Despite the fact that Cartoon Network's nocturnal block is called Adult Swim for a reason, kids are still prone to tune in to the programs shown. A lot of them tend to be fans of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken, and Rick and Morty. It helps that the network itself is kid-friendly (more or less) during the day.
- Rick and Morty seems like an innocent children's show at first, being about a young boy and his adventures with his Mad Scientist grandpa. However, it isn't. It contains plenty of violence, gore, threat, and peril that's better off in teen and adult entertainment. It also has several sex jokes, a good deal of cursing note and adult themes, up to including a disturbing Attempted Rape at the main character, and the aforementioned scientist is an uncaring sociopath and raging alcoholic who always puts his family and grandson in danger due to his bizarre experiments. Despite the "super-scientist on an adventure through the universe" plot, it's definitely not Doctor Who. It doesn't help that there is an innocent spinoff mons parody game called Pocket Mortys, that is only rated E10+, and it absolutely doesn't help at all that it occasionally starts the [adult swim] block after Cartoon Network ends, at 8. Both season sets also appear in the children's section of Overstock.com, even though other Adult Swim shows have managed to avoid this, and have also appeared as sponsored items on Amazon listings of DVDs aimed at kids such as The Loud House and My Neighbor Totoro.
- At an official Comic Con panel in 2017 for the show, a nine-year-old boy said that Rick and Morty was the best show ever. Everyone at the panel, including the people speaking at the panel, responded in shock and asked him "Why are you watching Adult Swim?".
- Not helping matters is that the title characters made a cameo in Space Jam: A New Legacy, which is intended as a family-friendly work. Not only that, but they also appear alongside characters from more family-friendly Cartoon Network shows (such as Steven Universe and Adventure Time) in a Massive Multiplayer Crossover of Warner Bros. properties.
- While the first four seasons of Samurai Jack are intended for kids, the fifth revival season on [adult swim] certainly is not. While it retains the same visual style and humour, it also gained a TV-14 rating, which allowed it to be far Darker and Edgier than previous seasons. The title character contemplates and later attempts suicide, there's a lot of onscreen blood and graphic onscreen death (for example, in the second episode, a character gets their throat slit), some mild language (such as a certain "penis"), and adult themes such as Jack having to convince himself that it's justifiable to kill people in self-defence. Didn’t help that after this release Samurai Jack was no longer classified as a Cartoon Network original and is now rebranded under the Adult Swim banner nowadays.
- Teletoon, the Canadian version of Cartoon Network, specifically aired warnings before and during each show from 9pm on (the Teletoon at Night block) that the shows are not intended for children. They actually built in a margin for error in that they started with an hour of Futurama and then came the shows like Moral Orel, Archer, and Squidbillies. By the time the later shows rolled around, the warnings included comments lampshading this, such as "...meant for 14 years of age and older. And if you aren't 14, what are you doing up this late?"
- Even with airing in a midnight slot when kids wouldn't exactly normally be up, Superjail! has also received criticism and ire from parental groups and media reviewers for its excessive violence and sexual references. When it briefly aired in Canada on G4, an episode was rated "PG" by mistake, which caused much backlash and complaints from the decidedly MORE than "PG" content
. - The New Adventures of the Wonder Twins shorts are often mistaken for being kid friendly. They were created by [adult swim] for people who were kids when Superfriends was on, which would make them over twenty when the shorts came out. They're mercilessly full of Black Comedy and Cringe Comedy making fun of the Memetic Loser perception of the Wonder Twins.
- Delta Airlines classifies Rick and Morty and The Jellies as part of their Sky Kids TV service alongside such kids' fare as Phineas and Ferb, OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes and The Lion King.
- Despite the presence of well-known and kid-friendly characters and having an adorable main character, Pibby and the series concept it presents are... very decidedly NOT for kids, between the violent situations, Zombie Apocalypse-esque plot, and the bucket-loads of Nightmare Fuel. The original YouTube upload of the short was pointedly given an age-restriction not long after its popularity blew up, note presumably to defy this trope, and avoid having any young children (or their parents) stumbling upon it thinking it was the cheery children's show it initially presents itself as.
- Some YouTube Kids Channels use Pibby in their videos despite the fact that it's intended to be a Subverted Kids' Show.
- It's no worse that a parent could mistake Smiling Friends as kid-friendly because of the title and its happy-go-lucky pink main character, and his inoffensive-looking friend sharing the spotlight. But that show is clearly NOT for children; it has a crude art-style and is full of violence and the season finale (if one doesn't count the Brazil special,) focuses on Charlie dying a gory death and having to travel through Hell and talk to Satan himself in order to get resurrected.
- Robot Chicken is a stop-motion comedy sketch show which takes action figures of family-friendly characters, such as Scooby-Doo, the Peanuts gang, SpongeBob SquarePants, Mario, and various Disney characters, and puts them in situations that are generally not family-friendly, such as taking drugs, doing crimes, having sex, and getting brutally murdered. Despite this, quite a few clips from their show have falsely been marked as being "For Kids" on YouTube.
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force just seems like the misadventures of 3 anthropomorphic fast food products and their neighbor Carl, but it features heavy graphic violence, sexual references, and profanity. That's not even bringing up episodes like "HandBanana", where their neighbor Carl gets raped multiple times onscreen by a dog.
- A downplayed example, SHOP: A Pop Opera is a lot tamer then some of the work it's creator Jack Stauber makes, but it still has some themes and imagery that might go over some kid's heads, along with some nightmarish imagery in "Oatmeal" and a use of "hell" in "Coffee". Despite this, it's rated TV-PG and has aired on Cartoon Network every once in a while before switching over to [adult swim].
