Every medium has its overpowered characters. Superman's notable in comics, while GoldenEye's Odd Job is probably gaming's most infamous OP villain. However, cartoons are an interesting case on their own. A lot of animated shows are adaptations of superhero comics, of course, but animated characters tend to have their own specific power sets.
A character's relationship with their world is what makes them overpowered. While Superman is tremendously strong, he also lives in a universe populated with sun-devouring entities and mind-controlling wizards. Without more powerful characters surrounding them, overpowered characters run amuck and often undermine their story's narrative. It's not interesting when it's obvious that heroes are indestructible and villains can never be vanquished.
Updated on 10/28/2022 by Matthew Z. Wood: Cartoons are always changing and CBR regularly updates its writing standards and formats. To keep our articles in touch with current pop culture, and make our content readable and useful to our audiences, we periodically update them accordingly.
15 Rick Sanchez's Smarts and Arrogance Put Iron Man To Shame
Rick & Morty
Rick & Morty's Rick Sanchez is likely the smartest person in his reality, though he's also arrogant enough to assume that this works to his advantage. His smarts, of course, come at the cost of his soul. Rick's an emotionally stunted, nihilistic cynic with little-to-no concern about anyone besides himself. However, he's still an unparalleled and completely ruthless inventor that no alien civilization can match.
Like a D&D Artificer, Rick's main power is invention. Throughout Rick & Morty, Rick's churned out everything from a portal gun to a starship made of garbage, and arsenals upon arsenals of hyper-futuristic weapons. Rick can also improvise impossible devices on the fly from the junk in his surroundings, including alien animals and body parts. Rick's held in check a little by his psychological limitations but there's nothing in his grotesque reality that can really match him.
14 He-Man's The Strongest Of Them All
He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe
On He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe, it's pretty normal for the titular character's friends and foes to call him "the most powerful man in the universe." He defined overpowered for his reality from the start. As long as he grunts loudly when he does it, the erstwhile Prince Adam is able to lift castles and mountains with ease.
The greatest hurdle He-Man ever faced was being encased in a completely unbreakable coffin with no leverage and that only slowed him down a little. He can survive massive explosions without a scratch. Even though he's not known for his speed, he's even able to cancel out tornadoes by spinning his arms. He's exactly as strong and indestructible as the narrative needs him to be, making any fight with He-Man feel completely unfair.
13 Avatar Aang Has All The Powers
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Avatar: The Last Airbender's benders are all incredibly powerful magical martial artists, each wielding their respective elements as powerful weapons and tools. However, even though it requires him an entire series to master it, Aang has access to power over earth, fire, water, and air. This makes him uniquely powerful on its own, but Aang's plainly one of his universe's most potent forces.
While the Avatar universe features other Avatars with similar powers, Aang seems to have a unique connection to the Spirit Realm as well. This lets him work closely with the Moon Spirits to trigger devastating tidal events, negotiate spirits, and gives him an unusual facility with the "Avatar State," a ruthless and nearly omnipotent version of himself that wields his powers with skills acquired over 100 lifetimes. Avatar Korra was a natural bender but her struggles with this aspect of her power show how OP Aang was from the start.
12 Jack-Jack's Powers Seem Unbounded
The Incredibles
In Pixar's The Incredibles, every member of the Parr family has incredible superpowers. They also have clearly defined limits that govern their powers. The same can't be said for their infant son, Jack-Jack.
Both the Parrs and their nemesis, Syndrome, are shocked to discover that Jack-Jack has what seems like an infinite array of powers, including teleportation, shapeshifting, energy forms, and of course deadly eyebeams. It's a disturbing turn of events that's continued in Incredibles 2, where Jack-Jack decides to protect his home from a passing raccoon. Jack-Jack's limited by his age and intellect but if his powers continue growing with him he'll clearly be Earth's most powerful Super.
11 Being A Vampire Queen Gives Marceline A Confusing Power Set
Adventure Time
Despite Marceline being a vampire, most of her powers come from her demonic heritage. Marceline is the child of the demon king, giving her the ability to devour souls. With this power, she acquired the abilities of other vampires, including flight, pyrokinesis, telekinesis, invisibility, necromancy, healing, and shape-shifting.
Though gaining these powers eventually resulted in Marceline's vampirism, with its accompanying aversion to sunlight and, in this case, a nagging taste for all things red, they still make her overpowered. Marceline's apparently not unstoppable, because ghosts inexplicably trump vampires, but she's easily one of Adventure Time's most powerful characters. If she ever truly embraced her potential for evil and took over Hell, no one could stop her.
10 If The Gems Are Superheroes, Steven's A God
Steven Universe
Steven Universe starts off his series as a human child fumbling with alien powers. However, by the time he reaches the sequel series, Steven Universe Future, he's already saved the galaxy from the godlike tyranny of the Diamonds. More impressively, he's mostly used emotional intelligence and decency to get the job done.
Each of the Gems Steven meets are powerful in their own right. However, as a human-Gem hybrid, Steven's power grows beyond his ability to understand. In even the deadliest Gem wars it was rare for Gems to be shattered, but by the end of the series, Steven has not only shattered Season 1's big bad Jasper but resurrected her. Steven's final, self-loathing-based form is so strong the galaxy's united power couldn't have stopped it, even if the power of friendship could.
9 Bugs Bunny Is A Chaos God
Looney Tunes
Early in Bugs Bunny's long career, directors like Chuck Jones figured out that Bugs was governed by just one rule. He wasn't allowed to start anything because no one likes a bully. However, once someone hit him with a pie or tried to fill up his rabbit burrow, there was literally nothing Bugs couldn't do for revenge.
While the Looney Tunes world is governed by cartoon physics, only Bugs has the ability to twist reality to his whims. Able to walk through paintings, compel others to accept the silliest disguises, and survive any punishment, being a villain in a Bugs Bunny cartoon is like being in Hell. There's no way to escape the Wabbit's Wrath.
8 Saitama Blows Up Every Opponent With A Single Punch
One-Punch Man
Despite the fact that Saitama is just a superhero for fun, he is most likely the most powerful being in One-Punch Man's universe. His very premise is that he's so overpowered that fighting cosmic evil is boring for him. Saitama has defeated giant monsters, master ninjas and alien overlords all with a single punch
The funniest part is that Saitama has no idea where his power came from. He originally attributed it to doing 100 push-ups a day but even he realized that didn't make any sense. Saitama's an incurious man and is somewhat limited by his naivete but he can also level entire cities, if not worlds, with a single blow. He's surrounded by powerful heroes but they don't really have a clue how powerful the Caped Baldy really is.
7 Freakazoid Is Like Bugs Bunny In A Superhero's Body
An amalgam of Mike Allred's Madman, Looney Tunes and classic superheroes, Freakazoid is the epitome of zany cartoons. The freaky blue-skinned hero nonsensically wields the power of the internet and is a living cartoon in a world of relatively tame supervillains.
Freakazoid's abilities in every episode of his short-lived series, and sometimes he was just pretending to have superpowers. However, he was consistently able to break the fourth wall. Marvel heroes like She-Hulk and Deadpool have demonstrated how this puts characters in a different class than other heroes. Combined with his cartoonish ability to grab objects out of thin air, Freakazoid is basically a god in his own world.
6 Infinity Ultron Broke The Marvel Multiverse
What If...?
The Disney+ series What If...? has highlighted powerful variants of popular characters like Strange Supreme and Captain Carter, and of course its narrator The Watcher puts them all to shame. However, The Watcher faced his own personal villain in Infinity Ultron, a version of Tony Stark's killer android that gained control of the Infinity Stones.
Infinity Ultron destroyed entire universes in an apparent quest to cleanse reality of organic life. Able to transcend Marvel's multiverse, he directly challenged not just The Watcher but the MCU's narrative. The Watcher was able to neutralize him through a combination of manipulation and the Guardians of the Multiverse, but in terms of raw power, not even Eternity came from to this guy.
5 Vlad Plasmius Is The Overpowered Hero's Better
Danny Phantom
At first glance, Danny Phantom's ghostly abilities might not seem like much. He can turn invisible, move through solid objects, fly -- all relatively tame stuff. However, as his series went on, Danny developed more and more ghostly abilities. He learned to possess people, throw ectoplasmic bombs, and other increasingly potent abilities.
However, Danny's foe Vlad can do everything he can, and has 20 years more experience doing it. Danny's arguably a quicker study than Vlad, but the show's other ghost-human hybrid consistently outperformed Danny. Overpowered villains like this are actually refreshing sometimes, and giving the heroes an obstacle they couldn't overcome really helped the series.
4 Benjamin Tennyson Accesses A Carousel Of Alien Powers
Ben 10
Ben Tennyson's alien device, the Omnitrix, is attuned to him alone and lets him summon up 10 different superpowered alien bodies to pilot. He's somewhat limited by the fact that he can only use one power set at a time, and there are some time limits, but being able to choose anything from super-speed to building-crushing strength at the turn of a dial makes him almost infinitely adaptable.
As several Ben 10 series rolled out, Ben's powers rotated with every new show. By the time the fourth series rolled around, he also gained access to something called Alien X. This let Ben 10 turn into a literal celestial god who could manipulate time and space. In something like a basic street-level superhero series, this was a hugely overpowered plot twist in the hero's favor.
3 Cosmo And Wanda Literally Grant Wishes
The Fairly Odd Parents
Timmy Turner's access to wish-granting fairy godparents Cosmo and Wanda is both the premise of Fairly Odd Parents and the engine that drives every plot. Giving off a Mr. Mxyzptlk vibe, Timmy's personal genies constantly do their best to interpret both Timmy's wishes and his best interests.
Like a lot of overpowered characters, the Odd Parents are really only limited by their dim wits and their loyalty to Timmy. Timmy's bad at making wishes, of course, but it's really the couple's misunderstanding of mortals and their limited realities that keeps them from permanently fixing all of the kid's problems.
2 Thundarr Cut Through All Obstacles
Thundarr The Barbarian
Hanna-Barbara's Thundarr The Barbarian was an interesting mash-up of Conan, Star Wars, and Mad Max. Along with his friends Princess Ariel (no relation) and Ookla the Wookie Mok, Thundarr had the power to magically find a solution to any problem in roughly 20 minutes.
This was pretty common for animated superheroes in Thundarr's era, however. What made him unstoppable was his Sunsword. The weapon could slice through almost anything and, while Thundarr lived in a world of "science and sorcery," the Sunsword canceled out both readily. A weapon with no clear limits is always overpowered.
1 Go-Go Gadget Deus Ex Machina
Inspector Gadget
Inspector Gadget doesn't seem overpowered on the surface and the fact is he hardly ever managed to save the day. However, as the series wore on, it became clear that Gadget was his world's only superhuman. A cyborg loaded up with every possible device, he was held back by his innate incompetence but not much else.
Realistically, though, even Gadget's clumsiness became a kind of superpower. Like Marvel's antihero Domino, probability always seemed to distort around him. Stumbling and falling wouldn't just mean he evaded a trap, it usually meant he destroyed the nefarious Dr. Claw's scheme simultaneously. It's hard to say if this would have worked in his favor if he'd learned how to use his abilities, but it's clear he was overpowered if also undertrained.