Older Than They Think / Western Animation

• "The Rubberface of Comedy," the first half of The Batman's two-part Season 1 finale, was the first attempt at adapting The Killing Joke into another medium, predating the official adaptation by over a decade.
• Apparently some fans believe that the term 'twinkle toes' was coined by Avatar: The Last Airbender. "Twinkle Toes" Flintstone would have something to say about that.
• Who first used Humongous Mecha? Was it Transformers? The Japanese Spider-Man? Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers? The Martian tripods from The War of the Worlds (1898)? The Tale of Garuda from ancient Hindu legend had a robot with rotary saws for hands. This one is officially one of The Oldest Ones in the Book.
  • Then there's the bronze giant Talos from Greek mythology, the original model for Dungeons & Dragons' "iron golem".
  • Myths are replete with this. Hittite mythology has one. Golden automata and other mechanical creatures were all over Greek Mythology. Rabbi Loew's Golem was well-known for being large and powerful. Creating a mechanical man is a very old idea indeed, and making it huge is simply the next step up. Naturally, it's arguable which of these "count" as actual mecha, but the basic idea goes back.
• Some people associate "Whoop whoop whoop!" noises with Zoidberg, unaware that this is a reference to The Three Stooges.
  • The DVD subtitles and closed captions on TV, at least, give "MIMICS THREE STOOGES" or "IMITATES CURLY FROM THE THREE STOOGES" rather than "WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP".
• The triangular Cool Shades worn by Soundwave and Prowl of Transformers: Animated are often mistaken to be a Shout-Out to the famous ones worn by Kamina of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, but Derrick J. Wyatt said they were actually a reference to the much older ABC Warriors of 2000 AD fame. They were also worn by several other characters before Kamina, including Calvin (in one strip) and Ash's Squirtle. Many also thought the Lagann had some influence on the Headmaster design (both are robots that could become the head of another mecha to boost its power). However, besides the idea of a robot becoming a Transformer's head dating back to G1, Wyatt stated that he'd never seen Gurren Lagann until after the first season was already done with production (though he stated that if he had seen it before, the design would probably have stubby legs and let Masterson poke his head out the top).
• Although many people think the catcall "Hellooooo, nurse!" was originally from Animaniacs, it originated several decades ago, in vaudeville.
  • As did most things on Animaniacs. Most of the trio's routines are very similar to The Marx Brothers.
    • Such as Wakko's accent, which was based entirely off Ringo Starr.
• Woody Woodpecker's first appearance was actually as the villain of a short of a now forgotten character called "Andy Panda". Oh, and his laugh (produced by Mel Blanc) didnt start with him either. Blanc used it earlier in a few of his Warner Bros. shorts like Porky's Hare Hunt (where it was used by the prototypical Bugs Bunny!).
• When The Simpsons first aired, some viewers believed certain lines popularized by Bart to have been invented by the show's creators. These include Bart's replacing the words of "Jingle Bells" ("... Batman smells, Robin laid an egg...") in the first episode and "Eat my shorts", first said in The Breakfast Club (1985). And while "Yo!" quite obviously predates Bart Simpson, being famously used at the ending of Rocky II (1979), many Generation-Y kids grew up not knowing that.
  • This is particularly ironic, as the creators note in the first season's DVD commentary, because Bart was meant as social commentary, speaking almost entirely in borrowed catch phrases and clichés. When the popularity of The Simpsons caused people to attribute the phrases to Bart instead, the joke was lost on many viewers. In fact Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, says that she first heard "eat my shorts" when she was in high school (in the 1970s), and that it became a running gag among the fellow members of her high school marching band.
  • Homer's iconic "D'oh!" outburst is from Laurel and Hardy regular supporting actor Jimmy Finlayson (though in a shorter form), as confirmed by Matt Groening and Dan Castellaneta.
  • While Homer Simpson is named after creator Matt Groening's father, he also shares his (first and last) name with a supporting character in Nathanael West's novella The Day of the Locust, which was written in 1939. This has amused more than a few English majors, though Groening deliberately got the name from that novel. In the Series 24 episode "Penny-Wiseguys", Homer lampshades the literary origin of his name with the line "I never thought Homer Simpson would be a part of the Day of the Locust!"
  • Adam West was Adam Westing six years before Family Guy premiered.
  • The Yes Guy is an homage to comedic actor Frank Nelson, a frequent player on The Jack Benny Program.
  • Similarly, Gil Gunderson is a parody of Jack Lemmon's Shelley Levine character from Glengarry Glen Ross. This is obvious enough in his first appearance, "Realty Bites," which is a largely a parody of GGR, less so in subsequent appearances when Gil becomes a recurring Straw Loser.
  • Many famous Simpsons episodes are direct homages to or parodies of other material, especially anything in the Halloween episodes.
    • Even those who think the episode "Cape Feare" is a direct parody of the two Cape Fear films have forgotten that said films are based on the 1957 John D. MacDonald novel, entitled The Executioners; in other words, the episode seems to be parodying the original novel itself.
  • Similar to Zoidberg from Futurama above is the famous bit from "Last Exit to Springfield" of Homer spinning around on the floor going "WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP!", which was originally used by Curly, but is now more commonly associated with The Simpsons.
• The American Darkstalkers cartoon featured a bespectacled boy named Harry Grimoire who was studying magic (and happened to have Felicia as a "pet"). This would've been an obvious rip of Harry Potter, if not for the fact that the cartoon came out some years before.
  • A similar thing happened with The Books of Magic, which has a bespectacled young boy who is destined to be a wizard — in fact Neil Gaiman admits that despite having a bespectacled wizard go to school wasn't his original idea, and that he and Rowling were more inspired by Arthurian legends than each other (unfortunately, a magazine Mis-blamed him as having accused Rowling of ripping off his ideas, which he rebutted).
• Most Disney fans assume that Mickey Mouse is Walt Disney's first cartoon character, and Peg-Leg Pete was created to be his primary enemy. Actually, Pete was the very first recurring Disney character, created in 1925 (before even Oswald the Lucky Rabbit) for one of Disney's Alice Comedies, a series of shorts which mixed live action and animation. Pete was always a villain, but the fact is that he was imported into the earliest Mickey cartoons to give Mickey an established character to fight, not the other way around.
  • For that matter, most people don't know that Mickey was an Expy of Oswald...but even fewer know that Oswald himself was an Expy of Julius the Cat from the Disney's Alice Comedies, who was himself a Captain Ersatz of Felix the Cat.
  • Even worse is when people believe that Mickey was the first cartoon character ever, when in fact that honor belongs to Windsor McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur", who was created when Walt was still in junior high school.
  • Pete's son, PJ, is generally thought to have been created in 1992 for Goof Troop. He was actually created half a century prior, debuting in a Donald Duck cartoon called "Bellboy Donald" (though he went by Junior and he looked like Mickey Mouse with cat ears), and the character is only 17 years newer than his father. However, his personality was the exact opposite in every way from what was to come, so he simultaneously looked less like his father and acted (and sounded) more like him.
  • Likewise, Goofy's son, Max, was created as "Goofy Jr." in 1951 in the Goofy short "Fathers Are People", but also had extensive changes done to his personality and design. Though the personality changes weren't as extreme as PJ's (Max kept his wild side, he just gained a serious side too), the appearance changes were more extreme (originally "Goofy Jr." was a redhead with a pink nose and no ears).
  • It's also common to name Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy in this order, assuming this is how they were created in chronological order. Yet Goofy is actually two years older than Donald, having been created in 1932, albeit still with a beardy chin which made him literally look older than he is nowadays.
  • The classic Chip 'n Dale shorts are well-known for portraying the duo as unintelligible pests that do battle with other Disney characters like Donald Duck and Pluto. That is until they were re-invented as talking anthropomorphic characters that wear clothes and live in a Mouse World in 1989's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. Except they weren't. That already happened decades earlier in 1952's Two Chips and a Miss.
  • Fans of Disney Junior believe that shows like Doc McStuffins and Sofia the First were some of the first animated preschool shows to not have any Fake Interactivity^note Barring the end credits during the first season of Doc McStuffins, when in reality, animated preschool shows without Fake Interactivity, such as The Backyardigans, Handy Manny, and Dragon Tales, have existed quite a while before the Disney Junior block was a thing.
• Spoofed in the "Springfield Shopper" booklet that comes with the Simpsons Movie DVD; in it, Homer (as a movie critic who's way behind with his column) describes Star Wars (by which he means A New Hope) as being "a parody of Spaceballs".
• An animated action series with a Fiery Redhead Action Girl whose blond male sidekick and a Voice with an Internet Connection help her pursue a former crimefighter with long black hair who turned to crime For the Evulz because she was bored being a good guy. What? What is this "Kim Possible" you speak of? It's Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?.
  • You know, Kim Possible? The slang-happy, petite, fashion-forward cheerleader who fights bad guys and occasionally saves the world while trying to maintain a normal social life, with the help of her two classmates, a nerdy computer hacker and an ineffectual partner with Hidden Depths who's secretly in love with her? They occasionally butt heads with the mean rich girl, or Kim's snarky brunette nemesis who defected from the good guys to hench for a perky villain-. No, wait, I was thinking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
  • And you could push it back even further - much further - with Buffy herself. A naive teenage girl who has mystical visions that compel her to become a warrior in defense of her people, becomes a social outcast because of this, but ultimately is recognized as a cherished national icon? Joan of Arc has Buffy beat by over five centuries. And in real life, too.
• Now and then someone will accuse Thundarr the Barbarian of being a ripoff of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983), despite the fact that Thundarr predates He-Man by three years.
• To this day, there are still fans of the Teen Titans (2003) cartoon who are surprised when they find out the cartoon was preceded by the Teen Titans comic book by 41 years.
• In one episode of Recess, Gus is involved in a plot against the Ashleys wherein he claims Ashley is also his name - insisting that it's not that unusual in the progressive 1990s. In reality, "Ashley" was almost solely a boy's name until the early 20th century; it was perfectly acceptable for a boy to be named Ashley over a hundred years before the episode was written or aired.
  • One of the best-known examples in pop culture would be Ashley Wilkes of Gone with the Wind, a film consistantly put in top 10 lists.
    • Which was a best-selling book first.
  • Another one people here may be familiar with is Ashley "Ash" Williams of Evil Dead fame.
• On a larger scale, a lot of baby boomers who grew up in The '60s, if they have no knowledge of animation history, will be surprised when you tell them that cartoons from The Golden Age of Animation such as Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry were coming out in the 1930s and '40s, and were already decades old back when they remember watching the cartoons on Saturday mornings.
• Adam West as Catman is a parody of Batman (1966) in The Fairly OddParents!. However, there actually is a Catman which is a Batman villain created in the '60s.
  • And the crazy paranoid Adam West in Family Guy made his first appearance in an episode of Johnny Bravo.
    • And that's an interesting case because, just before creating Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane worked on Johnny Bravo.
• The expression "Cowabunga!" did NOT originate on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or even the surfer/skater culture they were imitating). The phrase originated from "The Howdy Doody Show" (1947-60), spoken by Chief Thunderthud, the Indian founder of Doodyville.
• My Little Pony:
  • The brony fandom is this; back in the 1980s, many boys did in fact enjoy the G1 television program due to the adventure-filled plots that were uncommon in girls’ shows at the time. The primary reason male fans were not acknowledged until 2010 was that message boards and social media did not become especially popular until at least the early-to-mid-2000s.
  • The famous "Rainbow Dash always dresses in style" quote is usually associated with G3.5 (as is the theme song the lyric appears in), but the quote - and the song - were actually borrowed from G3's "Core 7" soft reboot.
  • Animated multicolored equines have been around since The '40s in the form of Pastorale from Fantasia.
  • Long before the G4 television show, shows starring a leading female cast like She-Ra: Princess of Power, Sailor Moon and The Powerpuff Girls (1998) already had sizable male fanbases, while Arthur, The Backyardigans, and Sesame Street already appealed to people well above the preschool and kindergarten age ranges.
  • My Little Pony Tales showed male ponies alongside female ones and experimented with Slice of Life stories long before Friendship is Magic.
  • Many ponies (especially in the toy line) predate Friendship Is Magic. Applejack was outright one of the first G1 ponies as she was a year 2 character.
• "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" did NOT originate with Looney Tunes, It even has its own lyrics that are different than the ones Daffy sing. Here is a link to a YouTube video with people singing the (slightly modified for gender) original lyrics.
  • Similarly, "Merrily We Roll Along" did not originate with Merrie Melodies. It was a song from a show of the same name in 1934, sung and co-written by Eddie Cantor. It was first repurposed with different lyrics in the cartoons "Billboard Frolics" (1935) and "Toy Town Hall" (1936) before becoming the Merrie Melodies theme.
• Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) got a lot of flack for being Lighter and Softer and having multiple improbable crossovers and where spidey faces foes not in his Rogues Gallery. They probably never heard of Spidey Super Stories
• Remember that one episode of Family Guy where Peter sang "Surfin' Bird"? Turns out the idea of using that song in a cartoon has been done before — a cover was used for the short-lived CBS cartoon Birdz. Oh, and the original showings of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show (In its first episode, at that!).
  • Family Guy causes a honking crapload of these sorts of errors thanks to its Reference Overdosed nature. Any film or TV show clip later parodied on FG will have hundreds of comments on YouTube mistakenly asserting the video is a reference to Family Guy, even if the age of the clip makes it obvious that it originated decades before Seth MacFarlane was even born.
  • The "Do you remember [X]? Pepperidge Farm remembers." joke from the episode "Hell Comes to Quahog" had also been done in the Futurama episode "A Fishful of Dollars" seven years earlier, which made many say They Copied It, So It Sucks!.
• Pop quiz: what was the first animated series about a teenager from a primitive society who is granted a magical weapon that, when he holds it above his head, grants him super-strength and transforms his pet into a fierce animal sidekick, and it features a character named She-Ra/Sheera? If you guessed He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983), you're wrong - that honour goes to Hanna-Barbera's Mighty Mightor, created in 1967.
• A lot of Internet commentators accused the Gravity Falls short "Hidebehind" of ripping off The Slender Man Mythos — being apparently unaware that the Hidebehind is a much older folkloric creature.
• In one episode of Batman: The Animated Series Harley sings a song about her relationship with Joker. The song, "Say That We're Sweethearts Again", is an actual song from the 40s and Harley did not tweak the lyrics. It's a Black Comedy that's even more violent in the original.
• A T.V. show about a team made up of four penguins who go on adventures with hijinks ensuing. No, no, not The Penguins of Madagascar, it's actually 3-2-1 Penguins!, made by Big Idea, the same studio that produced VeggieTales.
• Cartoon characters Breaking the Fourth Wall is nowadays mostly associated with Family Guy, but Looney Tunes did this already in the 1930s and 1940s. And even before that, in the 1920s, Felix the Cat often used a Speech Balloon or other parts of his own drawn environment in his gags, sometimes directly addressing the audience.
• Adult animation? Most people think The Simpsons, Beavis And Butthead and South Park were the first to specifically aim more at an adult audience. In fact, Ralph Bakshi created the first adult cartoon features in the 1970s, pioneering topics such as sex, drugs, bloody violence and politics. And even before Bakshi, you had Animal Farm (1954), satirizing Communism as an animal fable. Not to mention Looney Tunes, Betty Boop and Tex Avery MGM Cartoons in the 1930s and 1940s making adult jokes and sexual innuendo. You might think that Bakskhi at least can attribute the first animated pornographic film to his name, Fritz the Cat? Not quite, in 1928 (!) a silent black-and-white short cartoon was made called "Eveready Harton in Buried Treasures" featuring a man with a giant Raging Stiffie walking around looking for a woman. This short has remained anonymous however, fell into the public domain and was only rediscovered in the 1970s.
• Anime-influenced Western animation is actually this. Most casual fans will tell you this phenomenon began either in the 1980s (when series like The Transformers were produced with the aid of Japanese studios) or in the 1990s (when the DCAU cartoons took cues from classic anime). They're both wrong. The first Western animated series to deliberately use anime tropes was 1966's Frankenstein Jr., a Super Robot series about a Kid With The Remote Control for a giant robot created by his scientist father. Sound familiar?
• Roger Rabbit Effect: Cartoon characters interacting with humans in live-action is almost as old as animation itself. Max and Dave Fleischer already did it in the 1920s with Koko The Clown. Winsor McCay did a primitive version in 1914 in Gertie the Dinosaur.
• Stylized Limited Animation is associated with the UPA cartoons of the 1950s. Yet Chuck Jones already made a cartoon like this in 1942, The Dover Boys, and was almost fired over it (he only managed to keep his job because a replacement couldn't be found and the cartoon ended up being a hit)!
• Classical Music in cartoons is often associated with Looney Tunes, who used a lot of Standard Snippet music from symphonies, Opera and the like. Yet the Looney Tunes just copied this practice from the Silly Symphonies cartoons from Walt Disney Productions who did this since 1930. For instance, it's Mickey Mouse who first performed Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody" on a piano in the early 1930s, years before the more famous cartoons The Cat Concerto with Tom & Jerry and Rhapsody Rabbit with Bugs Bunny.
• Cartoony gags are often thought to be innovations brought by Tex Avery and the Looney Tunes cartoons who move to a more silly and absurd style compared to Walt Disney's realistically looking cartoons. Yet Disney himself made use of cartoony gags in the 1920s and 1930s, just like Felix the Cat did from 1919 on. In later Disney works, slapstick gags are typically associated with Donald Duck, as opposed to Mickey Mouse and Goofy.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Despite being the Trope Namer for Scooby-Dooby Doors, the franchise is not the trope originator. Tex Avery's works did this gag in the 1940s, two decades before Scooby-Doo went on the air.
  • You know that routine on A Pup Named Scooby-Doo in which Shaggy and Scooby-Doo had? Shaggy makes a pun. Scooby-Doo laughs, then says, "I don't get it." It comes from "Hang in There, Scooby-Doo" on The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Show. The gang had found a cassette of rock music in the cavern.
    Shaggy: Those cave teenagers love their rock music?
    Scooby-Doo: (laughs) I don't get it.
  • Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is often mistaken for the first entry in the franchise in which the gang deal with real monsters, instead of the usual criminals disguised as monsters. However, The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show featured real monsters a full decade before the movie, albeit Played for Laughs. Several tv specials such as Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers (1987) and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School (1988) also featured real monsters. Even the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! series hinted at truly supernatural elements existing alongside the hoaxes.
  • Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is often thought of as the first Scooby-Doo show to feature a Darker and Edgier tone that deconstructs its typical tropes and features an overarching plot. The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo did both in 1985.
• Cat-and-mouse cartoons. Everybody immediately thinks of Tom and Jerry. Yet even Steamboat Willie with Mickey Mouse and Pegleg Pete is already an early prototype of this typical cartoon situation.
• The Legend of Vox Machina is not the first animated series based on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Long before Matthew Mercer started DM-ing for Critical Role, which would serve as the basis of TLoVM, Ryo Mizuno wrote stories based on a DnD campaign that he DM-ed for, later published as novels and spawning animated adaptations of its own, called Record of Lodoss War.
• Arthur is one of those series associated heavily with the late 90s and early 2000s. The first book (Arthur's Nose) came out all the way back in 1976. Several generations grew up with the characters before the cartoon came out.
• The voices in The Archie Show were cast to emulate the voices from the 1940s Archie radio shows.
• Super Secret Secret Squirrel from 2 Stupid Dogs is a revival of a 60s cartoon named Secret Squirrel.
• Many people are unaware that the cartoon segments on House of Mouse originated as segments of the short-lived Mickey MouseWorks television series, possibly due to some of the shorts making their debut on House of Mouse without previously airing as part of Mickey MouseWorks.
• When it was announced that Samurai Jack would be getting a brand new fifth season years after being cancelled, one notable aspect that surprised many is that the new season would be set to premiere on Toonami on [adult swim]... and would still be produced by Cartoon Network Studios, the same company who produced the first four seasons. Surprising? Maybe, but it's actually not the first time that Cartoon Network Studios has produced anything for [adult swim]. That honor belongs to the second season of Black Dynamite.
• Speaking of Cartoon Network, it has recently become common to blame network CEO Christina Miller for the poor performance of its more "serious" action-based cartoons, with many viewers even accusing her of subscribing to the Animation Age Ghetto. But this problem actually dates back several years earlier, with Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Young Justice (2010), and Sym-Bionic Titan all being cancelled in a short period of time before Miller arrived.
• The Chipettes from Alvin and the Chipmunks first officially appeared in 1983 however they were first referenced a year earlier in the song "The One That I Want" from the CD The Chipmunks Go Hollywood. In the song, Theodore mentions Charlene and states that she's from a group known as "The Chipettes". Charlene was eventually replaced with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Brittany.

• Think sexualized furry/anthro art like you see on DeviantArt or Furaffinity is a new thing? Think again. This clip from a 1940 Looney Tunes short shows an anthro lizard, greatly resembling something from those aforementioned sites, performing a striptease as it sheds its skin, rotoscoped from an actual stripper.
• Animated shows with ongoing story arcs and cliffhangers are usually thought of as a recent phenomenon, at least as far as Western animation is concerned. Not true. The first "serialized" animated show, conceived with a plot continuing from episode to episode rather than having each episode stand on its own, was Rocky and Bullwinkle, which came out in all the way back in 1959.
• Many think Quack Pack was the first time Disney portrayed their Funny Animal characters amongst humans. In reality, many Classic Disney Shorts did not take place in a World of Funny Animals. This could possibly be due to Walt Disney's belief that the characters were really stylized humans
• Jem:
  • The Misfits were originally a horror-themed punk band from New Jersey formed in 1977, NOT an original creation as a fictonal band in Jem. The band was obscure at the time and had split up 2 years prior to the cartoon's creation, so it was unlikely anyone involved knew of them at the time, but when the band themselves tried to prevent Hasbro from using the name, Hasbro chose to go ahead regardless due to "legal loopholes" involving trademarks. Then former frontman Glenn Danzig gave his approval when he learned of it, no doubt due to his anger with the rest of the band at the time. While the band themselves have not taken any legal action to this day, Jerry Only and the rest of the band refuse to publicly acknowledge the cartoon even exists and will not answer questions concerning their thoughts on it (perhaps to avoid giving the series any attention at all). Jem fans likewise sometimes get angry when it's mentioned, believing the band has no right to complain (and yes, we shall point out the irony in anger over copied names, what with Jem having been the name of a character in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird some 20 years prior). Reportedly, the original intro was replaced because the original intro featured The Misfits proudly exclaiming their band name.
  • Jem is also the title of a 1979 Frederik Pohl novel.
• On Marvel's Spider-Man, Gwen Stacy's debut may have people surprised at what a stuck-up, less-than-kind attitude she has. However, this is actually Gwen's attitude when she originally debuted in the comics, and the characterization changed and was subsequently forgotten about over the years.
• An adult cartoon about an anthropomorphic horse celebrity making his way through Hollywood, set in a world where humans live alongside Funny Animals. Bojack Horseman? Nope - Klasky-Csupo did it first with their 2004 pilot You Animal.
• The title character of Hey Arnold! first appeared in a claymation short called "Arnold Escapes a Church", created by Craig Bartlett in 1988. He next appeared in "The Arnold Waltz" in 1990, and a third claymation short called "Arnold Uses His Imagination" (also known as "Arnold Rides a Chair"), which was created for Sesame Street, of all things.
• Ahsoka Tano of Star Wars: The Clone Wars got a lot of flack for using a Reverse Grip with her lightsaber, even though Galen Marek was using it several years earlier.
• The Theme song for VeggieTales mentions "There's never ever been a show like Veggie Tales". And indeed there wasn't... it actually was an All-CGI Cartoon before ReBoot by almost a year.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks is Starship Regulars without the Serial Numbers Filed Off.
• One of the many criticisms levied against Beast Machines is the addition to Cybertron's backstory of originally housing organic life. However, this was not a Retcon invented solely for this series. The original G1 cartoon which is set in the same continuity as Beast Machines, had an episode called "The Dweller in the Depths" which revealed that the Quintessons, the creators of the Transformer race, originally experimented with half organic creatures called Trans-Organics and the episode shows some of the organic caverns deep in the depths of Cybertron. In fact, the link between the Trans-Organics and the Transformers could explain how the latter could scan organic creatures for alt modes in the first place.
• While the general public believe A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first time Charlie Brown and the other characters were in animated form, the Peanuts characters actually made their animation debut in 1959, such as introducing Ernie Ford for "The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show" and appeared in a series of commercials for Ford Motors.
• In 2016, the Canadian series Fangbone! debuted on Disney XD in the United States, with many dismissing it as a ripoff of Daron Nefcy's popular 2015 Disney series Star vs. the Forces of Evil, due to both series being about young heroes from a fantasy world who come to Earth through magical means and befriend a normal kid who helps them fight monsters. What nobody at the time realized however was that Fangbone! was based on a children's graphic novel series called Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian written by acclaimed author Michael Rex that came out in 2012 — three years before Star Vs. was ever a thing — AND Fangbone!'s pilot had originally aired in Canada in 2014, a year before Star Vs. premiered on Disney Channel.
• The Thin-Line Animation style, often known in internet circles as the "CalArts style", gets a lot of flack because of its ubiquity since The New '10s. However, different cartoons during a specific time period always had a tendency to resemble each other. The 1920s and early 1930s had the Inkblot Cartoon Style, the 1980s had a trend of realistically-drawn characters, the late 1990s and early 2000s had Thick-Line Animation inspired by UPA and Hanna-Barbera, etc. In fact, the "CalArts style" term originally referred to the trend of Disneyesque animated films during The Renaissance Age of Animation.
• A lot of Americans figure that Peppa Pig is a fairly recent creation, debuting in the 2010's. It actually first broadcast in 2004, with the new tens being when it became popular in the United States.
  • Most people are also unaware that Peppa Pig's debut in the United States came from Tickle U, a short-lived block that aired preschool shows on Cartoon Network from 2005 to 2007, even being redubbed with America voice actors.
• Otaku O'Clock is something invented in the Turn of the Millennium as a place to put animated shows (usually Anime or adult-oriented cartoons), right? Nope. Even in the 1980s, some syndicated stations would start their broadcast day at 3 or 4am with cartoons they didn't want to put in prime time. Some of them were cheaply made DomesticOnlyCartoons designed only to take up space. Others were old Looney Tunes or Tex Avery reruns. A few, however, were anime or Animesque series that were unable to fit anywhere else.
• The Penguins of Madagascar: While some might think Rico's Flanderization for coughing up weapons originates in this series, it was used twice. First in the Christmas special where he pulls out a stick of dynamite (though even then he's struggling) and a Game Boy Advance video game called Operation Penguin, where he would casually burp out each new weapon for Private.

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