4 Beloved Cartoons That Became Live-Action Nightmares

4 The ‘Futurama’ Fan Film Was Creepy as Hell

In 2016, a live-action Futurama fan film dropped, revealing an extremely impressive stab at bringing the world of New New York to life. However, things quickly took a left turn into Creepsville as soon as the actors portraying Leela and Professor Farnsworth showed up, wearing prosthetics that had viewers not wanting to live on this planet anymore. Instead of just casting an elderly man, the Professor has a full-on Dick Tracy villain-esque mug. And Leela’s dead-eyed cyclopean style may work in animation, but it’s a tad more extremely horrifying here. But it all pails in comparison to Dr. Zoidberg, who somehow looks even grosser than when he molted his shell off on the show.

3 A 1980s Greek Smurfs Movie Swapped Animation for Cheap Costumes

Hollywood continues to be committed to churning out movies starring The Smurfs, regardless of how many European villages they ruin in the process. But while the tiny blue, gender-imbalanced creatures are usually animated, back in the 1980s, Greek filmmakers decided to make a live-action, feature-length Smurfs film after acquiring some low-quality costumes, access to a public park and, presumably, absolutely no intellectual property rights whatsoever. The resulting movie, Smurfs on the Moon, is smurfingly disturbing, even before the climax set on a barren lunar wasteland and the closing credits in which the “Smurfs” tear their own faces off.

2 Spanish TV’s Live-Action ‘Simpsons’ Was Worse Than a Porn Parody

The Spanish TV show Cruz y Raya once featured a brief segment in which the Simpson family was brought to life, and it resembles a porn parody directed by an Eraserhead-era David Lynch. Did Spanish audiences (or any nation’s, to be honest) need the haunting visual of Homer and Marge rendered as jaundiced, dead-eyed, walking corpses? With this failed experiment in mind, we hope any further attempts at making live-action Simpsons projects immediately get given the Poochie treatment.

1 ‘The Today Show’s ‘Peanuts’ Costumes Were a Goddamn Horror Show

Charles Schulz’s beloved Peanuts characters were nearly ruined forever by the folks at The Today Show back in 2015. As part of a cross-promotional deal with The Peanuts Movie, the daytime talk show hosts spent Halloween morning dressed up as Charlie Brown and the gang. Somehow, they all overlooked the fact that one of the key reasons people adore these characters is because they don’t look like middle-aged demons. Why does Carson Daly’s Linus resemble a strung-out burn victim? Why do Snoopy and Woodstock look like they’ve been on “DO NOT ALLOW ENTRY” posters at furry conventions? Why, why, why?

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