Ditzy Genius / Western Animation

A-L

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: Jimmy is undeniably smart, having a very big brain and possessing a major knack for science and inventing. However, he lacks common sense and can be very arrogant.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks: Jeanette. She's very well-read and book-smart, but otherwise lacks common sense and general intelligence, such as putting her shoes on the wrong feet, holding signs upside-down, walking into doors or walls, tripping over untied shoelaces, falling down the stairs, etc.
• American Dad!: Roger Smith is one of the smartest characters on the show, being a good planner in his schemes and having multiple professions with the help of his personas. He is also incredibly airheaded, gullible, lacking in common sense, and even Too Dumb to Live on occasion. He Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality, either.
• Camp Lazlo: Although Clam is able to create an exact copy of the Mona Lisa in 30 seconds, play an entire symphony by blowing across the top of a bottle, and construct a gigantic Segway-like machine out of a tree trunk, it's quite evident his worldview is very odd. Most of the cast does not recognize his genius at all, usually passing him off as The Ditz due to said oddness.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Gadget. She can make almost everything from almost anything, including rebuilding a plane out of garbage, but she simply does not register that in certain circumstances, certain behaviors are socially necessary or unusual.
• Class of 3000: Philly Phil is capable of building high-tech machinery in minutes and is a genius on the bass guitar, but he also has No Social Skills and displays a lack of common sense.
• Danger Mouse: Dr. Crumhorn is the smartest villain on the show, able to make sharks that swim through concrete. However, he's very ditzy, and has no common sense. He mixes up his cough drops and his transformation pills without fail, he's also just not very subtle. He's also come the closest to defeating Danger Mouse, only foiled by his own ignorance to the flaws in his plans.
• Daria: Ted was homeschooled for most of his life, which gives him both an Encyclopedic Knowledge of everything and a ditzy lack of social skills.
• Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: Dick Dastardly. He's skilled at mechanics and can build almost anything. But that's about all. He never plans ahead and spends his whole life trying to catch that pigeon.
• Dexter's Laboratory: Child Prodigy Dexter definitely fits the bill. He's able to time-travel, create robots and build portals to other dimensions, but is utterly incapable of taking care of himself for a single day when his mom is sick. He doesn't know how to cook (having never heard of "flour"), and when he cleans, is amazed at the sight of dust particles. He's also very gullible and doesn't even know what chickenpox is. In general, what he has in scientific smarts, he lacks in common sense.
• The Fairly OddParents!: AJ occasionally dips into this. Most notable in "Hex Games", where he shows an absolute inability to use slang or communicate like a normal kid, or the third Jimmy Timmy Power Hour, where he spends the whole special believing he's in the future.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Coco has the ability to lay eggs that contain anything she imagines, and she has a fairly logical and strategic mindset when it comes to emergencies, using her eggs to create things she and her friends might need to solve any problem. However, she's very eccentric and has a medely of unusual quirks of her own, and can also only say her own name.
• Generator Rex: The third season gives us Cesar Salazar, the formerly absent older brother of the eponymous Rex. Among his many achievements are: Working on the nanite project alongside his and Rex's parents, building a mobile lab capable of traveling at relativistic speeds, sauntering into Providence and casually neutralizing everyone between him and his kid brother, and creating the insane AI, ZAG-RS, which has nearly succeeded several times in destroying all life on Earth. When not performing feats of scientific awesomeness, however, it's clear that, against all logic, Rex, not known for being the smoothest guy around, got all the social skills in the family.
• Gravity Falls: Stanford Pines is a brilliant inventor and scientist who was capable of constructing a dimensional portal in his basement, but is also sorely lacking in any sort of common sense. He hands lethal weapons over to children without a second thought, and made a deal with a demon he summoned after being specifically warned against summoning it, all because it flattered him with praise. This is in contrast with his brother, Stanley Pines, who's a Street Smart Con Man with common sense enough to drive a successful business and take care of his family for thirty years.
• Grojband: Kin Kujira is the band's tech guy and a Gadgeteer Genius able to constuct inventions ranging from working hologram duplicates to time machines, but he's also a goofball Cloud Cuckoolander often crossing over into Mad Scientist territory. Interestingly, his brother Kon is instead a Genius Ditz.
• Invader Zim: Zim is a scientific genius among races of scientific genius. He can build time machines, enhance elite positioning systems (to the point that GIR could point out individual exoplanets while indoors), mutate small house pets into kaiju-like monsters, slow down objects (including explosions) in time and space, hack into the Massive, and much more. However, he is still one of the least competent Invaders. Zim has little enough common sense to attack his own planet with a battle mech, commandeer a gargantuan maimbot to break open a faulty vending machine, accelerate a temporally slowed explosion before the Almighty Tallest would examine his operation (even GIR realized that this was a bad idea), and uses paper-thin disguises for himself, GIR, and his base. He's lucky that most humans are too idiotic to notice that he's an alien, or else he would have been discovered literally minutes after arriving on Earth.
• Jellystone!: Cindy is smarter than the average bear (more so than Yogi), but not above wacky shenanigans that Yogi and Boo Boo commit. Plus, some of her best solutions are not always the most well-thought-out.
• Kaeloo:
  • When it comes to science, math and the like, Quack Quack is absolutely brilliant — and yet, he can't figure out that a picture of himself with Stumpy's head taped onto it isn't a picture of Stumpy.
  • Olaf the emperor penguin counts as well, as he has built his own Do-Anything Robot, an army of Mecha-Mooks, a freeze ray, and turned Stumpy into a Cyborg, but he is otherwise a complete idiot.
• Kim Possible: Dr. Drakken and Professor Dementor constantly produce spectacular world-menacing gadgets, but can't stop a couple of teenagers from foiling their schemes.
• The Loud House: Among the eleven kids, we have second youngest child (and daughter) Lisa Loud — at only four years old, she's already finished school up through getting a PhD, she gives university lectures, she has at least one Nobel prize and she also helps her parents do taxes and pay bills. But for all her accomplishment in book smarts, she's a bit lacking in mundane sense. She fails to see why experimenting on a fifteen-month-old baby would be a bad idea and very few of her experiments have actually worked without ultimately failing and/or having some kind of weird side effect. She's basically a female Dexter in this regard.

M-Z

• The Mighty B!: Bessie Higgenbottom can do anything that will earn her a badge — including creating cold fusion or building a working robot with limited A.I. — but that doesn't make her any less of a ditz.
• Mission Hill: Kevin French is this. He's absolutely brilliant in school, but so socially inept that it does him little to no good. Ironically he's forced to rely on his Street Smart but Book Dumb older brother to deal with pretty much any real-life scenario.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot: Jenny (XJ9) is a highly advanced and intelligent combat android. But she's pretty clueless and naïve when it comes to mingling with non-robotic teens (other than Brad or Sheldon).
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Twilight Sparkle is a unicorn so smart, she knows most of the constellations by heart and is able to finish a race fifth place, ahead of a few dozen other, more athletic ponies, simply by using her book smarts. She's also a filly so silly, she needs to consult a reference book on something as simple as a sleepover. She even reads the book to find out what to do when a tree falls into her house instead of just getting up and helping move it. There's also the fact that her dragon roommate, Spike, does most of the housework (he loves his job, though, so he's not complaining too much). While Twilight is able to take care of her own for short periods, Spike is way better than her at it and a few episodes imply that Twilight would be completely screwed if Spike wasn't involved in her life.
• The Owl House: Luz Noceda is actually shown to be rather intelligent, with sound critical-thinking abilities and a quick grasp of magical principles. That being said, she is also rather impulsive, airheaded, clueless, and lacking in common sense.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • Heinz Doofenshmirtz. He's a genius when it comes to science, technology, math, and engineering, but he lacks just about everything else such as social skills and common sense. He puts self-destruct buttons in a convenient location on just about every invention he builds, and he's never even recognized his nemesis, Perry the Platypus, in even the most transparent of disguises, and tends to assume Perry is just an ordinary platypus if he's not wearing his trademark fedora. To put all this into perspective, take his scheme in the episode "Fireside Girl Jamboree": He was smart enough to build a machine that is capable of transforming metal into broccoli (A mineral into living matter), but decided to make it out of metal.
  • To a lesser extent, Phineas himself. His brilliance with science and technology is nearly unparalleled, but he's also very naive and completely fails to pick up on things like Isabella's obvious crush on him or Candace's disapproval of his inventions.
• Pinky and the Brain: Brain regularly produces plans that are ingenious and lack any kind of common sense. He also often screws up his own plans when he lets his anger at Pinky distract him and forgets some essential part of his plan.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • Mojo Jojo lives and breathes this trope far too often. Despite his high intelligence, Mojo is extremely inept at planning his schemes with major detail and they predictably end in failure. A blatant example of this is in the episode "Monkey See, Doggy Two" where Mojo shows the girls the video of how his plan to turn every citizen in Townsville into dogs failed. So after turning the girls into dogs, the dog-transformed Buttercup runs around and bites him from behind, causing him to drop the Anubis (which he used to transform dogs) onto his head, breaking it. He tells the girls than his plan won't fail this time because he won't turn them into dogs, neither of them will bite him (since he has his rear covered with steel), and he won't drop the Anubis. All this and he forgets the fact that the girls can still beat him up, which they predictably do, causing his plan to fail even worse than it did before.
  • Professor Utonium is also like this to a certain degree. Pretty much everything useful he's invented, including the girls themselves, he's done so by accident. If that's not enough, whatever he set his mind to do something intentionally, he tends to create disasters. The episode "Uh Oh, Dynamo" is the best example of that.
• The Problem Solverz: Roba. He's the smartest member of the team, is knowledgeable about many subjects, and has built his own radar scanner. However, he's also very socially inept and childish.
• Ready Jet Go!: Jet Propulsion. He is an expert mechanic and can name every single one of Jupiter's moons, yet he is incredibly naïve about Earth culture and can't keep his alien identity a secret.
• Robot Chicken: The nerd is meant to be quite intelligent, yet one skit has him unintentionally hack into the US government's database and end up nuking Canada. He doesn't even realise he hacked into the database until a SWAT force sent by the government breaks into his house and arrests him.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Entrapta is a technological genius, genuinely a very nice person, and near-terminally devoid of common sense or self-awareness. At one point, she keeps Scorpia and Catra in a polar hellscape for multiple unnecessary days after finding the actual objective of the dig because she thought they were having fun. The mission then dissolves into chaos because after her first experiment with a virus-spreading First One artifact went catastrophically haywire and nearly killed multiple people, including her, she decided to not only repair the artifact, but carry it around in case she had the time to experiment with it again.
• The Simpsons: Sideshow Bob — cunning, cultured, ruthless, and an expert manipulator, he's nonetheless a hapless victim of highly avoidable slapstick and of anyone who can successfully appeal to his pride, with the result that grade-schoolers and garden rakes get the better of him on a regular basis. On one occasion he publicly confessed to his entire (up to that point, roaringly successful) evil plan of the moment and handed over detailed records of his involvement, simply because he'd been accused of being a pawn in someone else's scheme and couldn't bear to be thought of as anything less than a mastermind.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Sheldon Plankton. Despite being an evil genius, he tends to overlook simple things, which his computer wife Karen has to point out. Like that the alphabet ends with "Z", and he doesn't remember how to blink. He's able to make so many amazing inventions that not even humans can come up with, yet how does he decide to get money? By selling human resources at a dingy restaurant. And in "Goo-Goo Gas", he thought that baby powder was actually made from babies.
• The Transformers: Starscream is a former scientist and his scientific aptitude comes up in several situations, though it's not as prominent a trait as his backstabbing, at which he is majorly incompetent. Despite being scientifically knowledgeable, his schemes to overthrow Megatron are often poorly thought out and make him come across as an idiot.
• We Bare Bears: In a milder version of the trope, Chloe Park is a Child Prodigy who is grade-school aged but attending college. She has shown to be pretty smart and self-sufficient, but still takes rash decisions that can land her in dangerous situations (entering the cave of the titular bears to get information for a report or climbing into the habitat of an albino alligator because she promised Ice Bear they would see it).
• Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner: Wile E. Coyote is a genius capable of building roadrunner traps, but, if you think about it, wouldn't it be much easier if he just ordered food instead of ordering a bunch of supplies from ACME? Alas (for him, at least), he's simply too stubborn to give up. In comics, it's revealed that he's actually ordering food, and capturing the Road Runner is just his hobby.
• Winx Club: Tecna. She's the smartest of the group when it comes to technology and science, but she can be absolutely clueless when it comes to anything unrelated. Early on in the show, she referred to a mop and bucket as "primitive devices". Flora had to guide her in using them, but wasn't specific enough, which made Tecna utilize the bucket as a helmet and the broom as an elongated feather duster.
• X-Men:
  • Forge is portrayed this way in both X-Men: Evolution and Wolverine and the X-Men (2009), though in the latter it's more a case of Brilliant, but Lazy, while in Evolution he's energetic and brilliant, but somewhat foolish and lacking in foresight.
  • Shadowcat in X-Men: Evolution. She's portrayed as a very intelligent student, but could be easily excited over "typical" teenage topics (driver's license) and early on had the tendency to use the word "like" so much in a single sentence, Shaggy Rogers would probably take notice.
• Xiaolin Showdown: Jack Spicer is incredibly incompetent not only as a villain but also virtually everything he had done to the extent that the other characters tend to forget that he really is a genius who can create robots from scratch.

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