The Artifact / Western Animation

• All Grown Up! had kept the same title sequence throughout it's five season run, even when the characters had changed hairstyles and outfits.
• American Dad!:
  • Klaus, the East German athlete in a goldfish's body, seems to serve no narrative purpose in later episodes. Originally he was a much more mean-spirited character with a unrequited crush on Francine, and was intended as a foil to Roger, but with Roger's shift from sheltered and somewhat sympathetic Jerk with a Heart of Gold to largely-independent Heroic Comedic Sociopath, that's pretty much fallen by the wayside. Klaus mostly Took a Level in Kindness as a result, however, ironically becoming the lonely one.
    • In some later episodes, Klaus' lack of purpose is lampshaded through Klaus bemoaning his situation, or the other characters making fun of him. One particularly cruel example is "For Whom the Sleigh Bell Tolls", where the rest of the family is fighting for their lives against Santa Claus and his elves with machine guns and hatchets, and Francine mentions "What's his name?" during a conversation with Hayley; it then cuts to Klaus floating in his bowl with no background noise, and he dispassionately says "My name is Klaus Heissler."
  • Hayley was originally designed as a counterpart to Stan's extreme conservatism, and this relationship formed the backbone of many earlier episodes. As the show largely lost its political aspects over the years, Hayley's had less and less to do, with focus shifting to her marriage to The Stoner Jeff Fischer.
  • Both examples were Lampshaded by Klaus and Hayley about halfway through the episode "Ricky Spanish". Klaus pops up on the screen out of nowhere exclaiming, "Ha! I made it into the episode! Pay me, bitches!" Then Hayley pops up saying, "Ha! Me too!" Otherwise, both characters are entirely absent from the episode.
• On early episodes of Arthur, also evident on PBS Kids broadcasts, a thin black bar with white lines on it would appear and take up the entire left side of the screen. This particular bar was actually the signal for the Actimates toys of Arthur and D.W., allowing them to respond to the episodes, and kept appearing during reruns of those early episodes.
• In Atomic Betty, you might notice Maximus looks a lot like Betty's cat Purrsy and Admiral DeGill looks like her pet goldfish. This is leftover from the original concept of the series, where Betty's space missions were fantasy adventures at night involving her pets and toys (Sparky and X5 look very toylike, their designs stick out like a sore thumb compared to other aliens and robots seen in the show), whereas the actual show has them be unambiguously real occurrences.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Katara's Opening Narration remains the same through the series. Her statement "And although [Aang's] airbending skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone." was true early on, it makes no sense by Book 3, where Aang is clearly stronger and more mature, having saved countless people before even mastering the final element.
    • This is a bit of a subversion, as while Aang is far more powerful and mature by the end of the series than at the beginning, the "learning" aspect is still accurate until the end as two techniques Aang learns during the Grand Finale are instrumental to his ultimate success: lightning redirection and energybending.
  • In early episodes, the fauna in the Avatar world ran on Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit", filled with wildly-alien beasts with the names of ordinary Earth animals. By the end of the first season, the wildlife had been replaced by more organic-looking Mix-and-Match Critters. Despite this, the bizarre species introduced in the earlier episodes couldn't just go away, especially since two of them, Appa the "bison" and Momo the "lemur", were the show's ubiquitous Team Pets.
• Batman: The Animated Series ostensibly began as a tie-in with Tim Burton's live-action Batman movies, but eventually went in its own direction after it became a hugely popular show in its own right and the showrunners were granted more creative control by the network. Despite this, the show still retained a few changes from the source material that carried over from the movies, even after they ceased to fit with the show's visual sensibility and interpretation of the mythos. Most notably: Catwoman is portrayed as blonde, the Penguin is drawn with deformed fin-like hands, and the Joker is given a definitive backstory as a former Gotham City gangster (although he's never given a name, and he's not the one who killed Batman's parents). Tellingly, the first two changes were quietly dropped after the show was retooled as The New Batman Adventures.
• The 2011 reboot of Beavis and Butt-Head has the boys and Stewart still rocking the same T-shirts they did in the 1990s. While it's still reasonable that teenage metalheads would be rocking Metallica and AC/DC shirts in modern times, being iconic acts, one wonders how many teenage boys nowadays would wear a T-shirt by the nearly forgotten hair metal band Winger (hell, Winger was almost an artifact when the original B&B show started airing in the '90s).
• Ben 10: Several of Ben Tennyson's ten original forms have been made completely obsolete due to him gaining new ones with the same abilities and more over the course of the sequel, yet these forms still end up being brought back because of how iconic and popular they are.
  • Ben started using his Original Series favorite form Four Arms again in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien even though he had plenty of super-strong aliens with additional powers.
  • Wildvine was brought back in Ben 10: Omniverse even though Swampfire has the same abilities plus Playing with Fire.
  • Grey Matter started being regularly used again, also in Omniverse, even though Brainstorm had the same Super-Intelligence plus Shock and Awe. There was an attempt at Reimagining the Artifact by clarifying that Grey Matter is even smarter than Brainstorm, but they did a rather poor job at showing it.
• Vlad Plasmius, major villain of Danny Phantom, was originally intended to be a vampire, but the concept was scrapped. Despite this, he still has a lot of leftover elements from that concept: his design in both forms, his name, and so on. Based on Danny, his design seems like it should be a color-inverted version of his outfit when he became a ghost, rather than the Dracula outfit he actually wears, but it seems they liked the design too much to bother.
• In the Disney Sing-Along Songs VHS series, Professor Owl from the Adventures in Music Duology was originally the host, with Jiminy Cricket and Professor Ludwig Von Drake occasionally taking over. In later entries, Professor Owl only appears to say "And now, here is your host, [Jiminy Cricket / Professor Ludwig Von Drake]!", and in a completely different voice from the intro and the earlier videos despite the fact that Corey Burton was still voicing him, despite the change in the character's voice. The most likely reason is that the between-song segments were composed entirely of Stock Footage of old cartoons, and Cricket and Von Drake — particularly the latter, who by the end was the only one hosting — had a good deal more material to draw from.
  • This gets worse with Topsy Turvy (called The Hunchback of Notre Dame in select international releases) and From Hercules (which was only released outside America and Canada), as they had no host at all and only had Professor Owl appearing in the intro with Burton being uncredited for his role.
• After the first season Drawn Together lost the pretense of being "the first animated reality" by dropping the "confessional" segments, the votes, and so on. This however was referenced in The Movie that closed the series for good.
• The Dreamstone:
  • Zordrak was created as the sinister Big Bad in early episodes; while mostly staying in his lair, he devised many of the plans for his mooks, the Urpneys, and on a handful of occasions played part in the task at hand, making him a palpable Knight of Cerebus. As the show began to revolve more and more around the Urpneys' slapstick however, Zordrak's part in the show became smaller and more superfluous, usually appearing as little more than a source of abuse for his mooks while they plotted and acted out everything themselves. The heroes themselves even became trivial additions at times due to the Urpneys being such luckless imbeciles they could play out and fail at a scheme completely by themselves (though they were pushed back into spotlight a little in the final seasons).
  • The Noops in particular suffered for a lengthy amount of time. Originally Rufus (and to a degree Amberley) were the main protagonists, however it soon became blatant that every other heroic member was stronger and more competent than them, thus reducing them to The Load for a lot of the series. The later episodes rectified this somewhat by placing the others Out of Focus, isolating the two and thus putting them into more situations they had to handle on their own.
  • The dream premise of the show itself was downplayed pretty damn early, again, in favor of the Urpneys Road Runner vs. Coyote antics. After the pilot in fact, only a few episodes went into detail about the dreams, and even fewer actually shown them onscreen. This got to such a point that the only way to go was up, with the third and fourth season going into slightly more depth about the process (if still rather skimpy).
  • For a very minor example, we have Frizz's eye color. In the first season, he wore glasses but come the second season these were fazed out completely. The lens color, however, was not, leaving him with blue eyes for the rest of the series.
• Family Guy:
  • Meg Griffin seems to have been designed and included for one narrative purpose (high school angst-driven stories); as the show has become joke-driven, structurally looser and narratively weaker, Meg's continued existence often seems little more than a vestige of the plot-driven early seasons of the show. Couple this with the character's initial unpopularity for those very reasons, and the show's increasing reliance on the Seth MacFarlane-voiced characters, the audience's dislike of the Meg character (lampshaded frequently on the show through the rest of the family's increasingly pronounced and occasionally violent antipathy toward her) and there's really little left of the character beyond the awareness of her Artifact status.
    • The disproportionate in-universe hate towards her has shoved her through The Woobie Wall for many members of the audience, giving her an actual purpose in the show. It also makes the scene in the episode "Dial Meg for Murder" where she beats Peter after being in prison a few months a Moment of Awesome. Whether or not this was intended is a topic of debate.
    • The diminishment of Meg's character began at about the same time as her original (and uncredited) voice actor Lacey Chabert was replaced by Mila Kunis. In contrast to Lacey Chabert's rather mundane characterization, Mila Kunis brought a sharper, more distinctive quality to the character (along with a much greater appreciation for the show's type of humor than Lacey Chabert had, which is what caused her to leave the show and be uncredited). Mila Kunis' performance allows the out-of-proportion attacks on Meg to be funny, whereas had Lacey Chabert remained, it likely would have just come off as mean-spirited.
    • Nowadays, Meg can occasionally get whole plots dedicated to her, with them varying in how nice she is treated. In addition, recent seasons have added the gimmick that Meg may or may not be a troubled, disturbed, violent girl that possibly committed murder, needs constant supervision to stop her doing something wrong, and is a powder keg just waiting to explode.
  • Stewie Griffin's unusual appearance and voice—his posh British accent and slicked-back hair, in particular—were originally a pretty explicit Shout-Out to Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs. This made sense in the early seasons, since Stewie's entire gimmick was that he was a deranged evil genius with the body of an infant. But after years of Flanderization caused his characterization to become dominated by his snobbishness and his feminine mannerisms, it started to seem a bit odd that he still looked like a cannibalistic serial killer. But by then, his design was simply too iconic to change.
  • Chris Griffin is a blond even though his parents are a brunette and a redhead. However, Lois also originally being blond in the "Pitch Pilot" suggests it as a leftover that the son was originally to inherit from the mother.
  • Early episodes frequently brought up Lois' interest in playing the piano, which became a much less pivotal part of her character starting around the fourth season. Despite this, she continues to play the piano in the title sequence.
• Futurama: Fry's backstory as a 20th century human transplanted into the 31st century via cryogenic freezing almost became an afterthought in later episodes. If you got into the series at a later point, you'd scarcely think that Fry wasn't from the 30th century. This is a Justified Trope, however: similar to 3rd Rock from the Sun under the Live Action TV section, it was inevitable that Fry would get used to life in the future, especially since real time passed over the course of the series (he was 25 at the start of the show and in his mid-30s by the time it ended); the main surprise ended up being that he adjusted to life in the future far faster than they'd expected. One episode also acknowledges it, with characters mentioning that Fry fits in quite well in the future because he was such a misfit in the 20th century.
• Hey Arnold! kept the same title sequence throughout its run. Needless to say, by the show's end after five seasons some things that showed up in the title sequence had long since been changed, most noticeably Stinky's spiky arm-bands (from back in the first season where he was a bully alongside Harold, before he eventually became more of a mild-mannered Country Mouse with a slight Jerkass streak) and the very fact that Ruth MacDougal is still present. (By the series' end, she had all but disappeared.)
• Heloise has a scar on her head in Jimmy Two-Shoes. This is an artifact from an earlier concept, when the show was going to take place in Hell and Heloise was a teenage serial killer who was gunned down by the police. It was only left in to make her seem creepier.
• KaBlam!:
  • Beginning in Summer 1999, Nickelodeon began to have Henry and June host various Nicktoon blocks, such as 101% Whizbang! and U-Pick. While KaBlam! aired its last episode in May 2000, the duo continued to host U-Pick until the end of 2000 when the block was cancelled (it would be revived two years later with live-action hosts). However, they eventually came back (albeit with June being recast) at the beginning of 2001 to host the Nicktoon World News shorts in-between commercial breaks, where they'd sit at a newsdesk and give out fun facts about upcoming Nicktoons (or in some cases, already-airing Nicktoons), as well as various "coming up next" bumpers for the channel. Despite this, KaBlam! had already been cancelled a year earlier and eventually was taken off of Nickelodeon's schedule not too long after the shorts/bumpers began airing. They still continued to host them until Fall 2001 when Nickelodeon retired them for good.
  • The fourth season of the show received a slight Retool to the wraparounds, making the TV studio setting more apparent than it had ever been and almost abandoning the comic book setting, which had been the show's primary gimmick (most likely as an attempt to integrate elements from the failed The Henry and June Show pilot into the series). The only remains of it being in the opening and ending titles and the show's traditional "turning the page" to the next segment.
• Early episodes of King of the Hill feature other neighbors besides the usual cast, notably a woman with glasses and long dark hair (voiced by Kathy Najimy) and several housewives who occasionally hang out with Peggy. After the first two seasons, these characters occasionally appear as extras but are rarely voiced.
  • Despite getting Killed Off for Real in the Season 2 finale, Buckley still appeared in the opening sequence, even in its reanimated HD version in the final season.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • In-Universe example: A recurring theme of the show is asking whether or not the Avatar itself is an artifact of the world. The Big Bads certainly think so, and each has tried in their own way to create a world where the Avatar no longer exists. Granted, with the new Air Nation taking the role of international peacekeepers following season three, they may have a point.
  • The animal companions Naga and Pabu, whose significance and screen time dropped steadily over the seasons. By book 4, they had nothing to do and barely even appeared. Understandable, given the breakneck pacing with loads of characters all fighting for limited screen time. But even as far back as season 1, some fans felt they didn't add anything to the show and were only there so that The Legend of Korra would have counterparts to Appa and Momo from the original series (even though Appa's main function was to be transportation, as he could fly, whereas Naga is a terrestrial animal in a setting where cars and blimps are commonplace).
• Looney Tunes:
  • Porky Pig saying the iconic “That’s all, folks!” is an artifact from when he was the original Series Mascot.
  • Subverted with Daffy Duck's signature "WOO HOO WOO HOO" laugh. He was originally an insane Cloudcuckoolander comparable to Woody Woodpecker. Though soon became the a more levelheaded Jerkass he's known as being, albeit with a few screwball elements, he keeps his maniacal laughter during occasional Character Checks or Character Rerailments.
  • The infamous trippy and abstract opening used during The '60s was itself an artifact, as it was originally intended to be a unique alternate opening sequence for Chuck Jones' Now Hear This and other experimental one-shots prior to the shutdown of Warner Bros' old animation studio (the Looney Tunes cartoons with the regular cast continued to use the familiar rings intro) and the more odd look of the opening fit wonderfully with those cartoons due to them being trippy and abstract themselves. However, Warner Bros decided to adapt it as the permanent opening when they shut down the old studio in favor of outsourcing it to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, ripping it of its original intent and context in the process.
    • The ending titles are accompanied by the chimes of the famous British landmark Big Ben, since Now Hear This takes place in the United Kingdom. The two other cartoons that use the ending sequence, Bartholomew Versus the Wheel and Señorella and the Glass Huarache, also use the Big Ben chimes despite not taking place in the UK.
• The Loud House has its intro centering around the craziness of the house and its inhabitants, and shows Lincoln Loud working to dodge all of the chaos. While this was very accurate during the first two seasons, the show's premise grew and evolved over time, and as the characters gained more focus and humanity, the chaotic nature of the house itself was drastically toned down. The sisters are now more multifaceted and less crazy, while Lincoln's adventures would shift from the "chaotic family survival" premise to more relatable family matter and antics with his friends. The house in general is quite calm now (aside from the occasional throwback episode), to the point where the intro feels almost out of place entirely.
• Mickey Mouse's ears. No matter how he turns his head, they stay in the same position, in direct violation of the rules of perspective. This is a relic of the time Mickey was created (the late 1920s), when designs were simple and crude, but as the animators improved their drawing skills and the style became more elaborate, Mickey's design began to look archaic by comparison. His immense popularity made a complete redesign impossible, so only small, judicious changes were made over time. There was a time in the early 1940s when the ears were altered to look more like real mouse ears, as well as giving them dimension, but that change was short-lived and the round ears returned. Nowadays it's accepted as a crucial element in Mickey's design (even 3D depictions of the character like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Epic Mickey, and Kingdom Hearts have special adjustments to keep the ears the same from every angle), and is even lampshaded on occasion.
• Muppet Babies (1984): The end credits theme from Season 2 onwards is actually that of 'Muppets, Babies and Monsters, the very short-lived pairing of Muppet Babies and Little Muppet Monsters. The castanets and trumpet solo at the end also come from that. The Series Finale, "Eight Flags Over the Nursery" also reused footage from the "Pigs and Space" and "Kermit the Frog, Private Eye" segments from the LMM episode, "Space Cowboys".
• The Penguins of Madagascar:
  • King Julien still uses his original crown, even though he gifted that one to Alex in the original movie, and uses a notably different crown for the rest of the franchise. Probably because the other crown was much more colorful and detailed and, therefore, harder to animate in a lower-budget TV series.
  • Phil and Mason. The show was created to focus on the secondary cast of the Madagascar series but while The Penguins and the Lemurs were the stars, Phil and Mason never gained a place in the series, and had very few episodes focused on them during the show's run. They remained as recurring characters, but as the show continued, their role became interchangeable with other zoo animals. Even Phil's role as the only literate animal (despite using sign language to communicate with them, and Mason being his interpreter) became less relevant as the Penguins Depending on the Writer seemed to be able to read just fine on their own or had gained other mediums to gain information. The few times where the Penguins being incapable of reading is an issue are precisely to give Phil and Mason something to do.
  • Alice was something of an antagonistic force early in Season 1, both by accidentally making the Penguins operations harder while doing her job and being the one the Penguins have to hide from to be capable of continuing with their operations in the zoo. But once the Penguins gained their Rogues Gallery and the show started playing more into the science-fiction and spy-like aspects that in the zoo antics, she became rather irrelevant. Rare is the episode in Season 2 or 3 where she plays any role of importance.
• Phantom Investigators: Early in production, Daemona's real name was Prunella Daemon, and "Daemona Prune" was to be her alias while on the job as a Phantom Investigator. It was later decided that the latter name would be used as her real name, and she wouldn't use an alias as a Phantom Investigator, leaving her name as an artifact from an earlier point of production.
• The Phineas and Ferb theme-song has the titular boys saying that they want to "Drive their sister insane!" However, their personalities changed a bit during development, and now the boys are incredibly nice, and want to help their sister out—she's just too amped up to realise. However, because it rhymes and is so intrinsic, the line stays.
  • Then again, you could take the line to mean that the things they do are going to drive her insane as a side effect, even if it's not what they intend to do.
  • Sort of subtly lampshaded in Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension—Phineas is singing the song "Where Do We Begin", before diving into singing a part of the show's theme song, but suddenly realizes before he can finish the line "driving our sister insane". He claims that they're going too fast and resumes the song at its original melody. He doesn't try to drive her insane or even seem to realize that he's doing it, so it wouldn't make any sense for him to say that.
  • Candace yelling "Phineas!" was originally in response to him snarking "It's a short drive" following the above line.
• Hack and Slash in ReBoot fell into this during season 3. While the series got Darker and Edgier, they didn't. For the most part they were ignored unless some comic relief was needed.
• Some TV edits of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) cut out the revelation that Yukon Cornelius is looking for peppermint at the North Pole rather than gold or silver—but they leave in Yukon's peculiar habit of licking his pickaxe, which is foreshadowing for that twist (he's tasting his pickaxe for peppermint). Without the twist, it's just a random quirk of his that's never explained.
• Sofia the First: Sofia's backstory as a village girl who becomes a princess when Miranda marries the king becomes less significant as the series goes on. In the first season, Sofia adjusting to royal life is easily the basic premise of the show. In the later seasons, her backstory is rarely mentioned at all, and there is almost no indication that Sofia hasn't always been a princess. Justified in that it was inevitable that Sofia would get used to life as a princess as time passed.
• A few characters, but particularly Rotor and Bunnie in Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM). The show originally consisted of a Five-Man Band who got fairly even spotlight in Season One. Rotor was originally a dorky Ditzy Genius who provided tech support, however as both Sally's intellect and Antoine's clumsiness got Flanderized, his role became more superfluous, only having odd moments of importance. Bunnie meanwhile was originally a supporting powerhouse, though after Dulcy was introduced and episodes focused more heavily on Sonic and Sally's brawn and brains dynamic, she was demoted to a fairly unimportant role, rarely even using her cyborg powers.
• The early seasons of South Park had a pretty different tone and concept, and so many older elements have become this over time.
  • Kenny is The Unintelligible because his muffled voice was originally supposed to be a clever censor. In early episodes, he would often describe lewd things that were theoretically too vulgar to say outright, but viewers could listen closely and understand what he was saying. For example, in a short "This program is brought to you by..." spot promoting Magic: The Gathering, where Kyle plugs the card game, and Kenny says, "That sounds fucking gay," in a way that sounds like the game's tagline, "It's not just a game." There's also his various lines in the show's opening theme song, always muffled to the point you can only really understand that's what he's saying if someone tells you. As the show pushed the envelope and censors became more lax, however, this novelty became mostly pointless; other characters can use explicit language without any issue. Losing that novelty, combined with the reduction of Kenny's recurring deaths, is why Kenny faded to the background as the seasons progressed.
  • For many years, this was the case with Officer Barbrady, who was prominent in early seasons as the town's lone dim-witted police officer. A new police force was gradually established with distinct characters and a completely separate headquarters, which gradually displaced Barbrady, who was reduced to very brief and infrequent appearances when the larger force wasn't necessary. After being sidelined for a decade, he was written out of the show in Season 19, which included him being fired from the police force, with the Mayor outright telling him he was "from another time".
  • A more typical case is Stan's Uncle Jimbo, who was a prominent adult character in the first few seasons, seen often and rarely seen without his war buddy Ned. Both characters fell Out of Focus as main characters after the fifth season, as the boys' dads became more prominent. Unlike many other characters on the show who faded from prominence and were written out, Demoted to Extra or removed, Jimbo has remained a part of the show's cast for fifteen years since then, but has usually received only very small Straight Man supporting roles to other characters such as Randy or Cartman, with only a few lines of supporting dialogue and without his familiar comedic traits from early episodes (besides continuing to sell guns). A single scene in season 22's "Time To Get Cereal" features Jimbo and Ned in their familiar roles, but they are dropped for the rest of the storyline, and he appears hospitalized with COVID-19 in "The Pandemic Special."
  • Pip is yet another example. During the first four seasons, he was the resident Butt-Monkey, a nice boy constantly bullied by everyone else, and a classmate of the four main boys with possibly the most screentime right after them (excluding Wendy and a few adult characters). After his A Day in the Limelight episode in Season 4, he would become a Living Prop at best, with his initial role being basically replaced by Butters, whom the creators themselves stated to work better as such character. This would continue for several seasons until he was Killed Off for Real in the fourteenth one.
  • Early designs for the adult characters had the same circular heads, small noses^note barring Sheila Broflovski's hook nose, flat hairstyles, and simplistic body shapes. However, as the show underwent Art Evolution, adult characters developed more complex designs, being given different head shapes and facial features and more realistically-textured hairstyles, especially when caricaturing real-life people. Adult characters introduced early in the series, like the main four's parents, have kept their earlier simple designs, which is noticeable when they share scenes with newer adult characters.
  • An In-Universe example occurs when Cartman creates "Coon and Friends", a Justice League style group of heroes with his character, The Coon, as leader. The rest of Coon and Friends end up mutinying against Cartman's selfish, spoiled-rotten, Nominal (at best) Hero antics and kick him out, but continue to refer to themselves as Coon and Friends.
    Toolshed: Mysterion, if Cartman's gone, why are we still calling ourselves Coon and Friends?
    Mysterion: Because it pisses Cartman off beyond belief, and I find that (laughs) extremely funny.
• The Expository Theme Tune of Space Goofs still retains the "Five little monsters were riding through space..." part in the Season 2 intro even though Stereo no longer appears in the show (which brings the cast down to four), to the point that he's not even in the intro where they're shown crashing into Earth.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil:
  • Star's magic wand, the whole reason she was sent to Earth in the first place and the MacGuffin Ludo's forces are after, becomes less and less important as the show goes on. By the last season, Star doesn't even use it anymore, having since learned to tap into her own innate magical powers.
  • The series got a new title sequence in Season 3 to fit with the the change of setting from Earth to Mewni which among another things had Janna as one of the main characters, Ludo, Toffee and Glossaryck as the major antagonistic forces and the wand still with the split star. This makes sense for the 4-part arc The Battle of Mewni where the title sequence debuted but doesn't really fit with the events after that arc, Ludo and Toffee are gone, the wand has a new form, Glossaryck is temporarily dead and then returns to Star's side and Janna has being Demoted to Extra. The latter point became an aversion once Season 4 turned her into a main character again.
  • Speaking of Janna. She inverts this in Season 4, at first she seems to have no purpose in the narrative given she has no reason or way to be on Mewni and only seems to have regained her relevance on the show out of being a Breakout Character but then during the last episodes Star, Marco and Tom are unable to go back to Mewni for traditional means and it turns out only Janna can help them since she has being travelling without a portal.
• In the beginning of Steven Universe, the Gems were portrayed as almost completely magical beings who dealt with objects like devices that could move through time, scrolls that could come to life, and wands that could replicate anything. Most notably, the Crystal Gems live in a temple that is Bigger on the Inside and has all sorts of Alien Geometries within. As the series went on, the nature of the Gems shifted to more of a science fiction angle, and many of the more "magical" things disappeared or were explained as something more technical than that. As the home of the main characters, the Gem Temple couldn't just go away, so it ends up feeling a little out of place looking at Gem technology/magic/magitek from when Homeworld was first mentioned onwards.
• In Teen Titans (2003), Starfire's distinctive speech patterns became this trope. She would speak very slowly and properly, and often misuse slang and idioms ("Let us kick the butt!"). The original point was that she was an alien not used to speaking English, but over time the series introduced other aliens—including other Tamaraneans—who spoke English just fine. It simply became a quirk of her character.
• This World Can't Tear Me Down: Michele Rech voicing all the characters in both series is because Zero is the one telling the story but it also had a narrative reason back in Tear Along the Dotted Line. In that series, Zero is suffering from a major Guilt Complex where he believes that many of the many bad things happening to people around him (including Alice's suicide) are to some degree his fault for not interfering, in the moment where all of his friends make him understand the world doesn't revolve around him is that his friends finally gain real voices since he is not truly the protagonist of their lives. In comparison, there's no really any narrative significance in the characters still being voiced by Rech and the characters gaining real voices when the Framing Device is over doesn't have any impact in the narrative beyond the characters suddenly gaining different voices.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • Thomas and the Magic Railroad introduced the engine Lady as a sort of Barrier Maiden keeping the magical bond between the Engines' world and the real world alive, but this magical bond is not only never mentioned in any other version, but Shining Time Station and the Messrs. Conductor have since been phased out entirely. Nevertheless, Lady continued to appear in a few stories released shortly after the film, despite having lost the one thing that made her special and interesting. She disappeared after she'd appeared in enough stories to justify the toys to kids who didn't see the movie.
  • Given that the series has a huge cast, this is the case for the majority of the engines. Characters who were once mainstays of the series like Duck, Boco and Daisy have all but disappeared - if one were to be cynical, one might suggest that the few appearances they have are to ensure their continued presence in the various merchandise lines.
  • In addition, the original episodes, and the novels on which they are based, placed most of the engines onto different lines and work regimes. Now, the engines just seem to work freely anywhere around Sodor, making some of them superfluous. This was likely done so as to make main characters such as Thomas more flexible and easier to write into different situations.
  • Newer seasons, due to change in writing team, seemed to make some attempts to reverse these examples, with more accuracy to the original stories and the return of old concepts and characters. Some leeway is still made in favor of new additions however.
• The Tom and Jerry Show (2014) uses the classic gasp, gulp, and screaming sound effects for the duo even though they stick out like a sore thumb compared to the more modern noises of the show. Of course, said sound effects are seen as such an integral part of the franchise as a whole that it'd be just as weird to remove them as well (they continue to be used in Tom & Jerry media to this day).
• Cartoon Network's action-animation block Toonami has one in the form of a quote: "We won't be intimidated by criminal threats!", a line taken from the theatrical Superman cartoons, which aired via the Cartoon Roulette. While the Superman cartoons (as well as the Cartoon Roulette itself and the other shows it presented) left the block in 2000 and never came back, the sound bite for the line itself was still used in various promos. Even the revived Toonami on [adult swim] still uses it in promos.
• Total Drama started with 22 contestants in the first season, but while the second and third seasons still had most of the cast competing, a few characters were stuck watching from the sidelines. With such a large main cast, some pairs of characters were pretty similar to each other, which made a few like Eva, Katie and Sadie redundant as Courtney, Lindsay and Beth respectively took on their defining traits. The three only competed in the first season as a result, and have been Out of Focus ever since.
  • The Spinoff Babies, Total DramaRama, is set at a daycare instead of a reality show, but still uses Confession Cam segments.
• Transformers:
  • The final season of The Transformers does this to Optimus Prime, of all characters. They'd brought him back due to the heavy backlash over his death in The Transformers: The Movie, so they couldn't very well kill him off again. But because of the huge cast that had to be written in due to the toyline, all of the older characters like Blaster and Perceptor had been Put on a Bus in favor of new characters with more marketable gimmicks (such as being a Head- or Targetmaster, or being part of a combination team). Prime is the only exception, and looks notably out of place with his '80s-era Mack Truck form and lack of gimmicky weapons when surrounded by futuristic cars and jets and all the -masters. Notably, in the Japanese continuity, which splits off right after he's brought back to life, he dies again almost immediately, replaced by a series of newer, more visually and technologically impressive leaders.
  • In the third season, this also happens to some extent with many of the first- and second-season characters who survived the movie, although some of them do get important roles in an episode or two (Blaster and Soundwave in "Carnage in C-Minor", Perceptor in "The Face of the Nijika", etc.).
  • Optimus Prime himself may be an example of this trope. His nemesis Megatron has had several personality changes over the course of the franchise, but the Big Red himself is pretty much the same character, even when he's smaller or less red. His alternate counterparts tend to be closer to the original than the alternate Megatrons as well. Then again, there's not much that can be changed about a consummate hero without keeping him as heroic as he's expected to be. A lot of modern stories have seen him be demoted to a Supporting Leader role or otherwise written out, due to the difficulties in writing a character of his rank and personality (often moving the focus to Bumblebee). Notably, Transformers: Animated is one of the few modern series where Optimus is inarguably the protagonist from beginning to end, and it's also notable because he isn't the Big Good or Ideal Hero in that series.
  • Beast Wars:
    • Optimus Primal and Megatron were originally conceived of as simply being their G1 selves in new bodies. The TV series (and pretty much every version to follow) reinterpreted them as different people entirely, but kept their names, and in Primal's case, his extremely Prime-ish face design. It's the equivalent of your boss taking the name "Babe Lincoln" and wearing a stovepipe hat and thick beard to work, and nobody ever commenting on it. Megatron got a later justification in the series for why he has the same name as the other one ("Megatron" is actually an Antichrist-esque figure in their religion, and both versions take on the name because they're Card Carrying Villains), but Primal's reasons basically remain an enigma all the way to the end of the series.
    • The reasoning the cartoon gave for the beast modes of characters was that their modes were protective: the planet was infused with energy that would overload Cybertronians in minutes, and the only way to protect themselves was to use shells of organic material that could block it out. Essentially, beast modes were their equivalent to hazmat suits. At the end of the first season, the energy was converted to a stable form that was no longer harmful... but this had a side effect of also making beast modes rather useless. They were pointless for disguise, since the series took place in a prehistoric era and the modes generally weren't convincing anyway, and pointless for combat, since characters couldn't use weapons or gadgets in beast mode, and rarely offered anything their robot modes didn't (for instance, Silverbolt could fly just as effectively in either mode). This was given a bit of a bandage by the Transmetal concept, where characters could now use their beast modes as rapid transport, but even then, non-Transmetal characters in the later seasons have a habit of transforming for no other reason than to remind you they can.
  • The "robots in disguise!" slogan has stuck around in both the theme song and overall material, long after any hope of disguise faded out. Neither side in the original series displayed any interest in maintaining the Masquerade, and by the early second season, just about everyone on Earth is aware of them, with parades in the street commemorating the Autobots, open collaboration with Earth's governments, memorials to Optimus Prime built before his death, and Cybertron itself briefly appearing in Earth's orbit at one point. By the third season, even their designs are depicted as mostly crazy space-age vehicles or robot animals that would be no good for disguise anyway. In many future shows, there's even less reason for disguise to be a factor; Beast Wars takes place on prehistoric Earth, for instance, giving them nothing to hide from, and featured contemporary wildlife being mixed in with bugs the size of tigers and dinosaurs. Later commercials tried different slogans like "They've got the power to surprise!", "stronger, faster, more alive!" or "the challenge is in the change!", but none managed to really catch on.
  • Soundwave's classic cassette recorder altmode and array of "cassettes" that eject and turn into other robots got kicked in the bolts hard by Technology Marches On, what with those recorders being almost nonexistent in popular culture for years (most people assume him to be a boombox, which is, if anything, even more dated), and cassette tapes having been solidly eclipsed by the CD by the mid-nineties, which has itself been rendered obsolete by digital formats like MP3 (and that's just in the realm of music); not to mention the issues inherent to having a tiny handheld recorder turn into something large enough to go toe-to-toe with a walking Mack truck like Optimus Prime. However, there are only so many Decepticons with meaningful name and face recognition outside of diehard fans, so new TV shows have to try Reimagining the Artifact whenever they bring him up. Even when he's been reimagined significantly, though, his old "eject the tape" gimmick is almost always kept intact in some form, and his designs tend to include things like pause-and-play buttons, a window on his chest, or a suspiciously battery-like shoulder cannon as remnants of his old design.
• Young Justice (2010) has an example of this combined with Adaptation Relationship Overhaul. In this show, Tim Drake is in an Official Couple with Cassie Sandsmark/Wonder Girl, because it was inspired by the New 52 giving them a Relationship Upgrade. However, this was in part because at the time, the real character Tim is usually an couple with, Stephanie Brown/Spoiler, was Exiled from Continuity for perceived toxicity^note Even then, Tim/Cassie was Strangled by the Red String, as the characters had little interaction in the show compared to other romances that were present. Said blacklisting would eventually be lifted, with Tim soon enough becoming a couple with Steph once again and never going back (his relationship with Cassie was not taken well by fans, so this was a saving throw), and by the time the series was Un-Canceled and Outsiders was released, Stephanie Brown was fully introduced as Spoiler and they could've theoretically been made a couple as they usually are in the source. However, because Tim and Cassie are one Official Couple of the show, him and Steph haven't even had so much as a Ship Tease much less actually date each other, because doing so would mess with this particular continuity, even if it was inspired by a poorly-received period of time. Not helping matters is the Age Lift, as while they're normally the same age, here Tim is 16 while Steph is a full two years younger than him, making them as a couple sound unlikely.

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