Artistic License Geography / Western Animation

• Animaniacs:
  • The song "Yakko's World", ostensibly listing all of the countries in the world, makes some errors:
    • It leaves out several countries, such as South Africa and Burkina Faso.
    • As is traditional, the song messes up the UK completely by listing England, Scotland, and Ireland. It should either list England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, or just the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. And possibly adding Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, depending on the definition of 'country'.
    • The song mentions Greenland, Puerto Rico, Guam, and French Guiana, which are not countries in their own right but instead are constituent territories of Denmark, the United States, and France respectively.
    • The song, which first aired in 1993, also includes several outdated place or country names: Dahomey has been known as Benin since 1975 and Kampuchea reverted back to Cambodia in 1979.
  • The 50 states and capitals song:
    • The animation that goes with it is really fucked up. Many of the states are the wrong shapes in some shots (but correct in others), such as the ones bordered by the Missouri River, which are shown as having a straight north-south border. Iowa, in particular, is unrecognizable, with the eastern "nose" and southeastern "arm" missing.
    • Despite its name and theme, the song includes Washington D.C., which is the federal capital, not a state capital.
• Dino Squad tends to set itself in locations that actually exist, but at the same time tends to ignore the actual travel times. The episode "Easy Riders and Raging Dinos" has the kids driving to places in excess of 400 miles away from their hometown (Kittery Point, Maine to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Niagara Falls) like they're going to the next town over.
• The Doctor Who animated special Dreamland opens with an establishing shot of the "New Mexico Desert, June 13, 1947◊". Aside from the roadsign itself being an Anachronism Stew (due to neither the style of sign, nor Interstate routes, existing in 1947), it places the (not-yet-existent) I-25 within "35m"^note modern US roadsigns either spell out "MILES" in all-caps, or have no unit indicated as miles are assumed; the lower-case "m" shown is used to indicate meters of Roswell. The real-life I-25, built along the path of US Route 85 (which did exist in 1947), runs over a hundred miles west of Roswell.
• In the Dora the Explorer special where she travels the world, Dora can spot Africa by from where she's standing in Mexico by looking directly behind her.
• Family Guy:
  • In one episode, Brian and Stewie visit Munich, and drive in a tour-bus past Munich's Old Town Hall, the Sendlinger Tor◊ and the Mariensäule◊, which are all presented next to each other on a medieval intersection. This couldn't be further from the truth — not only are there hardly any truly medieval buildings left in Munich, but the Mariensäule is in front of the new Town Hall building a hundred meters away from the old one◊ (and all three buildings are on the central Marienplatz square, not on some intersection), while the Sendlinger Tor is almost an entire kilometer away from the Marienplatz. Obviously, Family Guy's Munich was just a setpiece for yet another 'All Germans Are Nazis' joke. Some Germans actually took offense to that.
  • Family Guy is also inconsistent in showing the correct shape of Rhode Island, despite the fact the show is set there and its creator went to college in Providence. Some maps are pretty close to reality with only some minor inconsistencies, while others - as in the Animaniacs example above, forget to include islands in Narragansett Bay, annex chunks of Massachusetts or make the east of the state◊ much bulkier than it actually is.
  • "Road to the North Pole", like most Christmas movies taking place at the North Pole, depicts it as on land and having a normal day and night cycle. The northernmost point of land is in Greenland at about 83.66 degrees north (read: 6.33 degrees south of the North Pole) and wouldn't experience daylight (or even twilight, for that matter) around the Winter Solstice.
• In the Direct to Video Franklin special Back to School with Franklin, when Miss Koala points out where Australia is to the kids with a globe. Apparently, southern Thailand has ceased to exist on their version of Earth.
• The "Invasion" song of Histeria! at one point shows a map of Europe to showcase all the countries Germany invaded. The map itself resembles something more akin to what you would get in a Paradox Interactive title . Some gems include:
  • Switzerland being placed practically on Italy's north-eastern side... almost on the Mediterranean.
  • Portugal having no border with Spain, meaning the two are somehow one country.
  • Berlin being placed in Poland
  • "The Germans invaded the Netherlands" verse is accompanied by an arrow pointing to Belgium.
  • Greece is apparently nowhere to be found
  • Yugoslavia is already broken up.
• In the House of Mouse short "Mickey's Rival Returns", Mickey is flung into the sky by popped volleyball where you can see a few states which are labeled... completely wrong. For example, Nevada has New York written on it, and New Mexico is labeled as Florida.
• In the Inspector Gadget episode "Wambini Predicts", Gadget goes to "Alpakistan", where there are diamond-spitting llamas. Llamas and alpacas are from South America, only camels are found in the Middle East.
• In the Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures episode "The Mummies of Malenque," the Quest team goes on a trip to the South American country of "Columbia." The country's name is spelled "Colombia". "Columbia" is a poetic name for all of the Americas, and often specifically the USA.
• In "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" from Johnny Test, a tourist guy and some visitors are able to see Antarctica from Argentina, which is impossible since Argentina is bordered by Chile at the south (even if they were in Chile, they still wouldn't be able to see it).
• In Justice League, the Thanagarians are building a planetary force field on the great Gobi desert, which covers part of China and Mongolia. However, we later the see that it's located in North Africa, in the Sahara desert (you can spot it on Batman's monitor during the Colony Drop).
• The King of the Hill episode "Uh Oh Canada" depicts Boomhauer meeting up with a French-speaker in Guelph, Ontario, very improbable in real life, and them kayaking with mountains in the background. As anyone who has been to Ontario will tell you, mountains are nowhere to be found in the province, especially not in Guelph.
• Metalocalypse: In "Dethwater", Nathan Explosion states he wants to record the new album in the deepest, blackest part of the ocean: the Marianas Trench (near the Marianas Islands in the Pacific Ocean). However on a globe, he points to a spot just southwest of Portugal (almost on the other side of the world). Somewhat justified, as the members of Dethklok are very often shown to be varying degrees of Book Dumb.
• The episode of Mister T entitled "Fortune Cookie Caper" is set in New York City and, apart from it being a strange, alternate-universe New York that has neither traffic nor parallel-parked cars (and where there are rickshaws in its Hollywood Atlas Chinatown), the plot relies on street addresses that turn out to be clues. All of the addresses are impossible and would send anyone seeking them deep underwater in either the Hudson or the East River, as The Agony Booth had some fun pointing out. It would be one thing if it were just code, but actual buildings are shown with the addresses in question.
• Molly of Denali: In "By Sled or Snowshoe," Molly gets the chance to see an erupting volcano. Given Qyah's location so close to Nenana in the Alaska interior, the closest volcanic fields to Qyah are Jumbo Dome and Buzzard Creek, northeast of Healy. Both are dormant. The only active effusive volcanoes in Alaska are on the coasts or islands.
• One episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) has the Mayor give the geographic coordinates of Townsville (the intersection of Lincoln and Main, specifically) as 32 degrees north, 212 degrees west. Degrees of latitude and longitude only go up to 180, but even if you wrap around the globe past that mark, going 212 degrees west of the Prime Meridian puts you in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan. Of course, this was likely deliberate to avoid pinpointing any specific place and having to deal with the repercussions of that.
• The Rocko's Modern Life episode "Wimp on the Barby" has Heffer mistaking Austria for Australia. While that part can be explained by the fact that Heffer is an idiot, the globe he uses has a Europe-like continent being labelled as Austria; Austria itself is landlocked and not a particularly large country. Also, Africa (south of Europe) and Asia (east of Europe) are nowhere to be seen on the globe.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle's "The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam" mislocates the Indian city of Jaipur as being in Pakistan, and has it ruled by a pasha (the monarch was historically styled as a maharaja, and had no political power by the 1960s).
• The Simpsons: The creators claim they often do a lot of research before they sent the family to another country. Yet they like to make use of stereotypes and intended mistakes, excused by the Rule of Funny. This makes it easy for less intelligent viewers to decide that these mistakes are really ignorant blunders rather than simply intended to be that way.
  • In "Itchy & Scratchy Land" the Simpsons stop by the five-corners monument, the location where (apparently) five state borders touch. This, of course, happens precisely nowhere in the USA (the closest thing to it is the Four Corners Monument, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet).
  • In "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson", Homer reaches the top of the (original 2 World Trade Center) South Tower and discovers the men's restroom is out of order. He has to travel back down to the ground, run across the plaza and go up the (original 1 WTC) North Tower. When he gets to the summit, the North Tower's 360 ft.-tall TV antenna is noticeably missing. It's worth noting because all other shots of the roof in this episode show it. This could also be considered a goof by the animators.
  • In "The Bart Wants What It Wants" the family travels to Toronto, Canada. However, their depiction is absolutely abysmal; the biggest goof of the episode was depicting the C.N. Tower as being in the middle of a field... anyone who has ever been to Toronto could correct that.
  • In "30 Minutes Over Tokyo" several Japanese landmarks are depicted being within a short distance of one another.
  • "The Regina Monologues" acts as if the United Kingdom still has the death penalty, which is acted out in a medieval fashion by ordering beheading in The Tower Of London. The same episode also features a secret tunnel from the Tower of London — which comes out in the Queen's bedroom in Buckingham Palace, which in reality is some five miles away (and was built several centuries later than the Tower of London).
  • In "Blame it on Lisa", Homer is kidnapped in Brazil. The kidnappers take Homer from Rio de Janeiro to the Amazon's Rainforest and back to Rio for the ransom during the same day, before sunset. Rio de Janeiro and the Amazon Rainforest are more than 4200km (roughly 2600 miles) apart, which means that those travels would take several days in real life. It would've made more sense for the kidnappers to keep Homer in captivity around Rio, specifically in some favelas where the police hardly enters.
• The South Park episode "Medicinal Fried Chicken" features Cartman visiting KFC's original home of Corbin, Kentucky to visit with Colonel Sanders. Corbin, a small town on the western edge of Appalachia, is depicted as being in a tropical rain forest. Justified by the Rule of Funny, as the scene parodies a key plot point from the 1983 version of Scarface.
• In Timothy Goes to School, an extremely huge lake has somehow formed in the mid-west of the US. There actually was a large inland sea in the midwest of the USA during the Late Cretaceous period, about 75 million years ago, in which case their map is a little outdated.
• In Total Drama's "Celebrity Manhunt Special" the gang travels from Ontario to New York City, and somehow get lost in a desert with a nuclear testing site (Trinity Site is in New Mexico, if you are wondering.)
• The Totally Spies! episode "The Getaway" has the spies going to a volcano research lab in Iceland, which is covered in ice and snow, but it's actually Greenland that's covered in ice; Iceland is actually pretty temperate considering its location just below the Arctic Circle.
• In "Friends in the City" from Toot & Puddle, Toot and Puddle visit the Statue of Liberty on the final boat of the day and observe it amidst a beautiful sky filled with stars. But given the bright lights of New York City, that shouldn't be possible, and the version of New York City that they visit appears to be just as filled with tall buildings that would surely be lit up at night.
• The geographic sins of the Transformers live-action movies are bad enough, but the original cartoon was much worse. The link is to a Transformers Wiki page, including both an incredibly erroneous map of Europe and a comprehensive list of what is wrong with it, and a list of what historical and political events would have had to occur to alter the map such.
• In the X-Men: The Animated Series episode "Days of Future Past, Part 2," Gambit travels to Washington, D.C. But the monitor shows the state of Washington (with Washington, D.C. captioned right below).