Reset Button / Western Animation

Reset Buttons in Western Animation.

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• Erasing someone's recent memory to prevent them from "knowing too much" is a common device. This has been used in Futurama and Dude, Where's My Car?, among others. See The Men in Black/Memory-Wiping Crew.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: A literal reset button occurs at the very end of "Sorry, Wrong Era" when Leppy zaps the fourth wall with the Quantum Replay 9000, causing the whole episode to rewind all the way back to the first seconds when the boys were making their frappes. Jimmy is naturally surprised by this ("Whoa... Déjà vu-ish!").
• Played with in Archer (naturally). At the end of the season long arc, in which the spy agency ISIS was shut down and turned into a drug cartel, they return to working as spies, under the CIA. There are some major changes however, such as the team taking orders from Slater and Lana having a child. The playing with comes when Cheryl and Pam are put in charge of refurbishing their old office...and refurbish it so it looks exactly like their old office, right down to the locations of stains on the rug. The first episode of the season lampshades the hell out of it, with Mallory furious at the office being reset (much to Cheryl's delight).
• One episode of The Batman has a villain, Francis Grey, who learned to turn back time while serving an extremely disproportionate prison sentence, though he can only go back a few seconds at a time. Batman is of course pretty helpless against a guy who can just rewind every time he gets his ass kicked (and on one occasion, to undo a bad Bond One-Liner and use a better one instead), and by the end of the episode Francis has killed the entire Bat family and most of Gotham. Unfortunately for Francis, "most of Gotham" included his son. The resulting Angst Nuke sends him all the way back to just before he commited the crime that got him sent to prison in the first place, and this time, he decides not to do it. This results in him never getting sent to prison, and therefore never acquiring his powers. Back in the present day, he now lives a normal life with his still-alive son.
• Done in almost every single episode of the Challenge of the Superfriends. The Legion of Doom would trap some or all of the Superfriends in some sort of deathtrap or Rube Goldberg scheme, but the heroes would escape and catch the villains, who would then invariably escape.
  • For an example of a Reset Button inside of a Reset Button, there is the episode "Rest in Peace Superfriends" where the Legion of Doom actually succeeds in murdering all of the Superfriends, only for them to reveal that they actually killed robot clones of the Superfriends.
  • In the final episode of the Season the Legion of Doom when trying to destroy the Superfriends with a solar flare accidentally destroy the world, including themselves. However Sufficiently Advanced Aliens visiting Earth turn back time and stop the solar flare.
• Code Lyoko has a Reset Button in the form of the supercomputer's Return to the Past (RTTP) program, which erases the past twenty-four hours (or thereabouts) with only the protagonists remembering it. They use at the end of every episode in the first season after XANA's current scheme has been defeated to erase all evidence that it ever happened. However, they start using it less frequently starting in Season 2, when they realize that every time reversion made XANA stronger, with that season's finale even having XANA abuse it himself to stop the heroes from completing their mission.
  • It also has the limitation of being unable to bring people back from the dead. How the heroes know this is never revealed.
• The Code Monkeys episode "Todd Loses His Mind" has a very literal Reset Button Ending: just as Dave and Jerry are about to be shot by Mr. Larrity, and Todd is about to blow up Gameavision HQ, the Code Monkeys "game" locks up, and the "player" is forced to start over.
• In the Dan Vs. episode "The Family Cruise", when the cruise ship that Dan, Chris, Elise and her parents are on enters a rift in space-time parodying The Bermuda Triangle, it goes back to right before Elise finished packing and only Dan remembers what happened. This time around Dan gets hit in the face when Elise's parents open the front door, knocking him out cold and Elise duct tapes him to a chair so he doesn't follow them.
• Danny Phantom:
  • Employed once via time travel and once with a wish. (The episode with the wish is generally ignored by fans) To be fair, it stopped quite a lot of death from occurring, including Danny's whole family. It did have (fortunate) repercussions, however. Danny is now aware that Jazz knows his Secret Identity.
  • And one using the Reality Gauntlet to erase his parents' memories of his life as a half ghost. For a show with continuity, this is a jarring Status Quo Is God moment.
• In the intended Grand Finale of Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter finally reveals his secret laboratory to his parents, while Dexter himself finds out his monkey is a superhero. (These are two things kept secret for the rest of the series). The very last shot of the episode has Dexter's memory-erasing ray used to revert everyone's memories back to where they were when the episode began except Dee Dee, who was already in on both secrets from the beginning anyway.
• Drawn Together: This happens at the end of "Terms of Endearment" which spoofs the Superman movie time reversal: Captain Hero does this while in a wheelchair, reversing time to the Big Bang. Then he takes The Slow Path back to the present by waiting.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy frequently has to hit the Reset Button by un-wishing whatever disaster his thoughtless wishing caused this time — often delayed by lost or stolen wands.
  • Played straight when the show was Un-Canceled. Well let's just say it was pushed as soon as the newborn baby "breaks wind" (It also caused a Disney Acid Sequence) and it was all worth it to Save the World (and the entire universe) from certain doom.
  • One episode includes Timmy wishing for a literal reset button, and going through his day dozens of times.
  • In the "Fairy Idol" special, Norm the Genie explains in the beginning that everyone's Three Wishes always go through the same format: 1)something stupid and simple (like a sandwich), 2)something world changing that backfires on the wish-maker, and finally 3)wishing they never met the genie so that everything goes back to normal. In the end, his plan to cause Timmy to lose his godparents is foiled when Chester, who was Norm's latest master and learned that he was being manipulated, remembers that he still has one last genie wish and makes the traditional "I wish I never met you" wish.
• Family Guy:
  • This happens in an episode in which Stewie builds a Time Machine.
  • At the end of "FOX-y Lady", Peter asks Lois how she lost her job at FOX News. She answers, "Oh I don't know. Does anyone really care?" Peter says that she's right — by the end of every episode everything is back to normal.
  • This trope is subverted in one episode: Peter loses his job and doesn't get it back at the end of the episode.
  • It is also lampshaded in one episode where Peter tries smoking and gets hideously deformed, but assures his family that "everything will be back to normal next week".
• Futurama did this twice:
  • In the episode "The Late Philip J. Fry," everything in the year 3010 remains the same as before, despite various screwing with the timelines as the universe cycled.
  • The final episode of the series, "Meanwhile," featured a literal reset button that reset the universe to the state it was in ten seconds prior to the button being pushed. Since the button took ten seconds to recharge, it couldn't be used to travel back in time but could create a stable time-loop which - this being Futurama - is exactly what happens, at least prior to an invocation of Twilight Zone plot.
• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy episode "Wishbones", Grim wishes for all of the episode's events to have never happened. It then cuts to the beginning of the episode, where Billy is watching the washing machine, thinking it's TV. This time, Mandy stuffs him in the washing machine.
  Mandy: [sarcastically] And what show is this we're watching?
  Billy: My favorite: Laundry Day!
  Mandy: Billy, would you like to be on TV?
  Billy: I wish!
  [Mandy opens the washing machine and sticks Billy in]
  Mandy: Wish granted.
• Kaeloo: Several characters^note usually not counting Quack-Quack since he cannot die, though this still applies to him sometimes have been decapitated, blown up, launched into orbit, driven to madness, turned into zombies, trapped in alternate dimensions or different time periods... Heck, the world even blew up once! Yet everything is always back to normal in the next episode.
• The three-part Time Travel episode of Kim Possible, "A Sitch in Time", undoes all memory and consequences of its events by story's end. The twist: Ron retains the memory of hating Norwegian meatcakes, even though his move to Norway was undone, and thus he never tasted any.
• The Grand Finale of Mighty Max has this as the only way to stop the Big Bad from using the cap to take over the world. However, the way it seems to work is a bit of a New Game Plus, with our heroes retaining the knowledge of all that had transpired during their first go-round (with the hope that they can actually defeat the Skullmaster this time).
• Extremely common in Miraculous Ladybug:
  • One of Ladybug's signature powers is the titular "Miraculous Ladybug", a World-Healing Wave that undoes all damage inflicted by Ladybug and her fellow Miraculous during the course of the battle, up to and including bringing back people killed by Miraculous magic.
  • Similarly, the power of the Snake Miraculous is "Second Chance", which lets the user rewind time to the moment he activated it.
  • In at least two separate episodes, Ladybug and Cat Noir have discovered each other's true identities and resolved the Miraculous Love Square. However, in both cases their memories were erased and the love square restored.
  • The show's primary villain, Hawk Moth, is trying to steal Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculouses because combining them will let him make a Wish. It's been implied that he wants to use this Wish to undo whatever event left his wife trapped in a magical coma.
• In the Ninjago episode "Wrong Place, Wrong Time", the ninja prevent Lord Garmadon from helping his past self defeat Kai by destroying his weapon that he used to go back in time in the first place. The episode ends with them at the beginning, where the weapon apparently never existed at all, bringing up all kinds of questions.
  • At the end of the season 6 episode "The Way Back", Jay makes a wish that undoes all the events of the season, with only him and Nya having knowledge of what happened.
• Phineas and Ferb regularly does this Played for Laughs, so the show can find the most off-the-wall ways to prevent the boys from getting caught by their mother.
  • Usually the resetting is limited to the boys not getting caught, but "She's the Mayor" went WAY farther. After becoming mayor of Danville for a day, Candace uses her position to reveal her brothers' newly built classic frontier village (complete with gold-loving old coot). Just as Linda calls the boys out to punish them, Doofenshmirtz activates his Accelerate-inator (which he invented to speed up having to play golf with his brother) which opens up holes in the space time continuum (which Doof knew would happen, but figured it was worth it), resetting everything back to earlier that day, with the old coot winning the contest instead and no one having any knowledge of what happened.
    Candace: [after watching the news] I was robbed!
  • The TV Movie "Across the 2nd Dimension" did this, erasing the characters' knowledge of Perry's secret identity at the end of the movie. In addition, the movie parodies the continued use of this trope: After dozens of "coincidental" occurrences, Candace begins to believe that there is a literal "mysterious force" that prevents her mom from ever seeing what her brothers are doing. (Actually, she more-or-less prays to it in an earlier episode, "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted".) After Candace disappears through an interdimensional portal, best friend Stacy even builds a shrine to the "mysterious force".
• Literally pressed in ReBoot by the User. Two keystrokes, and Mainframe is restored to its season 1 state. It even brings back dead characters, and clones Enzo. This was a risk though, as the characters had to make the user restart the system, and there was a chance that everything would just outright crash.
• In the Rick and Morty episode "Rick Potion #9", Rick manages to turn everyone in the world into monsters. Every attempt he makes at reversing the effects of his accidental plague just makes things exponentially worse. His eventual solution: Find an alternate universe in which that Rick got lucky and cured humanity, AND in which Rick and Morty died in an unrelated laboratory accident shortly after. Our Rick and Morty simply buried the bodies before they were discovered and took over their lives.
• The Simpsons:
  • Subverted in a (non-canon) Treehouse of Horror story, in which Homer's brain is taken out and placed in a robot by Mr. Burns, but his lack of motivation and love of donuts overrides any orders given to him and he ends up only causing destruction and doing nothing. In the end Mr. Burns puts Homer's brain back, but he is crushed under the weight of the heavy robot's body. He tells his assistant Smithers to get surgical tools and ether before Homer wakes up screaming in bed, thinking the whole story was just a dream... then he notices that Mr. Burns' head was grafted onto his shoulder as a way of preserving him. A teaser of the next episode of the Simpsons involves Homer being stuck in an Sitcom-esque situation where Lisa reminds him her class is having an all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner while Mr. Burns points out that they have to go to the reception for Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. This causes Homer to exclaim, "Oh, I hate having two heads!" (Luckily for him, the Treehouse of Horror episodes actually exist in Negative Continuity.)
  • The Simpsons is also home to one of the best-known and controversial Reset Button of modern times: Principal Skinner turns out to actually be named Armin Tamzarian, having assumed the identity of Seymour Skinner years ago, including Skinner's dream of being a school principal. The original shows up and wants to take over the position, but no one likes him. Just after the real Skinner is put on a train out of Springfield, Judge Snyder declares that anybody mentioning the events of that episode would be tortured.
    • This is briefly referenced in "I Doh-Bot". Snowball II is run over by a car and Lisa adopts two new cats who each die. Then the Crazy Cat Lady throws a cat at her that looks exactly like Snowball II just as Principal Skinner walks by.
      Lisa: I'm keeping you! You're Snowball V! But to save money on a new dish, we'll just call you Snowball II, and pretend this whole thing never happened.
      Principal Skinner: That's really a cheat, isn't it?
      Lisa: I guess you're right, Principal Tamzarian.
  • The episode "Das Bus" ends with Bart, Lisa and most of their friends still stranded on a remote island, reset as an afterthought by a single line from the narrator that sounds suspiciously like it's being made up on the spot:
  "Eventually they were rescued by oh, let's say... Moe."
  • A similar example occurs in the episode "Donnie Fatso", where Fat Tony dies and is replaced by his cousin Fit Tony, who lets himself go after the pressure of the job gets to him and becomes Fat Fit Tony, then just Fat Tony.
  • And a lampshading by Lisa: "Don't worry, Bart. It seems like every week something odd happens to the Simpsons. My advice is to ride it out, make the occasional smart-alec quip, and by next week we'll be back to where we started from, ready for another wacky adventure."
  • "Lisa episodes", with "Lisa the Vegetarian" as the exception, tend to do this. "She Of Little Faith"? Lisa's Buddhism is (almost) never mentioned again. "Lard of The Dance"? Alex Whitney never appears or is mentioned again, except for a one-liner and the occasional cameo. "Bye Bye Nerdie"? Francine and Poindextrose are never mentioned again. So it makes sense that Lisa has mild Medium Awareness.
  • Brilliantly used in the episode "Thank God It's Doomsday", when Homer asks God to take back the Apocalypse:
    God: To do what you're asking, I'd have to turn back time.
    Homer: Superman did it!
    God: Fine smartypants, I will undo the Apocalypse.
• South Park:
  • The Imaginationland trilogy has terrorists invade our imagination, the evil characters taking over, and Al Gore nuking the area. Butters restores everything to the way it was in the end.
  • The Deus ex Machina ending of The Movie is also thanks to the Reset Button.
  • Kenny's death, sometimes even a lampshade.
• The episode "The Fantastic Mr. Frump" of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends featured an ordinary man who accidentally gained reality-warping powers. After being egged on by Doctor Doom and unintentionally causing a great deal of trouble (including summoning up "the weirdest creature in the universe"), everything gets reset back to normal:
  Spider-Man: I can't believe that in a minute we're going to forget something as incredible as all this!
  Iceman: As incredible as what?
  Spider-Man: [shrugs]
• In the first of a two part episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series entitled "The Hobgoblin", Peter Parker finally moves out of his Aunt May's house to live with Harry Osborn in an apartment. To keep the status quo, he cannot be allowed to stay in said apartment, so the writers fabricated a rather flimsy excuse. During a visit by Aunt May to Peter's new apartment, which has been trashed from the previous night's housewarming party, the Hobgoblin attacks and kidnaps Harry, in the process sending Aunt May into a shock so fierce she goes into some kind of coma. She remains this way until the end of the next episode, after which she wakes up and tells Peter, to his surprise, her shock was at the mess in his apartment and not the Hobgoblin's attack. After which Peter thinks he's not ready to move out on his own, so he moves back in with his Aunt and by the next episode, the status quo is back to normal.
• In Superman: The Animated Series, all of Mr. Mxyzptlk's handiwork is apparently undone when Superman tricks him into returning to the fifth dimension.
• In the fourth season of Teen Titans (2003), Raven becomes the portal for her father Trigon to enter the world, after which he transforms the entire planet into a lava-covered inferno. However, at the end of the battle, Raven calls upon the powers of friendship and godlike power to reset everything and restore the world to its original form.
• Wakfu: The major goal of Season One Arc Villain Nox is to power up a magical one of these by harvesting vast amounts of wakfu to feed into the Eliacube in order to power up existing Time Control magic and save his family, at the same time erasing his past misdeeds of the 200 years since that tragedy and thus making him feel no remorse for the destruction he leaves behind. In the end, he kills or at least maims most of the main cast and collects the necessary wakfu he sought by wiping out an entire race and fires up the device...but to his despair and anger all that death and work only gathered enough to take him back 20 minutes rather than 200 years, only enough time to reset his own "victory". Broken at realizing it was All for Nothing, he teleports away and dies on the graves of his family.
• X-Men: Evolution has a bit: When the Brotherhood of Mutants attacks a high-school football game and reveals all of the X-Men, you hope. Professor Xavier mind-wipes a stadium filled with people, and the broadcast was cut thanks to some kind of magnetic corruption of the signal; Xavier concludes that Magneto thinks that the time isn't right. There is one lasting problem from this incident, however: because Professor X had to affect so many people, he wasn't able to fully wipe the mind of Edward Kelly, which is implied to be a large part of why he embraced Fantastic Racism for the mutants after they were permanently outed.
• X-Men: The Animated Series has a flatly ridiculous one: Scott proposes to Jean, she accepts, and they get married in a big ceremony. But, oh no, it turns out the priest was actually a disguised villain, so they're not really married! And despite their feelings not having changed, it never occurs to them to just have another ceremony, until a couple of seasons later. Presumably the idea was to not completely shut down the Scott/Jean/Logan love triangle. They eventually got married for real.

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