Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer / Anime & Manga

When journalists fail to do the research on the anime and manga they're reviewing, Cowboy BeBop at His Computer is the result.

Franchises with their own pages:

• Pokémon

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Specific Anime

• The Trope Namer is from Cowboy Bebop and a rather incorrect newspaper picture caption. In a similar manner to Harvard University's Statue of Three Lies, every single word except "at", "computer", and the photo credit "Bandai" is specifically, individually wrong:
  • The character pictured goes by Ed.
  • Ed is a girl.
  • "Cowboy," the slang term for "bounty hunter" used in the world of the series, refers to the main characters' profession rather than naming anybody. Ed is also not one, being the crew's Tagalong Kid and a hacker, not a bounty hunter.
  • It's Bebop, not "BeBop".
  • Bebop is the name of the main characters' ship, not (again) any person.^note It also references the music style featured in the soundtrack.
  • Ed doesn't own the ship's computer.
• A video by TIME Magazine interviewing female fans at Comicon mentioned an anime and web manga called Access Powers Hitalia. The misspelling is made more confusing because they showed official images, such as the cover of the English release of the DVD, with the title spelled out right on them.
  • And then there was the The New York Times' coverage of Comic-Con, where an England cosplayer was referred to as "the character Hetalia in 'Axis Powers,' a popular video game."
  • TV Guide's listing for Hetalia Axis Powers: Paint It White describes it as being about "teenagers [who] must defend Earth against an invading alien race called the Pictonians". The main characters of Hetalia are adults, not teenagers.
• When Bakuten Shoot Beyblade came out in Italy, many magazines that reported on the series mixed up sources and had recurring errors reported multiple times:
  • While the Italian dub was based on the original version and kept most of the Japanese names, articles often used some of the English dub names (like calling Mao "Mariah" or stating that Max's last name is Tate and not Mizuhara). A few cases even mentioned Kyouju's Bit Beast Dizzi, which was made up for the English dub and as such is not found in the Italian one.
  • Articles often talked about Mao as one of the main characters. She is in fact only part of a specific story arc from the first series (and later reappears in the third) and never joins Takao's team.
• This article (spoiler warning!) about the Tourist Bump caused by the anime adaptation of Banana Fish has a gift shop worker quoted as saying "We think Banana Fish is funny, but it brings in money". Aside from a few sparse comic relief scenes, "funny" is generally the exact opposite of what most people would describe ''Banana Fish'' as. In fact, the reason why people went to the library in the first place is because of one of the biggest tearjerkers in the series. Either she assumed it was a comedy based on the title, or because it was animated.
• At the time of Kentaro Miura's death, Spanish newspaper El Mundo published an article about him, which included a brief synopsis of Berserk. Oddly enough, however, the journalist seems to have got Berserk and Fist of the North Star mixed up in his memory, because his synopsis claims its story is that of "Guts, a lonely warrior pursued by dark forces who seeks to avenge his old master."
• TV Guide's descriptions for each episode of Blue Exorcist seem to be taken from the first three minutes of the episode, before the episode's plot actually surfaces, resulting in descriptions like "Rin shows up late for class" or "Rin demonstrates that he can cook." This makes Blue Exorcist sound like a Slice of Life show when Rin and his friends actually spend much of their time fighting evil spirits and demons.
• An article from a Scandinavian country advertised Code Geass as a comedy series about a delightful youth named Rerouch who became the King of Britannia through use of his mystical Geass, which allowed him to gain control over any individual whose name he had written down in a black note book. Unfortunately Rerouch is countered by a revolutionary named Jeremiah Suzaku who fights him by using a mecha named EVA. At some point, you have to wonder if they actually deliberately made this crap up because no sane human being could possibly get this much wrong if they had seen even 30 seconds of the show. To make matters worse, it spelled the series' name as "Code Geese: Rerouch of the Reberrion", even though the "rebellion" part isn't even Gratuitous English in the Japanese original (the title uses the actual Japanese word for "rebellion", hangyaku, making the misspelling just plain inexplicable).
  • Upon the release of R2, several Spanish-speaking sites, all probably echoing the same source, gave it a synopsis that had little to do with its real plot: according to them, the season featured a new, mysterious Zero played by an unknown character and it forced Lelouch to return to action to defeat him. This mistake, possibly stemming from a mistranslation or an uncorrected urban legend, proved so popular that it found his way into the Spanish article of The Other Wiki and is still there nowadays, even although the real plot is well known and has become pop culture since.
• This article about Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba The Movie: Mugen Train mentions that the film opens up with a scene where Tanjiro's family is murdered by a demon. This describes the beginning of the TV series and manga the movie is based on, not the Mugen Train movie. This particular moment is only brought up several times in the film itself, but it's never actually shown save for a brief image during a flashback and a dream sequence in which Tanjiro's siblings ask him why he let his family die.
• This Penecostal article refers to Death Note as "The Death Note" and claims it contains detailed instructions on how to go into a trance and use your mind to take someone else's life.
• A Hungarian TV spot for D.Gray-Man began summarizing the story along the lines of "Under the spreading darkness of the evil god Akuma..." According to the channel's forum, the producer doesn't speak Japanese but still had the promo made before a single episode was translated. The error was later fixed, though.
• Digimon:
  • A reviewer of Digimon: The Movie apparently never actually saw it, as she claimed that "the original Digidestined children are abducted by Diaboromon, and a new group of kids must save them". That very lie was perpetrated by Fox Kids' official site. In reality, Diaboromon never abducted anyone, he just stalked a twelve-year old boy and then tried to blow up the world. Then, when the new kids get involved, it isn't even to deal with Diaboromon, but with a corrupted Chocomon. The back of the VHS wasn't much better, as while it stated that the Digidestined were kidnapped by "A wayward Digimon" and not Diaboromon, it seemed to imply that it was happening at the same time as Diaboromon's attack and that the original Digidestined were abducted, which wasn't the case.
  • Not to mention the fact that Chocomon actually did abduct the original kids in the Japanese version, but that particular plot was completely cut out of the American version. Which may make this a case of someone doing too much research, and then completely mixing up the plots.
  • When Nicktoons started streaming the series on their website, they started using the character models of the Digidestined in their Digimon Adventure 02 attire while still streaming episodes of the original Digimon Adventure. Not as bad as some of the other examples on this page, but still glaring enough to notice.
  • One Digimon the "Official" Game Guide which explained how to play the trading card game also talked about the TV series, in which is referred to Devimon as the most evil of the bad Digimon even though he was a Starter Villain for the kids. And the guide book included information on Kari so it didn't have the excuse of being put together while the show was still running the Devimon arc; by this point, Myotismon was already a thing.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Before the anime came stateside, there was a Nintendo Power article about some of the Japanese Dragon Ball games - for one thing, it referred to the series as "Dragon Ballz", and got the genre of the games (Dragon Ball Z II: Gekishin Freeza and Dragon Ball Z III: Ressen Jinzōningen) wrong - It says that II was a "tournament simulation" and says that III was "head-to-head street fighting action" - both of them were actually Card Battle Games. It also says that "The artist who created the characters for Dragon Warrior also drew the ones for the Dragon Ballz games", which one could at least defend as technically accurate. See here.◊
  • During the 2003 Finnish controversy over the newly arrived manga's supposed pedophilic content (the usual story and accuracy), one gossip article opened by calling the comic Dragon Balls and went from there.
    • The most hilarious research failure was how the Moral Guardians commented how the neighboring country of Sweden is free of such vile products...when their most sold comic that year was none other than Dragon Ball.
  • Speaking of Dragon Ball and pedophilia, there's the case of Lloyd de Mause and "psychohistory". In his attempt to prove that all human history has been cases of child abuse, he used the phallic humor in Dragon Ball ("That poor dragon...", Goku's tendency to "check" to make sure people are male or female, etc.) and the underage male nudity to somehow prove that all Japanese mothers masturbate their sons. Okay, that's all fine, but because of Goku's Noble Savage origins, he referred to Goku as Tarzan throughout!
  • TV Guide reported on the popularity of the anime at the time the article was written. While not negative in tone, the writer openly admitted his bafflement, titling the article "Fusion Confusion" and claimed "It's harder to understand than computer schematics." He also credited Goku with protecting us from "the ferocious Saiyan"...which can technically describe a few storylines, but not the entire franchise as the quote would imply. He then added that he only understood as much from reading some fan sites. He listed Goku's sons as "Gohan and Gotan", and closed the article by saying that he watched the show for its "fantastic" animation. Well, there's far worse media coverage examples in this list, but this one is amusing as well as heartwarming in a "He's trying his best" sort of way. It also demonstrates the principle of the generational gap, where "grown-ups" just can't get "kid's stuff", something we see time and again in this list.
  • A rather fear mongering article about Dragon Ball Z in the Wall Street Journal described the series as "Pokémon meets Pulp Fiction". It also says Gundam is about "bad guys from outer space", and misspells Tenchi Muyo! as "Tenchi Meyo".
  • A French article about manga had a picture of Krillin/Kuririn from Dragon Ball Z with a legend along the lines of "When little Trunks goes mad, there's going to be hell to pay!".
  • A New York Times article once featured comedic redesigns of Mickey Mouse done by Butch Hartman, one of which was a vaguely Animesque take. The paper claimed that particular design was inspired by Dragon Ball Z, which they referred to as a popular children's card game. There was a DBZ card game at one point, but the writer seemed to be unaware that it was spun-off from the massively popular TV show and manga.
  • A book released in 2000 called Dragonball Z: an Unauthorized Guide is absolutely chock full of mis-information and blatant errors. Some highlights include Goku reaching Super Saiyan 5 in Dragon Ball GT (he gains Super Saiyan 4, not 5, SSJ5 doesn't even exist officially), every villain in the series having horns (only a small handful do), Roshi wears a giant turtle on his back all the time (it's only a shell and it's not all the time) and Yamcha being a Hollywood stuntman (he's a baseball player and Hollywood doesn't even exist in the Dragon Ball universe).
  • The Guardian's review of Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' does the same thing. He mentions it being a "gotta-catch-‘em-all battle for those translucent golden orbs," which is not only inaccurate (The Dragon Balls have long been relegated to a magical Reset Button) but seems to indicate that the author had managed to get the series mixed up with Pokémon. (And even that is wrong - Pokémon was a video game first.) He even calls it a reboot of the series..
• When Duel Masters first came in Italy, multiple TV guides stated that the original Japanese version of the show was composed of 5-minute shorts and the version that was being aired was an American remake created to give the show the same airtime as other anime. While it was true that the Italian dub was based on the US airing of the show, it was just a Gag Dub and not a complete remake of the entire show (which had 25-minute episodes even in Japan)..
• Elfen Lied when YouTuber Hazel made a video about this series, people on Elfen Lied subreddit pointed some inaccuracies.
• The Yahoo TV summary of Fullmetal Alchemist seems to have swapped around its anime: "While playing a game, brothers Alphonse and Edward Elric get transported to another dimension where Alphonse is trapped in a robotic body and Edward has become the Fullmetal Alchemist."
  • A library posted a description of "Fullmetal Alchemist: Profiles" on their website. The description included lines like "fighting the evil alchemists called the Seven Deadly Sins." The homunculi are not alchemists, and are named after the Seven Deadly Sins but never referred to collectively as such. Also, the description misspells the main character's name as "Edward Alric".
• Free!; this report on it being confirmed for a third season manages to pack an impressive number of errors regarding previous entries in the series into a few sentences:
  "Funimation has also announced they acquired the rights to the sequel, and two prequel films in the series. Free! -Take Your Marks - (which follows Haru and Makoto preparing for college after the events of -Eternal Summer-) High Speed! Free! -Starting Days- and Free! -Timeless Melody-, which explore the pasts of Haru and Makoto, and Kizuna and Yakusoku respectively, will be available to purchase on Blu-ray and DVD some time in the near future."
  • High★Speed! - Free! Starting Days is the only prequel movie. There is no such film as "Timeless Melody" - the writer presumably meant Timeless Medley, a pair of recap movies. The subtitles of those movies are Kizuna and Yakusoku, which the writer seems to think are the names of characters (presumably Rin and Sousuke)
• In a mix of this and Covers Always Lie, the text at the back of the VHS covers of the Finnish release of Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin is infamous for making little to no sense. The back of the first VHS, for example, claims that the show takes place in Alaska and the people raise bearhounds to protect themselves from ferocious grizzly bears.^note The show takes place in Japan, only one character in the main character's home village raises bearhounds and the bears are either brown or Asian black bears, not grizzlies.
  • The back of another cassette described the situation the previous VHS left off as the protagonists being "surrounded by Akaka Booto". Akakabuto is a single bear and as such unable to surround anything by himself, large though he is. The protagonists are actually surrounded by a pack of enemy dogs whose motivations are completely unrelated to bears.
• Isabelle of Paris: Many websites including MyAnimeList and AnimeNewsNetwork write this as the anime's synopsis:
  The Main character is a 15 year old Isabelle Laustin, other characters being her parents Leon and Marie, Isabelle`s friends Jean and his sister Marie, and Isabelle`s suitor, Captain Victor. When Paris is beseiged and Napoleon III`s army is defeated, Isabelle escapes to London, disguised as a boy, and engages in secret agent stuff.
  • There are many things wrong with this description.
    • Jean doesn't have a sister named Marie, let alone a sister at all. He's an only child. It's Isabelle who has a sister who's one of the show's main characters, Geneviève. Marie is the name of Isabelle's mother.
    • Captain Victor isn't Isabelle's suitor. While Isabelle has a one-sided crush on him, he's betrothed to her sister. Despite this, Geneviève is secretly in love with Jules, her piano teacher, and eventually breaks off their engagement to marry him. Because Jules is a commoner, Leon and Marie disown Geneviève, to the horror of Isabelle. Victor never stops loving Geneviève even after this fact and dies heartbroken as he mutters her name, meaning Isabelle never got the guy.
    • Isabelle doesn't engage in "secret agent stuff" until seven episodes into the anime, and even then, it's only an arc. Most of the anime is about the class divide between the Bourgieoisie and the commoners, the oppression of the Parisians, Jules and Geneviève's Tragic Romance, Andréa staving off the Prussians and Thiers' betrayal of Paris.
    • The description implies that Isabelle escapes to London right after the besieging of Paris, when in actuality Isabelle and the Laustins fled to Versailles, where Isabelle learned of the secret conspiracy against France. She went to London on Geneviève's orders, who was working with La Résistance in Paris.
    • The description fails to mention that she returns to France after escaping to London^note Though the "Everyone Dies" Downer Ending implies that she'll start a new life elsewhere.
• Gundam:
  • This Wired article about Hatsune Miku seems to think "Gundam" is the main character:
  "Consider Gundam, the iconic Japanese robot character. In the ’70s, a large Japanese toymaker, Clover, created Gundam and sponsored an anime series to market him."
  • Almost every Mexican newspaper misread the name of the Gundam franchise in many hilarious ways: Gandamu (phonetic), Gondam (spelling), Gandam, etc.
  • When reporting on Gundam Wing, PA decided to completely ignore most "r" and "l" translation conventions and generally go with "it's always l," giving us characters like "Heelo Yuy" and "Lelena Peacelaft."
  • The early issues of Anime Insider had particularly horrible errors include listing the character of Lacus Clyne from Gundam Seed as "Fllay Allster" (another character from the same show, who doesn't even share the same hair color). Their entire article on G Gundam reached levels of CBAHC that must be seen to be believed — things such as listing Schwartz Bruder as Domon's Master and the previous King of Hearts (Master Asia is both) and giving the Master Gundam the profile of the Dark/Devil Gundam.
  • An in-media example for Gundam Sousei: a newspaper announcing the release of the Gundam movie features a picture of Sayla, while captioning it as "the hero, Amuron".
• A caption on this names the green-haired girl in the picture (from Higurashi: When They Cry) "Rena", who is actually a different girl with orange hair; the girl in the picture is Mion. Also, she doesn't have a split personality; you could say that it's slightly implied at first, but those implications were dashed against the rocks in the arc before the DVD being advertised.
• This Cracked Article's author seems to have never seen the anime he complains about. Most glaring is Hellsing, where the author seems to think the Catholic Knights are the KKK (sorta understandable) and while he does recognize Alucard as the main protagonist, according to the author, the main villain is "a giant dog with lots of eyes commanded by a pedophile with bitching sholderpads" and a picture of Alucard after releasing restraint level 1 is given.
• Hello! Sandybell:
  • In Aeham Ahmad's autobiography The Pianist from Syria - A Memoir, he refers◊ to Hello! Sandybell as "a popular manga show [in Syria]". Hello! Sandybell never had a manga and is a case of Anime First.
  • In 2020, Edinburgh News published an article about Hello! Sandybell but used a screenshot from Candy♡Candy. The error is still up to this day.
• There was an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about how the rising popularity of anime was due in part to its depictions of strong female characters. The article featured a picture of Inuyasha. Uh...
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • A store in Amazon.com sells JoJo's Bizarre Adventure gashapon (small collectible figurines) of some Stands from Part 3 (Hierophant Green, Silver Chariot and The World to be specific). But what makes them an example of this trope? Their names. Respectively are now Green character, Silver Villain and Johnny Joestar.^{To understand exactly how wrong these are:}Hierophant Green is definitely green, but is not a character so much as a power; Silver Chariot is the power of a good guy, and Johnny Joestar isn't even from the same universe as The World! Apparently, this is an ongoing problem — figurines from other franchises are constantly labeled as "Pink one, Blue one, Yellow one, Green one, Orange one, Purple one, etc." with "one" sometimes replaced by "character," "girl," etc. VERY rarely they may say "Sailor," "Mew Mew" or "Ojamajo," but one wonders, if they knew that much, why they wouldn't just use the character's names.
  • On May 15, 2019, Crunchyroll made social media posts for the late Unshō Ishizuka's birthday with a selection of his notable roles. That was all well and good, but the picture they used for Joseph Joestar was from Part 2, in which said character was voiced by Tomokazu Sugita. Crunchyroll took it down and reuploaded it with the correct Joseph after fan outcry.
  • In the iTunes Store, the descriptions for Part 1 and the first half of Part 3 are switched. Even then, the latter makes no mention whatsoever of Part 2 when it makes up roughly two-thirds of Season One's episodes.
• Sentai Filmworks, for its press release about Log Horizon, said that it had a "if you die in the game, you die for real" premise in much the same way as Sword Art Online. Well, if the "adventurers" die, they just get respawned in the nearest Cathedral. The series does have Permadeath, however, but it's only for the NPC characters (called "People of the Land").
• An Anime News Network writer commented in a review for Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's that the songs were a good indication of why Yukari Tamura and Nana Mizuki hadn't hit the big time as singers. One little problem: Mizuki Nana at the time of the review had already achieved mainstream success in Japan as a musician, with all of her music singles and albums appearing in the Top 10 of the Weekly Oricon charts (Japan's equivalent of the Billboard Charts) for nearly half a decade since 2005. Also, "Eternal Blaze" (the opening song of A's) is the exact song that started this long string of hits by making her the first Seiyuu to debut a music single at no. 2 of the weekly charts.
• A lot of non-anime related tabloid articles claim that Nathan Parsons got his first acting role as Jean in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water when he was only two years old. Even ignoring the sheer impossibility of a toddler voicing a main character of a 39 episode anime, this is not true. The original Japanese version of Nadia came out when he was two years old, the series was not fully dubbed into English by ADV Films with him as Jean until the turn of the millennium when he was around 12. This article took things a step further and stated that he "reprised his role for the English version" a year later, implying that somehow this toddler managed to voice Jean in both the English and Japanese version. The "English version released a year later" they are talking about is the Streamline Pictures dub, which was never finished and cast Ardwight Chamberlain as Jean, and Noriko Hidaka voiced him in Japanese. It seems no other research was done for this list of "facts" other than looking at dates with zero context, without maybe stopping to think that maybe a two year old matching lip flaps in two different languages might be, you know, a little bit implausible.
• Naruto:
  • In March 2008, a ten-year-old boy died from being buried alive in his sandbox. The news claimed this happened by him and his friends imitating "Narutu", which the news described as a television show where samurai use sand as a tool to kill each other. It's also been called "Narutu Sand Ninjas". This story in particular has several major mistakes.
    • Mispronouncing "Naruto", despite featuring clips with the correct pronunciation "Nah-Ru-Toe". What's worse is that the person reporting the story was Japanese-American Akiko Fujita.
    • Despite avoiding calling it "Sand Ninjas", the reporter says that it is about Sand Ninjas.
    • Suggesting Gaara buries himself in sand, when showing him doing his Armor of Sand Jutsu. The only legitimate "sand burial" techniques are used against enemies and are explicitly intended to be fatal.
    • Relying on YouTube clips to inform themselves about the show; the other linked news clip used an AMV with Linkin Park music.
    • Confusing Ninja with Samurai is pretty bad too.
  • Naruto Forever: The Unofficial Guide repeatedly refers to Hinata Hyuga as "Hina" (possibly the result of her abbreviation in pairings like Portmanteau Couple Names like "NaruHina"), only getting it correct in the character index, and even refer to "Hina" as him.
• There was an Anime Insider issue with an article about the (development hell-induced) live-action Evangelion adaptation that said Shinji was a girl.
• Mandarake often labels merchandise from Ojamajo Doremi with the character names from the 4Kids Entertainment English dub, which would be fine except that they also occasionally do it with merchandise of seasons that haven't been dubbed, most commonly with merchandise from Dokka~n!.
• One Piece:
  • An article by the Academy of Fine Art Germany about One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda is topped with a picture of The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma. This mistake has spread throughout the internet, with other sites like Goodreads misidentifying Aonuma as Oda, and the Google Image Search results for "Eiichiro Oda" being flooded with that picture of Aonuma.
  • The Amazon editorial review for the One Piece movie The Desert Princess and the Pirates: Adventures in Alabasta calls the film "recut footage from the "Alabasta" story arc of the TV series with some bits of additional animation." Movie 8 was a complete remake of the Alabasta arc from scratch (the higher quality widescreen film featuring new animation and slightly alternate character designs and should have given it away), but this reviewer seems to mistake it for a Compilation Movie.
  • TV Guide's descriptions for episodes of One Piece as they air on Toonami are technically accurate, but they are written in a clueless and somewhat confused manner, with only the good guys being named and everyone else merely described, that makes the show sound more random than it actually is. Examples include "Usopp and Zoro fight animal assassins; Sanji teaches a CP9 agent how to make tea" (the episode's A-story was about Usopp and Zoro, handcuffed together, fighting CP9 agents Jabra and Kaku, who can turn into animals, and the B-story was about Sanji fighting Kalifa, with Sanji briefly attempting to brew tea out of courtesy) and "Luffy and his friends say goodbye to the ship" (Luffy's ship, the Going Merry, has been damaged beyond repair and is in an unsailable state, and the episode is about its funeral).
• An Anime News Network review of Overman King Gainer criticizes the opening for being silly in a series that has a "High serious nature". King Gainer is a comedy which just happens to have been made by Yoshiyuki Tomino, who is best known for his serious anime like the Gundam franchise.
• One particularly jarring case involving Memetic Mutation happened with Penguin Memories, which IMDb actually seems to think is called The Club Penguin Movie (never mind that it has the correct release year, 1985, which is long before Club Penguin existed).
• Pretty Cure:
  • The descriptions for Canadian TV listings for the English dub of Futari wa Pretty Cure claimed the protagonists' names were Nagisa and Honoka, their original Japanese names, rather than Natalie and Hannah, their dub names. Only the first 10 episodes and the last 5 episodes used the English names for the characters.
  • Some websites (most notably Anime News Network) list Tetsuya Kakihara's role as Brian Taylor from Smile PreCure! as being that of a character from Glitter Force, the English dub of the show. While he does appear in the original Japanese version, his episode was one of eight that was omitted in the Glitter Force dub released in most countries outside of Asia, though he did get mentioned in a later episode, where Kelsey reads a letter he sent to her.
    • The same thing happened with the Doki Doki! PreCure dub, Glitter Force Doki Doki, which merged or omitted more episodes than Glitter Force, with roles that didn't appear in that dub being listed under the dub's name rather than the original name.
  • The official Cantonese dub of HappinessCharge Pretty Cure! has the tenth anniversary messages redubbed so that the Cures say it's the 10th season of the show. Happiness Charge is the 11th season and the ninth continuity of Pretty Cure. The actual 10th season is Doki Doki Pretty Cure, while the 10th continuity is Go! Princess Pretty Cure.
  • When a French streaming service announced that they got the rights to Futari wa Pretty Cure, an image of KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode was shown...which turned out to be an accidental leak of the series that would be released in July.
    • On the topic of Kira Kira Pretty Cure A La Mode, some websites claimed the crossover with Hatsune Miku was a celebration of both Miku and Pretty Cure's 10th anniversaries. While this was true for Miku, Pretty Cure had its tenth anniversary three years prior. However, Yes! Pretty Cure 5, which began with 5 warriors like A La Mode, did have its tenth anniversary in 2017.
  • Rakuten sometimes mistranslates all Pretty Cure series names on products as Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GO!GO! regardless of the series they are actually from.
    • Similarly, other Pretty Cure series often have computer-mistranslated names, with Go! Princess Pretty Cure becoming Go! Princess Pricy A and Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure as Healing Kids Pretty Cure.
  • The book Drawing Fantastic Female Fighters, which features character sheets and concept art from HeartCatch Pretty Cure! and Fresh Pretty Cure!, states that Heartcatch is the first season to feature returning characters from previous seasons. The problem? That never happens in the show itself, only in All-Stars DX 2, which isn't even the franchise's first crossover movie. It's likely that the writers confused HeartCatch for Hugtto!, which had recently concluded at the time the book was published and did feature cameos from previous seasons' characters.
  • This article claims that the baton pass videos are only uploaded online and are never screened on TV. They actually premiere after the final episode of a series has aired.
• One of the first AI issues captioned a picture of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke by identifying him as "Mononoke."
• An article on the Oregon Daily Emerald criticizing anime for destroying American society says that Pokémon: The Series, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! (which at first is spelled "Yugio", but after that, "sorry, Yu-Gi-Oh!") all began life as trading card games. In reality, while they all have had card games, none of them started out as that — Pokémon began life as a pair of Game Boy games created by Game Freak (and the card game came to the U.S. just a few months after the video game was released there), Digimon was originally a virtual pet (hence "Digimon", or Digital Monsters), and Yu-Gi-Oh! started out as a manga written by Kazuki Takahashi. And funnily enough, Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn't actually about a card game - it was about gaming in general.
• Back in 2005, a mother looked through a volume of the Peach Girl manga, which happened to have a date rape scene. Cue an article claiming that Peach Girl is about girls being drugged and gang-raped and that Tokyopop only publishes porn comics marketed toward children.
• While reviewing a Ranma ½ fighting game for the PC Engine, GamePro Magazine must have thought Ranma to be some sort of transforming superhero, having summarized the title character's background thus:
  "[Ranma] fell into a well where a great female warrior had drowned. Now, when he gets wet, he gets wild! Bad guys learn not to spit when Ranma's around."
  • An issue of Game Players Magazine did something similar when previewing the Ranma ½ SNES game. They said the series was about "a family of fighters where the kids are trained by their parents. The kids become masters and beat up would-be bullies."
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: This hilariously inaccurate clickbait article claims that a hypothetical season 2 of the anime would involve Oliver winning the "Sword Festival" and turning out to be the childhood friend of King Arthur, who apparently wields the Seventh Spellblade instead of Nanao, who canonically invented it. Suffice to say, this bears no resemblance to the plots of volumes 4-6 of the original novels whatsoever.
• While describing Rurouni Kenshin (which was being aired on Animax), TV Guide said Kaoru was a guy, indirectly calling Kenshin gay, and mixing her up with the other Kaoru whose show was airing on the same channel.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Back when the anime was still airing in Russia, a local newspaper containing TV program guides would occasionally write something about it in the kids' section. This sometimes resulted in the Sailor Moon-themed mini-articles mixing up the timeline (e.g., calling the Crystal Tokyo the capital of the destroyed Moon Kingdom) and/or mixing up the continuity (calling Anime!ChibiChibi Sailor Cosmos). One would think they could've at least visited one of the local fan websites or ask somebody familiar with the show.
  • DVD Talk's reviews of DiC Sailor Moon DVDs constantly call Tuxedo Mask, "Tuxedo Max," despite his name appearing on the front cover of one of the volumes discussed ("The Man in the Tuxedo Mask").
  • A columnist◊ for the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet described Sailor Moon as a nine-year-old in a "fully developed adult body" who was dressed "in a skirt so short you see her panties all the time" and passive-aggressively reflected on how no one questioned the "horny pedophile's wet dream". While she later apologized to the fans for getting the age wrong, it was obvious she still thought of Sailor Moon as a typical "extreme [sexual] object".
  • An ABC News article on shoujo manga claims that Sailor Moon received a film adaptation by Disney in 2000. Yes, an article from the website of a TV channel managed by Disney themselves.
  • When Sailor Moon episodes aired in the United States, some viewers and news media thought the anime was set in Paris, France as they mistook the Tokyo Tower for the Eiffel Tower!
• A 2006 New York Times article seems to think Samurai Champloo is about a ninja in training. Interestingly, the article itself avoids this entirely; the caption in question, however...
• The Secret World of Arrietty was slammed on Lou Dobbs Tonight in 2012 for being made to be pro-Occupy Wall Street... wait, what? Even ignoring Production Lead Time, not only was the book it was based on written in the 1960s, but the film itself is a Japanese movie predating the then-ongoing American economic protest movement by almost two years, making the complaint a rather awkward one.
• Anime Insider's sister magazine Wizard once ran a review of Slayers saying Lina Inverse traveled with the sorceress Naga and "a girl named Gourry".
• The Crunchyroll description of Shirokuma Cafe read "Polar Bear’s café revolves around a Canadian white bear that quits his boring job and starts a cafeteria near a zoo." Polar Bear does not quit anything, a cafe is not the same thing as a cafeteria, and it takes a train to get to the zoo. And while it's not impossible that Polar Bear is from Canada, the story where he talked about Canada turned out to be a lie he made up, so there's no real basis to say he's actually Canadian. He's most likely just Japanese, as we see him as a young cub in the same house that Grizzly still lives in in present day. The only accurate part is "white bear."
• When Sonic X premiered on CITV in the UK, the presenters repeatedly referred to the main character as, you guessed it, "Sonic X". This was carried on by Fox Kids/Jetix, who also referred to the bad guy as "Dr. Egg" in one promo.
  • Same goes for a Singaporean magazine called Kids Company, which is kinda sad, seeing as they probably had prior footage and ample time to do research. They started showing the show on Singaporean airwaves a year late.
  • Italian press releases for the series state that Sonic is a cyborg and Knuckles is a female. Both of these statements are wrong.
  • The subtitles for the Netflix release of the first episode also identify Sonic as "Sonic X", despite the episode showing Sonic identifying himself as "Sonic the Hedgehog."
• In the book Japanese Animation From Painted Scrolls to Pokémon by Brigitte Koyama-Richard, the film Summer Wars is described as being about a "shy" heroine who "takes refuge in a virtual universe that she has to learn to leave by trusting others." The actual main character of the film is a guy, the female lead is not shy by any means, and neither of them "take refuge" in the virtual world and need help leaving it. Instead, the characters have to help Oz itself because it has been taken over by a rogue A.I. Oddly this is a somewhat accurate description of .hack//SIGN and they perhaps got the two works confused, although even then there's still some inaccuracies. For one, Tsukasa is literally trapped in the game and can't log out even if she wanted to, and she's more outright antisocial than shy.
• Malaysian provider Astro once had a description◊ of Sword Art Online stating that Kirito is a villain the main characters must defeat to get out of the game. He's actually the show's main protagonist.
• TV Guide once described Tenchi Muyo in Love as "Police partners hunt an escaped convict," which is technically accurate, but didn't even bother mentioning that they're Space Police, or that there's time travel, alien princes, or any other elements that are fundamental to the plot.
• This article about the announcement of a deluxe edition of the Trigun manga got every detail about the characters completely wrong. They claim that Vash is a former mercenary turned pacifist when he was never a mercenery and always a pacifist, and that Milly and Meryl are journalists when they're insurance agents (though they do become reporters at the end of the series). They also describe Wolfwood as adopting the tenet "Thou Shalt not Kill", when Wolfwood's willingness to kill is the main source of conflict with Vash. The article also states that "he and Vash kill a ton of people", when Vash Only directly, voluntarily kills one person in the entire series, not counting the destruction of July.
• At an exhibit in Epcot's Japan pavilion called "Spirited Beasts: From Ancient Stories to Anime Stars", the "Bakeneko & Inugami" display labeled Inuyasha as his half-brother Sesshomaru. More egregiously, a plaque labeled a figure of Rei Ayanami a "Robotic Cat Spirit", with this description:
  In mythic stories, the line between human and animal is often blurred. Rei Ayanami, a robotic being from Neon Genesis Evengelion, moves with feline grace, has antennae nodes that resemble cat's ears, and sometimes sports a catlike tail. Her origins are shrouded in mystery.
  • Rei Ayanami isn't robotic at all, and has never been officially depicted with a "catlike tail" unless you count these two figures. The Rei plaque was later updated to fix some of the worst inaccuracies... but it still misspells the series' title.
  • This inaccuracy was brought to the attention of NGE fanboy and the Genie himself, Robin Williams.
    Robin: Oh god, I’m dying over here. What were they thinking? You should really contact Disney over this, if they don’t already know.
• A book that listed the main protagonists and antagonists of well-known manga claimed that the main character of ×××HOLiC was Yuka Ichihara, a fifteen year-old part-timer at the magic shop who despite her age drank a lot of alcohol. Although they got Yuko being a Hard-Drinking Party Girl right, the book still makes her a Composite Character with the (male) fifteen yeard-old part timer at her magic shop, Kimihiro Watanuki, who is the true protagonist of the show.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • A newspaper article on the anime confusingly stated that Joey had made the common mistake of using powerful cards. This was the only information on the character. In actuality, the problem was that Joey used powerful monsters and nothing to support them.
  • A review for The Movie said it was 11 years old. The 11-year-old movie never got to America, and this one (Pyramid of Light) is completely different.
  • The website of the German network that aired Yu-Gi-Oh! provided us with hilariously ill-researched character descriptions. To provide a few examples: Yami was banned because he tried to seize the throne of the pharaoh with his shadow powers, Shizuka is blind, Anzu (Ms. Fanservice in the early manga) is eleven years old and has been the boss of a cheerleader-group for years, and Seto became the CEO of KaibaCorp by beating Gozaburo at another game of chess, not to mention that he's two years older than everybody else. Surprisingly subverted with Bakura, whose sister Amane they mention. Said German network, RTL 2, never really seemed to care too much about their anime anyway. When Attack No. 1 (Mila Superstar in Germany) aired, the summary on their webpage was actually for Attacker You! (Mila e Shiro in Italy! The show never even made it to Germany) and the summary for Captain Tsubasa used the names from the Italian translation. Really makes you wonder what the heck was going on there.
  • An Italian TV guide summarized Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds as "the story of a boy and his five dragons".
  • An interesting example here. If the link is broken (or you don't speak Swedish at all), it talks about Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, in which Yugi's grandfather is kidnapped by Pegasus...Which was the plot of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Monsters, not of GX.
  • The recaps of the various Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL episodes found on Italian TV Guides (as in, the one you find on the TV, not magazines) are well done. Except that sometimes they give wrong names to characters^note The Italian dub is based on the Japanese version, but using the 4Kids names for characters introduced before the World Duel Carnival. After that, new characters use the Japanese names, but the TV Guide keeps using 4Kids names for everyone. And they sometimes call Astral a female.
  • Disney Adventures has labeled a picture of Anubis (from the first Yu-Gi-Oh! movie) as "Seto Kaiba". They apologized for the mistake in a later issue.
• More than a few sites refer to Yuki Yuna is a Hero as a moe Slice of Life Schoolgirl Series. While it does have Slice of Life elements in early episodes some summaries completely ignore most of it is a Magical Girl Warrior anime that dives straight into Cerebus Syndrome toward the end.
• The front cover to the first edited VHS of The Vision of Escaflowne claims the series is "as seen on Cartoon Network's Toonami", and so does the Amazon review - however, the show was actually broadcast on Fox Kids.
• An editor for Anime News Network tweeted in an advertisement for the fall 2016 preview guide "Your favorite waitstaff are back in WWW.WAGNARIA!!". However, this new season has an entirely new main cast, something the editor realized the next day and apologized for messing up.
• There have been some articles on anime sites that refer to Chiba from Wandering Son as "Saorin Chiba". "Saorin" is a nickname, as putting -rin to the back of a name is common for girls in Japan; her name's just "Saori".
• Getter Robo: The Russian Wikipedia calls Ryoma an incompetent fighter that was thrown out of the championship(in reality, he simply stormed in and pummeled everyone he could), misspells Galilei's name as "Gareri", and glosses over the fact that he and Bat are lizards.

Anime in General

• The American Family Association wrote an article on the dangers of video games and this somehow segued into H-games. This would've been fine and all....except the article misspelled 'hentai' as 'hentia'. Again, wouldn't have been a problem except the article KEPT ON spelling it in that manner.
• Bleeding Cool, a comic book news website, has an article called "Swap File", where they show different background items being used in two separate comics. A recent one showed that a Clow Reed circle was used in one of the Brightest Day spin-off covers. Not so bad. The bad part is when they show clips and pictures from Cardcaptor Sakura and kept saying it was from Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. Readers were quick to correct them on their mistake.
• An infamous article◊ by The Edmonton Journal from Canada features gems such as "Hentae" and that all hentai is essentially lolicon or BDSM-rape.
• An article from Facts and Details about manga in Japan. They get most of it right, but when talking about doujinshi, they claim that it means a group of artists, when in actuality "doujinshi" is just a catch-all term for amateur manga, while a group of artists are called Circles.
• One 4Kids promo has Sonic the Hedgehog^note yes really, courtesy of his English voice actor and some recycled footage from Sonic X giving a synopsis of Dragon Ball Z Kai...and apparently Piccolo's a Saiyan.
• During the 90s, many popular anime series such as Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball were said to be French animated series in various European TV guides, because, in a lot of European countries, they have been licensed through French media distributors.
  • Partially understandable since the word "anime" looks like "animé", the French translation for animation in general, without the accent mark. For the record, if you want to specify you're talking about Japanese animation in France, they use "Manga" for both anime and manga.
• A September 11, 2008 MSNBC report on "sexy anime going mainstream". It said "Lolicom" is a combination of "Lolita" and "comic". And that "Otaku" is a word meaning "Techno-geek". Not to mention that one of the girls' "maid costumes" in the supplied photograph is actually a cosplay of Cure Black, who has never been a maid. And apparently Gurren Lagann is a "sexually-suggestive and explicit anime" comparable with Legend of the Overfiend.^note Amusingly, given Overfiend is the Trope Codifier for tentacle hentai, that's playing All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles literally.
• This first-hand account from the San Antonio Current of someone who's never seen anime before going to a Funimation panel refers to every single title listed as "hentai" - ecchi titles like Heaven's Lost Property, Cat Planet Cuties and the Senran Kagura anime are excusable for the mistake due to their adult age ratings and the amount of blatant Fanservice, but Free! has a clear PG label, as well as a fairly mild trailer that showcases no more than shirtless boys (which, considering its about a swim team, makes sense) - how on earth can that be mistaken for hentai?
• On February 18th 2012 The Sunderland Echo, a British local paper, had an article about the city's upcoming Anime Convention, Sunnycon and how Christopher Sabat and Veronica Taylor were guests. It was accompanied by this image ...yeah no, that's not Vegeta. Then at said convention, said guests were asked if they'd be happy to swap lines.
• When Spanish network "La Sexta" gave the news on the failure of the lolicon pornography ban, they somehow decided that "loli" meant "schoolgirl", so they talked about the "ban on schoolgirls"... which wouldn't have been THAT bad if all the clips they used were not of hentai anime with busty schoolgirls (except one, which did have a little girl in Hadaka Apron).
• A lot of the time, Bara gets miscategorized as Boys' Love just because they both feature homosexuality as a main theme. However, they both have completely different demographics, themes, and aesthetics. The same happens with the Otokonoko Genre. It doesn't help that there are actually boys' love series that do feature hunk-y men or effeminate crossdressers in them, and some bara artists also make works for the BL market.
• a Q&A about proportions of anime characters The writer claims that the average person is from 5 to 6 heads tall, actually, an average person is from 7 to 7.5 heads tall. she then claims that anime characters in children are 3-4 heads tall, teenagers are 4.5 heads tall and adults are 5 heads tall, teenage and adult anime characters are from 6-8 heads tall depending on the art style and age and children in anime are 6 heads tall depending on the art style and age, whereas anime with a simplistic art style have children, teenagers and adults with shorter proportions, it's possible the writer was confusing proportions on stylized western cartoon characters, although western cartoon characters have different proportions depending on the art style and age.
• A tutorial on manga and anime proportions falsely states that pre-teens are from 12-16 and pre-teens are from 10-12 years old, not 12-16 years old. They also claim that the characters from the manga and anime series Manga/K-ON use the 1:5 head to body ratio when the characters from K-ON are 6 heads tall. In fact, most teenage characters in manga and anime are 6-8 heads tall depending on the art style. Also, they mention two Ken Akamatsu manga and anime series Love Hina and Negima instead of mentioning other manga series, however, the characters in the aforementioned manga are 7 heads tall.
• In an article about framerate modulation in anime, the writer says that movement in cinema is real. Movement in film is not real, it's an illusion where your brain thinks it's moving, but it's not.