Hero Insurance / Western Animation

• Animaniacs played with this in its Power Rangers spoof 'Super Strong Warner Siblings'. Even activating their Humongous Mecha caused quite a bit of damage. Meshed with the Running Gag of the episode, at least...
• Atomic Puppet: This is a constant problem for the Mayor of Mega City. He's the one on hook for all the bills racked up by the battles between Atomic Puppet and their various foes after all, so he's determined to try find a reasonable way to replace Atomic Puppet, like getting the police force to step up their game or bringing in a less destructive superhero. This was averted in one episode though when Atomic Puppet was forced to pay for destroying an art museum and a wrestling stadium during two separate fights.
• Danny Phantom:
  • Danny apparently has no Hero Insurance since he actually feels bad about any collateral damage he causes while capturing ghosts, especially when people he knows bear the brunt of it. When he accidentally destroys a section of the mall, Tucker comments, "I sure hope they're insured." This could be either because, or partly why, Amity Park is an Untrusting Community.
  • Straight-up deconstructed with Valerie Grey, who went from Riches to Rags because the crossfire between Danny and a villain destroyed her dad's workplace, causing her to develop a grudge against all ghosts (and, ironically, become a catspaw for Danny's Arch-Enemy Vlad).
• One episode of Darkwing Duck had this factor into public opinion about him, with one member of the public complaining that he stepped on her foot and a construction worker complaining he somehow knocked a building out from under him. Not bad, for someone without any actual superpowers.
• The DC Animated Universe had its share of this as well:
  • Witness this battle between Superman and Darkseid, which is made all the funnier by Supes monologuing about how he usually has to hold back so nobody gets hurt. Gee, I guess all those buildings he punches Darkseid through were conveniently evacuated moments before?
  • Conversely, the fight between Superman and Captain Marvel was conveniently set in an empty city (built by Lex Luthor as a publicity stunt for his presidential campaign and it was its opening night). Two Capes tearing up Metropolis over an argument might have stretched the suspension of disbelief just a little too much. After the fight, Superman even offers to repay the cost of the damage from the Justice League coffers, looking at Batman as he says this.
  • In the Superman-Darkseid fight, Metropolis actually had been evacuated. You can see people watching the Superman-Darkseid fight, but a lot of people don't leave a city that has been evacuated. Also, given the fact Darkseid had pretty much invaded Earth in full force at this point, well... if they're gonna get killed, might as well enjoy the superhuman slugfest beforehand.
  • Also, see the fight against Solomon Grundy in Wake The Dead. Supes makes his appearance by punching Grundy through a line of cars, into the distance and into a gas line, and, while he chats with the League about strategy, there's a gigantic explosion far away in what is apparently a populated urban area. This just marks the fight getting more and more out of control and, of course, more collateral damage, almost all of the big things involving Superman.
  • However, there is a subversion in "The Greatest Story Never Told". After the League's battle with Mordru leaves whatever city they're in utterly demolished by collateral damage, the League helps clean up. Booster Gold, who had been criticized by the others for being too arrogant of a hero to actually be a hero (and himself coming to believe this over the course of the episode) and being relegated to crowd control, leaves the scene with the woman he was helping during the episode, saying that he only does crowd control.
  • Lampshaded when Superman was supposed dead and Lobo showed up to fill the vacancy. Showing why he's not the best replacement for the real Flying Brick, his strategy for defeating a baddie is by simply piling cars on top of him. When the rest of the League waves him off from adding another one once the villain surrenders, a dejected Lobo tosses it over his shoulder and into a building.
  • Earlier in the Superman animated series, Bizarro tries to help save the city, except doing more harm then good, such as "saving" a building being demolished by throwing the wrecking ball away (which almost landed on a wedding), "fixing" a draw bridge (that a tanker was about to pass under), and "saving" Lois Lane from the real Superman (by knocking over the Daily Planet globe).
• Futurama:
  • From the Superhero Episode:
    Mayor: Thank you, mysterious heroes! The value of the Gemerald you saved is slightly greater than the cost of the damage you caused to this museum: A net gain for our great city!
  • Leela also gives the reason for having secret identities: so they can only charge the "hero" persona for any resultant damages.
• The Gargoyles are pretty destructive when saving lives and fighting villains. Vehicles are some of their most frequent victims: motorcycles explode, train/subway cars get their roofs torn off, and cars get flattened. Gargoyles will leave claw marks and holes on walls whenever they climb up a building, and chunks of rock burst away from them and litter the ground when they wake up from stone sleep each morning. The gargoyles get away from all the repair bills, because they're seen as nothing but urban myths.
• While Hong Kong Phooey isn't so destructive given he doesn't have superpowers, he's so popular everyone who directly suffers from a fair share of his destruction is pleased for this.
• Megas XLR:
  • Megas regularly destroys significant chunks of the vicinity while he smashes the Monster of the Week. It's mostly Played for Laughs since Coop's a lovable buffoon, and the stuff he destroys often has signs that say things like "Conveniently Empty Building" and "We Were Going to Tear This Down Anyway". Plus it takes place in New Jersey, where such destruction might actually serve as an improvement...
  • There was an episode where a Gatchaman / Power Ranger Expy group fought Coop, after watching some videos of his blunders at piloting the robot, under the idea he was a villain. Even the team's own villain thought Coop was evil. They eventually realized Coop is a good guy, just really clumsy, and became allies.
• In Miraculous Ladybug, this is one of the titular heroine's powers; she and her partner Cat Noir are basically free to do as much damage as they want in their battles against akuma because her magic powers can fix everything afterwards. Some plans do involve purposely wrecking their surroundings to defeat their opponents, up to and including slicing the Eiffel Tower in half. This power explicitly even restores anybody who's killed in the battle, since on one occasion they fought an akuma with the power to erase anybody it touches from existence. Without Ladybug's World-Healing Wave, the supporting cast would've gotten a lot smaller afterward. This is probably also why there's no apparent stigma against people who had previously been transformed into akumas.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The main cast have caused a surprising amount of damage to poor old Ponyville. Their reasons for wanton destruction are usually caused for decidedly unheroic and mundane reasons (Well, mundane within the show's context at least) and include a flubbed spell to drive out parasprites, Pinkie Pie finding a cloning pool, and Twilight afraid of being late for a homework assignment. However, since they're the heroes, not once are they called on it — perhaps this is the reason they're apparently not paid by Princess Celestia for routinely saving the world.
  • Poor Derpy, on the other hand, gets some serious scorn heaped onto her by Rainbow Dash, for whom causing severe damage to buildings is part of the daily routine, after she inadvertently trashes City Hall. Hilariously though, it's Applejack who ends up going out to earn the cash to fix it.
  • The Dragon Ball Z style battle between Tirek and Twilight Sparkle in the season 4 finale has done lasting damage to Ponyville, and the aftermath of it comes up a few times during season 5; Applejack and Fluttershy have to deal with the remains of the exploded Golden Oak Library to get Twilight out of a depression in "Castle Sweet Castle", and the CMC have to deal with the destroyed school playground in "Crusaders of the Lost Mark", which eventually gets paid for by Filthy Rich after Diamond Tiara has a change of heart.
  • The Season 7 episode "Daring Done?" examined this trope, as it deals with Daring Do dealing with the fallout for leaving destruction across Equestria when trying to save the day. However, the royalties from her book sales mean she is rich enough to pay for the damages—she just gets so distracted stopping the bad guys that she forgets to clean up after.
• Spoofed in the Robot Chicken premiere. After a battle, Optimus Prime congratulates the Autobots: "Megatron was defeated with only 50 humans killed in the crossfire, a new record!" Everybody cheers.
• Nick Logan of Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends causes a lot of damage while pursuing/running from aliens. Since he's part of a secret organization they have a team dedicated to keeping it all under wraps, either by suppressing knowledge or arranging for someone else to take the blame.
• In Steven Universe, the Crystal Gems regularly are in the middle of destruction of Beach City. Most citizens complain, but quickly bounce back. Only Mr. Pizza got seriously angry at one point and asked for repairs. The Gems ignored him and Steven apologized for them which Mr. Pizza accepted. It's never mentioned how the town pays for all the repair costs. In the Gems' defense, one episode explains that the Gems had actually warned the citizens ancestors about settling there since they would be in danger. The humans settled anyway and most have grown up with the weirdness, only reacting confused or in panic when directly confronted by it.
• Super Giant Robot Brothers!: Entire cities are completely leveled in almost every episode, but there are never any consequences for anyone involved.
• One of Commander Feral's main points when speaking out against the SWAT Kats to the media is the amount of collateral damage they cause. The Mayor/Deputy Mayor accept that the big Villain of the Week will cause more damage with the huge mecha/giant spider/ultratank/whatever else if left unchecked. Because the Enforcers can't stop them using Feral's tactics to 'minimize damage'. Not that Feral cares. He's tried to have them arrested several times and tried to hold them accountable for city damage.
• In the premiere of Sym-Bionic Titan, the giant robot/giant monster battle creates a huge crater in the middle of the city. The heroes are dismayed by the destruction and resolve to fight future battles in remote, unpopulated areas (with limited success at keeping to that resolution). In the very next episode, we see that the city has already completed a long viaduct right through the middle of the crater and is starting to erect new buildings. A few episodes later, a drag race takes place in the construction zone, and we see that considerable progress has been made in the rebuilding. Now, just imagine if New York City had instantly begun building new roads and towers on Ground Zero after 9/11. And consider that the destruction zone here was much, much larger — and given that people actually do die in this cartoon, it's unlikely that entire sector of the city had been conveniently evacuated. One must conclude that the people of this city are remarkably unsentimental.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Cyborg once used a building against Plasmus. Perhaps The Abridged Series' line that "This city already has its own destructive jerks - the Teen Titans!" was closer than you'd think.
  • And how many cars has Raven telekinetically thrown at villains?
  • Raven has Cyborg beat in "Birthmark", where pretty much the entire city, frozen in time mind you, becomes her weapons. She used two buildings to try to crush Slade, who had superpowers at the time and survived unscathed. It's hard to believe that those buildings, or even half the cars, were empty.
  • They put several holes in several buildings and wreck a road chasing a jewellery thief.
• A citizen of Goodhaven in Ralph Bakshi's Terrytoons series The Mighty Heroes lampshades this in the simplest of terms:
  With heroes like these, who needs villains?
• Gumball and Darwin, and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Wattersons in The Amazing World of Gumball cause all kinds of collateral damage in many episodes yet are rarely punished for it. Subverted and lampshaded in "The Finale" when the consequences of their actions throughout the series come all at once.
• Averted on The Fairly OddParents! with Catman. This is the main reason he's a Hero with Bad Publicity, aside from being completely insane.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • Korra catches a trio of gangster benders and she's arrested along with the thugs for causing far more damage than the thugs would have if left unchecked. Chief Bei Fong explicitly tells Korra that the fact that she's the Avatar means squat to her.
  • Subverted. Tenzin steps up and offers to cover the damages as part of the agreement for Korra's bail. Another part of the agreement was that Korra would immediately be sent home, but Tenzin later changes his mind. Though not happy with the decision, Chief Bei Fong accepts it as long as Tenzin keeps an eye on Korra.
  • Double Subverted later on. After Lin sees the danger the Equalists, she is more or less lenient about Korra's way of handling things.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • The girls don't seem at all concerned about how much collateral damage they cause defeating the monsters that invade Townsville — the monsters alone would probably cause less damage. The citizens of Townsville have apparently gotten used to this... but The Big Rotten Apple metropolis of Citiesville, where the girls temporarily move to, is not so understanding:
    Citiesville Mayor: At what time did it seem like a good idea to blow up the Citiesville Bridge? Do you realize that the bank robbers you captured stole approximately $400? Do you realize you did over three million dollars IN PROPERTY DAMAGE TO THAT BRIDGE?!!
  • In another episode, when the girls' class has Career Day, Hanut's father comes in. In a deadpan style, he says that he insures buildings in Townsville from damage... and that he is a veeeeeery busy man. Of course, it's best not to think of how unlikely it is that any insurance company would agree to insure buildings in Townsville at all.
  • And then there's The Powerpuff Girls Movie, The Movie of the girls' origins, in which they almost destroy pretty much the entire town. From playing tag. Professor Utonium is actually arrested over this, and there is talk of the girls being incarcerated. Said movie also shows that Townsville pre-Powerpuffs was a horrifying dystopia of crime and violence where criminals ran rampant and the police seemingly never left their favorite store, the Donut Thing. The Powerpuffs might cause a lot of property damage, but Townsville seems to think that the reduced crime rate is worth it.
  • In still another episode, the Professor is horribly worried about the girls' getting injured, and so builds a Humongous Mecha for them to use. They refuse to... until they come up against a bigger monster that even they can't handle. They win... but level virtually all of Townsville doing it. The Mayor thanks them, then asks them whose stupid idea the big robot suit was. When they say it was the Professor's, he decides he'll let them off as long as they promise never to use it again. They're only too happy to agree, as the thing was damn finicky to work with. The suit returns in a later episode after The Mayor unwittingly activated the autopilot, and it's just as destructive as before
  • Yet another episode has a garbage man praising their destruction because it's keeping him in work.
• In The Spectacular Spiderman Spider-Man engages the Sandman who's robbing an oil tanker in the city harbor, even though there was literally no conceivable way for Spidey to defeat a colossus made of sand. In the ensuing fight Sandman accidentally sets the ship on fire and casualties are only prevented because he comes to his senses and saves the crewmen, and then sacrifices himself to protect people from the explosion. Spider-Man gives him an appreciative little speech and then leaves, oblivious to the fact that due to his pointless intervention both the oil and the tanker have been lost, and the oil spill and fire have probably spelled an ecological disaster for the city, not to mention all the hindrance from the wreckage. Somehow, nobody in the city holds it against him either. Maybe Jameson was on to something...
• The Tick:
  • Subverted. Arthur's attempt to break through the Sidekick Glass Ceiling ends with a climactic battle with the Tick, in which a restaurant was partially trashed. The episode ends with the reunited heroes fixing the same restaurant, with the maitre d' profusely thanking them: "When most superheroes have their brawls, they just leave a mess."
  • When The Tick went to Europe for a hero exchange program, he was prevented from Roof Hopping due to damaging historically important buildings.
  • At one point, he's vetoed from starting a fight with a supervillain in the supervillain's evil... Apartment?... On the basis that the supervillain will lose his cleaning deposit if it gets messed up. They decide to go fight on the roof instead.
  • Also subverted in Episode 3, a 70-foot tall dinosaur, whose DNA subverted a human is rampaging through town. A reporter catches another superhero on camera. "This is Sally Vacuum at the scene of the Dinosaur Neil crisis. As you can see, Neil is still growing. We have with us one of the city's superheroes, Der Fledermous."
    "Thank you, Sally."
    "Der Fledermous, can you tell us what the superhero community plans to do about this menace?"
    He tales one look at the creature, chuckles, and says, "Good question, Sally. I think we'll just, um, sit this one out and wait for the National Guard."
• In the universe of The Venture Brothers, fully-certified membership with the OSI includes a literal license to kill.
• Transformers: Animated:
  • Lampshaded. When Optimus Prime crashes into a truck, he apologized and says he heard something called "insurance" will cover that.
  • Inverted in one episode with Henry Masterson stealing yet another autobot body. Powell, the guy who sprung Masterson from jail and gave him a job, gave his employee what amounts to Villain Insurance by pointing out that the damage was done on his company property (it was the company's ship, and the company's goods that were damaged) and that hijacking an Autobot body was not a crime, as there were no laws concerning autobots, leaving Fanzone unable to arrest Masterson since the latter technically didn't commit any crimes.
  • Also played with a little bit in the live-action movie. In most cartoons, the Transformers trot around human areas with little to no difficulty. The movie shows just how destructive having giant, heavy robots mill about your back yard would be, even if they were trying to be not just careful but stealthy.
  • Played with further during one scene showing Optimus Prime running along a busy road; his feet chew giant holes in the tarmac, but he doesn't hit a single car.
  • This never came up in the Generation One series because they mostly fought in desert areas and even the city locations didn't have too much collateral damage. But Transformers: Animated tries to balance it out considering the Autobot heroes are occasionally seen helping to put the city back together after a battle. Robot Chicken had a segment that mocked this trope, however.
  • They also get called on it more than once, especially Gentle Giant Bulkhead. It's not fear that makes public opinion towards them someone ambivalent—it's the fact that they keep breaking stuff.
  • Averted in Generation One's third-season episode "The Burden Hardest to Bear" where Rodimus Prime is chewed out by Japanese politicians and business men over the damage caused in recent battles. This forms the basis for his Take This Job and Shove It moment.
• Ultimate Spider-Man: In the episode "Damage", Spider-Man and his team cause an unusually high level of property damage in their latest battle. As punishment, they are assigned to Damage Control, an organization set up specifically to clean up collateral damage caused by superheroes.
• Underdog had a Catchphrase for whenever he was confronted with the vast destruction caused during the episode: "I am a hero who never fails./ I can't be concerned with such details." For fairly obvious reasons, this was quietly dropped early in the show.
• VeggieTales: In a radio interview, Larry-Boy complained about how he has a really high insurance deductible, even though most of the things he breaks while fighting crime are only worth about five dollars.

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