All Animation Is Disney

No amount of dreams could make this work.

"But in animation, everyone is expected to come as close as they can to Walt Disney. That's not a rap on Disney. He was a genius, an innovator... his stuff was so terrific that people came to believe that that was all there was to animation."

— Ralph Bakshi, in the notes for the DVD release of American Pop

Ah, the Disney Animated Canon. Such wonderful movies to be found in it: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Swan Princess...

Wait, what do you mean that last one doesn't belong? It's not Disney? Don't be ridiculous, only Disney could produce animation of that quality!

Sadly, many people in Real Life believe that, if it's a quality animated feature film, it was made by Disney. This is possibly a side effect of the Animation Age Ghetto, as people are led to believe that not only are all cartoons for kids, but they're all made by the same kid-friendly company. Who (aside from fans of animation) wants to tell these people that there's more than one animation studio out there? Small Reference Pools might play a role here, as well. Some people go so far as to believe that Disney invented animation, which isn't true either: Walt was still in junior high school when Gertie the Dinosaur was released (though he did release the first feature-length hand-drawn cartoon, namely Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).

Remember, though, that Disney is the market leader in animated movies, and so it's understandable that rival animation studios follow trends set by the Disney Animated Canon (including Disneyfication). One critical reason is Don Bluth, responsible for taking that style with him when he left Disney, using it in his films with other studios and making that line more blurred if you're not paying closer attention than looking and assuming. Disney also releases films not made by a Disney animation studio, such as The Brave Little Toaster, and handles international distribution of some bigger-name foreign animators, most notably the works of Studio Ghibli (prior to GKids buying out the distribution rights to the majority of the latter's backlog).

Though it seems easy to distinguish when doing the bare minimum of research, Disney uses Vanity Plates on its work, and so do the other big-name animation studios. However, this can be muddied somewhat when studios strike up unanticipated strange licensing agreements - for example, Disney having the broadcast rights for Thomas & Friends in Asia, and between 2009 and 2016, somehow also ended up with the distribution and broadcast rights for DreamWorks movies in certain regions, creating a very bizarre scenario where Shrek and Over the Hedge were screened on Disney Channel Asia (and in the case of Japan, a double whammy where The Penguins of Madagascar screened on Disney Channel Japan because they no longer have a Nickelodeon feed in the country, in addition to DreamWorks' said agreement with Disney).

Since Disney's most famous movies are traditionally animated films, this usually applies to traditionally animated movies. On the CGI front, DreamWorks has become a big enough name in its own right that their films rarely get mistaken for Pixar's anymore. The other guys (such as Blue Sky Studios, Illumination Entertainment or Sony Pictures Animation)... not so much. If it shares DreamWorks' tendency towards subversive or referential humor, chances are it'll get mistaken for one of their films. So a sub-trope of this could be "All CG Animation is Pixar or DreamWorks".

As being an animation fan as an adult becomes less stigmatised, this trope is beginning to die off. This is also due to many films such as The Secret of NIMH and The Iron Giant gaining cult followings and being recognized as some of the best animated films, largely even considered contenders to Disney in quality. However, because of Don Bluth becoming a household name in the animation community, it's still common for people to believe that all non-Disney 2D-animated films were made by him instead. Just make sure not to make this mistake around animation fans. At the very least, you'll get eye-rolls from them.

Subtrope of Wrongfully Attributed. Compare/Contrast All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles and Disney Owns This Trope. Misattributed Song is the variant of this trope for music. When official sources mix up the studios, it's usually because the writer pulled a Cowboy BeBop at His Computer.

Not to be confused with Disneyesque or Disneyfication. Of course, sometimes the confusion goes the other way and a film really is by Disney, but it's hard to convince people of this because it's so "un-Disneylike" (Pretty Woman or Pulp Fiction, among many, many others).

Animated mockbusters often play on this trope deliberately to make unwary customers think their cheap knockoff is the original.

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Examples:

Works regularly mistaken for Disney:

Anime and Manga

• This article about a Maho Girls Pretty Cure! event has an image with "Copyright Disney" in the corner, when Toei Animation actually made the show.
• This listing for a Kurama keychain from Naruto calls it a "Disney keychain", when Studio Pierrot made the show, and Shueisha owns the rights to the manga.

Films — Animation

• Poor Don Bluth. This might happen to him the most. Then again, he did get his start at Disney and ended up pitted against them during The Renaissance Age of Animation.
  • Warner Bros. tried to play this trope to its advantage during test screenings of Thumbelina. When they played the film with the Warner logo, audiences gave it a mediocre score. When they played it with the Disney logo, the scores were much higher. Bluth reported the same thing was employed by 20th Century Fox with Anastasia. With the Disney logo, some sequences even met with applause! And the marketing of Anastasia heavily played up the Disneyesque elements. Funnily enough, thanks to Disney's purchase of Fox, the film is now owned by Disney.
  • It's not uncommon to find screencaps from the film with a "copyright Disney" watermark on the corner still floating around on the internet due to this.
  • The Disney Channel aired almost every Bluth film in the mid-1990s to add to that confusion. They even aired films that neither they nor Bluth made, like FernGully: The Last Rainforest.
  • Several websites of song lyrics file Bluth film lyrics under Disney films instead.
  • This video about Toy Story 3 makes a joke during a Disney medley about Bluth's films being Disney!
  • This site points to alleged political messages hidden in Disney movies, including in its list The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go to Heaven.
  • This Uncyclopedia page about Herbie jokingly implies that The Land Before Time is a Disney film.
• Once Upon a Forest is frequently mistaken for a Disney movie, also sometimes mistaken for a Don Bluth movie, when it was in fact produced by Hanna-Barbera. The film was distributed by Fox, which is now owned by Disney.
• The Iron Giant is frequently misidentified as Disney, even on This Very Wiki. It was actually made by the Warner Bros. animation studio and directed by Brad Bird… who would soon after make films for Pixar.
• Thomas and the Magic Railroad:
  • One reviewer was under the impression that Thomas had been produced by Disney. Then again, the review itself was poking fun at fundamentalist Christians who think all movies are the work of the devil.
  • Muddying the issue is that the movie actually aired on Playhouse Disney regularly in Asian markets. Heck, it seems that HiT Entertainment had an alliance with Disney in Asia (Barney & Friends actually aired on Playhouse Disney in the region) up until when they launched their own channel, JimJam.
  • Japanese confectionery Furuta used to call Thomas a Disney show on one of its products from the show, but when they lost the Disney license, the mistake was fixed.
• Magic Adventures of Mumfie, Thomas' sister show, is not alone in this trope either. However, it isn't surprising as the art style of the movie Mumfie's Quest can easily be mistaken for Disney's, as well as the presence of multiple musical numbers. Britt Allcroft adapted the movie from Katharine Tozer's books, and Phoenix Animation Studios animated it. However, some episodes of the TV series following the episodes the movie was made from avert this trope when it's animated by D'Ocon, as they look different.
  • This website calls the show "Walt Disney at its' [sic] finest!" Oddly enough, D'Ocon animated the episodes on this particular VHS tape.
  • Similar to its sister show, the Italian Disney Channel played Mumfie in the early 2000's on Playhouse Disney, right before Bear in the Big Blue House.
  • It also doesn't help that Pinkey looks very similar to Hen Wen, but with wings. In fact, a few people who want to remember this movie often mistake it for The Black Cauldron due to this.
• Most of the output of 20th Century Fox (which was almost entirely the work of Bluth) and much later, their 3D studio Blue Sky Studios, gets mistaken for Disney… or DreamWorks in the case of their CGI films. Though, thanks to Disney's recent purchase of Fox, they technically wouldn't be wrong about that now.
  • At least one customer review for the soundtrack for the Blue Sky Studios film Robots calls it a Disney film.
• This video calls the DreamWorks film The Prince of Egypt a Disney film. They did fix the description after several commentators pointed it out, though.
• In the heyday of Disney's Renaissance of the late '80s/early '90s, many many low-budget animation houses lived off this trope like kings. They made (or more likely scrounged up) the most incredibly cheap knockoffs of every Disney film of the era and released them on video around the same time the films had been in theaters for a while. They took advantage of the sad fact that some parents didn't realize the difference. "The Little Mermaid is The Little Mermaid, right? It says so on the cover!"^note The original story The Little Mermaid is in the public domain, so Disney couldn't trademark it and prevent other studios from using the title, and the same goes for many of the other stories used by their films at the time - which may help explain why Disney increasingly turned towards original stories as the 90s and 2000s progressed and why they started giving their fairy-tale adaptations titles like Tangled and Frozen. Fortunately, the majority of parents could tell the difference between the beloved Disney films and, say, this. Said films are still floating around out there and have proved to be a rich well of YouTube Poop. GoodTimes Entertainment counts itself among these companies; whenever a Disney movie hits theatres or video, GoodTimes is there with a based-on-the-same-public-domain-property direct-to-video cartoon.
  • Bonus points go the one company that also shamelessly based their logo off the Warner Bros. shield.
• Shrek:
  • This parody site claims that this movie, as well as Ice Age and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are Disney films.
  • Since Disney signed a distribution agreement with DreamWorks in 2009, they've screened Shrek on The Disney Channel several times in some markets. Understandably, this has raised a lot of confusion for those who know the differences between DreamWorks, Disney and Pixar. The agreement expired in late 2016 though, and while DreamWorks did not renew it, their new parent company NBCUniversal would sign a contract that led to the films appearing on the U.S. feed.
  • In the book I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai mentions at one point watching Disney movies while recovering from her injuries, specifically the first three Shrek films and "A Shark's Tale". Justified, as Pakistani have a very narrow perception of Western culture, including animation, thus any major film is perceived as "Disney". Additionally, Pakistan could very well be covered under Disney’s abovementioned deal with DreamWorks In Asia.
  • In this book about Latin dance, there is a reference to "2001 Disney Shrek film", in a topic about the presence of the Macarena in the cinema.
  • This article calls Fiona a Disney Princess.
  • This article about the 2007 Pester Power awards calls Shrek a Disney movie.
• The work of Richard Rich, who made The Swan Princess movies and The King and I, is often credited to Disney. Look closely during the Saturday Night Live "Saturday TV Funhouse" sketch "Journey To the Disney Vault", and you might find some Swan Princess DVDs sitting in the eponymous Vault.
• The Nutcracker Prince. Fans of this movie mistook most of the animation (save for the flashback sequences) as similar to the Disney era. It doesn't help that there's also a Disney Villain Death within this movie.
• Balto is another one that's frequently mistaken as a Disney film and as a Don Bluth film. It was in fact the product of the short-lived Amblimation, which would evolve into the 2D animation arm of DreamWorks (and was a semi-spinoff of Bluth's studio).
• Cats Don't Dance was distributed by Warner Bros. (and was originally going to have the Looney Tunes as its cast), but many think it's Disney. It was in fact from Turner Feature Animation, a short-lived outgrowth of Hanna-Barbera created after Turner Broadcasting bought them.
• Felidae is a 1994 animated film that had Disney-esque style but also showed cats getting decapitated, having sex, and being thrown around like puppets by a 90ft Gregor Mendel.
• El Tiempo newspaper, in a 1996 article, referred to the German animation The Fearless Four as if it were from Disney.
• The Wild, made by C.O.R.E. Animation, is a weird case. Technically speaking, it is a Disney film in the sense that they distributed it and it even carries the Disney logo. However, this often leads to people thinking the film was made by Disney themselves. Make that mistake in front of hardcore Disney fans, and they'll eat you alive. Made even worse by the fact that in the UK, The Wild is featured as the 46th film in the Disney Animated Canon, while the 39th film Dinosaur is excluded.
• A woman complaining about The Lorax (2012)'s discrimination keeps mistaking it for Disney when it's really Illumination.
• Roger Ebert's otherwise flawless review of Monsters vs. Aliens has one instance of it being called a Disney film (it's actually DreamWorks).
• Bridgit Mendler, who voiced the title character of the American dub of Studio Ghibli's Arrietty, refers to the film as a Disney movie in one of the bonus features on the DVD, since Disney commissioned the American dub.
• An increasing number of American consumers actually believe that Studio Ghibli movies are owned by Disney, while Disney only had the rights to distribute some of the movies in North America. Some even go as far as to believe that Studio Ghibli is "the Japanese Disney".
  • Certainly contributing to the confusion is the fact that Toy Story 3 brought a cameo of Totoro, the iconic character of Studio Ghibli.
• This video of The Road to El Dorado brings the warning: "Disclaimer: Rights belong to Disney and respective creators." And this video in Portuguese accuses supposed subliminal messages in this movie, claiming, when talking about the famous and controversial romantic scene between Chel and Tulio, to be a film made by Disney.
  • This article says "The Road to El Dorado is the most underappreciated Disney movie".
• This article describes Disney as 'An Animal Rights Activist In Disguise', citing as examples 101 Dalmatians, Finding Nemo, Finding Dory and... Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which is from DreamWorks.
• This site offers "The Croods disney dvd wholesale". However, the director of the film is Chris Sanders, who also directed Lilo & Stitch.
• Benedict Cumberbatch, speaking on the Graham Norton Show about his dubbing work on The Penguins of Madagascar (DreamWorks) said: “Well, I’ve had a word with Disney. I need to check that I have said [penguin] correctly in the film.”
• This video appoints "10 Disney KUNG FU PANDA Movie MISTAKES That Slipped Through Editing". In fact, Kung Fu Panda is DreamWorks.
• This site sells the DVD of Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (DreamWorks), indicating Walt Disney as 'Author'. And this review of the movie begins with: 'High seas, swashbuckling adventure, a sassy stowaway and several giant gruesome creatures provide non-stop action in Disney's animated version of the Sinbad story.'
• This site lists "6 incredible life lessons we can learn from famous Disney movies quotes". The last quote is from DreamWorks' Megamind.
• This blog points to suppost sexual subliminal messages in Disney movies, including Open Season, made by Sony.
• This site talks about the French-Canadian animation Ballerina, as if it were made by Disney. In their defense, however, Disney did make an unrelated Danish live-action film by that name half a century before, for their anthology series.
• Despicable Me is occasionally confused for a Disney film series, as the Disney Channel once had a habit of playing the first film a couple of times each month.
  • A video depicts a family making homemade Minion-themed Twinkies. The video refers to the movie as a Disney movie, when it’s really an Illumination film.
• The first question that shows up on the Google results for Sherlock Gnomes is "Is Sherlock Gnomes a Disney movie?" The film is distributed by Paramount, but it's understandable considering that the film it's a sequel to was distributed by Touchstone, a division of Disney.
• Aversion: With its 95% Rotten Tomatoes score, nobody would ever have (and for that matter, has ever) mistaken Yellow Submarine as being a Disney product. King Features produced it and TVC London animated it. The success of Submarine prompted Disney to re-release Fantasia in early 1969 as "The ultimate sight and sound experience." Disney did have plans to make a motion-capture redeux of Submarine in 2012 with Robert Zemeckis directing it, but Disney yanked it after the Zemeckis-produced Mars Needs Moms tanked.

Films — Live-Action

• The Wind in the Willows (1996) is mistaken as a Disney film because Disney distributed the film in the U.S. and also because it was released on home video as "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride", a name shared by a particularly famous Disneyland ride that was based off of their adaptation of the story.
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is frequently mistaken to be Disney film because it's a 1960s fantasy musical that stars Dick Van Dyke, similar to Mary Poppins, and had songs written by The Sherman Brothers, who wrote many famous Disney songs such as "It's A Small World" and the Winnie the Pooh theme.
  • One TV station in Malaysia, TV3, actually aired Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as one of the films on their Wonderful World of Disney movie slot a few years back. ^note To be fair, United Artists was probably aiming for this trope on purpose, by getting Dick Van Dyke and The Sherman Brothers, fresh off Disney's production of Mary Poppins, involved. Word of God states they even tried to recruit Julie Andrews, but she turned them down.
  • The Goldo song "Boom Da Boom", which is about Disney characters, mentions Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
  • Behold, a clueless ride operator refits a Pooh kiddie ride with a music box that plays the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang theme.
• Inverted and invoked live-action instance: at the 2010 Disney shareholder meeting (the first such meeting after Disney's purchase of Marvel Comics) Disney highlighted Iron Man 2 in their "upcoming films" montage. When asked why, as the film was being distributed by Paramount, Disney CEO Bob Iger responded with "It's not our movie, but it's our character." Disney would later buy out Paramount's distribution rights to the film and the other MCU films Par released.
  • Disney took a similar approach towards Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man Series. Although they didn't make or own the series, they did own the series' merchandise rights - as such, it was a common sight between mid 2012 and early 2015 to see merchandise of Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man being sold in Disney Stores and on shopDisney.com alongside Marvel Cinematic Universe merchandise, and they even showed the trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in their stores with other Disney films in 2014. Even following Spider-Man's incorporation into the MCU, Disney has continued to take this approach with other Sony-made Spidey films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and their Spider-Man Universe.
• This Facebook post had a comment asking Disney Live! to include Alvin and the Chipmunks in their shows. While Disney has owned the film rights to the Chipmunks since 2019 (and distributed the franchise on videocassette in the early-to-mid '90s), the overall rights to the characters are owned by Bagdasarian Productions.
• Occasionally you'll come across some naive person or group of people who have lumped The Wizard of Oz in with the Disney animated oeuvre. Nobody ever explicitly calls The Wizard of Oz a Disney film (it's well known that it was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and that Warner Brothers currently owns the rights to it), but school plays doing a salute to Disney will often include scenes from Oz alongside the likes of Aladdin. They must think the kids are stupid ("It's got fanciful characters and musical numbers, so it must be Disney!"), or else they might genuinely consider Oz a Disney film in all but name. On the other hand, Disney did a storybook published in 1978 in book, vinyl and cassette formats, produce the sequel, Return to Oz, as well as the "unofficial" prequel, Oz the Great and Powerful, both of which are probably the root cause of this confusion. What may also add even more to the confusion is the fact that The Wizard of Oz was among the many films featured in The Great Movie Ride (a former attraction at Walt Disney World), which was allowed due to a licensing agreement between Disney and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Warner Bros. In 1954, Disney purchased the rights to thirteen Oz books.
  • A notable example of this was the commentary track for Ghostbusters (2016): after Jillian sings "Come out, come out, wherever you are..." to try and find Rowan, Paul Feig mentions that the joke cost several thousand dollars, because it was from "some Disney movie". Even Mr. Plinkett pointed out how clueless they were in his review of the movie as an example of how the director doesn't understand movies:

    "You know that’s in your movie now, right? And you don’t even know what it’s from?"

• While The Sound of Music is owned by Disney as of March 2019, it was made by 20th Century Fox. A character in Addams Family Values saying "It's Disney" just before The Sound of Music comes on undoubtedly contributes to the confusion. Also, the association with Julie Andrews (of Mary Poppins fame) in a similar role, and just one year after Poppins no less, probably added to the confusion.
  • In addition to "The Sound of Music", the very same episode used "The Brady Bunch" theme from Paramount 1969-74 series and "Tomorrow" from "Annie" (either Broadway musical or 1982 Columbia Pictures film).
• This newspaper article calls the Warner Brothers film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory a Disney film. It doesn't help matters that NBC aired the anthology series The Wonderful World Of Disney at the time it was published.
• Stuart Little also tends to get confused for a Disney movie from time to time. The film was made by Columbia Pictures.
• 2018's The Little Mermaid caused some confusion. The Disney live-action remake had been announced but hadn't even entered production at the time.
• Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme is often mistaken for a Disney movie because it frequently aired on the Disney Channel in the late 1980s to early 1990s, and there's even been requests for the film to be added to Disney+. However, despite airing on their channel, the rights are not owned by Disney, as the film was made by Hi-Tops Video (the kids arm of Media Home Entertainment), known for distributing VHS tapes of the Peanuts specials, Pee-wee's Playhouse, Baby Songs, Barbie and the Rockers: Out of This World, and The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin. The film would later be owned by Lyrick Studios, who distributed Barney & Friends and VeggieTales.

Other

• Among the many flaws of The New Yorker's satirization of Epic Mickey and its darker, yet retro, reboot of Mickey, they call Porky Pig a Disney character.
• From the website "Letters of Note" comes this adorable exchange. In 1964, a girl who was a fan of Woody Woodpecker attempted to write a letter to his creator, Walter Lantz, but addressed it to Walt Disney instead, who was nice enough to reply to the girl and forward it along. Disney seemed to anticipate this trope in his note to Lantz, joking, "I get blamed for everything that happens in Hollywood!" Another common mistake made by many people, given the similar first names and the fact that they both were involved in the animation industry (although Disney owned his own studios while Lantz worked for Universal).
• On March 22, 2011, Disney's ABC TV network presented a two-hour special titled "Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time", which presented the best moments or films in various categories. In the animation category, four of the choices were made by Walt Disney Pictures: 1. The Lion King, 3. Beauty and the Beast, 4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and 5. Fantasia. Number 2? Toy Story — made by Pixar, but nevertheless distributed by Disney, and Disney had owned Pixar since 2006.
• In a similar vein, this is committed in large part by the lists published by the American Film Institute. They do tend to have animated films appear on lists every so often, but most of those films are Disney. On their 100 Years... series, Disney films appear in the low places like Passions, Cheers, and Musicals, with two Disney films listed on the Top 100 overall (Toy Story was #99, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was #29). This is amplified on their Top 10's when in the Animation Category, eight of the listed films were Disney and two were PIXAR, with Shrek at #8 the only non-Disney movie present.
  • For their annual awards series (where they list the ten best films and TV programs of that year), the film section tends to list one animated film per year most years. From 2007-2010, and in 2003 and 2004, it was always a PIXAR film. By 2015, Animation returned with Inside Out and Zootopia the following year. The only non-Disney films to make that list are Shrek (2001), Happy Feet (2006) and Coraline (2009, shared with Disney/PIXAR's own Up.
• Looking up "Dingo Pictures" on Wikipedia used to lead to the site saying "Did you mean Disney Pictures?" This is probably just the search software picking the closest match in the database, but given Dingo's business model it's kind of apt, really. (Now, looking up "Dingo Pictures" on Wikipedia redirects to the article on "Mockbuster".) In the episode I Take On Dingo from ICarly, Dingo Channel is a television channel clearly inspired by the Disney Channel.
• Inverted with the comic Blacksad - Guarnido, the illustrator, actually was a Disney animator, animating Hades in Hercules, Sabor in Tarzan, and Helga in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, among other work, but the only evidence of this is in the characters' facial expressions. It might be because Blacksad is a gritty, violent, sexual, political noir comic (populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals, no less) and going for an entirely Disneyfied look wouldn't fit.
• This picture from a tumblr blog shows Looney Tunes and Peanuts snowglobes being sold as "Disney Snowglobes".
• A screenwriting book called "Your Screenplay Sucks" called The Prince of Egypt a Disney film (it's actually DreamWorks). However, the author admitted later that it was a mistake here.
• One ESL worksheet uses Disney characters, but four of the characters – Snoopy, Superman, Garfield, and Tom the cat) – are not Disney! However, in the United States, ABC airs the Peanuts specials^note  (all but the most recent ones originally aired on CBS), Garfield and Friends reran on Toon Disney^note  (it also originally aired on CBS), Garfield Gets Real aired on Disney Channel Asia, and the second live-action Garfield movie aired on Disney Cinemagic Portugal.
• This Facebook post calls Thing 1 and Thing 2 Disney characters.
• The common slang word for animation in Greece is "mickey mouses", since that's all they know of it.
• The freeware picture font Disney family 1 includes Tweety in the capital A and lowercase a positions. From the same designer, Pixar family 2 includes Shrek and Turbo, both of whom are DreamWorks characters (as well as Disney's Wreck-It Ralph).
• Not even TweenComs and Kid Coms are safe from this. This complaint about Nickelodeon's Henry Danger calls it a Disney show.
• Mike Mozart's video on people who were arrested for file-sharing claimed that the Nickelodeon series iCarly was made by Disney.
• When Ashanti was interviewed on CNN in 2005 concerning her participation in an event at Walt Disney World, she said that her favorite Disney character was Daffy Duck.
• In Anansi Boys Fat Charlie is stuck on an airplane full of tourists from Britain to Florida Disney World who sing all the songs from Disney animations, including "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" (which is actually from MGM's The Wizard of Oz).

Theme Parks

• Exploited in a rather famous experiment on false memories: People were shown fake ads for Disneyland that included Bugs Bunny (who belongs at Six Flags), and they ended up telling the researchers that they'd seen Bugs Bunny when they went to Disneyland as children. (Though they may have been confusing him with Roger Rabbit, who has a ride at Disneyland's Toon Town. Not helping matters is that Roger Rabbit actually was a huge cross-company collaboration project between Disney and WB which resulted in Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes characters appearing in the movie, which already caused tons of confusion in it's time).
• Not even the Disney Parks are safe from this. For guests who are still in diapers, a store at the Disneyland hotel sells Huggies diapers and wipes (justified, since they have Disney characters on them) and Care Bears baby wipes. This might seem nice, until you know that Care Bears isn't a Disney property, even though it aired on Disney Channel from the mid-1980s up through the mid-1990s, and it also appeared on Toon Disney.
• It is not unusual for the trope to be both played straight and inverted with regard to the theme parks themselves. Many a guest have lamented that "for some reason, Disney makes you buy a separate ticket to go to Universal", or ask "where is the Harry Potter ride?", believing that Universal Orlando Resort is a part of Walt Disney World. At the same time, many other guests, when planning out their vacation, will claim that they are going to Epcot Monday, and "to Disney" on Tuesday, apparently under the belief that only the Magic Kingdom is a Disney park, and the other three are their own entities.
• The Little Mermaid ride at Disney California Adventure has The Incredible Mr. Limpet as a background character, causing confusion; This is a nod to Limpet cameoing as a background character in "Under the Sea" in a crowd shot.
• This news story misidentifies Universal Studios as Disney World.

Web Original

• This Disney alphabet video features the word "Zebra" for the letter Z. The picture shown? Marty from Madagascar, which is not a Disney movie, but rather a DreamWorks movie. The person who made this even admitted they knew Madagascar wasn't Disney, but they possibly put in the picture in there because there weren't many pictures of Disney zebras on the internet.
• The "If Black People Owned Disney" videos are a big offender of this trope. Not only do they show clips of Despicable Me (an Illumination film), but one of them claims that SpongeBob SquarePants was owned by Disney, despite the fact that it airs on Nickelodeon. Another one shows clips from Barney & Friends, Sesame Street, and even some DreamWorks Animation movies (like Shrek), even though they weren't made by Disney. Either these people are clueless, or they generalize kids' stuff as "Disney" products
• This Cracked contest asked contestants to create R-rated versions of classic Disney movies. Weighing in at number 2 is Anastasia, which as mentioned above, was a Don Bluth movie (distributed by 20th Century Fox - although, with Disney's purchase of Fox, they do own the rights to the movie).
• An accidental example: in LEMMiNO's top 10 list on Disney facts, he talks about the original names of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and... Tom and Jerry. Like the zebra example above, LEMMiNO admitted he knew that Tom and Jerry wasn’t a Disney property, he just accidentally missed the main subject matter.
• This article from the Onion has fun with the idea by claiming that the developers of DLC for Kingdom Hearts III were sent into a panic after incorporating numerous elements from the Shrek franchise before realizing it was owned by DreamWorks and not Disney. The article ends by claiming they resolved the problem by buying out DreamWorks Pictures and all associated properties.

Toys

• Many people believe that Teddy Ruxpin was made by Disney, with several listings on Mercari saying the brand of the toy is "Disney". While the creator, Ken Forsse, did formerly work for Disney and voice actors Will Ryan and Phil Baron did several Disney-related works, the toy was made by Alchemy II and Worlds of Wonder. It doesn't help that Worlds of Wonder would later create a Mickey Mouse toy that was similar to Teddy Ruxpin.

Western Animation

• The Trope Namer is obvious. Got its start during The Golden Age of Animation, and it only got worse from there...
  • It could probably be traced back to all of the Silly Symphonies clones that just about every animation studio was producing in the 1930's, to cash in on the success of Disney's shorts. Most of the time you could hardly tell the difference between them enough to realize which studio was producing it.
  • Also, up until Don Bluth launched his own studio in 1980, Disney had very little competition in the realm of feature-length animation (Ralph Bakshi does not count), so two whole generations grew up in a time where virtually all animated movies were Disney.
• The Disney parody in the Family Guy episode "Road to the Multiverse" is sometimes believed by others that it WAS made by Disney due to realistically mimicking the animation style and throwing in some Disney references (such as a musical sequence about pies, making Brian and Stewie look cute, Lois like a princess, Adam West as a mouse, etc.) But to be fair, this sequence was outsourced to a smaller, lesser-known animation studio (it wasn't even animated in South Korea like the show usually is.)
  • The fact that Disney now owns the rights to the parody as a result of their acquisition of Fox makes it Hilarious in Hindsight.
• An Iranian scholar ranting about how Tom and Jerry is part of a "Jewish conspiracy" repeatedly says that Tom and Jerry is a "creation by Walt Disney", which only further discredits his already-ridiculous argument.
• The 1936 Fleischer cartoon Somewhere In Dreamland was strangely aired as a short in the 1990s Disney Channel animation compilation show Donald's Quack Attack, and because of this is sometimes called a Disney cartoon.
• A possibly apocryphal tale states that Jack Warner, famously clueless with regards to his own animation house, once said this: "All I know is that we make Mickey Mouse." If it's true, then it goes a long way to explaining how the "Termite Terrace" gang were able to get away with so much.
• Nicely inverted by a story from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. When Gene Kelly was making Anchors Aweigh (1945), he suggested that he could perform a dancing duet with Mickey. His producers reportedly looked dubious and asked, "And what's wrong with our Jerry?" And Jerry it became.
  • The story exists in several variant forms. In some versions, Kelly wanted to use Donald Duck (in keeping with the film's nautical theme) rather than Mickey; in one version, Kelly's producers at MGM were willing, until William Hanna and Joseph Barbera heard about it and persuaded them to use Jerry; in another version, Walt Disney refused to loan Mickey out; in still another (thought to be the most likely) version, Walt was willing, but his brother Roy pointed out that their studio was in debt at the time and could not afford "to be making cartoons for other people."
• Disney Sing-Along Songs potentially invoked this trope on a Christmas-themed video. Apparently, they couldn't find any fitting Disney clips for the "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" segment, so instead they used public domain footage from Max Fleischer's Animated Adaptation. This might be the result of the fact that Disney did distribute Fleischer cartoons on home video in the 1980s. Disney must have taken advantage of the fact the cartoons were public domain and released them for their own profit. This becomes especially amusing if you can recall that Walt Disney and the Fleischer Brothers considered themselves rivals during The Golden Age of Animation.
• This Yahoo! Answers inquiry questions if there are any SpongeBob SquarePants rides at Disney Theme Parks.
  • A bootleg DVD of the series from China came in a cardboard sleeve with the Disney logo on it, amongst 25 or so different logos, of which only four were correct (Nickelodeon, Viacom, Paramount and MTV^note  which aired the show in the mid-2000's to keep up with its popularity with teenagers).
• An Amazon listing for a piece of merchandise based on PAW Patrol calls it Disney, when it actually airs on Nick Jr. and was created by TV Ontario.
  • This Pinterest pin says that the show was created by Disney Pixar, when the Nickelodeon logo used for the US licensing of the show is clearly visible in the image.
• This often tends to happen if Disney Channel imports a show from another country and airs it on their channel, with people often claiming Disney made the show when that's not the case. Under the Umbrella Tree, Rolie Polie Olie (These two are Canadian shows made for CBC. To add even more confusion, Disney distributed merchandise and DVDs of Rolie Polie Olie under their name until they lost the rights, though as of 2021, the show is now on Disney+.), The Koala Brothers (a show from Australia's ABC4Kids block, not to be confused with former the American ABC Kids Saturday morning block) The Octonauts, Kate & Mim-Mim (both of these are originally from CBeebies), PJ Masks (made by Entertainment One, the same company behind Peppa Pig, and is currently owned by Hasbro) and Bluey (much like Koala Brothers above, it originated on ABC4Kids and is distributed by The BBC).
• A listing on eBay for a storybook adapting an episode of Dragon Tales called it a Disney show. The series was actually made by Sesame Workshop together with Sony Pictures Television and aired on PBS Kids.
• One Amazon review of Butterbean's Cafe was under the impression that it was a Disney show, when it airs on Nick Jr., not Disney Junior.
• This article says My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is a Disney show. That's not true; it aired on Discovery Family. However, it does air on Disney Channel in Spain, France and Japan.
• Disney Channel airs The Penguins of Madagascar in Japan because they no longer have a dedicated Nickelodeon feed. Viacom and DreamWorks worked out a deal with Disney where Disney would air the show in that one country only. Understandably, tourists who've seen the Japanese merchandise are perplexed by the presence of the Disney Channel logo.
• This article has a copyright notice claiming the image of Sonic from Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) is owned by Disney Channel. To be fair, reruns of its sister series were aired on Toon Disney for several years.
• This listing for a Blue's Clues & You! plush calls it a Disney show. It's from Nickelodeon, not Disney.
• In Latin America, The Fairly OddParents! is commonly believed to be made by Disney due to it airing on Jetix and Disney XD, although they didn't air anything beyond the first half of season 5. This is because of Nelvana holding the rights of those seasons (they still hold the rights as of today), as further seasons were aired by Nickelodeon in Latin American countries.
• A listing for Ben 10 action figures calls it "Disney". Ben 10 is a Cartoon Network show, not a Disney show.
• This article about smear frames refers to The Dover Boys as a Disney cartoon. It was actually a Looney Tunes cartoon. Bizarrely, the article later identifies Warner Bros. as the studio (which is correct). It's possible that the author of the article found out too late and forgot to correct their mistake earlier into the post.
• During the Perestroika era, many pieces of foreign media were being imported over to the USSR. The most well-known of these were Disney features, and as a result, just about any non-Disney cartoon such as 'Tom and Jerry', 'Looney Tunes', and even 'The Smurfs (1981)' were labelled as Disney by Soviet people.

Works mistaken for something else than Disney:

Anime & Manga

• World Masterpiece Theater never adapted Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that doesn't prevent many people from thinking Huckleberry no Bōken (1976) and Huckleberry Finn Monogatari (1994) were part of it. Doesn't help that those were made in the same timeframe as World Masterpiece Theater series and had some similar animation (the main character looks markedly different compared to his counterpart in WMT's version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that said).
• Fairy Tail is often mistaken as a Shonen Jump manga. It's published in Shōnen Magazine. Not only are there people demanding FT characters to appear in Jump crossover video games, there's even fanart of "Jump heroes", including Goku, Luffy, Naruto, Ichigo and… Natsu (a main character of FT).
• IMDb claims that Magical Princess Minky Momo is related to Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel. This might be due to the crossover short that promoted the release of the OAVs of those shows, but besides that, the two series have no relation to each other.
• Kokoro Connect can be easily mistaken as a production by Kyoto Animation, as the studio's employee Yukiko Horiguchi worked as the illustrator of the light novel.
• Anime fans who were too young (or weren't even born) when Sailor Moon first aired in the USA often blame 4Kids instead of DiC, because they associate all obtrusive editing and censorship with the now-defunct company.
  • They'll furthermore use these shows to bash America in general, despite the facts that (1) American fans often led the charges against these shows and pushed hard for uncensored releases, and (2) Some censored anime – like the aforementioned Sailor Moon and Nelvana's Cardcaptors – were made by Canadians. It's also worth noting that edited versions like these have also been made outside North America; for example, Naruto's German TV edit^note Later broadcasts are uncensored as well as anything made after 2000 by Venus Centre (Al-Zuhra) for the Arabic-language channel Spacetoon.
• Shorts HD, a premium channel dedicated to short films technically calls Gintama a Funimation anime when acquired the broadcasting rights for the said anime and Sentai Filmworks has the licensing rights. Shorts HD does have the broadcasting rights for most of the title FUNimation licensed.
• Some people think the Fire Force anime was created by Kyoto Animation when it's actually by David Production. It doesn't help matters that one episode of the first season had to be changed due to a tragedy at the studio in question.
• Some Mercari listings for Anpanman merchandise claim that it's a NHK show, since the majority of Japanese preschool shows air on that network. The channel it actually airs on is Nippon TV.

Eastern-European Animation

• Many people in post-Soviet countries believe that all Soviet animation is Soyuzmultfilm. Of course, world's biggest country could not have just one animation studio, there were also Artistical Joint "Ekran", in fame of Leopold the Cat, Plasticine Crow, Last Year's Snow Was Falling etc., Kievnauchfilm, which made the Cossacks series, Adventures of Captain Vrungel, Treasure Island (1988) etc., Armenfilm - you know, that Armenfilm where Robert Sahakyants worked, and others.

Films — Animation

• Movies from Blue Sky Studios, Sony Pictures Animation^note with the exceptions of The Peanuts Movie and the Spider-Man: Spider-Verse series (due to Sony's iron grip on the Spider-Man brand), respectively or Illumination Entertainment are extremely likely to be mistaken for each other, since the vast majority of their filmography are quite similar in terms of writing, comedy and visuals.
• All Family-Oriented Anime films are Studio Ghibli.
  • This trope in turn has its own subtrope: All Studio Ghibli Is Hayao Miyazaki. Isao Takahata made Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, My Neighbors the Yamadas and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, while a wide array of other directors made movies like From Up on Poppy Hill and Whisper of the Heart. However, Miyazaki does have screenwriting credits for Whisper of the Heart, Arrietty and From Up on Poppy Hill.
  • Some people think some pre-Ghibli Miyazaki works were made by Studio Ghibli when they predate the studio itself, with the most common victims being Panda! Go Panda! and The Castle of Cagliostro. It doesn't help that Donguri Kyowakoku, the official Studio Ghibli retail store, sometimes sells merchandise of the former movie in their stores.
• All Computer Animation is Pixar or DreamWorks.
  • This came in full circle and bit Disney in the behind, because now when Disney makes CG movies independently of Pixar, people still assume it was Pixar. Doesn't help that the new renaissance of the Disney Animated Canon that started with Tangled was kicked off after well known Pixar veteran John Lasseter became CCO of Disney's animation studios.
    • Chicken Little was the first to fall under this as it was the first non-Pixar computer animated film from them.
    • Paperman fell under this hard when the award-winning short was uploaded to YouTube for a limited time, with several viewers insisting only Pixar could have produced the short. Many attempted to correct this mistake and were widely ignored.
    • Inner Workings, because of the stylised artstyle, the Inside Out-esque premise, and the fact that the main character looks like Carl, is frequently mistaken for Pixar's work.
    • Strange World has very "chunky," bulbous character designs that make it look similar to Soul, Luca, and Turning Red, resulting in it being mistaken for a Pixar movie. Strange World was actually made by Walt Disney Animation Studios.
  • Whoever created this list is a prime example. The list consists of eleven actual Pixar shorts, test footage for WALL•E (which is nevertheless related), seven independent short films (including Blender's Big Buck Bunny) and... the teaser trailer for Despicable Me 2.
  • Although otherwise very accurate in its behind-the-scenes information, this article from Glamour also calls Wreck-It Ralph a Pixar film, as does Charlie Brooker in Channel 4's How Videogames Changed the World.
  • And this review of Wreck-It Ralph says that Kung Fu Panda was produced by Pixar, prior to its acquisition by Disney.
  • DisneyToon Studios' Planes is often confused as a Pixar movie due to being set in the same universe as Cars. However, John Lasseter is the executive producer of the film and is responsible for the concept.
  • This video showcasing horrendous movie ripoffs calls Bee Movie a Pixar film.
  • An officially-licensed Zootopia 2017 wall calendar made by DayDream carried a copyright notice for "Disney/Pixar", despite Disney making the film themselves without any involvement from Pixar.
• Bootleg video tapes of Rock and Rule distributed at comic book conventions incorrectly claimed it was directed by Ralph Bakshi, when it actually was made by Nelvana in Canada, apparently because Bakshi was the only well-known creator of adult-oriented animation in The '80s, despite Rock & Rule having nothing in common with his style.
• Spill.com's review for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs listed the distributor as Universal Studios, not 20th Century Fox or Blue Sky Studios, who are actually the ones responsible.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is often mistaken for a Paramount Animation production, since it's findable on their website. In truth, they actually had no involvement in the film at all.
• The Angry Birds Movie is often mistaken for a Sony Pictures Animation production since two of the studio's sister companies were both involved with the film (it was actually mainly produced by original Angry Birds creators Rovio Entertainment via their Rovio Animation division), and the humor and character designs are similar to those found in some of their other films. The sequel averts this thanks to Rovio and SPA jointly producing it. This also applies to Storks and Smallfoot (which were both produced by the Warner Animation Group) for three of the same reasons.
• Laika seems to be having issues with "All Macabre/Horror-Themed Stop Motion Animation is Tim Burton" in the wake of Coraline and ParaNorman. It also doesn't help that the advertisements for the former said "From the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas", which led people to believe that they were Tim Burton movies, even though Burton wasn't the director of Nightmare Before Christmas — he was the producer, Henry Selick directed.
  • Especially since ParaNorman came around the same time as Frankenweenie, which was an actual horror-themed stop-motion animated film directed by Tim Burton.
  • Their distributors are likely doing this on purpose. Look on the DVD case for Coraline and try to spot Henry Selick's name anywhere. It's buried in those super-skinny all-caps credits on the back that nobody bothers to read.
• Advertising for the film Once Upon a Forest seemed to hope that audiences would mistake it for a Don Bluth film by saying it was "From the creator of An American Tail" (the film was produced by David Kirschner, who came up with the concept of the latter film). It fooled many, but didn't do much to help its box office take. It being 1993, well after Bluth's fall from grace, it was perhaps too late for this ploy to work anyway.
  • Some people are unaware that Don Bluth had no involvement in Fievel Goes West.
  • Balto and We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story are also often mistaken for Don Bluth films, in no small part for being Universal productions (which also distributed Bluth's more beloved works) and actual similarities in character design.
  • This site says The Swan Princess is a Don Bluth film.
  • The author of this fanart of The Nutcracker Prince thought this was a Don Bluth film.
  • Indeed, "All Non-Disney 2D Animation is Don Bluth" could be considered a subtrope.
  • The 2D animated films from A. Film, such as Help! I'm a Fish, are occasionally mistaken for Don Bluth pictures, since their character designs are pretty obviously inspired by his work.
• Igor tends to be mistaken for a DreamWorks film because of its design and humor.
• Some sellers of Inside Out merchandise call it a DreamWorks film.
  • A "related article" that appears as a sort of ad on some websites had the heading "Get To See The Inside Out DreamWorks Didn't Want You To Know".
• This Cracked.com list article calls Rio a DreamWorks film. Evidently all Disney-esque animation that isn't Disney is DreamWorks.
• One Wild Mass Guess of Robots calls it a DreamWorks film.
• Target's website claims that Dreamworks' Trolls was created by Nickelodeon. They also did the same thing with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

Films — Live Action

• Some people think that Daddy Day Care was made by Nickelodeon due to the film featuring Product Placement for several Nickelodeon properties. It's actually made by Columbia Pictures.
• Just as all animation is Disney, All British Horror Is Hammer Horror. Hammer's main rival Amicus Productions in particular gets this a lot. That both studio shared some actors and actresses such as Ingrid Pitt didn't help.
  • Similarly, with comedies, all British comedies made in the 1950s are Ealing Studios. Particularly the films of Alec Guinness not made there like Father Brown, but also many of the films of Alastair Sim, who only made one true Ealing Comedy - Hue and Cry, but appeared in many films in the same vein from Launder and Gilliat. Perhaps also owes to the fact that The Ladykillers (1955) was intended as a vehicle for Sim, and Guinness deliberately modelled his performance on Sim, to the point that a Mandela Effect has occurred, with people believing it a Sim movie.
• Some tend to think that all Japanese samurai films are Akira Kurosawa. One of the most acclaimed films of the genre, Harakiri, is actually by Masaki Kobayashi.

Literature

• Many people think that all Bright and Early and Beginner books are Dr. Seuss because The Cat in the Hat is on the logo for both of these series. The most common victims of this Are You My Mother?, Go, Dog, Go! and Put Me In The Zoo.
• No, not all gamebooks are Choose Your Own Adventure books; that's just the most successful gamebook series. The confusion is widespread enough, though, that even the TVTropes pages have banners at the top clearing things up.

Live-Action TV

• Many people who live outside of Canada assume that all Canadian Kid Coms are produced by YTV due to their huge slate of live-action original programming, when other networks in the country also create these types of programs as well.
• There was once a perception since The Sopranos that all prestige series/miniseries was from HBO (sorry AMC). Though is much less a thing since Netflix threw its hat in that game.
• Many assume all Italian prestige television (and biopic movies) is made by Paolo Sorrentino.
• Due to his huge popularity, many people assume any nature documentary with a British-sounding narrator is by David Attenborough.
• Due to his huge influence before his departure, many people assume any Nickelodeon Kid Com is made by Dan Schneider when in fact a lot of them (Ned's Declassified, The Thundermans, etc) are made by other people.

Music

• Any form of classical music will often be attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart regardless of the time period or style in which it was written. Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach are possible exceptions given that they are the other two most famous composers, but even they are prone to being misattributed onto other works.
• Pretty much anything in the 1960s soul music genre will tend to get misattributed to Motown. Possible exceptions are Ray Charles and James Brown, both of whom were well established before Motown appeared on the scene, but the likes of Aretha Franklin and the entire Phil Spector stable will almost invariably be misidentified as Motown by the general public.
• French Hardcore Hip-Hop of The '90s will very often be attributed solely to Suprême NTM. There's a belief that they participated to the soundtrack of La Haine, but the only thing from them in it is a lyric of JoeyStarr (which amounts to "Fuck the Police!") that was sampled by DJ Cut Killer.

Professional Wrestling

• All professional wrestling is WWE, due to that company's domination of the market for decades. The last major competitor to WWE, WCW, went defunct in 2001.

Theatre

• It's common for many people to assume all plays written during the Renaissance are written by William Shakespeare. It's quite common for people to assume ONLY Shakespeare wrote plays in England at the time. There are many other playwrights at the time such as Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Fletcher.

Video Games

• Many newcomers thought Animal Jam is created by the National Geographic Society, thanks to the game using to be under the brand. WildWorks created the game; they just had National Geographic to partner with them. This has died down after National Geographic ended their partnership in 2018 and thus the branding was removed.
• All Video Games are Nintendo: Much like Disney to animation, Nintendo reigns as the king of video games, especially kid-friendly ones, so it's not uncommon to mistake a usually kid-oriented game as Nintendo:
  • Some people think that Sonic the Hedgehog is created by Nintendo, due to most of its games following a cartoony and colorful design akin to that of Nintendo, Sonic's status as one of the most famous video game characters (something that many Nintendo characters share), later games appearing on Nintendo consoles (the Wii U's eshop even had a dedicated section for Sonic games), and Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. Sonic is created by Sega, which has plenty of M-rated games up its belt.
  • One editor on the Disney Wiki reckoned that all cameos in Wreck-It Ralph movie are either Disney or Nintendo. They even gave among the "Nintendo" examples, Pac-Man and Dig Dug — both of which are Bandai Namco Entertainment. This edit also ignored the Qix (Taito) and Q*bert (Gottleib), amongst other decidedly not-Nintendo examples. Even better is the fact that Sonic and Dr. Eggman are from a series made by a former competitor of Nintendo's and never appeared on a Nintendo console until the early '00s.
  • Brazilian Preacher Josue Yrion refers to video games as "Nintendos". This includes games such as Resident Evil, Doom or Diablo. The only aversion is in his infamous quote "Nintendos, Segas, Super Nintendos, PlayStations, whatever."
  • Several iconic video game franchises initially got their start on the Nintendo Entertainment System including Mega Man, Castlevania, Final Fantasy which has contributed to a strong association with Nintendo.
• Any game that is played through a web browser is almost unanimously referred to as a "Flash game". While it's true that many browser games are Flash-based, plenty of other games are written in programs such as JavaScript, Canvas, WebGL, and WebAssembly. That, and Flash largely stopped being used as a gaming platform outside of archival purposes around 2015 in favor of HTML5-based ones that were less resource heavy. Flash itself also ended support in 2020, with most browsers blocking anything Flash-based by default, if not removing their dedicated Flash players altogether.
• During a controversy over the “fatty, fatty, no parents” line from Portal 2, the television station reporting the story complained to Sony because the game was being played on a PlayStation 3. When Sony explained they had nothing to do with the game and tried to direct them to Valve (the developer) instead, they accused them of trying to evade scrutiny.

Western Animation

• All Slapstick/Cartoony Animation is Warner Bros.: Works like Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker and Tex Avery MGM Cartoons in particular were hit hard with this in the 1940s (and then again in the 1990s when "classic" cartoon characters became popular again). This has become something of a moot point, though, since Warner Bros.' purchase of Turner Entertainment in the early 1990s gave them the rights to the "classic" cartoons done by MGM and Hanna-Barbera, as well all the Popeye theatrical shorts from both Fleischer and Famous Studios so now only Most Slapstick/Cartoony Animation is (Owned by) Warner Bros.
  • Speaking of Hanna-Barbera, it isn't rare to find someone who thinks The Pink Panther was created by them (the character was actually made by De Patie Freleng Enterprises, itself made up of former Warner Bros. employees.). It doesn't help that Hanna-Barbera has their own pink feline character, whom people frequently mistake for The Pink Panther and vice versa. Ironically, Hanna-Barbera co-produced the Pink Panther and Sons series.
• A surprisingly large number of people believe Totally Spies! to be either an American or at the very least Canadian invention, when in fact the series is French. This is largely due to the exceptional English dub and the fact the series is set in Beverly Hills, which isn't the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they hear the phrase "French cartoon."
• On a ProTeacher thread about Halloween, one user said this:
  I like doing the Disney Characters for the younger grades! I am a big fan of the Belle and Snow White costumes!! Any of the characters from the Cartoon Network are recognizable by the little ones too—SpongeBob, Kim Possible, etc.
  • Ironically, Kim Possible is a Disney show.
• A Polish article at Tygodnik Przegląd about BP's problems also stated that SpongeBob aired on Cartoon Network. The show never aired on CN in Poland and before Nickelodeon launched in the country two years before the article was written, SpongeBob aired in Polish only for a brief time in 2004 on MTV with a Voiceover Translation).
• One bootleg DVD set of Recess said it was from Nickelodeon. Recess is also a Disney show, once again inverting this trope.
  • Many people have also mistaken Recess to have been made by Klasky-Csupo. While Rugrats co-creator Paul Germain co-created the show with Rugrats writer Joe Ansolabehere, Klasky-Csupo itself had no part in making the show.
• Warner Home Video released Thundarr the Barbarian: The Complete Series, a Ruby-Spears production, and mistakenly implied the series was made by Hanna-Barbera. Ruby Spears was founded by screenwriters Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, creators of ScoobyDoo. Thundarr had some characters designed by AlexToth, who had made the heroes of Hanna-Barbera, in addition, in 1981, Taft Broadcasting, the company that had bought Hanna-Barbera, also bought Ruby Spears.
  • Fangface is often miscredited to Hanna-Barbera, when in fact the show was produced by Ruby Spears.
• Mike, Lu & Og is sometimes mistaken for a Klasky-Csupo show. Probably because one of the creators worked on Rugrats.
• Barney Bear is often mistaken for being created by Tex Avery, probably due to the animation style being similar to the one used on Tex Avery MGM Cartoons.
• Because of D'Ocon working on the company's Pocket Dragon Adventures, Magic Adventures of Mumfie is sometimes mistaken for a DiC show.
  • A comment on the intro to the 70's version of Mumfie asked where the Don Bluth version was. Don Bluth didn't make Mumfie, Britt Allcroft did.
• Animation critic The Mysterious Mr. Enter once claimed that Hanna-Barbera made Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was actually made by Jay Ward Productions.
• An FCC complaint accusing Gravity Falls (another Disney show) of being "satanic" cited its network as Cartoon Network.
• This article on copyright laws refers to Robot Chicken as a "Nickelodeon Adult Swim" show.
• Outside of the United Kingdom, most people seem to think that "All Stop-Motion Children's Programmes Are Cosgrove Hall", due to them producing a large amount of programmes of that type. The original run of Postman Pat ^* The later episodes would actually be produced by Cosgrove Hall when Woodland Animations went defunct in 2001 and The Wombles get hit with this the most, when they were actually made by Woodand Animations and FilmFair.
• Max and Ruby, which airs on Nick Jr. in the US and Treehouse TV in Canada, is often mistaken for a PBS Kids show because the company who made it, Nelvana, has made several shows for the block including The Berenstain Bears and Timothy Goes to School, with the latter being also based on a Rosemary Wells book. It doesn't help matters that in the mid-2000's, Play Along Toys had a preschool toyline called Child Guidance, which featured merchandise of Max and Ruby alongside several PBS Kids shows along with The Wiggles and Miffy.
• In a similar vein to the "imported show airing on Disney Channel" example, many people believe that PAW Patrol was created by Nickelodeon, with merchandise even using the channel's name. In a similar manner to Rolie Polie Ollie, Nick only distributes it, as it was originally made for Canadian network TV Ontario.
  • The same thing tends to happen with other Nick Jr. imports as well, including Little Bear, Franklin, and Bob the Builder^note  Until it moved to PBS in 2005. The first two were not Nick Jr. originals and were actually Canadian, with the first being a CBC show, the second being a Family Channel show, (not to be confused with the United States Family Channel) and the last show being produced by The BBC with the voices redubbed to American English.
    • On the topic of Franklin and Little Bear, many people believe that these two shows aired on PBS Kids in the United States when they actually were broadcast on Nick Jr.
• This Very Wiki has mistakenly described The Backyardigans as a Canadian show that was exported to Nick Jr. The show was actually created and produced by Nickelodeon themselves. Not only that but the original pilots made for the show were produced in Florida and New York respectively. While Canadian studio Nelvana did indeed co-produce the show, their biggest involvement for it was providing the animation.
• Many people believe that programming that is syndicated to public TV stations via American Public Television were created for PBS Kids, including The Big Comfy Couch, Kidsongs, Redwall, Peep and the Big Wide World and Zula Patrol. Not helping matters is that Peep and the Big Wide World would later become a regular program on the PBS Kids 24/7 channel.
• A few YouTube videos showcasing playthroughs of Sid the Science Kid games called it a Nick Jr. show when it actually airs on PBS Kids. Not helping matters is that at least a few shows have been broadcast on both Nick Jr. and PBS Kids at separate points and PBS Kids additionally distributes at least one Nick Jr. show on DVD through its Skiprope label.
• Ironically, there is a rare Mickey Mouse plastic toy from 1959 that has Hanna Barbera copyright labelled on the back of it.
• An Internet Archive upload of the leaked Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go trailer has been put in the WildBrain category despite actually being animated by Nelvana.
• Many 90s cartoon adaptations of video games are often mistaken for DIC Entertainment cartoons usually because of how much of a hold they had on video game adaptations at the time (all three Super Mario cartoons, The Legend of Zelda (1989), Captain N: The Game Master, the Battletoads pilot, and all three 90s Sonic cartoons), and due to the less-than-stellar quality of most of the adaptations. Most of Capcom's animated projects from that time period (Mega Man (Ruby-Spears), Street Fighter^note Produced by USA Studios, alongside Graz Entertainment for season 1, and In Vision Entertainment for season 2, and Darkstalkers^note solely produced by Graz Entertainment) are often frequent targets.
• Underdog is commonly misattributed to Jay Ward, due to the animation being outsourced to Gamma Productions (a Mexican studio that animated most of Jay Ward's cartoons). The series was actually produced by Total Television.
• 2 Stupid Dogs is often mistaken for a Cartoon Network original series, no doubt because it shared some staff with some of the Hanna-Barbera-produced Cartoon Cartoons (namely Genndy Tartakovsky and Rob Renzetti) and reran on CN after it ended. However, Hanna-Barbera produced the show for TBS; at the time, Cartoon Network was merely a rerun farm for H-B's older series and Looney Tunes.
• Due to Dreamworks' large presence in streaming television, creating cartoons such as Voltron: Legendary Defender, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, you'll occasionally witness someone say that other Netflix animated series like The Dragon Prince or Carmen Sandiego were made by Dreamworks. The Dragon Prince was actually made by Wonderstorm, while Carmen was made by WildBrain.

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