Felony Misdemeanor / Western Animation

• Adventure Time:
  • The Earl of Lemongrab has some... er, interesting concepts when it comes to punishing those who do wrong. Making a mess? Thirty days in the dungeon. Asking questions? Thirty-TWO days in the dungeon. Refusing to clean up mess, or asking who exactly Lemongrab is talking to? Three hours dungeon. Harmless prank? Seven years dungeon, no trials. Assuring Lemongrab that the prank was harmless? Twelve years dungeon. Elaborate, painful prank involving spicy food? ONE MILLION YEARS DUNGEON!!! (Lemongrab isn't evil—he's just young, angry, and a bit of an idiot.)
  • Princess Bubblegum and Finn decide to play a harmless prank on the earl of Lemongrab— they leave a sign beside his bed that says "YOU REALLY SMELL LIKE DOG BUNS." How does the earl react? He clenches his fists, starts shaking, and opens up his mouth wide to scream loudly in sheer outrage for several seconds. And how does he attempt to punish those responsible? Round up EVERYONE in the castle, to sentence them to seven years in the dungeon, no trials! And poor Peppermint Butler (who earnestly tried to convince Lemongrab that it was a harmless prank) got sentenced to 12 years.
  • Marceline writes a heart-breaking, soul-crushing, tear-jerking ballad which questions if her dad even loves her because.... he ate her fries. A bit Harsher in Hindsight, as in "Memory of a Memory" we see Marceline's dad ate her fries while they were scavenging for food in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and Marceline was still human (well, half-demon) while her father had always been a demon, so dying of starvation was a real possibility for her.
• American Dad! had Stan arrested for egging a house. While the judge did rule it as a misdemeanor at his sentencing, the police response was pretty exaggerated. In which, Stan was tackled by one officer, while another officer kicked him in the chest a few times before drawing his gun on Stan and another officer arrives to pepper-spray him in the face with two more squad cars arriving and a police helicopter shining it's spotlight on Stan.
• In "Arthur's New Year's Eve" from Arthur, Franince Frensky tells Arthur that the New Year's Police arrest anyone who doesn't immediately throw out their old calendars when midnight ushers in New year's Day. Arthur has an Imagine Spot of his Grandma Thora being arrested by these police, who are depicted wearing party hats.
• Used in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  Guard: Your Majesty, these juveniles were arrested for vandalism, traveling under false pretenses, and malicious destruction of cabbages.
  Cabbage Merchant: Off with their heads! One for each head of cabbage!
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Clock King": Killing a man because he recommended you to relax, which wound up making you late? That's this trope alright, even if Fugate mistakenly believes Hill intently sabotaged him as it was his law firm that filed the injunction he ended up being late to; it's even lampshaded:
  Batman: Give it up, Fugate. Hill committed no crime against you.
  Clock King: He did worse. He made me late!
• In The Batman episode "The Laughing Bat", The Joker dresses as Batman and attacks "criminals" for offenses like jaywalking and going through the ten-item lane with eleven items.
• One episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold features Black Lightning acting like this in a Dream Sequence, during which he shoots lightning at people for the heinous acts of... putting sprinkles in coffee, not cleaning up after their dogs, driving an SUV, wearing white after Labor Day, and making "Smell That Pig IV". At one point he attacks Batman because he doesn't like his costume.
• In season 2 of The Boondocks, Grandad, Riley, Huey, and Jasmine all sneak into a movie without paying for it and are treated to a warning about movie piracy that insists that pirating movies makes you the most horrible, evil, violent person on earth. The boys all ignore it but by the time the completely over-the-top announcement is over, Jasmine is bawling her little eyes out and begging for them to take her out of the theater out of guilt. This is based off a series of strips in the comic (which is in turn based off a series of PSA's about movie piracy) where they show various people's over-the-top tearjerking plights thanks to movie piracy - one of which is a bootlegger who can't sell his pirated movies anymore.
• In an episode of Western Animation/Chowder, Schnitzel has to take Chowder to the bank, where he starts playing with a man's boney "necktie deformity". Cue Schnitzel taking the fall as usual:
  Dogman: Guards! Guards!
  Bird guard: What seems to be the problem here?
  Dogman: Zis man made me feel... uncomfortable.
  Bird guard: YOU SICK MONSTER! It's the timeout booth for you.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • Almost all the villains are built on this. Simple things most kids don't like doing such as homework, washing dishes, eating vegetables, and going to the dentist are blown to world-destroying proportions.
  • One episode features a hardware store owner who wants to eliminate two aviators who bought their plane parts from him. Why? Because they kept smudging his counter with chili. Disproportionate Retribution much?
• Danny Phantom, with the episode "The Ultimate Enemy." Danny cheats on a test, and what are the consequences? Not a detention, or a lecture, or auto-failing the test. Rather, circumstances make everyone he truly cared for (plus his English teacher) die, which also brought The Nasty Burger along with them in a horrendous explosion, which was caused by an exploded pack of hot sauce, which caused the boiler to leak, which eventually caused said explosion, which also took his family, his friends, and his English teacher along with it, and Danny's ghost half separating to became an Omnicidal Maniac with no humanity or morals whatsoever.
• In the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Dexter Detention", Dexter is sent to detention after unwillingly helping a student cheat. The detention warden seems to think getting under his wing is unforgivable, calling the kids there "criminals" and forcing them to write lines and worse punishments. Then in the end, apparently escaping detention is enough to send Dexter to the state prison.
• One Dudley Do-Right episode involves having the titular character be discharged from the Mounted Police for doing the unthinkable... eating his peas... with a KNIFE! His horse was also discharged. His crime? It was his knife.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: "Smile for the Ed" combines this with Selective Enforcement and Misplaced Retribution. When Edd impersonates the principal to stop the kids from picking on Eddy in the cafeteria, Eddy gets sentenced to a week's detention.
• Used in the Wartime Cartoon Education for Death. A boy is made to stand in the corner of a classroom wearing a Dunce Cap because he expressed sympathy for a rabbit that got eaten by a fox. Unfortunately, this is set in Nazi Germany and the lesson (that the fox should be admired for eating the rabbit because Might Makes Right) works as his Politically Motivated Teacher intended: the boy becomes a mindless, ruthless and evil prospective soldier for the Nazi regime.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, the first Oh Yeah! Cartoons short nearly ends with Vicky getting fired after Timmy proves he doesn't need a babysitter. Then his parents see a pepperoni in his teeth, and conclude if he can't do proper tooth care, he can't be trusted alone.
• Family Guy:
  • In "A Very Special Family Guy Freakin' Christmas", the FBI burst into Peter's living room and shoot the VCR when he attempts to tape Monday Night Football with the expressly-written consent of ABC, but not the NFL.
  • In "Lois Kills Stewie", when Stewie becomes ruler of the world, one of his new laws is that uttering the phrases "irregardless", "a whole nother", or "all of the sudden" is punishable by being sent to a work camp.
• Fillmore!, a police-procedural-type show set in a school, is the undisputed master of this, both for the title character and the show in general.
  • Fillmore himself is treated, by many people in the show, like an unstable/possibly violent ex-convict for his past crimes. What are those crimes, you ask? Directly ripped from the opening sequence: Chalk boosting, locker rigging, a comic book poker ring, cutting class, milk counterfeiting (non-dairy creamer), and backtalkery. For this sordid past, he has many The Atoner moments. This is before we even get into the scooter jacking ring, tartar sauce smuggling, and the time Fillmore's pet was almost killed by a boy in return for the answer sheet to a particularly hard test. Another episode features a psychotic, monotone, genius IQ boy who had to be locked up in total isolation because the spray paint tagging he was doing all over the school were so traumatizing they could make people physically ill.
  • Fillmore once inflicted this on the school mini-golf team. They (somewhat understandably) refuse to let him join them since he was a juvenile delinquent. How did this pre-Heel–Face Turn Fillmore react? By challenging them to a game with their trophies and other memorabilia as the stakes, mercilessly beating them and breaking their spirits...yikes...
• In Futurama
  • Bureaucrat Morgan Procter is dragged off by other bureaucrats because it turns out years ago she mis-stamped a form incorrectly.
    Hermes: Yes, but you only stamped it four times!
    (everyone gasps)
    Morgan: No, no! I was young and reckless!
  • Zoidberg accidentally destroys the Professor's model ship and decides to frame Fry in order to avoid blame. He later becomes wracked with grief and self-loathing after Fry has to pay for the damages to the amount of ten dollars. Justified, as to Zoidberg, ten dollars is a VERY large amount. He's too poor to realize that Fry simply rummaged his pockets to pay off the debt.
• In the episode "Wanted: Wade!" of Garfield and Friends, Wade pulls a tag off of a couch, then sees that the tag says that it's against the law to remove it. This causes him to run frantically around and have a dream where the police are after him for ripping off the couch tag. In that dream, tearing a tag off a pillow is so bad a crime it even gets two hardened robbers of banks and gas stations to grab the bars of the cell and want out when Wade admits his "crime" to them. Later, Wade sees a police car on the farm and gets him into his panic. When Orson tries to convince Wade he won't go to jail for it, a voice tells them and Roy "We know you're in there, come out with your hands up! We have you surrounded!", and Roy, Wade, and Orson run for it.
• One episode of Girlstuff/Boystuff has Talia and Reanne having an Imagine Spot of Ben getting arrested by the Video Store Police for spoiling movie plots out loud and "enjoying Honky Tonk Heatwave".
• In the Goof Troop episode, "Axed by Addition," Pete does this to himself. Among genuinely abusive and/or totalitarian actions he regrets doing to PJ, he also lists the heinous crimes of making him use "the manly deodorant" and a handkerchief. His overdramatic delivery of the latter suggests he finds it more reprehensible than everything else he mentions, which includes sending him to obedience school for not cleaning his room.
• Pepper in Iron Man: Armored Adventures believes removing a friend from her My Face account is more heinous than ripping their spleen out of them.
• In Jimmy Two-Shoes, Jimmy thinks up several horrible punishments of what Lucius will do to him when he finds out what he's done. He laughs them off. When Samy tells him that he'll take away his TV privileges, he reacts with horror.
• Justice League: In "A Better World", the Justice Lords' fascist rule is such that one man is arrested on the spot simply for complaining about his restaurant bill.
• The Looney Tunes short "Daffy Doodles" begins with this ominous bit of narration that describes what role Daffy Duck is playing this time around:
  In a large eastern city, a demon is on the loose. The people are terrified. The police baffled. With diabolical cleverness, the monster strikes without warning... and draws moustaches on all the ads.
• Once per Episode on Megas XLR, Coop berates the Monster of the Week with a list of everything evil they did in that episode and a declaration that he's going to kick their ass because of it. The final item on the list is always something extremely innocuous and is always the thing Coop claims is the most heinous act out of all of them.
• Type 3 is used in the The Mighty B! episode "Toot Toot", which is about Bessie farting during a meeting and getting kicked out of the Honeybees for it. It sends her into a Heroic BSoD, and the other Honeybees are suffering without her. However, just as Bessie was about to burn her manual, she realizes that farting is a natural function and that there is a badge called the "Toot-Toot" Badge, which is rewarded for those who go through farting in public with dignity.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie invokes this with her deadly-serious attitude towards keeping secrets in "Green Isn't Your Color".
    Pinkie Pie: Losing a friend's trust is the fastest way to lose a friend forever! FOR-EV-ER!!!
  • Rarity simply cannot abide crimes against fashion and/or fabulosity. She's willing to yell at a rampaging dragon just for damaging her clothes, rather than abducting her.
  • Later, in "Lesson Zero", Twilight Sparkle actually suffers a psychotic breakdown when she thinks that she'll be unable to write her weekly Aesop of the week letter to the princess and therefore be... gasp... tardy!
  • Also, in "The Cutie Pox", it turns out Pinkie Pie ate not two, not three, but six corn cakes (and possibly even more than that)!
  • "NOPONY breaks a Pinkie Promise!"
  • Twice in "Read it and Weep", as not only does the plot revolve around non-egghead Rainbow Dash being into reading, she also gets the hospital's staff on her case because they thought she had broken in to steal a patient's slippers.
  • "Peeved" is apparently a strong curse-word in Equestria, as a mother covers her child's ears and glares after Fluttershy struggles to drop a P-Bomb.
• The Owl House: In the season 1 finale "Young Blood, Old Souls", Luz and King plan to get deliberately arrested so they can sneak themselves into the Conformatorium, break out, and rescue Eda. They do this by deliberately ignoring a "Keep Off the Grass" sign in front of a guard.
• In the Pet Alien episode "The Sheriff was an Alien", Gumpers, playing the role of a sheriff, locks Dinko in jail for 3 million years for the crime of cheating at cards.
• In Phineas and Ferb, Candace is thrown out of the museum for yelling. She meets another kid, who was thrown out of the same museum for stealing a pterodactyl. He's impressed by how hardcore she is.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • When the Mayor gets called out for Holding Out for a Hero to the girls, he jumps into a Hot Air Balloon with Miss Bellum and starts to punch criminals with an extendable glove from the air. It starts by hitting a genuine mugger but then escalates to him hitting people he only thinks are committing a crime.
  • The episode where Buttercup was exiled from Townsville because she refused to take a bath (though to be fair, she had recently fought a monster that seemed to be made of raw sewage).
• Recess:
  • The show liked to revisit the unwritten code of honor kids must live by on the playground. Everything from how a scuffle is conducted to weird superstitions is treated as deadly serious, and God help you if you don't automatically know all the rules; if you're really lucky, you'll have friends who not only do know the rule you broke, but how to restore your honor as well.
  • The word "whomp" is treated a so bad a swear that SWAT teams are brought in and the kids are out in court.
  • In the episode where the kids protest the tearing down of an old jungle gym by staying on it endlessly, Prickly decides to initiate "Plan P", which Ms. Grotke calls "extreme". The plan: calling the kids' parents.
• Rick and Morty: In "Get Schwifty", a giant alien head appears in the sky and starts creating catastrophic weather. A religion called "Headism" forms around said head, where people such as goths, "movie talkers", and "inappropriate joke tellers" are executed via "Ascension" (AKA being strapped to several balloons and floating up into the sky).
• Inverted for comedic effect in a Robot Chicken sketch: After Paris Hilton is arrested, Nicole Richie decides to break her "best friend/meal ticket" out of jail, in a parody of Prison Break. To get herself arrested, she robs a bank. The tellers say that will probably only get her a fine, so she shoots him. The guard throwing her in jail proclaims:
  "Stupid celebrity! Armed robbery AND murder? You'll be locked up for forty-five days."
• In Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko was once chased out by his friends because he likes rainbows.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Fear of Flying", Homer is banned from the bar for loosening the lid on a sugar dispenser, in the aftermath of pranks which involved setting Moe's clothing on fire and loading his cash register with a live cobra.
  • In "The Frying Game", Homer has to take care of an endangered caterpillar and almost kills it by mistake. He is sentenced to 200 hours of community service for "attempted insecticide" and "aggravated buggery." Made especially ridiculous because, as Homer put it, God clearly wanted it to die. (The species is sexually attracted to fire, for example.)
  • "The Boys of Bummer" involves Bart failing to catch a fly ball in a championship baseball game when Springfield was one out away from winning in the bottom of the ninth, causing Shelbyville to win, and the entire town relentlessly boos Bart horribly (except his family). They sing a song on the radio about how horrible he is. They throw lots of food at him. And when Bart is about to jump off a water tower, they tell Bart they're not mad anymore, and when he falls off and ends up in the hospital they continue to yell at him even though he almost died.
  • In "Special Edna", Principal Skinner talks about the horrible thing he did in the Vietnam War. He stole cupcakes.
  • In "Separate Vocations", Skinner also behaves this way when the teacher's edition textbooks of Springfield Elementary are stolen, leaving the teachers completely unable to teach any new content. (The thief eventually turns out to be Lisa.) Upon finally finding the textbooks, Skinner's first reaction is relief; his second is moral outrage: "Who's responsible for this monstrous crime?!"
  • "This Little Wiggy" has Mayor Quimby ordering the police to do this to fill the prison they'd just reopened.
  • The episode "You Only Move Twice" manages to parody this beyond its normal comedic, parodying use during the end theme, which is a riff on Bond movie themes: where the singer would be regaling the audience with Hank Scorpio's foul deeds, she sings about the more benign aspects of his business plan as if they were horrible crimes and deceitful traps.
    Beware of his generous pension,
    And three weeks' paid vacation each year;
    And on Fridays, the lunchroom serves hot dogs and burgers and beer!
    He loves German BEEEEEEER!
  • In "Lisa on Ice", Lisa believes that getting an F in second grade gym will one day lose her the presidency, and get her sentenced to a lifetime of horror on Monster Island (don't worry, it's only a name).
  • In "Treehouse Of Horror IX"'s "Hell Toupee", Springfield has a "three strikes" crime law, and the penalty for strike 3 is death. Snake has his strike 3 by smoking inside the Kwik-E-Mart, and he's immediately executed on the electric chair.
• Sonic Boom:
  • In "It Takes A Village To Defeat A Hedgehog", Shadow considers the poorly-made bookshelf Sonic and friends spent the episode trying to build an embarrassment on behalf of all hedgehog kind.
  • In "Just A Guy", Team Sonic and the entirety of the village (except for Tails) gets pissed off at Sonic when he calls Mike the Ox "just a guy", constantly hitting him with insensitive remark after insensitive remark while chiding Sonic for being insensitive. It frustrates Sonic so much that he straight-up quits being a hero. Thankfully, it doesn't last.
• South Park:
  • In the episode "Christian Rock Hard", after the boys download a song, armed police immediately show up in a helicopter. They are taken to the station and shown how the artists they stole from are "suffering", such as how they can't buy a private island or get new features for their private jets.
  • Another notable example occurs in "Butt Out," when their parents act as if smoking is "the worst thing" Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman have ever done, never bothering to comment upon the fact that they've just burned their school to the ground!
  • South Park uses Type 3 a lot, like when Stan was exiled from the town for refusing to vote on the school mascot election between Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche.
  • Eric Cartman repeatedly insulted his friends, abused them (often brutally) and betrayed them just for the sheer joy of it. He also made at least two attempts to murder a large group of the population, convinced women to have abortions for his own profit and, having arranged to have a couple murdered (one of which was his father), made them into chili and fed it to their son. But eating the skin of all the fried chicken was the last drop that finally prompted his friends to ignore him. Kyle even mentions that Cartman did a lot worse before.
  • In "Toilet Paper", the boys' TPing of a teacher's house results in a full-scale police investigation, complete with Perp Sweating. Kyle, who participated reluctantly, becomes wracked with guilt, seeing flashbacks of the event in his nightmares. That being said, the family in question reacts to it appropriately: moderate annoyance. The police officer openly admits he's taking it so seriously because he has nothing better to do.
  • In "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce", Mr. Mackey calls the police when he discovers someone has taken a dump in the urinal. He becomes completely obsessed with finding the culprit, at one point declares, "I'm gonna catch this sonofabitch if it's the last thing I DO!!"
  • "I Should Never Have Gone Ziplining" has the boys going on a ziplining trip. The whole thing is a mildly crappy experience with the sort of things you'd expect of a disappointing vacation: the tour guides are annoying, the other people are annoying, the journey to get to the ziplines is way too long and the actual ziplining only lasts a few minutes. The boys and the narrative, however, treat the entire thing like an unforgettable traumatic event that they barely survived, a la I Shouldn't Be Alive.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In one example, SpongeBob and Patrick steal a balloon and fully intended to give it back. It pops. Torment ensues. Eventually, they give in and turn themselves in to the police, and get thrown in prison. Then they learn it is Free Balloon Day, and stay in prison for all of three seconds before being let free.
  • Squidward was once sentenced to ten years in prison for stealing a wallet and running (he wasn't driving) a stop sign.
  • SpongeBob's cousin Blackjack, Squidward (again), the Tattletale Strangler, Mrs. Puff, and SpongeBob himself all have gotten sent to jail for the unspeakable crime of littering. Though the Tattletale Strangler was probably arrested for strangling people who tattled on him (hence the nickname), he was just caught for littering.
  • In "The Algae's Always Greener", SpongeBob is ashamed of himself for accidentally giving a customer a large soda when they ordered a medium. "I've soiled the good Krusty Krab name! Soiled it, soiled it, soiled it, soiled it..."
  • In "Little Yellow Book", after Squidward reads SpongeBob's diary, he's alienated by the entire town, his house gets foreclosed, and he gets chained in the middle of the town for the citizens to Produce Pelt. There's a reason why fans consider him the show's biggest woobie, and the fact that the town themselves was reading it along with him makes it even worse.
  • In the computer game Employee of the Month, SpongeBob goes to a fancy restaurant called Sublime Seafoods to get a jacket needed to gain access to Oxygen Springs; once he is seated, the lobster waiter greets him and is ready to present an array of fancy foods, but when SpongeBob asks for a krabby patty, this infuriates the waiter enough to realize he's from Bikini Bottom which sells foods that are "despicable", resulting in him banned from the restaurant. However, the waiter forgot to remove his jacket, thus letting him in to Oxygen Springs.
  • In the episode “Shuffleboarding”, SpongeBob and Patrick disguise as Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, and arrest people for such “crimes” as chewing gum loudly, not tying their shoelaces, wasting food, and being too old.
• Taz-Mania: In The Origin of the Beginning of the Incredible Taz-Man, Mr. Thickley attempts to persuade Taz to make the mailman his arch-enemy for the heinous crime of delivering junk mail to Taz's family.
• In Teen Titans Go!'s episode "Breakfast Cheese", the Titans treat the H.I.V.E. loitering near a "no loitering" sign as an excuse to beat them up. This is even what kicks off the plot of the episode, as Starfire realizes that pounding someone into oblivion just for loitering is way too harsh and that the Titans have gotten more bloodthirsty thanks to all the fighting.
  Beast Boy: Look at them loitering so hard...
  Robin: Disgusting!
• Tiny Toon Adventures:
  • One episode had Plucky and Hampton steal a candy bar and go through inner torment before they give it back.
  • Also, one beer shared between three people will turn all of them into stereotypical wino bums, who will then steal a car to go joyriding before dying in the inevitable crash.
• In Tripping the Rift, Chode was sentenced to death for littering on a Neat Freak planet. Also as he was being arrested, a person who accidentally missed hitting the trash can with his trash was instantly vaporized.
• Inverted: One episode of What's New, Scooby-Doo? has the culprit going through the whole You Meddling Kids speech for something that wasn't even technically illegal.
• World of Quest: One episode features the town of Effluvium, where mundane things like stepping on the grass, sneezing, picking your nose, and hopping on one foot will earn you four consecutive life terms at best by a Kangaroo Court. It later turns out that this is because the "prison" is actually a giant subterranean monster that will destroy the town if the villagers fail to keep it well fed, which ends up happening after the protagonists manage to escape from its stomach.
• Xiaolin Showdown plays this for comedic effect in a few episodes, but one incident with normally calm, soft-spoken, steady Clay stands out:
  Kimiko: It's Spicer! He took the seed!
  Clay: And the hot dogs! (runs after Jack Spicer, losing his hat in the process and not even caring) Come back here with them doggies, you no-good low-down snake, you yellow-bellied dirty little sidewinder I'M GON' GET YOU!

---