Never Recycle Your Schemes in Western Animation.
- Dr. Robotnik in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog adheres to not repeating the same scheme throughout most of the series, even in episodes where the evil gadget of the week is not shown being destroyed.
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Zhao went to some trouble to get the Yu-Yan archers in his service for capturing Aang. The archers accomplish this easily, so it was a flawless plan, but we never see them used again.
- Beast Wars:
- Early on, the Maximals manage to send instructions to Tigertron's Stasis Pod by reflecting a long-range laser off of the moon, because they can't beat the Predacons to it in person. It's the only reason they save Tigertron from being reprogrammed into a Predacon, and it works without a hitch. They never attempt this tactic again, not even in the very next episode, instead opting to race to it in person... and that one ends up being reprogrammed as the Predacon Blackarachnia. For whatever reason, the Maximals never even consider this tactic ever again, not even as a back-up plan.
- Another episode has the Predacons burrow underneath the Maximal ship and plant a device that will allow them to drill into their base. It only fails due to sheer dumb luck when Optimus just happens to spot Waspinator hovering around. They never have Blackarachnia build another such device to attempt this strategy again.
- In Code Lyoko, XANA almost never tries the same attack twice. Sometimes, especially in the first season, the group takes action to prevent him from repeating a scheme. Other times you have to wonder why he doesn't just repeat an attack with a few modifications, considering the kids are so often only Just in Time to defeat him, sometimes within a few seconds.
- Donkey Kong Country: K. Rool never recycles his plans. Not even the ones that actually got him the Crystal Coconut.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: Averted to ridiculous extremes in the episode "Once Bitten, Twice Ed", where Eddy continuously reused the same scam with a minor tweak. Even when the kids stopped bothering to show up for his scheme, Eddy just kept "tweaking" it with a new theme, going from raccoons, to space mutants, to food, to jogging pants, to bathroom fixtures...
- The Emperor's New School: During one of Yzma's moments of planning how to get Kuzco to fail, she starts by saying that she'll turn him into a rabbit. Kronk tells her they've "been there". Yzma then starts over and considers turning Kuzco into a tree frog. Kronk tells her they've "done that". Yzma then asks if they've done a llama which has Kronk express disbelief.
- An odd case from Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, where the series finale has Doctor Doom stealing the Silver Surfer's powers again — it's noted that he tried this before in the previous season's finale. He simply makes sure that Galactus (who had kicked his butt before) was far away from Earth this time. (It should be noted they did it again because the second season's production team felt that the infamously poor first season had done the story a disservice, and sought to adapt it right this time.)
- In one episode of Gummi Bears, Toady suggests to Duke Igthorn that they build another catapult to attack Castle Dunwin (as they did in the first story). Igthorn scornfully remarks that they tried that idea already.
- A He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) episode where Skeletor dams and attempts to drain the Sea of Eternia to cause a massive drought to devastate the plant life to lower the oxygen level of the planet. He-Man makes a new ally with an insectoid people to stop the plot and afterward they agree to guard the Sea to prevent Skeletor from trying again.
- Not only does Dr Claw of Inspector Gadget never use the same evil plan twice, he always hires a new specialist agent for each new plan (but uses the same generic mooks for everything else).
- Looney Tunes:
- Averted in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Wily frequently modifies and repeats plans in the same short. Even so, step one of each plan is usually a bowl of "Free Birdseed" in the middle of the road, and this part nearly always works. If the Road Runner didn't stop for suspiciously free birdseed every time, most of the Coyote's schemes wouldn't even begin. Of course, this will be the last thing that works as it's supposed to, as the laws of physics are always on the Road Runner's side.
- In "Porky Pig's Feat", Daffy pulls the rug from under the hotel manager, causing him to fall down the stairs, screaming. However, he quickly runs back up, causing Daffy and Porky to run into their hotel rooms and Daffy to once again pull the rug. They hear the manager making the same screaming sounds he made previously, but it turns out he didn't actually fall - his painful reactions were just a ploy to make them think they had succeeded again.
- Dr. Wily in Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) never repeats a plan. Sometimes justified by Dr. Light coming up with a counter to whatever he had tried. In "Cold Steel" he tries to recover his device so he can start the plan over later, but Mega Man stops him.
- Averted in Miraculous Ladybug. Hawk Moth is fully willing to bring back the same akuma for another try, repeatedly akumatizing Mr. Ramier into Mr. Pigeon and August into Gigantitan, among others. However, the basic idea of the trope remains in play, as only a handful of these attempts are interesting enough to get an episode out of:
- In "Gamer 2.0", he akumatizes Max into Gamer again, giving him a power boost but using basically the same concept as the first time around. This episode runs completely differently than the first because Max has different frustrations that made him vulnerable to the akumatization in the first place, and his strategy as Gamer 2.0 is completely different.
- In "Stormy Weather 2", he once again akumatizes the same weathergirl as in the pilot episode, again just giving her a power boost while keeping the same concept. While she apparently escalates to being able to destroy the planet, her fight is nearly all offscreen, as the episode is a Clip Show about the characters reflecting on their development.
- In "The Puppeteer 2", Hawk Moth akumatizes Manon once more, but as she happens to be in a wax museum at the time, he gives her the power to control the wax statues directly rather than messing about with the control-via-doll power she had the first time around.
- In "Félix", Hawk Moth mostly just wants the title character to leave, so when Félix insults Adrien's friends while pretending to be him, he uses their shared anger to akumatize three of them into the "Punishers Trio", giving them back their old akuma powers to seek revenge on him.
- Hawk Moth's grand plan from the season 2 finale, to turn his Dragon into a villain capable of boosting his powers and engineer widespread despair to akumatize people en masse, is reenacted in the season 3 episode "Ladybug" and very nearly succeeds this time to boot. However, it's cut short by aforementioned Dragon suffering the aftereffects of using the broken Peacock Miraculous, causing Hawk Moth to detransform for the sake of her safety, and the rest of the episode focuses on a new plan.
- A few episodes see Hawk Moth akumatize several people and form a Legion of Doom, such as "Gang of Secrets".
- Subverted in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with Queen Chrysalis who is the queen of this trope. Granted, it's hard to fault her for it when said scheme is fairly effective against the Genre Blindness of the main cast and tends to only fail due to bad luck on her part. When she invades Equestria a second time in To Where And Back Again she uses the same tactic she used in A Canterlot Wedding, only expanding it to replace all the princesses and all the Mane Six instead of just Princess Cadance. Again, it only fails because Starlight Glimmer, who Chrysalis didn't even know of, was around this time to rally a rescue team. She presumably intended to pull the same scheme again in The Mean 6 by using the clones as replacement henchmen and, again, it fails because the clones decide to tell her to shove her orders and fight back. She's also pulled this stunt in the Loose Canon tie-in comics a few times with varying levels of success.
- Phineas and Ferb:
- Doofensmirtz recycled his scheme from the first episode, with his only change being switching out his giant magnet for a giant magnet-inatornote . It ended the exact same way as before, with Doofensmirtz barely realizing his mistake. Mind you, the rest of the episode was about recycling the first episode's plot AS A MUSICAL!
- On the non-villainous side, Candace rarely uses the same busting strategy more than once. Even though she has a camera phone, she very rarely thinks of using it. The only character who does this is Irving.
- Used increasingly straight in Pinky and the Brain: in the initial Animaniacs shorts, their plans really did have to be abandoned because they missed a one-time opportunity (like a Convenient Eclipse that would let them steal the crown jewels of Russia) or the plan was fundamentally flawed (trying to rob Fort Knox when they couldn't carry a single gold bar). Later on, Brain seemed to not only use each plan once—even when failure was due to wildly improbable circumstances that had little or no chance of recurring—but would often consider the plan a write-off if the funding stage failed. He never seems to imagine that he could simply postpone the plan and use a different resource-gathering method and abandons the plan as a failure before it even begins. Brain once hangs a lampshade on this by spending one episode trying to find new methods when he thinks all his old plans amount to the same thing and opening a "casting call" for new creative talent, but hitting a boredom breaking point when all other people (writers) that approached him with an idea for a plan just used all of the same old schemes again and again.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
- Doubly subverted for laughs. Mojo Jojo actually repeated one of his previous plans down to the tiniest detail, much to the surprise of the girls, who didn't believe it at first. When they confront Mojo, he says he studied the footage of his plan and figured out the fatal flaw: turning the girls into dogs, which allowed them to bite his butt and lead to his defeat. So, in this new version, he doesn't turn the girls into dogs and wears a metal plate to cover his rear (rather redundant, considering he doesn't turn them into dogs). Which of course, leaves him open to the girls just punching the stuffing out of him, as he discovers a moment later.
- HIM has openly stated, as a point of Pride, that he never uses a plan more than once, after having demonstrated his power to make all of Townsville attack the girls in a murderous frenzy, which the girls overcame by being perfectly willing to beat the stuffing out of the brainwashed citizens. Considering his Reality Warper powers, he really wouldn't ever 'need' to repeat a plan, though his later schemes were all over the map in terms of whether they were more interesting uses of his powers than "corrupt the town with murderous evil".
- Aku tends to never try the same scheme scheme against the titular Samurai Jack more than once. Actually justified as Jack is savvy enough for most tricks to only work once: He fell for Aku's "Ikra" disguise once, but when Aku shows up in a later episode disguised as a Yoda-esque figure Jack immediately has him pegged, baits him into a corner, and proceeds to kick the crap out of him.
- Played with in SilverHawks. Stargazer, who has been battling Mon*Star and his minions for a lot longer than the Sliverhawks have, explains that the bad guys recycle their schemes once in a while and he's ready for most of them. The Silverhawks and the audience are just seeing them for the first time.
- Justified in one episode when Monstar allows Yes-Man to be empowered along with him. The fact that the guy immediately started playing Starscream obviously put Monstar off any ideas about trying that again.
- Non-villainous, lampshaded example: in The Simpsons episode "Today I Am A Clown", Maggie has locked herself in the bathroom. Homer tries using a coat hanger to get her out. He inevitably bungles it up. Bart then uses Homer as a battering ram, and Homer yells at him to hit harder when Lisa opens the door and gets Maggie out. Marge asks how she did it. Lisa replies, "I tried the coat hanger again. I don't understand why we only try ideas once."
- Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. "I've used every plan from A to Y!" He then proceeds to use Plan Z.
- The plans of Koopa in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show were always foiled because the heroes just happened to be around whenever he carried out his plan. If Koopa ever went back and tried again after the heroes left he could have succeeded.
- In one episode of Superfriends, Brainiac uses a super vacuum to suck the ring right off Green Lantern's finger. He never uses this again despite it being capable of immediately disabling one of the most powerful Superfriends.
- Challenge of the Superfriends was notorious for this. The Legion of Doom would come up with matter teleporters, time travel devices, and all matter of wonder weapons — they'd use them once to try and rob a bank, and then never use them again. The dumpster out in back of the Legion of Doom's headquarters is probably full of trillion-dollar patents that will never see the light of day.
- Superman: The Animated Series had Desaad send a probe/automaton to battle Superman in "Father's Day". Superman beats the automaton but Desaad tells Darkseid that the probe was designed to fail, so that it would gather battle data in preparation for building "the ultimate weapon", presumably a more powerful automaton that would account for the failures of the first one and stand a much greater chance of beating Superman. Darkseid dismisses this, stating "That was your ultimate weapon" and refuses to allow him to even pursue the making of such a weapon. It's implied Desaad was lying about the probe being designed to fail and was trying to come up with an excuse, and Darkseid saw right through it.
- In ThunderCats (1985), Mumm-Ra pretty much never did the same plan twice. Played with in "Spitting Image". He uses a device to create a clone of Panthro, has the ghost of the evil warrior Hammerhand animate it, then sends him to terrorize the people and frame the real Panthro for it. When the clone is defeated, Mumm-Ra mocks Hammerhand and says he'll just make more clones and have stronger ghosts animate them. An angry Hammerhand smashes the cloning device, putting an end to that.
- In Young Justice (2010), T.O. Morrow stuck with his plot to "build a humanoid android to infiltrate the Justice Society" no matter what. His first attempt Red Torpedo found out he was an android, his Second attempt Red Inferno was KIA, and his third creation Red Tornado choose to be a superhero for real. This didn't work out well for him as he had wasted his life away for nothing. The one shown on screen was actually a robot — the real one was a comatose old man.
