Elephants in the Living Room in Western Animation.
- BoJack Horseman has BoJack's then-girlfriend, Wanda, namedrop the trope in regards to their I "Uh" You, Too moment. Unfortunately, this causes the handy-elephant BoJack had brought home to help set up his auto-erotic asphyxiation machine to indignantly storm out of the room while trying to call her out on using the phrase.BoJack: He is never gonna forget that.
- Cow and Chicken from Cow and Chicken are, somehow, siblings, despite being a cow and a chicken. Nobody in the cast questions it; absurdly, not even their own HUMAN parents. Members of their extended family include a boneless chicken, a sow, a black sheep and a half-human, half-snail hybrid (whose parents, as we see, are a human woman and a tiny snail). And we also see their grandparents were a human and a hen. It's... a big mess, really. This is lampshaded by the theme song.Mama had a chicken! Mama had a cow! Dad was proud! He didn't care how!
- The Fairly OddParents! has quite a few, some bordering on Fridge Logic:
- The show never shows poor and/or starving children in third-world countries with fairy godparents, despite the fact they're obviously more deserving of them than "an average kid who no one understands". They probably do have fairies, but we just don't see them.
- Timmy never makes any sort of world-benefitting wish, like no discrimination (the closest he got to doing that was wishing everyone was the same, but that didn't change people's attitudes like he had hoped), world peace, a cure for cancer, etc. While this could be justified in that he's a self-centered 10-year-old child and when he grows up all remnants of his fairies' magic will disappear unless he keeps the mindset of a child, it seems implausible that he never thought to wish for something like this not even once. In the live-action movies which take place in a possible future, Timmy can only make selfless wishes, and even if he does, there is a limit to how far he can go with them.
- Even the more good-natured Chloe doesn't consider making such wishes, even though she does occasionally make world-benefitting wishes on a much smaller scale.
- Family Guy:
- Brian, a talking dog—who interacts with everyone, has human girlfriends, drives a Prius, and so on. Yet no one ever questions it. Unless it's funny. Like when Peter is suddenly shocked to hear Brian talking... in the middle of a conversation, after having known him for years. Or when Brian goes to visit the farm where he was born:Farmer: Lots of dogs have been born here. Refresh my memory. Which one were you again?
Brian: I was the one who could talk.
Farmer: Brian! - Parodied in episode "Death is a Bitch", which has Peter and Lois discussing Peter having a breast lump. Lois insists that Peter should go see a doctor, but Peter says that it would be better not to talk about it, "just like we do with the squid." The camera pulls back to reveal an actual giant squid at the table, who knocks various objects to the floor; Peter and Lois make excuses.
- Played surprisingly seriously in "Seahorse Seashell Party." Throughout the series, poor Meg is the Queen of Butt Monkeys—she's openly mocked, criticized, excluded, mistreated, and even set on fire by Peter, Lois, and Chris. In this episode, she finally calls Chris, Lois, and Peter out on their horrific treatment of her, and delivers blistering speeches about their own flaws. The problem is that these revelations cause her brother and parents to start fighting endlessly with one another, prompting Meg to realize that she needs to be the target of the family's derision to keep them all alive. In other words, when she mentions the elephant, it goes on a rampage.
- Brian, a talking dog—who interacts with everyone, has human girlfriends, drives a Prius, and so on. Yet no one ever questions it. Unless it's funny. Like when Peter is suddenly shocked to hear Brian talking... in the middle of a conversation, after having known him for years. Or when Brian goes to visit the farm where he was born:
- The basis of a long-running introduction to an episode of The Far Side animated series. Probably.
- Done in an episode of The Garfield Show when an actual elephant hides at the Arbuckle residence. It takes Jon a while to realize the creature is out of place.
- Parodied in Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus. The Tallest are so obsessed with getting as far away from Zim and Earth as possible that they willfully ignore their navigator’s repeated warnings that they’re flying straight towards a black hole. They keep cheerfully ignoring it even as they fly straight into the singularity to their probable deaths, chiding the navigator for being "too negative" when he tries to warn them one last time.
- It was a Running Gag in The Oblongs that everyone avoided directly referencing the fact that Bob doesn't have arms or legs. Although, in the episode "Bucketheads", Tommy Vinegar does call him a Weeble. And in another episode (the one where Helga gets her parents back) Bob goes to play the piano, which leaves Milo embarrassed and the people shocked. I wonder what they could be alluding to…
- The City of Townsville, hometown of The Powerpuff Girls, is cartoondom's equivalent of Metropolis, Gotham City and Marvel Universe New York rolled into one. You'd have to wonder why people want to live in a city where the criminals only take a break from their activities whenever they need to run away from the giant-sized monsters that are regularly rampaging the city.
- A near-literal example in the Malaysian series Pumpkin Reports, where the Villain Protagonist has planted a giant pumpkin in the corner of her surrogate home that's visible in the living room and has taken out a sizable chunk of the wall.
- The Rugrats episode "Chuckie is Rich" deals with Chuckie's father winning the lottery and moving them into a new life. When everyone goes to visit he has purchased a large glass elephant for the living room. They would rather talk about that than the fact he became a snob. But everything works out. Except Stu broke the glass elephant.
- Scooby-Doo:
- Scooby Doo can talk... and no one cares. This has occasionally been lampshaded, even during the early era of the franchise, and the series would come to develop an on-again-off-again Running Gag where someone would exclaim "Oh my gosh! A talking dog!" and Scooby would answer "Rog? Rhere?" Much more frequent are jokes about his speech impediment: for example, in "Bravo Dooby Doo", Johnny Bravo is surprised that the gang can understand Scooby.
- Played with in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, where the fact that Scooby (and a few other animal characters) are capable of human speech still isn't questioned, but does end up serving as a key plot point in the show's Myth Arc, culminating the in the final episode where Scooby might now be the only talking animal in existence thanks to a Cosmic Retcon. where Velma calls Shaggy... "Scooby, put Shaggy on... Because you're almost impossible to understand over the phone."
- Mr. Krabs from SpongeBob SquarePants is a crab who has a whale for a daughter. It's never discussed so it's unknown if she's adopted or takes after her mom; similarly, in "Krusty Love" Mr. Krabs asks SpongeBob what happened to Mr. Puff when he develops a crush on Mrs. Puff, SpongeBob responds with a cutaway scene where we see Mr. Puff used as a lamplight set in a live action background. We then see someone offscreen turning on the light that no one discusses it.
- Steven Universe: In "Last One Out of Beach City", Pearl gets nervous when she comes across a woman with pink hair. When she, Amethyst and Steven leave the shop, there's an uncomfortable silence until Steven decides to address the issue.
