Accidentally Correct Writing / Western Animation

---

Accidentally-Correct Writing in Western Animation.

---

Shows with their own pages:

• The Simpsons

Individual examples:

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "Sorry, Wrong Era", Jimmy needs a diamond to use as a catalyst for a Bamboo Technology time travel remote, since he's stuck in prehistoric times with Sheen and Carl. Finding a diamond proves easy; the problem is that it's about the size of a hill, which obviously makes it too big to use. So how does he get a small enough diamond out of that? By baiting a tyrannosaurus rex into charging into it head-first, of course. This isn't as unrealistic a solution as it seems on the face of it. Diamond is the hardest natural substance on earth, sure, but one thing most people don't know is that it's also brittle enough to shatter. Most of the "science" on the show is of the jokey It Runs on Nonsensoleum kind, so the writers probably didn't know this either—and just to underline it even further, the show uses the justification that "a T-rex's skull is as hard as steel", which definitely isn't true.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Money", Richard rations that Swiss cheese is healthier than regular cheese because it has holes in it. Swiss is indeed one of the healthiest types of cheese due to its relatively low fat and sodium contents and high levels of micronutrients.
• American Dad!:
  • An episode says that George Washington Carver didn't invent peanut butter and that the US government had credited him with the discovery in order to help ease race relations after the The American Civil War. In reality, George Washington Carver actually did not invent peanut butter. Peanut butter actually dates back to the Aztecs and Incas, and the first patent was issued to Marcellus Gilmore Edson in 1884. Carver did invent a lot of peanut products, but his main accomplishment was his environmentalist efforts and creating various techniques to prevent soil depletion.
  • The episode "Spelling Bee My Baby" has Steve and Akiko compete in a spelling bee, only for neither of them to want to win so they keep deliberately misspelling words. By the end Akiko is asked to spell "a" and replies with "seven". While a joke, the numeral 7 is actually sometimes used as a letter to represent the glottal stop, a sound made by closing off the very backmost part of your mouth and can be found before syllables that start with a vowel (though almost nobody is aware they're doing it). Thus, Akiko technically spelled the first part of the word correctly.
• The "Yakko's World" song from Animaniacs lists Palestine as a "nation". While it was not fully recognized as a nation in 1993, when the song aired, it has since been recognized by more than one hundred sovereign states and became an observer state of the UN in 2012, fulfilling the de facto requirements of being a "country".
• In the Arthur episode "Binky Goes Nuts" Jenna mentions she's allergic to milk. Jenna is a cat. Cats are actually lactose intolerant (as are any mammal after infancy) and giving them milk will cause them digestive upset. In another episode Francine's cat Nemo is mentioned to not be allowed to be given milk as well.
• An offhand joke in Batman: The Brave and the Bold has Plastic Man claim to be "as patriotic as Benedict Arnold". While it's obviously a joke on how the guy has really crappy historical knowledge, Benedict Arnold actually was an incredibly patriotic sort for much of his life, and most historians agree that him turning was a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal. Part of the reason his betrayal was so shocking was that the guy had accomplished a lot in his career and risked his life on many occasions for the rebellion.
• In the third season premiere of Beast Wars, Optimus Primal declares, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings!" while carrying Optimus Prime's spark. According to Bob Forward, who wrote the episode, he didn't know the line's original context, but had picked it up while browsing Usenet's Transformers boards, which threw it around pretty regularly, and assumed it was important. As it turned out, it was the motto on Optimus Prime's original bio, meaning it made perfect sense for Primal to quote it in that moment.
• An eerie example of this with Bob's Burgers: In the episode "I Get a Psychic Out of You", Linda, convinced that she has psychic powers, tells her friend Gretchen to stay away from trains on her trip to Philadelphia. In Real Life about a year after the episode aired, an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, resulting in several deaths.
• BoJack Horseman:
  • A final season episode has Princess Carolyn discussing an all-female reboot of 12 Angry Men, clearly meant as a gag, but theatre productions with all-woman or mixed-gender juries and altered titles to match are not particularly uncommon.
  • Todd's idea of a "clown dentist" business doesn't seem so crazy when you know that there had been a real Mexican dentist-turned-entertainer by the name of Cepillín.
• The Cow and Chicken episode "Chicken in the Bathroom" had Cow desperately needing to relieve her udder. While this is treated as Potty Emergency, cows actually do find relief in getting milked.
• An episode of The Critic in 1994 featured a musical adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The writers and many others were quite surprised when Disney made an actual Animated Musical of the same book two years later.
  • Also, The first episode with this iconic line we left Kevin home alone and he only 23 predicted the fifth installment of Home Alone along with the Google Assistant commercial in 2018.
• Family Guy:
  • One episode had a Cutaway Gag of a cow really enjoying getting milked. This is actually true for cows and other dairy animals as it relieves pressure on their udders, and can sometimes be quite erotic to them as well.
  • In "We Love You, Conrad", which first aired in May 2009, Stewie jokes to Brian that "Bruce Jenner is a woman. An elegant Dutch woman." In another episode, Bruce is portrayed all-femmed up and using a boa to entertain a group of Navy sailors a la Cher in her "Turn Back Time" video. Jenner would then come out as a trans woman in April 2015.
  • One episode has a Cutaway Gag at a concentration camp where a prisoner jokingly says to a guard, "I don't suppose it would help to say I have a note from my doctor," in the Holocaust memoir "Man's Search for Meaning" the author, Viktor Frankl, mentions that some prisoners actually did try to use that very same joke with the guards, and it actually did ease the tension sometimes. Gallows Humor is a powerful tool that helped a lot of Holocaust survivor avoid dying from despair.
• Futurama:
  • The episode "The Cyber House Rules" features the line, "This jigsaw of a pacifier factory makes me want to have children with you even more." Originally the line was "This jigsaw of a barn makes me want to have children with you even more." By coincidence, the Swedish word for children is barn, a cognate of the archaic English "bairn" when means "children" (and found in the Scots language). "Bairn" is etymologically related to "born". Maybe the joke was cut because it was esoteric, even for a show that often has jokes about science and math that no one would get unless they were college or grad school-educated. The Scottish terrier from Lady and the Tramp refers to the new baby as a "wee bairn", so obscure but not unknown.
  • "A Pharaoh to Remember" features a brief gag where we see what look like a pair of modern-looking architects on an Ancient Egypt-themed planet looking over the plans for a new statue while Bender whips them. The whole gag is obviously contrasting the idea of modern, professional architects with the slave-fueled primitivism that we see in the rest of the episode and Egypt-related pop culture in general, but it's honestly a lot more accurate to how large Egyptian monuments were actually built. As far as modern Egyptologists can discern, the construction of pyramids really did involve a lot of skilled workers and professional architects, and those architects were held in very high regard.
  • In "T: The Terrestrial", Leela informs Bender that, contrary to his expectations, the Planet Express ship has no cloaking devices or any stealth technology that could get them past a blockade (save for a can of spray paint). The intended joke is that the Planet Express is ridiculously poorly equipped, but Leela is actually right: Stealth in Space actually is impossible.
  • The running joke of Hermes saying a rhythm with the format "Sweet X of Y!" whenever he is surprised ("Sweet Guinea pig of Winnipeg!", "Sweet gorilla of Manila!", etc.) once came as "Sweet squid of Madrid!" Well, despite Madrid being nowhere near the sea there is, in fact, a recipe for Madrid-style calamari, and calamari sandwich is a traditional street food in Madrid.
• The 2014 FIFA World Cup was accompanied by a German parody show called Hoeggschde Konzentration. The episode right before Germany's semi-final match against Brazil had the Germans completely ridicule their opponents, suggesting they'd win by the absurd margin of 6-0. The writers certainly didn't expect them to win 7-1 in Real Life.
• In the I Am Weasel episode "Time Weasel, I.R. Baboon refers to dinosaurs as "big chickens". It's now scientific consensus that birds are not just descended from dinosaurs but dinosaurs themselves.
• Infinity Train: In "The Crystal Car", Tulip mentions a movie about Star-Crossed Lovers on the Hindenburg, which is clearly a parody of Titanic. Believe it or not, such a movie exists, and (strangely enough) wasn't created as a parody of the James Cameron film.
• A similar joke to the Jimmy Neutron example occurs in an episode of Johnny Bravo: a thief is trying to steal the world's largest cubic zircon, but when she tries to cut the glass case with a small buzzsaw the blade dulls since the case is actually made out of diamond. She then smashes Johnny's head into the case and it breaks. Not only is this exactly what would happen in real life (diamond is extremely hard, and therefore resistant to cutting, but is also brittle and will shatter if hit hard enough), the way the case shatters is pretty accurate too (it doesn't break into shards like glass, but seems to crumble to dust: when diamond shatters it breaks along crystal planes into multiple tiny diamonds rather than shattering like glass).
• In King of the Hill, Peggy once claims that, "Swiss cheese is not Mexican, it is American." The kind of Swiss cheese she's most likely talking about, which is sold in American stores labeled simply "Swiss cheese," is an American recipe that's just based (and quite loosely) on a Swiss one—Emmentaler, to be specific.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Near the end of Falling Hare, as the plane is rapidly plummeting to the ground, Bugs makes loud, rapid screams of panic. That apparently originated as a studio in-joke, but real-life rabbits really do scream rapidly when they're distressed. And it's not so much "goofy shouting" as "blood-curdling shrieking".
  • In the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner short "Beep, Beep", the Road Runner mocks the Coyote for offering him a glass of water. Roadrunners actually do not need to drink water, as it comes from their diet.
• My Little Pony 'n Friends has a predominantly female cast, with the males traveling together and only coming back home once a year. Of course, this because it is a show marketed to girls, but in real life groups of horses are almost all female with sometimes a 'herd stallion'. In contrast, Generation 4 has the most male characters and happens to have had the most research put into it.
• Pinky and the Brain: In one episode, the Brain tries to tell a 'scary' campfire story to a group of camp kids, the joke being that he ends up boring them instead with a bunch of scientific and mathematical jargon that they don't understand. However, the punchline of his story, which involved a scientist inadvertently discovering a way to quickly calculate extremely large prime numbers, would actually have pretty terrifying implications in real life, as such an algorithm could be used to break most modern data encryption methods, making hacking, identity theft, and other cyber crimes incredibly easy, as there would be no effective way to protect your data.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • Perry the platypus makes a strange growling sound by chattering his teeth. It turns out platypuses really do make such a noise, though they don't make it by chattering (adult platypuses don't have teeth, after all).
  • Perry the platypus is teal green with a yellow bill, rather than brown, because the character designer thought it looked cool. Turns out, platypi are biofluorescent, and their fur glows green under ultraviolet light.
  • One of Dr. Doofenshmirtz's earliest inventions, the Magnetism Magnif-inator, uses a specially-crafted funnel to gather a magnet's magnetic field, extending and directing it over long distances. Though greatly exaggerated in the show, this method of preserving a magnetic field's power was discovered to be completely accurate several years later, by physicists who used a tube made of superconducting and ferromagnetic materials to pull off the same trick. Lasers that create powerful magnetic fields would also become a thing years after the show's conclusion.
  • As in the episode "Day of the Living Gelatin", it's possible to make a pool full of gelatin to lay on and to slide on, although it can't be used as a trampoline-like in the episode.
  • A running gag is that whenever the boys would have to drive motor vehicles, they drive by remote control, reasoning that RC cars don't need a driver's license. In real life, there are full-size RC cars, trucks, and other vehicles, mainly used for theme parks, showcasing, and other purposes—children using them legally is a whole 'nother story.
• Ready Jet Go!: In "Moon Circus", when Mindy suggests that Edmonton, Alberta would have lower gravity, she is technically right. Boxwood Terrace is located in the state of Washington, which has a mean elevation of 520 meters, while Edmonton has an elevation of 671 meters. These extra meters put Earth further away from the Earth's center of mass, meaning you would experience less gravity there. Obviously not as reduced as the moon (since it has an elevation of 384,402,000 meters), but still technically correct.
• Robot Chicken:
  • One sketch portrays Alvin and the Chipmunks with deep voices that Dave hates so much he tries to kill them over. He fills their booth with helium, giving them their signature high-pitched voices and Dave's approval right before it kills them. The canister being labelled "deadly helium" suggests the writers thought the idea wasn't supposed to make sense, but that much helium really would be fatal: even if it isn't poisonous, displacing that much oxygen would cause asphyxiation. Admittedly, it's also possible they were evoking Viewers Are Morons and assumed the audience wouldn't realize that helium, which is commonly huffed in real life to get high-pitched voices, would cause death via oxygen displacement.
  • Another sketch involves Mickey trying to ban mixed species Disney couples, which eventually gets into a pretty obvious metaphor for homophobia. It's funnier when you remember this comic actually exists.
  • The sketch "Welcome to the Golf Jam" is a Space Jam parody that featured Tiger Woods playing golf with DiC characters. Ironically one of the early ideas for a sequel to Space Jam would've had Tiger Woods in the starring role with Bugs Bunny, possibly with the title "Golf Jam".
• South Park:
  • There's an episode with a character called Sexual Harassment Panda that satirizes how difficult subjects (like sexual harassment) are often presented to children in a sugar-coated manner. Turns out there is a program called P.A.N.D.A. that deals with how to deal with sexual harassment at both school and work.
  • The episode "Smug Alert!" equated the self-righteous "smell your own farts" type of behavior of hybrid car owners and environmentalists in general as producing its own type of pollution and creating an ecological disaster. The thing is, hybrid and electric cars do still pollute — not in the same way as gasoline-powered cars, but the mining for rare-earth metals for their batteries is an industry that produces dangerous chemical runoff.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • The episode "Arrgh!" has the famous scene where Patrick says "East? I thought you said weast!" Circa the 13th century 'east' and 'west' would actually be pronounced a lot closer to each other (specifically, while 'west' was largely identical to the current-day pronunciation 'east' would've been pronounced something like est).
  • In the episode "Wormy", every time a character looks at Wormy the butterfly from up close, a film clip of a real horsefly is used for comedic effect, causing them to run away screaming. However, their fears would be totally justified, since unlike their smaller relative the housefly, horseflies can bite. And unlike mosquitoes, their saliva doesn't have any anaesthetics and have scissor-shaped mandibles, so their bites will hurt a lot.
• In the fourth season of Total Drama, a character named Mike with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) was introduced. It's pretty clear the writers didn't exactly do much research into the actual disorder (nor was creating a realistic representation ever a goal of theirs), but, by sheer happenstance, the show managed to semi-accurately portray some lesser known aspects of the disorder. For instance, Mike's personalities live in his "subconscious", a place in Mike's brain they occupy when they're not in control of the body. This heavily resembles headspaces/inner worlds, a real and very common symptom of DID.

---