YMMV / El Chavo Animado

• Author's Saving Throw: One of the most frequently criticized aspects of this adaptation is the lack of Chilindrina's character due to copyright disputes with her actress, with many fans waiting for her to be introduced during the animated series' original run with no avail. In 2023, Grupo Chespirito announced a new El Chavo cartoon, now making it loud and clear that Chilindrina will indeed be present this time around, and billing her as the deuteragonist after Chavo himself (a role that usually goes to Quico) to emphasize her presence.
• Broken Aesop: The episode where Chavo and the other kids enter Clotilde's house ends with the main character addressing the audience and telling them not to judge a person based only on their appearance. This is followed up by having the kids be transformed into frogs, meaning that they were right to suspect that Clotilde was a malevolent witch all along.
• Broken Base:
  • This series is a very divisive topic between fans of the original El Chavo del ocho. Some feel it's just a bad cartoon made to revive the franchise and drive it to merchandise (Carlos Villagrán and Édgar Vivar's thoughts on the topic definitely don't help), while others say it's a good cartoon, but not in the same league of the classic series. Then there are others, mostly newer viewers, who see it as being So Bad, It's Good and Watch It for the Meme in the wake of its Fountain of Memes status as of The New '20s.
  • Whether La Chilindrina was missed in this series also varies from person from person. Some think that her absence impacted the series negatively, with La Popis and Ñoño being poor attempts to substitute her, much like they were to Quico in the live-action since his departure in 1978. Others don't feel that she made much difference, especially since she had also been absent in the original series from late 1973 to early 1975 (in fact, several remakes of the animated series are adapted from that era, meaning it wasn't even necessary to replace her with a different character) and isn't as essential to the cast as Quico and Don Ramón, so much that Popis and Ñoño are perfectly replace her in almost all aspects other than being Don Ramón's daughter.
• Designated Monkey: Once again, Don Ramón is still very unfairly mistreated. It seems like the writers like to treat him this way, which explains why he was the only character who still suffered Amusing Injuries after the slapstick was phased out from the series.
• Discredited Meme: The Chavo/Amity meme quickly became overshadowed by the spite that caused between those who perceived as homophobic and the trolls who continued the trend to enrange as many people as possible, this lead to a lot of the people who started the trend to not find it funny anymore.
• Fandom Rivalry: A short-lived but notable one with The Owl House of all things. This is largely due to a meme shipping Chavo with Amity ironically, which portions of the fanbase perceived as homophobic (since Amity is canonically a lesbian) causing a lot of sound over it, this in turn has only motivated fan artists to continue this trend out of spite.
• First Installment Wins: Even haters admit that the first two seasons are the best seasons (or the most So Okay, It's Average depending on who you ask) since most of the episodes were remakes of the original series, they are more Truer to the Text as they keep many Running Gags, pre-Flanderized personalities and are less Denser and Wackier.
• Franchise Original Sin: The series has largely been critized for its Denser and Wackier approach, "killing" the realism of the original series. The original series was never 100% accurate to Real Life, as it had its Acceptable Breaks from Reality such as characters being hit on the head with bowling balls or other heavy objects that in real life would render a person unconscious or worse, Doña Florinda kicking Don Ramón's butt in a rather cartoonish fashion, the infamous scenes where Ñoño explodes like a balloon and Don Ramón is Squashed Flat, etc. Even the 1979 animated credit sequences featured cartoonish elements such as Chavo gaining the ability to shoot beams from his finger after being eletrocuted. However, that's where the show drew the line with fantastic elements; they were brief moments and the show tried to have a realistic atmosphere most of the time, unlike this series that has full episodes based on fantastic and crazy things like a magic rabbit that grants wishes or time traveling.
• Fridge Horror: In the episode "La fábrica de juguetes" (The toy factory), when the adults finally find the children (as babies), they have a Flashback remembering with nostalgia when the children were babies, where all the adults are taking care of the children. But then there's Don Ramón, who is also in the flashback but is only dancing disco. Then you remember that Don Ramón has a daughter, La Chilindrina. But then you remember that she was Adapted Out due to copyright issues with her actress. Once you think about this, the flashback not only becomes less charming, but it also gives the sad image that Don Ramón likely never became a father in this Alternate Continuity (though he does still mention being a widower in an episode, so he still had a wife at least).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • There were many, many Shout-Outs to El Chapulín Colorado throughout the series. In 2015, El Chapulin Colorado also got its own Animated Adaptation.
  • In the 2-part episode "La Maquina del Tiempo", El Chavo and his friends travel to the past to take several objects and bring them back to the present in order to repair a time machine. 9 years later, and Avengers: Endgame would see the Avengers doing the same thing to restore half of all live in the universe.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A major complaint about the show is that it tried to adapt one-hour long stories or even entire arcs into episodes that last just under 30 minutes. As a result, entire plots are slashed off or left hanging, with the more infamous examples being the Churros episode, where Ramon doesn't even get to sell Florinda's treats like he proposed in the beginning of the episode, or the Acapulco arc, which had most of its jokes excised in favour of making an original, extended Dream Sequence and does not explain how the characters got there, especially with the absence of Chilindrina, who was the responsible for making the travel possible in the first place.
• Memetic Mutation: Starting in late 2020, it became common to edit the dialogue of the characters in image macros, putting them in increasingly bizarre, dark and... NSFW situations, in Latino shitposting communities in Facebook. This is one of the multiple videos that contain examples of said memes. Very NSFW
• Misaimed Merchandising: Part of this series' marketing included a computer video game called Learn to code with El Chavo. It is a very strange choice to use El Chavo, a poor orphan boy who has probably never used a computer in his life, for an educational game about coding.
• Narm: In the original version, the episode where the entire Vecindad accuses El Chavo of being a thief is regarded as one of the saddest moments of the series. Not so much when the cartoon adapted it, though, as the exaggerated faces the characters make ruin any drama the scenes would have. It's one thing to have El Chavo, a kid, sobbing with huge Puppy-Dog Eyes and a pouting lip, but when the same expression is used to display the adult thief's regret it just crosses over into utterly and irredeemably ridiculous.
• Padding:
  • In a great part of the remake episodes, the first half is set entirely at the classroom adapted from a school episode, while the second half actually starts off the main story. Other episodes adapt two or three completely separate stories of the original series, causing the episode to not have a specific, consistent plot but rather being a collection of multiple plots.
  • This becomes a problem in later seasons, as many episodes include subplots or scenes that are there and have no impact on the plot like in "El valor de la amistad" (The value of friendship), whose main plot doesn't start almost midway thought the episode and the first act is just the children playing baseball and Don Ramón getting hurt for laughs; the latter is Don Ramón (and Doña Florinda)'s only appearance in the entire episode.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The series got two video games, both bad:
  • The first one, simply titled El Chavo, was released for the mobile devices and the Nintendo Wii. The Wii version is a Mario Party clone which only has four characters (El Chavo, Quico, Ñoño and La Popis), 30 minigames, only one board and two game modes (Free Mode and Cup Mode). Even the first Mario Party has more content than that. It also has terrible controls, terrible graphics (even for Wii standards), poor animations, forgettable music, poor grasp of the source material (both original series and this one) to the point of being on the edge of In Name Only and very loud sound effects. The mobile version, on the other hand omits the board, and is just a gallery of extremely simple minigames with very loud sound effects.
  • The second one is titled El Chavo Kart, and as you can guess, is a Mascot Racer featuring El Chavo. While it improved in certain aspects from the previous game like having more characters (12 in total) and better grasp of the source material, it still has many problems such as generic and uninspired tracks, terrible 3D models and inconsistent and unbalanced AI.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Ensemble Dark Horse Godínez is very underused in this series. He is largely an Advertised Extra who appears in every intro, yet he still manages to be Out of Focus even in school episodes. Even Patty, who appeared midway though Season 1 and got Promotion to Opening Titles time later, manage to have far more screentime than him.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Although Doña Florinda's restaurant is adapted into the cartoon, it only appears in a total of two episodes (Una mosca en el cafe and Los empleos del Chavo, both of which are remakes). Not only did it waste the potential for original plots and even other possible remakes taking place in this location, but it also created a plot hole as Doña Florinda's job there is never seen or mentioned anytime outside of those two episodes. And most importantly, it wasted the opportunity to show Quico visiting the restaurant, since in the original series, he had already left before it was introduced.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Fans were angered about some episodes that had the adults (except for Mr. Beliarge), and even the kids (except for Patty), treating Chavo very cruelly and tormenting him callously, accusing him of things that weren't his fault.
  • In "El Chavo y el lobo", a grey wolf that escaped from a local zoo wreaks havoc on the neighborhood as it ends up eating Junior's lunch that Professor Girafalde previously confiscated from him, Manny's tacos, some eggs Mr. Raymond bought for himself and a cake baked by Miss Pinster. All of them are quick to wrongly accuse Chavo for the deeds. Even when they are told it was actually the wolf, they cockily dismiss this believing it's only an excuse not to own up to his actions. Just when the wolf does show up, they are last seen screaming in terror and the episode ends, which also makes it worse as they never apologized to Chavo.
• Values Dissonance: The episode "Visita al zoológico" (Visit to the Zoo), despite airing in 2009, features a tribe of Blackface-Style Caricature-looking Hollywood Natives during Chavo's dream sequence that wouldn't be out of place in the Censored Eleven, and that would not have a pass in any cartoon of the 21st century if it were not because in Mexico (and in Latin America in general) political correctness regarding race is not that big of a deal there due to cultural differences.