8 Horrifying Moments From Classic Kids Cartoons

When most people picture classic cartoons, they think of cute characters, fun songs, and maybe some light, folksy racism. What you may not remember is how often they took careful aim at childhood innocence and shot it right between the eyes. Because those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it, here are some examples of some truly insane, child-ruining pieces of classic animation.

#8. Mickey Mouse And Pluto Become A Madman's Experiments

Walt Disney

Mickey Mouse is the likable but otherwise nondescript ruler of the Disney universe. He's not a cauldron of rage lunacy like Donald Duck, a calamitous buffoon like Goofy, or a subtle reference to male erotica like Chip n' Dale. Mickey is just kind of there, waving and squeaking. It's almost as if he's suffered some kind of unspeakable mental trauma. And we think we found that trauma in the 1933 Disney short The Mad Doctor.

The story begins with Pluto being dragged away from Mickey's home by a dark hooded figure. The fear in Pluto's eyes and body language is so lovingly animated that it makes us wonder how an experienced dog murderer found the time to become a Disney animator, because that's clearly what happened here:

Walt Disney
"I can't quite get the panic right. Bring in another model dog!"

After Pluto is captured, the abductor pulls off his hood to reveal himself as the Mad Doctor, a deranged man with plans to attach Pluto's head to the body of a chicken, a complicated surgical procedure requiring a bloody hand saw and absolutely nothing else.

Walt Disney
Honestly, every part of this equation is equally confusing.

In one of the more surreal sequences of horror in the history of cartoons, the Mad Doctor hangs Pluto on a hook and cuts his shadow in half with a pair of scissors. Pluto is forced to watch as his shadow's corpse hangs limply from the ends of a fork, as if half of his soul is now dead. It's equal parts body horror and existential crisis, like Salvador Dali making a flipbook to describe weeks of penis torture.

Walt Disney
Holy fuck.

Things don't turn out much better for Mickey, who stumbles into a trap and finds himself strapped to a gurney beneath a relentless saw blade, with a single blinding spotlight in place to illuminate his final shrieking moments.

Walt Disney
Luckily, all those crunches paid off for Mickey.

In the end, it turns out it was all a dream, which honestly doesn't do much to soften the crippling blow Disney has dealt to the world's children. To give you a sense of how disturbed everyone was by this cartoon, The Mad Doctor was banned in Great Britain and Nazi fucking Germany. That's right, this cartoon was so terrifying that it freaked out the Nazis. The Mad Doctor character was brought back for the Epic Mickey video game series, but that seems less an artistic decision than the result of a failed exorcism.

#7. Felix The Cat Knocks Up A Girl, Commits Suicide

DreamWorks Animation

Years before Mickey Mouse invaded every home in America and spent the next half century stoutly refusing to leave, like some falsetto vampire, Felix the Cat became the first cartoon merchandising bonanza. He was on everything from tie pins to bombers to radiator caps, an impressive feat made doubly so by the fact that Felix died a lonely, bleak death in his debut cartoon:

In the 1919 short Feline Follies, Felix (who at this point was named "Master Tom") looks more like some kind of dog monkey than a cat, so he has to game twice as hard to score a date with the neighbor's cat:

DreamWorks Animation
"Hey, baby. You like poorly drawn, indeterminable animals?"

While Felix and Girl Cat are out on their date, Felix's house gets destroyed by mice, because he left the door open or something:

DreamWorks Animation
Magical, color-changing mice.

Felix is ashamed at his failure as a mouse hunter, so he decides to move into his new girlfriend's house, where, much to his surprise, he is greeted by over a dozen of his offspring. Felix's first date went super well, is what we're saying.

DreamWorks Animation
This cartoon would later be adapted into a human in the form of NBA great Shawn Kemp.

Felix immediately books the hell out of there, partially to avoid responsibility and partially because he's clearly put his barbed penile spines into some kind of ultra-fertile witch cat and wishes to escape before the ritual is complete. Even after beating a successful retreat from his litter of bastards, the specter of fatherhood proves to be too great for this soon-to-be beloved icon. Felix, despondent over the prospect of raising all of these offspring, makes a decision. He finds a gasworks and a hose, then sucks down the darkest possible solution to all his problems.

DreamWorks Animation
Cut to black.

Okay, sure, 1919 was a bit of a depressing year, what with World War I and the Spanish Flu, so it's understandable that a cartoonist might be going through a bit of a Cure phase. Even so, who the hell thought an imitable, casual suicide was a fun way to end a cartoon? Was that the banana peel of 1919? Those kittens grew up seeing Felix on gum wrappers and billboards, thinking, "Hey, that guy looks exactly like my deadbeat father, who chose to kill himself rather than love any of his children!"

#6. Betty Boop's Deathbed Hallucinations

Paramount Pictures

In 1932, the Fleischer Brothers made a spoof of Snow White starring Betty Boop. If you're not familiar, Betty Boop was an octopus-haired sexpot who existed in a world where inanimate objects randomly came to life and humans could spontaneously turn into frying pans for no reason whatsoever.

Paramount Pictures
After a while, you stop even noticing.

Besides the aforementioned lunacy, it's a pretty recognizable Snow White parody; there's an evil queen, dwarves, and magic mirrors. However, when the dwarves think Betty is dead, everything takes an abrupt left turn into Batshitsburg. As with most Fleischer Brothers cartoons, the plot comes to a complete stop to make way for a bizarre musical number. In this case, a devastatingly creepy clown begins singing a Cab Calloway song called "St. James Infirmary" as the dwarves carry Betty's frozen body away. For reasons that can never be explained, this is intercut with shots of dinosaur skeletons trying on pants, ghouls playing poker, and an anthropomorphic cow with giant breasts tickling the ivories on a melting hell piano:

Paramount Pictures

Paramount Pictures
Five aces? That ghost is cheating.

Paramount Pictures
It quickly becomes some kind of Hieronymus Bosch tableau made of body parts and snot.

As the clown continues singing, the evil queen shows up out of nowhere and transforms him into a pupil-less banshee with a pair of towering spider legs extending all the way up into his brain.

Paramount Pictures
Improbably, she made the clown creepier.

The spider banshee is locked in an endless struggle with his high-waisted pants, which fall down around his ankles only to be snatched back up by a separate pair of hidden arms, because this is what happens when you do tons of acid in a graveyard and then try to draw a cartoon.

Paramount Pictures
Look closely and you'll almost certainly see a scrotum.

Then, as suddenly as this nightmare began, the magic mirror changes everything back to "normal" and the story resumes. None of it had any impact on anything. It was like the cartoonists were telling all the kids, "Terrors lurk in every shadow, and even we wealthy Hollywood animators have no control over them."

The cartoon ends with Betty's weird dog friend Bimbo defeating the witch by grabbing her tongue and pulling her inside out.

Paramount Pictures
Yeah, we wouldn't want to go on living, either.

Our point is that 83 years ago, someone animated the inside of a serial killer's brain and showed it to children.

#5. Hell's Bells Is A Surprisingly Convincing Hell

Walt Disney

In 1929, Hell's Bells, a cartoon in the popular Disney Silly Symphony series, was released to remind children around the world what awaited them should they ever turn their backs on the Lord Jesus Christ. After all, if it's good enough for a sinner's eternal punishment, it's good enough for children's programming.

The cartoon barely gets started before a gaping spider monster swings onscreen and swallows both the camera and every child's next four months of healthy, restful sleep:

Walt Disney
Behold your foul, burning reward, children!

Don't worry, though -- that spider is immediately consumed by a pit of ravenous fire tendrils, which suddenly turn into demon fingers in order to drag the spider down into gnashing, ashen eternity.

Walt Disney
"SEE? FIRE CAN PROTECT YOU, KIDS! PLAY WITH MATCHES!"

A bat spits on a snake, who eats the bat and absorbs its wings. That sentence isn't a Japanese sex position run through Google Translate. It's the grim reality of this terrible place.

Walt Disney
It's like if Ozzy directed a Red Bull commercial.

This cartoon Hell has everything, provided your definition of "everything" includes an infernal jazz band playing bone instruments:

Walt Disney
These are the thoughts you start to generate when your animation studio is filled with lead paint and asbestos.

A giant demon cow having curdled, poison milk squirted into a cauldron by two adorable imps:

Walt Disney
At this point, we're just hoping on it being milk.

And one of those adorable imps being fed to Cerberus as it squirms and protests for its miserable Stygian life:

Walt Disney

Walt Disney

To recap, this entire cartoon is about feral demons with giant ears eating each other in a boiling fever landscape. How badly did the Disney brainstorming session go if "a bunch of Hell monsters cannibalize each other" got put in any column higher than "MAYBE"? The thing ends with yet another demon getting yanked by a pair of fire hands down into the presumably worse Hell roaring below them.

Walt Disney
Those fire hands are undefeated.

Hell's Bells was drawn by Ub Iwerks, the man who really got Disney started as a media empire and who went wildly underappreciated for his contributions. And judging by this orgy of fiery torture, he may have been a little bitter about it.