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You're The Hero about to face off with the Big Bad. Then the Big Bad removes his mask to reveal... he's that big kid who kept stealing your lunch money when you were in third grade. And now he's all grown up and wants more... apparently that's what this whole conquering the world thing is about.

The Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up comes along when that character who made your life hell when you were in school grows up into a more formidable adult antagonist. If you were in grade school with him, then he was the Mouthy Kid. If you were in high school with him, then he was probably the Jerk Jock. If he is a "she" then she was the Alpha Bitch. Either way, the character hasn't matured one iota, but can now do a lot worse damage.

An alternate version is someone who wasn't quite a bully, but still holds a grudge against you for something you did back in school. ("Remember when you took Cindy to the High School Dance? That should've been me! Meet my Death Trap!") The Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up will hate your children for absolutely no reason, even if they're nothing like you. Somewhat cruelly, this character seems especially likely to become one of your kid's schoolteachers. If the story is told from the children's perspective, then all this will be a backstory.

Often a result of the fact that Everyone Went to School Together. A previously established villain may be revealed to be one of these when Spinoff Babies are created.

Sometimes subverted by having the one-time bully growing up into a sensible, responsible adult who holds no ill will towards his schoolyard nemeses, something which sometimes happens in real life.

Not to be confused with the other type of all grown up now. See also Kids Are Cruel.

Examples of Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up include:


Anime and Manga[]

  • Twentieth Century Boys: The cheerfully sadistic, pro-wrestling-loving bullies Yanbo and Mabo grew up to be charitable, good-natured people with a...somewhat rose-colored view of their 'playing' with the neighborhood kids. (They're also absurdly Bishonen in their first grown-up appearance, but went back to being fat after the next timeskip.) Friend fits the Disproportionate Retribution part of the trope. Particularly the second Friend, though he was also the target of bullying.
  • Liar Game: Yokoya, who essentially turned his entire school into his playground, including the authority figures.
  • A Detective Conan case had one about a man who killed the now grown up guy who bullied his son into suicide. It is, however, more complicated-- the man was a child psychologist by trade, and was originally quite willing to not hold any grudge over the said bully. So that when the said ex-bully went to college and happened to live close with the said man, they were originally quite friendly. It was only after noticing this trope has been playing straight that he decided to kill the ex-bully.


Comic Books[]

  • X-Men villain Mr. Sinister is known for his unethical genetic practices and his somewhat disturbing obsession with the Summers family. However, few people know his original intended origin: he was a young rival of Cyclops who couldn't age. By the time Cyclops was an adult, Kid Sinister was still stuck as an eight-year-old (physically and mentally), and he used his mutant powers to change his appearance into that of a gaudy, over-the-top supervillain: an eight-year-old's vision of a cool supervillain. When considering that origin, Mr. Sinister's corny appearance, unimpressive name, and stereotypical supervillain demeanor actually make sense. But, The Powers That Be decided not to go with that origin...
    • It also explains his minions: The Nasty Boys (a name an eight-year-old would be far more likely to pick than a mad geneticist) earn their name by being filthy ultra-slobs, living in conditions akin to the X-Men: Evolution version of the Brotherhood. In other words, they never take baths or clean their space - part of an eight-year-old's idea of perfect freedom.
    • Things like this tend to happen with Chris Claremont: he loves to do long-running elaborate storylines in every book he writes, but he's often replaced as the book's writer before he can get it all done. And his successors invariably take things off in a different direction. Sinister's planned origin was something he'd literally laid all the groundwork for, but his run as Uncanny X-Men writer ended before he could do The Reveal. Which probably would've happened within months had he stayed on as writer.
  • In The DCU, Cliff Carmichael was the intellectual tormenter of Ronnie Raymond (the teenager who would become the hero Firestorm). Carmichael eventually became the supervillain the New Thinker.
  • Nicely averted in the Spider-Man comics. Flash Thompson, originally a rampaging Jerk Jock, comes back from his overseas military service much wiser and more mature. He actually forms a friendship with onetime target Peter Parker, as both men have grown since their high school days. Of course Flash was never all that bad compared to other bullies.
    • Flash is currently Venom, but he's by far the most heroic person to ever use that name. Spider-Man thinks the new Venom is a bad guy due to a complicated misunderstanding, however.
    • Played straight with the Garth Ennis story, "The Thousand", where the villain turns out to be a guy named Carl King who bullied Peter when they were kids. He saw Peter get bit by the spider and saw his first display of powers. He then promptly went back and ate the dead spider hoping that'd give him Spider-Man powers. Instead, he turned into a thousand spiders that could take over a person by eating them from the inside. Him and Peter duke it out with each other, but he accidently fries all his spiders by punching a transformer.
  • Kron Stone was the bully at Miguel O'Hara's school in Spider-Man 2099. Since his dad was a Corrupt Corporate Executive who basically owned New York, he got steadily worse as a young adult, eventually killing Jake Gallows' family for the hell of it. Gallows became Punisher 2099, shot Stone and dumped the body in the sewers. This only led to him being "saved" by the Symbiote and confronting Miguel again, as Venom 2099.
  • Subversions occur at least twice in Archie Comics, both times with the gang hearing about an old friend returning to town, and then they (or at least Archie specifically) get freaked out thinking that the guy's gonna whomp 'em but good. These two stories are of the few times that Archie specifically tied its mythology to Little Archie:
    • Subversion: When Fang Fogarty came back to town, he turned out to be a large young man, as could've been predicted from his childhood size. But he holds no ill will toward the gang - in fact, he sheds a tear over old times - and he's lost his nickname, thanks to dental surgery. The group parts amicably.
    • Double Subversion (?): When Ambrose Pipps came by, Archie recalled all the times he'd bullied and marginalized that poor little long-suffering kid, all the times he'd broken promises and refused Ambrose's well-meaning help - not to mention the times he'd made Ambrose cry. He started thinking about Ambrose having grown into a huge adult who would get Archie back for treating him bad all those years. Yet it turns out that Ambrose, true to his character, remembers only the good side of his childhood - and when Archie brings up the bad stuff, he shrugs it off.
  • Subverted with Brittany who bullies the title character in Earthboy Jacobus. By the time she grows up, she is not only on better terms with Jacobus, but Happily Married to him as well.
    • It kind of helps that although she spends several years in a coma, they can communicate while Jake is on a different plane of existence. By the time she wakes up, she's fallen in love with him.


Fanfiction[]


Film[]

  • Back to The Future: Biff Tannen in the original timeline. More so in 1985-A. Averted in the understood alternate timeline that Marty returns to at the end of the first movie. Biff, having been humbled by George thanks to Marty's guidance, is no longer George's evil cube farm boss, but an auto detailer who is waxing George's fancy cars.
  • The Power Of One: The school bully that tormented the protagonist as a child later turns up as an evil Apartheid-enforcing police officer. We know it's the same guy since he has a swastika tattooed on his arm and obviously only one person could have that.
    • In the original novel The Power of One, the Judge (i.e. how Peekay knew the the bully) isn't a police officer but instead is partnered with Peekay as his diamond-driller in the Northern Rhodesian mines. Also, it's obvious that it's the same guy because not only do they have the same name (Jaapie Botha), and not only is the swastika tattoo self-done and therefore distinctively crude, but it's the Judge who confronts Peekay and not the other way around.
  • In the 2003 version of Freaky Friday, it's revealed that one of the girl's teachers picks on her because her mother wouldn't date him when they were in school together.
  • Flirted with in Billy Madison: After being bullied upon returning to high school, he realizes his own bullying had emotionally hurt his victims, and tries to make amends. He calls up one of these victims, apologizes and befriends him. Immediately after the victim crosses Billy off a list of people to kill, implying that he had been intending to exact revenge on him (and numerous other individuals). Becomes something of a Chekhov's Gun, as the victim - a trained rifle marksman, it turns out - saves Billy and Veronica when Eric snaps and pulls a gun on them at the final decathlon event.
  • Mayor Augustus Maywho (Jeffrey Tambor) in The Movie of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Pretty much a Jerkass as both a kid and an adult.
  • In Big Bully, the bully Roscoe Bigger, a.k.a. Fang (played by Tom Arnold) thinks he and his victim David Leary (played by Rick Moranis) were friends back in school. Roscoe returns to bullying him after David becomes a teacher at their old school (and where Roscoe teaches shop class). Ironically, their sons are in exactly reversed positions.
  • Used in Johnny Dangerously, when Danny Vermin, the underling who keeps trying to subvert Johnny's authority, happened to be the bully who got his ass kicked by Johnny when they were kids.
Cquote1

 Vermin: Let's just say I've fulfilled a lot of people's expectations about me; I've become a real scumbag.

Cquote2
  • Subverted in Grosse Pointe Blank, when Martin Blank meets his former bully Bob at his high school reunion. Bob tries to antagonize Martin, but Martin is unimpressed, being a deadly assassin these days, as well as completely uninterested in any comeuppance. Bob then tries to open up and read a poem to him, but Martin has bigger fish to fry.
  • Inverted in Old School, when Jeremy Piven's character, Dean Pritchard, who was bullied in college ("Cheee-eeeese") turns out to be the dean of the college and is out to make the protagonists' life a living hell.
  • Don Price, from Burton's Big Fish, was consistently overshadowed by by Edward Bloom during their childhood. When Edward comes to win Sandra Tempelton's heart, he has to duke it out with Don... Who beats the living crud out of Edward (out of Sandra's request that Bloom not hurt him).
    • Although while the stories in the film are true, the much-older Bloom embellishes the hell out of them when he tells them, so it's possible Price wasn't as bad a person as he appeared.
  • In Anger Management at one point Dr. Rydell takes Dave to the home of his childhood bully....only to discover he is now a Buddhist monk. Dave is reluctant to start anything until it turns out the bully still thinks that at least one of his pranks was genuinely funny. At his therapist's urging, they end up wrestling right there in the monastery.
  • The forthcoming movie You Again has it...times two.
  • The Benchwarmers: Subverted by Rob Schneider as it turns out he was a schoolyard bully that used stinging insults (rather than fists) to torment other kids. That's why he's standing up against bullies as an adult, he hates who he was and what he did, and thinks that if there is any karma in the world his own kid will be either picked on mercilessly or an even worse bully than he was, unless he can make up for some of what he did by helping out against bullies now.
  • Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle When a cop appears out of nowhere to ticket Harold for jaywalking, Kumar accuses him of being this trope, to which the cop gleefully admits.


Literature[]

  • Harry Potter
    • Inverted with Severus Snape, when it's unequivocally revealed in Order of the Phoenix that Harry's dad was the bully and Snape, his victim.
    • When we get glimpses of Voldemort's past, he also was a cruel and bullying kid, though being Voldemort he went about it rather subtly. Rather surprisingly, the only one of Voldemort's schoolmates to end up opposing him as an adult seems to be Hagrid. Voldemort got Hagrid kicked out of school, and banned from ever using magic again, on suspicion of raising a monster that killed a girl. After the second book, Hagrid may or may not know that Voldemort was the one who released the monster in the first place.
    • Averted with Draco Malfoy, whose rivalry with Harry ends in a stalemate and goes on to raise his son, Scorpius, to be a better man than he was.
  • Assef in The Kite Runner is also a pretty typical example. He starts off as a sadistic bully in pre-Taliban Afghanistan before growing up to be... well, a sadistic bully in Taliban Afghanistan. Of course, he also becomes a Taliban official/executioner, so that makes him a bit more powerful than he was as a teenager.
    • Don't forget he is also a bisexual, pedophile rapist. So he can rape both boys and girls. Sadly he doesn't get killed but he does get his eye shot out by the son of the first person he raped. Also, he was raping the son as well.
  • Soon I Will Be Invincible: This Superhero Pastiche has this motivation for Dr Impossible, who became a supervillain partially so he could take revenge against the Jerk Jock he was so envious of. This motivation is subject to some heavy lampshading towards the end, where one character points out at the end of a fist just how pathetic this is.
    • It's also to be taken with a grain of salt as there are some indications that what Doc says happened and what did happen are two very different things.
  • Info Quake: In this science fiction novel Brone goes to a futuristic boarding school with Natch, the protagonist. Years later, Brone invites Natch into his office, uses virtual reality to play mind games with Natch, then brags about how he's not holding any grudges because he's forgiven him because he's so morally superior, and asks Natch to cooperate with him in an important business matter.
  • Subverted in The Wish List. One of the things Lowrie wants to do before he dies is get even with the guy who bullied him at school. However, when the two finally meet, the ex-bully is found to be a fairly likable person who really regrets the things he did in school.
  • The Ben Elton novel Past Mortem is all about the relationship and dynamic between bullies and victims when they're all grown up; the novel's serial killer, himself a bullied child in his past, uses the 'Friends Reunited' website to target former bullies based on the testimony of their former victims as posted on the website. Naturally the main character, who is the investigating police detective, meets his own school bully, also a detective, who ends up spying on and interfering in the main character's investigation in order to try and get his rapidly failing career back on track. In a confrontation, the bully reveals why he picked on and hates the main character so much; the main character assumed it was because he was a bit of a dorky outcast at school, but the bully reveals that it was actually because, compared to the bully's own self-loathing and mixed-up insecurity (prompted by, amongst other things, his homosexuality), the main character was always self-assured, confident, and secure in his own skin, and never let anyone — particularly the bully - affect this. The bully ends up becoming a victim of the serial killer himself.
  • Stephen King
    • The Body: During the main character Gordon's narration of his childhood relationship with his friends, they were often bullied beyond mere sadism by Ace and his gang of thugs. Despite none of his friends surviving past young adulthood, there's a little satisfaction for the reader in the end when Gordon meets Ace, who has become a broken shell of a man and doesn't recognize him.
    • Needful Things: Ace, who became a drug dealer and gunrunner, is employed by the story's Big Bad, Leland Gaunt, and eventually gets shot by a police officer.
    • IT: Acting as a puppet for the book's titular character, Henry Bowers escapes from a mental institution to get revenge on the kids who kept escaping from him twenty-seven years ago.
  • Star Trek Deep Space Nine a Stitch In Time: A variation is found in Andrew Robinson's novel. The Cardassians that seem to delight the most in oppressing Bajorans during the Occupation are the same ones that bullied Garak while he attended the Bamarren Institute.
  • Bend Sinister: Inverted in Nabokov's novel, where the Evil Dictator was the kid all the other kids (including the protagonist) used to pick on.
  • The fourth book in Tamora Pierce's Lioness Quartet has a mysterious antagonist named Claw, who attempts to take the leadership of Tortall's thieves from Alanna's companion George Cooper, and causes a fair amount of carnage along the way. Turns out he's Ralon, the older page who tormented Alanna mercilessly in the first book until she learned how to beat him up.
  • Lord Pavel Young. Bully to many and attempted rapist of Honor Harrington (and likely others, based on comments made about him) when they were in the military academy, he tries to use his family's influence to screw her naval career from her first deployment to her deployment under his command when she gains command of a light cruiser. Eventually drummed out of the service, he uses his family's power to have Harrington's lover legally assassinated in a duel just to get back at her. Her shooting the bastard dead was one of the more satisfying book endings in the early part of the series.
  • Flashman, the bully from Tom Browns Schooldays, gets his own series where he is, unusually for this trope, the protagonist.


Live Action TV[]

  • Elliot on Just Shoot Me is visited by the boy who bullied him at school. Turns out he's now shorter than Elliot. Still, he manages to humiliate Elliot same as before.
    • Elliot finally stands up to the bully and hits him. He is then booed by his co-workers for hitting someone smaller than him.
  • Gus and Shawn meet their schoolyard bully grown up on Psych. He's a 4-foot tall jockey who hasn't grown since grade school.
  • "Spanky" on ICarly, who used to spank Spencer when they were both kids. The episode he's in ends with Spencer handcuffing "Spanky" over a couch and spanking him with a broom, much to Spencer's delight. Did I mention Spanky's son is watching and enjoying it? And yes, the writers do seem to know just how wrong it is, as Carly walks downstairs to get something, sees the scene, and heads right back upstairs.
    • Oh it gets stupider, Spanky is a cop and bugs Spencer on duty, in front of his parent how the hell did he get in the force?
    • When Spencer was in middle school, he was a prankster and ended up playing a trick that accidentally blinded(temporarily) a couple of classmates and sent them to the hospital. The incident made him give up pranking. When Spencer starts playing pranks again as an adult, his sister Carly calls up the kids he blinded, now all grown up for an intervention to stop him. They still hold a grudge and beat the crap out of him when Carly leaves the room.
  • A really bizarre subversion in an episode of Scrubs: J.D. tells Turk that he was making out with a hot girl, when the three Jerk Jocks from his high school saw him, admitted they were clearly wrong about him, and added that they were now "all gay together". He's making it up, of course.
  • An episode of Frasier had Frasier's plumber turn out to be the bully at his and Niles' prep school. Initially, he still seems to be a jerk, but Niles ends up giving him free therapy and finding out why he's a bully.
    • Then, his still-bullying brother (and business partner) shows up and fails to recognize Frasier as one of the kids he pushed around. While Niles is talking to his old bully in the living room, Frasier decides to try talking things out with the brother (who bullied him) in the bathroom while he's fixing the toilet. But after Frasier brings up the subject of school days, the brother starts recounting to Frasier how much fun he had being a bully when he was younger before Frasier gets to the part about how they know each other. The bully is laughing as he reminisces about all the stuff he did to "this one kid", all the while with his head over the toilet bowl, still unaware that his old punching bag and Butt Monkey is in the room with him and oblivious to the fact that the stories he's telling are making Frasier angrier and angrier. Finally, Frasier can't stand any more and gives him a swirly.
  • An episode of Supernatural focuses on a memorable time in Sam Winchester's life when he went to a nice school for a handful of weeks. It was only marred by a bully who came back as a homicidal rule-breaking ghost who was killing bullies. The bully himself thought he was the victim because he was teased after Young!Sam beat him up defending himself. The bully probably was bullied after Sam left, with a new the nickname and everyone knowing he was weak.
  • Used a lot in Cold Case. Naturally, the bullies tend to become Future Losers.
  • In 21 Jump Street, the main characters recount the bullies who have plagued them in their youth. When Doug Penhall recounts his particularly bitter memories of such a tormentor, a friend suggests he seek the bully out and confront him. However, when Penhall does just that by finding the bully's current home, he learns that the bully is now a pathetic unemployed loser with an unhappy marriage to a shrewish wife. Delighted at this turn of events, Penhall decides not to speak to him and returns home quietly gloating how he got the classic best revenge by living well.
  • In an episode of The West Wing, a lawyer trying to get his client's death sentence commuted needs to talk to the White House. His connection is Sam, whom he says he used to beat up in high school.
  • Al Bundy is a rare protagonist example.
  • The Tv Land reality show "High School Reunion" had really hyped up how one of the guys on the show was going to confront the man who bullied him in school all those years ago. Only for this to fall flat on his face when the bully turns out to be rather apathetic about the whole thing, saying "That was more than ten years ago. I don't care."
  • In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, "The Speckerman Reoccurence" Leonard's high school bully contacted him on facebook and asked to get drinks. When they meet up Speckerman was very polite, praised Leonard for his accomplishments and seemed to not realize he tormented Leonard, who left him with a list of offenses. Later, Speckerman showed up drunk at Leonard's apartment and apologized for everything he's done, with Leonard letting him stay the night so that he won't drive drunk. In the morning and sobered up he immediately reverts to his high school bully ways but by this time Leonard was no longer afraid of him, unfortunately not realizing he still can't match him on a physical level. The episode ends with Sheldon and Leonard running from the guy.


Newspaper Comics[]


Professional Wrestling[]

  • The ECW feud between Tommy Dreamer and Raven was based on the "classmate seeking revenge" version of the trope; Dreamer had bullied Raven and stole his girlfriend, Beulah, when they were kids, and, years later, Raven showed up in ECW looking to ruin Tommy's life. Of course, in the intervening years, Tommy had undergone a Heel Face Turn and turned out to be a pretty decent guy, but Raven was so eaten up with hatred and anger that he didn't care.
  • John Bradshaw Layfield admitted in a promo that he was this.
  • Many of the fans' signs will accuse heel wrestlers of being this.
  • The Miz's apprentice Alex Riley has this and being a Jerk Jock as his gimmick, he pulls it off very well, because he's inherited his pros mic skills and has a Letterman Jacket as part of his ring attire. It gets weird once you realize that his pro is a disrespected guy that started as a bit of a loser. And was in fact bullied in Real Life but aforementioned Jerkass JBL.


Real Life[]

  • NBC CEO Jeff Zucker is perhaps the prime person responsible for screwing Conan O'Brien out of The Tonight Show. Zucker and O'Brien headed up rival school newspapers when they went to Harvard together. No joke.
  • Sammo Hung used to beat up Jackie Chan while they attended the Peking Opera School, Years later, Jackie met him again and they wound up doing a number of movies together. However, they're no longer enemies as adults.


Video Games[]

  • The Gainax Ending of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge reveals that LeChuck is Guybrush's brother, who put him through all that misery over Guybrush accidentally breaking one of his action toys. Mind Screw doesn't even start to cover the way it is presented.
  • The Big Bad of Mother 3 is Porky, Ness' old next-door neighbour and ruler of the Pig Mask Army.
  • The plot of Reading Blaster Ages 9 - 12 involves a stereotypical Mad Scientist, Dr. Dabble, attempting to take revenge against several people for supposed transgressions that they committed against him when he was in high school. (After you rescue them, the victims always reveal that he pretty much always had it coming.)
  • The third vid-comic in Ratchet and Clank Up Your Arsenal reveals that Captain Qwark and Dr. Nefarious go way back to Qwark's 9th grade Biology class, in which he used to pick on Nefarious for his headgear, among other things. A wedgie for old times sake sends Nefarious careening into a pit, temporarily ending Dr. Nefarious' reign of terror but turning him into a robot.
    • Somewhat of a subversion actually because Qwark happened to be 26 years old and three times Nefarious' size at the time.
  • Teepo in Breath of Fire 3. His role as a bully is arguable, though; he considers Ryu and Rei as family, and only acts as a bully to anyone outside of their family. His big mouth more than often gets them into trouble, though...


Web Comics[]

  • As much as she is painted as one of the good-guys, Elf Blood's Shanna Whittle is in no way a pleasant person. At school, she apparently bullied Gipsy (although this was justified in Shanna's mind as Gipsy stole a boyfriend of hers), she bullied TKO (while the two were out on their graduation mission), and she stole Carlita's lunch money (vengeance for which was exacted with brutal precision). Even today, she still prefers to deal with things with force and fists than reasoning and talking.
  • Grobi from Captn Crazy.


Western Animation[]

  • The "classmate with a grudge seeking revenge" version occurs in The Venture Bros when Dr. Venture, Brock Samson, Baron Ünderbheit and Pete White get kidnapped by their old college classmate Mike Sorayama, who holds grudges against all of them. Although his revenge is elaborate and impressive, it's all a bit much considering that the things he hates them for are all pretty minor, most of which revolve around his pathetic unrequited crush on an attractive classmate and their teasing of him for it. Worst of all, the thing he hates Venture for he didn't even really do[1]. Not surprisingly, they all consider the fact that he kidnapped them and intends to subject them all to a lengthy and horrible Death Trap to be a little excessive.
  • In Kim Possible, it turns out that we have the 'classmate with a grudge seeking revenge' version: Doctor Drakken, Kim's arch-foe, goes after the three guys who laughed at him in college, driving him to drop out and starting his slide into evil. The trio are all physicists, and their ringleader? Kim's dad.
    • The crime? Mocking Drakken's freaky robot 'dates'.
  • Rocko's Modern Life. Rocko spends an entire episode dreading a visit from his childhood bully Dingo, and training so he could finally fight back, but as it turns out, Dingo wants to make peace with him. Oh, and he's a member of a weird pacifistic cult, and insists on making amends by letting Rocko punch him in the face.
  • In the South Park episode "Pre-School" from season 8, a bully who the boys had sent to juvenile detention for an offense they committed returns a hardened criminal and bent on revenge. Fortunately for the boys, they find a way to pin another offense on him and get him sent away again.
    • To be fair, Trent Boyett wasn't so much a bully as he was a tough loner. And the crime that was pinned on him was so heinous (accidentally lighting a sweet preschool teacher on fire and turning her into a paralyzed, catatonic wreck) that you can't really blame Trent for wanting to dole out a few "titty-twisters." (The infamous "Texas Chili Bowl", however, is another story....)
  • There's an episode of Ren and Stimpy where an old school friend of Ren's comes to visit him. However, over the course of a few flashbacks it's revealed the "friend" humiliated him at every opportunity and made him miserable.
  • American Dad: Growing up, Stan Smith was bullied by a big Greek kid named Stelio Kontos. When Stan tries to be his own son Steve's bully in a attempt to toughen him up, Steve finds Stelio (who now works at Kinko's) and hires him to beat Stan up.
    • Likewise, Family Guy had an episode where Peter wanted revenge on his high school bully, only to discover that he's now crippled by multiple sclerosis and regrets what he did. Peter still tries to beat him up, but Chris intervenes and points out to Peter that he himself has become a bully.
  • A U.S. Acres segment of Garfield and Friends had Orson fearing an old bully of his who is coming to "settle" with him. He finally faces him...where he returns all the lunch money he stole from him.
  • A Back at the Barnyard episode sees Otis dreading the arrival of an old bully. The bully turns out to be a duck (voiced by Tom "Biff" Wilson), but he still terrifies Otis. When the other characters attempt to gang up on him in defense, the duck beats them all silly. Then the duck simply says that he has had therapy and just wanted to do was apologize to Otis for bullying him.
  • An episode of Darkwing Duck had Drake go to his high school reunion and meet the Alpha Bitch and Jerk Jock who made his life miserable for years; only now, they're rich and successful and still treat him like crap (and for bonus points, they idolize Darkwing). During a fight with Megavolt (who also attended the school), DW's mask comes off and the bullies make fun of him some more. In the end, he saves the day they apologize for the way they acted and for not recognizing that he was a good person, and promise to keep his secret (he says thanks, but uses hypnosis to erase their memories anyway).
  1. he thinks Doc slept with the girl, but it was Brock who really did