Continuity Lock Out / Western Animation

#-L

• The Adventures of Kid Danger expects viewers to be familiar with the parent show. As such, it doesn't do much to introduce shows to new viewers.
• Adventure Time has this problem in later seasons. While the show slowly starts to build up an actual continuity with its fair share of Worldbuilding and character arcs, one could still watch any given episode up until Season 7 as a Standalone Episode with little to no context of how it fits into the Myth Arc. But as far as episodes in the final few seasons are concerned, you would need to have a friend that has some good knowledge of the setting's deep lore, or otherwise go back and watch the whole series from the beginning yourself, as even the most innocuous jokes from early seasons return to form the basis of entire episodes or become Cerebus Retcon'd into the main plot. And then there's the epilogue miniseries; in this case, viewers have to watch the original to make sense of it.
• The Amazing World of Gumball was never that heavily concerned with its continuity to begin with, be it either that each episode either found some way to return to the status quo or just completely disregarded the events of previous episodes. However, beginning around the end of Season 2, the show started increasing its continuity to where viewers would be required to know at least the bare minimum of past events. Major examples include "The Finale" (which has a Call-Back to almost every episode prior), "The Shell" (in which Penny breaks out of her shell, reveals herself to be a shapeshifting fairy, and finally becomes Gumball's girlfriend), and the series finale "The Inquisition" (the ending of which requires knowledge of an underlying plot that's only mentioned a handful of times across the show's entire run).
• Archer zig-zags this trope. While the overall plots of most later episodes can be viewed and understood without having seen earlier episodes, much of the show's jokes are call-backs and references to previous running jokes (such as Archer asking "why aren't we doing "phrasing" anymore?") or require long-time understanding of each character's foibles to get the full humor (such as Pam's history as an underground pit fighter/drag race champion). So while someone jumping in late in the show will have a basic understanding of what's going on, they may wonder what the joke is supposed to be when Archer keeps saying "danger zone".
• While not important to the overall continuity, viewers of later episodes of Arthur may be thrown off by witnessing Pal and Kate talking all of a sudden unless they familiarize themselves with season 6's "The Secret Life of Dogs and Babies".
• Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra suffer this problem, as every episode tends to either move the plot forward or develop the large cast of characters. This is especially true for Korra, which unlike its Myth Arc-driven predecessor, is heavily serialized with no Breather Episodes to speak of. Each season-long story arc directly leads into the next, and the Previously on… segments only explain what happened in the prior episode alone. While The Last Airbender has a few jumping-on points even in its final season, anyone who watches Korra casually or missed early episodes may be lost later on, when things get heavy and the characters are already well-established.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes has subplots that span several episodes, or start off one week and get picked up again much later. The second half of season 2 was mostly changed to stand-alone episodes, as Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb claimed that the show's mediocre ratings might have been the result of the series being inaccessible to new viewers. Even then, viewers jumping in at this point would probably still feel confused.
  • This was then used as part of the justification behind ending Earth's Mightiest Heroes and launching Avengers Assemble as a replacement.
• As the Ben 10 franchise went on, it became harder for audiences to become invested in the arcs and growing cast of characters. The fact that the films and crossovers that the franchise have spawned are all canon^note Even Race Against Time is acknowledged by one dimension traveling character as being an alternate continuity, meaning that those disinterested may have to watch them anyway. Ben 10: Omniverse promised to be a good starting point, though it still required a good deal of understanding of the three previous shows to understand jokes, characters, and even certain story arcs. Omniverse's poor ratings led to the franchise being rebooted with a new continuity a few years later.
• Bojack Horseman aggressively defies Negative Continuity and does not use Status Quo Is God - except for the Show Within a Show, and so can become difficult to follow if you drop in on a random episode, since characters will frequently reference past events and actions with very few details. A good example of this is in Season 6, where one episode begins with Bojack, Princess Carolyn, Todd and Diane all working through every bad thing Bojack has ever done, writing them on various whiteboards. A random viewer would assume the majority are Noodle Incidents, but not only are the vast majority all actual events that happened at some point during the show's run, but most of what's written are extremely brief descriptions of said events (such as "Stole Daniel Radcliffe's fruit basket" and "Ruined Integrity of Booty Academy") that will fly over the heads of anyone who hasn't watched every single prior episode.
• There's are no fewer than six episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door that start off with the KND trying to steal the birthday cake of the Delightful Children From Down The Lane with no explanation for a new viewer as to why exactly the DCFDTL are supposed to deserve this. Included in the six are the first episode, and the final episode.
  • Aside from this episode, there are many episodes that continue off of each other, numerous Myth Arcs, newly introduced KND members, and other organizations or subfactions of the KND themselves.
• Craig of the Creek doesn't have this compared to its fellow Cartoon Network original shows like Steven Universe, but there are more than a few episodes that you won't understand without watching the series from the beginning.
• Danny Phantom had a bit of lock-out in its second and third seasons as the world got more developed and more characters were added. The third season in particular suffered from this during its initial run, as the episodes were aired out of order, leaving more than a fair number of viewers wondering when Danny got cryokinesis abilities or why Vlad Masters is suddenly the mayor of Amity Park.
• With each episode of Detentionaire, the plot becomes more and more intricate as either new characters are introduced, old characters change, or some important plot point is revealed. As a result, jumping into the series without starting from the beginning, or missing one episode entirely, could result in a lot of confusion as to what is occurring, even with the recap at the beginning of each episode.
• When making the move from Cartoon Network to Netflix, Dragons: Riders of Berk had to leave behind its Cartoon Network seasons and start fresh as Race to the Edge. Even though the setup deliberately tries to be fairly self-contained, it is still a continuation of the previous show and references to past events may go over the heads of fans who only started watching from Netflix.
• Gravity Falls was pretty tightly packed with continuity, especially during its second season. The series had long-running plot arcs concerning mystery objects, major changes that tend to avert Status Quo Is God, and important call-backs that could be confusing for new viewers. Although season one was largely stand-alone, it was still necessary to watch the series in its entirety as certain characters or plot-points end up reappearing or become important later on. It's not so bad that some of the show's younger audience may not be entertained just by the jokes and the action elements of the plot, but the show's older Periphery Demographic is unlikely to include anyone who hasn't watched it from the first episode, and the Grand Finale is completely inaccessible for anyone not familiar with the show.
• For that matter, Green Lantern: The Animated Series falls under this starting with the Manhunter and Anti-Monitor arc in the second half. That's pretty impressive for a series that only lasted 26 episodes.
• Amusingly lampshaded in Justice League Action; a major plot twist towards the end of season one reveals that the show is actually set in the same universe as Green Lantern: The Animated Series and the Space Cabbie’s AI assistant is really an amnesiac but still alive Aya, unconsciously searching for Razer. The significance of the scene where this is revealed will probably go completely over your head if you haven’t watched Green Lantern, so the show has the Space Cabbie say exactly what such viewers are probably thinking (“Well, that was weird”), with an implicit assurance that it will be explained later.
• With each passing season of Littlest Pet Shop (2012), protagonist Blythe Baxter continues to move up in the fashion world and becomes increasingly famous, and those seasons' episodes that focus on that aspect of her are written with her then-current status in mind. There are also a handful of episodes that have the Biskit Twins as the antagonist with no explanation given as to why they are the Designated Villain; knowledge of their repeated attempts to sabotage Blythe is required.
  • There is an episode in Season 2, "Blythe's Big Idea", which exists solely to set up the rest of the season. This includes the introduction of the Pet Jet (which allows Blythe to travel to other countries, which would become a recurring theme from then on), Blythe acquiring her kiosk store, and details about the Pet Fashion Expo to be used in the season finale.
  • Season 3 also gets a Mid-Season Twist: Blythe's best friend, Youngmee, has been clued in to Blythe's ability to communicate to animals. Season 3 also had a case of continuity lock-out that, due to the episodes airing Out of Order, inflicted this upon everyone following the show as it premieres: At the end of Season 2, the Biskit Twins' butler, François, was fired, but he was suddenly back with them early into Season 3. It turns out that the Christmas Episode had François re-hired to serve the family, but this episode was pushed back to, unsurprisingly, the holiday season and was skipped during the season's initial run. Hence, every viewer who saw him suddenly back were confused as to what happened.
• The Loud House is very light on continuity, usually by virtue of Negative Continuity or returning to the status quo at the end of each episode. However, those who haven't seen "11 Louds a Leapin'" yet might wonder why Lynn Sr. and Rita are no longer The Faceless from most of Season 2 onwards.

M-Z

• Platypus Comix lampshades this trope on their review for the final day of Kids' WB!, specifically Magi-Nation. After only a few lines, they're extremely confused, plus they point out the fact that a show like this is airing at 7:30am, where the last time the "big kid" shows aired that early, it didn't work out so well for Freakazoid! and Earthworm Jim.
• It was once rumored that Lauren Faust wanted a season-long story arc about Nightmare Moon in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which the higher ups vetoed specifically to avert this trope. This was later proven untrue (Faust always planned on the show being episodic), but either way, the series eventually did delve into tighter story arcs and continuity in later seasons. Trying to watch any given episode from the last three seasons if your last experience viewing the cartoon was the first three will result in some confusion, as you wonder why some characters have changed appearance, why certain locations no longer exist, etc.
  • "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000" wasn't aired in the UK, due to cider more commonly meaning hard cider there, causing some confusion for viewers who only watch the show on TV when Flim and Flam reappear in later episodes.
• Ninjago suffers from this to an extent, which is an inevitable effect of a serialized TV show lasting for over eleven years.
• Some later episodes of OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes have a few examples, as some of which can affect the plot of the show. Such as concerning the identity of KO's father, as well as Enid going to P.O.I.N.T at season 2, and it can leave new viewers left out.
• The Powerpuff Girls (2016) is meant to be a reboot aimed at 2010's children, yet it also assumes that they are fans of the original 1990s cartoon. It doesn't give proper introductions to old villains and features numerous Mythology Gags to the original.
• While Ready Jet Go! is not a heavy story arc-driven series like Beast Wars or Steven Universe, it does have continuity. If you stumble upon a random episode, you may think that the Propulsions are a weird, stupid human family when they are really aliens. And if you do discover that they are aliens, you may wonder why they need to keep their identity a secret, or why a little kid in nerd glasses is spying on them.
  • Face 9000 gets an upgrade in "Face on the Fritz", so new viewers who see a post-FOTF episode, and then see a pre-FOTF episode might be confused.
  • Mindy turns 5 in season 2 and is also to go into space with the others. A viewer can find themselves catching one of those episodes, only to watch an earlier one wherein she's explicitly denied the opportunity.
• ReBoot suffer from this problem in its later seasons, as it became more serialized and thereby require knowledge from previous episodes to catch up with the story.
• Regular Show fell into this in the latter half of its run. Seasons 1-3 were pretty much stand-alone, but the premiere of Season 4, "Exit 9-B", involved almost every character who appeared in the show to that point. It continued with seasons 5 onward, with the introduction of more ongoing story arcs. There are still more than enough stand-alone episodes scattered throughout the show's run for the casual viewer, but to get the full experience (wait, why is the final season IN SPACE!?) you'd have to watch the earlier seasons, or at least the relevant episodes.
  • It got really bad with the UK airings of "Merry Christmas Mordecai" and "Sad Sax". The UK gets the episodes a few months after they first air, but since Cartoon Network UK will only air Christmas episodes around Christmas, when they got to that point in the season, they skipped over MCM and went right to Sad Sax, despite the fact that Sad Sax is a direct sequel to MCM, likely confusing some viewers.
• Rick and Morty is a unique example; given the nature of the series. While it is still possible to enjoy most of the jokes on their own; each season so far has stories that connect in some way or another, despite its episodic story structure. Notably, the season 3 premiere does make a fairly entertaining episode on its own; though humor does require knowledge of the character dynamic and how subtle details from previous seasons become key to the story. This can largely be attributed to how many events and lines, no matter how insignificant they may seem at first glance; play a part in the show's Myth Arc. This becomes increasingly lampshaded in Season 4, with a lot of lines in "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat," "Never Ricking Morty," "Promortyus," "The Vat of Acid Episode," and "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri" referencing the struggle between making the show episodic and focusing on bizarre and dark humor versus maintaining serialized and dramatic elements and meaningfully developing the main characters.
• Later episodes of The Simpsons suffer from a mild case of this condition at times (though it's understandable for a series that has long past the 30th season mark). One particular gag in the ninteenth season's "E. Pluribus Wiggum" involved Homer (accurately) daydreaming about a "think-tank", a joke which is probably funnier to longtime viewers than new ones unaware of his bizarre Imagine Spots.
  Homer: (noticing the rest of the family staring at him) What, I'm not allowed to get one right?
  • Many of The Simpsons' minor characters are completely bizarre without context, yet the show takes it for granted that the audience can recognize and appreciate most of them without any sort of perfunctory introduction or explanation. Examples would include Bumblebee Man, Sideshow Bob and Mel, Duffman, "Sea Captain" McCallister, Disco Stu, or even Krusty, all of whom are long-running continuations of one-off gags from many, many years past. One gag even relies on the viewer recognizing Duffman's voice, when he himself neither appears nor even gets mentioned in the episode.
    • This is Lampshaded when Marge gets amnesia in the seventeenth season's "Regarding Margie". She finds all the side characters confusing and creepy and is incredibly disturbed when Homer says they're his and Marge's close friends.
      Marge: (of Otto Mann) Why is that drug addict driving a school bus?
• South Park for the most part, was very light in continuity, with at least one Half-Arc Season. Then along came Seasons 18 and 19, which have ongoing season-specific storylines yet still maintaining episodic plots, with Season 18 having a Bizarro Episode with an ending that has no bearing on the rest of the series. Season 20, however, is all Four Lines, All Waiting, with every episode dealing with continuous subplots spanning across multiple episodes like a gender war, a regular character becoming a notorious Internet troll, a Romance Arc, and the 2016 presidential election. Season 21 tones this back down reasonable levels, as the episodes stand alone for the most part, and Mr. Garrison more closely resembles Donald Trump and isn't referred to by name, likely to minimize confusion to new viewers.
• Understanding the plots of some episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series requires having seen at least the majority of Star Trek: The Original Series, as several of them allude to the events of the original live-action series, such as Cyrano Jones' first encounter with the crew of the Starship Enterprise and Harry Mudd being asked how he escaped from his imprisonment at the end of the original series episode "I, Mudd".
• The majority of the jokes present in Star Trek: Lower Decks fall flat if you haven't familiarized yourself with the whole franchise. The writers are hardcore Trekkies, who poke fun at common Trek plots, name drop episodes and one shot characters, and basically half its humor is "OMG, they made that reference!"
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Season 1 is relatively standalone, but with some plot-centric episodes, but once Season 2 aired, the series starts throwing out major plot twists, continuing almost every episode after each other, characters gradually changing, and building up mythology for Mewni. By the Season 3 premiere, the series expects the viewers to have seen most of the previous two seasons to follow the events both previous and going forward.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars was often comprised of episode arcs rather than a typical serial. For casual viewers, missing a new episode could lead to getting confused if they don't recover and instead choose to continue to the next episode without context. This actually ended up being a problem for the show's ratings over time in combination with the Cerebus Syndrome (meaning it turned away younger viewers, who are the target audience since the show aired on Cartoon Network), which eventually led to the show's (initial) cancellation before the Disney buyout. This is why its sequel, Star Wars Rebels, tended to avoid arcs and sought a balanced Cerebus Syndrome that wouldn't turn away the younger audience as time went on.
  • You may still be locked out of Rebels, however, especially if you've never watched The Clone Wars due to continuing off of characters and plots from it, such as Ahsoka Tano, clone troopers Rex, Gregor and Wolffe, and a very alive Darth Maul. Also, Rebels is also similar to its predecessor in that every episode counts towards something later on, no matter how big or small the impact is.
• Steven Universe, with only eleven minutes per episode, tells an increasingly dense narrative by having small details that later get referenced and expanded upon with the expectation that the viewer will recognize and connect previous foreshadowing in a show that just doesn't have the time to recap them. The first half of season one is episodic enough that you can skip most of it without much trouble. Everything after "Mirror Gem" however, and you're going to need a working knowledge of the show's mythology to grasp the significance of characters' actions.
  • After season one, if you've not seen every episode by this point, you're going to be lost as the show expects viewers to recognize locations and plot points that might have only appeared once, dozens of episodes previously. For example, season three spends its premiere reintroducing the Watermelon Stevens, the Malachite fusion of Lapis Lazuli and Jasper fully formed and emerging from the ocean, Steven's empathetic powers and mental contact, the Alexandrite fusion of all three of the Crystal Gems, and the threat of the Cluster hatching in the Earth's core. With the exception of the Cluster, all of this is payoff for situations and events that hadn't even been mentioned since early Season 2 at best and the middle of Season 1 at worst.
  • The movie attempts to mitigate this by providing a brief recap of major plot events up until that point and having the four main characters reintroduce themselves (five seasons worth of character development and all) via song, but there are still plenty of details that people who haven't seen the show will miss.
• Thunder Cats 2011 is heavy on its Heroic Fantasy plot, but this makes it fairly difficult to leap in halfway and know what's going on. Some episodes don't really end as much as they just stop, only to pick up right where they left off the next week, which lends to the show being more accessible in large chunks.
• Total Drama has been getting less and less elaborate on its past as the series goes on. The latest season, All Stars, begins with no real recap of any of the show up to that point (aside from the characters quickly bringing up certain moments), so anyone who hasn't seen the episodes beforehand would be much more confused than those who had, which makes sense because PSN does not have the Island special, all of Action, and all of World Tour, creating weirdness concerning Sierra's crush on Cody, and Alejandro being in a robot suit among others.
• Transformers:
  • One of the many complaints people had about Beast Wars is that when it aired, it had the strongest continuity ever seen in a cartoon on American or Canadian TV. As a result, a new viewer jumping in partway through is going to be quite perplexed by what's all going on. Then its sequel Beast Machines one-upped it.
  • Ironic with Beast Machines, since they were originally trying to avert this trope by ignoring most of Beast Wars, only to end up with a stronger version of the trope in its own series.
  • Transformers: Prime ran into similar issues. There's one episode fairly late in the series' run that references nearly every episode that had come before it in some way, ranging from what an item in the background is to why one of the characters is a zombie now; TFWiki.net continuity notes begin by saying that this would be a tough episode to start watching the series. This may be why its sequel is using more of an episodic Monster of the Week approach. However, some knowledge of The Movie Grand Finale of Prime is required to explain why Bumblebee is speaking to the spirit of Optimus Prime in the early episodes of the series. While it is possible to follow coming in cold, this holds more significance for those who have seen the later episodes of Prime before this series; which connects the two.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • The series creators, Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick, actually discuss this trope when they hosted the season four finale Operation PROM on [adult swim]. They appeared in a series of videos leading into and coming back from commercial breaks during the initial airing of the episode, and in one of them, discussed how self-referential this episode in particular was. The series in general, at least after the first season, can have this effect as well, as the episodes are packed with references to things that happened previously, not to mention that it gets weirder and weirder with each passing season.
  • The cause of Dean's emo phase through the fifth season was explained in the Halloween special which aired before it. Not helped by the fact that the special is included on the season box set as a bonus feature, meaning a lot of people will watch the main season first.
• Young Justice (2010) progressively falls more into this with each season. The first season is a fairly typical superhero cartoon that doesn't expect you to know too much about the universe. The second season added a much larger cast and regularly jumping around to accommodate them without explaining who they are. The third season moved to a streaming platform marketed solely at existing comics fans (and currently unavailable outside the United States) and is more or less incomprehensible unless you really know the universe. Plus, the New Gods are introduced with aplomb. The franchise has always been popular with critics and comics fans but they're a pretty casebook text of Mainstream Obscurity, as they've never had an adaptation to themselves. The show doesn't take the time to really explain the concepts of the mythos like the fourth wall or mother boxes that are involved either.

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