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Took A Level In Dumbass / Western Animation

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  • In the Aladdin sequels and series, Genie seems to have lost brain cells as well as magic powers. He frequently forgets about the phlebotinum and has I've Heard of That — What Is It? moments about things he should have already encountered (e.g. he asks what a royal vizier is, when a royal vizier was the Big Bad in the original movie!) The fact that he keeps losing games against a rug doesn't help either.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball:
    • In the pilot, Gumball was able to design a Rube Goldberg contraption that would help them escape school. In the series proper, most of his intelligence is passed on to his younger sister Anais. He gets better in the later seasons, thankfully.
    • Jamie's intelligence seemed average for the first three seasons. In season four's "The Girlfriend", Jamie comes off as a mentally-challenged psychopath: pondering simple questions causes her to go nigh-catatonic for hours, her spelling skills are years below her grade level, and she misreads nearly every social situation as a grave insult against her (even if she caused it). By this episode, only Richard and Banana Barbara can rival her in terms of stupidity.
    • Banana Barbara herself is revealed to have gone through this in "The Future". She used to be an overworked intern at Chanax and possessed normal intelligence, but repeated commands (many of which were outright impossible) from her Bad Boss caused what Banana Joe describes as burnout, thus turning her into an idiot.
    • Darwin's intelligence took a nosedive in Season 6, despite serving as his brother's Straight Man in Seasons 2-5. In "The Lady", Gumball has to spell it out to him that Richard and Samantha are the same person after it takes him a while to figure it out. In "The Brain", a doctor states and shows a chart showing that Gumball is smarter him. In "The Potion", it takes him a while to figure that Gumball wants to use a shrinking potion on Hector despite many hints, and mistakes the "O" in orangutang as a zero. In "The Understanding", he thinks that have a piece of a wire on him is the same thing as "wearing a wire".
  • American Dad!: Ever since Season 9, Stan Smith slowly seems to lose more and more brain cells to the point where a more "subtle" name for him as this point is Peter Griffin II.
  • The Angry Beavers: Daggett was never exactly clever, but as it went on his intelligence decreased sharply. He stayed angry, though.
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Master Shake was never really the brightest guy around, but in the first season, he was simply a delusional moron who had very high opinions on himself and someone who (early on) genuinely tried to solve crimes. But as Shake became more of an asshole, his intelligence dropped severely, to the point where you wonder how he's still alive despite his inhumane antics.
  • Compared to the original Barnyard where he was of average intelligence, Otis in Back at the Barnyard is a lot dumber to the point that writing his own name proves difficult at one point.
  • The Battletoads cartoon turned the three heroes into brain-dead teenage idiots. It even introduces Morgan "Zitz" Ziegler, a Genius Bruiser in the game canon, by having him cause a computer to explode just by trying to type something into it.
  • Beavis and Butt-Head started out as just stereotypically lazy and not all that bright teenagers. As the show's popularity picked up the need for more outrageous material resulted in them becoming the Too Dumb to Live types everyone knows them as. Must be from all of their (self) destructive antics and those beatings from Buzzcut and the like. Beavis especially went from a generic dumb teenager to a bizarrely stupid boy with a split personality.
    • Interestingly enough, it appears to be inverted during the duo's music video commentaries where they actually seem brighter than normal.
    • In "Young, Gifted and Crude", a student named Martin is conducting an experiment with a computer program to try and raise his intelligence. Beavis accidentally unplugs the computer when he trips on the extension cord. As a result, the experiment backfires and Martin is reduced to a blithering idiot.
      Martin: Uh hu hu. The capital of France is Jupiter. One plus one is 37. Carry on my wayward son. That was cool! Uh hu hu.
  • Ben 10: while Ben Tennyson was immature and bratty in the original show, this was justified due to him being a 10-year old kid. When the sequel Ben 10: Alien Force turned him into a teenager, he Took a Level in Badass and became much more competent, smarter and responsible. Then in season 3, the writers tried Pandering to the Fanbase in a failed attempt to make him more like his 10 years old self, and he started acting more narcissistic and cocky again. Partially justified in-universe in that saving the Universe went to his head, but it sticks far longer than it should. This was then zig-zagged in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien. Finally, Ben 10: Omniverse took the trope to Flanderization levels on both his teenage self and his 11-year old self, making them both much more bumbling, clumsy and immature while removing a large amount of his badassness from Alien Force.
  • In the original Bob the Builder show Scoop (Bob's digger) was the leader of the machines for a REASON! He was trustworthy, smart and responsible. In the 2015 revival, however, he is childish, naive, ditzy, careless, and has moments of laziness.
  • The Brak Show: Thundercleese started off as the badass neighbor. As his appearances became more common, his intelligence lowered but not so much that he had no common sense. This changed in Season 3 when he became so stupid that it's a wonder he was still functioning. Want proof? He fell in love with and married Brak's Dad's vacuum cleaner.
  • Chowder: The titular character; compare the naive little boy of season 1 to the completely Too Dumb to Live of season 2.
  • The title character of Clarence. Despite being naïve, and was never really considered book smart as Jeff or street smart as Sumo, he was originally more of a like-minded character who tends to not go too far of his actions and at least willing to fix up the damages and learn from his mistakes. But overtime, as the series progressed, he became much stupider and less aware of his actions and the issues he caused, and it becomes part of his Flanderization.
  • Cleveland grew progressively dumber when he left Family Guy and starred in his own show, The Cleveland Show. Cleveland used to be the voice of reason in Peter's group but once he moved away, he is pretty much a black version of Peter.
  • Wallabee Beetles, aka Numbuh Four of Codename: Kids Next Door. In the first couple seasons, his stupidity was an Informed Flaw, the villains often referred to him as "the stupid one," when he wasn't all that dumb in actuality; just slightly below average compared to Numbuhs One and Five, and at times would let his anger get the better of him. Thing is, however, he was very resourceful and had some brilliant tactics to his plans. But in the later seasons, he's so stupid he can't spell or do basic math, he's a lot less competent and badass than he originally was, he very rarely won fights anymore, and often whined when things didn't go his way. It's a wonder how he went to Harvard in the finale.
  • Penfold on Danger Mouse was the token dumbass, but as the series wound down to its final two seasons, Colonel K was afflicted by a case of the dumbasses which could be chalked up to early senility.
  • In the pilot episode of The Dreamstone, Rufus was somewhat careless and a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander, but still reasonably crafty when put into the fray of things. By the second season, Rufus became more lucid, though his competence diminished utterly, being useless at stopping even Sgt Blob and his bumbling mooks and half the time being the one who got the Dreamstone lost in some foolish antic. The final season made some attempts at reviving his former characterisation.
  • Fingers Malone from Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop debuted in "Grime Doesn't Pay" as a crafty thief who outwits Dr. Zitbag before he's finally caught and arrested. In subsequent appearances, he's reduced to being Professor Sherman Vermin's dim-witted thug.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy: Ed was initially the somewhat childish Gentle Giant of the trio, but before long he became a complete doofus who, among other things, actually believed that babies were delivered by storks, although he became able to deliver Eddy like one.
  • Invoked in Episode 7 of The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants, where Melvin purposefully impedes Bo's cognition to turn him into a more intimidating Blob Monster. This makes Bo (later dubbed Claylossus) easier to manipulate and talk in Hulk Speak.
  • The Fairly OddParents!: Pretty much every character with the exception of Wanda and A.J. Timmy started off simply as a ten year old boy who usually made rash decisions without thinking his wishes through. The newer series makes it debatable how he hasn't destroyed the world already yet.
    • Cosmo most definitely. His first appearance was of a suave, gentlemanly persona in the first episodes, who made sarcastic comments and wisecracks. In fact, the one time he makes a wish that goes wrong, it's because his wand malfunctioned. In the main series, it's usually him genuinely misinterpreting them, usually through Exact Words or a Mondegreen Gag. Now he's a screeching, literally brainless fairy who would have already killed Timmy if not for his wife's constant surveillance.
    • Even Wanda herself was starting to become as dumb as her husband and make some immensely bone-headed decisions towards the end of the series, with a stand-out moment being from Season 10's "Girly Squirrely" where she mistakes the stomach acid of a bear that just ate her and Cosmo for a "babbling brook" and tells Cosmo to dip their wands in it to see how deep it was, ruining their wands. It bears repeating that it was the normally down to earth and aware Wanda who suggested this and not Cosmo.
    • On that note, Mr. Turner also suffered from this, with him going down the exact same path as Cosmo (minus the vocal pitch change). Mrs. Turner seems to have mostly been spared, however.
  • Family Guy: Peter Griffin was a dumbass, to begin with, yet he was a good guy at heart and after discovering how much trouble his idiocy caused would do his best to fix it. After the first uncancellation, he's gotten even worse. He's legally mentally challenged in-canon. You never would have seen that coming in the show's early seasons. Taken to extremes in "Brian's a Bad Father", where Quagmire calls Peter out for foolishly shooting him in the arm during a hunting trip. Heck, now he can't even walk and chew gum at the same time.
  • Fauntleroy Fox from The Fox and the Crow, in most cartoons he is portrayed as a refined gentleman who speaks in a falsetto voice who can be gullible sometimes, for some reason in their last two Columbia shorts "Tooth or Consequences" and "Grape Nutty'' he is a fat idiot who speaks in a Simpleton Voice, thankfully he is back to his usual self in the three UPA shorts.
  • In season one of Frisky Dingo, the villain Killface is intelligent, educated and sophisticated, by contrast to the Idiot Hero Awesome X. A lot of the comedy from Killface stems from the contrast between their personae. Come season two, they're both complete morons.
  • This happened to Philip J. Fry in Futurama. In the earliest episodes, where he was supposed to be a Fish out of Temporal Water and stories would mostly focus around him adapting to life in the 31st century, he was a fairly average guy with a dash of Cloudcuckoolander and a few moments of genuine cleverness. As the show progressed, he adapted to his surroundings much faster than the writers intended, and so he devolved into a gibbering manchild unless the writers needed him to say something profound.
    • It's somewhat justified in-universe with Fry's lack of a delta brain-wave, which effectively stunted his mental growth:
      Professor Farnsworth: And, Fry, you've got that brain thing.
      Fry: I already did!
      • Of course, the means in which he contracted it — as shown in the episode "Roswell That Ends Well" — would have meant he had this his whole life, including all prior episodes. Also of note is that, in "The Why of Fry", the Niblonians reveal that they deliberately froze him so that his "superior, yet inferior" brain would be used to protect the universe in the 31st century. Later it is revealed that the Niblonian who blew Fry into the cryochamber was, in fact, not a time traveler, and that the Niblonians knew of this phenomenon at least a millennium before the Roswell time travel incident.
      • It's possible the Nibblonians only knew about him a millenium in advance after he did the whole Roswell timeloop. Time travel is fun like that.
  • The titular Jimmy Two-Shoes in season 1 was an airheaded and oblivious fellow, but he was shown to have genuine moments of cunning (if odd ones sometimes). Some writers went even as far as making him the Straight Man to Beezy and Heloise. In season 2, he's as dumb as Beezy, even more childish and oblivious, and more prone to making things worse due to his own idiocy than ever with not a single moment of intelligence in sight.
  • Johnny Bravo: In the first season, Johnny was just naive and unable to understand why his Casanova Wannabe approach doesn't attract women. He was shown cooking barbecue and had managed to outsmart a leprechaun and a James Bond style villain. His intelligence took a nosedive in seasons 2 and 3, where he couldn't even prepare cereal without his mother's help. The fourth season reversed course and made Johnny a bit wiser.
  • King of the Hill
    • All of Hank Hill's friends seem to slowly lose their precious remaining IQ points over the course of the series — resulting in dumber and more outrageous schemes that Hank must eventually fix.
    • Luanne and Peggy also. Peggy has never been the Closer to Earth person between her and Hank, but she used to be at least a competent Spanish teacher — now she's shown to have a tenuous grasp at best on the Spanish language, though it does lead to some admittedly hilarious moments. Luanne has had a similar path of regression. She was a bit of a Wrench Wench during the first two seasons, but that was eventually abandoned and she became increasingly ditzy as the years went on (it should be noted that this happened long before Lucky came along).
    • Joseph was a little kooky, being Dale's son and all (by nurture, of course) but when he hit puberty, he pretty much only begun to think with his hormones. It got to the point where his dialog was replaced with Hulk Speak.
      • It got to extremes in one episode where Bobby accidentally sees Luanne without a shirt on and Joseph practically went beyond creepy levels when he kept asking Bobby to look at Luanne topless again so he can get the details on what her breasts look like.
    • Inverted with Bobby, who went from slow, dull, and lethargic to... Well, not exactly smart, but more definitely charismatic and possessing of a decent amount of common sense.
  • Modern Looney Tunes adaptations like Duck Dodgers and The Looney Tunes Show tend to portray Daffy Duck as a total idiot, instead of just a bitter (and occasionally gullible) loser who is often defeated due to his narcissism, impatience and selfishness.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Discord has become less intelligent ever since his debut. Initially introduced as the vile master of chaos, his next appearance had him eagerly play along with Fluttershy's submissive attitude and do idiotic things just to make her happy. Despite how he also Took a Level in Kindness, him promising to only use his powers for good is obviously what leads to Villain Decay. As one will have observed, the entire purpose of the villains' evilness degradation is too make Lord Tirek the Big Bad instead.
    • Poor King Sombra... Despite being a Flat Character in his debut in Season 3 – he nevertheless stood out for being a dangerously savvy No-Nonsense Nemesis compared to the other, more–Villain Ball-prone antagonists. But come Season 9, and he finally got more characterization – now as a reckless Smug Snake who monologued his head off, got overconfident at the drop of a hat, and basically caused his own (final) defeat.
  • Paddington Bear in the 1990s TV show by Cinar. Sure, Paddington wasn't always the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the number of idiot moments he exhibits in this particular series (which includes him taking "tying off (the boat)" to mean tying himself off by wrapping a rope around himself (thus causing a boat to float away) and making Beef Wellington with his own Wellington boots) is rather glaring.
  • Dum-Dum from The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. They don't call him that for nothing. The Hooded Claw's minions the Bully Brothers come a close second.
  • The Powerpuff Girls:
    • Fuzzy Lumpkins took this between the pilot and the series proper: in the pilot he was a reasonably calm furry... thing with enough intelligence to build a gun that turns objects into meat; in the series he's a trigger happy hillbilly stereotype whose idea of a weapon is a rock (compared to, say, the ray guns of Mojo Jojo and Princess). Consider his line in "Fuzzy Logic" while chasing a squirrel from his home:
      Fuzzy: Come back here an' git off mah proppity!!
    • The Mayor was never the sharpest knife in the drawer but in the early seasons he seemed to be more naive rather than outright stupid. By the end of the series half the time he can't even structure proper sentences together. Highlight to an episode where Professor Utonium has to literally babysit the Mayor when he drops by.
    • The Amoeba Boys of all people were genuine threats in the original "Whoopass Stew" short. They successfully pulled a bank robbery, used guns, and were strong enough that the girls had to use the sun to stop them. The short "Crime 101" and the series turned them into incompetent idiots who can't even shoplift to save their lives.
  • Peter Venkmann from The Real Ghostbusters. When his original voice actor Lorenzo Music was replaced by David Coulier, his wit and intelligence steadily decreased to the point where he became a bumbling, catchphrase-spouting buffoon who was now Slimer's best friend, whereas in the earlier seasons he was often annoyed by his antics and wished he would leave him alone.
  • T.J. from Recess started out relatively average in the first season. He became more Book Dumb in season two, and by season four, he was The Ditz. Though to an extent, this was for the better, as he was a borderline "Mr. Perfect" in the early episodes.
  • Baby Dil in Rugrats. When he was introduced in The Rugrats Movie, he was somewhat intelligent, though due to being younger than the other Rugrats, he didn't know as much as they did, but he did have quite the vocabulary. When he was brought into the series, he seems a lot less intelligent, talks even less than he did in the movie, and the only words he says with any regularity are "poopy", "Tommy", and "Yucky" (his name for Angelica).
  • In the 1965 version of Secret Squirrel, Morocco Mole was a Bumbling Sidekick. In the 90's revival, Super Secret Secret Squirrel (made for 2 Stupid Dogs), he's Too Dumb to Live.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Homer Simpson has never been the brightest bulb in the box, but he actually started out a fairly normal person (particularly in the Tracey Ullman shorts, back when his temper was his defining character trait). The trend towards increasing dumbassery was so noticeable that more than once there have been in-show explanations for this, all contradictory. Conan O'Brien said on a DVD commentary that Homer's IQ started out at 65 and dropped 5 points a year until it hit zero in Season 13.
    • Much like his father, Bart Simpson has become increasingly stupid in recent seasons. In earlier seasons he didn't do well in school mainly because he didn't care and he couldn't stay focused for long periods of time but he was brilliant in other fields as he could manage to pull off time-consuming schemes and pranks in minutes, could master languages in relatively short time, and was a skilled detective. (At one point he was quite plausibly diagnosed with ADHD, but this was used for a one-episode plot about overmedication and then never mentioned again). In more recent seasons he's so stupid he can barely read or write, is easily entertained, and has trouble figuring out simple tasks.
    • Ralph Wiggum has suffered from this trope more than any almost any other character mentioned. He was originally just another generic classmate of Lisa's before becoming the unbelievably dense collection of non-sequiturs we all know. Word of God says that Ralph was originally intended to be an eight-year-old version of Homer. When they realized that didn't really work, they just made him the most childlike character imaginable.
    • Chief Wiggum was never really that intelligent, though he took his job more seriously and was more competent early on. Around Season 3 or so, his IQ plummeted and eventually he became Police Are Useless personified.
  • The titular Johnny from the Danish series Soldier Johnny is a rather extreme example. At the start of the series, he is more of a Stereotypical Nerd - quite gullible and occasionally absent-minded and forgetful, but not outright stupid. He's also very good with technology, especially computers. With time, as the show becomes more action-oriented, his intelligence takes a steep nosedive, and he becomes more and more incompetent at simple tasks. He still remains a tech whiz, but he seems more like an Idiot Savant (with emphasis on the "idiot" part) than a nerd. In the last season of the series, he has become so absurdly stupid that he can't even put on his own pants without guidance, he often only communicates by making nasal sounds and yelling his own name rather than saying actual words, and he even breaks a television screen (that his friends were watching a movie on) to "free the little people trapped inside the box", showing that his last speck of intelligence - being good with technology - is also gone.
  • South Park: Almost every single adult undergoes this to a degree, but Randy Marsh is possibly the greatest example of this trope ever. Through all seasons of the show, he has taken more levels in dumbass than any other character, other than possibly Ralph Wiggum. Despite being the town's only scientist, no less.
  • Space Ghost Coast to Coast: Done with several characters.
    • Brak's case was actually justified; the cloud of space dust into which Space Ghost threw him during an episode of the original series was apparently to blame.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants has always been a little loopy. But he has become actually dumber and dumber (not just loopier and loopier) as the series has progressed, especially in "A Pal for Gary".
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): Rocksteady and Bebop were never portrayed as smart, but the longer the show went on the dumber they got. In the first few seasons, they were at least capable of being threats to the Turtles due to their size and strength, but they eventually reached the point of being so stupid and foolish that they could wind up thrwarting Shredder and Krang's plans through their own incompetence without the Turtles even getting involved. You really have to wonder why Shredder never got rid of them for some more competent minions.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): Michelangelo is easily the least intelligent of the Ninja Turtles due to his childlike personality, but in spite of this still managed to showcase some hidden smarts, but as the show went on you have to wonder how he can function sometimes. Compare a first season episode where he's able to successfully able to read Donatello's notes to make a cure for a mutated venom that's turned his other brothers into mindless zombies, while being infected with the same venom no less, to an episode one season later where he willingly exposes himself to potentially fatal mutagen while even ignoring the warnings on it, nearly dying as a result.
    • Similarly to Mikey, Casey Jones was never the brightest bulb, but he was still a realatively street smart, competent member of the team. Come season four and he seems completely unable to grasp the seriousness of things like Earth being pulled into a black hole, and his only contributions are making increasingly stupid choices that land the group in even more trouble. Mikey ends up looking like a genius in comparison.
  • Turtles Forever: While there's no denying that the '87 Turtles were goofy, this film dials it up to eleven. Instead of being portrayed as being just as competent as the '03 Turtles or maintaining their original characters, the 80s Turtles are portrayed as completely incompetent morons who never take anything seriously, laugh at their own jokes, are all one-dimensional and share the same personality, and can barely hold their own in a fight.
  • Total Drama:
    • Lindsay has this trope applied. In Island and Action, she had a few genius moments and showed some Hidden Depths occasionally, despite her usually airheaded nature. However, in All-Stars, she had reached such a phenomenal depth of stupidity that she didn’t even know how to push or pull.
    • While not a true genius, Scott in Revenge of the Island was pretty cunning and capable of pulling off some truly nasty schemes. In All-Stars though, he becomes much more bumbling, loses most of his manipulative skills, and is even more Book Dumb than before. Considering he also Took a Level in Kindness the same season, one has to wonder if his mauling at the hands of Fang changed him as a person.
    • Cameron goes from being able to realize everything regarging Mike's splite personalities in Revenge of the Island from mere observation to not being able to realize Mike's body was taken over by Mal in All-Stars. This is painful because he's usually The Smart Guy.
    • Similarly, while Zoey was fooled by Scott in Revenge of the Island, she was intelligent enough to realize something three people tell her... something that is gone by the time of All-Stars. It seems that the writers did this on purpose, considering how both her case and Cameron's are regarding them not knowing about Mal.
    • Geoff was never known for being intelligent, but in Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race, he seems to have lost most of his brain cells, to the point where he Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality. It probably doesn't help that his race partner Brody is basically just his stupider double personality-wise.
    • Wayne from Island (2023) was always portrayed as a Dumb Jock, but he was good at strategy and leadership in the first half due to being the captain of his hockey team. In the second half, he's the main comic relief and his strategic side hardly shows up anymore.

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