They Killed Kenny Again / Western Animation

---

• South Park

---

• N.I.G.E.L in Godzilla: The Series was destroyed in just about every episode. Of course, being a robot, the crew would often send him into dangerous situations so they wouldn't put themselves at risk.
• Sealab 2021 has the whole base blow up with all hands in several episodes. It once led to the line, "Once again, your stupidity has killed us all!"
  • Note that this line was from the show's very first episode.
    Dr. Quinn: "You know Sealab is prone to massive explosion!"
• Transformers:
  • Optimus Prime is known to die several times in almost every continuity he appears in. However, unlike most examples, deaths of Optimus Prime are never Played for Laughs, they are always Tear Jerker. TFWiki.net even has a special page for recording The Many Deaths of Optimus Prime.
  • This also happens to Starscream, who is immortal. In Transformers: Animated, he's even voiced by Tom Kenny.
  • Beast Wars has Waspinator.
    Waspinator: Waspinator having good day! Not get shot once. *BLAM*
  • Cy-Kill got this treatment after Hasbro's buyout of the GoBots franchise. It quickly became a Discredited Meme among the fanbase.
• The Simpsons:
  • Hans Moleman dies in most of his appearances.
  • Gil Gunderson has also died a few times. He gets shot to death during a bank robbery in "I Don't Wanna Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" but returns in later episodes with no explanation.
  • Itchy kills Scratchy in almost every episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show. In "The Tears of a Clone", Scratchy is seemingly Killed Off for Real. Itchy then decides to clone him a bunch of times, just so he can kill them.
  • In Treehouse of Horror V, Groundskeeper Willie gets murdered with an axe to the back in all 3 segments while trying to assist the protagonist(s).
    Willie: Hold on, kids! I'm coming to rescue the lot of you! I'll- OW! Ugh, I'm bad at this. (collapses)
  • "Holidays of Futures Past" reveals that this is the case for future Ralph.
  • Ralph also played the role of the Trope Namer in "O Brother, Where Bart Thou?".
  • Bart and Milhouse both have a special edition of the Radioactive Man comic where the titular character and Fallout Boy get killed on every page.
• Family Guy: Peter, Meg, Chris, Brian, Stewie, Lois, Cleveland and Joe have all been killed at least once.
  • Peter often dies in the Cutaway Gags, which are usually non-canon and not part of the episodes' main plot. Examples include snapping his own neck to avoid the book club, watching the video from The Ring (which turns out to be Mannequin), having his head explode due to a severe case of brain freeze, getting shanked by a mongoose, hanging himself with a necktie, and getting eviscerated in the neck by ants.
  • Several episodes end with Meg dying. In "Jungle Love", when the rest of the family manages to escape from a tribe of South American natives (in a parody of Raiders of the Lost Ark), she's last seen falling face-down into the river, having been pierced by a whole bunch of darts and arrows.
  • Happens occasionally to Brian as his status as The Chew Toy has been amped up. In "La Famiglia Guy", he is killed in three different ways.
  • "Vat Man and Rob Em" ends on a Sudden Downer Ending in which the entire Griffin family succumbs to carbon-monoxide poisoning.
• Æon Flux: Æon Flux (the main character) died at the end of the first, serialised, season, and in every episode of the second season. The show had Negative Continuity during this period.
• Futurama:
  • The show has a minor character, a used car salesman named Malfunctioning Eddie. Every episode he appears in, his head explodes at some point. Of course, being a robot, he is always fixed by his next appearance.
  • The entire cast has died at some point at least once, most notably the first Comedy Central episode ("Rebirth") when everyone BUT the Professor died, and the Professor himself often declares himself to not be technically alive. In the episode Ghost in the Machines, even the robots Bender and the Robot Devil die during the episode and are alive again before the end of it, which is amusing considering in the prior season Bender was told he'd Killed Off for Real if he ever died. The episode doesn't technically violate continuity, since Bender wound up in his same body while the Robot Devil downloaded to a new one.
  • Even the city of New New York and Earth itself have been Kenny'd several times, from being scorched by the Omicronians to being consumed by a Grey Goo of Benders, only to be rebuilt perfectly in time for the next episode. Even lampshaded during one such ending.
• Virtually everyone in Squidbillies, especially Rusty, the Sheriff, Granny, the convenience store guy, and Early himself. Technically justified for the Sheriff, as it's revealed he's actually one of hundreds of identical Sheriffs grown in a field, all just as stupid and incompetent as him.
• Everyone in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but mostly Carl. [adult swim] even has a video of some of Carl's deaths.
• In most episodes of The Venture Bros., H.E.L.P.eR. has something horrible happen to him, including being sent into orbit around the Earth and shrunk to ant-size and stepped on. Of course, he's a robot, so it's likely that he gets repeatedly fixed up. As well, Hank and Dean are shown in the first episode of the second season through flashback to have been killed/died and then re-animated via cloning many, many times.
• Fluffy and Uranus the teddy bear secretaries from Duckman died in every episode they appeared in except one.
• The entire cast of Drawn Together are subjects to this, with Toot and Ling-Ling getting killed the most.
  • Somewhat justified with Xandir, as he is a video game character with numerous extra lives in reserve. In one episode, however, Ling-Ling was so angry with him that he killed off all of Xandir's extra lives, though that didn't stop Xandir from coming back to life the next episode anyway. Totally justified; he used a CONTINUE after that one. He also lost all but one of his extra lives in "Gay Bash", but it still didn't stop him from coming back from the dead in later episodes, although he probably just got more extra lives.
  • Lampshaded in "Lost in Parking Space: Pt. 2":
    Wooldoor: We can't just keep dying and coming back to life the next episode! IT'S TOTALLY ILLOGICAL!
    Ling-Ling: (appears after dying two minutes earlier) You're telling me.
  • Finally subverted in The Movie as, since their show was canceled, there was no Negative Continuity to glean from to resurrect them. Once they were dead, it was for keeps.
• Robot Chicken has the host of the Blooper shows, who always ends the show by killing himself. The entire show's staff has been killed at least once as well.
• Tom of Tom and Jerry has died at least three or four times, not counting the short "Heavenly Puss" which was All Just a Dream. He's been executed in Revolutionary France in "The Two Mouseketeers". In "Mouse Trouble," he gets blown up and floats toward Heaven after a failed attempt to catch Jerry. Hell, it's implied that he and Jerry commit suicide in "Blue Cat Blues"! But of course he's back next cartoon as if nothing happened.
• Virtually every Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Wile E. Coyote has the coyote suffer amusing injury after amusing injury with seemingly no long-term consequence. But occasionally, the final backfiring trap has apparently killed him:
  • In "To Beep or Not to Beep", where he makes six attempts to use a catapult to hurl a large boulder on top of the unsuspecting Road Runner. Each attempt fails, often in comically spectacular fashion; the sixth attempt has — after much prodding — the catapult finally working (he jumps up and down repeatedly to get it to unjam ... only for him to be hurled toward a large rock formation and then a series of electrical transmission lines, after which he is hurled back to the catapult and finally killed. (After Wile E. is finally flattened, the catapult's manufacturer is revealed — The Road Runner Manufacturing Co., the Road Runner on the name plate "beep-beeping" for joy as he runs off.
    • In his pairings with Bugs Bunny, the most spectacular deaths come in:
    • "Operation: Rabbit" In the final gag, Bugs uses a tractor to pull away a shed (where the Coyote is busy pouring nitroglycerin into carrots) and unhooks it on some railroad tracks ... just in time for a train to be coming. The train hits the shack, resulting in a huge explosion and sending Coyote high into the air. The dazed Wile E. lives long enough to visit Bugs one last time and admit defeat.
    • "Compressed Hare", where in the final gag, Wile E. builds a 10 billion-volt magnet to — after getting Bugs to eat a metal carrot — pull his prey to his cave for an easy dinner. However, not only does Bugs send the carrot back, but the magnet begins pulling everything with metallic properties toward Wile E.'s cave, trapping him inside as the final object, a Mercury rocket attempting liftoff, is pulled into the cave; immediately thereafter, everything explodes and (presumably) kills the Coyote once and for all.
    • On one occasion, he blasted himself into space on an out-of-control rocket sled which explodes and turns him into a constellation of stars.
  • Sylvester J. Pussycat died the most out of any golden age cartoon character at 24 deaths in 16 cartoons. He even goes to Hell in "Satan's Waitin'", after losing all nine of his lives.
  • Daffy Duck has died four or five times: first in "Daffy and the Dinosaur" when a giant inflatable duck he set up and goaded another character into attacking exploded and both are last seen as angels on clouds with Daffy remarking that maybe the whole gag "wasn't such a hot idea after all". In "Draftee Daffy", when the rocket he's riding on crashes and explodes and his soul is last seen in Hell. In Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, he is vaporized by Marvin the Martian (but revived by Porky so this one may not count), in "The Scarlet Pumpernickel" he may or may not have died after shooting himself in the head, and in "Show Biz Bugs" he swallows a bunch of explosives and tosses a lit match down his throat causing himself to explode and is then seen as a ghost.
  • Another Looney Tunes character to get this treatment is Yosemite Sam.
    • In "Devil's Feud Cake", Sam has a run-in with Bugs Bunny and gets himself killed. He finds himself in Hell, where the Devil offers to bring him back to life if he can send him Bugs's soul to take his place in Hell (by killing Bugs). Sam ends up getting himself killed a second time while going after Bugs, so the Devil "gives him another chance" and sends him after Bugs again. After dying the third time, Yosemite Sam tells the Devil that if he wants Bugs so badly he should go get him himself - he's staying put this time.
    • He also died at the end of "Dumb Patrol" after his plane crashed into an ammunition dump and he's last seen as a spirit in a devil costume strumming a harp.
      Bugs: I've heard of Hell's Angels, but I never thought I'd see one!
    • In the The Looney Tunes Show episode, "The Foghorn Leghorn Story", Foghorn makes a movie based around his life story and quest to find the Burmese Turtle, a rare treasure that made a Chinese Queen literally burst with joy when she saw it and had to be hidden by the King so that nobody else would burst with joy. Sam finds the Burmese Turtle near the end of the episode and bursts with joy upon seeing it, but shows up alive and well to see (a very cheap version of) his own death in Foghorn's movie in the following scene.
  • Elmer Fudd died at least twice. After being buried alive in "The Old Grey Hare", Bugs hands him a huge stick of dynamite and the explosion rocks the title card as the ending plays. In "Back Alley Oproar", he is fed up with Sylvester's singing so he plants a bunch of dynamite around the fence; it explodes as he lights it, killing both of them. He's seen as an angel on a cloud surrounded by Sylvester's past 9 lives (still singing). This last one may or may not count but in the ending of "Hare Do" he is eaten by a lion but he's still alive before the Iris Out.
    • It's also possible he died at the end of "Ant Pasted"; Elmer is at war with a colony of ants who use firecrackers as arsenal, at the end Elmer gathers up the remaining firecrackers and runs away yelling "You'll never take me alive!" unknowingly leaving a trail of gunpowder behind, the ants light the powder and blow him up in a massive explosion and you don't see him after that.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show
  • The title characters died at the end of many of their shorts, most notably in "Terminal Stimpy" when Stimpy keeps getting killed and he tries to stop himself from losing his last life.
  • Muddy Mudskipper has died at least three times; in "Powdered Toastman" he is left behind on an exploding dynamite keg and his skeleton is seen flying from the debris of the explosion, in "Bass Masters", he is seen as a trophy mounted on a wall, and in "Terminal Stimpy", he is run over by Stimpy and after his dying wishes are fulfilled he asks Stimpy to be skipped across a pond and he is then hit by a bus and his corpse is seen sticking to the grill.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Mr. Scarface the Ventriloquist's puppet is destroyed at the end of every appearance. The creators said they went out of their way to give Scarface the most gruesome "deaths" they could, which they'd never get away with if he was a human, because hey, he's a puppet, so it's okay. Since he's (probably) just a projection of the Ventriloquist's addled mind, he comes back in the time it takes the Ventriloquist to carve a new dummy.
  • Mr. Scarface is finally destroyed for good when the Ventriloquist undergoes a Heel–Face Turn and does the deed himself.
• Celebrity Deathmatch: A running gag was Don King getting killed randomly during matches; he eventually had a deathmatch himself against Donald Trump who kills him for the last time in the series when he climbs down his throat and tears him apart from the inside. After King's permanent death, he was replaced by an unnamed popcorn vendor.
  Trump: How do you get Don King out of worsted wool?
• In Jackie Chan Adventures when Dao Lon Wong turns Finn, Chow, and Ratso into Dark Chi Warriors they got killed multiple times per episode exploding into dust every time they do so, until they are changed back. Uncle explains that Wong had the power to resurrect them any time he wanted.
• In the Private Snafu shorts, the title character died in 6 out of his 15 shorts all due to his stupidity; these were made to teach soldiers what they shouldn't do when in the army.
• This happens to all of the inmates in Superjail!.
  • The fat perverted inmate is the one who gets killed the most often.
  • The Vegetable Garden are also frequent subjects to this. They get mowed down in their first appearance, get killed by weed monsters their second, and suffer other deaths in subsequent roles.
• Nearly every episode of Stressed Eric had Eric die from stress at the end, except for the final one, which has an Ambiguous Ending.
• Katnip Cat of Herman and Katnip died at the end of many of their shorts.
• The title character of SpongeBob SquarePants has completely exploded... and somehow returned... seconds later in the same episode. It's justified as it's explicitly shown he can regenerate.
  • Scooter apparently drowned when SpongeBob left him buried up to his neck on the beach. He appeared later in that episode as an angel. Let that sink in for a few seconds. Scooter was seen alive and well in later episodes but died on two other occasions. In "Something Smells" SpongeBob's stinky breath killed him and another fish, and in "My Pretty Seahorse" after he thinks Mystery the seahorse is a ride and inserts a coin into her, she kicks him and he explodes where he lands.
  • Fred doesn't die, but whenever he shows up you can expect him to get horribly injured and scream "MY LEG!".
• In Woody Woodpecker, his nemesis Buzz Buzzard died in a couple of shorts. In "Wild and Woody" Woody locked him in a stove and threw dynamite inside causing it to explode and then guides his soul to hell, in "Buccaneer Woody" he lights a match in a gun barrel he's carrying and after it explodes he's seen as a ghost, in "Scalp Treatment" he's blasted off into the distance with a large explosion where he lands, and in "The Great Who Dood It" he launches him into space with exploding cigars. Woody himself has died in a couple of cartoons such as "Ration Bored."
• There's a series of short films based on a picture book named "The Many Deaths of Norman Spitall", in which the title character would die or be executed by quirky methods.
• Bluto from Popeye has died in a couple of shorts like in "Blow Me Down" after being punched around the world twice by Popeye he falls to the ground with x's on his eyes and in "We Aim to Please" at the end Popeye punches him into a wall where he lands on a meat hook and he turns into cuts of meat labeled "a bunch of baloney"
• In Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, the crew had a trio of robots who they would sometimes use to protect them, they would give them a command and they would repeat the command they were given and be instantly destroyed by the Monster of the Week.
• In the South Park parody segment in the Arthur special episode "The Contest", Buster's character fell victim to this trope after aliens landed directly on top of him right when he told the aliens to land. Staying true to the source material, Francine's character shouts "Hey! You squished Buster!"
• Many of Chris's interns in the Total Drama series end up dying in various horrible ways only to come back perfectly fine in future episodes.
• Donald Duck may have died at least three times. In "Uncle Donald's Ants" after getting sick of the ants invading his house he attempts to blow them up, resulting in him blowing himself and his shed sky high instead. The cartoon ends without seeing him come back down. In "Dragon Around" Chip and Dale attach explosives to his ladder, again blowing him into the air, and like the previous entry he isn't seen again. In "All In a Nut Shell" Donald is knocked unconscious and Chip and Dale place him in a log then stuff a bee hive into it. When the bees sting Donald he goes bolting out of the log like a cannonball into the horizon. Chip and Dale hold their hats while "Taps" plays and they laugh.
• In Courage the Cowardly Dog, the Reset Button has been used for the whole cast, but Eustace tends to need it the most. Of course, most times he deserved it, seeing as he was usually the one who got himself, Courage, and Muriel into whatever mess they were in that got him killed in the first place.
• Zorak from The Brak Show died at the end of a lot of episodes, most commonly being shot or blown up.
• Several characters such as Grim, Billy, Irwin, General Skarr and even Mandy from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy have died multiple times. And despite having The Grim Reaper under their control it doesn't have to do much with easily reversing death but more that it flaunts Negative Continuity to the point of making a joking twist out of the few times that there is continuity.
• Everyone in Action League NOW!; every episode usually involves heavy objects falling on the characters, someone getting dismembered, run over by cars...and more!
• More than one character in The Amazing World of Gumball has taken injuries that couldn't be described as anything less than fatal, but recovered afterward by next episode:
  • Anton the toast is often eaten alive, but he always comes back. In the Season 3 episode "The Recipe", we see his parents replace him with a clone (made by a toaster) every time he dies.
  • The living balloon Alan Keane has been popped 14 times, plus once in the early reel and once in the launch trailer.
  • Idaho the potato has come back from exploding from shock twice, plus enduring many other forms of abuse like getting stepped on by a T. rex and being hit with a golf club.
  • Banana Joe and his parents are regular slapstick victims, ranging from bruised peels to getting completely splattered against various surfaces. How they un-splatter is never explained.
• Rigby from Regular Show has died or almost died on multiple occasions, often getting better through supernatural means.
• Harry Sachz, the man whom Beavis and Butt-Head prank phone called repeatedly to make fun of his name, died twice. The first time was in "Butt Flambe" when he received a gunshot wound and later died in the hospital, and in "Nothing Happening", he is killed during a standoff with the police; he came back both times with no explanation.
  • The boys themselves have died a few times, or at least ended some episodes trapped in a situation where survival was highly unlikely. Such cases included getting buried under a mountain's worth of feces by Sterculius, sliced to pieces by a creepy chainsaw-wielding farmer, stranded on a wooden plank in the middle of the ocean, visibly flatlining in the hospital after suffering severe DDT poisoning, being crushed in a car grinder, and dying after being trapped underneath their own trash for years.
• Invader Zim has this with Invader Skoodge, who's been thrown to a planet of "slaughtering rat people", shot out of a cannon into space, eaten by the Hogulus beast twice, etc. only to return later on completely unharmed.
  Zim: I thought the Almighty Tallests killed you.
  Skoodge: Yeah, but I'm better now.
  • Several characters in the show have this happen occasionally; notable examples include Zim's death at the end of "Backseat Drivers From Beyond the Stars" and "Hobo 13", both his and Dib's presumed deaths in "Walk For Your Lives" and "Bolognius Maximus", and Keef's death in "Bestest Friends"; all of them apparently recover by the next episode. Made more confusing by the occasional Continuity Nod, implying that the show doesn't actually run on Negative Continuity.
• A minor character on The Cleveland Show died in almost all of his appearances. He's knocked out a window in a regular episode, gets shot in the Die Hard parody, and gets shot again in another non-canon episode spoofing The Sopranos.
• Entree of Spliced may have died at least twice: In "Whirrel Call", he is killed when his brain goes flying out of his head after he falls off a cliff and his body is then destroyed by being crushed by a boulder, and he may have died in "Sgt. Snuggums" when the island is blown up.
• Kaeloo: Several characters have been decapitated, blown up, committed suicide, etc... yet everyone is perfectly fine in the next episode.
• The Fly kid in Gravedale High. A running gag on the series is showing Busby (a teen version of The Fly, as all students are based in movie monsters) in mortal peril screaming the iconic "Help me!" in every episode. Among other stuffs he's eaten by a carnivorous plant, taken away by a giant ant and even put in a soup by the school's cook!
• Biker Mice from Mars has Fred the Mutant, a masochistic Mook that is often abuse and use in experiments producing him grave harm, which he happily enjoys.
• Fall-Apart rabbit in Bonkers is a toon stunt double that, as his job implies, gets destroyed often. He's even seen always with bandages and a medical robe, and his body parts are shown to be detachable.
• Xayide in The Neverending Story: The Animated Adventures of Bastian Balthazar Bux gets killed at the end of almost every episode, but somehow she always comes back for the next one.
• Xanatos' robot mook Coyote gets destroyed in every episode of Gargoyles he's in.
• In Milo Murphy's Law, the episode "The Island of Lost Dakotas" reveals that Cavendish is this trope, though he is completely unaware of it. His time travel partner Dakota has created a system where he goes back in time to prevent his friend's constant deaths, with all the prior versions of himself that result from doing this going off to live on a deserted island to minimize temporal irregularities.
• The episode "Reformed" in Steven Universe has Amethyst repeatedly getting poofed (having her Hard Light form destroyed until she can regenerate from her gem) and reforming to conform to what she thinks Garnet wants her to look like. It's not until the end of the episode that she takes four hours to regenerate a new form— the only one that pleases Garnet because it's the one Amethyst chose for herself and no one else. Amethyst retains the form for the next season until she is poofed again by Jasper in "Crack the Whip".
• Jay Leno has been killed twice in American Dad!, first in "Stan of Arabia part 1" when he annoys Stan causing him to break his neck, then in "Casino Normale" when Roger locks him in the basement and he dies from starvation.
  • Dr. Ray, the CIA Psychiatrist dies in every episode he appears in starting with “The Shrink”. Someone always notices he’s died before, but he simply denies that it happened.
  Francine: I'm sorry. I have a vivid memory of you dying horrifically in an escalator accident.
  Ray: Hm. Doesn't sound like something I would do.
• Angela Anaconda: Nanette Manoir often dies in Angela's Imagine Spots, themselves happening Once per Episode.
• Il Était Une Fois...: In addition to being the antagonist, Le Teigneux is definitely the Butt-Monkey. He is the one to get shot, decapitated, or killed in several ways during the series, more than anyone else.
  • In "The Fertile Valleys", he plays the role of Goliath, who ends up struck in the head by a smooth stone courtesy of a kid with a sling.
  • In "The Carolingians", he plays the role of a Frankish warrior who disagreed with Clovis over who gets what share of the booty after a battle. One year later, Clovis retaliates by killing Frankish!Teigneux with his ax. Teigneux reappears as a Frankish nobleman, though.
  • In "The Age of Vikings", he plays the role of a Viking chieftain-turned-outlaw who stabs Viking!Pierre In the Back, only to be put to the sword himself by Viking!Pierrot.
  • In "The Quattrocento", he plays the role of a Renaissance nobleman caught up in a vendetta with Renaissance!Nabot. This vendetta ends when Renaissance!Teigneux stabs Renaissance!Nabot In the Back only to die because his victim has poisoned his drink.
  • In "Elizabethan England", he plays the role of Thomas Doughty, who is condemned for mutiny and is beheaded on orders of Sir Francis Drake.
  • In "The French Revolution", he plays the role of Maximilien Robespierre's second, who too ends up beheaded, this time by the guillotine.
• Several episodes of Teen Titans Go! feature the titans dying for the sake of the plot or a joke, only to resurrect them by the next episode, if not within the episode itself.
• Every episode of Trollz has an epilogue with the little brother of one of the troll girls facing some sort of spell experiment that backfires on him changing him into something else or just outright dying.
• A couple of Space Ghost Coast to Coast episodes features the cast structure (mainly Space Ghost) practically dying in crazy ways like being set on fire, exploding, having a meteor crash in the studio, drifted in sea, eaten by blobs, etc.
• The Penguins of Madagascar has a unique example in the form of Manfredi and Johnson, two former members of the team who we never actually meet (until the series finale), but are the subject of nine out of ten of the Noodle Incidents on the show, and just about all of them entail their demise. Private smothering them after receiving incomplete orders, the flying piranha attack, the "worst talent show" ever involving a Chinese lantern and six bottles of rocket fuel, etc.
• In The Legend of Vox Machina a recurring elf or half-elf designed to look like (and voiced by) Matthew Mercer appears in multiple episodes. They can't all be the same person since several of them die horribly and the rest end up on the receiving end of the party's shenanigans.
• Downplayed Trope in Archer, which uses liberal applications of We Can Rebuild Him to justify an otherwise cartoonish level of Amusing Injuries and fatalities to its regular human cast. In particular, recurring villain Barry and Archer's ex Katya get killed off almost every time they appear, each of them returning as cyborgs after the first time it happens.
• Dishonest John from Beany and Cecil has died a couple times, in “Ain’t I A Little Stinger?” Beeping Tom lights his rocket with gasoline causing him to explode and he’s first seen as an Angel before deciding he doesn’t belong there and goes to Hell, and in “The Seventh Voyage of Singood” his genie zaps him with a spell that kills him and his soul is seen in Hell.

---