Happy Ending Override / Western Animation

• Adventure Time: The series finale of the original run ends with the main cast ending up in a good spot; though the Final Battle cost Finn and Jake their Treehouse and their friend Fern, they come out of it more mature and realized, with them not bothered by the former and glad to pay their last respects to the latter. Distant Lands is an epilogue miniseries with most of the episodes taking place after the series finale. "Together Again" confirms what "Obsidian" implied; Jake died not too long after the ending and it takes Finn himself dying and reuniting with Jake in the afterlife to properly come to terms with losing his brother.
• Beast Machines:
  • Beast Wars ended with the Maximals successfully capturing Megatron and taking him back to Cybertron, with him tied to the roof of their spaceship. However, in this series, it's revealed that Megatron has been able to successfully take over Cybertron, in large part because he was left outside the spaceship. ^note It let him jump off and out of the timestream and return to Cybertron much earlier than the Maximals.
  • On a lesser note, another happy ending is undone as well, albeit of a villain. The previous series ended with Waspinator remaining on Earth, being worshipped by a tribe of primitive humans. Beast Machines undoes this with Waspinator being ousted by the tribe almost immediately after the end of the first series. He winds up back on Cybertron and becomes a villain again, as a Vehicon general named Thrust. The sequel series ends with Thrust/Waspinator shrunken down and given the body (and size) of a wasp, being able to do nothing but complain about his worsened situation.
• Combined with Chronic Villainy when it comes to the Vreedle Brothers in the Ben 10 franchise. At the end of their final appearance in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, they had reformed and become students at the Plumber Academy. Come Ben 10: Omniverse, we learn that since then, they blew up the Plumber Academy and went back to being thugs.
• BoJack Horseman manages to do this halfway through its final season, which premiered in two parts. Part 1 has BoJack, sober for almost a year and being on good terms with everyone from his social circle (for once), successfully rebuilding himself as a well-liked acting professor, and finally beginning to forgive himself and triumph over his depression. Then an Intrepid Reporter digs up details about some of his most serious misdeeds from the past several seasons, which leads into Part 2, wherein his public image is destroyed in a disastrous second interview (he aced the first), most of his close friends cut ties with him (including his half-sister Hollyhock), and he relapses into alcoholism.
• Duck Dodgers was originally intended to run for only two seasons, with the finale having Earth sign a peace treaty with Mars and the Martian Queen Tyr'ahnee preparing to get married to Commander X-2 after learning that he loved her. When the show was renewed for a third season because of good ratings, the premiere had Tyr'ahnee leave X-2 because she decided she still had feelings for Duck Dodgers and subsequently revoking Mars' truce with Earth when Dodgers continued refusing to reciprocate said feelings.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • At the end of the episode "Fairy Fairy Quite Contrary", Timmy wins the magical duel and gets to keep his fairies while Remy Buxaplenty loses his fairy and memory. But Timmy feels sorry for Remy and wishes that Remy and his parents were stranded on an island so they can spend more time together. When Remy returns in the episode "Remy Rides Again", he reveals that not only does he remember everything, but the desert island thing actually worsened things for him, as his parents struck oil, thus becoming even richer and more neglectful of their son.
  • A minor example occurs with the Crimson Chin. In "Timmy's Secret Wish" he's called to serve as a character witness for Timmy, and while the previous episodes with him ended on high notes, after a bit of pressing from Foop he reveals that he's still extremely depressed over Timmy bringing him to life only to ruin it.
• Family Guy: In the episode, "Candy, Quahog, Marshmallow", Dee Dee - Donna's mother who appeared on The Cleveland Show - is revealed to have committed suicide by gunshot. In the final episode of the latter series, Dee Dee had married Donna's ex-husband Robert and adopted a Chinese baby with him, and between Cleveland and his family returning to Quahog and Dee Dee's suicide, plans for this storyline to go anywhere were pretty much cancelled out.
• In the lead-up to Toonami's The Intruder II event, a comic was released that depicted The Intruder being fended off by TOM 4. Week 5 of the event proper has the Intruder gloating about killing TOM 4.
• Downplayed in The Legend of Korra regarding the original Team Avatar. They defeated the Fire Nation, are revered as heroes well into the new age, and went on to have very eventful lives. However, their kids still have issues from having parents with such huge legacies and responsibilities. Tenzin's siblings feel he got the bulk of Aang's attention due to being an airbender, and Lin has more than a few choice words for Toph when they finally meet again. In this case, it's not so much "the characters didn't get to live happy lives" as much as "the characters went on to live realistic lives with ups and downs", coming off the heels of Avatar: The Last Airbender's Happily Ever After finale.
  • However, the world as a whole is in a worse state as the Avatar Cycle is reset, meaning future Avatars no longer have millennia of stockpiled power and wisdom to draw from to help them protect humanity.
• Between the fourth and the fifth generations of My Little Pony the relationships between pony races had worsened so much that they are back to living as three isolated tribes who are constantly afraid of one another. This is completely at odds with the implied golden age that the generation 4 series ends with. Furthermore, every race seems to only have enough members to populate a single city, and little mention of other races is seen.
• The ending of Osmosis Jones has Frank turn his life around and adopt a healthier lifestyle, and we see him spending time outdoors with his daughter. In Ozzy & Drix, on the other hand, Frank is once again an obese slob, suggesting that either he has relapsed back into unhealthy habits. Or, if O&D is an Alternate Continuity, Frank will be killed by Thrax.
• ReBoot's third season ended with a pretty happy ending (including restoring dead people back to life). Then came season four with "Daemon Rising" and "My Two Bobs" which ended on a giant cliffhanger which left Megabyte in control of the principal office, and this was never resolved.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): The first three seasons of the series each ends with the seemingly 'final' defeat of the Turtles' arch enemies as well as their war machine The Technodrome, only for the villains to somehow survive and make plans to counter attack the following season. The most significant of these happened in season eight. Season seven concludes with the Turtles again saving the Earth as well as the employees of Channel Six news, but cut off from the Technodrome, Shredder, Krang, Rocksteady and Bebop hijack the Channel Six building and wire it with explosives. When the Turtles confront Shredder, he sets the explosives off and levels the building, with the Turtles initially believing their friends were inside. The premiere episode ends with Channel Six in ruins and their friends permanently out of a job, a status quo that would last for the remainder of the series, with the Turtles again vilified in the eyes of the media.
• The Simpsons;
  • Played for Laughs with Homer's half-brother Herb Powell, an auto manufacturer who was ruined and reduced to abject poverty in one of the earliest seasons after he allowed Homer to design the new car for that year...but made his fortune back by inventing a "baby translator" to help mothers understand their babies. Many years later, the Simpsons pay him another call... and get a message on his answering machine announcing that he's broke again.
  • "Marge vs. the Monorail" ended with the runaway monorail successfully stopped before anything serious can happen. Years later, "The Old Blue Mayor She Ain't What She Used To Be" opens with the abandoned monorail reactivating and causing devastation in Springfield.
  • "Kamp Krusty" has Bart and Lisa going to the titular summer camp, only to suffer from horrific treatment and living conditions, until all the campers start a rebellion. Krusty saves the campers (despite their suffering coming from his own negligence), and when he takes them to Tijuana, all is forgiven and forgotten...until the Season 28 episode "Kamp Krustier". In this episode, the kids are finally returned, but they are scarred and shaken, as if the trip to Tijuana never happened.
• Had there been a fourth season of Transformers: Animated, their version of Megatron would have escaped from prison (he is arrested at the end of the show's final episode), possibly with help from Team Chaar, and been reformatted into a Triple Changer.
• Steven Universe's fifth season has Steven and company convince the Diamonds that he's his own identity separate from Pink Diamond and gets them to rework their regime, saving the galaxy and improving the lives of countless gems. And while we do see some lingering problems in The Movie dealt with, it doesn't totally infringe on the happier ending established. The same can't be said for epilogue series Steven Universe: Future, however. With everything now fine, Steven has trouble adjusting to a life where he isn't constantly needed to solve problems, which leaves him open to dwell on how messed-up his life has actually been. As a result, the latter half of the miniseries follows him undergoing a mental breakdown as the mental repercussions of the events of the series finally catch up to him, and his slow descent into copying Pink's self-destructive habits nearly costing him his family, his new life, and even causes him to corrupt.
• Tangled ends with Rapunzel finally being free from Gothel's confinement, reunited with her actual parents and is now engaged with Eugene. Tangled: The Series however opens with her wedding being postponed due to Rapunzel not feeling ready and, as a result of having her hair grown back, her father confining her within the kingdom walls, resulting in her falling into the same position as she once did back in the Tower as well as causing their relationship to be strained in the process.

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