Stable Time Loop / Western Animation

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• In the Adventure Time episode "Betty", Simon created a portal to the past so that he can say goodbye to his former girlfriend Betty and to gain her forgiveness. This was because he believed that she fled him in terror, after he did something unpleasant to her in his madness after putting on the crown that turned him into Ice King. On seeing him, she jumps into the portal to permanently enter the show's present, explaining why she disappeared.
• Played for Laughs in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. When discussing immortal Villain of the Week K'rull the Eternal, Booster Gold mentions to Batman that he fought him once before in the future, and after the two defeat him in the present he swears revenge. The episode ends with a flash-forward 500 years later where Booster before he has his powers bumps into K'rull, who's visiting the museum he works at and becomes enraged upon recognizing him.
• In Beast Wars, though a large part of the final season is the Maximals desperately trying to prevent Megatron from Making Wrong What Once Went Right, the final episode implies that it was a stable loop the entire time and that the Beast Wars were the original past: there was no record of the shuttle the Maximals escaped the Ark in (implied to be because the Maximals took it) and the Covenant of Primus cryptically "predicts" the Beast Wars (it's implied to actually be a retelling of the war written much later).
• Ben 10:
  • Ben and Kevin's friendship is shown to be the result of this; in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien Ben's 10-year-old self is brought to the present and sees that he's friends with Kevin in the future despite his attempts on his life. Professor Paradox explains that while he won't actively remember these events he'll subconsciously carry them, leading to Ben being more open to trusting Kevin when they meet again in Ben 10: Alien Force.
  • In the final episode of Ben 10: Omniverse, the villain Maltruant is revealed to be stuck in one, something that he is completely unaware of. He reassembles himself, sets out to remake the universe in his image by going to before time has started and the current universe has yet to be created, only to be defeated and destroyed by Ben. Then Professor Paradox hides the pieces of him across the universe with his memory wiped, and the cycle of reassembly and defeat starts all over again.
  • Earlier episodes "And Then There Were None" and "And Then There Was Ben" provide an example that's a bit more complicated, which involves alternate versions of Ben. Basically, a version of Ben who never retrieved the Omnitrix is attacked by evil versions of Ben working for Mainstream Vilgax because he sees No Watch Ben as a wildcard, but No Watch Ben is saved by alternate, heroic versions of Omnitrix wielders, including Mainstream Ben. Vilgax is able to kill off all the Omnitrix wielders with a Chronosapien Time Bomb, but Mainstream Ben passes on his Omnitrix to No Watch Ben before dying. After, Professor Paradox takes No Watch Ben back into time to when Mainstream Ben was 10 years old, it turns out that No Watch Ben is the reason Ben has the Omnitrix at all, including causing the earthquake that caused Mainstream Ben to fall into the crater. After this, No Watch Ben also turns out to have been the one to have recruited all of the alternate versions of heroic Omnitrix wielders, including Mainstream Ben. After returning to a point after the bomb killed off the Bens, No Watch Ben is able to reverse the damage, and the heroes manage to defeat Vilgax once more.
• Danny Phantom: In "The Ultimate Enemy", the events that led to Dark Danny being formed began when Danny's friends and family were killed in an explosion and Danny moved in with Vlad. Said explosion was caused by a fight between Danny and one of the ghosts sent back from the future to destroy him before he could become Dark Danny and occurred after Danny and Dark Danny's climactic fight, but when Danny is again unable to save the captives in time, Clockwork arrives to give him a second chance and break the loop. Said earlier fight also leads to Danny obtaining the CAT results, tempting him to cheat, which caused Lancer and his parents to meet up at the Nasty Burger to discuss said cheating.
• Darkwing Duck: In "Extinct Possibility", the dinosaurs accidentally send back the timetop to the present day with Launchpad and Gosalyn inside before Darkwing can board it. To comfort Darkwing, the dinosaurs invite him for breakfast and accidentally encase him in tree sap, becoming the fossil that was the reason he went back in time in the first place. Then in the present day, Gosalyn and Launchpad break Darkwing out of the amber, restoring the status quo.
• Dexter's Laboratory:
  • "DeeDeemensional" begins with a giant monster attacking the lab. Before Dexter gets swallowed by it, he writes a message to warn his slightly younger self about not opening the passage that would free the monster and sends Dee Dee back in time to give it to him. However, younger Dexter doesn't believe Dee Dee's statement until he sees both the present and future versions of her. Because he had been rude to Dee Dee earlier, they both refuse to tell him the message until he does what they want. After he opens the passage, he writes the same message for his younger self, only to find out it's the very same message that future Dee Dee wanted to give him.
  • The movie "Ego Trip" starts with robots appearing in the lab, looking for "the one who saved the future" and Dexter assumes they came to kill him. Inspired by this, Dexter hops in his time machine and ends up going on an adventure with three future versions of himself, battling four Mandarks. In the end, the day is saved when Dee Dee walks in and does her thing. Furious at being upstaged, the four Dexters build some robots and send them to beat up "the one who saved the future". When he realizes this, Dexter's reaction is to give up on explaining time travel and then going to eat lunch.
• Disenchantment: Elfo goes back in time to stop whoever shot him with an arrow and killed him. Armed with a bow and arrow, he prepares to fire at whichever soldier shot past him, but when he does fire at a suspicious soldier, he misses and ends up hitting his past self in the back.
• In Duck Dodgers, the queen of Mars finds out the one moment in his life that inspired Dodgers to become the person (or duck) he is, and sends Marvin the Martian back to prevent it. When he arrives, though, he finds that Dodgers was just a waterboy then. Refusing to believe that they were wrong, Marvin tries to make it happen the way it did, and fails his mission to stop it in the process.
• The Fairly OddParents! full-episode special "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker": Timmy goes back in time to figure out why Crocker is so miserable. He discovers that Crocker had fairy godparents as a kid, and not just any random fairies, either—Cosmo and Wanda were his fairies. Since present-day Cosmo and Wanda had no memory of this, they quickly figure that Crocker had done something to lose his fairies. They then set out to try to stop this, but Timmy ends up being the one revealing Crocker's secret in public. Worse still, he leaves A.J.'s "Crocker-tracker" in the past, which Crocker managed to reconfigure with Cosmo's DNA, making it a much more effective "Fairy-Finder" than the one present-day Crocker previously had. Jorgan and his 70s counterpart also ban Timmy and the fairies from coming back to this day ever again, to prevent any more interferences with the timeline.
  • ...which actually proves to be only a semi-stable time loop. If it were a true stable time loop, Crocker would have had AJ's tracker the entire time. Either that, or he 'forgot' that he had it until immediately after Timmy gets back from his time travel.
  • This loop actually has a logical beginning. Past Cosmo is about to reveal Crocker's secret to a large crowd, but then Timmy stops him, only to accidentally reveal the secret himself when present Cosmo wondered "What does this switch do?". Less of a time loop, more of Timmy kicking the can a few seconds forward and becoming the cause himself. This means with or without Timmy's intervention, either Cosmo is going to mess something up.
    • And the reason Cosmo and Wanda didn't remember having Crocker as a godchild? The past Cosmo was playing with the device Jorgen Von Strangle used to erase young Crocker's memories of having fairies (the device being a reference to Men in Black) and accidentally erased his and Wanda's memories of having Crocker as godchild.
  • This has actually happened a few times. Timmy helped the boy who would grow up to be his father win a trophy he used in turn to propose to the girl who would grow up to be his mother in the episode "Father Time". In "Timmy Turnip" he helped his grandparents escape their native country to come to America. Both of those were necessary to restore the Status Quo. In "The Past & the Furious" we see he had a hand in the invention of the wheel and the sandwich, plus the founding of his favorite restaurant chain.
  • In "Which Witch is Witch?" Timmy goes back in time to do research on the founding of Dimmsdale, where he discovered it was going to be named Bitterburg after notorious witch hunter Alden Bitterroot, an ancestor of Crocker, and that Dale Dimm, who Dimmsdale was ultimately named after, was an oafish Manchild. It was Timmy who exposed Bitterroot as a witch himself and got Dimm to beat him to death. Also, the town would have been named Daleburg had Timmy not come up with the name Dimmsdale.
• An episode of Family Guy explicitly pointed out the trope when Stewie and Brian accidentally caused the Big Bang due to time travel. This puts the existence of the universe in jeopardy when Bertram goes back in time to kill one of Stewie's ancestors, having been unaware of this fact.
• In The Fantastic Four (1967) episode "Rama-Tut", the heroes go back in time to ancient Egypt after finding an Egyptian tablet that seems to depict a man with a condition similar to the Thing's returning to normal. It turns out that the man in the tablet is the Thing himself, who briefly regains his human form after being enslaved by Rama-Tut.
• Futurama:
  • In "Roswell That Ends Well", Farnsworth is very adamant about not changing the past, unless of course it turns out they were supposed to change the past, in which case, they must, for the love of God, not not change it. Fry ends up killing his grandfather Enos by mistake, after an attempt to keep him safe. He impregnates his grandmother, thus becoming his own grandfather, which becomes a Chekhov's Gun. After that, Farnsworth gives up about not changing the past. The crew blasts up Roswell Air Force Base, steals some gear, rescues Zoidberg and Bender's body, and blasts off into space. Farnsworth then delivers one of the best lines ever: "Choke on that, causality!" Oh yeah, and throughout all this, the crew ends up being the mysterious alien ship that crashed in Roswell, and Zoidberg is the alien.
  • Later, the aforementioned Chekhov's Gun comes into play, which gave him a birth defect that enabled him to fight the Brainspawn. He ends up trapping himself with the Brainspawn, and they send him back in time, so he can avoid falling into the cryogenic tube, and live out his life in the 2000s. It turns out Nibbler is the reason he fell (Nibbler never went back in time, he's just that old). Nibbler convinces him to stay by saying he might have a chance with Leela in the future, and thusly helps himself fall alongside Nibbler. In a clever twist, on an earlier flashback episode, you can see Fry and Nibbler's shadows just as Fry falls into the tube.
    • Note that this ends up clashing with the previous bullet as, before being kicked forwards in time again (as he didn't prevent the event that he went back to stop), Fry says he needs a better escape craft when he redoes the mission in the future and the Nibblonians provide it. This means Fry doesn't get trapped in the Infosphere and thus the events that allowed him to have the better escape craft never happen.
    • If you look carefully at the pilot episode when Fry puts down I.C. Wiener's pizza on the cryogenic lab desk, you can see Nibbler's eye poking from under the desk. Yes, the writers planned that far ahead.
  • Bender's Big Score adds a few more. The aliens that destroyed civilization in the background while Fry was frozen? That was Bender gone back in time. Fry's dog turned out to have a happy life with a copy of Fry who chose to stay behind in the 2000s, while letting his other copy freeze to the year 3000. The dog gets killed and instantly fossilized when a mind controlled Bender blasts Fry's apartment. Lars was the copy of Fry who decided to stay in the 2000s. He makes it to the year 2012, making him biologically older than the Fry we know, and his larynx and hair were damaged in the blast. He remembers the name Lars from the future, and thusly knows what to name himself and how to act. The Bender tattoo that allowed him to travel back in time in the first place is glued on by a repaired Bender who did just that in a seemingly random part in the middle of the movie, but who got it from Lars/Fry's dead body at the end.
    • Also, in the movie, their main method of time travel is stated to be a self-correcting method. Thus, any copies made using the time travel are doomed to die horribly at some point. Some last longer than others. Farnsworth and Nibbler state that there can't be any paradoxes, and if there are, such as by the end of the movie where it's revealed there's hundreds of Benders (all of whom one Bender foolishly tells to stay underground until that moment, thus completely screwing up the timeline of the whole movie and creating hundreds of paradoxes), it rips open a hole in the universe, which is exactly what happens, leading to the events of the second movie.
  • The events of "Meanwhile" are a stable loop... possibly one with no escape... barring a reboot happening 10 years later.
• The Galaxy High episode "Founder's Day" has Doyle, Aimee, and Milo go back in time and end up responsible for Galaxy High being founded and Luigi setting up the pizzeria that Doyle and Milo work at.
• Gargoyles
  • Time travel (via the Phoenix Gate) can't be used to change the past — no matter what you do, You Already Changed the Past. But if the plot requires it, you can turn yourself into a god by means of a Stable Time Loop. The Avalon arc includes the flashback antagonist known as the Archmage in a classic bootstrap scenario: he travels back in time, saves himself from his supposed death at the bottom of a cliff, spends a day jumping through time handing his past self an absurd amount of firepower, ending the day by sending his past self off to repeat the process.
  • Magnificent Bastard David Xanatos uses this to his advantage in "Vows". When pulled to 975 AD, he gives the Illuminati a coin to hold onto for one thousand years, and then deliver it to a young David Xanatos. The coin wasn't worth much in the past, but by the time it reaches him in 1975, it's worth twenty grand, which is the foundation for his fortune. He also gave them a letter to hold onto for 1,020 years, so he'd get it precisely one week before the episode began, telling himself exactly what to do. He uses this as proof to his father that he's a Self-Made Man after-all. Dad's not impressed. He makes a direct Lampshade Hanging of the trope when Goliath arrives to rescue him.
    Goliath: If I didn't fear the damage you'd do to the timestream, I'd gladly leave you here.
    Xanatos: But you won't. Because you didn't. Time travel's funny that way.
  • Goliath found out that history is immutable to his dismay in the same episode. He tried to convince young Demona not to turn evil. It worked, but only temporarily.
    • In the same scenes, Demona did attempt to change history, but was clearly not surprised when it didn't work, because she still remembered what had happened to her past self that night. Future/Present Demona was the one that brought them all to the past in that episode, and then she goes to her younger self. She travels 20 years into the then-future, to 995 AD, and Goliath catches a ride. She shows herself the slaughter of Wyvern castle, and then tells herself to get rid of all the humans. Initially her past self rejects this, and she fights herself. She seems to take to heart what future Goliath tells her as she is returned to 975. However, by the time those twenty years pass, she makes a plan to do exactly what her future self told her to do, eliminate all the humans from the castle. This causes the scene her future self used to scare her in the first place, resulting in the classic irony this trope generally causes.
    • The final irony of this is that young Demona was simply told "the humans" destroyed our clan. She assumed it meant the humans in the castle, and tried to get rid of them by allowing the Vikings to sack the castle. In reality, it was the Vikings who killed the gargoyles, so this became a classic case of fulfilling a prophecy by trying to stop it.
  • In "M.I.A.", Goliath travels back to World War II London to investigate an accusation that he caused the death of a gargoyle back then. He eventually ends up having to take the Gargoyle in question to the present day with him in order to save his life, resulting in his clan assuming his death for fifty years, which they had blamed Goliath for in the present, which led to him going back in time in the first place...
• Gravity Falls:
  • "The Time Traveler's Pig" combines this with Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and You Already Changed the Past. Time traveler Blendin Blandin comes to the present from the year Twenty-Sñevety-Twelve to prevent series of time-anomalies from occurring. It turns out that the anomalies were caused by Dipper and Mabel messing around with Blendin's time traveling device, dropping several items around past episodes, and Blendin is sent to retrieve the litter- explaining why Blendin popped up in those episodes as a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
  • "Blendin's Game" has two of them:
    • In the beginning of the episode, Soos shows the twins a trick a certain "genius" taught him to retrieve a jammed snack from the vending machine. When the twins travel back in time ten years, Mabel teaches that exact trick to the 12-year-old Soos upon running into him.
    • Dipper accidentally leaving behind a screwdriver at the doorstep of the Mystery Shack causes Soos to eventually find it and bring it to Stan, resulting in him getting a job at the shack.
• Hotel Transylvania: The Series made use of this trope in "Drac to the Future", where Mavis mentions early in the episode that her favorite part of monster history in an enchanted book she and her friends have been tasked with guarding entails a battle to determine the future of monsterkind between two vampires and two humans. Kitty Cartwright, a monster-hating human who occasionally antagonizes Mavis, ends up inside the book and attempts to alter history by terrorizing the monsters at the hotel when it was first constructed, with Mavis following Kitty to thwart her scheme of altering the past. Eventually, Kitty's husband Donald finds his way into the past as well and Mavis meets up with the past self of her father Dracula. After Mavis and her father's past self defeat the Cartwrights in a game of tennis, Mavis realizes upon returning to the present day with the Cartwrights that she and her father were the two vampires and that the Cartwrights were the two humans.
• Justice League: Unlimited:
  • In "The Once and Future Thing: Time, Warped", Batman reprograms the villain's time belt to stick him in one of these — his Start of Darkness, in which his shrewish wife berates him over and over, causing him to time-jump to a few seconds ago, into infinity.
  • In "Far from Home", Brainiac 5 summons Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Supergirl to the 31st century to help in a conflict as history records show that the three time-traveled once — but Supergirl didn't return, implying that she died. At the end, Supergirl doesn't die, but she enjoys 31st century-Earth more like the advanced society she grew up in, as well as developed a crush on Brainiac 5, that she decides to stay voluntarily.
• Kim Possible: A Sitch in Time has this. Shego stole the time monkey only because she stole it, went back in time, transferred Ron away from Kim, and then told herself to steal the time monkey. This somewhat changes when the time monkey is destroyed and the entire timeline that its use created is revoked, along with the very existence of the time monkey. So, you destroy it once, it erases itself from ever existing. So Shego never went back in time, Ron never left KP, and nobody ever knew or cared about the time monkey.
  • And within that wheel, Shego takes the monkey while in the past and escapes into the timestream, so Kim goes straight from the past to face Shego in the Bad Future. Shego manages to Take Over the World partly because Kim wasn't around to stop her, since she skipped over that whole time.
  • On the other hand, the self-destruction of the time monkey is only implied; if its destruction doesn't affect its past existence, then the movie becomes a case of the Timey-Wimey Ball.
• Love, Death & Robots has a particularly mind-screwy example^note coupled with equally mind-screwy animation in "The Witness": A girl sees a man kill someone who looks remarkably similar to herself. He notices her and gives chase; in the end she kills him in an exact reversal of the initial scene. Then she sees a man looking through the window and starts chasing him... It seems the two of them are stuck in some kind of two-phase loop.
• In an episode of Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, the Wolfman is bitten by a seemingly unknown werewolf and his girlfriend tries in vain to kill him with regular bullets before shooting herself. Decades later (after Dr. Frankenstein tries in vain to stop his immortality as a werewolf), he travels through a Frankenhole portal to the past and attempts to give his beloved a silver bullet-loaded gun... before turning into the werewolf that bit him in the first place. Plus, the gun he tried to give her is the same one that she ended up killing herself with.
• Milo Murphy's Law:
  • In "Missing Milo", at one point, Milo, Dakota, and Cavendish are running through the ruined future city, but would have run into a small horde of pistachio-monsters had they not been stopped by a peach being thrown at them, which Dakota then pockets. They later escape the Pistachions by traveling back ten minutes, only to see themselves about to walk right into that very Pistachion squad. Thinking quickly, Dakota hands Cavendish the peach, which he then throws at their past selves, who pocket it and later travel back to throw it at themselves, ad infinitum. Cavendish is confounded by this.
  • Meanwhile, in the present, Sara, Melissa, and Zack are looking for Milo, and the Murphy family dog Diogee finds him... in a Lost Episode of their favorite TV show, Dr. Zone. They go to meet with the show's creator/star Orton Mahlson, who gives them a letter Milo gave him over 50 years ago. At the end of the episode, Milo learns of the letter, but realizes he hasn't been on that adventure yet. Rather than having to write the note later, he simply tucks it away in his backpack to give to Orton Mahlson in 1965.
• ¡Mucha Lucha!. Señor Hasbeena is a Jaded Wash Out since he lost his World Championship title in 1972 and never won it again, an incident that continues to haunt him for years. In "Woulda, Coulda, Hasbeena", Rikochet accidentally opened a time portal to the day of that fight and Hasbeena tried to stop the incident that resulted on his defeat, only to become the one who caused it in the very first place. Specifically, a light shone on Hasbeena's face during the fight, blinding him temporally and allowed his opponent to get the upper hand and defeat him. When present!Hasbeena tried to prevent this, a light from the ring shone on the big buckle of his belt and onto past!Hasbeena's face thus leading to the events described above.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "It's About Time", Twilight Sparkle comes across her (lightly injured) future self, who came from next Tuesday to give her a very serious message that she isn't able to finish due to Twilight constantly interrupting her; she finally starts to deliver the message ("Whatever you do, don't —") but vanishes before she could finish. The rest of the episode has Twilight spend the next several days worrying about averting impending doom and getting more and more injured because of random events, matching up with her future self's injuries until Tuesday morning comes and absolutely nothing happens. She attempts to use a special magic scroll to go back in time and tell her past self that they wasted their time worrying for nothing, only for that previous interaction to play out. Upon realizing she just invoked this trope, she decides to shrug it off and declares it her past self's problem now.
• Time travel in The Owl House episode "Elsewhere and Elsewhen" operates on this principle. We see this demonstrated very early on when Lilith seemingly trips over a rock, only for it to be revealed a few minutes later that what she actually tripped over was her own head looking through a time pool. It's hinted at the time (and later confirmed in "Hollow Mind") that Emperor Belos was aware of the fact that the entire series up to this point had been part of a single 400+ year loop and had Flora subtly push Luz and Lilith into seeking out the time pools so they would go back and teach his younger self the light glyph and lead him to the Collector. Once he gets conformation that the loop has been closed, he almost immediately tries to kill Luz as she's become nothing but a liability for him.
• The Penguins of Madagascar episode "It's About Time" involves a time-traveling Kowalski trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong while avoiding a temporal paradox... and a second Kowalski trying to avoid another temporal paradox that would be caused by him succeeding in stopping the time machine from being made. Hilarity Ensues and in the end, the whole time loop can be basically summed up as Kowalski jumping through time twice: once to tell Private to not make the time machine, and then jumping through time again to tell Skipper to keep the time machine intact to preserve the paradox/loop. At that point, he (now the only Kowalski in the timeline after his present and once-future self travel back in time to act out their roles) realizes he never needed to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, because Rico stops the Reality-Breaking Paradox caused by the timeline jumping and Never the Selves Shall Meet by throwing the time machine into the rupture and shutting it, averting the catastrophe.
• In the Pinky and the Brain episode "Brain of the Future," the two mice travel to the distant future in a time machine given to them by their future selves, who had just returned from the distant future. There, they lose the time machine they arrived in but manage to steal a "different" one and return to give it to their past selves...
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998)
  • Mojo Jojo goes back in time to try to kill Professor Utonium as a young boy to prevent him from creating the Powerpuff Girls. The girls follow and save The Professor, and it was this very incident that inspired him to get into science and try to create "the perfect little girl".
  • In another episode where Mojo captures the Professor, it's revealed that Mojo's continued existence is proof that this plan was Doomed by Canon because the blast that the girls made on being born mutated a lab monkey into Mojo himself.
• In Rick and Morty's first (and so far only) time travel episode, the titular duo are aided by their future selves with homemade disguises. Nearing the end of the episode, Rick and Morty encounter their future selves again, who tell them it's their turn to make the disguises.
• In Regular Show episode "Prank Callers", while being chased by the Master Prank Caller in the 80s, the gang ended up accidentally running over Pops, turning him into the ditz he is in the present.
  • It gets weirder since Pops was the one who gave Mordecai and Rigby the 80's cell phones that brought them back in time, and Pops gave them the phones while he was falling for a prank call Mordecai and Rigby pulled on him. (They asked him to wait for a collect call from Joe Momma. And he did.)
• In Road Rovers episode "Reigning Cats and Dogs", main villain General Parvo is turned (back) into a house cat and sent back in time, with his memory implicitly erased. He's adopted and renamed by Professor Shepherd, who at the time was working on the Transdogmifier. Shepherd's colleague Otitis tries to kidnap Shepherd's dog, but settles for the cat instead, and uses Parvo to test his knock-off Transdogmifier. Parvo is changed back into his humanoid form (though to his memory it's for the first time). He then kidnaps Shepherd's dog, Scout, and accidentally mutates him into Muzzle. The Groomer appears, having followed him through time, gives him the name General Parvo and his signature helmet, and swears loyalty to him. The two of them try to ransom Scout/Muzzle back to Shepherd for the real Transdogmifier blueprints, when the Road Rovers appear, having followed the Groomer. During the ensuing chase, Shag sends a letter to Shepherd to warn him that Parvo will double-cross him at the ransom exchange, just before the present Master/Shepherd (somehow?) pulls the Rovers back to the present. The events of the series proceed from there unchanged, with Shepherd's survival of Parvo's double-cross now explained by Shag's letter.
  • Logically, this means Parvo and the Groomer only exist because they went back in time, having no origin point outside of the loop, and they should not be able to exist outside it, though they appear in later episodes. Also, the Groomer should have, or have had, foreknowledge of all the events of the series that she's already lived through. Neither point is ever addressed.
• The intro short for The Simpsons theme park ride has this. Professor Frink learns that Doc Brown's Future Technology Institute was bought out by Krusty the Klown and closed down, and uses the DeLorean to go back in time and prevent this. When he arrives, Frink accidentally runs down the investor to whom Doc was speaking, forcing him to sell the Institute to "that mercenary clown".
• In The Smurfs (1981), Gargamel uses Father Time's magical hourglass to travel back in time to his childhood when he saw the Smurfs for the first time vent on killing the Smurfs with a rock over the spot the Smurfs stood at the time. Things however happen differently when Bigmouth appears distracting him, he drops the rock before time causing it to fall on his younger self while persecuting the Smurfs, presumably causing his early hatred for them.
• The Spongebob Squarepants episode "SB-129" had Squidward going to the distant past through a series of events stemming from avoiding SpongeBob and Patrick trying to get him to go jellyfishing with them. He meets the caveman versions of them and shows them not to be afraid of jellyfish by demonstrating jellyfishing, then giving both nets to try it themselves. Upon his return, he mocks whoever was the one who invented jellyfishing, to which SpongeBob and Patrick tell Squidward it was him.
• In South Park: Post Covid, Clyde in the Bad Future has become a Strawman Political for COVID-19 vaccine skeptics, refusing to get it under any circumstances for nonsensical reasons. In the second part South Park: Post Covid: The Return of Covid, he shouts that he's like this because of "expert advice", with the "expert" in the end revealed to have been himself after going back in time, misinforming his past self, and creating a bootstrap paradox.
• The Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "Yesteryear" has Kirk and Spock return from a trip to the past to find that the ship suddenly has a different science officer, and no one else knows who Spock is. Spock relates a memory from his childhood when his life was saved by an adult Vulcan, who he realizes looked exactly like he does now, so he has to take one more trip to the past to save himself and set things right. In a very odd scene, the alternate-history science officer, an Andorian, is informed by Spock that Spock's plan, if successful, will mean the Andorian will no longer be the science officer for the Enterprise — and may in fact cease to exist entirely. The Andorian accepts this notion with an almost eerie calm, and wishes Spock the best of luck on his quest.
• Star Wars Rebels: In "A World Between Worlds", Ezra enters the titular Eldritch Location, which is a Place Beyond Time containing portals through which all of space and time can be reached. He comes across a portal leading to the planet Malachor, during the events of "Twilight of the Apprentice", two years prior In-Universe, and sees the tail end of Ahsoka Tano's duel with Darth Vader, which she is losing. Just as she shatters the floor, causing Vader to fall through it, Ezra reaches through the portal and pulls her through just before the Malachor Sith temple explodes. This explains the mention that Vader assumed her dead in "Steps Into Shadow" — since she was in a place that Vader didn't even know existed, he couldn't sense her. By the end of the episode, instead of coming with Ezra to Lothal, Ahsoka goes back through the Malachor portal, returning shortly after she left. Her appearance in the epilogue of "Twilight of the Apprentice" is shown again, revealing why she went deeper into the ruins — to find a portal into the world between worlds so she could track down Ezra again. It's also implied by the reveal in "Family Reunion — and Farewell" that she survived to Ezra's time, two years later, that she stayed away from the Rebels for all that time because she knew that if the events in Ezra's life after Malachor that led to him entering the world between worlds didn't happen the same way, he wouldn't be able to save her life.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), notably in "Timing is Everything", in which the events of this episode are heavily implied to be the reason why the Shredder became so ruthless in his hunt for the turtles during the "The Shredder Strikes Back" two-parter. The Shredder that appeared in "Timing Is Everything" was right after the events of "The Shredder Strikes, Part Two" (as in, right after he broke out of the wreckage of the water tower that fell on him), and learned of his eventual defeat at their hands. Thus, he resolved to ensure it never happened, resulting in the events of the follow three or so seasons — making his defeat inevitable.
    Raphael: "We put the kabosh on you a long time ago! You're history!"
  • In the same episode, Raph and Mikey see their future selves through a time portal. Future Raph tells them where to find a package they need that Donnie had sent from the past. Future Mikey reminds them to tell themselves the same thing when they get to this moment in time. Later, they wind up in the same situation they saw their future selves in. They see their past selves through the time portal and give the exact same message to them. Raph did not know this package existed before then. He only knows about it because his future self told him about it.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) episode "Tale of the Yokai" has the Turtles go back in time to the day when Hamato Yoshi fought Oroku Saki and Tang Shen was killed. After attempting to explain to Tang Shen that Yoshi is a good man and Saki is not, the Turtles realize in the end that they are indirectly responsible for the circumstances under which Saki became their enemy Shredder and Yoshi left Japan to live in New York City.
• In Teen Titans (2003), the time-travelling villain Warp claims that he's taking part in one; he goes back in time to steal a special clock because, a hundred years in the future, the historical records say that someone stole it at that point. It's unclear if this trope is actually in effect or if his attempt merely preempted a more mundane robbery, but regardless, the Titans manage to Screw Destiny and save the clock.
• The Transformers featured a truly epic multi-layer time loop revealed over the course of several episodes. 11 million years ago, A3 led a revolt against the Quintessons; however, in 2006, the Quintessons yanked A3 into their own time to prevent themselves from losing Cybertron. Blaster, Perceptor, Blurr, and Wreck-Gar go back in time to help the rebellion, while the Aerialbots save A3 from the Quintessons. A3 returns to his own time to lead the rebellion. Two million years later, A3, now known as Alpha Trion, meets the Aerialbots, who have travelled back in time from 1986. The Aerialbots persuade him to save the life of a young dockworker named Orion Pax, who he rebuilds into Optimus Prime (and also rebuilds Orion's girlfriend Ariel into Elita One). The Aerialbots return to their own time and then, in 1984, Optimus Prime and Alpha Trion build the Aerialbots from a group of shuttles. You may wish to draw a diagram.
• Uncle Grandpa:
  • In the episode "Future Pizza", Future!Uncle Grandpa goes back in time to warn Pizza Steve that he will lose all respect for him for reasons he can't explain. Pizza Steve then spends the entire episode worrying about everything he does being the thing that makes Uncle Grandpa lose respect for him, and near the end, he tells Uncle Grandpa that he's giving up on doing awesome stuff altogether. Uncle Grandpa tells him that all the awesome stuff he does is what makes UG respect him, which causes him to believe that giving up was what made Uncle Grandpa lose all respect for him. He then does everything he had wanted to do before, and asks "I didn't disappoint you, did I?". It then turns out that asking if he was disappointed was what made Uncle Grandpa lose all respect for him in the first place, and Uncle Grandpa goes back in time to warn Pizza Steve not to do that.
  • In one guest-animated short, a weird-looking time traveler asks Uncle Grandpa to look after his time machine. Uncle Grandpa takes it for a joyride and eventually turns it up so high that the sheer force of traveling through time turns him inside-out, revealing that he was the original time traveler.
• Young Justice: In the first arc of Season 4, Superboy is seemingly killed by an assassination plot by Lor-Zod with a human-shaped scorch mark from the explosion, though it's later revealed that Phantom Girl saved Superboy and unwillingly brought them to the Phantom Zone. Unaware of this, Lor-Zod considers the mission a success and plots to free his father, General Zod, along with his mother Ursa and their fellow prisoners from the Phantom Zone. The explanation of the scorch mark comes in the season finale, where after his parents are defeated by the heroes, Lor-Zod steals the Time Sphere that Rocket used to get back to Earth to go back in time, but the sphere was pre-programmed by Metron to take him to the moment that Superboy is almost killed, and leave the moment Lor-Zod steps out so he is killed by his own bomb instead. Thus set the events in motion that would lead Lor-Zod to torture Metron for the Kryptonian Phantom Projector, which leads Metron to set in motion the events of Lor-Zod's death in the recent past for both curiosity and possibly revenge.

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