ComplexityAddiction / Western Animation

Perennial Hanna-Barbera villain Dick Dastardly is the king of this trope.
- In his first appearance on Wacky Races, he always comes up with elaborate plans to cheat his way to victory. Here's the kicker: he doesn't need to do this at all. His car is several times faster than anyone else's. He could have won every race legitimately with ease, and in fact, each race begins with him surging to a huge lead, but he always stops in order to set up traps, which invariably end up backfiring and costing him the race. This pattern of behavior carries on to all of his many other appearances: no matter who he's going up against, Dastardly's complexity addiction is his greatest enemy. He even refuses to win legitimately: he's such a Card-Carrying Villain that he can't stand to win if he didn't cheat while doing so.
- Another fine example was when Dastardly was given his own spinoff series. It revolved around him concocting ridiculously complex plans and inventing insane flying machines, all to catch a pigeon.
- Also, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop kept seeing the titular character captured and put into overly ridiculous deathtraps. Granted the guy responsible wants to inherit her fortune and is probably trying to make it look like an accident (hence the reason he doesn't just shoot her), but some of them just get outright absurd, and after putting her in whatever trap he just runs off rather than sticking around and making sure it works.
- Lampshaded by Penelope (after having been captured and informed how the latest death trap will work): "That's not very diabolical." (after having been told the elaborate way it will be triggered) "Now THAT'S diabolical!"
A heroic example: In The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Tom Chan will often suggest needlessly elaborate plans such as deploying a series of mirrors to examine a statue (when Anne can just climb the tree and look through a pair of binoculars) or catapulting them over a wall (when the gate's open). Mostly Played for Laughs.
American Dad!:
- Down to the Gary Oldman accent:
  Barry: You're not in any position to be calling the shots Steven; I'm the one holding the gun.
  Steve: Sure, you could kill me with your gun... but are you willing to try something much more elaborate and unnecessary?
- Roger also demonstrates this in the season seven finale "Toy Whorey". He goes through several elaborate plans to try to get a bottle of Rain Duck wine from Greg and Terry, such as using an elaborate Rube Goldberg Device to cut the power in the Smith house and then just wait for the two to notice the blackout and come check on them. Eventually, Francine gets sick of waiting, goes straight to their house, bitch-slaps them with a spatula, and simply takes the wine. An earlier episode has Roger enacting a scheme to steal a $10 pair of gloves, which involves buying a $700 necklace. His alter ego lampshades this, but Roger tells him to shut up.
- In one episode, in order to get into a local baseball stadium that he was banned from, Stan, rather than simply sneak or break in decides to: move to Cuba, become discovered by a baseball agent, get smuggled into the US, join a minor league team, get picked up by the New York Yankees, become addicted to steroids, get caught, get dropped by the Yankees and then get picked up by the team that plays in the stadium late in the draft.
This is MC Pee Pants' MO in Aqua Teen Hunger Force. His very first evil scheme is to release a rap single to get people eat tons of candy before instructing them to visit a warehouse and use their hyperactive sugar rush to power a giant drill to bore into the center of the earth, releasing demons onto the surface to partake in a diet pill pyramid scheme. They get never any less overly complicated than that.
Slater from Archer seems to suffer from this.
- In "Pocket Listing", he needs to scan the handprints, retinas, cell phones and flash drives of a visiting prince while he is in New York. He comes up with a ridiculously overcomplicated plan that involves luring the Prince and his bodyguards to Cheryl's mansion, having her pose as the listing agent while the rest of the gang pose as servants, having Ray use a laxative to separate the prince from his bodyguards, separating the prince from his incredibly overbearing mother, then drugging the prince with a dart gun and scanning all of this in the roughly sixty seconds that it will take for the drug to wear off... Even though it would probably be infinitely easier to simply break into his room while he is sleeping and scan all the electronic equipment and then drug the prince and scan his retinas and handprints. Lampshaded twice in the episode, first by Lana ("Why are your plans always so complicated? You're like Wile E. Coyote with access to Predator Drones.") and later by Archer ("It had everything but a sign for free bird-seed.").
- At the end of Season 6, it's implied that Slater's been exploiting this trope in order to sabotage the gang so that the CIA could fire them for incompetence.
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Evil Chancellor Long Feng has secretly ruled Ba Sing Se for years by suppressing all knowledge of the Fire Nation's war against the rest of the world. When the Avatar shows up, he finds himself in a position where he can't simply silence the Avatar and can't accept the Avatar's help without admitting the war is real. Instead, he has them followed constantly, captures Appa, then tries to get them to leave by lying about Appa's whereabouts. Had he just taken their intel but refused their help, then given them Appa, he wouldn't have been deposed at the end of the season.
Batman: The Animated Series:
- In "Almost Got 'Im", five members of Batman's Rogues Gallery (Joker, Two-Face, Penguin, Killer Croc, and Poison Ivy) share their stories of how they almost killed Batman. These stories share a common theme where the villain could have easily killed Batman with a gun or some sharp pointed object, but instead opted for an elaborate Death Trap ranging from flipping a giant penny with Batman tied on it or using birds to inject poison into Batman. And naturally, their plans failed. The sole exception is Killer Croc's story where he simply threw a big rock at Batman but based on the other villains' reactions, it's clear that Boring, but Practical just doesn't register with them.
- In "Mad Love", Harley Quinn manages to make one of the Joker's theme schemes to kill Batman work. However, Batman manages to foil the improved and foolproof scheme by getting Harley to phone Joker to come see his death and impress him...but the Joker's huge ego would not let anyone but him kill Bats, this in spite of it being a worthy death. Just goes to show that stylish evil can and does work... but pride'll get ya every time.
- The Clock King even surpasses the Riddler as an addict to overly complicated schemes, but he exhibited this even before becoming a supervillain. As Temple Fugate, he has a chain pocketwatch, a wristwatch, and at his office he has a grandfather clock and another clock at his desks.
The kids from Bob's Burgers occasionally run into this problem. One Halloween, the three kids are a group costume: the movie Twister, with one dressing as a tornado, another dressing as various objects that got picked up by the tornado, and the last being Helen Hunt. Later, the kids become costumed wrestlers, and decide to become sea cucumbers with an overly complex backstory and in the ring routine. Despite the kids being overly ambitious in some of their plots, they are able to pull them off as often as not.
In Care Bears (1980s), Professor Cold Heart always incorporates an element of manipulation into his plans, whether or not it makes the plan better... and in at least one instance, it makes the plan worse. In the episode "Wedding Bells", he manipulates his associate Auntie Freeze into going along with his plan to smuggle a dangerous invasion into Care-A-Lot, only for her to grow enraged and turn on him in the climax when she realizes the trickery — when there's no reason to think she wouldn't have willingly participated in his evil scheme if he'd asked honestly.
Leonardo Leonardo suffers from this in the pilot of Clerks: The Animated Series; he's got a 63-step plan that starts with building the Quicker Stop across the street from the original Quick Stop, followed by a series of increasingly ridiculous solutions to increasingly unlikely or pointless problems that the previous step might cause ("What will he do for eggs after his army of gorillas kill all the chickens?" "Next step: Robot Chickens."). The final step ends with a pleasure dome launching into space and nuking the Earth from orbit.
The central premise of Dexter's Laboratory is that he uses his powerful inventions to solve minor everyday problems and gets in trouble for it.
DuckTales (2017): Flintheart Glomgold frequently suffers from this with a majority of his schemes. His scheme to take down Mark Beaks in "The Infernal Internship of Mark Beaks!" (which also has an extra plan to betray Scrooge) involves a billionaire's party on a yacht, a swimming pool full of sharks, a fake holiday involving carrots and an active volcano. "Moonvasion!" also has him coming up with such a scheme to help Scrooge beat General Lunaris after all of Scrooge's plans fail. The scheme involves sharks dressed in parkas, Beakley dressed as a kid, Launchpad dressed as a rock, a giant slingshot, and Scrooge dressed as Santa Claus (whom Scrooge hates). The hilarious thing about this overly complicated scheme is that it actually works thanks to Lunaris seeing it as nothing but a distraction due to how stupid it appears. "The Ballad of Duke Baloney!" reveals that he suffered from this even as a kid: in a flashback to when he was a humble shoeshine boy (then going by his birth name of "Duke Baloney"), he tells Scrooge about his plan to save up all his shoe shining earnings, then buy a coal mine, turn all the coal into diamonds, create a diamond point for a large drill, and finally drill through the ground for gold to sell for a fortune. Scrooge asks why he wouldn't just sell the diamonds, to which a confused Duke asks what he's supposed to use for the drill if he does.
The scams in Ed, Edd n Eddy are this. The Eds are shown to have amazing talent in setting up services, but Eddy continuously insists on cutting corners with flashy scams that ultimately make the kids want to have a refund. It would be easy if they just set up an honest business, especially with all that technology Edd makes from junk. Case in point, any success they had is from a scam that's pretty straightforward while Jimmy succeeded on his first try with a trampoline.
The Fairly OddParents!: In the episode "Back to the Norm", Crocker joins forces with Norm the Genie to defeat Timmy Turner. Rather than follow Norm's simple advice to, say, wish Timmy be sent to Mars, Crocker keeps coming up with a number of elaborate booby traps which keep backfiring onto Crocker himself.
Lampshaded in the Futurama episode "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" by Robot Devil: "Ah, my ridiculously-circuitous plan is one-quarter complete!" The plan is a Chain of Deals that started by taking Bender's ass-plate in exchange for a horn nose. Bender uses the horn nose to deafen Leela, whom the Robot Devil offers a pair of robotic ears to so she can hear Fry's Holophonor opera. She agrees on the condition of giving him her hand in marriage, which allows the Robot Devil to negotiate the return of his own hands from Fry, who had won them in a game with the Robot Devil. Hilariously, a later episode reveals that going through this was unnecessary anyway; the Robot Devil has multiple replacement bodies anyway, therefore he could have switched out Fry's hands for one of the ones from the extra bodies easily enough.
In the Gravity Falls episode "Double Dipper", Dipper lays out an elaborate plan (which later gets more elaborate, with the help of his clones) to ask Wendy to dance because he's too nervous to simply ask her like Mabel suggests. Her tone gives the impression that this is a regular thing for Dipper.
Once per Episode in Higglytown Heroes, Twinkle will outline a long, complicated and absolutely absurd solution to the problem of the week. Fran will then point out one problem with it.
Invader Zim: Zim constantly falls into this trope, to the extent that "Zim comes up with comically overblown solution for relatively simple problem, hilarity ensues" makes up the plot of basically half the series and lesser examples happen almost Once per Episode. For example, in "A Room with a Moose", Zim comes up with a relatively (for him) simple plan for getting rid of Dib and his fellow students and then adds several new phases to it that doesn't improve the plan at all and makes it possible for Dib to escape (it does, however, make the episode a lot funnier). Zim has an overblown ego the size of the planet he's trying to conquer and is incapable of self-reflection, thus ensuring he falls back into this trap time and time again. Given that Zim possesses technology capable of depopulating and/or destroying the Earth in less than a week if he ever applied it correctly, this trope (and the Rule of Funny) is practically necessary for there to be much of a plot at all.
Kim Possible:
- Dr. Drakken suffers from this. His sidekick, Only Sane Woman Shego, lampshades this repeatedly.
  Shego: Okay, let's get Operation Too-Complicated-to-Actually-Work started!
- Drakken actually turns this to his advantage in So The Drama. Near the beginning of the movie, he refuses to explain his plan to Shego. When a curious Shego decides to investigate, she still can't figure it out, even with all the different pieces of the plan in front of her. Frustrated, Shego threatens Drakken to spill what the plan is, but he explains that he was testing whether Kim would be able to figure out his plan; he reasons that, since Shego is as smart as Kim (or smarter), the fact that Shego can't figure it out proves that Kim won't be able to either. Shego is stunned to realize that Drakken is right, which means he could actually win — and he nearly does.
- The Affably Evil Señor Senior, Senior insists on sticking to the code of classic villainy on principle, even if it lets Kim get away and foil his crimes. Then again, considering that for him, this is an elaborate retirement hobby, it entirely fits that he's more interested in having fun and challenging himself by playing by the rules than actually succeeding. Notably, the one time it wasn't a hobby but an attempt to steal back his fortune after he was cheated out of it he went for a simple plan (use his extreme sport abilities to steal everything back piece by piece while pretending to be poor) that nearly succeeded. When Kim was about to catch him, his son Señor Senior, Junior succeeded with another simple plan: claim the bounty placed on his father by the guy who cheated them out of their fortune and then hire a lawyer to take everything back.
Miraculous Ladybug: Marinette Dupain-Cheng/Ladybug is this crossed with Zany Scheme. A recurring theme with Marinette is that she will always come with the most complicated explanations and plans to accomplish simple tasks. For instance, Kwami Buster takes the gold when Marinette comes up with an over-elaborate ruse to hide her secret identity from Cat Noir by getting "Marinette" and "Ladybug" to interact with each other. (To really hammer it in, it's immediately contrasted with Cat Noir's far simpler measure of making himself look like he doesn't know anything about their high school by blatantly misidentifying it as an elementary school.) It generally backfires on her when she isn't Ladybug, and will surely fail if her objective involves Adrien in some capacity.
Molly of Denali: In "Mollyball", the eponymous game is designed to induce this. The plays get increasingly elaborate, and the kids have to draw diagrams to explain them. The points awarded also increase exponentially.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- In the season 2 premiere, it's made very clear that if Discord wanted to disable the Elements of Harmony, the only stuff that can beat him, all he has to do is swiftly touch each of the mane six to invert their personalities and make them unfriendly to one another. But that would be too boring for him, so he decides to lure them into a hedge maze, divide them with hedge walls, give them lectures on how how the elements they bear are either weaknesses or hypocritical, then hypnotize them to make them unfriendly with one another.
- The episode "Applejack's 'Day' Off" shows that Applejack has gotten to be this way with some of her chores, reflexively doing things to circumvent problems she fixed a while ago. Due to wanting to follow Applejack's instruction list to the letter, Twilight and Spike don't even manage to finish feeding the pigs by the time she and Rarity get back from their hour at the spa.
Phineas and Ferb:
- Dr. Doofenshmirtz will regularly plot to do something needlessly complicated rather than something much simpler, like steal Big Ben rather than go to a store and buy a watch big enough for him to read. It's often lampshaded.
  'But I'm no longer a hater
  'Cause I've got an inator
  And an overcomplicated scheme!
  I get a couple of checks
  Every month from my ex
  So I can finance my coming regime!
- Phineas and Ferb are prone to this as well. For them, it's literally an addiction — Phineas goes into withdrawal when they're forced to climb a mountain the normal way, with no crazy inventions, in "Bully Bromance Breakup". Ferb holds up a little better, but that doesn't mean he likes it. ("If we hadn't been able to invent something soon, I was going to scream.") Another example, from "Picture This", after Ferb has left his skateboard in England:
  Phineas: I know! We could create a highly-intricate and sophisticated machine that will transport any object from anywhere on the globe to our backyard!
  Dad: Well, why don't you just build a new skateboard?
  [Phineas and Ferb stare at him in silence]
  Phineas: Hmm, yeahhh, I don't think so.
  Ferb: If it's all the same with you, Father, we're going to build the machine.
- Candace too. In the Christmas special, she decides that to make sure she gets Jeremy the perfect gift, she's going to trick him into writing a letter to Santa and then read it; she laughs and calls Phineas ridiculous when he suggests she just ask Jeremy what he wants.
Ready Jet Go!: Jet loves coming up with convoluted solutions to problems, because he considers those plans to be fun. For example, in "Astronaut Ellen Ochoa", he has a Mundane Made Awesome plan for making lemonade. Also, in "Sydney 2", he and Sean build a Rube Goldberg Device just to deliver snacks.
In the Regular Show episode "Steak Me Amadeus", the Capicola Gang's plan for revenge on the park workers is printing fake Amadeus dollars (coupons to buy steaks at "Steak Me Amadeus") and sell them to Pops who would give them to the rest of the workers. When they want more cheap steaks, they would set up a meeting to exchange more Amadeus dollars and then ambush them. Their whole plan is dependent on the gang's desire for affordable steaks, and they apparently didn't bother to take in account that if the park workers use these counterfeit coupons, they would get trouble with the police and get arrested and won't have the chance to meet them. Rigby lampshades it:
Rigby: Dude, that's really weird.
Capicola Gang Leader: Well, it worked, didn't it?
Most Scooby-Doo villains succumb to this, and every episode ends with either them or the members of Mystery Inc. giving detailed explanations of how they were pulling off what they were doing, and why. The common problem is that their schemes do not require a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, and by trying to set one up the criminals create a lot of extra evidence and attract the attention of Those Meddling Kids.
- In the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated episode "Mystery Solvers Club State Finals", the villain (revealed to be The Funky Phantom, of all people), goes into excruciating detail about how he carried out his plot, which turns out to be an overly-complicated way of getting rid of his team so he can stop being a sidekick. This could be justified by the fact that the whole episode is just a fever dream Scooby's having, but still...
- In the following episode, the Villain of the Week's plan is even more complicated, and more pointless. The Gang lampshades this.
- The reason why is generally something along the lines of "scare everyone else away so I can do what I want in the area," often involving treasure. Simply buying them off would work just as well, and would not attract people with an interest in ghosts.
- In the Mystery Incorporated incarnation, the fact that everyone's plans involve costumes and monsters is overall lampshaded/explained by the fact that Mystery Cove is famous for hauntings, and the overall plot involves cursed treasure (that would be a very strange curse). Everyone just uses monsters because everyone acts as if monsters are real until the reveal. The townsfolk, lead by the money grubbing mayor, never think to prove the monsters are real; they just try to make money off of them, justified by their tourist economy/haunted history. The whole thing is not always complexity addiction, sometimes it is a reasonable way to take advantage of everyone's unreasonable behavior. Though unless they are hiding something there is almost always an easier way.
- Also in Mystery Incorporated, Fred has an obvious addiction, setting up Rube Goldberg devices to capture villains on the regular. While Played for Laughs, Mystery Incorporated showcases this far more than other incarnations of Fred.
A Running Gag in Les Shadoks is the title characters' ridiculous and nonsensical so-called "proverbs". Among one of the most popular is: "Pourquoi faire simple quand on peut faire compliqué?", which is a parody of the French counterpart to "Why make it complicated when it can be easy?" Guess what it means? "Why make it easy when it can be complicated?"
The Simpsons:
- Subverted in "Brother from Another Series" when Sideshow Bob's brother Cecil is about to kill Bart by throwing him off a hydroelectric dam:
  Cecil: At last, I'm going to do what Bob never could: KILL Bart Simpson!
  Bart: By throwing me off a dam? Isn't that a little crude for a genius like you?
  Cecil: Ooh, I suppose it is. Eh. If anyone asks, I'll lie!
- In "Sideshow Bob Roberts", Sideshow Bob rigs the Springfield Mayoral Election by stuffing the ballots (even though his opponent was guaranteed to lose anyway), and in "Day of the Jackanapes", he tries to kill Bart and Krusty with one stone by kidnapping the former, hypnotizing him, rigging him with explosives with triggers on his palms and having him try to hug the latter during what was supposed to be his final show.
- Another subversion: in "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", when the Simpsons refuse to sell the Obviously Evil Mr. Burns their puppies, he takes it with such suspicious grace that they're sure he's coming up with some fiendish scheme to get them... Cut to Burns just stealing the pups at that very moment while their backs are turned.
  Smithers: Honestly, sir, you just don't put the effort into your schemes that you used to.
- In "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", Sideshow Bob decides to steal a nuclear bomb and threaten to detonate it unless television stops broadcasting in Springfield. He busts this plan by picking a 1950s vintage bomb that is no longer operative, purely because of its "retro" value and despite the fact that there were plenty of modern bombs at his disposal. Then he tries to kill Bart and Krusty in a murder-suicide... using the 1903 Wright Flyer.
- In "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes", during a parody of The Prisoner (1967):
  Number 2: I'll be blunt. Your web page has stumbled upon our secret plan.
  Homer: That's impossible. All my stories are bullplop. Bullplop!
  Number 2: Don't be cute. I'm referring to the flu shot exposé. You see, we're the ones loading them with mind-controlling additives.
  Homer: But why?
  Number 2: To drive people into a frenzy of shopping. That's why flu shots are given just before Christmas.
  Homer: Of course. It's so simple. Wait, no it's not. It's needlessly complicated.
  Number 2: Yes, it is.
- In "Funeral for a Fiend", Sideshow Bob has Bart trapped in a coffin which is slowly being transported on a conveyor belt towards a crematorium furnace. That said, when the Simpsons arrive to rescue Bart, Sideshow Bob switches the lever from Gloating Speed to Kill Him Already! to speed up the conveyor belt. This isn't after managing to exploit his addiction in order to fake his death by attracting the Simpsons to a Death Trap, then being convinced to trigger it so it will go off in his face, and wiring it so it will be a non-fatal explosion. It still involves a Gambit Roulette with an ad for a BBQ joint made in a way the family would find irresistible.
- Sideshow Bob ultimately gets called on this by Lenny, Carl, and Moe in "The Great Louse Detective". He actually does try to take their advice to heart in the end but finds he's grown too fond of Bart to go through with it.
  Carl: Say, Bob, how come you were never able to kill Bart?
  Moe: Yeah. Kids should be real easy to kill.
  Lenny: I'd just come up behind him and slit his throat real quick-like.
  [Later, Bob has Bart cornered with a knife]
  Bob: And now, I'm going to take some advice that was given to me by Lenny... and kill you without delay.
- In the "Treehouse of Horror XXIV" segment "Freaks No Geeks", Homer learns that Moe has an emerald. He tries to get it by tricking Marge into marrying Moe then killing Moe and marrying Marge to get the emerald. Homer says that the plan's best part is its simplicity.
Parodied in Smiling Friends, where Allan's Landlord claims to have masterminded a plot that involves 8 months of planning, $750,000 in costs and involves Allan getting chased by the US Air Force, dealing with Ghost Pirates and eaten by a sea beast... All for the purpose of getting Allan to hang out, smoke weed, drink diet soda and play Burnout Revenge with him.
South Park:
- In "Toilet Paper", the boys need to come up with an alibi to prove that they couldn't have toilet papered the art teacher's house. Cartman, rather than coming up with something simple, fills his story with irrelevant and overly specific details that the others fail to follow even after he explains it twice.
- In "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy", Cartman decides to break into the hotel where Ike and his teacher are to get them, even going as far to terrorize and attack the staff and guests with bear mace with Kyle and his fellow lackeys, rather than just simply report to the police where Ike and Miss Stevenson are, or wait till morning and get them when they leave the hotel.
- In "Dead Kids", Cartman fails a math quiz because Tolkien figured out that Cartman was just copying his answers and prevented him from cheating. Cartman then goes into a lengthy chain of blackmail, talking to Tolkien's ex-girlfriend and his parents, and eventually threatening to contact the news based on something Tolkien didn't do. Tolkien points out that Cartman could have just actually studied for the test instead of going through such lengths to be able to cheat on it.
  Cartman: You saw Black Panther without your parents' permission. I typed up all my findings, Tolkien. I made ten copies and put them in envelopes. If I don't pass this math quiz, the envelopes are all set to be sent to ten different news organizations.
  Tolkien: You did all that instead of actually studying for the test?
- In "Turkey Trot", Cartman has an analytical "race science" idea and a plan that revolves around running to Tolkien's farm (which, according to Stan, is 30 miles away from South Park), grabbing his Xbox, and running that same distance back so that Tolkien will chase him to retrieve his stolen console. At the end, he intentionally tricks Tolkien into winning to humiliate him, since the money is from Saudi Arabia and goes against Tolkien's principles. Even after that, it's highly unlikely Tolkien would give Cartman any of the money, and the following episode implies he gave at least some of it to Stan.
SpongeBob SquarePants:
- This is pretty much Plankton's signature flaw when attempting to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula. From all his ridiculous schemes backfiring on him due to poorly timed planning, his robot wife Karen manages to swipe a Patty easily on her first try solo, just by ordering one (due to Krabs' cashier, Squidward being too apathetic about his job to care).
- Done in-universe with "Pet or Pests". After the baby worms get thrown into the road and a truck comes right at them, SpongeBob takes the time to slam the brakes on the truck, making it stop just in time before it runs over them; given this time, he should've just ran to the road, picked up the babies, and run them to safety before the truck came.
Pretty much every plan come up with by the Legion of Doom in Challenge of the Superfriends. This was probably due to there being thirteen members and wanting everyone to seem like a participating member. It didn't help that the show's version of The Riddler had no purpose but to tip off the heroes how to beat the current scheme.
In an episode of Underdog, Simon Bar Sinister's plan to take over the city was thwarted because he couldn't reach a vital piece of equipment due to the Thanksgiving Day Parade blocking the street. Fortunately, he has a time machine. How does he use it? Option A: Go back in time to that morning, cross the street before the parade starts. Option B: Go back in time one day, tell his troops the attack is postponed until Friday, when the parade won't be blocking the street. Option C: Go back in time one week, and move the device to the other side of the street, so the parade won't be an issue. What he comes up with is Option D: Go back several hundred years and sabotage the formation of Plymouth Plantation so that Thanksgiving Day never happens, and therefore the Thanksgiving Day Parade will not exist to keep him from crossing the street. He opted to try to alter centuries of history, possibly creating a Butterfly Effect that would cause the city he wanted to conquer to never exist in the first place, just to remove a temporary traffic obstacle.
In Wakfu, Qilby the Traitor tried to accomplish his goals with a rather complex plan that really wasn't necessary. Adamai even points out that Qilby could have used the Eliacube to retrieve his sister's Dofus without relying on Yugo. He claims that he couldn't do it on his own because he was no match for the Dragon Phaeris. A claim that rings hollow when he and Phaeris actually fight and he proves to be an even match. In the end, Yugo calls out the villain on devising a needlessly complicated scheme when he could have easily defeated the heroes from the very beginning and claims that he did this because he can't bring himself to actually kill his fellow Eliatropes or the Dragons. Deep down, Qilby just wanted to convince them to join him so they could all be friends again.
Wallace & Gromit:
- Wallace is a guy who loves his Rube Goldberg Machines, using them in every step of his daily routines. This has included a jam catapult that launches a glob of it at his toast while it's airborne from the toaster, a slide incorporated into his breadmaking machine that allows him to use the same slides as the dough to descend a single story (and needs outside interference to avoid him falling into the machine), and a mechanical boot to push the gas pedal on his motorcycle that he has to move aside his foot for.
- Feathers McGraw, for his part, came up with a diamond heist plan that involved a sleeping Wallace dangling from the ceiling in a pair of remote-controlled mechanical trousers, wearing a helmet with a claw arm in it. Given the technical skill he shows in modifying the trousers and building the helmet, he could presumably have simply stolen the trousers, bolted the claw to them directly and cut Wallace out of the equation entirely.
WordGirl:
- Dr. Two Brains has a really bad case of this. In "When Life Gives You Potatoes...", for example, he tries to build a ray to transform gold into cheese. (Two Brains really likes cheese.) However, the ray doesn't work right, as instead of changing gold into cheese, it changes gold into potato salad. So Two Brains invents another ray to turn potato salad into cheese. Then he and his henchmen steal gold, to turn into potato salad, to turn into cheese. Granted, the plan did briefly work in his favor since Word Girl originally couldn't believe the cheese-loving doctor would steal gold when he would usually just steal cheese.
  Word Girl: Doesn't that seen a little unnecessarily difficult? I mean, why not steal potato salad instead of gold? Or use the gold to buy the potato salad? Or why not just steal cheese in the first place?
  Dr. Two Brains: Well, when you put it like that it seems really obvious... b-but I had my reasons!
  - "A Simple Plan" really highlights this, fitting as one of the featured words is "complicated", as even he recognizes that his schemes are getting far too complicated for what amounts for very little payout. While he does work with simply stealing cheese like Word Girl suggested in the above quote, the amounts he steals are too small to satisfy his mouse brain, and thus decides to go after a stadium full of cheese. While the plan starts simple, his henchmen bring up several points that necessitate more steps, eventually resulting in him needing an anti-gravity ray, a cart full of hideous dolls, a sonic ray gun, a blimp, and scuba diving mice for the 23 step plan to work.
- In the episode "Vocab-Bee," The Butcher has a bout of this and hatches a perfect plan to rob a bank that involves a giant bowl of chili, a hippopotamus, a skywriter, a tightrope walker, polar bears, a garbage trunk, a trampoline, a french poodle, circus clowns, and a giant parakeet. It takes all day to set up and is foiled in seconds.

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