do game on the web featuring these as setpieces for an ancient temple. You can push them around to an extent, but no giant spiders ever show up, and it's never revealed just what's behind all the silk. Which just makes things scarier...
- Aladdin: The Series: "Web of Fear" has the Unkhbut wrap up Princess Jasmine and take her underground.
- American Dad!: In "Brains, Brains, and Automobiles", during the sequence where Stan is trying to find Francine in Roger's brain after Francine gets mad at Stan for purposely poisoning Roger as a means to stall their "alone time", Stan walks into a cave and finds Roger's conscience (a small, weak Jiminy Cricket-esque bug who's dying of neglect) begging Stan to kill him. He then finds actor Tom Skerritt stuck to the wall in a white web-looking cocoon. Tom begs Stan to "Get me work!"
- Ben 10: Alien Force: Gwen is tied up by a feral version of Spidermonkey who briefly escaped the Omnitrix in "Vengeance of Vilgax part 2".
Kevin: He's going to lay eggs in Gwen's head, and when they hatch, they'll eat her brain!Ben: That's ridiculous.Kevin: What? You've laid eggs before.
- Danger Mouse: In "Aiaggg! Spiders!", DM and Penfold find Colonel K in this state as well as all of London due to Greenback's ray that makes spiders grow huge. When they ask Colonel K what happened:
Colonel K: One of the blighters got here before I could warn you. Said his name was Webb, said he'd come to help with the admin. I said I could do with a hand; he said he had eight of 'em. Next thing I knew I was part of his blasted filing system!
- The Dreamstone: The purpose of the Spidermobile in the episode of the same name. It ends up as one of the Urpney's few formidable weapons, successfully webbing up nearly everyone in the Land Of Dreams (and later Rufus, Amberley and Pildit when they try to sneak into Viltheed).
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: This seems to happen to at least one character every time Jeff shows up. At least Jeff's a friendly spider. The Spider Queen, who appears on the made-for-TV movie Billy & Mandy: Wrath of the Spider Queen, is much nastier, and she tends to tie up victims this way too.
- This happens to Hilda in the episode "The Forgotten Lake" when she is caught by the Spider-Frog. The web is so strong that it requires the rotating saw that Johanna happened to bring along in order to free her.
- The Legend of Zelda: Because actual violence was a no-no, the cartoon had tektites project red silk to entangle their victims, which effectively mummifies the titular heroine in the episode titled "That Sinking Feeling". (In the games, tektites just hop around for Collision Damage.)
- The New Adventures of Superman: Jimmy Olsen gets wrapped up in a cocoon when he is kidnapped by one of the Insect Raiders in "The Insect Raiders". Superman later borrows the cocooning gun to wrap up the villains.
- The Smurfs: In "The Magnifying Mixture", Papa Smurf gets spun into a cocoon when he accidentally spills enlarging formula onto a small spider.
- The Spectacular Spider-Man: Spider-Man, just like his comic book counterpart. Probably most notably is when he does this repeatedly to Kraven to make sure he can't break free this time.
- Total Drama:
- When Team CIRRRRH spends the night in the Amazon Rainforest in "The Am-AH-Zon Race", Alejandro lets giant caterpillars drag away Owen, whom he hates. Owen is cocooned and hung upside down, presumably to serve as food later on. Alejandro only comes back to save him because the challenge is unwinnable if the whole team isn't present.
- A giant mutant spiders picks off the contestants one by one in "Finders Creepers". Captured contestants are webbed up and left hanging in a giant web. Though the contestants initially appear to be in danger, the spider is actually Izzy and their captures are part of the challenge.
- Totally Spies!: Very briefly occurs in an episode, via a giant robot spider.
- Transformers: Animated: Blackarachnia does this to her enemies, like Bumblebee and Prowl.
- The Worm Turns: Mickey Mouse's first test subject for the Courage Builder is a fly wrapped up in a spider's web. After the fly escapes, it wraps the spider in his own web.
- Spiders do this naturally in real life, though they've never been reported to do so to humans, obviously.
- This is basically how velvet worms catch their prey — they spray a long strand of sticky fluid
onto a potential meal (usually a small bug), which immobilizes them by basically gluing them to the spot they're in.
- Many a haunted house during Halloween will feature mannequins wrapped in cotton stuffing to look like the cocooned victims of a giant spider. How convincing these props look varies by the artistic talents of whoever made them.