Set Right What Once Went Wrong / Western Animation

Setting Right What Once Went Wrong in Western Animation

Series Plots

• Megas XLR starts when the Human Resistance steals a prototype Glorft mecha, modifies it, and attempts to send it and its pilot back in time to prevent the Glorft from winning the war against humanity. But a Glorft's fleet pursuit ends up sending it and them hundreds of years earlier than the humans intended. Hilarity Ensues when the salvaged prototype is found and refurbished by a 21th century motor enthusiast, which is somehow still enough to keep the Earth safe from the Glorft and more.
• The Peabody and Sherman segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle involve going back in time to correct historical events which have gone wrong. This carries over to its reboot, The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show.
• Samurai Jack: Once upon a time, a powerful demon known as Aku pillaged a kingdom, until a great Samurai warrior almost defeated him and was flung into the future by Aku, figuring that in the Bad Future he controlled he would have the means to dispose of him once and for all. As Aku himself puts it: "Now the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku..." And he did, but at a great cost.
• Saving Me involves the elderly millionaire Bennett Bramble being lonely, miserable, and Hated by All, so he decides to mentally travel back in time and teach his younger self into becoming a better person.
• This is Time Squad's mission; to keep the past from unraveling. However, all of these changes are comedic and none ever cause a bad future. They just have to be fixed.

Episode or Character Plots

• Aladdin: The Series: "Lost and Founded" involved Abis Mal stealing a time-travelling artifact and using it to change the past so that his family would be the one who founded and built Agrabah instead of Jasmine's family. Aladdin and the others quickly follow him to the past to ensure that Jasmine's ancestor becomes Agrabah's original founder.
• The Batman: Francis Grey, the villain of the week in "Seconds", spent 18 years in prison over a simple mistake that spiraled out of control before snapping, discovering his Time Master powers, and attempting to seek revenge on all of Gotham. He succeeds, but accidentally kills his son in the process, and the Villainous BSoD he suffered gave his powers the boost he needed to go back and avoid going to prison in the first place.
• The Fairly OddParents!: In the episode "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker!", Timmy's attempts to stop his teacher from growing up to become a fairy-obsessed maniac result in him lamenting "NO! This is exactly what I was trying to prevent!" To clarify, Timmy finds out Crocker had fairies (his fairies, in fact) in his childhood and was actually quite beloved by the town. But at the ceremony they were throwing for him, Timmy accidentally reveals them to the whole crowd. Granted, it wasn't his fault though, as Cosmo turned the power to the mics back on in his usual bout of stupidity, and even then, the original timeline would've had Cosmo stupidly blurt out their existence anyway. To say the least, it all went downhill after that. At least he was stopped before his actions affected the election of President McGovern.
• Futurama:
  • "Bender's Big Score" deals extensively with time travel, ending with Bender going back to the year 2000 with the tattoo on the time duplicate Fry's ass to put the tattoo back onto past-frozen Fry's ass in the first place, for any of the plot to make sense.
  • In "Decision 3012", it turns out that Earth President candidate Chris Travers is actually from the future and went back in time to stop Nixon's head from getting re-elected and ruining Earth with his policies. However, after winning the election, he fades from existence, as his reason for coming back no longer exists and Nixon's head wins by default anyway.
• In X-Men: The Animated Series:
  • Bishop traveled from the future to the present on three separate occasions to prevent a Sentinel-ruled dystopia from coming to pass. On the second trip, Cable travels from even further in the future to stop Bishop from inadvertently making the far future worse.
  • Bishop is terrible at this though, mostly due to his trigger happy nature. His plans to just kill/destroy the source of the problem and then head back to the future never work because he doesn't unravel the conspiracies involved. Fortunately his actions let the X-Men know, and they do manage to fix things.
• Back to the Future: In "Go Fly a Kite", Verne accidentally interrupts Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment, causing the electricity in present day Hill Valley to disappear. Doc and Marty must head back to 1752 and simulate a storm in order for Franklin to make his discovery.
• Played straight in the "OK at the Gunfight Corral" episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Hoggish Greedy & Sly Sludge travel back to the Old West to get the deeds for the Grand Canyon turning it a landfill. The Planeteers follow and work things back on track, returning the Grand Canyon to its natural state.
• A common occurrence in Code Lyoko. Many episodes feature the main characters using a computer program called "return to the past" to undo the damage the from the Big Bad XANA's attacks in the real world. The main characters are the only people who remember the events that occurred the first time around, allowing them to undo conflicts or mistakes that occurred initially (for example, Yumi regularly has to lie to her parents about the group's Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World activities, which regularly gets her in trouble for regularly staying out late and eventually leads to the group's activities being exposed. After a return to the past, she tells her parents "the truth" that's she in love with one of her friends, which is technically also true.)
• Danny Phantom promises not to allow his evil future to come to pass after seeing himself as a sadistic, mass-murdering sociopath. His evil future self realizes, to his shock, that Danny's succeeded in changing the timeline when he sees his 14-year-old past self use a New Super Power that he himself doesn't/didn't/won't get until ten years from now.
• Phineas and Ferb: Future Candace travels back in time after she discovers that her meddling with the timeline has turned the tri-state area into a dystopia ruled by Doofenshmirtz in the episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo".
• Wakfu: Nox, the first season's Arc Villain, has a desire to save the family that he lost 200 years before the show. It has driven him to go from a simple watchmaker to one of the most powerful (and insane) magic users alive. Unfortunately, while he is a skilled enough time mage to slow time to a stand still, he has so far been unable to actually travel backwards in time. He believes that this is a power requirement issue, and now seeks to drain enough wakfu from the plants, animals, and people of the world to save his family. One character mentions that he has drained entire countries dry over the years, and his current plan involves exterminating an entire race of people to gain the wakfu he needs. Grougaloragran thinks this type of time travel is impossible, and he'll probably just end up breaking the universe if he tries. Nox, however, is long past caring. Turns out it is possible. Too bad the wakfu requirements were far steeper than Nox estimated — the wakfu he spent two centuries gathering was only enough to facilitate a twenty minute time jump.
• In the Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures episode "The Edge of Yesterday", we learn that Dr. Quest created a time machine program in Questworld after his wife died, which would allow him to travel back in time and see his wife again. When he finished it, he realized he wouldn't only be able to see his wife, he could also change the past to prevent her from dying. His ethics would not let him alter history for personal gain, so he sealed the program so it couldn't be used. Later on, Jonny and Jessie use the program to go back in time and prevent Ezekiel Rage from planting a bomb that could cause the tectonic plates to split, destroying the Earth.
• Two episodes of Lilo & Stitch: The Series centered around this plot. In the first, Lilo embarrasses herself in front of her love interest. She finds out Jumba has a surfboard style time machine and uses it to fix the blunder, but at the same time, there's an experiment running around that Stitch tries to catch, and each attempt causes a disaster to the area causing multiple re-dos. Eventually, Lilo has to let herself get embarrassed to fix the timeline. The second such episode involves Lilo finding an experiment that can warp time forward, allowing her to age into a teenager and later an adult. However since she and Stitch are time traveling, they're not around to catch experiments, allowing Gantu and Hamsterveil to capture them and take over the Earth. Conveniently, said experiment has a Reset Button, but they have to rescue it first to fix the damage.
• The Codename: Kids Next Door episode Operation: F.U.T.U.R.E. deals with a future ruled by boy-hating girls who either enslave or convert any remaining boys using technology, with an elderly Numbuh Four being the only remaining male adult. The plot was apparently brought about by the world's ruler through communication with her past self in the present day. The resistance movement gets help from an unlikely source: Numbuh Three's granddaughter, who helps Numbuh Four send a message to the present day Kids Next Door with the information they need to halt the scheme at a vital time, preventing the shift from occurring.
• Family Guy
  • Done as a Shout-Out to Back to the Future, when Peter has Death warp him back in time so he can relive a day in his teenage years. However he does so at a critical moment in the history of his relationship to Lois that ends with her married to Quagmire and him married to Molly Ringwald (its complicated, just go with it). Peter, along with Brian, convince Death to send them back to undo Peter's mistake.
  • Also, explicitly referenced in an episode where Peter becomes a Jehovah's Witness (among other things) and explains Jesus like this, leading to a Quantum Leap sight gag.
  • And now Stewie and Brian are credited as using this to CREATE THE FAMILY GUY UNIVERSE. LITERALLY. So that's a... set half-right what was elsetime random-in-the-void? It gets played straight in the same episode when Stewie's sperm-brother tries to erase one of his more 'European' ancestors to erase Stewie.
  • At ne point Stewie used his time machine to prevent Kurt Cobain from taking his own life. He accomplishes this by giving Cobain a tub of Haagen Daaz Ice Cream; Cobain survived until at least 2012, though he gained some weight.
  • And in the episode "Christmas Guy" Stewie did this in order to save Brian from getting hit by a car.
• Likewise, sister series American Dad! had a Christmas Episode that featured a Ghost of Christmas Past trying to pull Yet Another Christmas Carol on Stan but he uses the opportunity trying to "fix" Christmas by killing Jane Fonda. His guardian angel stops him, but when they get back to modern times America is under the control of Soviet Russia. It Makes Sense in Context.^note Stan also got Martin Scorsese off drugs, which meant no Taxi Driver, which meant John Hinkley Jr. didn't try to shoot Ronald Reagan, which meant Walter Mondale gets elected President and immediately surrendered to the USSR. In a bit of a subversion, trying to fix the original event by making Taxi Driver doesn't work, so Stan is forced to shoot Reagan himself (which much to his relief is told he just has to "wing him") to fix the timeline. Note that even in the end the timeline isn't the same: Since Stan only shot Reagan, his assistant James Brady was fine which meant no Brady Bill and thus America has less strict gun laws.
• In Young Justice (2010), this is why Bart came back from the future: in forty years, the Reach managed to take over the world with the help of a moded Blue Beetle — hence why Bart specifically cozies up to that character. A side mission was stopping his grandfather, the Flash, from being killed by Neutron, whom he also saves from decades of being Brainwashed and Crazy.
• The two-part Justice League episode "The Savage Time" involves the Justice League being trapped in a Bad Present created when Vandal Savage sent a computer back to his past self, giving him the information he needed to depose Hitler and assume control of the Nazis, allowing him to conquer the world. So, naturally, the Justice League have to travel through time themselves to topple Vandal Savage and prevent this from coming to be. Incidentally, the fact that this episode ended with Hitler's impending restoration to power elicited such a massive case of realized Fridge Horror — that the heroes had implicitly restored the Holocaust to prevent Vandal's present-era regime — that the directors publicly announced that Vandal's usurpation and cryogenic freezing, combined with when Hitler was released, meant that whilst Hitler went on to lead the Nazis to defeat, he had neither the time nor the resources to spare in directing the Holocaust.
• Played with in an episode of The Simpsons where Artie Ziff asks Marge to re-create their original prom date so he can end the evening properly as compared to the first instance in high school. Homer sees them dancing and concludes, "If Marge and Artie get married, I'll never be born!"
• The whole plot to the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic season 5 finale, "The Cutie Remark". Starlight Glimmer discovers and refines a time travel spell that Starswirl the Bearded had made and uses it in a mad revenge scheme to stop the Sonic Rainboom and prevent the Mane Six from uniting. Twilight Sparkle and Spike are stuck in a strange timeloop where Failure Is the Only Option when they try to use force to stop Starlight in this plot. Ultimately, Twilight stops fighting and grabs Starlight to the next timeloop which ends up breaking her badly.
  • Also the plot of the earlier episode, "It's About Time". Twilight gets visited by a future version who looks like she comes from a warzone, but never learns why (because she keeps interrupting her future self with irrelevant questions) and has to figure out what's going to go wrong and prevent it. In the end, it turns out nothing bad happened at all, and she worried herself sick the whole week for nothing. So she goes back in time to tell her past self not to get worried unnecessarily...
• At the end of Season 3 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) the Earth gets invaded by Triceratons who use a Black Hole Generator to destroy the planet. At the last second the turtles are saved by the Fugitoid, who takes them six months into the past to save Earth. He points out that this is the only chance they are going to get and won't be able to time travel again.
• Kaeloo: The plot of Episode 75 had Kaeloo, Stumpy and Mr. Cat use their Time Machine to go back to the series pilot and prevent Quack Quack from getting addicted to yogurt. Unfortunately, Stumpy ignores a warning from Mr. Cat telling him not to mess with the past, and he gives his past self information about what the future entails. When they return to the present, Stumpy is the king of Smileyland.
• Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero: In "Back to the Past of Future Balls", the part-time heroes revisit the world they visited in "Balls!" and find out Rippen used a Time Machine to create a bad timeline where he took over. Penn and the time machine's inventor try to use it to undo the changes. They instead go back further in time and prevent the incident that started the war Rippen took advantage of in the first place.
• The Grand Finale of Xiaolin Showdown has Omi planning to travel to the past to prevent Hannibal Bean from turning Chase Young evil. However, in doing so he mostly messes things up, like creating a Bad Future where Jack Spicer rules the world and a present where Hannibal turns Master Monk Guan evil, Wuya is brought back to her human form with her powers and Master Fung is sent to the Yin Yang World. This is why Omi doesn't become the leader of the monks. Raimundo does.
• Briefly touched on in the DuckTales (2017) episode "Last Christmas": when Della and Donald reveal to Dewey that they figured out that Dewey was a relative of theirs from the future, Dewey tries to warn Della about the disaster with the Spear of Selene that strands her on the moon for a decade. They immediately shut him up before he could, being Genre Savvy enough to know if he tried to do this trope, it would end badly.
  "Haven't you ever seen any movie?"
• Wander over Yonder: In "The Waste of Time", Wander unknowingly fills their orbble bottle with time orbble juice, which grants he and Sylvia the ability to travel through time and visit their past adventures, even far before that and into the future. However, Wander is too excited about this new ability he doesn't listen to Sylvia and ends up using up all the time orbble juice by the time they arrive back at the station...at the wrong time. Realizing his mistake, Wander and Sylvia have to work the gas station while Wilmur and Orbble Wright spend time inventing the orbble juice; the last scene ends in the present day at the time Wander first got the time orbble juice, and the elderly fifty-year older Wander prevents his present day self from getting the time orbble juice by placing an "out of order" sign on the time orbble spout, allowing him to realize and choose the regular juice instead, stopping the events of the episode from occuring and causing the old Wander and Sylvia to fade out of existence.
• Star Trek: Prodigy has a very odd one. In "A Moral Star Part 2", we learn that The Diviner hails from a future 50-some years ahead where First Contact between his race and the Federation lead to a civil war that ravaged his people and his world. He came back in time in order to find the Protostar to stop the Federation from performing this by... infecting the ship with a Trojan Horse that would tear the Federation apart. Despite his daughter Gwyn pointing out that he could just go to them and tell them to stay away, he refuses, wanting the Federation to suffer.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: In the two-part episode "Demon World", Shendu has written history with the Book of Ages to ensure that he and his demon siblings rule the Earth. However, Jade managed to rip a page out of the book before history was altered, and after assembling this timeline's J-Team counterparts, set off around the world to stop the demons and restore history.

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