Today, I’m looking for what you think was the saddest TV death of all-time.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
Obviously, death on TV is a big deal, and if a character you’ve grown to care about is killed off then, well, you’re obviously going to be sad, ya know? However, I’m curious as to which TV death you found the SADDEST.
For me, I’m going with the death of Seymour Butts on Futurama‘s “Jurassic Bark.” Fry learns that his dog from the 20th Century could be cloned, but right before he is about to be cloned, Fry realizes that the dog lived until he was 15, so the vast majority of its life (12 years) withOUT Fry. So he figures Seymour Butts lived a good life without him and likely forgot all about him, so he wouldn’t bother cloning him, as Seymour Butts wouldn’t even care. We then see in flashbacks that Seymour Butts actually NEVER forgot Fry and obeyed his last order to wait for him in front of a pizza joint for the rest of its life, before dying outside the pizza place. WOW (and yes, there was later a retcon. I’ll probably do a bit on that. It doesn’t take away from the original death).
That’s my pick. What’s yours?
And feel free to suggest future Pop Culture Theme Time topics to me at brian@popculturereferences.com!
NYPD BLUE – Bobby Simone
Since you began with an animated example, I may as well keep the trend alive. I imagine for people of a certain age, they might answer, “Optimus Prime,” but that technically happened in the 1986 Transformers movie. The movie took place between seasons 2 and 3 of the TV show and the TV show reflected the continuity after, but still, likely doesn’t count. The TV show did resurrect him by the end.
The first episode of 1989’s BABAR, which aired on HBO in the U.S., has a pretty sad death right at the start. In a flashback, things are very cheerful for the child version of Babar and his friends until a hunter shoots his mother, on screen. And then proceeds to hunt him across several more flashbacks in subsequent episodes. I swear it was sadder than BAMBI.
My best example would be the series finale to 1992’s X-MEN, “Graduation Day.” Professor X is mortally wounded and by the end only has enough strength to bid all his students a final farewell, tailoring one line for each of them. There isn’t a dry eye in the place. They do kind of cop out at the end — Empress Lilandra claims that Xavier can live, but ONLY in space, and I guess having to leave Earth forever is pretty close to death for a children’s TV show — but it counts.
i was going to mention xaviers death on the xmen cartoon but alex already did that so besides seymor i would go with buffy finding her mother died on bufffy the vampire slayer plus also animation wise homer finaly once and for all loses his mother mona as she dies right after they argue on the simpsons.
If we want to go with most terrifying and sad death, I’ll tag off of Alex’s mention of Optimus Prime. As he said, the show did bring him back, but there was an episode before Prime was brought back fully where he was resurrected by their enemies the Quintessons. He’s secretly evil but returns to his senses shortly before entering a trap he was leading the other Autobots into. He sends them away and then pilots their ship into the Quintesson trap, and there’s a scene where Prime is being shot apart before crashing into the Quintessons.
It was sad to see Optimus Prime come back and then lose him again in the same episode, but the shot-apart image of Optimus Prime was truly horrifying.
Howard in better call saul but maybe it’s a recency bias. I have sort of hated Kim since.