Brown Note / Western Animation

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• In Adventure Time, Princess Monster Wife repeatedly inadvertently knocks Finn and Jake unconscious with her appearance, even when they use mirrors to avoid this. She also made Gunter (a literal Eldritch Abomination) puke, again inadvertently.
• American Dad!:
  • It's never stated, but it is implied, with the Golden Turd. While it does have a lot of monetary value, seeing as how it's solid gold and encrusted with valuable gems, it drives the people who find it to do some insane things to keep it or to prevent others from having it, implying that it does have a more drastic immediate effect on the finders. Let's see, the first man who finds it is with his friend, and he quickly kills the friend because he doesn't like the idea of sharing the value. He regrets it immediately and kills himself. The next person who finds it is a long-time ethical cop who takes it from a crime scene two weeks before retirement, putting his pension at risk. He immediately regrets it, but not before his wife finds out. The cop decides to return it and his wife ACTS like she agrees, but then we see her put poison in his tea... The turd ends several episodes later powering up Roger's UFO so he can escape the war on Earth between Heaven and Hell forces after the Apocalypse, but not before taking Stan and Jesus itself as passengers to the Anti-Christ's hideout...transforming it along the series from an Artifact of Attraction to some sort of Chekhov's Gag.
  • Steve gets lost in the desert and meets God, who took the form of Angelina Jolie. When Steve asks to see her boobs, she agrees, though warns him that staring into the rack of infinite wisdom has been known to drive men insane.
  • Oscar Gold, an inside-series film created by the villain Tearjerker (Roger, in a Bond-style parody) so sad you will cry to death. It's about a Jewish, mentally retarded, alcoholic boy, in hiding from the Nazis (Anne Frank style), whose puppy has cancer... and then the pup dies and Oscar walks and jumps in joy while he drags the dead doggie body... There's also an even sadder film, consisting of several hours of a baby chimp trying to revive its dead mother, but fortunately, it's never released.
  • Roger's "approved friend" for Steve, Freddy, screams at such a high-pitched frequency that it causes the eyeballs of anyone hearing it to pop out of their head.
• In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, Shake's horrific self-written song "Nude Love" forces the Insanoflex to kill itself upon hearing it.
• One episode of Archer has Krieger studying the phenomenon of the Brown Note. Mostly to weaponize it into a gun that makes people shit on command.
• An episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold has Blue Beetle use a sonic gun with incapacitating effects; he and Batman argue about its side effects.
• Ben 10: Omniverse has an entire species whose faces are so horrifying that Ben's transformation of it (Toepick) saves the day by just standing there. Any sentient lifeform that he opens his mask in front of is rendered catatonic with fear.
• In the pilot episode of the revival... episode of Biker Mice from Mars, the Big Bad throws his little evil brother against a wall, and the sound of his claws scratching makes their prisoners wince and cry.
• In the Bluey episode "Magic Xylophone", the Heeler family play a game where they pretend that the sound of a xylophone freezes them. The only way to reverse it is to make the sound again.
• Close Enough: In "The Erotic Awakening of A.P. LaPearle", the prospect of Alex writing erotic novels is considered gross enough that nobody (except Pearle, who enjoys it) can hear him say anything sexual without vomiting.
• The first season of Code Lyoko has an episode where XANA distributes an MP3 called "Glad to be Bad" through the Internet that sends listeners into a coma. It's so much this trope that when Yumi picks up a set of headphones playing the song indistinctly, she's completely thrown for a loop and just barely misses hitting a coma.
• In The Fairly OddParents! episode "One Man Banned", Timmy is initially such a Dreadful Musician that he can't play a single note on a triangle without causing havoc; he plays it at home and it makes it rain frogs while volcanoes erupt and fill his house with lava.
• Family Guy:
  • On one episode, Peter is warned not to watch a video that kills anyone who watches it. He scoffs and takes the Schmuck Bait, and promptly keels over. The film? Mannequin. A certain amount of Truth in Television, to be sure...
  • On another episode, Quagmire tells Peter a dirty joke with the punchline "P.S.: Your vagina's in the sink!", which Peter finds so funny he poops himself every time he hears it. So Quagmire and Joe keep telling him the punchline through various means (texting him, having Freddy Krueger tell him it in a dream).
    Peter: Stop it, you guys, you're ruining all my clothes!
  • In "Killer Queen", Stewie is initially terrified of the sad-looking giant robot on the cover of Queen's News of the World, but eventually gets over it. At the episode's climax, when Charles Yamamoto is strangling Chris to death as revenge for Chris beating him in a hot dog eating contest earlier in the episode, Stewie shows him the album, which scares Yamamoto so bad that he has a fatal heart attack.
• In one episode of Fish Hooks, Bea attempts to make friends with Albert by playing the violin. Her playing is so bad Albert's face cracks and his organs fly out.
• In the animated version of Fraggle Rock, Boober finds a scroll that holds "The Funniest Joke in the Universe", which is so funny that anyone who hears it will laugh forever, literally. While most of the main cast falls victim to the curse, Boober does not, because he does not "get" the joke, leaving him the only one able to lead the search for an enchanted spring that can cure them by erasing the joke from their memory. He succeeds in the end... And right in time, because then he finally does understand the joke. Fortunately for him, the spring is nearby.
• Futurama:
  • Quantum lichens, such as Langdon Cobb. Anybody who sees one, even in a photograph, would be drained of their lifeforce, which it would then collect for nourishment. Cobb becomes an actor because the adulation given to him as a celebrity is enough to sustain him without draining anyone.
  • Also the telepathic brain spawn, who are so enraged by the sound of thoughts that they have been genociding every intelligent species they encountered since the birth of the universe.
• Used in Gargoyles when Demona used a spell broadcast via TV to turn everybody who saw and heard the recitation into stone by night. Those who didn't catch the transmission as well as those who did but were deaf or blind and thus logically couldn't both see and hear it were unaffected.
• In Grossology villain Lance Boil uses a brown note to make everyone crap their pants. Heroes Ty and Abby wear a special device that make them immune to its effects. The downside is the devices make it look as though they are wearing diapers.
• Hazbin Hotel: In a technological variant, Alastor, a Demon Lord who hates television, tends to visually glitch out on any video, and he entirely broke a video camera when it was pointed straight at him.
• In Justice League, the supervillain Ace of the Royal Flush Gang is a human Brown Note. Simply looking into her eyes, even through a television broadcast, can lead to delusions and eventual catatonia. If she really puts her mind to it, the result can last long after she's left or even become permanent. Eventually, her power expands until she is a full-blown Reality Warper.
• Kaeloo: The Halloween Episode had Mr. Cat tell a story (not shown to the audience) that makes everyone except himself and Stumpy vomit profusely.
• Kim Possible: Singing "Rock-A-Bye Rufus" instantly puts Rufus to sleep.
• Dethklok's music on Metalocalypse has some unique effects, but they may be supernatural in origin. In "Dethkomedy", it's mentioned that the song "Go Into the Water" caused a million people to go into the water and drown (although Ofdensen successfully argued in court that it was their own fault since the album that song was on was 'intended for fish only'). They summon tornadoes in "Bluesklok", a troll in "Dethtroll", and a large amount of fish in "The Metalocalypse Has Begun". All the while, they remain mostly oblivious to this ability, often acting just as surprised as everybody else at the results. Every time Skwisgaar starts to play a solo, PEOPLE START DYING! Duncan Hills Coffee anyone?
• Mightyman and Yukk is one of the Three Shorts of the late-70s Plastic Man cartoon. The titular Yukk is a dog whose face is so ugly that it is continually concealed by a doghouse; when he takes it off, whoever is looking at it would run away in terror, and it could even cause inanimate objects to break.
• The New Adventures of Superman: In "The Toys of Doom", the Toyman uses a calliope that plays music capable of crumbling a skyscraper.
• The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show has singer Enrico Caruso sing a note so powerful, it causes the Great San Francisco Earthquake.
• In Rick and Morty, Rick creates a perfectly flat surface (which is mathematically impossible) and invites Morty to stand on it. Morty becomes euphoric over it but has a breakdown upon being brought back to Euclidean space due to Perfection Is Addictive, forcing Rick to erase the memory to preserve his sanity.
• The Smurfs (1981):
  • One episode dealt with a magic flute that caused anyone who heard its song to fall into a permanent magical sleep. What was the cure for this curse? Harmony Smurf's trumpet playing, a racket that was so bad that it could "wake the dead".
  • Grandpa Smurf's foe Nemesis was a wizard whose face had become so hideously deformed in an accident that no-one could bear to look at him, either fainting or fleeing in horror if they did so.
• South Park:
  • The Brown Note itself appears in the episode "World Wide Recorder Concert", here referred to as "the brown noise" and said to be "92 cents below the lowest octave of Eb", but shown as a low Eb on the treble clef in written music. Unusually, the note is heard: it's a low tuba note, which can be somehow produced with a simple recorder. By accident ^note (the boys tried to get back at the New York kids for making fun of them by modifying their sheet music, but their revised version was intercepted by the concert coordinator, who thought Yoko Ono had revised the score again), the 4 million kids at the titular concert end up playing the note, which makes everyone in the world crap their pants. If Kenny's death at the end of the episode is any indication, some people may have crapped themselves to death.
  • "Now, as you all know, the Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka can supposedly kill you with one horrid gaze. If a person even so much as looks into the frog's eyes, they can be paralyzed, or even die."
  • The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs, a novel within the series made by the boys on an episode with the same title, is more of a Technicolor Note, as it causes everyone who reads it (with the possible exception of the boys themselves, who just laugh) to vomit from the Squicky parts (which we never hear). Even attempting to talk about them causes the same reaction, which is why we never actually hear them; any attempt at discussion is always cut off by vomiting. Apparently, nobody has gotten past the first paragraph without this reaction, and in a game show where you try to listen to the audio books as long as you can, one person threw up after 2 seconds. The twist of all this is that despite this reaction, it is agreed-upon in-universe to be an excellent work of literature.
  • "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers" has the porno Backdoor Sluts 9, which inflicts Mind Rape on Token and Butters.
  • Ugly Bob, the ugliest man in Canada (or so we are told). He's so ugly that he has to wear a paper bag over his head, and anyone who looks at him turns to stone. In the episode "Royal Pudding" his ugliness is used to defeat the monster that stole the Canadian princess.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Patrick once wrote a song so horrible that a band died while recording it. SpongeBob and Patrick receive the record at their funeral, then when they play it from atop a radio tower, it causes the town to riot. (They assume it's their fan club.) Despite the In-Universe reactions, the song itself isn't so bad, even if the lyrics make no sense (although considering that Patrick wrote them In-Universe, that should be a given).
  • Once there was an ugly barnacle. He was so ugly that everyone died. The End.
  • The fan-favorite ending of "Band Geeks" features an example of The Power of Rock that's so awesome, it gives Squilliam Fancyson a heart attack.
  • In "Jellyfish Jam", Squidward's bad clarinet-playing has this effect on the jellyfish, causing them to go berserk. Notably, this is possibly the only occasion in the entire series in which Squidward not only acknowledges, but embraces his lack of skill, weaponizing it to piss the jellyfish off further.
  • In "Out of the Picture", the mere sight of one of Squidward's paintings sets Larry's eyes on fire.
• In Steven Universe, The Corruption that turns Gems into monsters appears to have been some combination of weaponized light and sound that literally broke the minds of nearly all Gems on Earth. Later in the series, it was later revealed that this wasn't the intended effect. The Diamonds' attack was supposed to kill all the Gems on the planet and even they were horrified when they realized what it actually did.
• The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!:
  • In the episode "Stars in Their Eyes" established that certain sounds could disrupt 'Moonman' Koopa's technology. In order to save the Marios from being blown up by Koopa's spaceship, the quirks- an alien race Koopa enslaved- use their double-snouts to toot a kazoo version of the Zelda theme.
    Koopa: You call that music? Stop that racket!
  • In the sequel series, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, the episode "Do the Koopa" centers around the Doom Dancer Music Box, an artifact that, when cranked, causes everyone to start dancing (including plants and statues). When Bully Koopa gets it, he attempts to use it on King Koopa, but since he has a cold, he can't hear well and is immune. At the end, Mario uses some plumber putty in his ears to get near Koopa and make him drop the music box.
• An episode of The Transformers, "Carnage in C Minor", features a race of aliens who can produce resonant tones which can cause a variety of effects, from healing to destroying stuff. When working in concert, several such aliens can create a harmonic effect that can be quite devastating, and the Decepticon Soundwave attempts to record this sound to use as a weapon.
• In the Trolls: TrollsTopia episode "The Joy Chord", Dante meets his idol and inventor of the eponymous chord, Beetrollven, who turns out to be an uncouth slob heavily contrasting the other Classical Trolls. When Beetrollven ultimately refuses to teach him the chord, Dante tries to replicate it himself based on what he knows and tests his results on Poppy and Holly. It instead causes them to, in order, start hiccuping, start sneezing, become itchy, have their legs fall asleep, and act like chickens, forcing Dante to seek Beetrollven for help. It turns out to all be a Secret Test of Character from Beetrollven in order to get Dante to learn some humility, and he teaches him the real Joy Chord which turns Poppy and Holly back to normal.
• In The Venture Bros. episode "Twenty Years to Midnight", the voice of the Grand Galactic Inquisitor, which is both extremely loud and sounds like it's played through a low quality, rattling speaker, causes Hank Venture to grab his crotch in pain.
• In World of Quest, saying "witch" near Shrieks causes them to...well, shriek. Because they have a long history with witches. (Which is entirely folk tales.) In one episode, Quest says they shouldn't use the W-word. Prince Nestor goes to the Shrieks and says a sentence ending in "...the W-word. You know, witch." causing the entire city to shriek. Then again, he's pretty stupid.

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