Media Research Failure/Western Animation

Cartoons are just for kids. No one's going to care if we don't fact-check this, right?

"Snooper: Oh, no! Not "Stop That Pigeon"-type cartoons! Blabber: Our brains will turn to mush!"
 * In one of Jeff Lenberg's animation books, he begins talking about the Peanuts film Snoopy, Come Home, and says the plot of the movie is Snoopy being depressed from there being to many "No Dogs Allowed" signs, and Snoopy decides to commit suicide. Um....
 * That's not the only error in Lenberg's book. In the Wacky Races entry, he lists the General as a character. There was no General as a recurring character (as he was on the spinoff, albeit heard and not seen), just Private Meekley and Sgt. Blast. Also: Help! It's That Hair Bear Bunch! reputedly went into syndication after its CBS run under the title "The Yo-Yo Bears" (its working title). The show remained off the air until 1984 when USA cable ran it in repeats.
 * The desperation-born sweat from reporters trying to figure out just what the hell Aqua Teen Hunger Force is was enough to smudge the pages. Most of them came up with variations on "show about anthropomorphic food detective superheroes".
 * Even TV Guide's description of the show is "food items fight crime". You try explaining it.
 * Well, that was the original premise of the show. For about one episode -- the whole reason the first episode portrayed them as a crime fighting team was because the creators couldn't think of a way to explain what the show really was in any way that would get it green-lighted.
 * It was actually stated in the show on at least one occasion: in the episode "Robositter", Shake refers to them as "detectives" (to which Frylock replies, "We haven't actually detected anything in three years").
 * Small potatoes given some of the other examples here, but Family Guy is sometimes called "The Family Guy".
 * Within Family Guy, Peter thinks Scrubs is a character's name. Also Black Scrubs.
 * Agent Booth called it this on an episode of Bones, which was a little odd since it was the episode that featured a well-publicized Intercontinuity Crossover appearance by Stewie.
 * Even odder -- Stewie was a manifestation of his subconscious, indicating that he must be at least a moderate viewer of the show for it to be on his mind. Yet he still gets the title wrong!
 * Time Warner Cable descriptions of Family Guy sometimes gives the vague description "nihilistic animated antics of the grousing Griffins."
 * The Polish video game magazine Secret Service, issue April, 1998. In one article, the author claimed that Wacky Races is a crossover show where "Hanna-Barbera characters such as Yogi, Huckleberry and the Addams family" do racing. Either the author didn't see even one episode of the show, or (more likely) he has seen it, but mistook Blubber Bear for Yogi Bear and the Gruesome Twosome for the Addamses. Or maybe he just got it confused with Fender Bender 500.
 * Speaking of Wacky Races, Jerry Beck, a renowned animation historian, claims in his book The Hanna-Barbera Treasury that The Perils of Penelope Pitstop "featured the Ant Hill Mob as her chief rival", when everybody knows that they were in fact her protectors on the show.
 * Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines was referred to as "Stop That Pigeon" (its theme and original working name) so frequently that Yogi's Treasure Hunt lampshades it. In the episode "Yogi's Heroes," Dick and Muttley capture Snooper and Blabber and torture them by making them watch old Dastardly & Muttley cartoons.

""The Teen Titans are a motley crew of five teenagers, each one gifted with a superpower to put to good use. Robin the Boy Wonder is the default leader of the troupe, which roams the planet to protect it from those who aim to harm it and its citizens. But on their days off, they still have to deal with the typical problems that plague teenagers, such as making good grades and forming friendships at school!""
 * The Canadian TV provider Bell ExpressVu used to describe the Venture Bros as, "Two teens live as though it is the 1960's even though they are 21st century teens!" The only good thing about this description is that the awkwardness of the sentence structure distracts you from the head-scratching description.
 * That's probably because "If Arthur Schopenhauer had written Jonny Quest" wouldn't make sense to most of the viewing public.
 * Once, Conan O'Brien made a reference to how "Avadar" Aang and his bison Appa (pronounced like Apple with an a on the end) had to break out of an iceberg to save the world. Then he compared it to Sarah Palin breaking out of Alaska.
 * It's rare that you have a reviewer who is tasked exclusively with watching a show fail completely. IGN's Avatar: The Last Airbender reviewer Tory Ireland Mell actually did fail that badly. Her legendarily bad, unprofessionally written, spoiler filled, completely ignorant review of the season 3 episodes was so bad that comments on the reviews lack of skill forced her to watch several episodes before the finale, the review of which still had all of the same issues, only more glaringly magnified, as it covered the 2 hour finale. In highlighting the Critical Research Failure, we find that this reviewer:
 * 1) Didn't watch the first episodes, otherwise she'd know Katara was the only Waterbender in her family.
 * 2) Completely missed the episode covering Blood Bending.
 * 3) Has no idea that the show develops other characters regularly.
 * 4) Has never seen Zuko vulnerable before (so... she has never seen seasons 2 or 3)
 * Another reviewer claimed: "He's supposedly the only one skilled in manipulating all of nature's basic elements. But he isn't. A rival shares his powers."
 * Newspaper articles on the upcoming movie adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, based on the popular "anime." Jesse McCartney says it was "explosively huge in Asia." It is also not a good sign when the director of the film adaptation refers to Avatar as an "anime"...
 * The movie will star the eeeeeeeevil Prince Zucko, no less. The news anchor in that same video describes the show's plot as involving "the epic battle between the Fire and Air Nations." Air "nation"?
 * On the anime part, it has been released in parts of Asia but isn't nearly as popular there.
 * The movie itself can be an example of this, M. Night said he was interested in the show because his daughter loves it. Apparently he only saw season 2 and up, because the movie ended up being widely described as quite bad and the characters derailed.
 * Much of the print material based on Animaniacs (such as the comic books) used the show's name when directly referring to Yakko, Wakko and Dot, who were always called the Warners and never the Animaniacs in the show. Even some Kids' WB! spots (such as the preview special Welcome Home, Animaniacs!) made this mistake.
 * It was on Jeopardy!, too. The answer was "On the Warner Bros. lot tour you can see the water tower that this cartoon trio calls home." The contestant responded "Who are The Warner Brothers and Warner Sister?" He lost. They gave it back to him after the commercial, with Alex professing that he hadn't known that; he learns something new every day.
 * Another Kids' WB! thing -- in a promo for "Crazy Takes" ("bloopers") a scene from Jackie Chan Adventures showed Ratso wearing a Hsi Wu mask, but an announcer said, "Ratso, that's not your spot! That's the demon sorceror His Wu's spot!"
 * All of which might've been averted by using hanyu pinyin instead of Wade-Giles (though "Xi Wu" is no easier to pronounce—the X represents a sound very few Indo-European languages have—"Xi" is less likely to be mistaken for "his").
 * The original VHS cover of It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown stated that Charlie Brown was trying to buy a present for the little red-haired girl, when in the actual special, it was in fact for a completely different character named Peggy Jean. This was most likely caused by the fact that the special depicted Peggy Jean as a redhead rather than a brunette as she was in the strip.
 * In an animation encyclopedia's entry on The Raccoons, Cyril Sneer is called a "pink wolf." (A sidenote oddly then mentions that he "looks like an aardvark." Well duh!)
 * An issue of Weekend magazine said that, in The Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror X, Maggie was the daughter of Kang and Kodos rather than Kang and Marge.
 * On the subject of The Simpsons, a recent book about the show was full of little mistakes that most fans would have known better than to print:
 * Smithers' first name is Waylon but listed as Wayland in the book.
 * The book claims Maggie killed a man. Maggie shot a man, but Mr. Burns is still alive.
 * Marge's sister Patty is gay, not Selma as stated in the book.
 * There's an alternative ending to the first Road Runner cartoon that the Latin American press is correcaminos raving about, claiming that the ending was funded by a Japanese millionare who was tired of the Coyote always being the Butt Monkey. The actual footage leaves a lot to be desired. The framerate is obviously a drop from the real footage, the animation is basically a cut-and-paste of the Road Runner and Coyote's poses rearranged and assembled, and there's gratuitous use of O Fortuna. But the kicker has to be the Coyote holding up a sign with the name of the new ending's creator on it for absolutely no reason. How the news media have not picked up on these is inexplicable.
 * Translation of a Swedish TV-guide's blurb about Danny Phantom: "In the past Danny was a shy child who was hardly noticed. But suddenly one afternoon, when Danny unfortunately burned down his parents' lab, he became a super hero." Er, at least they got the name right?
 * Let's take a trip back to the early-to-mid 1990s, when Moral Guardians were up in arms about Beavis and Butthead. Not only did South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings infamously refer to them as "Buffcoat and Beaver" (later referenced on the show), the three-part documentary about the series ("Taint Of Greatness") revealed some parents thought there was an episode where the boys set a cat on fire. One can only assume one mother caught a glimpse of the episode where they paint Mr. Anderson's cat and set his hedges on fire, completely mis-saw what happened, and told her friends about it.
 * The South Park Studios synopsis for "City Sushi" claims that "The boys want to help Butters find out what's really happening to him", but the main four boys don't do anything in this episode; this episode focused solely on Butters. This is especially damning because South Park Studios is the official website for the show and its creators. Whoops.
 * Sky ( UK satellite TV provider) currently claims that Flapjack was 'raised in a bubble'...right. This probably had root in an understandable typo: he was raise by a whale named Bubbie. Someone probably just misread "raised by Bubbie" as "bubble" and went from there.
 * A Mexican film magazine did a report about San Diego Comic-Con, which, apart from treating the comic geeks attending it with various levels of contempt got a picture of two girls cosplaying with this caption "80s fever: Mario Bros. princess, is still in fashion". The movie the girls in the picture were actually cosplaying... Enchanted -- which at the time had not even been out of theatres a year. The main character's name in the film is Giselle, and the princess from the Super Mario is Princess Peach.
 * Netflix is pretty bad about this, especially when it comes to animated films and TV programs (see also the Anime example).


 * Really funny and sad, since there was never a single episode that showed the characters outside of their secret identities or at school.

""An article on Monday about Jack Robinson and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children's TV show "My Little Pony" that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.""
 * Not to mention that Robin is just a well trained human. So much for "each one gifted with a superpower".
 * Besides blowing things way out of proportion in regards to Disney's efforts to revamp Mickey via Epic Mickey, this New Yorker article calls Porky Pig a Disney character even though he's a character created by Warner Bros. Cartoons.
 * A box of SpongeBob SquarePants-themed fruit snacks claims that Squidward plays the accordion. He plays the clarinet.
 * This review of a SpongeBob video game calls Sandy a chipmunk and Mr. Krabs the mayor of Bikini Bottom - respectively, they're actually a regular squirrel and the proprietor of the Krusty Krab restaurant. On a somewhat less blatant note, it indirectly calls Squidward a squid (he's actually an octopus).
 * The box for Kim Possible: A Sitch In Time describes a plan by "Shego and her evil henchmen". Though she's Kim's Evil Counterpart and nemesis and, Shego is normally the sidekick of Kim's Arch Enemy Dr. Drakken. Also, Drakken is even dismissive towards her in a way he usually isn't in the series.
 * Some sources misspell the title as A Stitch In Time, apparently unfamiliar with Kim's catchphrase.
 * This Allmovie.com summary of the Phineas and Ferb episode "Lawn Gnome Beach Party of Terror!" calls the stepbrother main characters "twins." Not to mention, the majority of that author's other summaries for the show just glisten with this trope, including misspelling Doofenshmirtz's name, calling the boys' band a Boy Band, and claiming that anyone who sings "Happy Birthday" to Doof will become hypnotized. Nice one.
 * That last bit was probably the writer's misinterpretation of the thumb-wrestling episode, where it actually is Doofenshmirtz's birthday and he invents a hypnosis machine inator.
 * "Doofenschmirtz" is an incredibly common misspelling, so much so that it actually appears in the official Disney encyclopedia.
 * Disney XD in the UK seemingly can't decide whether Phineas and Ferb are brothers or best friends.
 * DVD Verdict's review of Bolt calls it the first computer animated movie in the Disney Animated Canon, even though two CGI movies immediately preceded it, and Disney produced a CGI/live-action hybrid even earlier. Becomes even more critical by the fact the body of the review includes a link to an article about Disney's actual first all-CGI movie, Chicken Little.
 * The Disney XD website for Jimmy Two-Shoes refers to Lucius as the mayor of Miseryville. This is an understandable mistake, however, as Misery Inc runs the town anyway.
 * IGN's review of the Lady and the Tramp Platinum Edition DVD lists that the DVD contains two versions of the film: one made in CinemaScope, and one with characters and details re-arranged for Academy ratio (which are shaped like a square), offering "a sort of unofficial history lesson for folks who are interested in cinema's technological history." However, if he read the back cover more carefully, he would have noticed the DVD actually contains Lady and the Tramp in CinemaScope --its original, unedited format-- and Pan and Scan. Instead of including the specially-modified version, Disney simply cropped the picture for people who can't tolerate black bars on 4:3 TVs. So much for learning about technological history.
 * Take a look at Amazon.com's editorial review for the House of Mouse Christmas DVD, provided by Tami Horiuchi. It contains this statement: "Mickey tries to brighten Donald's glum mood by screening one of his favorite Christmas stories, Mickey's Christmas Carol. When Donald sees himself as Scrooge (literally)..." Anyone who has actually seen Mickey's Christmas Carol can immediately tell what's wrong with that sentence (it's Scrooge McDuck who's playing Scrooge, not Donald!).
 * Ms. Magazine posted an utter absurdity of an article about My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, based entirely on early artwork from the show and the very first version of the official website, that was... let's just give you the title: "My Little Homophobic, Racist, Smarts-Shaming Pony". Show runner Lauren Faust later posted a rebuttal that is basically the text equivalent of patting the Ms. writer on the back and saying, "There, there..."
 * The Hub's facebook page called Rainbow's Shadowbolt costume a Wonderbolt costume. It's their own show!
 * A local news segment called In Living Glover in St. Louis has claimed that the "Bronies" are man-children who love the show so much that they collect disability payments so they can stay home and watch the show all day.
 * In general, a lot of news articles about bronies define them exclusively as male, when there are in fact a number of older female fans of the show who also call themselves bronies. It is sort of understandable, given the fact that "brony" has the word "bro" in it, but still...
 * "If you're not 7, there's a good chance that you are unaware of the latest 'My Little Pony' re-boot". Brought to you by the Cirno News Network
 * Averted in one case that was immediately heralded "The Best New York Times Correction Ever"

"Bobby: And in the book that is called 'Justice of the Unicorns'.""
 * The Daily Mail had a pop at reporting on the Derpy Incident. The sub-headline of the article refers to the show's Periphery Demographic as "Brownies."
 * That smacks more of spell-checkitis than actual ignorance—remember, most spell-checkers think Dystopia is digestive distress.
 * This Cracked.com article states that Duke Igthorn from Adventures of the Gummi Bears wiped the Gummis out single handedly and reduced their number to the main six. It's firmy established that the Gummis were forced underground long before the series began, to the point where they're considered myth, and that Igthorn didn't discover them until the first episode.
 * It also claims Igthorn probably earned his rank in (a grotesquely ahistorical caricature of medieval) military service, but he's actually the king's younger brother. (Which means all those times he's threatened to murder or torture the princess would involve not just, well, murdering or torturing a c. 12-year-old girl, but also murdering or torturing his own c. 12-year-old niece).
 * The official Hungarian description to Bionicle 3: Web of Shadows claimed that the villainous pair, Roodaka and Sidorak, are Makuta. While the name Makuta does refer to a whole race of beings, within the context of the movie, there was only one Makuta, with Roodaka and Sidorak being his servants. In the defense of whoever wrote or mistranslated the description, though, the movie leaves a lot of story-points horribly vague, so watching it wouldn't have helped much.
 * German TV programs advertise Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Duel of the Droids" as Count Dooku having a duel with Asajj Ventress and giving her the mission to kill Anakin Skywalker. In reality this is a complete summary of a 3-minute episode from Star Wars: Clone Wars. Such summaries exist for episode 1 and 4 to 8. One wonders how they could do a false summary, two correct ones and they a bunch of false ones again.
 * The Sky TV guide's summary for El Tigre claims that El Tigre is Manny's secret identity. Anyone who actually watched the show would know that it's not a secret.
 * One of the cards in the Disney version of Trivial Pursuit shows a picture of Disney's Cinderella losing her slipper shortly after marrying Prince Charming, and asks what time it was when the scene occurred. The card says the scene occurred at midnight, even though Cinderella actually got married at 12 noon. Apparently, someone mistook this for a picture of the ball.
 * For some reason, people tend to confuse Dumb Donald from Fat Albert for Mush Mouth, a mistake that was once made in a Saturday Night Live sketch as well a scene in Boondock Saints.
 * Nick Jr., in its advertising for Wonder Pets, once referred to Linny as a hamster. Linny is a guinea pig and this error has itself been Lampshaded on the television program itself. This sort of mistake isn't uncommon for eBay listings of merchandise of this character either -- a couple listings even refer to her as a hedgehog.
 * An in-show example in King of the Hill. Where Bobby is interested in reading a fantasy action book in "Full Metal Dust Jacket", Hank takes it away from him because he believes it is an effeminate book due to the main character on the cover is a woman and the line he read out of context was about dandelions and someone crafting her breast plate.
 * It also didn't help that Bobby has picked out effeminate things in the past. Also the random quotes he would take out of the book seriously did not help his case.


 * On the Sky TV guide, one episode of American Dad is called "Meter Maid" instead of the actual pun title "Meter Made".
 * This reviewer constantly calls Kick Buttowski's mother Denise instead of Honey, even in his review of the episode where her name is revealed.
 * On a few TV listings for Recess, Miss Finster is described as being the gang's fourth grade teacher. She's actually only the monitor for recess and lunch (and later becomes their fifth grade teacher), while Miss Grotke's their fourth grade teacher. Considering that the latter doesn't appear often in promotional material, this mistake had to be made sooner or later.
 * A few summaries for the series say that T.J. is "the brains" of the group. In the show, he's really only this when it comes to his schemes. Otherwise...not exactly.
 * Walmart's online listing for Recess: School's Out lists it as Recess: The Movie: School's Out
 * On Amazon.com's listing of Invader Zim episodes, three titles are mislabeled:
 * "GIR Goes Crazy and Stuff" became "Gir's Gone Crazy and Stuff".
 * "The Sad, Sad Tale of Chickenfoot" became "The Sad, Sad Story of Chickenfoot".
 * "Battle of the Planets" became "Battle of the Planets of Doom".