- Disney:
- Silly Symphonies was one of the most influential cartoon series of The Golden Age of Animation—and as a result, it was also one of the most copied. Virtually every studio from the time (except Terrytoons) had its own knockoff of Walt Disney's lush cartoons: Max Fleischer's Color Classics, Walter Lantz's CartuneClassics, Columbia Cartoons' Color Rhapsodies, Ub Iwerks' Comi Color Cartoons, Harman and Ising's Happy Harmonies, etc., etc. Earlier on, Warner Bros' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies began this way, as their titles suggest, but changed dramatically later, as we all know.
- The various Mickey Mouse clones of the era, like Foxy from Lady, Play Your Mandolin!, Milton Mouse from Van Beuren Studios, Walter Lantz's Pooch the Pup, and others. Though Mickey himself was based partly on Felix the Cat and partly on Disney's earlier character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
- The trend continued. The 1940s character Mighty Mouse was obviously modeled after Mickey, as have been countless "heroic mice" in cartoons ever since.
- It eventually crossed over into Anime in The '60s with Astro Boy, whom Osamu Tezuka specifically designed to be Japan's version of Mickey Mouse. The intention is especially apparent with Astro Boy's hair, which is clearly based off of Mickey's iconic mouse ears.
- The Smurfette Principle was actually introduced when Mickey Mouse got a female companion that was basically a copy of himself in female drag. This has been imitated ever since with Daisy Duck, Winnie Woodpecker, Babs Bunny...
- Disney was also the first animation studio to include famous tunes from the world of classical music on the soundtrack, such as Rossini's William Tell Overture whenever characters are running or riding a horse. This has been copied by many other animation studios, most notably Looney Tunes.
- Donald Duck was obviously the inspiration for a lot of aggressive cartoon characters, most notably Daffy Duck.
- This was the greatest weakness of the obscure Van Beuren cartoon studio; while their animation was as off the wall as you could get, their cartoons were very derivative of what other studios were doing, and they were clearly handicapped by their inability to create unique characters. Many of their early '30s cartoons take their surreal cues straight from their rival studio from literally across the street, Fleischer Studios; "The Farmerette" even has an obvious Betty Boop stand-in, even voiced by one of her actresses, Bonnie Poe. One of their sound fables, "Panicky Pup", is an obvious knockoff of Fleischer's "Swing, You Sinners!". Their Tom and Jerry note is a flaccid attempt at a Mutt And Jeff-esque duo, and their Milton Mouse and Cubby Bear, as well as their interpretation of Felix the Cat, are obvious Mickey Mouse knockoffs. Their Toddle Tale and some of their Rainbow Parade cartoons ride off the coat of Disney's Silly Symphonies series.
- Betty Boop inspired the trend of adult jokes in a genre so much associated with children.
- Tex Avery's style of comedic exaggerations, Wild Takes, off the wall absurdity, fourth-wall-breaking jokes, and more adult comedy have been ripped off to the point of death by other cartoon shows. Even gags like the "Painted Tunnel, Real Train" joke were stolen from him.
- Looney Tunes also borrowed a lot from Avery (no surprise, considering he was an ex-Warner Bros. staffer that established the house style) and became very influential itself. Animation with jokes that adults can enjoy are still mostly derived from them, most obviously in Animaniacs.
- Crazy and aggressive screwball characters like Daffy Duck likewise inspired a lot of similar insane and annoying characters like Woody Woodpecker.
- Tom and Jerry: Though not the first cat-and-mouse cartoon it remains the most famous example, inspiring countless rip-offs such as Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinks (by Hanna & Barbera themselves) and Herman and Katnip, as well as the Bloodier and Gorier Affectionate Parody The Itchy & Scratchy Show.
- Frank Tashlin, who previously worked at Warner Bros., arrived at Columbia Cartoons in 1941 and brought his influence with him. The direction of the cartoons went Denser and Wackier as a result, with shorts like Dog, Cat and Canary, The Rocky Road to Ruin (which is clearly based on The Dover Boys), and most famously the The Fox and the Crow shorts (which were a heavy influence on Chuck Jones, who partially based the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner shorts on them).
- Looney Tunes also borrowed a lot from Avery (no surprise, considering he was an ex-Warner Bros. staffer that established the house style) and became very influential itself. Animation with jokes that adults can enjoy are still mostly derived from them, most obviously in Animaniacs.
- At the end of The Golden Age of Animation, UPA became such a success that many studios began emulating their style: Warner Bros., Terrytoons, Famous Studios, and even Disney would incorporate UPA's style into their cartoons. In particular, Famous Studios created an entire series (Modern Madcaps) clearly intended to ape the UPA cartoons.
- One of the Modern Madcaps cartoons, Finnegan's Flea, was also very clearly trying to copy One Froggy Evening.
- Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men: The Animated Series were such hits that they led to a wave of similar [Comic Book]: The Animated Series type shows using a similar back-to-basics approach. Comic-based animated shows before would try all sorts of gimmicks and be "hip" to the times, while these shows were targeted towards "adult" stories that kids can still understand. Their immediate contemporaries include Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Phantom 2040, etc. This is without considering the producers of Batman repeating the pattern throughout the DC Animated Universe, or many of the staff who worked on X-Men later trying the same thing with Spider-Man.
- The success of X-Men and Spider-Man also inspired Marvel to farm out their IP to several other channels and production companies, leading to Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, Iron Man: The Animated Series, The Incredible Hulk (1996) and The Avengers: United They Stand. These also included a number of people who worked on X-Men, like Larry Houston, who went on to work on Fantastic Four, Incredible Hulk and The Avengers.
- Disney's Gargoyles was influenced by Batman:TAS, with its similar Timm Style art design, dark and moody atmosphere, and complex storylines.
- Years earlier, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was commissioned to cash in on the success of the Superfriends franchise.
- The Flintstones was the first successful animated sitcom. Without them The Jetsons and later The Simpsons and Family Guy would have never happened.
- The popularity of The Ren & Stimpy Show led to many more Gross Out Shows, notably Cow and Chicken, a trend that seemed to meet its end in 2001 with the canceled-after-a-season The Ripping Friends (incidentally made by John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy). Granted, arguments could be made for Sanjay and Craig and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.
- The success of Hanna-Barbera's Scooby-Doo launched a whole boatload of other series about mystery-solving/crime-fighting teens and their talking animal/car/whatever friend. The interesting thing about this was that most of these copycats were actually produced by Hanna-Barbera themselves. And they made a lot: Josie and the Pussycats, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, The Funky Phantom, Speed Buggy, Clue Club, and Jabberjaw, just to name a few. There are so many clones that, for a few years, Boomerang had a block called "Those Meddling Kids" dedicated to all of them. And even before that, the clones and the original had their own team on Laff-A-Lympics, the Scooby-Doobies.
- Likewise, when their Animated Adaptation of The Smurfs became such a massive hit, Hanna-Barbera tried repeating the success with myriad variations of the formula, such as The Snorks, The Biskitts and Paw Paw Bears.
- The success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) led to the creation of numerous other Teenage Mutant Samurai Wombats shows. Even the Licensed Games inspired imitators in the form of Battletoads and Cheetahmen. Both tried to spin off cartoon series as well, but the Battletoads cartoon flopped instantly and the Cheetahmen cartoon never got off the drawing boards.
- Whilst the extent to which more adult-orientated animated shows such as Family Guy and South Park are direct 'rip-offs' of The Simpsons is a subject of bitter and acrimonious debate across the Internet, it is fairly safe to say that without the enduring popularity of The Simpsons, which showed there was a market for animated programming aimed at more adult audiences, the former two shows — plus a lot of more obscure and more quickly forgotten similar shows — would probably have never been greenlit thanks to the Animation Age Ghetto.
- After the show first premiered, there were a number of prime time animated shows that came out afterward, like Capitol Critters, Family Dog and Fish Police, that lasted barely one season. While it wasn't a cartoon, Dinosaurs was simimilarly a response to The Simpsons (which was acknowledged by both shows), but lasted several years longer.
- Beavis and Butt-Head garnered probably even more controversy than South Park. Precisely because the Animation Age Ghetto was still in full bloom.
- The Simpsons itself inspired plenty of prime time cartoons aimed at slightly more mature audiences on network television such as The Critic, Futurama, Dilbert, The PJs, The Oblongs, Clerks: The Animated Series, Mission Hill, and Family Guy.
- Extremely bloody violence in American mainstream animation was popularized by "The Itchy & Scratchy Show" from The Simpsons, originally intended as a parody of old style non-fatal cartoon violence in the Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry (to name a few). Back then it was seen as shocking. Nowadays, shows from Beavis and Butt-Head over South Park, Family Guy to [adult swim] and Happy Tree Friends have included horrific body mutilations and gruesome bloody deaths in their episodes ever since.
- The Simpsons were also the first animated show to frequently include parodies of famous film scenes in their scripts. Today this "pop culture referencing" trend has literally gone berserk in other animation such as The Critic, Futurama, Shrek, Shark Tale, South Park and especially Family Guy!
- Even Homer Simpson himself has been copied several times in shows like Bob in God, the Devil and Bob, Jay Sherman in The Critic, and Peter Griffin in Family Guy which all feature a dumb and/or obese, pathetic slob as its main character.
- The long-running rivalry between The Simpsons and South Park is an interesting case study in this trope. In South Park's early days, when it generally stuck to its simple "quirky small-town America" premise, many people unfavorably compared it to The Simpsons, accusing it of substituting that show's clever writing for simple vulgarity. South Park is generally agreed to have Grown the Beard when it started drawing more humor from current events and politics (effectively becoming a weekly political cartoon in animated form), and topical satire became its biggest strength. Conversely, when The Simpsons came to be criticized for its increasing reliance on quickly outdated topical humor, many people accused it of trying to copy South Park. So while South Park was once derided as a less clever version of The Simpsons, The Simpsons is now often derided as a less daring South Park.
- Teen Titans set the tone for kids' action cartoons throughout the 2000s with its Comedy-action blending and Animesque artstyle.
- An example from Italy: When the comic book Angel's Friends was adapted for TV, the characters went from looking like grade-school students... to looking a whole lot like the Winx. And in a reversal of fortune, the TV series itself has been adapted back into a comic book, using the Winx-ified character designs.
- Ever since SpongeBob SquarePants proved popular, it started a string of cartoons with random humor and an idiot protagonist trying to match its success. Examples include Yakkity Yak, Coconut Fred, Scaredy Squirrel, and Fanboy and Chum Chum.
- It could be argued that even SpongeBob took more than its share of inspiration from Ren and Stimpy, minus the gross-out humor (at first, at least). The two shows share loose artwork, manic pacing, Surreal Humor, hand-painted close-ups of the characters, and the same music cues.
- The pre-movie episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants are very popular, even to this day. Many cartoons have picked up the same formula where they are very joke driven as opposed to cartoons like Rugrats and Hey Arnold! & don't have plots that can relate to real life such as Adventure Time (the Exec Producer of that show is SpongeBob co creator Derek Drymon), Regular Show, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Gravity Falls (with the only exception of this being Phineas and Ferb, despite the fact that it can be very surreal).
- Some could also say that SpongeBob drew inspiration from The Pink Panther and Woody Woodpecker where the main protagonist is depicted as extremely annoying to the other characters (Animaniacs and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends are also part this club).
- It could be argued that even SpongeBob took more than its share of inspiration from Ren and Stimpy, minus the gross-out humor (at first, at least). The two shows share loose artwork, manic pacing, Surreal Humor, hand-painted close-ups of the characters, and the same music cues.
- Animated Anthology shows were often made in the 1990s due to the popularity of Liquid Television. Some include Cartoon Network's What A Cartoon! Show, Disney's The Shnookums & Meat Funny Cartoon Show, Fox Kids and WB's Animaniacs, and Nickelodeon's KaBlam! and Oh Yeah! Cartoons.
- Parodied in The Simpsons episode "Flaming Moe's". The episode revolves around bartender Moe stealing Homer's idea for a drink recipe and renaming it the Flaming Moe. He even goes as far to rename his bar after the drink. His bar becomes a popular club spot, attracting even the likes of Aerosmith. After Homer outs the recipe to the general public, dozens of bars, restaurants and carts sprout up on the same street with variations on the name—e.g., Flaming Meaux.
- Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "Beyond The Farthest Star": In particular, the biomechanical alien architecture and never-seen-before-or-again wavy warp-through-a-star effect were both duplicated shortly afterward by Space Battleship Yamato. (Also some suspiciously similar background music.)
- During the mid-1990s, Cartoon Network produced a couple of cartoon series where the characters had very stylized designs, intentionally looked rather one-dimensional and were drawn with thick black outlines around their bodies (the style was intended to be a throwback to certain 1950s cartoons). After the success of The Powerpuff Girls in 1998, this style became enormously widely used in cartoons both by Cartoon Network and by other companies. It remains popular to this day, partly thanks to the rise of animation programs that allow the use of "puppet rigs" like Adobe Flash and Toon Boom. This ironically mirrors how Limited Animation caught on in The '50s. It started out as a unique artistic statement, but later became a way to create cheap, lazy animation.
- With the success of Michael Bay's Transformers movies, Hasbro decided to hire a "creative steward" to reinvent its other big property, My Little Pony. The result was Lauren Faust getting the deal to produce My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic And as a result of that, The Hub is introducing more similar shows and advertising them as part of the same lineup as My Little Pony. Most prominently, and most obviously, is the new Littlest Pet Shop, which shares a similar visual style and somewhat sarcastic but good-natured writing style. It hasn't achieved the huge success of Friendship Is Magic, but it does have its fans and is developing its separate identity. The European-produced CGI cartoon Filly Funtasia and the Disney series The Lion Guard are also this to an extent.
- The Jetsons was rather blatantly created by Hanna-Barbera to cash in on the success of their other animated sitcom in an unusual setting, The Flintstones. And a decade later, they tried again with The Roman Holidays.
- Invader Zim, after hitting its cult/ sleeper hit status, paved a road for many shows that accessed dark, random humor as opposed to conventional gags. The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, and even more recent shows like Adventure Time, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, and Regular Show are all examples of this.
- Seth MacFarlane and his basic template of off-color humor, violence and sex (with a Talking Animal sidekick) has stood him well for two separate series leading off from his first series, Family Guy. So much so that it spawned a few clones, too. Comedy Central's Brickleberry borrows directly from the MacFarlane book with lots of violence, black humor and sex jokes, whereas Teletoon's Crash Canyon is possibly the most egregious of all, borrowing pretty much everything, including the visual style of his shows. Mercilessly spoofed here.
- Phineas and Ferb helped usher in an era of cartoons that aspired to have excellent writing, a great sense of continuity and consistency, smart humor, and a way to use tropes that had not been done before until Phineas and Ferb came along. Some of the cartoons that Phineas and Ferb has influenced include Regular Show, The Amazing World of Gumball, and even Gravity Falls.
- The kids' Christmas movie "The Nuttiest Nutcracker" is this applied to VeggieTales. It's a musical about talking produce whose message is "Have faith."
- Archer could be considered something of a Spiritual Successor to The Venture Bros., both being adult-oriented Action/Comedy series set in a Retro Universe making heavy use of deconstructive humor.
- The Netflix series Pacific Heat was slammed for blatantly ripping off Archer and doing a shoddy job of it. The creators, however, said that they had the idea since 1996 and say that they had no intention of mimicking the other show.
- Another Hanna-Barbera series, Pac-Man, inspired other studios to create Saturday morning cartoons based on video games: Saturday Supercade, Dragon's Lair, Captain N: The Game Master and Pole Position, among others.
- The sheer lasting power of [adult swim], particularly Adult Swim Comedy, seems to have created a profound effect on Cartoon Network's appearance. Promotional material turned into rapid montages of related material, often characters doing stupid things; there is a rise of 15-minute shows (that are not necessarily part of a two-shorts format); and a few shows have appeared recently that have Random Events Plots, crude artwork, and bizarre humor (with lots of Black Comedy) like Chowder, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, The Amazing World of Gumball, MAD (itself playing Follow the Leader with Robot Chicken), Adventure Time, Regular Show, The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange, and Incredible Crew, all of which would fit right in with Adult Swim Comedy. Teen Titans Go! seems to have taken this humor and simplistic art style and put a DC Universe cover over it. The influence seems to have crossed networks, as even Sanjay and Craig draws clearly from the Adult Swim "house style" (and a bit of Bob's Burgers, with whom it shares a character designer).
- Speaking of Robot Chicken, they themselves made fun of this trope by mocking the entire genre of "Fat Suit" movies like Big Momma's House by advertising a movie literally called "Giant Fat Black Lady Who's Really A Black Man In A Really Big Fat Suit."Come see the movie you've already seen a million times before! It's Giant Fat Black Lady Who's Really A Black Man In A Really Big Fat Suit! It's the second-best fat suit movie in at least four months!
- Wild Brain Entertainment's animated series Poochini is under the influence of that of Courage the Cowardly Dog and Oggy and the Cockroaches. Take Courage the Cowardly Dog's plot about a dog discovering weird stuff in the neighborhood he lives in and mix it with Oggy and The Cockroaches' plot about a house pet getting some trouble from a Gang of Bullies. From there you get Poochini.
- The combined success of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) and the first mini-series of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero led to an onslaught of Merchandise-Driven action shows throughout the 80s and early in the 90s. Common features include being being produced for first-run syndication, dozens of characters on both the good and evil sides, and short educational segments tacked-on at the end to meet broadcasting requirements.
- The massive success of Adventure Time and Regular Show has led to a string of bizarre cartoons like Breadwinners, Sanjay and Craig, and Pickle and Peanut. Interestingly, a new trend of slice-of-life shows like Clarence, Harvey Beaks, and We Bare Bears has also begun as if to rebel against the norm. Besides their quirky and ironic sense of comedy, another thing that virtually ALL of these aforementioned shows have in common, from Adventure Time to Steven Universe to Clarence, is that they feature an very similar visual style, especially in regards to character designs. This style is marked primarily by rounded shapes, and a massive usage of certain specific character design traits such as "noodle"-arms, round cheeks, red noses, etc. At this point it is probably warranted to simply describe this style as "2010's American television cartoon style", as it is so ubiquitous.
- It's clear that one of the main reasons The Powerpuff Girls was rebooted was to cash in on the success of Steven Universe, Cartoon Network's other famous female-lead series. The series does not have the gratuitous action and violence the original series was famous for, making it similar to Steven Universe, which also has relatively little violence. Furthermore, the reboot got rid of characters like Ms. Bellum, as well as sidelining the original villains in favor of giving more focus to characters like Princess and Manboy.
- Following the success of Fritz the Cat, an X-rated animated film, we had King Dick, Down and Dirty Duck, and Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle.
- The popularity of Monster High has spawned many similar doll lines. Several have Animated Adaptations, such as DC Super Hero Girls and My Little Pony: Equestria Girls.
- Thomas & Friends started the trend in children's TV of slapping a face on a vehicle and calling it a day, which is a trend that still pops up to this very day. It has inspired shows like Chuggington, Roary the Racing Car, Jay Jay the Jet Plane, and Jungle Junction. Though, one of these instances actually did have the same producer.
- After Sofia the First finally beat Dora the Explorer as the most popular preschool animated series, Nickelodeon decided to create shows that followed young girls who were able to use magic to help others with a special item such as Little Charmers, Shimmer and Shine, Mia and Me and Dora and Friends: Into the City!. Although the first two shows were successful with the target audience, the last two shows weren't as successful, with the latter show's failure having killed off the chances of Nickelodeon making any further Dora-related productions, this would mean nothing to Nickelodeon as PAW Patrol would beat Sofia as the most popular preschool animated series.
- A very likely example, as Oggy and the Cockroaches was so popular in India, that it influenced Rat-a-Tat (Pakdam Pakdai in Indian). Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird became a victim to this as well, as Toonz Media (the studio behind Rat-a-Tat) used it as inspiration for Bunty and Billy, another pantomime cartoon.
- The critical acclaim of Gravity Falls led to the creation of more modern fantasy cartoons spliced with comedy, horror and mystery like The Owl House, Victor and Valentino, and Infinity Train.
- After Nickelodeon's successful compilation blocks of SpongeBob SquarePants, The Loud House, and PAW Patrol, Cartoon Network got in on making their own compilation blocks of Steven Universe (such as "Greg's Greatest Hits", "Fusions" and "Stevonnie Forever") Teen Titans Go! (such as "Titans vs. Santa", "Opposite Titans", "Tooth Fairy Fun" and "Beast Boy's Best Beasts"), The Amazing World of Gumball (such as "The Amazing Dates of Gumball & Penny" and "Gumball's Nemesis") and We Bare Bears (such as "Panda Crushes", "The Stack of Life" and "Basketbears").
- Arthur started a trend in children's TV of "make an educational cartoon out of a book and hope it gets successful" - inspiring shows such as Clifford the Big Red Dog, Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, Franklin, Timothy Goes to School, Elliot Moose, George Shrinks, Max and Ruby, Scaredy Squirrel, and Martha Speaks.
- Since the launch of Doc McStuffins, Disney Junior has made other Merchandise-Driven shows with a social-emotional curriculum to cash in on its popularity.
- While on that topic, after the success of Disney Junior's Merchandise-Driven, story-based shows, Nick Jr. began including more and more of them in their lineup. This worked, as one such show, the Canadian import PAW Patrol, became the biggest preschool hit since Barney & Friends. As of February 2020, only three shows on the block, Bubble Guppies, Blaze and the Monster Machines and Blue's Clues & You!, have educational themes and are still being produced.
- The reason for this change in pace for preschool blocks is actually the result of Technology Marches On. When Disney was developing Disney Junior, several families that were surveyed to collect information to help develop the block. Most families claimed their kids prefered watching TV as entertainment, as new technology like iPads made it easier for children to learn basic preschool concepts. In comparison, when Disney ran the same survey 5 years prior note , most parents prefered that their preschoolers watch TV to learn.
- On the note of PAW Patrol, that show's massive extreme success, and global popularity for Nickelodeon, and Spin Master, ironically led to Disney to create preschool shows to compete with the franchise's huge success, the first was Puppy Dog Pals, a show which puts the two main dogs characters, Bingo, and Rolly in a detective/spy role, and the second, most current and most obvious, is Pupstruction, a show where construction crew leader Phinny, an innovative young corgi, and his members, Tank, Luna, and Roxy, build and create things around the city of Petsburg, Disney created this show to compete with Rubble & Crew, the PAW Patrol's first spin-off series which focuses on Rubble relocating to Builder Cove to build new things in that town with his family.
- PJ Masks, while not technically a series created by Disney, note avoided following it's rival shows for the first five seasons and it's success led to Marvel, and Sony to create their animated superhero preschool shows, starting with Season 6note however, the PJ Masks could not avoid replicating PAW Patrol, even though it has some of the voice actors from PAW Patrol since the show's beginning, PJ Masks replicating PAW Patrol took effect where the Season 6 premier "Heroes Everywhere" having a somewhat similar premise to the first Mighty Pups special and one of the franchise's antagonist, Romeo, gaining the same super powers in the same episode as Harold Humdinger, and this season adds new three members note into their team, similar to how the pups gain new members in specific seasons note in their franchise, and the Power Heroes episodes having a similar structure to PAW Patrol.note
- Familia Tipo is an Argentine cartoon heavily based on The Simpsons. The protagonist Hector dresses and acts like Homer, his wife Bianca is a more fanservicey version of Marge, and they have a son and daughter. Most of the characters are also yellow, like how white characters are stylized in The Simpsons.
- God Rocks! is a CGI-animated (or at least was) children's series featuring inanimate objects teaching lessons and singing songs about the Bible. It is very obviously trying to imitate VeggieTales, and they even made fun of it in "A Blast From The Past (Anybody Got Change For A Buck?)." However, while God Rocks! is not as well-known as VeggieTales, its discography was successful in its own right, and received several spinoff series.
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