5 Old Children's Cartoons Way Darker Than Most Horror Movies
Entire television empires now exist thanks to cartoon characters cursing and taking on dark subject matter. Shock humor works best when it's coming out of a character from South Park or Family Guy because we still think of cartoons as wholesome kid stuff. After all, that's the way it was prior to, say, the 1990s. Right?
Not quite. And in fact, some of the most nightmarish cartoons predate your grandparents ...
Bimbo's Initiation (1931) -- Torture, Sexual Insanity and Betty Boop
The only way to describe this 1931 cartoon by Fleischer Studios (Disney's biggest rival at the time, best known for stuff like Popeye and Superman) is "hell."
The story follows Bimbo the dog, a forgotten cartoon mascot of the '30s, who falls down a manhole and meets a strange race of black-faced candle-headed people, one of whom chants at Bimbo, "Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?"
Horrified, Bimbo says "no" in what is quickly revealed to be the worst decision of his life. Bimbo gets subjected to multiple torture methods/assassination attempts, ranging from having a board of spikes slowly dropped on him as he's helplessly stuck to the floor ...
"Hello, Bimbo. I want to play a game."
... to being forced to ride a bicycle connected to a spanking wheel that bashes his ass so hard that smoke starts emanating from it ...
... to being trapped in a spinning room, a la Inception, while a large knife coming out of the wall repeatedly pokes his butt. You know, the usual cartoon stuff.
After making it through a room where lines of axes come dangerously close to decapitating him, Bimbo is dropped into another room, where he comes face to face with the leader of the candle people, who reveals that he's actually ... Betty Boop?
Bimbo, sporting the most confused boner in history.
For a second it looks like the nightmare is finally over and the cartoon is going to have a happy ending ... but then all of the other members of the candle people reveal that they are also Betty Boop. All of them. Bimbo, beyond broken at this point, simply gives up and joins their degenerate butt-slapping ritual dance. Welcome to hell.
By the way, the guy who let Bimbo fall into this maze of horrors in the first place? You might recognize him:
This 1931 Columbia Pictures cartoon created by Dick Huemer (who also worked on Disney films like Fantasia and Dumbo) stars a young sociopath named Scrappy whose main hobby is punching babies, making him the second worst Scrappy in cartoon history.
The cartoon follows Scrappy as he tries to get rid of his baby brother, Oopy, so he can go on a fishing trip with his dog. The more Oopy insists on tagging along, the more violent Scrappy turns against him. It starts with some mild pushing and threatening:
But then it quickly escalates into Scrappy smacking the kid right in the face, hard enough to send him flying across several yards:
"It's not child abuse if a child does it, right?" -Dick Huemer
Scrappy abandons his brother in the forest and goes fishing, but then Oopy (clearly brain damaged at this point) catches up to him anyway. After managing to not beat up any babies for a record time of two minutes, things get violent again when Scrappy's fishing line gets tangled with Oopy's and he ends up pushing his brother into the water. Oopy obviously can't swim and starts screaming for help:
"It's the '30s, kid. Pull yourself up out of that lake by your bootstraps."
Scrappy pretends he doesn't hear him and actually starts walking off, whistling cheerfully as we hear the horrible infant drowning noises.
Suddenly, Scrappy decides to save his brother ... not because his conscience tells him to (he doesn't have one), but because he sees a vision of the electric chair. No, if he kills his brother, it has to be clean and without leaving behind any evidence.
The moral of the cartoon is: Never drown a baby in Texas.
He pulls Oopy out of the water and starts freaking out because he's not breathing.
After several panicked moments, Oopy is revived, and for a second Scrappy seems relieved, even emotional ... but then Oopy says, "I want a drink of water," causing Scrappy to fall right back into his old homicidal self and chuck the baby back into the water. The end.
Seriously, the last thing we see is the baby landing in the water and Scrappy walking away, knowing full well that his brother can't swim. Yet this is not the darkest ending on our list ...
Blue Cat Blues (1956) -- Tom and Jerry Get Depressed, Kill Themselves
Over the past 70 years, Tom from Tom and Jerry has survived so many face explosions, dog bites and mousetrap-related accidents that he's got to be used to the pain by now. That's why a cartoon from 1956 decided to take things to the next level by killing not his body, but his soul.
The cartoon starts with Tom sitting in the middle of a train track with the clear intention of letting the train run over him as Jerry's suave narration states that "in a few minutes it'll all be over" and that "it's better this way."
Pictured: Adele's cat.
We then flash back to reveal the reason of Tom's suicidal despair: a dame.
Tom instantly falls in love with her and they have some tender moments together (as far as we can tell, because her expression never changes), but the floozy ends up leaving him the moment she spots another cat with more money. Tom tries to win her back by using his life savings to buy her jewelry:
And giving himself up for slavery to buy a new car:
When people sign slavery contracts, it's usually less about new cars and more about really weird orgasms.
But nothing works. Devastated, he turns to drink:
Finally, we come back to the railroad tracks, with Tom waiting to die as Jerry reflects on how lucky he is to have a loving girlfriend -- however, Jerry's world quickly shatters as well when he happens to see his girl cheating on him with the guy she just married, and he joins Tom on the tracks, both of them waiting for death.
So ... this is where they hug and realize that they're not really alone as long as they have each other, right? Or, at the very least, when they remember that they're a cat and a mouse and start carrying out a whimsical chase sequence, united in their hate? Right?
And remember, kids: There's not enough food for everyone.
Nope. They just sit there as we hear a whistle indicating that the train approaches, and then ... it's over. Holy shit, was this the last episode of the series or something? Now we know where The Sopranos got the idea for the finale, except that at least they made it somewhat ambiguous and not totally soul-crushing.
Balloon Land (1935) -- Condom People vs. The Masturbating Monster
Right from the title screen, this 1935 cartoon by Ub Iwerks (aka the guy who co-created Mickey Mouse) lets you know there's going to be a somewhat disturbing recurrent motif in the story. Let's see if you can spot it.
Hint: It's dicks.
Balloon Land supposedly takes place in a world populated by living balloons, and judging by the above image, they're of the penis-wrapping kind. The story begins with the balloon people squeezing rubber out of a living tree and placing that rubber on a machine that shapes it into a little balloon boy and a little balloon girl.
These balloon kids haven't been alive for five seconds when a man warns them, through a song, that if they go into the forest, they'll run into a creature that will "rip your skin." The children, being children (and idiots), decide to do exactly that anyway, and that's when they run across the Pincushion Man, who looks like ... wait, what ... what's he doing now?
Oh sweet Jesus. Apparently the Pincushion Man was supposed to look like a giant safety pin (or at least that's what Mr. Iwerks told the police), but the animators didn't quite know what to do with the huge metal rod protruding from his hip, and so they decided it would be appropriate if he yanked it in front of little children.
"Don't worry, there's no way anyone will ever take this out of context."
Besides being a pervert, the Pincushion Man is also a certified psychopath who goes around Balloon Land murdering people by poking them with his big sharp stick -- like this completely innocent racial stereotype, whose only crime was letting the children hide in his house:
Pincushion Man goes on a murderous rampage all over the city -- the citizens send an entire Balloon Men Army to stop him, but they turn out to be exactly as useful as their name implies. Eventually, the citizens figure out that they can harm the Pincushion Man by hauling raw rubber at him, pushing him out of Balloon Land until he literally plummets to his death.
Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker.
Officially, LSD was first produced in 1938. We say "officially" because this cartoon says it's from 1930, and there's no way it was created without massive doses of acid being pumped into everyone involved.
Swing You Sinners! starts like every other cartoon from its era, with a cartoon dog trying to steal a chicken and being chased by a fat cop. While escaping, our protagonist runs into a graveyard ... and that's when the terror begins.
It turns out that everything in this graveyard is alive, including the dead things. Especially the dead things. For starters, the gate grows a mouth and swallows its own key, which is never a good sign.
What will it grow if it wants to give it back?
Just the gate mouth alone would be terrifying enough, but unfortunately it's about to get much worse: More mouths open in the ground and try to swallow up the protagonist as the headstones come alive and surround him, telling him how terrible he is. Even more unfortunately, it's all in the form of jazz blues.
The protagonist tries to escape and only comes across more and more deranged beings from the darkest depths of the imagination, which condemn him for the "chickens he used to steal ... craps he used to shoot ... girls he used to chase." Wait, that's it? That's all this cartoon doggie did to deserve being subjected to this horror?
The protagonist runs into a barn where the insanity steps it up a notch. First he's harassed by inanimate objects clearly possessed by demons and a giant version of the chicken from the beginning, who starts scatting uncontrollably at him, Leland Palmer style:
Then his underwear floats off and turns into a ghost who tries to cut his throat, which frankly is something we never thought we'd see outside of a Japanese cartoon:
Ghost Pantsu Panic Go! is very popular in Japan.
He runs back outside, but the entire barn turns into ghoulish faces straight out of '70s poster art:
Our hero is chased into a cave by an endless column of ghosts, and here the cartoon stops fucking around and just goes into full-blown drug-fueled insanity. It contains, we swear to God, a frog thing inexplicably feeling itself up in a way that it is impossible to think of as anything other than opium chills ...
... a giant skeleton hand that beheads the protagonist with a knife ...
... and finally a giant, horrifying skull face that swallows him.
That's the last thing you see in the cartoon and, if you watch this late at night, ever. Man, we're never stealing another chicken again.
Jim Ciscell is the author of Boofy Comics. You can find Vincent Pall judging the Craptions Contests and on his YouTube channel.
For other instances of terrifying old-timeyness, check out 7 Songs From Your Grandpa's Day That Would Make Eminem Blush and 6 Famous Artists You Didn't Know Were Perverts.
If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 3 Racist Incidents That Weren't Actually Racist.
And stop by LinkSTORM to discover your grandaddy's porn stash.
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