Radish Cure

Somebody wants something (s)he shouldn't have. Knowing this, somebody else responds by giving it to her, to the point where she can't stand it anymore. An Aesop is had by all.

This is named for a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle story in which this is prescribed to a little girl who hates taking baths. Her family lets her go without a bath for quite some time (maybe a week, but don't think about it too hard). At one point, the dirt on her hands is thick enough that her parents plant radish seeds there. In a day or two, when the girl sees them, a Freak-Out ensues and she clamors for a bath shower, and never wants to go bathless again.

This seems particularly common in kids' stories where the moral is "when your parents don't give you what you want, they really do know best."

Compare Be Careful What You Wish For, Exact Words. Also definitely Truth in Television, as many a parent has managed to give his beer-craving teenage son a disgustingly warm beer.

Examples of Radish Cure include:

Anime and Manga

• See Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei, when Nozomu and Kafuka board up Komori, plus probably some others.

Comic Books

• In one Sandman story, this is Dream's punishment for an author who kept a Muse captive.

You say you need the ideas? Then you shall have them.
Ideas in abundance.

• Subverted in a classic Charles Addams cartoon, which shows a young boy – perhaps five years old – sitting in an armchair, contentedly puffing smoke rings from a huge, ornate meerschaum pipe. Says the child’s disgruntled mother to a sheepish father: “So much for ‘Oh, let’s let him have a puff; he’ll be so sick he’ll never want to try it again!’”

Film

• In Brewster's Millions, a recently-deceased relative of the title character employs this trope in his will: Montgomery Brewster must spend $30 million within 30 days, in order to get his actual inheritance of $300 million. There are several catches, though: at month's end, he's not allowed to own any assets of any kind, he can't simply give money and/or valuables away (beyond the $1.5 million he's allowed to donate to charity, that is), he mustn't destroy anything that's inherently valuable, and the final catch that makes this Radish Cure truly work in the end--during the 30 day period, he's not allowed to tell anyone else why he's spending his $30 million so foolishly.
  • In the 1985 movie, the relative cites this trope as his motivation behind the will in the first place, since his father used the typical "letting your kid smoke... a whole heap of smokes all at once" tactic to prevent him from ever wanting to smoke.

Literature

• Named for the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle example. In fact, all of the early Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories had this basic form, not just the Radish Cure one. The plot outline changed a little after the author added magic powers to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's repertoire.
  • For example, the Whisper Sticks - sweet candy canes given to two little girls who whisper incessantly, so that they can't do anything but whisper and end up in a huge fight.
• Bread And Jam For Frances is right up there with Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle as the classic example of this trope.
• Subverted in Roald Dahl's Matilda, where the evil Trunchbull forces a dessert-stealing child to eat a monster cake in a single sitting—he does get sick, but manages to finish it and becomes a hero figure for the school. Hooray, strange Dahlish morality fables!
  • Arguably, this could be Wonka's real thoughts behind the children meeting their various fates. They all were taken out of running when they went to steal or use something that clearly wasn't safe but they still wanted. In both movie adaptations, Wonka seems decidedly unconcerned with rescuing or stopping the kids, so yeah.
• One of Jean de la Fontaine's Tales In Verse has a Family-Unfriendly Aesop version. A Casanova aristocrat sleeps with the wife of his servant and to prove to the servant that monogamy is impossible, serves him eel pie daily. This is at first a delicacy, but soon becomes unbearable.
• Done in The Great Brain is Back when Tom, in experiment to find out why men smoke, gets caught smoking a cigarette in the barn. Papa tells him he may not smoke cigarettes outside, but he's free to have a pipe or cigar in the house anytime. Tom lasts about a few minutes before turning green, and when his girlfriend says she doesn't like the smell anyway, he concludes that men smoke in order to repel women.
• Miss Wilder tries to use it in Little Town on the Prairie. She's mainly doing it to spite Laura, since she picks on Carrie and and another girl for unconsciously rocking their seat, while other kids are purposely throwing things and talking out loud. Laura has a Crowning Moment of Awesome when, after Miss Wilder makes sickly Carrie keep rocking the seat alone, she proceeds to tell Miss Wilder she'll rock it and does so so loudly no one can hear anything else.
• In Otis Spofford by Beverly Cleary, the title character's teacher has him make spitballs exclusively as punishment for shooting them. Cleary also includes a story in her autobiography of some boys who chewed garlic in class. The principal finally bought a dollar's worth of garlic—this was in the 1930s—and had them chew it all.
• There's a children's book called The Chocolate Touch based on the legend of King Midas where a boy who eats too much candy unwittingly buys a magic chocolate from ~The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday~. After he eats it, everything he puts into his mouth turns to chocolate, making him thirsty and sick and ruining some possessions, like his trumpet. Finally he accidentally turns his mother into a chocolate statue by kissing her on the cheek, runs back to the shop's proprietor and tells him he's learned the error of his ways, and is allowed a Reset Button.
• Another children's book, Strega Nona, is a Sorcerer's Apprentice Plot starring the titular grandmotherly witch and her magic pot that produces pasta on command. The Radish Cure comes in at the end: Big Anthony's punishment for having flooded the entire village with pasta ... is having to eat all of it.

Live Action TV

• Inverted in The Sarah Silverman Program - After being offered Tab by his boyfriend (who insists he at least try it once), Steve pretends to become obsessed with it. But, the boyfriend starts offering him more and more of it, turning it into an Escalating War.
• Loren does this on an episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman when a boy keeps stealing his cigars. He finally tells the boy he can have them- as long as he smokes them all in the store, in one sitting.
• Cliff and Claire do it on The Cosby Show when Rudy complains about not being allowed to stay up late, choose her own clothes, etc. They agree to let her stay up as late as she likes.
• In an early episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Malcolm swears at his father, who is deeply hurt, and considers that it's hard to punish a child for swearing - 'if it was smoking I'd have him go through the whole pack until he was gasping for air'. This gives him an idea. Later, he hands Malcolm a long list of terms of abuse, and asks Malcolm to read everything on the list to 'the man who held you in his arms the moment you were born'. Malcolm gives up somewhere in the middle, but when Hal attempts to let him off, he quickly exclaims that he can finish the whole list. He does.
• In one episode of MASH, Father Mulcahy cures a dog of its liquor stealing habits by giving the dog all the whiskey it can drink. One massive hangover later, and the dog refused to touch alcohol ever again.

Mythology

• The legend of King Midas and his golden touch.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin's mom in Calvin and Hobbes lets Calvin smoke a cigarette his grandpa left behind. Calvin soon develops a distaste for smoking.
  • Well, he certainly didn't enjoy it, but the Aesop he learned was not to trust his mother.

Radio

• There is a play about a German man who worked at a radio station and had to edit a four-hour speech by Adolf Hitler (to decide which three minutes to cut). He had to listen to the speech three times to make the decision, and as he said, before he started this work, he was a Nazi, but after hearing it the third time, he wasn't a Nazi anymore.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • Homer Simpson had a literal Ironic Hell version of this, which was subverted as he was Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth.
  • They also had an episode where Bart was storing ten thousand cartons of cigarettes for the mob, and Homer threatens to make Bart smoke each and every one of them.
• King of the Hill: Hank Hill made Bobby smoke a whole carton of cigarettes. It only turned Bobby into an addict. Oh, and it rekindled Hank's own cigarette addiction as well.
  • In their addiction support group, Bobby mentions that he's been an addict since his dad "let" him smoke a whole carton, to horrified reactions. Hank tries to correct him, in that he "made" him smoke them (neglecting to mention it was a punishment for smoking at all), to even more horrified reactions.
  • While attempting to use the Radish Cure on Bobby, Hank even bothered to correct him on how to hold the cigarette, stating there's a right way to do everything, even wrong things.
• Used in an old Disney cartoon, where Donald Duck catches Huey, Dewie and Louie with a carton of cigars, and makes them smoke them all—only to find out they were a gift for him.
• A second season episode of Heathcliff and The Catillac Cats series involved a (court-ordered) attempt to get Heathcliff to stop stealing fish from the fish store using this method (otherwise, he would have to go to jail). It ends up working too well...

Grandpa Nutmeg: Heathcliff not only doesn't want to eat fish, he can't even stand to hear the word fish.