Informed Ability / Western Animation

• Played for Laughs on Adventure Time when Marceline's dad, the local Humanoid Abomination who rules a World of Chaos, states that the Ice King's pet penguin Gunter is the most evil creature he's ever encountered. Most of the time, Gunter acts pretty much like a normal penguin, though he does show enough initiative to smack Marceline's dad in the face when he tries to steal his soul. Despite being an Informed Ability at the time, though, later episodes have backed up this claim, eventually revealing Gunter to be a Cosmic Horror forced into penguin form.
• In Animaniacs, Ralph the Guard is often seen chasing the three main characters around (often as part of a Funny Background Event) but never succeeds in catching them, at least onscreen. Still, given what some other characters say, he may be more successful in corralling them than these scenes suggest. (And he has delivered them to both Dr. Scratchnsniff and their teacher in crates.)
• In Batman Beyond, the assassin Curare was supposedly the best member of the League of Assassins, the best organization of hired killers; none of them were ever known to have failed to kill a mark; of course, after Curare — the supposed best — was the first to do so when she ran afoul of Batman, she was targeted by the others herself, and she proceeded to wipe out the whole organization, killing two of them on-screen with the attack of "casually tossing a poisonous capsule at them", only to fail a second time when she went after Batman. Even the extent of Curare's "skill" basically consists of just charging at her foes swinging a sword at them and occasionally throwing shurikens, and she struggles in battle against anyone she fights, be they professional or amateurs. In short, the only known victims of this "most successful assassin" were other members of her organization who went down like complete Jobbers to fairly basic attacks, which brings their actual skill into question.
• The Vehicon Generals in Beast Machines. Not the first three, they were pretty much always chumps. This honor goes to Obsidian and Strika, two guys we've never heard of, who we're told were two of the greatest generals in Cybertron history. Their respective "strategies" are to pretend to be idiots and use swarm tactics. They suffered Villain Decay in pretty much every episode afterward, and their new favourite tactic seemed to become Beam Spam.
• Optimus Primal's "Optimal Optimus" upgrade in the last season of Beast Wars is treated, in bios, dialogue, and story, as leaps and bounds above everyone else in strength, only being remotely equalled or surpassed when Megatron got a similar powerup or when Physical God Tigerhawk showed up. But his supposed great power also made him a major victim of The Worf Effect, causing him to get disabled or knocked around without much trouble by a lot of characters. After he got blasted out of the sky for the fifth time that season, you really started to wonder why Megatron was so worried about him.
• Ben 10:
  • The show devoted two episodes to his future persona Ben 10,000, who was established as having obtained that many alien forms on the Omnitrix. Between the two episodes, he and his son use fewer than twenty of them total, and only three couldn't be found on 10-year-old Ben's watch. And that's ignoring the sequels... Justified in that seeing 10,000 different aliens would require a ton of episodes.
  • Several of Ben's aliens are stated in their official profiles to have abilities that are never shown in the series, such as Wildmutt being able to fire spikes from his back (supposedly Ben's form isn't mature enough, but other members of Wildmutt's species have been shown who still didn't do it), Jetray being able to breathe underwater (he only does so in a tie-in video game), and the list goes on. Ghostfreak's telekinesis is one in the first series, but Alien Force eventually has an episode with him using it.
  • Humongousaur's ability to grow bigger wasn't originally one in Ben 10: Alien Force, but became one in later episodes due to the writers apparently forgetting he could do that. Despite the fact it was his main power when he was first introduced.
  • Vilgax, when coming back in Alien Force, is stated to have absorbed the powers and equipment of 10 great heroes. He uses around five of them for all the time he had those powers. He's also supposed to be stronger and more dangerous than before, yet he is easily defeated by Diamondhead. Five years earlier, Diamondhead's fists shattered against Vilgax's body, proving him just as ineffective as any other form. Even assuming Ben got stronger in five years and gained some experience, Vilgax had explicitly gained new powers and should have been just as challenging, if not moreso.
  • The Omnitrix from Omniverse, despite supposedly being better than the previous ones used doesn't seem to be any different from the ones used previously. If anything, it could be considered a direct downgrade to the one used in the previous series, Ultimate Alien, since that one had the added benefit of giving his alien forms their own Super Modes. The only thing we know of that sets the new one apart is that it's supposed to only work for Ben.
  • When Ben unlocked Brainstorm, it kind of made Grey Matter irrelevant, because they both have Super-Intelligence, but Brainstorm also has electricity powers and lacks Grey Matter's weakness of being tiny. To make up for this, Galvans, Grey Matter's species, are stated to be smarter than Cerebrocrustaceans, Brainstorm's species. But Brainstorm has been shown running physics calculations in his head and accurately predicting every move his opponents will make, while Grey Matter's intelligence has been limited to technology. It comes across as Galvans being racist rather than an actual fact.
• This is played for laughs in the Codename: Kids Next Door movie "Operation: Z.E.R.O." At the beginning of the museum scene, Numbuh One is surrounded by four enemies, and he excitedly says that now he has a chance to use his new move where he takes out four opponents in one blow. However, the villains retreat before he can do so. Later in the movie, when he's surrounded by his four teammates (who've been turned into senior citizombies) he says, frightened, "I wanted a chance to use my new move where I take out four opponents in one blow, but not on you guys!" End result, unfortunately, the viewers never see this new move of his.
• Played for humor in The Dover Boys, where the opening narration gives a quick rundown of the personalities of the group: Tom is the fun-loving one, Dick is the serious one, and Larry is the youngest. In the actual cartoon, though, Tom, Dick, and Larry almost never display any unique traits, and a lot of their lines are spoken in unison.
• Family Guy:
  • Parodied during the episode "Peterotica", where Peter writes pornographic novels. Everyone absolutely loves them, and they become a major hit, which would normally leave the audience wondering how Peter could possibly write anything halfway readable; however, the episode takes every possible opportunity to read excerpts from Peter's work, confirming that his writing is, in fact, downright abysmal. One book is entitled "The Hot Chick Who Was Italian Or Maybe Some Kind of Spanish."
  • Averted with Meg's singing. Mila Kunis is, by her own admission, a terrible singer, so Tara Strong took over when Meg actually had to sing.
  • Also, during the episode "420", after Brian succeeds in legalizing pot, he goes on a rant about how crime is almost nonexistent and productivity at work skyrocketed. However, with the possible exception of Ollie Williams, all we see are people so stoned that they can't do their jobs properly. Perhaps the people gathering the statistics were too stoned to do their jobs properly, so they pulled the numbers out of their asses.
  • In "Emmy-Winning Episode", in the segment riffing on Emmy-winning dramas, Meg is supposed to be Claire Dane's character from Homeland. Every other character remarks how "smart" and "good at her job" she is, but she's only shown being insane, on a Daffy Duck level.
  • The episode "Christmas Guy" features the family watching a film called "Home Alone with Competent Robbers." What we see is two guys who walk into the house with uncovered faces and no gloves (making them easy to identify and giving a lot of room for fingerprinting), who shoot Kevin at first sight with an unsilenced pistol (likely alerting every nearby house and upping their charges from burglary to murder of a seven-year-old). They do pass the low bar of being more competent than the Wet Bandits, at least.
• Futurama:
  • Played for laughs in one episode, where the window wipers of the car from Knight Rider were the most evil window wipers in the world. It just didn't come up much in the show.
  • Wonderfully parodied with Zapp Brannigan. He is constantly praised as a brilliant military leader and a brave fighter but all the main characters (except the somewhat senile Dr. Farnsworth) know that he is in fact deeply stupid, cowardly, and incompetent as well as being a major jerkass who takes credit for others' work.
• In Generator Rex, Providence's Red Shirt Army gets a whole episode about how each officer is put through Training from Hell in order to be top-class officers to fight the EVOs that are infesting the world. Problem is, the officers of Providence have largely been shown throughout the series as useless with in dealing with any EVO by themselves without the help of the superpowered Rex or Badass Normal Six. However, it is suggested that Rex or Six is their Godzilla Threshold with Evos they can't handle themselves.
• Jetta from Jem is introduced as a saxophonist and her introduction song "I Like Your Style" clearly shows her using it. Despite being told she's the sax player of the group, she only uses it in two other Misfits songs ("Trapped" and "Free and Easy"). Otherwise she just provides backup vocals and plays guitar. The fact that she was originally a bass guitarist and the fact a sax changes the music vastly could be why she rarely plays the saxophone.
• In Justice League, there's dialogue referring to the notion that Superman is virtually invulnerable and significantly stronger than the other Leaguers, even though the show famously nerfed him so that he wasn't particularly powerful in the grand scheme of things because if he really was that strong, it wouldn't make sense to even have the rest of the League at all. He does seem to be noticeably stronger than the others (for instance, he managed to hold his own against Amazo the longest), but the gap between him and them isn't that wide, and he's by no means invincible.
• Professor Dementor from Kim Possible is said to be such a great villain that compared to him, Dr. Drakken is even more of a joke. (Though at least Dementor invents his own doomsday devices.) But in the end, he's foiled just as easily as Drakken, sometimes even more easily.
• King of the Hill:
  • A running gag is for characters to make note of Boomhauer's suave and charming way with words. This is never apparent to the viewers, as Boomhauer speaks in unintelligible mumbles.
  • In one episode he takes a heartbroken Bobby under his wing, and you see that Boomhauer's technique is the "shotgun approach" (put enough lead in the air and you're bound to hit something): he hits on every attractive woman he meets and gets rejected nine times out of ten, but he focuses on the one who says "yes" rather than the nine who say "no".
  • We do get to see his eloquence when the scene is shown from his point of view, showing Boomhauer speaking normally while everyone else has his Motor Mouth tendencies.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Earth pony magic is supposedly tied to plants and nature, but outside very few moments indistinguishable from cartoony gags they never showed supernatural-level abilities in such while other pony tribes did^ExamplesThe pegasus Fluttershy having animal powers, unicorn magic being able to manipulate plants, the earth pony Mage Meadowbrook's abilities were due to Magic Potions as opposed to innate magic.. The most detailed description of how it works being "Without their strength, they will not be able to tend the land" and what has been shown suggests their normal powers and prowess were due to Super-Strength as opposed to nature-related magic. When the Distant Sequel Generation 5 gave them clearly shown Green Thumb powers, it treated it as a completely new magic they didn't have prior.
  • Although Nightmare Moon is allegedly quite powerful, she only really tries to distract or scare away the main six, and even when she does directly engage them she goes down very easily. Compared to how fiercely she fought her sister in the Season 4 flashback, fans have attempted to Fan Wank this by claiming she was still weak from being freed to "good" Luna holding her back to even her holding herself back because, evil or not, she was still facing her subjects.
  • Princess Celestia's standing as both a wise ruler and powerful Physical God is somewhat questionable when you consider her rather blatant lapses in judgment, her tendency to either be entirely absent or easily defeated when the Monster of the Week shows up (often with little to no justification, and often off-screen), and it being a plot point in the Bad Future scenarios of The Cutie Remark that Equestria is ultimately doomed to destruction if Twilight Sparkle and her friends aren't there to save it. While it's clearly a Drama-Preserving Handicap, since there'd really be no show if she could just steamroll the problem for the main six, it never-the-less doesn't change the fact she's batting a fairly low average for a character who's alleged to have such power and wisdom.
  • The Pony of Shadows was supposed to be powerful enough to cause The End of the World as We Know It via worldwide Casting a Shadow. But he's quickly sealed away by Equestria's Precursor Heroes before showing such, once freed he's quickly beaten back due to his weakened state, then is re-sealed by the Elements of Harmony before they can even put up a fight. While other villains got a You Can't Thwart Stage One or Near-Villain Victory to show their threat, The Pony of Shadows never does more than Evil Gloating, average-level Black Magic, and resisting the Elements longer than any other villain, making for an impressive Stone Wall but still short of supposedly warranting sacrificing the Elements of Harmony to stop.
• The Owl House:
  • The Emperor's Coven are supposed to be the best of the best subject to very strict recruitment and training standards. But the rank and file Guards and Scouts are with rare exception as inept as expected from Mooks showing at best normal magical ability despite being able to use all magic and frequently bested by even inexperienced schoolchildren.
  • In the final episode Belos claims that Raine Whispers has always been unusually powerful. However, from what we see of them, they aren't shown as powerful so much as very skilled with using their power.
• The Robotboy equivalent of Dr. Dementor is General Yakitori, who is supposed to be a greater villain than Big Bad Dr. Kamikazi. He won the "Evil Genius of the Year" award six times in a row, yet he's never been seen to do much evil. Or much genius, for that matter.
• In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko and Heffer have to watch over Filburt's pet mynah bird Turdy, whom he claims has a beautiful singing voice. All he does throughout the episode is squawk. Played with in that Filburt loved that bird, despite it being an obvious pest.
• The Simpsons:
  • Played for laughs in "Lisa's Wedding" where Lisa's first love (or at least, first fiancé) is introduced, in which Hibbert comments of Maggie, "She's quite a hellion but she does have an incredible voice." The closest thing she ever got to saying anything on-screen was when Marge interrupted her when she spoke with her mouth full. (Or for that matter, immediately after Hibbert's quote, where said fiancé cuts her off when she's asked to sing.)
    "Will that girl ever shut up?"
    • In "Holidays of Future Passed", Maggie is revealed to be a world-famous singer. She still doesn't use her voice because she's pregnant and talking at that point could be bad for the baby, according to her doctor.
  • Lisa Simpson is often referenced as a skeptic (mostly by herself, however, so this could be construed as the character's obliviousness). However, she is also shown to at various times show faith in Christianity, Buddhism, (temporarily) Wicca, and alternative medicine, showing rather extensive compartmentalization. On the other hand, a Western Christian converting to 'fashionable religions' such as Buddhism and Wicca and preferring alternative medicine while looking down on her peers would be very fitting stereotypical behavior for a pseudo-intellectual character.
  • At the end of "Married to the Blob", Comic Book Guy states he found a new job after having closed his shop, thanks to his degree in Chemical Engineering. Said degree was never mentioned before and will likely never be mentioned again. Other episodes stated that he has a Master's degree in Folklore and Mythology.
• In The Smurfs (1981), Gargamel's cruel godfather Lord Balthazar is supposedly a far-more competent wizard than his godson. However, he's never seen using any actual sorcery, using machines, technology, and other scientific experiments to achieve his goals. Practically every other wizard in the series, Gargamel included, has displayed far more magical knowledge and skill than Balthazar, with Balthazar dismissing almost anything mysterious or magical as "nonsense" or "fairy tales", even though it is plainly visible. In fact, his "magic wand of the future" is actually a musket.
• South Park:
  • One or two episodes have kids mention Stan's mom having large breasts. The way she's animated, she actually looks completely flat-chested most of the time.
  • Another episode has Butters make construction paper models of the main cast which, unsurprisingly, look exactly like them. Kyle then comments that they were slightly inaccurate, as his nose is shaped differently (neither he nor the model has a visible nose) and Stan's eyes are blue (each has black dots for pupils).
  • There are several other episodes where they play with this. In "The List," for example, Gerald says Kyle has his mother's nose; again, he has no visible nose, yet acts horrified since his mother's nose is somewhat large and ugly. "The Coon" would probably count as another example, merely because the characters can tell Mysterion's face apart from anybody else's while the audience can't.
  • Ugly Bob in "Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus" apparently has a face that looks as if "somebody tried to put out a forest fire with a screwdriver" though he's animated to look like every other Canadian. A later episode makes it clear that Americans can't tell the difference, while other Canadians (and Saddam Hussein) can.
• In Star Wars: The Clone Wars the elite senate guard, and their even more elite counterpart, the senate commandos, are supposedly some of the best soldiers in the Republic, with even Ahsoka Tano claiming them to be security overkill while transporting an extremely influential CIS prisoner. In almost all of their (numerous) appearances, they tend to be killed to a man by the whatever threat the heroes have to deal with, whether those threats are bounty hunters, assassins, or traitors, without ever doing anything notable in return. They are usually shown, at best, simply arresting the villain after the heroes incapacitate them. The only one of them shown to have any sort of genuine combat ability is Captain Argyus, who promptly uses that ability to betray the Republic, kill his fellow commandos, and save the aforementioned CIS VIP. Even basic clones have shown better combat ability than these elite guards.
• Greg Universe in Steven Universe is intended to be an excellent musician held back from a successful career by his exploitative manager. While he's a talented guitarist and good at the technical side of things, his singing voice is at best rough and his Signature Song "Like A Comet" has a clear autotune. Ironically, his voice actor, Tom Scharpling, is one of the few among the voice cast who doesn't have some kind of musical career, which makes Greg's voice stick out somewhat from what's otherwise a murderer's row of singers. It's particularly noticeable when he has a duet with Rose, who is played by Broadway actress Susan Egan.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Raven, as an Emotionless Girl, was said to have to be emotionless to prevent her powers from going out of control. This was shown precisely twice, with most of the series showing her expressing varying degrees of emotion (and even falling in love in one episode) with no apparent problem. She did become a more developed character for it, albeit by ignoring the limitation instead of finding ways to work around it.
  • Season 5 features the Doom Patrol, who, despite being described as superhero "legends", actually seem to be very dysfunctional and bad at working together. Not to mention their primary battle strategy is Leeroy Jenkins.
  • General Immortus of the Brotherhood of Evil is said to be the ultimate military genius due to his experience with centuries of countless wars. But he never displays any above-average intellect, and his battle plans all seem to rely on the simple Zerg Rush.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), Shredder's ally Krang had a massive mobile fortress called the Technodrome, supposedly one of the most powerful weapons in the universe. It was largely reduced to MacGuffin status, with occasional plots to recover it from wherever the hell it ended up after their previous attempt to get it to the surface of the Earth. Due to the short episodes, it typically took less than five minutes to be defeated the handful of times it actually got there; since "powering the Technodrome" was Shredder's default motive for doing anything, this was often five minutes after an entire series of trying to get it moving.
• Total Drama characters have tons of these since most characters don't get much screen time, but their character bios reveal many abilities that the fans have yet to see in action:
  • Ezekiel is apparently rather intelligent since his bio mentions him speaking eight languages and winning the National Spelling Bee.
  • Cody and Lindsay are actually rich - this has never been mentioned within the show, although it explains why neither of them is that determined to win the prize money.
  • Courtney's Island bio claims she's a published author, having written the award-winning book Total Triumph for Teens, and that her bedroom is covered with trophies, ribbons, and plaques; she's apparently never lost anything in her life before Total Drama. You would be forgiven for not believing that with her performances in Total Drama Island. In Season 1, Courtney refuses to jump off the cliff into shark-infested waters as part of the first challenge; she claims to have a medical condition. When Chris warns her that she's risking the possibility of elimination, Courtney accepts the risk, believing the majority of the members on the opposite team won't jump. She was wrong, and the only people that didn't jump were DJ and Beth. Later, Courtney elects herself as project manager to lead the team in building the hot tub but fails to get her team to build it, and as Duncan points out Courtney's management skills have demonstrably fallen flat. It was clear that Courtney was going to be voted off and she was only saved by Ezekiel angering the whole team and getting voted off instead. In the "Phobia Factor" episode where the challenge was to face their fears, Courtney gave each of her teammates a hard time when they have trouble facing their fears, but when the time comes for her to face hers, she can't even go through with it. Yet for some reason, she was not voted off, and Tyler was sent home, despite the fact he at least tried to overcome his fear.
  • Gwen is said to love her family very deeply and apparently become "Soft as a marshmallow" around them, but she never mentions them, despite being away from her family far longer than most of the campers were.
  • Trent apparently loves motorbikes to such an extent that it even overshadows his love of music and spends almost all his time working on them. He never even says motorbike on-screen, though his love of music comes up often.
  • Zoey's label is "The Indie Chick", but outside her audition tape, there is never any mention of this in the show itself, with Zoey more defined by her mutual crush on Mike.
  • Amy and Samey wear cheerleader uniforms, but neither ever talk about cheerleading or show any skills related to the field either.
• The Transformers has plenty of characters with traits mentioned only in their bios:
  • Thundercracker is supposed to be a Noble Demon who uses sonic booms, and Skywarp is a thuggish prankster with the power to teleport. You'd never know it from the show, where they're almost always just a pair of baddies who fly in the background and shoot at things. There's even an episode where Megatron steals their powers, during which he uses them more in a single fight scene than the duo had in a good portion of the series beforehand.
  • Predaking is treated as one of the most threatening opponents in the entire series. His official bio notes that "as a warrior, he has no equal; as a weapon, he has no restraints. He is the closest thing to a perfect fighting machine the Decepticons have", claiming him to be the most skilled and dangerous of all the combiners and possessing no weaknesses except that his allies are terrified of him. He has one of the worst combat records of any character in the franchise, and never won a battle onscreen in the original series - and it's not even that he gets beaten by outwitting him or exploiting his weaknesses, no; he's been straight-up overpowered by everything from other combiners to Sky Lynx on multiple occasions. And if you count Transformers: ★Headmasters, he was once taken down in one shot by Pointblank. Who's Pointblank? Exactly.
  • A number of characters, including Trypticon and Metroplex, are described as cityformers. Even at their biggest, though, they rarely assume anything resembling the scale of a city, and their altmode comes out being more like a large-ish building or a small base (because their toys are playsets about a foot tall). And in some cases, they never even enter their city mode, period - the comic version of Fortress Maximus, for instance, isn't big enough to try.
• Transformers: Animated: According to supplementary materials, Grimlock is equal in power to Megatron. While Megatron is portrayed as a huge badass that can utterly thrash all five main Autobots at first, Grimlock is frequently tossed around by lesser opponents. There was actually going to be a scene in the first season finale where the two met face-to-face, and Megatron mopped the floor with Grimlock and the other Dinobots. (It ended up being cut due to bad animation and the realization Grimlock fans wouldn't like it.)
• It's noted a few times in The Venture Bros. that Sgt. Hatred underwent a Super-Soldier treatment some years ago and possesses enhanced athleticism. However, he rarely demonstrates any of the prowess you'd expect of a man with his origins and background—he's not terrible in a fight, but he relies mostly on firearms and gadgetry, and he gets his ass kicked whenever he has to fight hand-to-hand. Some of this is probably down to him being Formerly Fit and the stress of his life falling apart, though. This is acknowledged at one point when Rusty outright scoffs at the idea of Hatred being a super-soldier, at which Hatred retorts that he lets Doc call himself a "super-scientist" without laughing.
• Winx Club, 4Kids dub:
  • In one of the S1 episodes, Musa talks to two background students Ortensia and Priscilla about having to work together to save Alfea, letting drop that Ortensia has the best counterspell skills and that no one can fly as fast as Priscilla. Which would be nice for the final battle, except that, well, they're background characters. (In the original version, she only discusses how everyone has a part, without any abilities being mentioned.)
  • Another S1 ep has Flora mention before an exam that Musa gets the best grades out of the Winx.^note Her exact words differ slightly... Original: "Give us a break, we all know you're a straight-A student." 4K: "I'm sure you'll be fine. You've got the best grades out of all of us."It's a break from the usual expectation of having the tech whiz be the straight-A student, but not only do the writers never use this fact, at least one scene actually seems to be inconsistent with it (read main post, then 2nd reply).^note The part with Musa attending Griselda's class. Incidentally, the 4Kids dub of the scene in question doesn't have this problem, as the dialog goes: "I competed in the All-Realm Magic Games. In fact, I was the first female black belt gold medalist." "And what year was that?" "It was 20 years ago, but I can still fight like a champion!" Point is, the writers have never done anything that would require Musa to really show off her smarts.
  • In the original, Flora also got top grades; when it was translated, Musa was the only one mentioned (which might be a little racist, since she seems to be the Magix equivalent of Asian).
• Xiaolin Showdown is a show that really likes the Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Jack Spicer was a definitively lesser threat than the succeeding villain, the resurrected Wuya, and then Chase Young showed up and made Wuya look like a chump. So when the show introduced Hannibal Roy Bean to succeed Chase, the show claimed he was the most dangerous one yet—but it didn't really work. Hannibal's episode-to-episode plots were smaller-scale and less impressive, his combat skills, though nothing to scoff at, never seemed better than what Chase could do, and it seemed most of the time like his only real reason for being a threat was abusing the Moby Morpher. The show liked to claim that he had some kind of other, greater plan that everything was leading up to—but said plan was never actually revealed, so it just looked like he screwed up a lot.

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