Leeroy Jenkins / Western Animation

Leeroy Jenkins behaviour in western animation.

---

• El Guante Blanco, Puss in Boots' mentor from The Adventures of Puss in Boots. Once his youth and strength is restored, all he wants to do is rush into battle, even when he is clearly still outmatched.
• Angel Wars: Eli's flaws include self-centeredness, showboating, ambition, pride, stubbornness, and especially rushing in without thinking his plans through. This gets him beaten up more than once, and his superiors are well aware of these flaws.
• In a segment of Animaniacs (2020), Pinky directly quotes the Trope Namer when charging at a dragon.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Wheeler's passionate nature (fitting his being assigned the power of Fire) sometimes makes him reckless. Oddly enough, though, "Ozone Hole" sees him restraining Ma-Ti when he gets too impetuous. Ma-Ti nearly charges out into plain view to free Linka, Gi, and Kwame from the ice, only for Wheeler to remind him that they have to stay out of Nukem's sight.
• Code Lyoko:
  • William has his Leeroy Jenkins moment in episode "Final Round", during his first virtualization on Lyoko. So eager for clashing with the monsters, he never listens to Aelita's repeated calls for caution or Jérémie's orders of drawing back, and ends up captured and brainwashed by the Scyphozoa.
  • Odd has his moments, too, several times. Usually lampshaded by Ulrich: "[Odd's] nuts."
• Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: In "Zilly's a Dilly", Dick Dastardly hires a hypnotist to make Zilly brave. Unfortunately, Zilly becomes too reckless to follow plans and Dastardly decides to turn Zilly back into a coward.
• Supergirl in DC Super Hero Girls is a textbook example, particularly in "#FightAtTheMuseum." As in the trope description, her tactic of shouting her name and charging at enemies works well the first few times she uses it; the only downside is that the other girls get bored from not getting to engage the villains themselves. It's not until she finds herself facing a different genre of villain that she realizes she's in trouble.
• Dewey in DuckTales (2017), his defining trait is he is always eager to charge head on to danger. He gets it from his mom.
• Dungeons & Dragons (1983) gives us Bobby the Barbarian, who thinks nothing of attacking Tiamat head on, much to the worry and consternation of his older sister, Sheila.
• Ewoks: Paploo does this quite often, which eventually gets him in trouble in "The Three Lessons", when he's held captive and tickled repeatedly by the giant Stranglethorn plant.
• Family Guy does a parody of the Trope Namer where Peter Joe and Cleveland are having to face guy with uzis. Cleveland asks Joe and Peter if they are familiar with Leeroy Jenkins. Peter responds saying he doesn't know what Cleveland is talking about and then comes up with a plan that involves him running in shouting then Joe running in shouting. After Joe does a number crunch, Cleveland shouts "LEEROY JENKINS".
  Peter: Cleveland, you're an idiot.
  Cleveland: This episode has a lot of internet things.
• Fred the Caveman: In a couple of episodes where the characters were hunting, everyone would prefer to sneak up on the dinosaur silently and ambush it. Fred, however, prefers to just charge at it, club above his head, screaming.
• Grossology. Ty can be considered one, and probably the worst offense was going to a garbage dump without waiting for orders. This led to his being brainwashed by Fartor, and it took a lot of effort from his sister Abby to save him from the "fart side".
• Hawkgirl, as depicted in Justice League.
  Hawkgirl: Less talking, more hitting!
• Kaeloo: In an episode of the second season, Kaeloo, Stumpy, Quack Quack and Pretty are looking for a magical artifact in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. At one point, they go into a chamber with horizontally suspended ropes. Kaeloo says that if they touch the ropes, it might trigger a trap, so they have to move slowly and carefully. Stumpy picks up a knife and runs through the chamber, cutting them all and triggering the trap. Stumpy escapes the trap, but the other three are impaled by Annoying Arrows and get mad at him.
• In Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm, Sonya Blade has a tendency to yell "Kombat Time!" immediately before charging towards her enemies.
  Stryker: We need a strategic plan of attack.
  Sonya: I got one: Kombat Time!
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Lampshaded and Subverted in the second part of "Friendship is Magic". Twilight prepares to charge Nightmare Moon, which causes the latter to respond "You're kidding, right?". In the end, it was just a ruse to get closer to the Elements of Harmony.
  • Rainbow Dash, on a several occasions. When facing down a Hydra in "Feeling Pinkie Keen", Twilight wonders, "What would a brave pony like Rainbow Dash do?" Answer? Charge headfirst at it. In "Dragonshy", she kicks a dragon in the face. A dragon about fifty times her size, mind you.
  • In "Daring Don't" we have the following:
    Rainbow Dash: We've got to help Daring Do retrieve the ring for safekeeping before it's too late!
    Twilight Sparkle: Okay. But sounds to me like we're in way, way, way over our heads. We're going to need a carefully thought-out plan...
    Rainbow Dash: [Flies off] I'm coming, Daring Do!
    Twilight Sparkle: [Annoyed] That's not a plan!
  • And again in "Power Ponies", when the Mane 6 arrive at the villain's headquarters:
    Twilight Sparkle: All right, Power Ponies, here's the plan. Rarity, you, me, and...
    Rainbow Dash: Come on out, Mane-iac! Or the Power Ponies are comin' in!
    [thunder crash]
    Twilight Sparkle: So much for the element of surprise.
  • In "Sonic Rainboom" one of the contestants in the Best Young Flier competition was a brown male background character that energetically shouts "Let's do this!" right before flying out of the starting gate to do his routine.
    • Fittingly, his Fan Nickname is "Leeroy Wingkins".
  • In "To Where and Back Again", the Changelings have captured and imprisoned the Mane Six and the Royal Family. The Changeling hive has a Power Nullifier that prevents non-Changeling magic from working. While Starlight, Trixie, Thorax and Discord sneak in to try to save them, Discord loses patience and charges in screaming he has to save Fluttershy at the top of his lungs. Naturally, he is caught pretty quickly.
• Phineas and Ferb: During "The Klimpaloon Ultimatum", Buford ignores Phineas and Baljeet's planning and recklessly charges into the Big Bad's lair in a direct homage to the trope namer. See it here.
• Ready Jet Go!: Jet's Fatal Flaw is that he acts before thinking. This impulsive behavior has caused trouble for him on many occasions.
• Blitz pulls this in the second episode of Road Rovers right after Hunter says they need to figure out a way to get into the enemy base ("Let the biting begin!"). He did get inside, though... after being knocked out from a distance by a gas grenade and taken prisoner by guards.
• In the Samurai Jack episode "The Princess and the Bounty Hunters", one of the bounty hunters was a huge, hulking guy named Boris, who actually planned to ambush Jack this way. Princess Mira, who had previously given a rather detailed explanation to the others as to why their plans were flawed, gave a pretty brief one to his.
• Scrappy-Doo of Scooby-Doo. Possibly downplayed in the fact that his recklessness didn't really destroy too many plans of Mystery Inc., since their plan essentially amounted to "split up and find the monster, figure that out when we get to it".
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • "Storm Over Ryloth": During the first attempt to break the blockade, Ahsoka, while commanding a fighter squadron, refuses to retreat when she's told, leading to the deaths of almost all of her pilots.
  • "A Distant Echo": Immediately after Anakin takes pains to remind everyone this is supposed to be a stealth mission, Wrecker charges into the first room they see and starts crushing and shooting patrolling droids, with the rest of the Bad Batch following soon afterwards.
    Rex: So Much for Stealth...
• Static Shock may be pretty smart, but he falls into this on occasion. In one episode, the Old Superhero Soul Power, who has Shock and Awe powers like Static, contacts him and warns that his arch-enemy Professor Menace has resurfaced. Static overconfidently charges into battle before Soul Power can stop him. He gets his ass kicked and has to be bailed out by Soul Power. Annoyed, Soul Power asks if he was even paying attention: Professor Menace is his arch-enemy, so he has a lot of experience dealing with guys who can control electricity.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks gives this a bit of deconstruction with Beckett Mariner. She will jump into action and do things that would be against the rules, claiming that Starfleet's bureaucratic red tape just makes things too slow. While she's right, there's an underlying reason for all that: she's actually a Shell-Shocked Veteran of the Dominion War and absolutely terrified of moving up in rank in fear of losing her friends, especially after the loss of Sito Jaxa.
• Steven Universe:
  • In "Jail Break", Ruby and Steven run around Peridot's hand-ship in an attempt to find Sapphire. Sapphire is singing to help them find her, but whenever she stops, Ruby screams Sapphire's name at the top of her lungs, with zero regard for the fact that Peridot and Jasper are on the ship as well, and won't take kindly to the fact that their prisoners escaped.
    Ruby: She stopped singing... SAPPHIRE!!
  • "Sworn to the Sword" reveals that Pearl would repeatedly leap in front of Rose Quartz to protect her during the First Gem War. This is despite the fact that Rose was a powerful Barrier Warrior with an unbreakable shield, while Pearl is a Weak, but Skilled Fragile Speedster in comparison. Basically she was a Glass Cannon trying to tank blows for the actual Tank. When Garnet mentions this to Steven, he envisions a little montage of Pearl being repeatedly poofed into Gem form by vastly stronger foes that Rose almost certainly could have handled by herself. Then the image switches Pearl and Rose with Connie and Steven. The scene cuts to Steven's horrified reaction right before the axe hits Connie — fully aware that Connie being human can't regenerate from a lethal blow — and he immediately tries to stop Pearl's training before Connie permanently falls into this mindset too.
  • When Amethyst is looking for a rematch with Jasper, she always runs straight at her by herself, even refusing help at first.
• In Superman: The Animated Series, Supergirl starts off as this. When Darkseid built a device to cause a comet to redirect from its course and crash into Earth, Supergirl smashed it. Superman just glared at her and pointed out that he could have used the device to try and put the comet back out of harm's way. So now they had to go and stop it the hard way. Later, in Justice League, Green Lantern chewed her out for being headstrong and endangering their mission, and threatened to have her kicked out of the League if she did that again. She gets better though as the series progressed.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • Shredder in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was always a threat to ruin Krang's well-laid plans by letting his hatred of the Turtles overtake him:
    • In "The Big Blow Out", as Krang was on the verge of sending Earth into Dimension X, Shredder drove the Technodrome after the Turtles, falling right into their trap that sent the Technodrome into Dimension X instead.
    • "Shredder Triumphant": Shredder and Krang appear to have pulled off the perfect plan when they capture the Turtles and banish them to Dimension X. Then Shredder brings them back to Earth himself after they taunt him into believing he hadn't really beaten them unless he actually fought them.
  • The very first episode of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has April of all people do this, complete with a Shout-Out to the Trope Namer. It has become her Battle Cry since at times when she charges into battle:
    April: (gets fed up with the TMNT bickering about Raph's speech) Let's do this! APRIIIIIIIIILLL O'NEEEEEIIIILLLLLLLL!!!!!!! (leaps into action to save Mayhem)
    Mikey: Oh my gosh, she just ran in!
• Transformers
  • Bumblebee of Transformers: Animated always goes head-on into any battle, even though it's been repeatedly shown that his weapons do absolutely nothing against any Decepticons.
  • His Armada counterpart, Hot Shot, also had a tendency to do that.
  • And was still at it in Cybertron. Overhaul also has elements of this.
  • In various incarnations of Transformers, this is the consistent character trait of Cliffjumper. He's always itching for a fight and always the first to leap into action — even if, as his name suggests, that leap is off a cliff. This is especially true of G1 Cliffjumper and Prime Cliffjumper. Establishing Character Moment: From the first episode of Transformers ever...
    Cliffjumper: I'm goin' too... I'm gonna boot some Decepticon right in his Turbo-Charger...
    Optimus Prime: Easy, Cliffjumper. Just find them. We'll deal with them later.
    (Later, Hound and Cliffjumper travel to the Decepticons' Rocket Site)
    Hound: Cliffjumper, what are you doing?!
    Cliffjumper: I've got Megatron dead-center in my view finder...
    (Fires and misses, alerting the Decepticons that they're being watched...)
  • Air Raid's motto is "If you look first, you may not leap", and he lives by that code with all his spark.
  • Miko in Transformers Prime has a tendency to jump headfirst whenever a fight between giant robots is going on. The fact she's a squishy teenager human doesn't stop her. Neither does being told to stay put by the Autobots, or her more sensible human friends trying to talk sense into her. This often leads to her making the situation worse for the Autobots.
• Keith from Voltron: Legendary Defender is exactly this, though not so much with the yelling. Although initially appearing to be the most level-headed, it is soon realized that the temperamental quality of his Lion (the red Lion) matches that of its Paladin very much. Keith is prone to charging into situations (that could end up making the situation much worse) without thinking it through and is more reliant on his impulse than thought. However sometimes, it works in Keith's favor.
• Sir Sadlygrove Percidal of Wakfu. If it weren't for the fact that he is part of the main cast, his complete lack of subtlety and love for impossible odds would've gotten him killed twenty times over. Although he did die once. In fact he states he wouldn't mind dying as long as it is during a great fight.
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: Xavier leaps headfirst into adventure without a second thought. He's so impulsive, he often forgets to tie his shoes.
• In Xiaolin Showdown episode "Mala Mala Jong", Master Fung sends the Chosen Ones away from the Temple with the Shen Gong Wu when Wuya is about to attack with the titular demon warrior. Raimundo decides to go back and help, and gets captured for his effort, letting Wuya track down the other heroes. This is why Raimindo wasn't promoted along the others.
  Raimundo: But I was brave!
  Master Fung: You did not obey my orders. Your brash and impulsive actions nearly led us to the brink of destruction.
  • Clay does something similar in "Big as Texas", at the orders of his father, against Omi's never-heard sneaky plan to retrieve the Orb of Tornami from Jack.
• Young Justice (2010)
  • Superboy gives a perfect example, (except he yells rather than shouts his name) in "Performance". The team has a plan to take down Parasite... which Superboy promptly screws up by charging in screaming. Interestingly, here it's an Out-of-Character Alert and a sign that Superboy is using the shields, as Superboy had long since grown out of this.
  • Arsenal in his first real episode. Covert ops mission? He feels like spiting Luthor, so he blows up the lab.

---