Examples of this trope in Western Animation[]
- This trope is the entire premise of The Fairly OddParents.
- Both subverted and affirmed. Subverted because Cosmo and Wanda have a huge book of rules to protect Timmy, and Wanda tries to warn Timmy when he makes a bad wish (Cosmo then grants it anyway). Affirmed by Norm the Genie.
- This drives the movie Shrek Forever After. When Shrek wants "one day where I can be an ogre like I used to be," he gets it. Too bad the deal he made with the Big Bad has rather unpleasant consequences.
- The Samurai Jack universe has a well that grants any wish. Once, three men wished that they would become the ultimate warriors. And they did! By becoming the well's eternal gaurdians. (Except... Jack beat them. So they weren't really ultimate. But, whatever.)
- They were the ultimate warriors at the time their wish was granted, and Jack Took a Level in Badass to beat them (since he apparently didn't have enough levels already).
- In the ReBoot episode "Enzo the Smart", Enzo fiddles with the system clock in order to make himself smarter than everyone else, and instead makes everyone else half as smart as he is. Since he's Just a Kid, this ends up making everyone else in the city of Mainframe really dumb.
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Enzo: Dude! Everything's gone 8 bit! |
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- Danny Phantom did this in one episode, though the wishing character was not aware that their wish would be granted. Notable for the fact that at the end of the episode the Reset Button remained largely untouched. All the characters retained full memories of everything that had transpired, and a permanent change to Danny's ghost costume was made.
- There was another, earlier episode with the same villain with the same premise where Tucker wished he had ghost powers. The Reset Button was pressed because Tucker did not handle them all that well...
- The pilot of Transformers Animated had Optimus Prime nostalgically wishing that he'd been around to fight Decepticons in the Great War. Ten minutes later the biggest, baddest Decepticon of all time shows up with his warship. It's not pretty.
- Parodied in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, "A Dumb Wish". Grim's mom gives Billy, Mandy, and Grim three wishes. Billy squanders his wish, and his arguing with Grim bugs Mandy enough that she wishes they would shut up, causing Billy and Grim's mouths to become sealed shut. Since Grim can't talk, Mandy gets his wish, and Grim and Billy compete to see who gets their mouth fixed by buttering up to Mandy. They only succeed in driving Mandy to the point that she shouts "I wish everyone in the entire world would just go away!" After everyone else on the planet disappears, Mandy seems to regret what she did, only to instead smile for one of the only times ever and say "Perfect".
- Another episode, "Wishbones," also played with this trope. A Literal Genie trapped in the form of a talking, rhyming skull named Thromnambular spends most of the episode granting various characters wishes, which inevitably backfire. (It's explicitly said that it doesn't matter what they're wishing for, it'll screw them over regardless.) Thronambular is condemned to grant nine wishes before it can be freed from its skull form, more on that later. One example of a wish (and its reworking) is General Skarr wishing to be ruler of the world. A giant statue of himself rises from the ground beneath him and grows so large, he ends up in the upper atmosphere and suffocates. When it's Mandy's turn to make a wish, she realizes that any wish she makes will only turn out badly, so instead she decides to sell her wish to the highest bidder. A frustrated Grim pushes the Reset Button when he declares "I wish you two had never found that skull!" This wish does not backfire, instead returning everything to the way it was before Billy and Mandy found the skull. Grim then wishes that he was free of his promise to be Billy and Mandy's best friend, and that Thronambular was free of his imprisonment, hoping that Thronambular would be grateful enough not to stab him in the back. To Grim's horror, Thronambular grants the wish by trading their dilemmas: Thronambular had to keep Grim's promise, but gained a body. Grim found himself trapped as a skull, and bound to carry out the eight remaining wishes.
- It's unclear if Thronambular really had to keep Grim's promise.
- The Simpsons had a Halloween episode based on The Monkey's Paw. Homer buys the magic paw at a Bazaar of the Bizarre and he and his family try wishing for fame and wealth (which backfires when everyone gets sick of hearing about the Simpsons) world peace (which backfires when aliens attack the now defenseless Earth) and a turkey sandwich (which backfires because the turkey's a little dry.) Homer gives the monkey paw to Flanders in the hope that it backfires on him too, but the Rule of Funny ensures that no such thing happens.
- More like the end of the episode ensures that Flanders' wishes don't backfire (that we get to see). Indeed, Kang and Kodos imply that his first wish, to rid the world of alien invaders, will backfire because humans will develop "bigger boards, with bigger nails, until they build a board with a nail it in so large, it will destroy them all!"
- "Wish World" from the Mighty Orbots series. Oh-No wishes to be human—and thanks to one of the Big Bad goons, she becomes human—but discover that Oh-No can't power up the Mighty Orbots in this form.
- The episode "The Magic Coins" from My Little Pony.
- Also, in "The Prince and the Ponies", the First-Tooth Baby Ponies were jealous of the extra attention the newborns were receiving and wished them ill only to be sorry when they saw it had actually happened. An important and applicable lesson for the target audience.
- The entire premise of the Celebrity Toon Wish Kid. Nick gets a magical baseball glove that lets him have one wish a week - and that's it. And they're all temporary and can end at any time, meaning that every single wish he makes disappears at the worst possible time. All so he can learn this trope as a moral every single episode.
- Played straight and averted in Gargoyles. When we first meet Puck, he plays Literal Genie to Demona. Later, it's revealed that when Puck revealed himself to Xanatos for the first time, he offered him either a single wish or a lifetime of loyal service as Owen Burnett. Proving himself to be the smartest person in the entire series, Xanatos chooses the latter.
- Puck ended up on the receiving end of this too. One of his major motivations throughout the series is delaying his return to Avalon because he finds the mortal world too fun. At the end of "The Gathering", Oberon decides to give Puck what he wants...by trapping him in human form (except for the purposes of training Alexander in magic) and banishing him from Avalon forever.
- The Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers episode "A Lad in a Lamp" has the heroes meet a malicious genie who would teach them just this if the episode didn't come with its very own built-in Reset Button.
- A similar thing happens in an episode of DuckTales (1987): both Scrooge McDuck and Flintheart Glomgold find a magical lamp. To decide who gets it, the genie tells them to race each other back home. Glomgold wins, and his first wish is for Scrooge to be stranded on a desert island. However, his second wish is that he could see the look on Scrooge's face, and he's sent to the same island to do so. Then he wishes that he "had never found this blasted lamp". Cue the Reset Button, and Scrooge this time wildly chases Glomgold out of the cave without finding the lamp, just before a cave-in traps it forever.
- Extreme Ghostbusters: The team fought a wish-making ghost who functioned as a Literal Genie. It turned Eduardo into Kylie's cat (because he wanted to be closer to her). The episode was actaully titled "Be Careful What You Wish For".
- A preview episode has Ben 10 easily dispatching criminals, and, in the end, he was wondering if there was any challenge left for him. The episode in question is the Series Finale, which introduced the Negative 10.
- One episode of Wunschpunsch revolved around it - Wizards created a spell that granted one wish for every person in the city, but always in the way to backfire. The wizards used it later for themselves, sure they'd found a wish that would let them get rid of their boss and not backfire at them in any way. They were wrong.
- Towards the end of TinkerBell and the Last Treasure, Tink accidentally uses the Mirror of Incanta, which she intended to use to repair the broken moonstone, when she snaps at her Non-Human Sidekick, "I wish you would be quiet for just one minute!"
- The Spectacular Spider Man: In Group Therapy, just before going to sleep, Peter remarks, "I wish I could just wake up tomorrow, with Doc and his merry morons back in jail." Oh, he gets his wish alright. But at the cost of losing himself to the symbiote, waking up exhausted, and being out of the loop for a whole day that his aunt has had a heart attack.
- SpongeBob SquarePants had an episode that featured Mr. Krabs wishing for the power to be able to talk to money. It turns out that money always wants to be spent.
- Cow and Chicken also had this in an self titled episode. It turns out Chicken wished Cow would shut up, which backfires as Cow cannot warn Chicken of the dangers of the road to prevent him from getting hit and she cannot speak during the testimony when Chicken is put into prison for 50 years.
- The Human CentiPad epsidoe of South Park has Cartman demanding God to "give me a courtesy lick before I get fucked!" after Cartman loses his Human Centipede/iPad hybrid. God complies by smiting Cartman with a bolt of lightning, landing Cartman in the hospital.
- The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: In "Wishing Not so Well", K'nuckles wishes to be left alone and is immediately finds himself in a Stormalong that contains no other people. It doesn't work out so well for him.
- In Phineas and Ferb Get Busted, Candace busts Phineas and Ferb on building an unsafe airlift, and their mother sends them away to a reformatory school; at first, Candace is glad they are away, but it is not too long before she begins to miss them. It Gets Worse when she finds out how the reformatory school is run. Candace's friend Stacy even calls her out on this:
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Stacy: You finally have everything you ever wanted. Call me when you get over it! |
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- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "The Cutie Pox", Apple Bloom uses a magical flower called "Heart's Desire" to finally get her Cutie Mark. Unfortunately, over the course of the day she gets several more cutie marks, each of which brings both a new talent and a compulsion to practice that talent endlessly, whether it's window-washing, tap-dancing, speaking French, or lion-taming.
- The theme also shows up in "Sisterhooves Social," when Rarity wants to get away from Sweetie Belle earlier on but misses her later on, or "Green Isn't Your Colour," when Rarity is so jealous of Fluttershy's fame as a model that she wishes Fluttershy would just humiliate herself on-stage, and Rarity feels awful when it actually happens. Even the first two episodes seem to have a hint of this with Twilight Sparkle at first not wanting to make new friends, only to find out later that "just when I learn how wonderful it is to have friends, I have to leave them." That is a milder case, though, as it turns out Celestia lets Twilight stay in Ponyville with her new friends anyway.
- A hint of this also shows up in "May The Best Pet Win," with Rainbow Dash insisting earlier on that she wanted a fast, agile, flying animal for a pet... and after putting the animals through competitions testing these (among other) traits she found out that the falcon met her standards the most... but by the time she found this out, she had evidently changed her mind about what she wanted in a pet after all, as she clearly wasn't happy about being told that the falcon won. Of course, she found out a loophole in her rules that allowed her to adopt a tortoise instead, in a clear contrast to what she at first wanted.
- In the Young Justice episode "Misplaced", Zatanna tells Artemis how she wished her Overprotective Dad would give her some space. The very next second, her father (and the rest of the adults) disappear before them. At the end of the episode, Zatara sacrifices himself so that Nabu wouldn't possess Zatanna. She may never get her father back.
- Garfield and Friends: In one episode, Garfield found a wishing well and wished there were no more Mondays. At first, when he learned the wish became true, he was happy. A few weeks later, Garfield felt the drawbacks of a world without Mondays: the streets were full of garbage because garbagemen only came at Mondays; gyms that used to be open for all days of the week were closed; movie theaters never showed new movies because they only changed their movies at Mondays; Jon couldn't buy more food because he always received his paychecks at Mondays; and he always made lasagna at Mondays. Being a Big Eater, the two last bits were what horrified Garfield the most. He then returned to the wishing well, desperately asking for the Mondays to be back. The well refused and threatened to remove other stuff, until the well's mother, who revealed they were actually Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who look like wells, forced him to restore everything back to normal. Garfield then started loving Mondays. At least until he was reminded of why he hated them in the first place.
- Back to Be Careful What You Wish For